Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

His reasoning had been simple and instantaneous. If the Ganik had a sword, he must be one of the leaders, and a leader of any group or race could be expected to have a better and more complete knowledge of events and peoples and territories than most of the followers, and Corbett still stood in dire and pressing need of reliable intelligence concerning • the country that lay between this area and Broomtown base.

The action was bloody, savage and very shortly concluded. Corbett’s force’s casualties were negligible—one pony had been hamstrung and one trooper had taken a dart through his bridle arm, just below the elbow. Three or four Ganiks had gotten away, afoot certainly, and possibly wounded as well. With the exceptions of the bald Ganik and one another, the remainder of the cannibals lay dead on the track and along the stream, most of them never having gotten farther up than their knees before flashing saber blade or axehead hacked the life from their bodies and tumbled those bodies in the dust.

Corbett had fallen in love with the mace and resolved to carry it or one like it by preference in future. Unlike axe, saber or sword, there was no microsecond of dire danger while freeing a cutting edge from a body, and where stabbing was necessary, the short, broad finial spike provided ample utility for the purpose.

The officer dismounted a third of his force and himself joined them, leaving another third mounted as horse holders and the other third as security. The bald Ganik was on his knees in the middle of the track, rocking to and fro, barely conscious, his right arm hanging limp and useless from his crushed shoulder. With slashes of his field knife, Corbett cut away the man’s baldric with its old, Ahrmehnee-style sword, and the waist belt containing a profusion of sheathed knives of varying lengths and shapes. After jerking out another knife peeking from the top of the Ganik’s rawhide boot, the officer went to join his dismounted men in finishing off the rest of the Ganiks.

Corbett had just dispatched an already-dying Ganik near the stream and was swishing the gory point of his saber blade in the swift-flowing water when he sensed more than heard movements in the holly thicket to his left. Before he could turn, a stocky shape mounted on a pony emerged and from it came the zweeep of steel leaving scabbard, quickly followed by the flash of the moonlight along the length of a bared blade.

Corbett tossed the saber into his left hand, drew and cocked his big pistol, whirling to face this new attack.

It was well into the second week before Long Willy began to harbor any worries about the missing party and their leader, his father-brother, Johnny Skinhead. Even then, the worries were more for the thirty-seven Ganiks who had ridden out with the elderly bully than for the man himself, for the losses in the attacks against the strangers had been little short of catastrophic; Long Willy had left a good half of his men dead before that cursed gap.

All of the bullies, saving only old Johnny and Strong Tom, had been among those mangled corpses, but that had been no lasting problem; Long Willy had simply chosen the requisite number of bigger, stronger, meaner Ganiks from the remaining ranks of his depleted bunch and publicly announced that they were now his bullies and would remain so as long as they continued to please him and support him. Everyone knew, of course, that any man who felt himself capable of openly fighting and killing one of these bullies could expect to take his victim’s place; that was one of the few laws of the Ganik bunches.

But although Long Willy was all-powerful in his own bunch, commanding the life or death of every man and woman in his camp, he, too, had and grudgingly recognized a suzerain, the Kleesahk, Buhbuh, whose bully he was by right of combat. And Long Willy knew well that Buhbuh’s expected reaction to his loss of so many fighters for so negligible an amount of gain could be—and, he feared, would be—dangerous and deadly to him, personally.

Nor could Long Willy really blame the huge humanoid for his anticipated rage, for by halving his smaller bunch, he had also weakened by just that many fighters the larger bunch of which they all were a part. The attack on the strangers had seemed like a sure victory—considering how few their numbers had been—with promise of much loot, at least a dozen big horses or mules, and the thrill of prisoners to torture slowly to death, then eat.

However, despite the care he had lavished on the planning of everything, he had met with unmitigated disaster in all save the taking of the Ahrmehnee woman and her firestick. The pursuit party under Strong Tom had turned back because of that capture, and now Long Willy was sorry that he had not sent a rider to call back Johnny Skinhead, as well.

For there had never been anything approaching friendship between Long Willy and Buhbuh, for all that the Kleesahk ‘ had not disliked him enough to’ force him into a stand-up fight and kill him—as he well knew that Buhbuh could anytime he wished, for the partly human creature stood half again Long Willy’s not inconsiderable height and was massive in proportion—he also knew that there were certainly Ganiks in this camp whose job it was to watch him for Buhbuh and report to that overall-bully any serious transgressions against the good of the bunches.

That Buhbuh had not already moved against him Long Willy ascribed to the fact that he had forbidden anyone to ride out of camp for any reason until the return of Johnny Skinhead’s party, and had put his new bullies to the bloody enforcement of that edict. He wanted to face Buhbuh the Kleesahk in his own good time, and that time would not be until he knew himself capable of surviving the certain combat with the huge creature, which meant not until he had been instructed by the Ahrmehnee woman in all the niceties of the use and recharging of his captured firestick. Long Willy knew well that only that marvelous, deadly, esoteric weapon of the oldest Ganik myths and legends could give him the needed fatal edge over the monstrous, otherwise undefeatable Buhbuh.

. But the captured woman remained weak, .seldom able to even stand or walk without assistance, and neither he nor Lizzie nor anyone else seemed to be able to talk with her. She did not speak Ahrmehnee, rather did she babble on in some rapid, abrupt language that often sounded a little like Ganik but was not.

She was still lodged in Long Willy’s cabin and was still tended and looked after by Lizzie Flat-chest, fed the best fare that the camp had to offer. Willy had, after having proved his strength and right to lead upon the bully’s head, finally allowed Strong Tom to possess the woman, as was his indisputable right. He also had given each of his new bullies a brief session on the woman, but he had closely supervised all of these sessions and made certain that she was not bitten or otherwise injured and that she had several hours to rest between sessions.

But once these perfunctory and begrudged bows to bunch-law were done and over, Long Willy declared the interior of his cabin off limits to any uninvited man and placed a pair of his new bullies—a special pair, a pair who seemed much more interested in each other than in the Ahrmehnee woman—before the single door whenever he had to be away for any length of time.

In any case, Long Willy was not granted much time to worry about Johnny Skinhead and his group, for about noon one day, One-ball Sierrason came into camp on a barebacked pony, with his tale of the debacle on the moonlit track.

Long since intolerant of the constant jokes about his single testicle—it was all he ever had had and he knew of no way to grow another—One-ball had taken to the brush alongside the track to squat and had happened to be there when the host of strangers had ridden in to slaughter his erstwhile mates. He had managed to make it into the wooded eastern hills unseen. There he had found this pony, removed its hobble and, as his only armaments were his assortment of knives, had not gone anywhere near the track, but rather had ridden straight for camp.