“I’ll let you know by tomorrow night, Jay, after I’ve had a chance to get together with O’Hare and Schiepficker. Do you need any additional supplies or personnel up there, for the primary mission? Arms, munitions, explosives or whatnot?”
“Not really, David,” replied Corbett. “If anything, we have an overabundance of ammo just now, since the only use we’ve made of our weapons is killing animals for food… plus, of course, one bear and those two whatchamacallits we had to kill in self-defense. There’ve been no contacts of any sort with living humans, Ganiks or otherwise, since Johnny found that dead one back down the track.
“He and I took a patrol over as far west as what used to be—or so he avers—the camp of the overall leader of the Ganik raiders, and the only living things we found up there were a herd of scrubby ponies.
“However… look, David, if you do decide to send Mike up here, why not have the copter bring as much extra fuel as it can and still get decent range? I’ll have the party I send down there pack spades and picks and dig a hole big enough to cache the fuel. I have a feeling that if we do suddenly need resupply or reinforcement, we’re going to need it in one hell of a hurry and may not be able to spare the men to send down to pack them back up here. Okay?”
Erica’s party of Ganik bullies worked northward into the range of steep, forested hills from the site of the successful ambush of the pursuing cavalrymen. They moved as fast as the terrain and the animals would allow, bearing a little westward and essaying to traverse the roughest and most thickly grown areas until, at last, they came down into a tiny, grassy vale watered by a burbling, icy-cold little streamlet barely a foot in width. There they made a cold camp, dining on their packed rations while the horses and other mounts grazed the new, tender shoots of grass. No fires were built, and after eating, all but the guards rolled up in their blankets and plunged into deep, exhausted sleep.
When they awoke out of that deep, deep slumber, in the dawning light of the new day, it was to find themselves completely surrounded by hundreds or thousands of big, burly men armed with immensely long pikes, shortswords and dirks.
“B’god, but you’re a scruffy-looking lot!” remarked the brigadier, with the bare trace of a sneer. “Are you and your detachment the best that King Mahrtuhn can do? If he’s scraped the barrel so deeply, perhaps we can march at once.”
Erica could not place the mustachioed old man’s accent, it or the less precise version spoken by the pikemen and most of their officers. Some of the pronunciations and usages of certain words reminded her a bit of the speech still affected by a fellow member of the Board of Science—Dr. Bertram Underwood Deverell Crawley, called Bud Craw ley by his few friends, Creepy Crawley by the majority at the Center. The doctor had never—not in nearly a thousand years, despite the scores of different bodies his consciousness and intellect had inhabited in that amount of time—forgotten or allowed anyone else to forget his “Hahvahd” education or the additional bits of ersatz British speech patterns he had acquired during a two-year stint at Cambridge University.
Nonetheless, the language of the old man was far closer to educated twentieth-century English than anything she had heard at any place not controlled by the Center in a long, long while, and that ancient tongue that his so resembled was the one in which she answered him.
“You mean you think we are Kuhmbuhluhners, troops of King Mahrtuhn of Kuhmbuhluhn? Sir, we had thought that you were Kuhmbuhluhners. If you’re not, then what are you?”
“Hummph!” snorted the brigadier. “No irregular or spy ever admits to his or her true status, of course. But I could almost believe you, woman, for you certainly don’t talk like any other Kuhmbuhluhners I’ve ever heard. So I’ll give you your question back: If you and your riders are not Kuhmbuhluhners, then what, pray tell, are you, and why did you find it necessary to murder so many of my cavalrymen?”
Erica shrugged. “As to what we are, we’re all that’s left of the Southern Ganiks. The rest were all, in their thousands, driven out of Kuhmbuhluhn or butchered by King Mahrtuhn’s heavy cavalry, last summer. So we are no friends of that red-handed king or his people, needless to say.
“As regards your own troops: The first one, the hunter on the road, was killed because he loosed at one of us first, with a stone from his prod; as regards our ambuscade of the cavalry, well, they were hard on our trail with bared steel and the obvious intention of using it when they caught up to us, so we could hardly be expected not to try to turn the tables on them. What would you have done in our position, sir?”
“Probably just what you did, woman,” said the brigadier bluntly, shrugging. “It was sound tactics, that, and you’d like to have gotten away from us clean, had you stayed up in those hills and not come down into the glen, as you did. But we were expecting you to do just that, you see. It is just what a party of Kuhmbuhluhners out to foment a guerrilla movement amongst the conquered Kuhmbuhluhners still living here, in the glen, would do.”
She shook her tousled head ruefully. “The joke’s on us, sir, grim joke that it is. We had no idea where we were, as we had no knowledge of this area, having but just come down from the northwest where we wintered. We thought that that little vale was just what it seemed to be—a good place to camp and rest and breathe the beasts before pushing on on the morrow.”
“Then why,” the brigadier snapped, “did you build not one fire? Were you as innocent as you’d have me to believe, you’d at least have set a watchfire to burning.”
“And be spotted by the surviving pursuers?” replied Erica. “We’re not fools… and we’ve been hunted before, by Kuhmbuhluhners, last autumn. Furthermore, we knew that we had not gotten all of that cavalry; yes, we dropped most of the heavy-armed, horse-mounted forward elements, but there were close to a score of spearmen on ponies coming up behind them when we withdrew. In our place, under such circumstances, would you have built a fire and slept sound beside such a beacon?”
He shrugged again, sipped at his flagon of beer, belched loudly twice, then said, “Probably I would have done just as you did, woman. You make sense. All right, let us imagine for the nonce that I truly believe your cover story. Just what are you Ganiks? I’ve heard the term from some of our enemies, along with some very disgusting supposed habits and practices allegedly common to Ganiks, but I’ve discounted the most of said stories, for similar garbage and slander has been attributed to us Skohshuns at various times and in varying places by our enemies, too.
“Now, tell me, woman, just why did King Mahrtuhn set his army against your people? Were you, perhaps, in rebellion against established authority?”
Erica thought hard before she framed an answer. In all truth, the Ganiks had been in rebellion against the Kuhmbuhluhners—an ongoing rebellion of scores pf years’ standing. That was all that the outlaw bunches could have been called, for all that the bunch Ganiks had preyed as much upon their own people, the fanner Ganiks, and the Ahrmehnee as they had upon the Kuhmbuhluhners. Furthermore, she was certain that most if not all of the “disgusting” facts that this old man had heard of the Ganiks were probably pure, unvarnished truth, but it would do no one any good just now to tell him so. But she also sensed him to be a shrewd, intuitive man, who would quickly sense a fabrication if she spread it on too thickly, gave more than a bare outline. The more closely the lie skirted the actual truth, the better, she felt, in this case.
“Not rebellion, sir, not really,” she replied. “Ganiks, you see, were settled here for years before the Kuhmbuhluhners arrived. King Mahrtuhn’s ancestors took over the north, here, where there had never been very many Ganiks, but they grew in numbers and aggressiveness and, over the years, encroached steadily upon Ganik lands. Most of the Ganiks were a peaceable folk to begin, but the dispossessed joined with the naturally warlike and as the resultant bands grew in size they began to openly resist further Kuhmbuhluhner encroachments. If you choose to call the defense of one’s ancestral lands rebellion, then, yes, the Ganiks were indeed rebels.”