Swords of the Horseclans

9

Sub-lieutenant Stamos and his patrol, riding the left flank of the High-King’s army, clattered into a tiny, foothill village just before noon. They had crossed the Kuzabwabtcbee River at dawn, so Stamos estimated that perhaps a quarter of the main force was now in Karaleenos.

This was the third little village they had entered, always after approaching through acre upon acre of ash and char, denoting crops burned where they stood. Stamos was glad they’d brought along feedbags for their mounts, since most of the grass and wild grains had also disappeared in the holocaust.

Stamos detached a galloper and sent him back to find Captain Portos and apprise that officer of the utter lack of forage in the fields. It was the second galloper so far; the first had been sent when they had come across the fourth polluted water source.

The sergeant came alongside and saluted. “If this place proves deserted, too, it might be a good halt for the noon, sir. At least there’ll be some shade, if nothing else.”

Sub-lieutenant Stamos nodded slightly, and the sergeant set about searching the huts and cabins and empty storehouses, but there was no living creature, not even a dog or a hen. Nor were there any portable items of value … and the men commenced to grumble, for loot had been their principal incentive for enlisting under King Zastros’ Green Serpent Banner.

Stamos dismounted and strode to look down the stone-lined village well, unconsciously holding his breath against the expected reek of rotting flesh. About twenty feet down, however, the surface of the water was dark and still and the only things his nose registered were coolness and damp, mossy stones.

A man was sent down the narrow steps that spiraled around the inner wall to probe with his hook-backed lance, but all he brought into view were a couple of old, water-logged buckets and a few short lengths of rotting rope. So Stamos had a leather bucketful drawn, and then he stripped off a silver armlet and dunked it in. When the silver did not discolor—as, everyone knew, it would have, had the water been poisoned—he sipped a mouthful from his cupped hand, then jerked off his helmet and padded, sweat-soaked hood and dunked his head into the bucket.

Grinning through his dripping beard, he said, “If I’m not dead in a few minutes, Sergeant, have the men go ahead and water the horses. God, that stuff is cold!”

After the glare of the sun, the interior of the partially covered well was dark, so it was not the first or the second but the third trooper who chanced upon the “treasure.” There, in a cooling niche that had been fashioned into the wall near the stairs, sat six stone jugs, each looking to hold about a half gallon. The trooper drew the corncob stopper and sniffed … and when he came back up, he carried his brimful bucket with exceeding care. -With their mounts watered and cared for, the sergeant designated a couple of troopers as sentries and, while the rest of the patrol settled down to their cold bacon and hard bread, he stumped over to join the officer at a table under a tree.

Stamos and the sergeant chewed stoically the same noisome fare as their troops in mutual silence. When they were done, he shared a small flask of wine with his grizzled second-in-command.

After a first sip of fine wine, the sergeant half turned and bawled for another pair of men to go and relieve the lookouts. There was no response. Grumbling about the lack of discipline in these modern-day armies, he rose from his stool and stumped around the well to the place where the troopers had gathered.

Suddenly he shouted in alarm, “Lieutenant Stamos, mount and ride! They’re all dead! We’ve got to get out of … !” He grunted then, and Stamos heard the clashing of armor as he fell.

But before Stamos could reach his horse, he saw that he was surrounded. Short, fair warriors mounted on small, wild-looking horses now were spaced between the buildings, and detachments were trotting up the road.

Stamos cleared his throat. “Who is your leader?” He asked the question twice, first in Ehleeneekos, then in Merikan. When there was no answer, he added, “I am Lord Sub-lieutenant Stamos of Tchehrohkeespolis and the eldest son of my house. My father will pay a good ransom for my safe return.”

“Sorry,” said one of the horsemen, grinning, “we take no prisoners, Ehleen.”

After a full day and no word from die far western patrol, Captain Portos dispatched a full troop—one-hundred-twenty troopers, six sergeants, and three officers—on the route presumably taken by Stamos’ men. They rode through a deserted countryside, peopled only by small, wild things; the only animals, larger than a rabbit, that any of them saw was a brace of wild turkeys pacing across a burned field, the sunlight striking a bronzed sheen from their plumage.

They took time to fire the structures of the two empty villages, so it was well into early afternoon when they entered the third. Out of no more than curiosity, a sergeant rode over to see what sort of offal this well contained … and the missing patrol was found.

Troop-Lieutenant Nikos was a veteran. After thoroughly searching the empty buildings, he posted three platoons in a tight, dismounted guard about the village perimeter, with another platoon standing to horse in a central location. The other two platoons were detailed to the grisly task of raising the bodies from the well.

When twenty nude corpses lay in ordered rows, Nikos examined them closely. Only four bore marks of violence: young Stamos’ skull had been cleft to the eyes by a sword blow; the wound in the sergeant’s back had been made by an arrow; two of the troopers had had their throats cut. There was no single wound upon the cold flesh of any of the remaining sixteen!

Nikos sent his best tracker on a wide swing around the village and a trail was sighted, headed across the charred fields, due west, toward the mountains.

Nikos recalled the guard, mounted the troop, and trotted them to the wide swath of disturbed ashes. “How many?” he demanded of the tracker. “How long ago?” Swinging from his saddle, the tracker eyed the trail critically, then switched the buzzing flies from a pile of horse droppings and thrust his finger into one of them, gauging the degree of warmth. “Between fifty and sixty horses, Lord Nikos, but not all bore riders. They are a day ahead of us.”

“Were any of the horses ours?” asked Nikos needlessly, already knowing the answer.

“Close to half, Lord Nikos, bore shoes of our pattern. As for the shoe pattern of the other horses, which were smaller animals, I have never seen the like. They were not shaped by Karaleenoee,” the tracker stated emphatically.

Nikos sighed. Nothing to be gained in following a day-old trail into unfamiliar territory with only one troop of light cavalry.

Returning to the village, they hastily distributed the score of corpses amongst the wooden houses, then fired them. They had only been on the return journey for a half hour however, when suddenly, without warning, four troopers fell from their saddles, dead.

When it was pointed out to the troop-lieutenant that these had been the four men who had labored in the depths of the well, affixing the ropes to corpse after cold corpse that their comrades might draw the burdens up, he brusquely ordered that none touch these bodies more. Leaving the men where they had fallen, he had the gear cut off their mounts, then set out for camp at a fast canter, his skin prickling under his armor at the thought of pestilence.

Despite King Zenos’ fears of dissension, High-Lord Milo’s horseclansmen and the mountain tribesmen of Karaleenos worked well and willingly together, far better than either group did with regular troops; their mutual dislike and distrust of the lowland Ehleenoee bound them together as much as did the war practices they shared and the fact that both faced a common foe.

A week after Troop-Lieutenant Nikos had frantically galloped his troop back to camp, three men squatted around a small fire near the mouth of a large cavern, chewing tough meat and tougher bread and washing down their fare with long drafts from a goatskin of resinous wine.

Tall, spare, and big-boned, Chief Hwahlt Hohlt’s brown hair and beard showed streaks of gray and nothing else betrayed his years, for he was possessed of a strength and endurance equal to that of his co-commanders.

He spoke: “Much as I hated to see thet good shine go down the gullets of them bastards, she worked like a charm—I’ll say thet.”

“Trust to an Ehleenoee to think of stealth and poison, rather than open battle and honest steel,” growled Pawl Vawn of Vawn through a mouthful of mutton. But the twinkle in his hazel eyes revealed his words as banter, not insult.

Tomos Gonsalos took a swig of wine and grinned. “I thank both of you ratty-looking types for the compliments, if such they were. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you barbarians really mean.”

“But what good did it do God-Milo to feed those troopers poisoned whisky?” put in the Vawn quizzically. “With their two miserable watchers downed, we could as easily have shafted most of them, then ridden in and sabered the rest. They’d have been just as dead.”

Tomos questioned in answer. “Did you notice how Zastros narrowed his columns and stopped all patroling within leagues of that village, Pawl? Disease has killed more soldiers than all the steel ever forged, and they fear it in proportion.

“As to how this little scheme has aided King Zenos and High-Lord Milo,” he said, weighing the wineskin for a moment, “look you, Pawl.” And then he shot a thin stream of wine into the fire.

“Now, what would happen were I to now remove the nozzle from the mouth of the skin?”

Hwahlt answered, “All our wine would be in the fire and you’d find my knife blade kinda hard to digest.”

Tomos ignored the mountaineer and continued. “My King and your High-Lord need time, and the way we gave them some little time is this: the swamps extend far inland, near to that village, and Zastros is not fool enough to try to march troops and horsemen and haul wagons through the fens; therefore, it would appear that—as he needs to maintain a wide front to achieve any kind of speed of march—he originally intended to march both on the narrow strip of flatlands and in the foothills. But now that his troops are afraid that pestilence stalks those foothills … well,” he said, squirting another stream of wine into the fire, “we’ve put a nozzle on his army just like the nozzle on this skin. So there’s a stream going north, instead of a flood. Thus do we buy time for our lords.”

To the east, across the width of that narrow strip of flatlands, Benee poled his flat-bottomed boat through the ways known only to his fellow swampfolk. His skinny body was nearly nude and he was smeared from head to foot with mud. He beached his boat with a barely audible crunch on a tiny sand pit at the foot of a high, grassy bank. Taking a small, wooden cylinder from the bottom of the boat, he entered the grass and slithered up the slope as silently as a cottonmouth … and every bit as deadly.

Just below the rim, he stretched out on. his back and fitted the sections of his blowpipe together, then carefully inserted a two-inch dart, its needlepoint smeared with a viscous substance.

Gingerly, he parted the small bushes clinging to the edge of the slope and his keen eyes judged the distance between him and the nearest spearman, who slowly paced to and fro, his frequent yawns loud to Benee’s ears. No, the distance was just too far for a sure hit on vulnerable flesh, and blowdarts could seldom pierce cloth, much less armor.

Up … and over the edge, a shadow among the shadows. Flat as the earth itself, his supple body conformed to every hump or hollow of the ground it covered. Two yards closer … five yards, and Benee could pick out a movement of the sentry’s arm, accompanied by rasp of clothing and muttered curse as he scratched himself.

Six yards closer, then seven, eight, and Benee stopped, stockstill, fear suddenly drying his mouth, sucking the air from his lungs. The sentry had turned and was looking dead ahead at him! He fought the almost overwhelming urge to get up and run, run, run, back to the safety of the boat, of the swamps of his birth. But that way lay certain death; already could he feel that spear blade in his back.

Then, all was again well. Muttering something incomprehensible under his breath, the man began to pace back and forth, but never more than a few yards in any direction.

At the end of thirty agonizing feet, Benee felt he could be accurate enough for a sure kill. Slowly, he brought up his blowpipe, made certain that the war dart was still in place, then put it to his lips and took exacting aim. A single puff of his powerful, trained lungs … and death flew toward the nameless spearman.

The sentry slapped at his cheek, as if at an insect. But when his fingers felt the dart and his mind registered what it must be, he screamed! Screaming on and on, regularly, like a woman at a birthing, he dropped his spear and ran a few strides toward the distant firelight. All at once, he stopped screaming and fell, his limbs jerking and twitching.

But Benee had not been idle. As soon as the spear was dropped, he ran forward at a crouch and scooped it up; still at a crouching run, he reached the lip of the bank and was over it before the sentry fell. He took time to disassemble his blowpipe and fit the sections back into their cylinder, then slung it and loped down to his boat. Before he pushed off, he gently placed the spear in the boat. Tonight, Benee had become a full man, and this spear was proof of the fact.

So, along the fringes of that narrow land, the swampers and the mountain bands took regular toll of Zastros’ troops, never many at one time. But the constant threat of ambush began to retard an already snail-slow, advance, as the exposed flanks unconsciously drew closer to the center.

So Zastros had two columns of light infantry sent into a particularly troublesome stretch of fenland and no officer or man of them was ever seen again. The harrassment never even slowed. The next unit was a full tahgmah of Zastros’ picked men. Two long weeks later, a bare two hundred of that thousand staggered or crawled out of the fens, and most of those survivors were useless as soldiers, what with strange fevers and festered wounds and addled wits.

And the march route was officially narrowed again, keeping a couple of miles between the eastern flank and the edges of the fens. And Zastros raged and swore at these additional delays. And his young queen, Lilyuhn, whom some named “Witch,” listened to his tirades in heavy-lidded, expressionless silence.

Captain Portos rode back from the High King’s camp in a towering rage. His quite reasonable request that his battered, now understrength, unit be replaced on the hazardous left flank had been coolly denied. As if that were not enough, his personal courage had been questioned for having the temerity to make such a request, and then the High King had refused him his right to meet the questioner at swordpoints.

How quickly, he pondered, did kings forget. When the High King—then Thohooks Zastros, with only a distant claim to the throne—first had raised the banner of rebellion, Komees Portos had enlisted and armed and mounted a squadron of light horses and taken up the rebel cause. Most of that first squadron had been recruited of his own city and lands. Then, oh, then, Zastros had warmly embraced him, spoken to and of him as “brother,” sworn undying gratitude and rich rewards for such aid.

Portos had watched most of that first squadron extirpated at the Battle of Ahrbahkootchee, and he had fled with Zastros across the dread border into the Great Southern Swamp, within which, somewhere, lay the Witch Kingdom. What with fevers and quicksands and horrible, deadly animals, he had had but a bare score left, when Zastros sent word to him and the other living officers. And Portos and his score, all with high prices on their heads, had returned to the ancestral lands and secretly raised and armed and mounted another squadron.

Then came first the horrifying word that King Rahndos and seven other claimants to the throne had, all in one day, deliberately slain themselves! Thoheeks Fahrkos, who had no more right to the throne than Zastros, had been crowned. Then had the kingdom been well and truly split asunder as a host of pretenders’ warbands marched north and south and east and west, fighting each other as often as they fought Fahrkos. Cities were besieged or felled by storm, villages were burned; noble and peasant alike fled to mountain and forest and swamp, as fire and rapine and slaughter stalked the land in clanking armor.

Portos and most of Zastros’ other captains defended their lands as best they could, stoutly held their cities, and awaited word from the Witch Kingdom, where dwelt their lord.

They waited for three long years, while the once-mighty, once-wealthy Southern Kingdom dissolved around them into a hodgepodge myriad of small, ever-warring statelets. Fahrkos ruled his capital and controlled a few miles of land around it, but a large proportion of his predecessor’s fine army had left with many of his most powerful lords, when they departed to cast their hats into the much-crowded ring. The strong central government that had made the Southern Kingdom what it had been and extended its borders over the years had collapsed into anarchy and chaos; from the western savannas to the eastern saltfens, from the Iron Mountains to the Great Southern Swamp, might made right and the status of men was determined not by their pedigree, but by the strength of their swordarm and the size of their warband.

At last the long-deferred summons came and Portos led his squadron to the rendezvous, leaving defense of his lands and city in the hands of his two younger brothers. By the time Zastros and his Witch Kingdom bride, the Lady Lilyuhn, arrived, there were fifteen thousand armed men to greet them … and a full tenth of that force was Portos’ squadron.

Portos and all the rest had expected an immediate, lightning drive on the ill-defended capital, but Zastros marched them west, bearing north, through the very heart of the savannas onto the shores of the King of Rivers; and men marveled at the size of his force—the largest seen under one banner since the breakup of King Fahrkos’ inherited army—and noble and peasant alike came from fen and from forest to take their oaths to so obviously powerful a leader … only such a one as he could put things right again.

Then it was north and east for the more than doubled army, and petty claimants—who might have had a bare chance against equally unworthy opposition—saw the death of glorious pipedreams and swore their allegiances to Zastros and added their warbands to his, so that, by the time he camped below the walls of Seetheerospolis, the fifty thousand men under his banner left the Eeyeh-geestan of the Iron Mountains no choice but to throw their far from inconsiderable forces and resources into Zastros’ lap. And the massive army marched due south, again bypassing the capital, then east to the fringes of the saltfens.

Only when he had almost seven times his beginning strength did he turn toward the capital and King Fahrkos, whom he considered a traitor, since Fahrkos had been one of his supporters in his first rebellion. As Zastros’ van came within the crown lands, the pitiful remnant of that mighty force that had trampled his aspirations into the gory mud of Ahrbahkootchee only five years agone threw down their battered arms, hailed him savior of the realm, and begged leave to serve him.

King Fahrkos, even his advisors and bodyguard having deserted to Zastros, slew his wife, his daughters, and his young son, then fired the wing that had housed his loved family, and fell on his sword. Only the prompt arrival of Zastros’ huge army prevented the entire palace complex from burning.

So the victorious Zastros was crowned High King of all Ehleenoee, a new title, never before claimed by any other. But to the faithful Portos, the price of victory had been steep. Soon after his squadron’s departure, his city had been stormed, sacked, and razed by some bannerless warband; only the citadel had successfully resisted, but both his brothers had died in the defense. And what with disease and accident and the occasional skirmish, no troop of his squadron could, on Coronation Day, muster more than fifty men.

But when Zastros announced his intention of taking advantage of the war betwixt Karaleenos and Kehnooryos Ehlahs to reunite all the Ehleenoee under his rule, ever-faithful Portos did what he felt he must: he sold his ancestral lands and what was left of his city for what little he could get—and that was little enough; considering the condition of the kingdom, more than he’d expected, really—and he re-armed, re-equipped, and recruited replacements to flesh out the shrunken squadron.

Since then, his men had been first to set hoof upon the soil of Karaleenos, had been first to die from hostile action, had ridden nowhere other than van or scout or extended flank. In five weeks he had lost nearly six hundred irreplaceable men and almost as many horses, all by enemy action or disease. Also, being stationed where they were, his troops were at the very tail of the supply lines; therefore, they wanted for everything. His loyal officers and sergeants drove themselves and their troops relentlessly, but it seemed that each order from Zastros’ pavilion was more stupidly impossible than the last. And Portos could feel it in his bones; there would be a mutiny—and soon!—if something were not done to raise the morale of his battered squadron.

That was the reason he had ridden the dusty miles to the main camp, to ask the lord, for whom he had sacrificed so much for so many years, that what was left of his command be temporarily shifted from their hazardous position, be replaced by another squadron long enough to resupply and restore the morale of the men. And he had been spurned like a homeless cur, been kept waiting for hours—a dusty pariah among the well-fed, well-groomed officers, whose burnished armor bore not one nick or scratch.

Anger had finally taken over and he had forced his way into first the anteroom, then the audience chamber, swatting aside gaudy officers and adjutants and aides-decamp as if they had been annoying insects. The pikemen of the King’s bodyguard knew Captain Portos of old and did not try to bar his entrance.

Portos shuddered strongly and his lips thinned to a grim line when once more he thought on the things that had been said to him … and of him, a veteran officer, of proven loyalty and courage … in that chamber. The only thing of which he could now be certain was that the King Zastros who had not only heaped insult and unwarranted abuse upon him, but allowed—nay, encouraged—others to do the same, was not the Zastros for whom he, Portos, had led more than twenty-four hundred brave men to their deaths and willingly forfeited his last meager possessions! Perhaps that wife he had taken unto himself during the years he dwelt in the Witch Kingdom had ensorcelled him.

But, ensorcelled or not, Portos resolved, ere he reached his own camp, that never again would his men suffer or his sacred honor be questioned by Zastros.