Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

And almost the same thing occurred as the baffled Ganiks swung around and headed back for their camp. Their chosen path took them directly across one of the lanes being cleared for snaking the logs, and they rode their little ponies between two groups of the warrior-workers, yet obviously could not see the men who could have easily reached out and touched them.

In the days that followed, these occurrences became almost commonplace and the workers quickly became accustomed to freezing in place, doing nothing that would make a noise, as larger or smaller contingents of Ganiks searched for them in vain. Of course, this invariably slowed down the work, but Bili and the other officers were well content to lose hours or even days of work time rather than find themselves in combat against the vastly overwhelming numbers of the enemy at a place and a time not of their choosing.

But Bili also knew that the Ganiks were going to have to be nibbled at to put them in the proper mood so that when the time was ripe his plans might work smoothly, with full Ganik participation, if not willing cooperation. But he had already formulated schemes to that end, nor was he much longer in putting those schemes into operation.

“Them damn Kleesahks and Kuhmbuhluhn bastids is flat a-scarin’ the shit outen the fellers down ther, Ehrkah,” Merle Bowley informed Erica the Goddess one night, adding, “Ain’ hardly none of “em too lowng awn brains, nohow, so they’s allus a-scairt of enythin they don’ unnerstan’… and it’s a whole lots they don’ unnerstan.”

It had been bad enough, thought Erica, when Horseface and his hundreds had been unable to find a fairly large group of foemen that watchers on the shelf could clearly see. That had even shaken the placid Horseface for a while, until Bowley and a couple of the older bullies had patiently explained to their bemused comrade that it was simply a case of hominid magic, such as had confounded to death the Ahrmehnee invaders of long years ago.

Then, for almost two full weeks, there had been alarms— dozens, sometimes—every day and some nights as well. So many cliffside sentries had sent their companions galloping back with word of large bodies of Kuhmbuhluhners advancing across the ridges, or marching east or west along the track or even in the process of scaling the cliff faces, that the Ganiks and their ponies had been run ragged dashing hither and yon. Usually, moreover, when the mobs and the bullies reached the supposedly threatened areas, it was to see no trace of the purported threat and to hear only the witless babbling of the sentries about how the armored Kuhmbuhluhners had suddenly just vanished into thin air.

Merle had at once suspected that hidden Kleesahks, down below, had addled the sentries’ minds, convincing the hapless men that they really saw what they thought and reported they saw. He countered this wily tactic—more or less—by posting roving groups of a bully and a dozen or so men on a route that ran along some hundred yards behind the line of sentry posts. Their orders were to find a high point away from the edges and see if they could spot whatever the men directly on the edges reported. Sometimes this had worked, other times it had not.

Then, half of a patrol had ridden back in from a circuit of the surrounding hills. All of the Ganiks in that hundred, even their leader, a bully named Weasel Welch, had been nearly out of their wits, literally white with fear. It seemed that at one minute the second hundred had been strung out behind them, and in the next minute they were gone, ponies and all!

Merle had been gathering and mounting a force to go out looking for the men when they appeared to sentries along the cliffs. Bursting out of the woods, the other half of the patrol whipped their ponies along the track, riding in silence but with many a backward glance, as if old Plooshuhn himself were hot on their heels. Nor did one of them even so much as slow until all were back up on the shelf.

The various versions of their story were all disjointed and vividly colored by their superstitious terror of the living dead, but by the expedient of taking a scrap from here and a bit from there, Merle was able to piece out the whole fabric of the fantastic tale.

At one and the same time that the group behind had become invisible to the group ahead, so had the group ahead vanished from the sight of the group behind. What had replaced the leading group had been at first a wavery, unstable patch of smoky fog. As the shaken men had watched, this cloud had grown wider, higher, denser, and then out of it, mounted on his big, familiar, dappled Northorse, clad in stained and hacked and dented armor, had ridden the ghost of their dead leader, Buhbuh the Kleesahk!

His contrabasso voice booming from within his closed helm, waving his six-foot sword in emphasis—as he always had done in vehemence—so violently that the long darts rattled in the case slung across his back, he had warned them all of the terrible fate awaiting them should they not heed his advice and flee the shelf to follow the farmer Ganiks south and west, but rather should try to fight this host which now opposed them. Many of this host actually were, he assured the terror-struck men, ghosts like himself, murderous and unkillable ghosts of those killed by the Ganik bunches over the years.

The gist of the warnings had been that, should the bunch continue aggressive movements against the host now opposing them, many would die and many others would simply disappear… forever, snatched to an eternal death of torment by demons. Also, rocks and fire would fall from the skies as they had so fallen on the very day Buhbuh had died. Others who did not heed his warnings would have the earth open beneath them and swallow them up, entire.

Some attested that Buhbuh had then just disappeared, but most claimed that the apparition had reined about and ridden back into the dense cloud of smoky fog, which then had slowly become smaller and more wavery before dissipating altogether.

Being a rational man, Merle naturally did not believe a word of the tale. Of course, he recognized the possibility that it was another instance of Kleesahk witchery, but it did not smack of any illusions he had ever heard of Kleesahks casting. He thought it far more likely that, their weak and unstable minds already roiled by the occurrences of the last few days, this group had commenced to lose the stomach for fighting the Kuhmbuhluhners and Kleesahks and had convinced themselves and each other that the spirit of a respected leader had now given them firm grounds for running.

He felt just then like either killing them all, then and there, or telling them to get on their ponies and skeedaddle, but realizing that either course might be a mistake with the other Ganiks so agitated, he set the tone by laughing at the men who claimed to have seen and heard Buhbuh, mocking them, making light of their fears. Loyally, the other bullies had emulated him… in public. Privately, however, they were all worried, confused and more than a little frightened. So, too, was Merle Bowley, but he confided in only one person: Erica.

Soon after Bowley had taken up swimming and had discontinued the common Ganik practice of wearing clothing until it rotted off his body, Erica had become aware of a physical attraction to him and, never having seen any reason to stay chaste for long, had begun sharing her huge old bed with him, now and again. With hundreds of years of experience in lovemaking, Erica was a good teacher, and Bowley had proved to be a quick learner, so quick that both soon were deeply satisfied one with the other and Erica, for her own part, found herself constantly postponing her departure and even trying to think of ways to persuade him to accompany her when depart she finally did.

Even in his primitive state, she had found Merle Bowley to be an admirable man, and that was before he became her lover, she took pains to remind herself. Could he enjoy the benefits of a proper education, of long exposure to a more sophisticated culture than the general brutishness of the bestial Ganiks, what wonders might come of his native intelligence, his rare innovativeness, his natural quality of leadership?