No female above the age of six was safe from the lusts of the marauders, nor did the perverts spare boys. The elderly and the very youngest were generally cut down at the beginning of an intaking with callous strokes of blades and stabbings of spears, and thus were they the luckier citizens, for it was after the first flush of bloodthirst was sated that the true horrors commenced.
After all visible wealth and goods had been plundered, then were the luckless inhabitants savagely tortured to extract possible hiding places of more loot, and torture for definite purpose often led to torture, maimings and indescribable mutilations for no purpose at all save the satisfaction of causing agony and hearing screams and pleas. Some of the pack delighted in such atrocious obscenities as forcing hapless sufferers to imbibe of unholy broths seethed of portions of their own bodies or those of spouses and children. Brutal men would gouge out eyes, rip out tongues, slice off breasts and sexual organs, noses and ears and lips, smash out teeth, sever leg tendons, then leave the bloody, croaking, flopping things to roast in the blazing ruins of their homes.
Of a day, however, a broken nobleman who had joined the bandit army to avoid starvation had words with Mainahkos and Ahreekos and slowly convinced them of the sagacity of those words. For all that they and most of their followers were now become wealthy beyond their former wildest dreams of avarice, each succeeding victory had cost and was costing them at least a few men, while men of fighting age or strength or inclination were become almost as precious as emeralds or rubies in this land stripped of warrior stock by High King Zastros’ strenuous impressments and recruitings atop the civil war and its years of carnage. Moreover, the few scattered survivors of witnesses to the intakings and occupations and burnings of the stinking charnel houses that the two warlords and their band had made of every city that had fallen to them had moved fast and spread the terrible word far and wide. Now, every walled enclosure within weeks of marching time had been forewarned and was doing everything possible to strengthen its existing defenses and had resolutely put aside any previous thoughts of trying to deal with the marauders on any near-peaceful basis.
So, although it went hard against the grain, the two warlords had begun to rein in their savages and even resist their own natural impulses and inclinations somewhat. They began to deal gently—gently by their personal lights, of course—with the inhabitants of any place that opened the gates without a Fight or showed a willingness to treat.
Mainahkos and Ahreekos even took it upon themselves to move against and either recruit or wipe out numerous smaller bands of their own ilk lurking about the countrysides. Then they began to recruit from the tiny garrisons remaining in a few of the larger walled towns and the smaller cities. Slowly, their howling pack of human predators began to metamorphose into a real, more or less organized, savagely disciplined army.
Therefore, by that day, now three years in the past, that they had appeared under the walls of the ducal city of Kahlkopolis—the onetime seat of the Thoheeksee of Kahlkos—the few straggling hundreds of ill-equipped, sketchily armed bandits that they had been in the beginning were become an impressive and very threatening sight indeed.
All classes of infantry marched in the ranks, fully armed and equipped. Heavy cavalry rode at head and tail of that column, with light cavalry on the flanks and van and riding close guard on the baggage train and the awesome siege engines, the large remuda and the beef herd. Only elephants were lacking, and this deficiency was partially alleviated through the use of old-fashioned war-carts as shock weapons and archery platforms—the
stout, reinforced cart bodies with scythe blades set in the wheel hubs, the big mules all hung with mail, the postillions fully armored having proved quite effective at the tasks of harrying and smashing in infantry lines for long years before the elephants had been trained for warfare.
The last Thoheeks of Kahlkos, one Klawdos, was by then nearly a decade dead, a casualty of the civil war. His wife and young son had disappeared during disturbances shortly after his demise, and the ducal city was just then being held by a distant cousin of the mostly extinct ancient line. The man was a bastard, with scant claim to any scintilla of noble heritage and even less to military experience.
Therefore, when this poseur ordered the gates of the city to be slammed shut and barred, the walls to be manned by the pitifully few men he owned to defend them, those still living of the ducal council of advisers did the only reasonable thing—they murdered him and left the city open to the overwhelming force outside.
Since then, Mainahkos had been thoheeks in all save only name; he had seen to it that that ducal council had all quickly followed their victim into death, by one means or another. He had been teetering upon the very verge of declaring himself Thoheeks Mainahkos Klehftikos of the Duchy of Klehftikos and the City of Klehftikopolis (for, as he and his men had become at least marginally “respectable,” he had adopted the new surname, and now no man who did not desire a messy, agonizing and brutally protracted demise ever recalled aloud the powerful warlord’s original cognomen, Klehpteekos—“the Thief”, and riding to Mehseepolis to demand legal confirmation of his title and lands of the council of the Consolidated Thoheekseeahnee .
He and Ahreekos had both chanced to be out of the city when the boy, son he claimed of Thoheeks Klawdos, came nosing around, in company with some tall, arrogant dotard. But they had both been gone beyond recall by the time the would-be thoheeks had returned, and he had had the fools who had allowed their escape to be flayed alive and then rolled in salt for their inordinate stupidity; those tanned skins still hung in prominent places on the walls of his hall of audience, a silent, savage, ever-present warning to his followers.
On a summer’s day, Mainahkos sat at meat with his principal officer-advisers and his longtime partner. Ahreekos had never bothered to change his cognomen, still reveling in being known as “The Butcher,” although he was become so fat that he no longer did or could do much fighting of any nature. The topic of the discussion around that table was that army which they had been warned was marching upon them from Mehseepolis, in the east-southeast.
In answer to a query directed at him by Mainahkos, the heavy cavalry commander, one Stehrgiahnos—who had been born and reared the heir of avahrohnos, though his father had fallen at Ahrbahkootchee and Stehrgiahnos himself had forfeited title, lands and nearly life itself in an ill-timed rebellion against King Fahrkos, the failure of which had seen him declared outlaw and a distant cousin confirmed to all that which had been his—set down his goblet and patted dry his lips, moustaches and beard before saying somewhat cautiously, “My lord, it might be as well to at least essay a meeting with the senior officers of this army. After all, my lord’s claim to this city and thoheekseeahn should be as good as that any other might make, for he has been a good lord since he has held the city and lands, and, although not related to the ancient but now probably extinct house, he does own the support of at least some of the people of Kahlk—ahh, that is to say, of Klehftikos.”
Mainahkos frowned, sniffed, sneezed and wiped his nose on the wine-and-food-spotted sleeve of his fine linen shirt, considering the suggestion.
Ahreekos shoved aside what little was left of the whole suckling pig on which he had feasted, drained off a half-liter mug of beer, belched thunderously twice, broke wind just as thunderously, then nodded his agreement with the cavalry officer, giving no more thought to his grease-glazed beard than he did to the flies that crawled on and in it and buzzed about his face.