Robert Adams - The Death of a Legend

“What we got, however, was very different from what we had anticipated at the start. We reduced a pair of salients with the intent of using them as forward emplacements for engines, only to find to our cost and consternation that both were but devilishly conceived and constructed traps.

“Although our engines bombarded the works and walls and the city within them almost continuously, still each well-planned and well-executed assault bought us nothing save more hundreds of casualties. Finally, the High Lady Aldora and Sir Ehd and I, who then were sharing the overall command in the High Lord’s absence, set ourselves to starving the city out, swallowing our frustration as best we could.”

“This High Lady Aldora willingly shared her authority over the warriors with both you and another man?” asked Rahksahnah. “She must be a very powerful and self-assured woman, and of a most generous and forbearing nature, Bili.”

“She is, all those things, and more, Rahksahnah,” Bili quickly agreed. But he thought it just as well not to mention that he and Aldora had, before and during and after the times which he was discussing, been most passionate lovers. He added, “The High Lady Aldora is a fine strategist and a very gifted cavalry tactician; she it was who wrote one of those books that Baronet Drehkos found and used so disastrously against us.

“And this final strategy into which we had found ourselves forced might have succeeded in the end, for the city had never been well or even adequately supplied and was in pitiable condition but then the decision was taken out of our hands.

“The High Lord Milo had, while still fighting the rebellion in my duchy, captured two supposed kooreeoee—leaders of the Ehleen Church for the duchies of Morguhn and of Vawn—who were in actuality witchmen, agents of the Witch Kingdom, far to the south; he had earlier captured another of these human monsters who had headed an earlier, similar rebellion in a duchy farther south, and the answers wrung out of the first had helped him to partially head off affairs in Morguhn.

“Leaving the army at Vawnpolis, he had personally escorted these two new captives up to the Confederation capital at Kehnooryos Atheenahs and had them put to the same severe degrees of question as the first The answers they two were at long last persuaded to reveal so alarmed the High Lord that he returned posthaste to the camps under the still-embattled walls of Vawnpolis and insisted—over the vehement objections of Aldora, me, Sir Ehd and every other commander— that the city be granted terms of honorable surrender, despite their many and hideous crimes and treacheries and their long and costly resistance to rightful authority. He is, after all, the Undying High Lord, and so his will was done.

“What he had learned that had so agitated him was that other agents of the Witch Kingdom were, even then, in the Ahrmehnee Stahn, persuading the Ahrmehnee tribes and the Moon Maidens to arise and set aflame the entire border shared with the Confederation. Most of the tribes had already sent their warriors to camp around the village of their nahkhahrah and the time was worn exceedingly thin, was widespread warfare to be kept out of the duchies of the western borders.

“While the High Lord with all his infantry and quite a few rearmed former rebels, marched directly up the trade road, through the Frainyuhn lands, clearly bound for the main gathering of Ahrmehnee at the largest village of the Taishyuhns, operations against the virtually defenseless Ahrmehnee tribal lands to north and south were also commenced.

“The High Lady Aldora, with most of the Regular cavalry, a few Kindred noblemen and their retainers and Baronet Drehkos commanding what remained of his mobile force of rebels, circled around to strike from the north. I, along with all of the mounted Freefighters and most of the Kindred nobles, circled to strike upward from the south. The High Lord correctly thought that, did enough Ahrmehnee refugees—dispossessed, terrified, wounded and maimed, and starving—pour into the war camps with blood-curdling tales of burnings, butcheries, rapes and pillagings, the warriors would decide that they were needed in their home lands, and so would delay or forget the projected invasion of the Confederation.

“I trust that the High Lady’s force did a thorough job, for as I have said, she is a master tactician of cavalry operations. For my own part, the Freefighters and I soon taught the Kindred among us the proper way to put the fear of Steel Into peasants—we looted, we drove off livestock and slew where we could not capture. Rapine was encouraged, but we only killed folk when they forced us to it. We burned every structure that would take fire and tried to knock down the few that wouldn’t, and the fanned-out squadrons pushed on steadily toward the north, driving the surviving villagers before us.”

Prince Byruhn noted that the expressions of both of the Ahrmehnee headmen—Vahrtahn Panosyuhn and Vahk Soormehlyuhn—and of the lovely Rahksahnah had become hard and grim and flushed with a degree of anger as Bili recounted the planned and executed depredations of the Ahrmehnee lands.

“Assuming that, sooner or later, a sufficiently large number of Ahrmehnee warriors would come down from the north to offer serious opposition, I had been following a day or so behind the front-line squadrons with a reserve force and the trains. Then, when we were about halfway through our assigned territory, the High Lord farspoke me, ordering a cessation of hostile acts against the Ahrmehnee and a general withdrawal of most of my forces to the south, and thence back into Confederation lands.

“He went on to inform me that the nahkhahrah Kokh Taishyuhn had indicated to him a desire to merge the Ahrmehnee Stahn with the Confederation, and that Aldora, too, was being recalled.

“Then he gave me another mission. I was to take the best of each of the then existing squadrons—the best units, men, horses and weapons—combine them into a single squadron and head them due west, collecting support as I passed the areas of the various squadrons. I was warned to be on the lookout for several troops of Moon Maidens and was advised to render them any needed assistance in tracking down and eliminating a column of witchfolk and pack mules, headed south.

“As matters turned out, we none of us ever saw hide nor hair of that column, but we did find the Moon Maidens and a force of Ahrmehnee warriors, to boot. They were on that plateau, backed at bay against the wall of a cliff and hopelessly battling two to three thousand shaggies—your small Ganiks—who were being led by Elmuh’s son, Buhbuh.

“I detached my bowmasters and sent them to range along the top of that cliff, and when next the shaggies charged, they quilled as many as they could to soften them up for the kill. It was a steep slope from my position down to the shaggies,

but not too steep, it developed; I led the rest of the squadron down it and full into the shaggies, taking them on the flank.

“Precious few of those shaggies were astride full horses, and those little mountain ponies are no match at all for an ordinary horse of decent size, much less war-trained destriers, so the initial impact was less fighting than striving to keep one’s seat and helping one’s mount to stay on its feet while bowling over ponies like ninepins.

“But real fighting came soon enough. For all that few of the shaggies had decent weapons and fewer still had any form of armor, they still outnumbered us by at least six to one, and that crashing charge gradually lost its impetus. I fought my way clear on the other side of the press and was shortly joined by a young knight of rare bravery, Sir Geros Lahvoheetos of Morguhn, who had been riding guard on my Red Eagle Banner and had himself taken it when the banner-man was slain.