Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

” Soon !” he urgently mindspoke Ahndee and Klairuhnz, while bringing his axe up so that its fearsome double-bitted head rested against the steel plates covering his right shoulder. He dropped his reins over the pommel-knob, for, in battle, he guided Mahvros solely by mindspeak and knee pressure, not that the battlewise and faithful stallion required a great deal of guidance. Then he lowered and carefully locked into place the slitted half-visor which served to protect eyes and nose. By that time, the peril lay so very near, pressed so heavily upon his senses, that he could hardly bear it.

” Now !” he beamed with mind-blasting intensity. “ It is all around us !”

Ahndee and the bard drew their blades, and the sibilant zweeep of steel leaving scabbards alerted the two troopers, who bared their own weapons. The servant, Geros, awkwardly gripped and regripped the haft of his boar spear in a sweaty hand.

Up the slope, to their left, the trees abruptly thinned out… and the fickle moon chose that moment to again start a slow emergence from the clouds.

There was a scuffling noise at the head of the column, a strangled grunt, followed almost immediately by a horse’s shrill scream of agony and terror, then came the unmistakable clash-clanking of an armored body falling to the ground… and the moon came fully out.

Bili could see the trooper, Dzhool, twitching on the roadway. A stocky, black-bearded man had a foot on the dying Freefighter’s chest and was frantically striving to jerk the point of his spear from the body.

The rebel bushwhacker never got the weapon free, however, for Bard Klairuhnz kneed his mount past Bili and Ahndee, and his heavy, cursive saber swept up and then blurred down. The bearded head, still wearing its old-fashioned helmet and a look of utter surprise, clattered across the road and into the weeds. The headless body stood erect for a brief moment more, geysering great, ropy spouts of dark-red blood, then collapsed atop the still body of its victim.

From around the far side of the screaming, hamstrung lead horse charged another of the rebel ambushers, lacking either helm or body armor, but swinging up a short, broad-bladed infantry sword. This man was as short and stocky as the first, but beardless, with thinning gray hair. His lips were pulled back in a grimace, revealing his rotten and discolored teeth. There was fresh blood showing blackly on his swordblade, and he ran directly at Bili, shouting something in Old Ehleeneekos.

Ahndee watched Bili—seemingly effortlessly handling his long, massive weapon with but one hand-catch the sword-slash on the steel shaft of his axe and allow the blade’s own momentum to propel it into the deep notch between shaft and head. Then a single twist of Bili’s thick wrist tore the hilt from the old rebel’s grip and sent his sole weapon spinning off to clatter into the roadside weeds near his companion’s severed head. But the spike surmounting the twin axebits was jammed deeply into the oldster’s chest well before the sword came to ground.

Dead Dzhool’s crippled mount was still screaming. Then the servant, Geros, began to scream, too; no warrior, he, he was frightened beyond words and could only scream and point his spear up the brushy slope. There, a line of riders— at least a dozen of them, the moonlight reflecting from their arms and armor—was issuing out from amongst the trees which had concealed them.

” Back !” roared Klairuhnz. “There’re too many of them to fight here; back to the bridge!” Suiting action to words, he reined his mount about and set off in the wake of Geros, Sharl and Ahndee.

Bili lingered long enough to split the skull of the suffering horse, then he set off toward the narrow bridge just as the line of mounted ambushers came tilting down the rise. This granted Bili a closer look, and his battlewise eyes informed him that though numerous—nearer a score than a dozen—the charging horsemen were not nearly so well armed as they had at first seemed to be.

All of them had swords of one kind or another and a few even bore the weapons as if they understood them and their proper use, but the uniformity ended there. The big man in the lead had a full panoply of longsword, shield and suit of three-quarter armor that looked to be decent-quality plate.

But all of the men he led might have been outfitted from a hundred years’ worth of battlefield pickings. Their helms were of every description, from true antique to almost new. One man’s body armor was naught save a dented breastplate, another had squeezed into a shirt of rusty scalemail, two or three went in ancient jazerans, one in a cuirass of boiled and lacquered leather and another in an old, threadbare brigandine. Bili thought that the ruffianly crew certainly looked the part of the brigands they probably were.

Mahvros’ powerful body responded to Bili’s urgings, and the big, steel-shod hooves struck firelight from the pebbly roadbed. The black stallion splashed through the little rill, and then they were descending back along the road’s first curve.

Suddenly, twenty yards ahead, riders emerged from among the treetrunks to block the way back to the bridge. A shaft of moonlight silvered their bared blades.

Bili mindspoke Mahvros, “Faster, brother mine; be ready to fight.”

The huge ebon horse increased his speed and beamed his approval and impatient anticipation of the coming conflict, one of his principal joys in life being the stamping unto death of anything or anyone he was set against. Raising his head, he pealed a shrill, equine challenge, then bore down upon his promised victims.

“Good old Mahvros,” thought the ancient Bili. “I’ve forked many a strong, faithful, pugnacious horse in the years since he went to Wind, but never has there been another that was his equal in any way. Sacred Sun shine ever upon his brave spirit.”

One horse and rider went down in a squealing, screaming, hoof-flailing tangle, while Bili took a ringing swordswipe against the side of his helmet in passing. Still shrilling his challenge, Mahvros came to a rearing halt, pivoted and returned to savage the downed horse and man, while Bili axed the second rider out of the saddle with a single businesslike stroke. The stallion knew the brief elation of feeling man-ribs splinter under his hooves before Bili urged him back along the road to the bridge.

Scores of hooves were pounding close behind them as Mahvros cleared the last of the trees to see Ahndee and Klairuhnz, their blades gleaming, sitting their mounts knee to knee a few paces out onto the span. Three yards behind them, the trooper had uncased and strung his short hornbow and nocked an arrow and was calmly awaiting the appearance of a target for that arrow.

“Bili!” Ahndee shouted exuberantly. “Sun and Wind be thanked. We’d thought you slain back there.” He began to back his big gelding that Bili might have his place.

But Bili signed him to stay, positioning Mahvros a little ahead of the two warriors. “This will be better,” he stated shortly, adding, “An axeman needs room.” He did not see the smile that Ahndee and Klairuhnz exchanged at his automatic assumption of command over them.

The trooper proved himself an expert archer, putting his shaft cleanly into the eye of the first pursuer to gallop out of the dark forest. His second arrow pinned an unarmored thigh to the saddletree beneath it. He nocked a third, quickly drew… and the bowstring snapped. Cursing sulphurously and most feelingly in four languages, he cast away the now useless bow, drew his saber and ranged up close behind Klairuhnz and Ahndee.

The next four attackers took a brief moment to form themselves up, then launched a charge, apparently expecting their prey to remain in place and await their pleasure. They none of them lived long enough to repent their error or to recover from the counter-charge.