But one or both of them miscalculated. The eruption, when it occurred several days later than anticipated, was anything but small. It blew the Hold and most of the mountain off the face of the earth, sending white-hot chunks of rock—ranging in size from invisible dust particles to multi-ton boulders—far up into the sky to fall to earth many kilometers distant. Nor were the rocks and the far-ranging forest fires they caused all or even the least of the calamities.
A powerful series of earth tremors rocked and racked the entire region, changing the courses of streams, shaking down some mountains while raising new ones and, in at least one instance, reducing a long, wide, high and previously inhabited plateau into so many square kilometers of dusty, shattered rocks.
This plateau had been called by the Ahrmehnee the Tongue of Soormehlyuhn, and the principal north-south trail to the westward of it had run under the beettling bluffs of its westernmost flank. And the bulk of the pack train had been strung out along that very stretch of trail when the tremors had brought the entire line of bluffs crashing down upon men and beasts alike, crushing out the lives of the living and sealing their corpses and the inanimate treasure beneath untold tons of stone.
And for the survivors of this disaster, the quakes and fires had been only the beginning, a mere prelude to weeks to come of danger and horror and, for some, death.
Burdened from the beginning with burned or injured men, and menaced also by hundreds of rude, crudely armed but no less dangerous, pony-mounted savages who called themselves Ganiks and practiced, among other degeneracies, senseless and insensitive torture of prisoners and cannibalism, Jay Corbett had finally taken the most of the surviving force to hold the mouth of a narrow defile. In so doing, he hoped to allow the two scientists, the wounded, the pitifully few remaining packloads of loot from the Hold of the Maidens, the packload of fast-dwindling medical stores and a minimal escort of sound troopers under the command of the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer, Sergeant Gumpner, a bare chance at escape and survival.
Dr. Harry Braun had once been married to Dr. Erica Arenstein and had alternately loved her and hated her ever since—through hundreds of years and scores of bodies. She loathed and despised him and had many times deliberately done the very things that she knew would hurt him or arouse him to fits of public fury.
Braun had suffered a severe compound fracture of the leg when the first tremors of the earthquake caused his big saddle mule to fall with him still in the saddle. After treatment and splinting by Erica—who held an M.D. among her other degrees—the injured scientist had been narcotized and borne in a jury-rigged horse litter for the first few days of the southward journey.
But then the pressing danger from the Ganiks became more severe and Corbett had decided to try to shake the pursuit by cutting cross-country through the brush and thickets, hacking out a passage laboriously with sabers and axes. It had been necessary to put Braun astride a mount and tie him into the saddle. He had taken it into a mind already fuzzy with fever-induced delirium and drugs that Erica and Jay were deliberately, maliciously and with jolly sadism torturing him, especially in light of the fact that Erica had found it best to cut his dosages of anesthetics if he was to have enough to last the rest of the journey.
As they all rode hard up the narrow defile, leaving Corbett and this riflemen facing hundreds of Ganiks in the forlorn hope of saving what and who could be saved, Braun slowed, then dropped behind and, when Erica came up to him, pled piteously with her to dismount and tighten his girth, which he could feel slipping. But when she did so, he drew his big-bore belt pistol and tried to shoot her. When the weapon jammed, he pistol-whipped her into unconsciousness, then rode on and left her to either die or, far worse, be taken by the Ganiks. The story he gave out to Gumpner was that Erica had been killed by a small party of Ganiks in the defile and that he had been able to get off but the single shot at the marauders before his pistol malfunctioned and he could only ride on.
When he had decided to make his stand, Corbett had been convinced that it would certainly be the last stand for him and the riflemen he commanded. For all that the horde of barbarians were primitively armed even for this time and place, there were just too many of them; far more of them than he and his force had of cartridges for their rifles. But he had been wrong.
Due to some wildly implausible turns of good fortune, he and his force had beaten off charge after charge of the screaming, wild-eyed cannibals, piling up three to four hundred dead or dying Ganiks with well-aimed shots and explosive bullets.
But it had been a near thing—or so it had seemed at the time. They had been down to a scant handful of cartridges per man when the Ganiks were suddenly reinforced and, encouraged by the fresh forces, had mounted yet another full-scale charge. But when this one, too, had ended as had all the earlier ones in bloody butchery and defeat, those Ganiks still unhurt, some two hundred or more, had mounted their horses and ponies and ridden away to the northwest without a backward glance.
After a far-ranging reconnaissance of the Ganiks’ line of withdrawal to be certain that it was really such and not simply a ruse to draw them out of their well-defended defile, the exhausted riflemen had butchered a Ganik pony and camped the night in the grassy, well-watered area just to the north of the mouth of the defile. Then, next morning, they had pushed on southward in the wake of the smaller, more vulnerable party.
It did not ease their minds to discover signs that a sizable mounted party of Ganiks was spurring on along the same trail between their force and the smaller one. But luck still rode with them. They surprised the contingent of Ganiks camped along the trail and had cut most of them down before some were fully awake. Two or three, no more, escaped in the darkness, afoot and unarmed. Their leader was captured alive but unconscious, victim of a blow from Jay Corbett’s mace.
Some presentiment had caused Jay Corbett to spare the life of the middle-aged, bald, bearded and indescribably filthy cannibal chief, and he had never had cause to regret his action, far from it. Old Johnny “Skinhead” Kilgore had proved himself worth his weight in diamonds to Corbett and every other trooper of the survivors.
The Ganik’s knowledge of game and hunting, of wild but edible plants and of plants having natural medicinal qualities had kept them well fed and healthy for almost all the remaining journey. He had quickly and easily shed most of his Ganik ways and become one of them. He made friends easily, and his unquestioned expertise as a woodsman soon had earned him the respect and trust of all the troopers.
But if he and his newfound mates fared well, the murderous Dr. Harry Braun surely did not. When Gumpner halted his small command for the night, after the wild ride from the defile, in a sheltered, easily defensible glen, Braun was alternately screaming with pain and lapsing into unconsciousness. Upon lifting him down from his saddle and examining him, Gumpner found the injured, splinted and bandaged leg immensely swollen and horribly discolored for its entire length—toes to crotch—with the toes and part of the foot turning black.
When Corbett joined Gumpner, the officer decided to do what little he could in the absence of a trained doctor by opening and draining the infected leg, and this he did with the assistance of Gumpner and a few others.
In the aftermath of the crude surgery, Braun surprisingly seemed to be improving, and when the horses, ponies and mules had grazed out the glen, Corbett had felt few qualms about moving on with the injured scientist. But Braun’s condition had gradually deteriorated under the strains of daily travel, and when Old Johnny Kilgore and a hunting party found a promising, grassy, well-watered spot some kilometers west of the trail, Corbett had had the unit go into camp there.