“That I would do such was decided long long ago, before first my eyes saw light, Lord Champion. I have told you of the Prophecy, told you of the Last Battle of which you will be Champion and final victor. That battle looms ever nearer to us now, and it were necessary that I did and do the bidding of the prince; otherwise, you might have departed this Kingdom of New Kuhmbuhluhn and all might have then been lost, nor would your own illustrious deeds have been done. Can you not see, Lord Champion?”
“No,” Bili replied bluntly, “I cannot. I see naught but treachery by wizardry, or its near counterpart. Over the last year, you have done many good deeds for me and my folk and I had reckoned you friend. Will you not now reverse the evil you have wrought this night, erase from the minds of my warriors there the counterfeit wishes and aspirations you and the other Kleesahks have implanted therein? A true friend could do, would do no less, Pah-Elmuh.”
Bili could almost hear a deep sigh from the Kleesahk. “I could wish now that my father had seen fit to get me upon a Teenéhdjook, so that I were pure, with nothing of your race within me, Lord Champion. For I find it increasingly hard to behave as a true-man, where duty must be placed above friends and friendship, where necessities of the moment must take precedence to the rightness of actions.
“No, Bili of Morguhn, for all that you have been, are now and will be in time to come, despite the deep affection I bear for you, your brave mate and your fine cub, what has been done will remain done so that what has been foretold will take place when and as foretold. That this must be so, I deeply regret, but so it must be.”
3
Ahrszin Behdrozyuhn, newly chosen dehrehbeh and war-leader of the Behdrozyuhn Tribe of the Ahrmehnee stahn, lay in the snow just below the brow of a hill. On his right lay two of the leaders of the lowlander force which had been engaged in helping his tribe stem the tide of Muhkohee that had begun to attempt invasions from the west some months before; on his left lay a brawny Moon Maiden and, beyond her, his cousin, Hyk Behdrozyuhn.
Down the slope of snow-covered shale and frozen rocks, some quarter-mile distant, an elongated mob of shaggy, pony-mounted Muhkohee were moving up the valley along both sides of the frozen brook. The savages were proceeding directly into the wind that whipped down the twisting, narrowing valley laden with flecks of ice and the firm promise of more snow yet to come. The cannibal war party rode hunched and miserable-looking, huddled into their furs and ill-cured hides, but with most of their primitive armament clearly in evidence to even the most casual eye.
Then the lowlander farthest right, the one known as Raikuh, spoke in a low tone, for all that the distant foes could not have heard him easily unless he had shouted, and probably not even then.
“There’re a lot of the stinking swine, aren’t there, Son-Geros? Five, six hundred, anyway. They’re no better armed and mounted than any of the others were, but still our numbers are just too small to throw against them openly. So, what do we do? Pull the helpless villagers trick again?”
The man to whom Raikuh spoke might, Ahrszin thought, have been an Ahrmehnee himself, what with his wavy, blue-black hair, dark eyes, deep-olive skin tone and reckless cour-age in battle, save that his nose was too small and his body was not hairy enough. Nonetheless, despite his alienness, Sir Geros Lahvoheetos had won the respect and admiration of all the Behdrozyuhn Tribe many months ago and was accorded the deference that Ahrszin himself received; and the fact that he continued to be modest, unassuming and self-effacing only added to their deep respect and near love for him. The new young dehrehbeh reflected, a bit ruefully, that did this born-lowlander desire it—and he had several times made it clear that he did not—the elders of the tribe would depose him, Ahrszin, in a twinkling and name Sir Geros dehrehbeh in his stead; and Ahrszin was honest enough to admit to himself that such a move would be good for the tribe.
And the tribe needed some good luck. Hardly had they been able to reorganize themselves after the twin disasters of the invasion and pillage by first lowlanders, then a monstrous raiding party of Muhkohee, when earthquake and forest fires wreaked destruction all over the mountains. Then wave after wave of Muhkohee—both family groups and savage war parties—had begun to surge across the western border.
Ahrszin’s father, his uncle Tank—then the dehrehbeh—and many another brave Ahrmehnee warrior had fallen while defending the tribal lands against the inroads of these stinking savages. The Soormehlyuhn Tribe had sent some early aid, but when their border, too, was threatened by the Muhkohee, it had had to be withdrawn, precipitately.
The truly hard times had started at that juncture. Some of the less-defendable villages had had to be abandoned. Livestock that could not be driven or carted in quickly had had to be butchered and the meat left to rot. Standing crops had had to be burned. And despite these painful sacrifices, the tribe had stilt been hard pressed by the seemingly numberless Muhkohee.
Then, on a day of happy memory, Sir Geros and his column had come riding down from the north. A heterogeneous lot they had been—some two score Moon Maidens and a handful of Ahrmehnee warriors from far-northern tribes, mostly Taishyuhns, but with most of the near ten score total consisting of those very same scale-shirted mercenaries who had so savaged and ravaged and raped and burned their gory, charred path through Ahrmehnee lands not very long ago.
The distinctive armor and the nasal dialects of Mehrikan had set Behdrozyuhn teeth edge to edge, and Ahrszin’s eldest cousin, Knahtcho, had to exercise extreme force to prevent incidents of retribution until the bulk of the tribesfolk learned just how great a blessing these grim, steel-sheathed lowlanders were for Behdrozyuhn interests.
Sir Geros and his lowlanders had come seeking some trace of a great lowlander dehrehbeh, who had been separated from the others during the period of earthquakes and forest fires and, in company with a similarly mixed lot of Ahrmehnee, Moon Maidens, mercenaries and Confederation nobility, had disappeared in the mountainous area south of what had once been the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn; with him had been the hereditary war leader of the Moon Maidens, the brahbehrnuh and at least two Ahrmehnee headmen.
Those Soormehlyuhns who had come south to help the tribe before their own lands were threatened had, of course, told the tale of the force of lowlanders that had miraculously appeared when all seemed irrevocably lost to save a mixed force of Ahrmehnee and Moon Maidens from a thousands-strong mob of Muhkohee raiders. They had then joined with those they had saved to drive the surviving Muhkohee off the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn, only to be themselves scattered if not killed when the massive shifting of the earth had shaken down the Tongue and altered the very shape of the land. Upon learning that these newcome lowlanders were mostly of that party and that those they had ridden so far to seek were also, they became much more acceptable to the previously hostile tribesmen.
The campaign which had followed had been hard-striking and brutal, with no quarter asked or given by either side, but no sooner had the victorious Behdrozyuhns and their new, stark allies seen the backs of one batch of Muhkohee invaders, it seemed, than did yet another come trotting or plodding over the western horizon.
Had all of the encroaching barbarians been in large parties or had significant numbers of them been armed fighters, not even Sir Geros and his force would have been of much help to the beleaguered Behdrozyuhns, save perhaps to cover the tribe’s evacuation of their homelands. But most of these Muhkohee seemed to be spiritless aggregations of less than a dozen to perhaps a score of men, women and children—some on foot, some in carts or wagons along with pigs and chickens or a few sheep or goats, with an occasional milk cow hitched behind. It was the rare one of these who bore anything even vaguely like a weapon, and those who did not immediately rum tail at the mere sight of a party of the steel-sheathed men on the big, lowland-bred horses were absurdly easy to direct back south and west, though some were heard to grumble that they wished the Plooshuhn-damned Kuhmbuhluhners would make up their minds. Such grumblings made no sense to the defenders, for there was not among Sir Geros’ force a single man from the Principality of Kuhmbuhluhn!