“Little happening up here, oversized brother,” she replied silently, with a touch of equally silent humor. “But down below, the enemy are scurrying hither and yon like ants on an overturned hill. Another wagon train just arrived on the plain, along with two, maybe three hundreds of pikemen. Perhaps they mean to attack again. I hope so—things are deadly dull here.”
He smiled, beaming back, “Yes, if they come again, we’ll just serve them another heaping helping of what we gave them last time. We have at least as many stones as they have men for us to squash with them. This is a variety of siege warfare that I can easily live with—no fear, no hunger or thirst, no worry about mines under the walls or towers, no enemy engines that can range the city, a competent garrison, along with a loyal and uncomplaining populace. Now, if only King Byruhn were still hale and about ... ”
“He shows no improvement, then?” she beamed. “I had begun to think that Pah-Elmuh and his Kleesahks could heal anyone of any injury.”
“They explained it all to me, little sister. What it all boils down to is that they cannot breach his involuntary mindshield, and therefore they cannot order his mind to begin the self-healing process, so he well may die.”
“And if he does,” probed Kahndoot, “you will accept the crown, brother Bili?”
“Oh, no, little sister, not me; I have lands and family and dependent folk far and far to the east. I have no designs on this cold, stony little kingdom.”
“Then who, brother? It is said he is the last member of the royal house.”
“I know not,” Bili admitted. “I suppose it will be up to the council—what’s now left of them in the wake of that stupid battle—to choose a new king. But it won’t be easy, for all of the nobility are related to King Byruhn in one way or another, though all about equally distant in relationship. There will surely be a long period of anarchy in the land before a strong man finally seizes control, and I neither want to nor intend to be here to see it. Immediately these Skohshuns are scotched, it’s me for home.”
She sighed audibly. “Would that I might say such, brother. But we Maidens, we now have no homes, no families to which to return; for us now, one strange place is as good as another. We had hoped that here, after what Prince Byruhn had told us ... but what good are the assurances, the promises of a dead man, or of one soon to be dead?”
Bili the Axe had no answer to that question.
Of nights when there were no other wounded to tend, when no childbirth was imminent to occupy him, Pah-Elmuh the Kleesahk took his rest in King Byruhn’s chamber, trying in every way he could to reach the monarch’s mind through that seemingly impenetrable mindshield, so that the huge body could have the opportunity of healing its hurts before the lack of proper food weakened it enough to die.
Near the rising of the old moon on a night, he lay supine on the pallet he had devised. After over an hour of vain mental probing of the comatose king, the hirsute humanoid was teetering upon the edge of sleep when the silent call came.
“Pah-Elmuh!” Bili’s powerful mindspeak was immediately recognizable to the Kleesahk. No other pure-blood human he ever had encountered had so strong a telepathic talent. “Pah-Elmuh, it is Rahksahnah. Her waters have broken and ... it’s too early, isn’t it?”
“I come, Lord Champion,” Pah-Elmuh beamed. Sighing gustily, he arose from his pallet, once more examined the unconscious king, then strode toward the chamber door. He now was of a mind to regret that he had helped the Lady Rahksahnah to delude Bili as to just how far along her pregnancy was or had been at the time she insisted upon riding out to war, for this Lord Champion just now had more than enough worries cluttering his mind and this new one was pointless, needless. As he paced down the corridors in the direction of the suite of the Lord Champion, the massive Kleesahk mindcalled his two assistants.
Behind him, the soft beams of the risen moon bathed over the recumbent form of Byruhn, King of New Kuhmbuhluhn, lying like one of the carven images of his ancestors in the crypt buried in the bowels of King’s Rest Mountain, only the movements of his chest as he shallowly breathed showing that a spark of life still glowed within his body.
In the chambers of the Champion, Pah-Elmuh and his Kleesahks wasted no time, shooing out all humans save only the Champion himself, and a brace of trusted, experienced palace midwives.
After resting the palm of his hairy hand briefly, lightly, on the young woman’s distended abdomen, he smilingly reassured both her and Bili, mindspeaking, since such was far easier to his kind than trying to shape human speech with tongue and palate ill suited to that task.
“Nothing is amiss. The two babes simply are ready to emerge.”
Bili’s cornsilk eyebrows rose in the direction of his shaven scalp. “Two babes, Pah-Elmuh? You are certain?”
The Kleesahk kneeling beside the wide bed smiled, then beamed, “Oh, yes, Lord Champion, two babes—one male, one female, both perfectly formed, alive and healthy. They each are, of course, smaller than was your son, born last year; but, even so, as ill suited to proper childbearing as is the Lady Rahksahnah’s body, as much as was her suffering last year ere I was able to come to her, I think it were better that the two babes be removed as I finally had to remove your son from her body.”
Bili nodded, wordlessly, beaming, “You know best, Pah-Elmuh. What benefit needless suffering, say I?”
Once more, Erica sat with Brigadier Sir Ahrthur Maklarin. Anger, disgust and a tinge of embarrassment were mirrored on the old man’s lined face as he spoke.
“Madam, you have my deepest apologies for the actions of Colonel Potter. Most reprehensible. He will suffer dearly on account of what you and Reserve Surgeon Devernee have here recounted this day. My orders to him regarding you, your men and the New Kuhmbuhluhn prisoners were explicit and written out in plain English, so it will be on his head, alone, that he chose to so flagrantly disobey them.
“The suffering he inflicted upon your men was senseless and cruel in the extreme. Moreover, there was no cause for their injuries in the first place, for he might have asked, determined that they owned inappropriate footwear and had them all issued pikemen’s boots to replace their own riding boots, did he intend to march them rather than follow his original orders.”
His tone became softer, then, as he gently asked, “The ... the injury to your face—more of Colonel Potter’s work?”
Erica’s fingers went involuntarily to the scabbed-over cut running almost from ear to chin across her cheek. “No, not Potter,” she grimly replied. “That supercilious little bastard Ensign Hollister. He was supervising the beating of one of my men who had fallen, lay already senseless on the road. This beauty mark was my punishment for objecting to that beating; the fledgling sadist did it with that riding crop he carries for a swagger stick.
“I’ll tell you, Sir Ahrthur, if he hadn’t had armed, grown men at his beck and call, I’d have killed the little son of a bitch right there!”
The Brigadier riffled through the stack of notes made by his adjutant during the questionings of the woman and the reserve surgeon earlier, then asked, “That was the man who was beaten to death?”
Erica Arenstein shook her dull, dirty, matted head. “No, the man they beat to death was not one of mine, Sir Ahrthur. That was one of the Kuhmbuhluhners, an older man, and from the look of him, not in the best of health to begin. No, all they did to my man was to break his upper arm and crack some ribs. But another of my men is now blind in one eye, thanks to another bite of Hollister’s whip.”
The brigadier sighed sadly. “What could have gotten into that boy? Beating, tormenting, maiming helpless, unarmed prisoners! That is not, has never been the Skohshun way. Were you or your men mistreated, in any way ill used whilst you all were held in the glen, up north?”