With the best parts of Abner’s late opponent become a comfortable weight within their bellies, while the remainder of the butchered carcass simmered in stewpots about the camp, Abner chose several lieutenants, with his brother-cum-lover, Leeroy, as the chief one, then outlined to the bully council his plans for dealing with the Ahrmehnee and these strange eastern Kuhmbuhluhners.
Abner had both liked and admired Crookedcock Calder, and the plan he outlined was but a rehash of the plans of the deceased (and long since eaten) leader. They would mount no raids of a large enough size to invite any more of these calamitous attacks by the heavy-armed and well-mounted foe, not until they once more possessed numbers large enough to stand a chance of defeating the foe in open combat. They were to see that their small raiding parties left villages strictly alone, preying rather upon herders and charcoal burners and any isolated farms they could find still tenanted.
If they came across far-inferior forces of warriors, they might attack, but under no circumstances were they to do so if said forces were even half their numbers, and should more warriors come up after a fight had commenced, they were to break off, scatter and flee. Abner wanted live Ganiks, not dead ones, and he said so in no uncertain terms.
But the wait for reinforcements turned out to be a very long one, far longer than it ever had been when Crookedcock had still been alive and leading. It seemed that most of the farmer Ganiks who were coming east had already come and that the bulk of them had trekked south or southwest. And such few outlaw Ganiks as did ride in were mostly weary survivors of the final, bloody defeat of the old main bunch, back in New Kuhmbuhluhn; nor were there many of them.
It was full, frigid winter before a group of some two hundred Ganiks trotted their ponies into the environs of Abner’s camp. The leader of this small bunch, one Gouger Haney, had been a bully appointed by Buhbuh the Kleesahk to head up one of the satellite bunches. When his bunch camp had been attacked and burned the preceding spring by the Kuhmbuhluhners, he had quickly recognized the futility of trying to stand and fight the large number of warriors with their superior arms and big horses, and so had led some three hundred of his followers in a breakout to the west.
Although they had won free of Kuhmbuhluhn, they had not ridden far into the completely unknown far west before they had found themselves being preyed upon by a very numerous and unremittingly savage race of people. After many vicissitudes, he and those who now followed him had won back into western Kuhmbuhluhn and headed for the camp of the main bunch, only to find it firmly in the hands of the very foemen who had burned their camp and massacred so many of them long months before.
And so, after a couple of near things which very nearly led to discovery by the superior Kuhmbuhluhner force, they had sought out the easternmost trail and proceeded southward until they encountered the Ganik markers showing the way to Abner’s camp.
Abner freely and warmly accepted the newcomer bully as one of his principal lieutenants, second only to Leeroy, for he shied away from any set of circumstances that might lead to a leadership fight with the older man, some sixth sense assuring him that there could be but one sure outcome and that it would be Abner, not Gouger, who went to the stewpots.
But this arrangement seemed not to please Haney in any way. After hearing all that Abner and the others had to say of their unbroken string of reverses and bloody defeats, he still mocked and derided the cautious strategy and tactics of Abner and his predecessor, siding with every hothead already resident in the camp and casting so many aspersions upon the leadership ability (or lack, thereof) and personal courage of Abner, Leeroy and the rest that it soon became crystal-clear to Abner that he either must take his chances in a death match with this Gouger or include all the newcomers in a full-scale reinvasion of the Ahrmehnee lands, come what might.
Even with the addition of Gouger’s Ganiks, there were still only a little over six hundred raiders. Abner had desired not to enter the Ahrmehnee lands again until he led a good ten hundred outlaws, nor did he particularly like the idea of having to force the stubby-legged ponies through the deep snows that now shrouded all the routes of access with the ever-present danger of being caught in the open by one of the fierce blizzards which had been so numerous this winter… but, faced with Gouger Haney, he felt he had no option.
Once across the nebulous border, the large party proceeded northeastward up a very familiar valley; many of them had fled several times down this very valley with the Ahrmehnee and the Moon Maidens and those strange, out-of-place Kuhmbuhluhners snapping at their heels. When last Abner had had a brief, running glimpse of the length of this valley, it had been littered with dead and dying Ganiks, all lying amid the scattered bones which were a well-gnawed testament to earlier Ganik defeats and flights; he wished that the deep snow might suddenly disappear long enough for the posturing Gouger Haney to see in advance the full extent of the folly into which he had forced Abner and his veterans.
A number of times during the ride up that valley, Abner’s well-developed senses had told him that they were all under the gaze of hostile eyes, but no move was made to attack them and the men and ponies were having enough trouble breaking trail through the relatively shallow depths of snow on the banks of the hard-frozen creek. Floundering in the deeper blanket of snow that waited on each flank, they would be virtually helpless, so he forbore even mentioning his firm suspicions that they and their slow progress were being constantly observed by those who could be naught save foemen. But as that day lengthened, it became obvious to anyone that an irresistible and implacable foe would soon attack them head on. The increasingly keen winds and the ominous-ness of the northern skies gave certain promise of yet another of those murderous blizzards in the offing. Shelter of some sort was a dire necessity, for to be caught in the open would be the quick death of most of them; therefore, the blackened stone walls of a burned-out village near the head of the valley was a most heartwarming sight to the raiders, for all that many of the cottages were lacking all or most of the thatched roofs. Indeed, not even the Ganiks’ usual fear of the spectral inhabitants which might be encountered in such a place served to deter them. Their justifiable terror of the fast-coming blizzard submerged even this primitive fear.
As the pitiless wind howled like a damned soul in torment about and through the enlarged and palisaded village of the dehrehbeh of the Behdrozyuhn Tribe of the Ahrmehnee stahn, Sir Geros Lahvoheetos sat comfortably in the warm, snug main room of the stone house that was his headquarters and personal quarters. Despite the freezing temperature outside, the combined efforts of the fire and the body heat of the half-score of men and women packed into the room to sip mulled wine and confer over how best to deal with this latest Ganik menace had served to so raise the inside temperature as to cause the young knight and many another to loosen the neck and front and sleeves of shirts and jerkins.
“Perhaps,” mused Geros, occupying—at Pawl Raikuh’s firm insistence—the only real chair in the room, “long and furious as this blizzard has proved to be, it will do all or a part of our fighting for us… ?”
“Not likely!” snorted Raikuh. “Those canny bastards have lived all their lives at a primitive, savage level. They’ll have found a place to hole up and wait out this howler, depend on it, Geros lad.”
“Yes, I too think so,” agreed Tohla, one of the two leaders of the contingent of the Moon Maidens which rode and fought as a part of Geros’ force against the mutual enemy. “These Muhkohee accustomed to hard living are, like the wild beasts they wear the raw skins of. But where? Close enough could the pigs be to under the cover of the storm attack us here?”