Robert Adams - The Witch Goddess

“No, Sergeant,” Corbett agreed, “none that we can see. But how are we to know what may lie under the soil, eh? Or what we may unknowingly have passed through or inadvertently camped upon or among back along the track? No, the best thing that you can do for us all now is to get on the move and send back help from Broomtown.

“When you get there, give your report to the base sergeant major. Old Ted Graham will know what to do from that point on.

“Now, help me back to my lean-to. Oh, and leave the drugs and syringes with me, too.”

With the officer tucked into his blankets, Cabell arose, then turned back. “One thing, sir. If we should run into any trouble… well, Dr. Braun, he’s unarmed… ?”

“Oh, hell,” Corbett mumbled, feeling a chill beginning. “Give the son of a bitch a pistol. The one he murdered Dr. Arenstein with is in my near-side saddlebag. There’s only one other person that I know of he’d like to see dead, now, and that person won’t be with you on your ride.”

Later, he was to recall those words.

Alerted by the powerful farspeak of the watching prairiecat, Whitetip, as soon as the Ganiks began filing down the path from the shelf, Bili had all three hundred and twelve of his male and female warriors standing to arms in their preassigned places when the van of the Ganik mob came onto the crest of the first ridge. Only a few, on the flanks and in the rear center, were mounted. Most of the force were on foot and bearing long-hafted pikes, in addition to their customary sidearms.

Soon the entire ridgetop seemed to be aswarm with shaggy, yelling Ganiks on their weedy little ponies. Anyone could easily see that they still outnumbered Bili’s force by at least five to one. But the armored men and women stood fast in the face of the threatening horde, for they knew of things that the screaming mob of pony riders did not… yet. Moreover, they nurtured supreme confidence in the sagacity of the very young man who led them— Thoheeks Bili of Morguhn, Bili the Axe.

Merle Bowley, in his fine armor, sitting high on his big, well-bred horse, in the midst of a knot of similarly equipped and mounted bullies at the rear of the mob of lesser Ganiks, reflected that whoever was in command of the Kuhmbuhluhners must be either an utter fool or a military tyro to so place his pitiful little bunch. He should have made his stand up on top of the next ridge, so that the Ganik charge would have been slowed, the impetus weakened by the ascent.

But no, the idiot had spread them out in way too thin a line and without even the big horses that gave them an edge over the pony-mounted Ganiks. Now, true, because of the thick growth of brushy woods to either side of that line, it would be damned hard to hit them from all sides—the preferred Ganik tactic. They would all have to hit them in front, but few of them as there were and with the added power of a downhill charge behind them, the Ganiks should be able to tromp right over the two or three hundred, then wheel around on the slope of the next ridge and finish them off, good and proper.

Merle smiled for the first time in twenty-four hours. When he had bid goodbye to Ehrkah, he had been certain that he and the rest were riding out to their deaths. Now he was not so sure. Unless there were a whole helluva lot more of the Kuhmbuhluhners hidden somewheres—and there could not be, not within easy reach, for there was just no place to hide enough to make any difference. The Kleesahks? No, he knew a bit about Teenéhdjook magic, and there were just too many of his Ganiks up here for the Kleesahks to cloud all of their minds.

“A’raht,” he yelled at the bullies, “git ’em movin’. Rahd raht ovuh the Kuhmbuhluhn fuckuhs!”

Soon after Merle had left the cave, Erica had saddled her horse, buckled on her equipment belt, slung her rifle and the big binoculars and ridden across the depth of the shelf—now deserted, save for the much-shrunken herd of ponies, and seeming oddly lifeless. She had ridden to the highest point along the cliffs, a spot almost fifteen meters above the track meandering below.

Dismounting at the base of the pile of huge boulders, she tethered her horse to a tough-looking bush and climbed as high as she felt she safely could. Finding a steady seat, she took out the binoculars, removed the protective lens caps, put them to her eyes and began to adjust the focus.

She watched the horde of Ganiks come out of the thickly wooded area between the track and the first ridge and begin to mount that ridge, the knot of bullies—recognizable even at the distance by their bigger horses and steel armor—at the rear of the mob. Bullies, she had learned, did not lead large numbers of Ganiks, they stayed behind, trusting that the ill-armed lesser Ganiks were more afraid of their sadistic cruelties than they were of whatever lay ahead of them.

When all were assembled along the ridgetop, most of the bullies began to ride along the rear of the throng, waving their fine weapons and shouting, their voices thin and tinny with the distance. Then the Ganiks began to wave their clubs and spears and, shortly, move down below the ridgetop and so out of her vision. A small knot of armored men on big horses stayed atop the ridge, observing the charge, but strain and adjust as she might, she could not see clearly enough to tell which one was Merle Bowley.

But then she saw the first of the rocks dropping and a frigid hand seemed suddenly to grip her heart.

Bill waited patiently until the horde of shaggy men had actually started their downhill charge before he mindspoke the signal to the engine crews waiting by their loaded and cocked catapults, for he knew that there would be time for but the one volley before the Ganiks got too close to his own lines to risk a rockfall.

The iron basketloads of one- and two- and three-pound stones came down as a deadly rain upon the mob of shouting, club- and spear-waving cannibals, bashing in heads of man and of mount, smashing through flesh to shatter bones. Including those Ganiks bereft of a pony, Bili estimated that the stones had subtracted perhaps three hundred from the howling throng.

As soon as the survivors had reached the foot of that slope, the archers hidden in the fringes of the flanking woods brought them under fire. As fast as they could pluck up a shaft, nock, draw, and then loose, they did so. They knew there was scant need to aim, for in such a tight-packed mob there was hardly any chance of an arrow not fleshing itself.

Then, when the van was only thirty yards distant, the leading riders became suddenly, terrifyingly aware of just what lay before them, of what they and the bullies had been unable to see, at the onset of the charge, so artfully had it been disguised. The doomed men made shift to rein up, but were borne irresistibly on by the hundreds behind them.

From his place upon the ridgetop, Merle saw it all—first the shower of rocks; then the deadly work of the concealed archers; finally the fiendish cleverness of the ultimate trap. He had thought the Kuhmbuhluhner who set the troops where he did a fool or a novice. Dully, resignedly, he admitted to himself how very wrong he had been in that premature estimate. His rash and overconfident decision had cost the lives of most of what had been left of the main bunch of Ganiks.

Coming down the steep slope of the ridge as they had, the bulk of the mob had simply had no possible way of stopping or even of slowing before they plunged into the deep, wide ditches that lay in front of the Kuhmbuhluhners’ small host of warriors. As if the sudden plunge were not enough, the bottom of those ditches had obviously been thickly sown with sharp wooden stakes to impale both man and pony.

Those pitifully few Ganiks who avoided the deathtraps had only done so because the near sides of the long ditch were already clogged to the ground level and above by the kicking, squirming, screaming bodies of those who had not been so fortunate.