Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

Despite their clearly manlike traits, the Ganiks had decided that the Teenéhdjooks and Kleesahks came under the protection of Ndaindjuhd and, as the pelts were not to Ganik liking, they had lived in relative harmony with the hominids.

Then, in what Erica supposed was a response to repeated incursions or raids by the Ganik bunches, the warriors of the Ahrmehnee stahn had invaded in force, aided by a large group of Moon Maidens. In a great battle, early in the invasion, the fierce Ahrmehnee had virtually exterminated the then main bunch of the Ganiks, then had pushed on westward.

The Teenéhdjooks—such few of them as still remained— and the Kleesahks, who considered pure man to be incurably and incredibly savage in nature and who always tried to avoid any part in his constant squabblings and slaughterings, would most likely have retreated to their wilderness fastnesses, leaving the Ganiks and the Ahrmehnee to fight it out between themselves to the bitter and bloody end, had not some group of Ahrmehnee point riders captured and then coldly murdered two Kleesahk youngsters.

After that, with the priceless aid of the uncanny abilities of Teenéhdjooks and Kleesahks, the Ganiks were enabled to hound and harry the largest proportion of the huge invasion force to their richly deserved deaths, to capture and the Ganik torture frames and, eventually, to the Ganik stewpots. It was thought that some few of the invaders had escaped back whence they had come… but not many.

As Erica understood it, the “magic” of the manlike beings was an ability to cloud men’s minds so that they either could not see things and beings which lay within clear sight or saw things which did not, in fact, exist. As if those abilities were not enough, they were possessed of incredible strength, could see in light far too dim for even the sharpest-eyed humans, had much keener senses of smell and of hearing and could communicate with their own kind and with a few humans by what she would have called telepathy.

On exactly how the Ganiks and their hominid allies had drifted apart, Bowley seemed less than sure, saying only that the Kuhmbuhluhners had “won the Kleesahks over” soon after they had entered Ganik territory. Then, when the Kuhmbuhluhners turned against and began to persecute the “raht-livin’, land-lovin’ Ganiks,” the fickle Kleesahks chose to side with the newcomers against their own co-religionists, it seemed, for Bowley often spoke of the turncoats most disparagingly, calling them “phony Kuhmbuhluhners” and “rat finks”—which last was a term Erica had not heard used in hundreds of years.

Some years after the hominids had gone over to the Kuhmbuhluhners, Bowley had continued, an extended family unit of pure-blooded Teenéhdjooks had wandered down from the mountains to the north. They had possessed even more remarkable mental powers than had their predecessor hominids, and their arrival had thus vastly strengthened the Kuhmbuhluhners, who had responded to this strengthening by increasing their holdings at the expense of the Ganiks.

As more and still more farmer Ganiks had been dispossessed, had been offered the bitter choice of giving up their old-time religion, customs and time-hallowed practices or quitting the fertile valleys and glens to try to scratch out a meager existence on stony hillside farms, the bunches had mushroomed in size and aggressiveness. They had quickly learned, however, the utter folly of trying to meet the Kuhmbuhluhners—with their vastly superior weapons, long years of training, discipline and big, predatory horses, all too often aided and abetted by the wiles of the Teenéhdjooks and Kleesahks—in open, man-to-man battle.

So, generation after generation, the way of the bunches had been one of total outlawry, of raiding anyone and everyone—Kuhmbuhluhners, Ahrmehnee and even their fellow Ganiks—of sometimes dodging and sometimes ambushing Kuhmbuhluhner patrols, of a mean and nasty and brutish and often short existence that still seemed to most of them a better life than they would have had amid the never-ending drudgery of the farms whereon they all had been born and reared.

Then had come a few years of glory for the bunches. With the arrival of a renegade Kteesahk, Buhbuh, and his bloody ascendancy to leadership of the main bunch, the tide had seemed to turn… briefly.

Apart from his size and his longevity, Buhbuh had had, it seemed, few of the rare talents of his ilk, being far more manlike and, to judge by many of his actions over the years, more than a little deranged. A son of one of the leading Kleesahks, he had arrived among the Ganik bunch in his mid-teens, already seven feet tall, riding a stolen Northorse—the oversize draft-type horses used mostly by traders to draw their wains and wagons—and wielding a Kuhmbuhluhner greatsword easily with but one hand.

Within a month or so, he had hacked his way to the overall leadership with that sword, a leadership he was to retain until his death in the course of the great rout of the Ganik main bunch on the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn, a total of between sixty and seventy years.

One of his earliest acts had been the leading of the massed Ganik bunches in the taking of the area where the present main camp was situated. This area had been held by a vassal of the King of Kuhmbuhluhn and his retainers, who had been for some years engaged in stripping the rearmost caves of many hundred-weights of steel, iron, copper and sundry other metals. Pressed back and back by the swarming horde of the Ganiks, the defenders had finally taken refuge in the areas of the caves from which had come the metals. Yet when Buhbuh had at length pepped up his bunches to go in after the Kuhmbuhluhners, no living defenders were to be found, and none had ever known how they had escaped the Ganiks.

Erica thought that she knew the answer to that particular question, however. For large as the complex of man-made caves had been, one airshaft would not have been sufficient; two or possibly three would have been needed. Clearly, no one had used the one she had found, else there would have been rungs already in place within it, but that still left others.

And so Buhbuh had established himself in the caves, using them for home, stables, storehouse and treasury. He had personally led one or two big raids each year, sometimes on the Kuhmbuhluhners, but more often against the Ahrmehnee. In addition, he had demanded and received first choice of all loot taken by any of the bunches. Most of the inanimate loot had disappeared into the recesses of his caves. Women had always been turned over to his bullies, for the huge part-human had been apparently of an asexual nature, never having been known to have shared his caves and his monstrous bed with either woman or man in all of the long years he reigned.

Not contented with the Ganik men and boys who straggled in from time to time to join the bunches, Buhbuh and his bullies had taken to riding among the hill farms of the Ganiks and persuading—which word Erica read as “impressing”—any likely-looking men and boys to ride away with them, also using these forays upon their own folk to acquire anything that appealed to them or that seemed to be of value, as well as to kidnap or lightheartedly gang-rape any likely female they chanced across.

When Buhbuh took over, the total of all of the bunches— main and satellite—had been between two and three thousand. At the moment of his death, however, that total had swelled to more than six thousand outlaw Ganiks. So many had there been that in order to minimize interecine warfare, existing bunch territories had had to be strictly assigned and the borders clearly marked. Then, too, more and new territories to the south and the southwest had had to be opened and new-made bunches assigned to them. The bunch that had captured Erica had been one of these.