Champion of the Last Battle

III

The road widened a bit at the crest of the ridge, and it was there that the king, his grandson and his son, along with their principal lieutenants, sat their restive mounts staring down at the valley-spanning formation of the Skohshuns, their foemen. Of them all, only Prince Byruhn and a couple of his nobles had ever seen a formed-up Skohshun pike line, but as this one was almost twice the size of the one against which they had so vainly flung themselves last autumn, even they were impressed, mightily impressed.

The big men stood a bit over a yard apart, it seemed, in lines that stretched unbroken from half up the slope of one of the flanking hillocks to half up the slope of the other. And there were a hellacious lot of them. Bili’s quick, battlewise eye told him of at least a hundred pikemen in each line and as many as ten of those lines, one behind the other in ordered ranks.

The overlong pikes were all grounded and stood up from the lines like a narrow forest of branchless saplings, with the near-nooning sun a-sparkle on the honed, polished, foot-long points that capped the eighteen-foot hafts. Also reflecting the bright sunlight were the scale breastplates and simple steel caps of the Skohshuns and the gold and silver and brass animal figures that capped the staffs of the line of standards at the rear of the formation, while the standards themselves rippled slightly in the breeze that blew fitfully down the vale from the north.

Shrunken with the distance, a few mounted men—nobles and officers, probably—could be seen riding up and down the forefront, ceaselessly dressing the formation, assisted in this by men on foot bearing shorter polearms and wearing more armor than the common pikemen.

From their elevation, the New Kuhmbuhluhners could see that though the front ranks were straight and unbroken—like lines carved accurately in soft wood by a sharp knife in a sure hand—the formation was more jagged in the rear. More depth existed at the road and in level areas which might prove a good location for a full-scale charge of the New Kuhmbuhluhn horsemen, while the lines were reduced in depth in other places—such as behind the abattis in the streambed and on the brushy, steep slopes of the flanking hillocks.

The pickets who had quitted the ridgeline upon the approach of the first battle were to be seen between the foot of the ridge and the formation, formed in a precise column and running easily toward the slope of the western hillock. Even as the king and his party watched, a Skohshun horseman spurred from a point at the foot of that hillock leading a riderless horse. As the other pickets continued on afoot, their leader paused long enough to swing up into the empty saddle, then followed the first rider upslope and into the hilltop camp.

For all his understandable impatience, the brigadier saw to it that Sergeant Winchel, who had commanded the advance observers, had a pint of foaming beer before officially rendering his report to the waiting knot of officers.

Still redfaced and streaming sweat from the long run in the heat of the sun, the broad-shouldered, thick-bodied man stood at rigid attention, his eyes fixed unwaveringly on a point directly ahead of him, and rendered his report in short, terse, toneless sentences.

“Sir! The enemy are all across the ford. There are three mounted units and one of foot. Only some half of the horsemen are heavy-armed ... ”

There were sighs of relief and a few exchanged grins amongst the officers at this, all silenced and wiped off by an imperious wave of the brigadier’s horny hand.

“I’ll have silence, gentlemen, if you please. We’ve damn-all time, as it is. Go on, sergeant.”

The sergeant continued in the same dehumanized voice. “There seem to be no bowmen or dartmen or slingers among the foot, and no horse-archers. The numbers of the horsemen are a total of fifty to fifty-five score; the foot are half that number or less.”

“Could you see any units that appeared to be dragoons—mounted men armed with infantry weapons, sergeant?” rasped the brigadier.

“Sir! A few, perhaps ten score, in the third mounted unit might have been such, but all in both of the leading units were cavalry—either heavy or light.”

The old officer nodded once. “Well done, sergeant. You may return to your unit. Dismiss!”

As the beefy noncom spun about and stiffly marched from the pavilion, the brigadier allowed himself the luxury of a thin smile beneath his drooping mustaches. “It would appear, gentlemen, that our old trick has worked yet again in the case of these New Kuhmbuhluhners. They apparently lack either the numbers or the weight to truly endanger us, and their leaders were obviously so stung by the cunning words of our herald that they put their brains and war sense up on the shelf and left all their missilemen at home.

“If God so wills it and all goes well, goes as I planned it, our arms should win us a new homeland, this day.

“To your commands, gentlemen. The foe is in sight!”

Although Bili of Morguhn had no way of knowing it, while Skohshuns and New Kuhmbuhluhners faced each other across the expanse of that narrow mountain vale, far and away to the southeast, three men squatted around the dismembered remains of a serpentine creature and conversed, while constantly waving at the hordes of buzzing flies that shared their interest in the decaying flesh.

Dr. Mike Schiepficker laid aside a four-inch scalpel and whistled soundlessly through clenched teeth, then addressed the man across the table from him. “Well, you were right about its being no reptile, Jay. In close to a thousand years of off—and-on study of zoology, I’ve never seen or heard of any reptile this primitive. But it’s no worm either, despite outward appearances; no worm has a bony spine or such well-developed internal organs. Offhand, with only the dissection of this single specimen behind me, I’d say it is an amphibian.”

The other man’s eyebrows rose sharply in disbelief. “An amphibian, Mike? Three meters long? And we’ve killed even longer, bigger ones before you got up here. I’ve been around for as long as you have and I’ve never heard of any amphibian this size. Not even half this size.”

Schiepficker nodded. “Then you never saw or heard of the Japanese giant salamanders? They ran to lengths of just under two meters, very broad and stocky and heavy, too; heavier by far than this beast was. And this thing’s ancestors did have legs. Look here, see that small, flat bone? That is an atrophied scapula—a shoulder blade. And back here ...” He moved down the table and utilized two pairs of forceps to spread the lips of the incision that ran the length of the long, slimy body. “See that? And those? They’re what’s left of a functional pelvis and the bone structure of rear legs. This creature’s very distant forebears may very well have looked a great deal like salamanders.”

“That still doesn’t answer the main question, Mike. Just what is this thing? A mutation of some sort, as David—Dr. Sternheimer—thinks?”

“No, I don’t think so, Jay. There once was fair evidence that something the descriptions of which sounded amazingly like this inhabited certain portions of Europe—the Bavarian Alps and Sweden, as I recall. The Germans called it a Tatzelwurm, I believe, saying they inhabited caves, mostly. But not much was known of the beasts, as I say. And I never heard even rumors of anything like them in the Western Hemisphere.”

“You say these are scavengers, basically?”

The second man nodded. “The first things we noted when we began to uncover the remains buried when that line of cliffs collapsed were that every trace of flesh, skin, cartilage and the smaller bones were gone and even a good bit of the cured leather, while the larger bones and bits of wood or metal to which leather had been attached were scored with scrapes and deep gouges. The peculiar teeth of the first of these things we killed fitted some of those scrapes and gouge marks perfectly, Mike.

“But I think they’re predators, too. I know damned well they’re vicious as all hell and next to impossible to kill without virtually blowing them apart. And any bite they deliver always results in a serious infection.”

Schiepficker shrugged. “That’s often true of the bites of flesh-eaters, Jay, most especially of those which indulge principally in carrion. Not that I’m necessarily ruling out the possibility that the creatures are venomous; it’s a trait that many amphibians have, after all. Some kinds of toads used to be boiled down and rendered into arrow poison, you know.

“Well, if you and your man there will assist me, I’ll get the still-intact parts of this specimen into the preservative before this heat rots it any further. I’d like to have two, maybe three, more of the critters to take apart, but don’t detail any men to hunt them out until you get as much of that salvage work done as is possible. You know how important Dr. Sternheimer considers the primary mission of your present expedition to be, Jay.”

General Jay Corbett did indeed know. This was his second attempt to bring back to the J&R Kennedy Research Center the packloads of millennium-old artifacts which the labors of his current command were slowly recovering from beneath the untold tons of shattered rock—books and technical manuals and schematics, dismantled machinery and electronic equipment and spare parts, miles and miles of wire of differing gauges and resistances, transistors, silicon chips and a vast multitude of items the uses of which he could only guess. And that was not even mentioning the precious metals—gold in both coin and bars, silver, several kilos of industrial diamonds, leaden containers of radioactive substances, a few flasks of quicksilver, five kilos of platinum and smaller amounts of other, much rarer metals.

Two years before, Jay and two of the Center scientists—Drs. Erica Arenstein and Harry Braun—their minds transferred into Ahrmehnee bodies, had journeyed far northeast, into the Ahrmehnee stahn, to rouse that entire fierce race into a full-scale invasion of the western thoheekahtrohnee—or duchies—of the Confederation, as part of a centuries-old scheme to so weaken the upstart Confederation as to allow the Center to reestablish the United States of America, of which long-defunct political entity they considered themselves to be the last legitimate portion.

While on a related mission into the Hold of the Maidens of the Moon Goddess—a race of warrior-women distantly akin to the Ahrmehnee—Dr. Arenstein had discovered that not only was the Hold squatting atop a barely quiescent volcano, but that the side of the mountain was honeycombed with caves, many of them far too regular in form to have been natural in origin, and that these caves were the repository of a hoard of items of twentieth-century technology, more precious than rubies to the Center.

Upon being presented this god-sent opportunity to obtain the priceless trove, Dr. David Sternheimer, the Center Director, had organized and dispatched north a sizable pack train and the force to guard it, along with necessary gear and certain explosives and related devices requested by the three agents in the north.

With the bulk of the Moon Maidens away in the Ahrmehnee stahn, making ready to join with the male warriors in the invasion of the western marches of the Confederation, Dr. Arenstein and her people had returned to and been welcomed in the Hold. Of a night, they had coldly murdered their immediate hostesses, signaled those hidden outside the Hold, who then had crept up on and knifed or strangled the sentries, and finally used radio signals to release the contents of previously concealed canisters of a powerful gas.

When it was safe to do so, the men and beasts filed through the entrance tunnel—all equipped with face masks which filtered out the noxious, sleep-inducing fumes. Reaching the caves, they began to dismantle, gather and speedily pack the entire contents of the caverns onto the mules and ponies, stowing the more fragile items in special containers brought north for that very purpose.

When all was in readiness for the long journey southward, two explosive charges were laid and equipped with timed fuses. One, the smaller, was for the purpose of sealing the entry tunnel; the other, a far larger one, was for the purpose of sealing the vent of the volcano which underlay the entire glen of the Hold. The thinking of the scientists was that if this vent was sealed, a small volcanic eruption could well result and thus conceal the fact that the Hold had been stripped of its treasures.

But one or both of them miscalculated. The eruption, when it occurred several days later than anticipated, was anything but small. It blew the Hold and most of the mountain off the face of the earth, sending white-hot chunks of rock—ranging in size from invisible dust particles to multi-ton boulders—far up into the sky to fall to earth many kilometers distant. Nor were the rocks and the far-ranging forest fires they caused all or even the least of the calamities.

A powerful series of earth tremors rocked and racked the entire region, changing the courses of streams, shaking down some mountains while raising new ones and, in at least one instance, reducing a long, wide, high and previously inhabited plateau into so many square kilometers of dusty, shattered rocks.

This plateau had been called by the Ahrmehnee the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn, and the principal north-south trail to the westward of it had run under the beettling bluffs of its westernmost flank. And the bulk of the pack train had been strung out along that very stretch of trail when the tremors had brought the entire line of bluffs crashing down upon men and beasts alike, crushing out the lives of the living and sealing their corpses and the inanimate treasure beneath untold tons of stone.

And for the survivors of this disaster, the quakes and fires had been only the beginning, a mere prelude to weeks to come of danger and horror and, for some, death.

Burdened from the beginning with burned or injured men, and menaced also by hundreds of rude, crudely armed but no less dangerous, pony-mounted savages who called themselves Ganiks and practiced, among other degeneracies, senseless and insensitive torture of prisoners and cannibalism, Jay Corbett had finally taken the most of the surviving force to hold the mouth of a narrow defile. In so doing, he hoped to allow the two scientists, the wounded, the pitifully few remaining packloads of loot from the Hold of the Maidens, the packload of fast-dwindling medical stores and a minimal escort of sound troopers under the command of the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer, Sergeant Gumpner, a bare chance at escape and survival.

Dr. Harry Braun had once been married to Dr. Erica Arenstein and had alternately loved her and hated her ever since—through hundreds of years and scores of bodies. She loathed and despised him and had many times deliberately done the very things that she knew would hurt him or arouse him to fits of public fury.

Braun had suffered a severe compound fracture of the leg when the first tremors of the earthquake caused his big saddle mule to fall with him still in the saddle. After treatment and splinting by Erica—who held an M.D. among her other degrees—the injured scientist had been narcotized and borne in a jury-rigged horse litter for the first few days of the southward journey.

But then the pressing danger from the Ganiks became more severe and Corbett had decided to try to shake the pursuit by cutting cross-country through the brush and thickets, hacking out a passage laboriously with sabers and axes. It had been necessary to put Braun astride a mount and tie him into the saddle. He had taken it into a mind already fuzzy with fever-induced delirium and drugs that Erica and Jay were deliberately, maliciously and with jolly sadism torturing him, especially in light of the fact that Erica had found it best to cut his dosages of anesthetics if he was to have enough to last the rest of the journey.

As they all rode hard up the narrow defile, leaving Corbett and this riflemen facing hundreds of Ganiks in the forlorn hope of saving what and who could be saved, Braun slowed, then dropped behind and, when Erica came up to him, pled piteously with her to dismount and tighten his girth, which he could feel slipping. But when she did so, he drew his big-bore belt pistol and tried to shoot her. When the weapon jammed, he pistol-whipped her into unconsciousness, then rode on and left her to either die or, far worse, be taken by the Ganiks. The story he gave out to Gumpner was that Erica had been killed by a small party of Ganiks in the defile and that he had been able to get off but the single shot at the marauders before his pistol malfunctioned and he could only ride on.

When he had decided to make his stand, Corbett had been convinced that it would certainly be the last stand for him and the riflemen he commanded. For all that the horde of barbarians were primitively armed even for this time and place, there were just too many of them; far more of them than he and his force had of cartridges for their rifles. But he had been wrong.

Due to some wildly implausible turns of good fortune, he and his force had beaten off charge after charge of the screaming, wild-eyed cannibals, piling up three to four hundred dead or dying Ganiks with well-aimed shots and explosive bullets.

But it had been a near thing—or so it had seemed at the time. They had been down to a scant handful of cartridges per man when the Ganiks were suddenly reinforced and, encouraged by the fresh forces, had mounted yet another full-scale charge. But when this one, too, had ended as had all the earlier ones in bloody butchery and defeat, those Ganiks still unhurt, some two hundred or more, had mounted their horses and ponies and ridden away to the northwest without a backward glance.

After a far-ranging reconnaissance of the Ganiks’ line of withdrawal to be certain that it was really such and not simply a ruse to draw them out of their well-defended defile, the exhausted riflemen had butchered a Ganik pony and camped the night in the grassy, well-watered area just to the north of the mouth of the defile. Then, next morning, they had pushed on southward in the wake of the smaller, more vulnerable party.

It did not ease their minds to discover signs that a sizable mounted party of Ganiks was spurring on along the same trail between their force and the smaller one. But luck still rode with them. They surprised the contingent of Ganiks camped along the trail and had cut most of them down before some were fully awake. Two or three, no more, escaped in the darkness, afoot and unarmed. Their leader was captured alive but unconscious, victim of a blow from Jay Corbett’s mace.

Some presentiment had caused Jay Corbett to spare the life of the middle-aged, bald, bearded and indescribably filthy cannibal chief, and he had never had cause to regret his action, far from it. Old Johnny “Skinhead” Kilgore had proved himself worth his weight in diamonds to Corbett and every other trooper of the survivors.

The Ganik’s knowledge of game and hunting, of wild but edible plants and of plants having natural medicinal qualities had kept them well fed and healthy for almost all the remaining journey. He had quickly and easily shed most of his Ganik ways and become one of them. He made friends easily, and his unquestioned expertise as a woodsman soon had earned him the respect and trust of all the troopers.

But if he and his newfound mates fared well, the murderous Dr. Harry Braun surely did not. When Gumpner halted his small command for the night, after the wild ride from the defile, in a sheltered, easily defensible glen, Braun was alternately screaming with pain and lapsing into unconsciousness. Upon lifting him down from his saddle and examining him, Gumpner found the injured, splinted and bandaged leg immensely swollen and horribly discolored for its entire length—toes to crotch—with the toes and part of the foot turning black.

When Corbett joined Gumpner, the officer decided to do what little he could in the absence of a trained doctor by opening and draining the infected leg, and this he did with the assistance of Gumpner and a few others.

In the aftermath of the crude surgery, Braun surprisingly seemed to be improving, and when the horses, ponies and mules had grazed out the glen, Corbett had felt few qualms about moving on with the injured scientist. But Braun’s condition had gradually deteriorated under the strains of daily travel, and when Old Johnny Kilgore and a hunting party found a promising, grassy, well-watered spot some kilometers west of the trail, Corbett had had the unit go into camp there.

At various times, when drugs or delirium had dulled his conscious mind, Braun had ravingly relived his cold-blooded murder of Erica Arenstein well within the hearing of every man in the column.

A week or so of bedrest, injections of antibiotics and nourishing foods, combined with the solicitous care of the two troopers assigned to attend him, had almost restored Braun completely. Then, like a thunderbolt, Corbett and Gumpner discovered that the foot of the broken leg was becoming gangrenous.

As a group of troopers on a deer hunt had recently seen landmarks that told them they were but a few days’ ride from Broomtown Base—their home and the northernmost bastion of Center activities—Corbett decided to send Braun on ahead, mounted on a big mule and escorted by a Sergeant Cabell, Old Johnny Kilgore and a trooper, with led remounts and orders to get the scientist to Broomtown alive so that he could have his mind transferred into a whole, healthy body before his injured, diseased one died. Cabell, the trooper and Johnny were chosen because they and their charge were just then the only men in all the company who were not sudden victims of illness that left them infant-weak, feverish and racked with bone-rattling chills.

A few days along the trail, in a raging tantrum because Cabell would not immediately inject him with one of the last few dosages of opiates, Braun shot the well-meaning noncom out of his saddle. But as he turned his attentions and his smoking pistol on Old Johnny, the old cannibal sped a wickedly barbed wardart into the thigh of the scientist’s good leg and then, regretfully, put another into the chest of the trooper just as that man fired a rifle at him.

In the fresh agony of the sharp iron blade deep-seated in his flesh and grating on the femur, Braun dropped both pistol and reins, and the mule set off at a flat-out run toward the south, with the screaming man firmly strapped into the saddle.

Old Johnny had returned to the campsite in time to tend the stricken men and nurse some of them back to health, but it was long weeks before they were capable of marching on to the base. There they discovered that Dr. Harry Braun had, after everything, been dragged in alive by friendly natives and had reported that all of the remainder of the expedition were long dead, that he was the sole survivor.

It had long been an ill-kept secret that Dr. David Sternheimer had nurtured a deep and abiding love for Dr. Erica Arenstein for centuries, and when once he had learned from Jay Corbett the truth of her murder, his vengeance had been savage. Not only had Dr. Harry Braun been summarily stripped of all his privileges and rank, his mind had been forcibly transferred from the new, healthy body to another one—a body a good deal older and slowly dying of colonic cancer. Then he had been assigned menial, degrading duties in a place where Sternheimer could keep an eye on him.

For most of the following year, careful and meticulous preparations had been made both at the Center and at Broomtown Base. Then, in the spring, a large, well-armed and lavishly supplied force of Broomtown men had set out for the site of the buried pack train under the overall command of General Jay Corbett. Gumpner, now a major, was in command of the battalion of troopers and the civilian packers, while another civilian, Johnny Kilgore, led the scouts assigned to the new expedition.

They bore everything thought to be needful for retrieving the lost treasures. There were explosives to blast the huge boulders into movable sizes, sledgehammers, picks, shovels, crowbars, axes and other hardware, cables and strong cordage and chains, as well as collars and draft-harness sets for the big mules. A number of the troopers were trained experts in the use of the explosives, and not a few of the civilian packers had been drafted into the expedition from their normal occupation of stone-quarrying.

The memory of the vast hordes of bloodthirsty Ganiks had not faded from the minds of the planners, either. The men of the battalion were far better armed than had been the few who had defended that defile. In addition to the rifles and pistols, the sabers and axes and bayonets and dirks, there were machine guns, mortars, shotguns, and both hand and rifle grenades.

There were not just one but two of the big, long-range radio transceivers, each complete with its heavy, bulky battery pack and bicycle-powered generator for recharging. In addition to the regular once-per-day broadcast, Jay Corbett had Sternheimer’s carte blanche. He could call in to either Broomtown or the Center when and as he wished to do so.

Although he was almost the antithesis of a superstitious man, Sternheimer had grudgingly admitted to Jay that he had had several unexplainable dreams that made him think that Dr. Erica Arenstein was still alive somewhere up in that wild country, and he had almost begged the general to watch carefully for any signs of his lost love.

Privately, Corbett felt certain that the missing woman was long months dead, and he did not quite know what to make of the emotional pleas of the normally cold, distant, correct and objective Director, but he had finally agreed to keep his eyes peeled for a trace of Erica Arenstein, then had shoved the matter to a far recess of his mind.

It had been shortly after the first blastings that the first of the monsters of the ilk of that one now stinking and covered with feasting flies on the table had manifested itself. They averaged three and a half meters in length and a thickness of thirteen centimeters, were annulated and covered with a thick, viscous slime. Seen at a distance, they might have been taken for huge earthworms. But at close range, when their beady eyes and wide mouths filled with double rows of sharp teeth became evident, it was clear that this was no worm.

They were aggressive and vicious, could move as fast as most snakes and had jaws powerful enough to easily sever a finger or a toe or to tear off sizable amounts of flesh. No one had ever heard one of the creatures utter any sound, but they were unremittingly fierce and devilishly hard to kill. Even with most of its body blown loose from the head by explosive rifle bullets, one of them had still managed to propel the head close enough to a quarryman to clamp the dying, tooth-studded jaws down on his foot, shearing right through the tough hide brogans to the flesh beneath.

Aware of the Director’s long-held interest in unusual animals, Corbett had reported these creatures to the Center on his daily report and had suggested the dispatch of a trained man to properly examine them. Dr. Mike Schiepficker had been coptered up far enough for a mounted escort of troopers to meet him.

Actually, Corbett reflected, a large armed escort had really been unnecessary, this time around, and he could not conceive of any explanation for it, not one that made any sense. Nor could Johnny Kilgore, who had ranged farther afield and seen more.

Where, just bare months in the past, there had been a country aswarm with large and small mounted war or raiding parties of savage Ganiks, they had seen none, not one single living Ganik, and the one dead one they had chanced across had been many days’ trek southward of here, that one killed by a bear. Their woodland camps sat tenantless—some of them, according to Johnny, had been attacked and/or burned, the signs were there—and even the plateau which had recently been home to thousands of the cannibal raiders was now utterly deserted, now affording a habitat only to a herd of scrubby ponies and other wild creatures.

And, again according to old Johnny, not only had all of the bunches of outlaw Ganiks disappeared from their usual haunts, but all of the families of Ganik farmers were gone as well, their farms and farm buildings sitting empty and obviously unworked for many months.

So the machine guns and mortars reposed still in their crates and cases in the rear of the supply tent, and the only shots anyone had fired hereabouts had been at game or to dispatch specimens of these huge, wormlike beasts in and about the work site.

When the last portions of the creature that Schiepficker intended to save had been immersed in the preservative and the containers sealed, the zoologist washed and dried his hands, then nodded to Corbett.

“Thanks again for your help, Jay. Now I guess we’d best get on the horn and tell Sternheimer of my findings and suppositions.”

But even as the two men left the tent, a trooper trotted up, red-faced and streaming sweat in the heat. He rendered the abbreviated hand-salute of a cavalryman, then panted, “General Corbett, sir, Major Gumpner says come at once. Old Johnny Skinhead is back again. He’s brought him a prisoner, another Ganik what says Dr. Arenstein is still alive, or was a month ago when he left her, leastways.”