It was incredibly brutal work. Into the open space between the wrecked buildings which once had been the village square, the Freefighters would drag screaming, pleading, sobbing, struggling Ganiks. When the scale-armored men had forced the victims to their knees, one would grasp a handful of matted, verminous hair to hold the head as still as was possible while one of the Ahrmehnee warriors hacked through the neck of the ancient and detested enemy with sword or axe.
Before very long, the spaces between the standing walls were fast filling with stiffening, headless bodies, stacked like so much cordwood, while the pile of grisly trophies at one end of the square was growing faster than the Ahrmehnee could pack them into the sacks brought for the purpose.
The entire square, it seemed to Pawl Raikuh, streamed and steamed and stank of spilled blood, and even with above thirty years of soldiering and hard fighting behind him, the veteran officer still felt more than a little queasy as his boots sank almost ankle-deep in bloody mud. But he swallowed his rising gorge and kept his face blank. Necessity must be served, duty must be done.
Moreover, that duty must be completed before Sir Geros returned from the pursuit. Pawl knew his young, ennobled commander well—fierce as a scalded treecat in battle, still did this knight of the Confederation deeply detest all which smacked of violence and bloodshed, and he would never have condoned this cold-blooded execution of hundreds of completely unarmed, helpless men, even cannibal shaggies.
That they had not enough strength to take and guard so many prisoners would not have mattered to Sir Geros. Nor would the fact that were the shaggies to be freed and escorted out of the stahn, they would assuredly have been back immediately they were rearmed. Not even the certainty that the Ahrmehnee would never have sat still in the face of such foolishness would have persuaded Sir Geros that what Raikuh had here ordered performed was necessary.
“Hohguhn,” the tight-lipped captain called to one of his Freefighter lieutenants, “it took Ahdohm there three hacks to do for that last shaggy. See he has a sharper sword, eh? Let’s us git this butcher business over with.”
Well before the last shrieking Ganik had been shortened, the best of the captured ponies had been loaded with bulging bags of still-dripping, freshly severed heads, bundles of the rough, crude weapons the metal of which could be reworked by the skilled Ahrmehnee smiths and craftsmen, and such other usable items as the shelters and the piles of decapitated corpses had yielded to searching Ahrmehnee and Freefighters. The rest of the scrubby, thick-coated little equines were stripped of any gear and driven out of the environs of the blood-soaked village.
But disposal of the heaps of headless bodies was not so easily accomplished. Despite the recent thaw of the snow and ice which had for so many months blanketed the land, the earth below the top inch or so was still more or less frozen for some distance down. It was of dense, heavy consistency and studded with rocks of varying sizes at the best of times, winter frosts bringing them up from lower levels each year. Furthermore, the only shovels available were the few crude wooden ones of the now-dead shaggies, and while they had worked well enough in wet snow, they soon proved no match for hard ground.
At length, Pawl had all the corpses dragged to the nearest patch of thick woods and dumped in the heavy brush. Then he had his part of the force mount up and head back for the main village.
11
General Jay Corbett stood beside Old Johnny Kilgore in the center of what had obviously T>een a temporary camp for some group of some nature. The layers of ash and charcoal from last year’s horrendous forest fires had been removed down to bare earth and a half-dozen rude shelters had been constructed of saplings and brush brought in from less-damaged areas, and there was an arrangement of fire-blackened stones surrounding a shallow pit containing fresher charcoal.
But it was equally clear that this was not the site of a recent camp, for the green shoots of plants were now thrusting up from beneath the old, soggy coals in the firepit, and all of the shelters showed the effects of long disuse.
“It ‘uz Ganiks, fer sure,” averred Old Johnny baldly.
“How so?” inquired Corbett, though not doubting the oldster for a minute, having seen his judgments prove right too often during the last year or so. “What makes you think so,Johnny?”
“Way the lean-tos is scattered awl roun’, fer one thang, gen’nil. The Kuhmbuhluhners, whin they sets them up a camp, they does it a lot lahk yawl Broomtowners does—straight ‘n’ purty V awl. Ganiks, they puts they lean-tos up wherevuh it pleasures ‘em, ushly the placet it’s easies’ fer to dig the posties in, mos’ly. Won’ meny of ‘em though, mebbe twenny, thutty fellas.”
Corbett removed his helmet and scratched at his scalp. “But why, in God’s name, would they have camped here, I wonder? There’s no graze to speak of for a good mile, and the only reliable source of potable water is farther than that, I think. They’d have,had to pack in their firewood, too, and even the materials for their shelters and bough beds. It all makes no sense to me.”
“Simple, gen’rul.” Johnny shrugged and spat. “They ‘uz a-minin’ loot fum unduh the edges of thet rockslide, is whut.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” Corbett softly swore. “I never thought of that, Johnny. Are you sure they were?”
The head of the bearded bald man jerked a brusque affirmative. “Shore they wuz. It’s been a whole heap of them rocks a-shifted at places awn thet slide, and the raw poles they used fer to shift ‘em is awl still up ther, too. Thang I can’t figger is, if they’d come crost suthin’ worth thet much hard work, how come they din’t brang’t’ whole bunch with ‘em? Two, three hunnert boys coulda done it quicker an’ a damn sight easier.”
The officer whistled softly between his teeth. “David Stemheimer is not going to like tonight’s report one damned bit. Let’s just hope those Ganiks didn’t get away from here with too much. Any idea just when they might have been here?”
The old cannibal walked over to one of the tumbledown shelters and poked around for a few moments, then answered, “Early las’ fawl, gen’rul, enyhaow; mebbe evun afore thet, sumtahm inna summah.”
While speaking he arose and came back to the officer’s side, adding, “But whin they did come fer to leave, they did ‘er in a hellashus hurry, elst they’da took thisheanh with ‘em, shore.”
He passed to Corbett a dagger in a scratched and battered gilt case. The finely balanced weapon had surely been a highly prized possession at one time, and even now, with its still-sharp acid-etched blade all discolored and pitted with rust, its crossguard bent and deeply nicked and most of the semiprecious stones missing from their settings, it still felt good in the hand. Clearly, no fighter, not even one of the savage Ganiks, would have left so fine a weapon behind by intent.
Tapping the scarred pommel of the dagger absently into the callused palm of his hand, the officer reflected that this latest find fitted neatly into the pattern they had been encountering since first they returned up here into Ganik—well, formerly Ganik—lands. The untenanted farms where someone had planted crops but had not been around to harvest them, the deserted bunch camps, and now this once lovely little weapon, left to deteriorate in a hurriedly evacuated temporary campsite.
Someone—some thing?—had either completely exterminated the Ganiks or driven them out of and far from their ancestral homelands within a space of less than a calendar year, that was all that could be assumed from the evidence. But who? What? No need to ask why, he thought. Take all of the most detested and heinous abominations of conduct despised and almost universally prohibited by races or communities of civilized man and you had the mundane, everyday practices of your average, run-of-the-mill Ganik, were Old Johnny and that earlier Ganik prisoner, Jim-Beau Carter, to be believed, and neither had had any reason to stretch the plain truth or to lie, especially in light of the fact that none of the Ganiks considered their rather outre customs and practices to be in any way wrong or even unusual.