Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

The leading man held up his shield to fend off Bili’s axe, while he aimed a hacking cut at Mahvros’ thick neck. But the stout target crumpled like wet paper and the axeblade bit completely through, deep into the arm which had held it, the force of the buffet hurling the man down to a singularly messy death beneath the stamping hooves.

Mahvros roughly shouldered the riderless horse aside, while Bili glanced around, seeking another opponent. At that very moment, Ahndee was thrusting the watered-steel blade of his longsword deep into the vitals of his adversary and Bard Klairuhnz looked to be more than a match for his shaggy foe. But the hapless Freefighter trooper had troubles aplenty. First his bowstring had broken, and now his saber blade, leaving him but a bare foot of pointless steel jutting up from the hilt. With this stub, he was fighting a desperate defensive action.

In a single, mighty leap, Mahvros was alongside the mount of the ruffian. Shortening his grip on his axehaft, Bili jammed the terminal spike deeply into a side made vulnerable by a wide gap between the back and breast plates of an ill-fitting cuirass. Shrieking curses in both Old and Modern Ehleeneekos, the wounded man turned in his saddle to rain a swift succession of swordblows on Bili’s head and shoulders. Although the stout Pitzburk plate turned every blow, Bili was unable to retaliate, for at such close quarters, his long-hafted axe was all but useless.

Unexpectedly, the swordsman hunched his body and began to gag and then retch, spewing up quantities of frothy blood. At this juncture, the Freefighter reined in closer, used his piece of saber to sever the man’s swordknot, then virtually decapitated his late opponent with the man’s own antique blade.

They had almost regained the bridge when the main body of attackers caught up to them. First to fall was the rearmed Freefighter, his scaleshirt unable to protect his spine from the crushing blow of a nail-studded club.

Bili’s better armor turned a determined spearthrust before he axed the arm from the spearman. Then he turned Mahvros full about and, straightening his arms, swung his bloody axe in several wide arcs before him; he struck nothing and no one, but did achieve his desired effect of momentarily halting the van of the oncoming force and granting Ahndee and Klairuhnz a few precious moments to regain the bridge.

Bili’s vision, somewhat restricted by the bars of his visor, failed to record the man who galloped in from his left… but Mahvros saw him. With the speed of a striking serpent, the mighty horse spun about and sank big yellow teeth into the flesh of the smaller equine.

The mare thus assaulted was not a warhorse, not even a hunter, and she harbored no slightest intention of remaining in proximity to this huge, maddened stallion. Taking the bit firmly between her own teeth, she raced back into the forest, bearing her shouting, cursing, rein-sawing rider only as far as the low-hanging branch which swept him from her back and stretched him senseless among the dead leaves and mosses.

Mahvros’ forehooves were already booming the bridge timbers when a hard-flung throwing axe caromed off Bili’s helm, nearly deafening him and filling his head with a tight-spiraling red-blackness, shot with dazzling-white stars. Only instinct kept him in the saddle while Mahvros, well-trained, battlewise and intelligent animal that he was, continued on to the proper place, then wheeled about just ahead of Ahndee and Klairuhnz.

Reaching forward, Ahndee grabbed Bili’s arm—limp under its sheathing of steel and leather—and shook him. “Are you all right, Bili? Are you injured?” he shouted anxiously.

Then he let go the arm and turned to Bard Klairuhnz, saying, “Your help, please, my lord. He’s barely conscious, if that. We must get him behind us ere those bastards cut him down.”

Bili could hear all and could sense movements on either side of him, but neither his lips nor his limbs would obey his dictates. Fuzzily, he pondered why Vahrohneeskos Ahndee, a nobleman of this duchy, would have addressed a mere roving bard as his “lord.”

In his great bed in the dimly lit room already smelling of death, old Bili smiled to himself. “That was the first fight I fought beside the Undying High Lord, though I knew not that that same Bard Klairuhnz was my sovran until much later in the rebellion.”

Against so many attackers, holding at the bridge, where a flank attack was impossible, had been a good idea. The blades of Ahndee and Klairuhnz wove a deadly pattern, effectively barring their foemen access to the dazed and helpless Bili, now drooping in the saddle. Because of the narrowness of the span—it being but just wide enough to easily accommodate passage of a single hay wagon or ox-wain— only two men at a time could attack the defenders, thus doing much to nullify their numerical superiority. And on a man-to-man basis, the ill-armed, ill-trained crew were just no match for well-equipped and seasoned warriors. The length of the Forest Bridge, from the far side to the center, was very soon gore-slimed, littered with dropped weapons and hacked, hoof-marked corpses.

But the repeated assaults had taken toll of the two stout defenders, as well, for flesh and blood can bear only so much. Ahndee sat his horse in dire agony, his left arm dangling uselessly at his side. He had used its armored surface to ward off a direct blow from a huge and weighty club, while he slashed the clubman’s unprotected throat, and he now sat in certainty that the concussion of that buffet had broken the arm beneath the plates.

Klairuhnz’s horse now lay dead and the bard stood astride the body. Hopefully, he had mindspoken Mahvros, but the black stallion’s refusal had been unequivocal. Moreover, he had promised dire and fatal consequences should any two legs attempt either to unseat Mahvros’ hurt brother or to take said brother’s place in the warkak.

Bili regained his senses just in time to see Klairuhnz sustain a vicious cut on the side of his neck and be hurled down, blood spurting over his shoulderplates. Roaring, “ Up Harzburk !” through force of habit, Bili kneed Mahvros forward and plugged the gap, admonishing the horse by mindspeak not to step on the man.

A swing of his axe crushed both the helmet and the skull of Klairuhnz’s killer. As the man pitched from the saddle,

Bili belatedly recognized the twisted features—it was the face of Hofos, Komees Hari’s majordomo.

Then there were two more enemy horsemen on the bridge before him. But this time it was Ahndee who was reeling in his kak, kept in it only by the high, flaring cantle and pommel, and unable to do more than offer a rapidly weakening defense.

Bili disliked attacking a horse, but the circumstances afforded him no option. He rammed his axe spike into the rolling eye of his opponent’s mount, and in the brief respite allotted him while the death-agonized beast proceeded to buck its rider over the low railing and into the cold creek, he swung his axeblade into the unarmored chest of Ahndee’s adversary. Deep went that heavy, knife-sharp blade, biting through hide jerkin, shirt, flesh and bone and into the quivering heart, itself.

Someone in the decimated group between the bridge and the forest cast a javelin, and Mahvros took it in the thick muscles of his off shoulder; he screamed his shock and pain and made to rear, being restrained only by Bili’s mindspeak. Grimly, the young man dismounted and gently withdrew the steel head—blessedly, unbarbed.

Then he backed the big warhorse and turned him, beaming, “Go back to the hall of Komees Hari, Mahvros.”

“This horse still can fight, brother!” the black balked, stubbornly.

“I know that my brother still can fight,” Bili mindspoke with as much patience as he could muster up. “But that wound is deep. If I stay upon your back, you might be permanently crippled… and that would mean no more war for you, ever again, brother.” Thinking quickly, he added, “Besides, the other man can fight no longer and must be borne back to the hall. A horse of your intelligence is needed to keep this stupid gelding moving, yet see that it does not move so fast that the man falls off.”