Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

With such overwhelming numbers at his beck and call, Buhbuh had kept the Ahrmehnee borders in a state of almost constant turmoil, nor had he ignored the hated Kuhmbuhluhners. Many of the fertile valleys and glens seized by these non-Ganiks had been rendered untenable due to the constant raids and incursions from year to year. The few that remained in Kuhmbuhluhner hands were those that had been massively fortified and garrisoned with seasoned warriors. Bowley noted that the base of the current persecutors of the bunches, Sandeeskaht, was one of the strongest such places.

When the news had reached Buhbuh that the vast majority of the fearsome Ahrmehnee warriors had been summoned to assemble in the far northeast and that even the grim Maidens of the Moon had ridden to join with them, he had speedily gathered thousands of his own men and mounted a larger raid than had ever before been launched against the ancient enemy.

There had been but little resistance during the first few weeks of the incursion. The bunches had merrily murdered and raped and pillaged and tortured and burned, filling their bellies with stolen grain and Ahrmehnee flesh, while sending back to the main camp long pony trains of assorted loot.

But then the first disaster struck. A contingent of the Ganik raiders, over a thousand strong, had unexpectedly met in the course of a swing far to the east some hundreds of heavily armed non-Ahrmehnee warriors and had been almost annihilated by them—would have been, had not another Ganik bunch about equal in size to the first chanced upon the battle and swung the victory in the Ganik favor.

Then Buhbuh and his personal force had discovered that they were being tracked, pursued, by a force of Ahrmehnee warriors. He had deliberately led them and the Moon Maidens who had subsequently joined them out onto the plateau known as the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn. There he had ambushed them and driven them to bay against the face of a low cliff, gradually whittling them away with attack after attack of his thousands. There had been but few of them remaining, and many of those were wounded, when Buhbuh led the Ganiks in another full-scale charge that would surely have ended the affair.

But then the second disaster struck the unsuspecting Ganiks. A line of bowmen who looked nothing like Ahrmehnee, but somewhat like Kuhmbuhluhners, appeared atop the cliff against which the Ganiks’ prey were ranged. These proved to be master bowmen, and very soon their black-shafted arrows were slaying Ganik after Ganik, knocking them off their ponies’ backs to be trampled to death.

Then, down a steep and shaly slope to the right of the charging Ganik thousands, came rank upon rank of steel-clad men on big, armored horses and armed with lances, axes, longswords, sabers and iron maces. When they reached level ground, they so maneuvered that they struck the Ganik mob—poorly armed by any standards and pony-mounted— from both the right flank and the rear.

Most of these strangers fought and rode their way completely through the horde of Ganiks, then formed up on the left flank of the now-halted and milling bunches and struck them yet again. From Bowley’s description, Erica could be confident that the Ganik losses had been appalling, to say the least. When Buhbuh had reined about and set his Northorse at its fastest pace—a lumbering trot—toward the southwest, the battered Ganiks had quickly streamed in his wake.

Bowley himself had not seen Buhbuh die, but he had had the account from several who had. The Northorse had been seriously hurt in the first onslaught of the strangers and had at length fallen, sending Buhbuh tumbling. The Kleesahk had then doffed his barrel helm, dropped his quiver of darts and even his huge sword and set off at a run almost as fast as a pony’s. But a big armored man on a large black stallion had spurred up behind the fleeing leader and split his head to the eyes and beyond with an oversized battleaxe.

The survivors of the battle had fled at their fastest speed— ahorse, afoot, on hands and knees, any possible way to escape their blood-mad pursuers. Erica thought that that must have been the very gang of barbarians that she and Jay Corbett and the Broomtown men had watched coming off that plateau as if the hounds of hell were hot on their trail.

The fearsome strangers and the Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens had broken off the pursuit at the edge of the plateau, and the battered and bemused and by then leaderless Ganiks were just beginning to stop and think and gather and try to organize the tattered remnants when the third disaster struck.

Along with the written rendition of the strategy he had outlined to his force, Bili of Morguhn sent to the prince a request for the loan of as many more of the Kleesahks as that portion of the kingdom could spare. Prince Byruhn sent him an even dozen, along with a wholehearted endorsement of his plan.

The usual week-long rest period lengthened into two, then three weeks; it took that long for the blacksmiths to finish fashioning the massive hardware items that Bili had ordered to specifications drawn up by Lieutenant Frehd Brakit and Pah-Elmuh.

Once completed, the order was loaded onto a two-ox wain, which took its place in line behind other wains loaded down with scores of wood axes of various types, saws, crowbars, sledges, wooden mallets, chain and cordage of differing sizes and strengths, adzes, planes and assorted other tools of the carpenter’s trade. In addition, there were spare weapons, tents, buckets, supplies for man and horse, all the impedimenta necessary for the establishment of an encampment intended to house in excess of three hundred warriors for an indefinite period of time.

The distance between Sandee’s Cot and the Ganiks’ main camp, which Bili and his reconnaissance party had traveled in only two days, required more than six days for the column. Once, long ago, there had been a true wagon road between the present location of the Ganik stronghold and a spot just east of Sandee’s Cot, where it had intersected with the Royal Road. But that had been more than fifty years past, before the late and unlamented Buhbuh and his horde had driven out the small Kuhmbuhluhn garrison and themselves occupied the shelf.

All of the logs of that road had long since rotted away.

Brush and even trees had grown up to narrow it to little more than a pony track, so long hours of hard labor had been required to widen sections of it sufficiently for the wains to pass along it.

Finally, however, almost a full week after leaving Sandee’s Cot, the huge, patient oxen drew the huge, creaking wains into the area chosen for the campsite. That was about noon. Only three hours later, Brakit and Pah-Elmuh already were choosing and marking trees for the woodcutters, then selecting and marking the routes along which the felled and trimmed trees were to be snaked to the points where the artisans would take over. Since there were two of these points, fairly widely separated, it was decided to do most of the felling at a place an equal distance from both, or as nearly so as possible.

Work began at all three sites the next morning, even while two more teams of warriors-cum-laborers hewed and hacked and sweated and cursed and slowly cleared the paths for the logs and the oxen that would drag them into place. There were two Kleesahks with each working party, not including Pah-Elmuh, who stayed close to Brakit at all times. The huge hybrids quickly proved their worth when a mob of several hundred Ganiks came down from the shelf, armed to the teeth, riding fast, clearly bound for the woodcutters, who perforce working atop a ridge, were clearly visible from the Ganik camp.

But at a mindspoken signal from Pah-Elmuh, all of the Kleesahks dropped whatever metal tools they were using and stood in silence, unmoving as so many massive statues. Then the screams and warcries of the oncoming mob of Ganiks suddenly became cries of consternation, shouted questions and scarce-believing curses. The shaggy, smelly multitude passed within bare yards of the woodcutting party, looked directly at some of them, yet saw them not.