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Robert Adams

The Coming of the Horseclans

To Christopher Stasheff and Graham Diamond, respect­ed colleagues and good friends; to Robert and Verna Boos, alte Kameraden; to John Estren; to the late, lamented Harvey Shild; and to Pamela Crippen, who is made of sugar and spice and everything nice.

AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION

The following tale is a fantasy, pure and simple. It is a flight of sheer imagination. It contains no hidden mean­ings and none should be read into it; none of the sociological, economic, political, religious, or racial "messages," with which far too many modern novels abound, are herein contained. The Coming of the Horseclans is, rather, intended for the enjoyment of any man or woman who has ever felt a twinge of that atavistic urge to draw a yard of sharp, flashing steel and with a wild war cry recklessly spur a vicious stallion against impossible odds.

If I must further categorize, I suppose this effort falls among the sci-fi/fantasy stories which are woven about a post-cataclysmic age, far in our future. In this case, the story is set in the twenty-seventh century. The world with which we are dealing is one still submerged in the barbarism into which it was plunged some six hundred years prior to the detailed events, following a succession of manmade and natural disasters which extirpated whole nations and races of mankind.

For the scholars and just plain curious: Yes, the lan­guage of the Blackhairs or Ehleenee is Greek. I have, indeed, indulged in a bit of literary license with regard to spelling, both in that language and in Mehrikan or English. I tender no apologies.

Robert Adams

PROLOGUE I

"And, in His time, the God shall come again,

From the south, upon a horse of gold,

To meet the Kindred camped upon the plain,

Or so our Sacred Ancestors were told . . ."

—From The Prophecy of the Return

The big man came ashore at the ancient port of Mazatlan, from off a merchantman out of the equally ancient port of Callao, far to the south. The men of the ship professed little sure knowledge of their former passenger, save that he was a proven and deadly warrior, certainly noble-born, though none seemed quite certain of the country of his origin.

This man, who gave his name as Maylo de Morre, stood a head and a hand's-breadth above even the tallest of the men of the mountains who, themselves, towered over the men of the lowlands and coast. His hair was strippled with gray, but most of it was as black as their own, though not so coarse, and his hair, spadebeard and mustachios were cut and fash­ioned in the style of noblemen of the far southern lands.

Silver he possessed, and gold, as well, but no man thought of taking it from him by force, not after they saw his smooth, effortless movements or looked but once into those brooding, dark-brown eyes. At his trim waist were shortsword, dirk and knife, another knife was tucked into the top of his right boot and the wire-wound leather hilt of a well-kept, antique saber jutted up over his left shoulder.

After he had secured lodgings in the best inn of the upper town, his first stop was at the forge of Mazatlan's only ar­mor-smith, where he stripped for measurements and ordered a thigh-length shirt of double-link chainmail, paying half the quoted cost in advance in strange, foreign, but pure, gold coins. And that night the smith told all the tavern of his cus­tomer's hard, spare, flat-muscled body, covered from head to foot by a veritable network of crosshatched lines denoting old scars—battle wounds, for certain, the smith opined.

The next morning, Morre sought out the town agent for old Don Humberto del Valle de Castillo y de las Vegas and shortly the two were seen to ride out toward the local noble­man's estancia. When they returned the next day, the Don himself rode with them, trailed by ten of his lancers, and Morre was astride one of the fine war-stallions which it was the Don's business and pleasure to breed and train. This stal­lion was of a chestnut hue that shone like fine gold, with mane and tail that seemed silvery ripples in the brisk breeze blowing in from the sea.

Two lancers fetched the stranger's effects from the inn and, for the next month, he resided at Don Humberto's townhouse as a clearly honored guest. He no longer visited the shops; rather, uniformed lancers summoned and escorted the various artisans to the mansion—the saddler, the bootmaker, the best of the tailors, a merchant who was ordered to bring with him several of the rare and hideously expensive but immensely powerful hornbows made by horse-nomads far and far to the north and east, and the armorer.

Mio, the saddler, had to confer with the goldsmith, Pedro, since some of the decorations the foreign nobleman wanted on his saddle and harness were beyond the skills of a provin­cial worker of leather. And the bootmaker, Jose, had to have words with Diego, the armorer, if the boots he was to construct were to be properly fitted with thin sheets of steel and panels of light mail.

The tailor, Gustavo, was nearly ecstatic, seeing great fu­ture profits from the new and unique designs of clothing this great nobleman had brought from oversea. His only outside need was to haggle with the tanner, Anselmo, for the extra-fine grade of leather to line the esteemed gentleman's riding breeches.

Sergio Gomez—who was a bastard half-brother of the Don and had, himself, done a bit of soldiering before bringing several years' worth of loot back to the town of his birth and setting himself up as a merchant—could talk of nothing save Don Maylo's horsemanship, bowmanship and skill with lance and saber.

Sitting in the smoky tavern with his pint-cup of milk-white pulque before him on the knife-scarred board and eager ears hanging upon his words, old Sergio puffed at a thin, black cigarro and opined, "Muchachos, I certify, el Señor Maylo de Morre is un hombre formidable. With either lance or saber, he is more than a match for any caballero I have ever seen fight . . . and I have seen many, in my day."

"But with the bow, now," he whistled softly, "I tell you, it smacks of wizardry. Within minutes after he had selected the bow of his choice and strung it to his satisfaction, he was plunking arrows into a bale of straw with such speed and ac­curacy as to make my poor old head to spin."

"Then that splendid palomino stallion came trotting over, though no one had called him and the Señor had not even looked in that direction. The Señor hooked a full arrowcase to his belt and was up on the stallion with bow in hand in the blinking of an eye, without either saddle or reins or even a bare halter."

"He rode far out, then came back at a hard gallop, guiding the stallion Señor Dios alone knows how, since both hands were busy with the bow. Muchachos, he started loosing shafts at a hundred meters or better from that bale of straw, and here to tell you is this one that not one of the dozen shafts he loosed was outside a space I could cover with my palm and fingers.

"That would be good shooting from a firm stand at fifty meters. But from a galloping, barebacked horse at a hundred? Angel Gonzales, Don Humberto's sergeant, is himself a bow-master and has, as we all know, won many, many gold pesos in competition, and he told me that there can be no man in all the Four Kingdoms of Mexico with such skill."

The merchant took a long draught of his pulque, puffed his cigarro back to life, then lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Don Humberto avows that the Señor Maylo de Morre is but a noble traveler from somewhere in the Associated Duchies of Chile, who is passing through on a leisurely trip; but Angel opines that he is none other than one of the famous Defensores Argentinos, on loan to our Emperor from the Emperor of the Argentinas and traveling secretly, incognito and in a most roundabout route to meet with his new master."

Of course, all of them were wrong. Maylo de Morre was much less than they thought, but far more than they could imagine.

——«»——«»——«»——

The long, difficult and dangerous journey across the Sierra Madre Occidentalis to the Grand Duchy of Chihuahua was accomplished—through the good offices of Don Humberto, who seemed to have highly placed friends and/or relatives at the courts of all four kings and of the Emperor, as well—in company with a heavily-guarded caravan which had wound down from the Emperor's alternate capital at Guadalajara and was proceeding slowly up the coast roads, making fre­quent stops so that the merchants might offer their wares and the attached imperial officers could collect the yearly taxes from the various local officers, such as Don Humberto.

Despite the numerous and well-armed guards, Don Hum­berto would not hear of his guest departing with less than a full squad of his own lancer-bodyguards, a quartet of ser­vants, and a fully equipped and provided pack train to afford the estimable Conde Maylo de Morre security and civilized comforts on the long trek over the mountains. Don Hum­berto had never been able to obliquely wheedle—for of course gentlemen did not demand or even inquire about un-offered personal information from other gentlemen; it would have been most impolite—any particulars of el Señor's true origin, nationality, family or rank from him. But he had pro­claimed him a count so that his "rank" would match that of the commander of the caravan, who then would treat el Señor as an equal. The old Don felt that it was the least he could do to repay his guest for the many hours of pleasure his tales of the lands and peoples and their singular customs and mores had brought him here in his isolated and provin­cial little backwater of empire.

For his own part, Don Ramon, Conde-Imperial de Guanajuato and Colonel-General of the Imperial Tax Service, had not needed old Don Humberto's assurances. He knew a well-bred man when he saw one—the air of relaxed self-assurance, the strict observance of the courtesies and proprie­ties, the matchless seat which made a single creature of him and his fine destrier, the easy and natural assumption of com­mand, like a hand slipping into an old and well-worn glove. Indeed, Don Ramon suspected that this foreign "Conde" had deliberately misled the aged Humberto, that his true rank was likely several notches higher, and throughout the first two legs of the journey, he deferred to his guest as he would have to his own overlord, el Principe de los Numeros. High nobles were often wont to travel incognito—this Don Ramon knew well from his years in and around the imperial court—and while he diligently played the game and always addressed the foreigner by his nombre de guerra and his assumed title, he never failed to treat him and see that he was treated like a prince of the imperial house.

——«»——«»——«»——

The ambuscade was sprung in a rock-walled pass, high in the sierras. While rocks crashed about them, throwing off knife-sharp splinters, and arrows hummed their deadly song, while horses and mules and men screamed, whips cracked and the confusion of those in authority was reflected in their torrent of often-contradictory orders, Don Ramon caught a glimpse of Conde Maylo.

Despite his evident fear—his rolling eyes and distended nostrils—the palomino stallion stood still as a statue, while his noble rider calmly uncased and strung his hornbow. Be­hind him, his ten lances tried hard to emulate him, their ef­forts frustrated partially by less biddable mounts. Only the short, scar-faced sergeant managed to get his mount under sufficient control to allow him to ready his own bow and fol­low his lord when that worthy moved at an easy walk up into the pass.

When he was where he wished to be, the Conde once more brought his horse to a rigid halt. With rocks bouncing about them and arrows occasionally caroming off their helmets, the sergeant and his lord commenced—before Ramon's half-disbelieving eyes—such a demonstration of superior archery as not even the ancient rocks could ever before have witnessed.

Soon, the falling rocks had been completely replaced by falling, screaming bodies, and after a good dozen of the bandit archers had hurtled, dead or dying, to the floor of the pass or had dropped their bows to sink back against the rock walls, shrieking in agony and clutching at the feathered shafts which had skewered various portions of their anatomies, their so-far living and whole comrades faded back among the boul­ders.

So it was that, when the heavily-armed and mounted ele­ment of bushwhackers struck the head of the column, they found not a shattered, disorganized and demoralized party to slaughter and plunder at leisure, but rather a rock-hard line of disciplined troops.

Even before they came into physical contact with the wait­ing soldiery and gentry—almost all of whom should have been down, crushed by rocks or stuck full of arrows—volley on well-aimed volley of shafts rose up in a hissing cloud from the rear ranks to wreak havoc and death amongst the attack­ers.

Those who had set and activated the ambuscade were not soldiers but hit-and-run banditti, so they could not have been faulted for breaking and running immediately they saw their leaders hacked by sabers and broadswords, lifted writhing from their saddles on dripping lance-points or hurled to death amid the stamping hooves by blow of ax or mace. Run, the survivors did and pursued they were. Very few escaped alive, nor were any prisoners taken, though several dozen heads were.

Few of the captured horses were of much account, so they were simply stripped of their ratty gear and turned loose. Those which looked as if they might bring a price or a re­ward were added to the pack train, loaded with bags of ban­dit heads and bundles of captured weapons, valuable for the worked metal.

For the rest, a few pieces of jewelry were taken from the corpses and a scant handful of gold and silver coin were gar­nered, as well as two battered, antique helmets and an assort­ment of arm-rings of brass, copper and iron. None of the robbers had possessed boots or armor of any description or even decent clothing, only rags, rope sandals and jackets of stiff, smelly, ill-cured hide sewn with strips and discs of horn and bone.

Ramon had noted, despite the confusion of the melee, that Morre's skill with his exotic saber was superior to that of most swordsmen if not quite the equal of his astounding tal­ent with the hornbow; on the lance he could render no judg­ment, since his guest's shaft had splintered on the first shock. But he was satisfied that this Don Maylo de Morre was a most competent warrior, by any standards, as well as a natural and accomplished field commander.

And all of this simply deepened the mystery, in the Conde-Imperial's mind.

While men were sent to climb the crags to detach the heads of those ambushers who had not fallen from their perches—for each bandit head would bring half a peso in sil­ver upon delivery to the proper authority—Ramon circulated, taking stock of his own casualties. That was when he saw Morre, leading his golden chestnut down the rocky defile, with young Don Caspar de Garrigo reeling in the saddle and the stocky archer-sergeant with the scarred, pocked face straddling the animal's broad rump and gripping the high cantle. From both men, steady trickles of blood dripped down to streak the stallion's glossy hide.

After his aides and other hurriedly summoned men had lifted down the swooning hidalgo and the agonized and creatively cursing sergeant, Ramon offered his own, sweat-soaked scarf to "Conde" Maylo, who was dabbing at the blood streaks on his destrier's flanks.

"No, thank you, Count Ramon," croaked Morre from a dry throat. "The only thing that will really help El Dorado, here, is a good wash. I'd settle for a pint of cool wine . . . or even a bare mouthful of stale water, right now."

Ramon proffered the miraculously unbroken saddle bottle. "Brandy-water, my lord, the best I fear I can do until we get on about a mile and set up camp."

After a long, long pull at the flask, Morre said, "A mile, in those wagons, over these rocks? The young knight will likely be dead when we get there. Why not camp here? That riff­raff, what's left of them, won't be back."

"My lord's pardon, please," said Ramon. "But this is not my first such trip. I know these mountains. This pass doubles as a seasonal riverbed. If my lord will regard those water­marks"—he indicated discolorations at least twelve feet high on the rock walls of the gap—"in this season, a storm could blow in from the west at any moment. But a mile beyond this place there is a fine plateau, with a spring and grass and a few trees."

"As for Don Caspar, he is a tough hombre. And your ser­geant, well, he looks to be the consistency of boiled leather. But I shall see that they are constantly attended and well-padded."

In camp, Ramon and Morre watched the gypsy horse leech-cum-physician—all they now had, as the master physi­cian of the Conde-Imperial's staff had been brained by a boulder early on in the ambush—fumble and blunder his way through a wound closure, nearly burning himself with the cautery.

Sergeant Angel Gonzales, whose deep wounds in thigh and upper arm assured him next place in line, had also been observing the less than efficient performance. Raising his good arm to attract his lord's attention, he said, laconically, "Don Maylo, if it please you, I be a old sojer and I've survived right many wounds and camp fevers and I think I'd as lief take my chances with dying of blood-losing or the black rot as put my flesh 'neath the iron of that faraon fastidioso. Like as not, he'd miss his pass at my thigh and sear off my man-parts."

Morre smiled reassuringly down at his follower. "His lack of skill is not calculated to breed confidence, is it, Angel? Would you trust my hand guiding that cautery more?"

The sergeant's ugly head bobbed vigorously. "For a surety, Don Maylo. But . . . your pardon, my lord. My lord has burned wounds before?"

"I, too, am an old soldier, Angel." He said, gravely, "Yes, I have closed many a wound, over the years. And," he added with a grin to lessen the palpable tension, "never once have I toasted valuable organs . . . by accident."

With Angel and a couple of other lancers behind him, Morre and the men attending to the brazier and the dead physician's other instruments proceeded with Ramon to his tent, wherein waited Don Caspar de Garrigo.

At Morre's direction, the young knight was lifted off the camp bed and onto a sheet of oilskin spread on the earth. To Ramon's questioning look, he answered, "That bed has too much give to it, Count Ramon, and we need above all things a firm surface beneath him. Have your men get his breeks off and his linens as well. When the iron burns his flesh, his body will release its water and probably its dung, too. You saw that, outside, there."

Morre reflected silently that chances were good the boy would die of lockjaw—tetanus infection—no matter what was done for him. "Short of," he thought, "tetanus toxoid and an­tibiotics, but this poor lad was born five or six hundred years too late for such medical sophistication."

A crude spear—really just an old knife blade riveted to a shaft—had been jammed completely through the calf of the right leg, two thicknesses of boot top-leather, the tough, quilt­ed saddle skirt and deeply enough into the horse's body to kill him, outright. Then Don Caspar had suffered the ill-for­tune to lie pinned beneath the dead horse until Morre had chanced across him. Likely, the horse's body fluid had seeped into the man's wound.

But Morre resolved to do the best he could with the primi­tive tools at hand. He sought through the bag of instruments until he found what he assumed was an irrigation instru­ment—a bulb of gut attached to a copper tube—then rinsed it inside and out with brandy from Ramon's seemingly inex­haustible stock. He poured another quart bottle of the fiery beverage into a small camp kettle, added half the measure of clear, cold spring water and nodded to the waiting lancers who knelt to pinion the half-conscious knight into immobility.

Filling the bulb with the liquid, Morre scraped away the clots at either end of the wound and, disregarding the fresh flow of blood, thrust the nozzle of the copper tube into one end, pressed the gory flesh tight about it and gave the bulb a powerful squeeze. Diluted blood squirted out of the opposite opening.

And Don Caspar, his raw flesh subjected to the bite of the brandy, came to full, screaming, thrashing consciousness. He was an exceedingly strong young man and the six lancers were hard-put to hold him down, much less still, so before he proceeded with his treatment, Morre called for three or four more men.

But such was the pain of the second flushing of the pene­trating stab that the hidalgo again lapsed into an unconscious state, though still he moaned and thrashed fitfully. When the wound was as clean as he felt he could get it, Morre took a thick strip of tooth-scarred rawhide from the physician's bag, swished it about in undiluted brandy, then placed it between Don Caspar's jaws, securing it with an attached strap around the patient's head.

While one of his helpers sopped up the fluids—blood, brandy, water, serum, sweat and urine—from the oilskin, Morre looked to the cauteries in the glowing brazier, selected one and wrapped a bit of wet hide around the shaft.

"All right, hombres, turn the señor over, then hold him as if your lives depended on it. Put your weight on him. You, there, sit you on his buttocks. Pablo, take your best grip on that knee. If your hands slip, I swear I'll burn them for you."

The patient had the misfortune to regain consciousness bare seconds before Morre was ready. Ramon knelt, gently dabbed the younger man's brow with a bit of wet sponge and softly admonished, "Be brave, now, Caspar. Remember the honor of your casa. Set your teeth into the pera de agortia and implore Nuestra Señora that She grant you strength. Don Maylo is most skilled and it will be done quickly."

It was. Morre lifted the pale-pink-glowing cautery from its nest of coals, blew on it once to remove any bits of ash, took careful aim, then laid it firmly upon the entry wound, holding it while he counted slowly to five. He tried vainly to stop his nose to the nauseating stench of broiling flesh, his ears to the gasps and whining moans of his patient.

Morre returned the cautery to the brazier and examined his handiwork, critically, while Don Caspar relaxed, sobbing despite himself, and a lancer cleaned his buttocks and legs of what had come when his anal sphincter failed. Ramon, him­self, sponged away the mucus which had gushed from the tor­mented man's nostrils, all the while softly praising his bravery and self-discipline. Morre decided he could hardly have done a better job and, as he turned again to the brazier, hoped that the second and last burning would go as well.

After that day, if Morre had revealed himself to truly be a pretender to the throne of the Emperor of the Four Kingdoms and in league with El Diablo, himself, atop it all, not a noble or man of the tax train but would have raised his banner and his war cry, and Conde-Imperial Ramon would have been first.

——«»——«»——«»——

During the lengthy stay of the caravan in Ciudad Chihua­hua, Ramon saw to it that his newfound friend, "Conde" Maylo de Morre, was feted and honored by his cousin, Duque-Grande Alberto. The shrewd Conde-Imperial also ar­ranged an exhibition of archery so that his tales of Morre's expertise might be believed in future days, and further took advantage of the day to realize more than a few golden pesos by confidently backing Morre against any and all local con­tenders.

The way of the tax train now lay south—through the grand duchy of Durango and so back to Guadalajara and the imperial court—and Ramon tried every argument and entice­ment he could muster to attempt to persuade Morre to ac­company him, rather than following his announced course north, through the inhospitable and bandit-infested desert to Ciudad Juarez and El Paso del Norte. But it was all in vain. Morre was determined. The best that Ramon and his cousin, Duque-Grande Alberto, were able to accomplish was to con­vince the honored guest that he should delay his departure a couple more weeks and ride north in company with a detachment of replacement troops bound for Fortaleza Bienaventuranza, just north of the river which separated the sister cities.

At one of the informal dinners a week or so prior to Ramon's scheduled departure, the subject of old Don Humberto, lord of Mazatlan, came up in conversation.

"Ay, poor Umbo," sighed the Duque-Grande, dabbing at his beard and flaring mustachios with a linen napkin, "our two fathers were old comrades, you know, and he and I sol­diered together forty years ago, both of us young ensigns in the Dragon Regiment. Ah, those were brave days!"

Morre, looking every inch the hidalgo in his silks and tooled leathers and sparkling jewels, set down his goblet of chased silver and asked, "You said, 'poor Umbo,' my lord duke. May one inquire why? During the month I guested with him, Don Humberto seemed happy enough to me, and Ramon, here, tells me that the old man is a favorite of his overlord, loved by his people and much respected at the im­perial court. He takes much pride in the horses he breeds, and rightly so. My own El Dorado is one of the finest and best-trained mounts I have ever straddled."

"Alas," answered the Duque-Grande, "those horses are all that Umbo has left, these days. All four of his fine sons were slain while fighting bravely for the Emperor in Yucatan, these twenty years agone. Then the great plague which decimated the Four Mexicos three years later took his entire house­hold—his wife, Dona Ana, his three young, unmarried daughters, the widows of two of his sons and all his grand­children."

"When he dies, there will be none of his casa to swear the oaths and take over the fief. The overlord will have to take the oaths from some outsider and then there will be trouble in Mazatlan . . . mayhap, much trouble. There often is when one casa replaces another, especially a native other, on a fief. Good old Umbo knows this too, and you can be certain the knowledge grieves him, for he is a good man, a good lord and loves his lands and people."

Morre shrugged. "It seems a problem simply enough solved, my lord. He appears a lusty man, even yet, so surely he has a bastard or six living nearby. Why does he not just recognize a likely man of his siring as legitimate? In his posi­tion, I would do such."

The Duque-Grande loudly cracked a knuckle. "Other lands, other customs, Conde Maylo. Yes, Umbo has many bastards of both sexes and ranging in age from mere toddlers to not many years his junior. And not just in his homeland, either—he always was mucho hombre. But, Conde Maylo, in the Mexicos, a common-born bastard cannot so easily be legitimatised, not if lands and succession are involved."

"Umbo could recognize every bastard of his casa in all of Mazatlan, but he would not be allowed to name any of them heir to imperial fiefs. To inherit lands, obligations and privi­leges, a man must be born to the hidalguia or, failing that, be a formally-invested caballero, elevated for conspicuous brav­ery in the service of the Emperor."

Morre stared into the dark-purple depths of his wine, for a moment, a smile flickering at the corners of his mouth. He was privy to some knowledge to which these two noblemen were not, and it had required time and cunning to set them up so perfectly for consummation of his plan.

"My lord Duque-Grande, if a commoner soldier should take his stand over a fallen knight and fight long and hard, sustaining grave wounds himself, to protect that knight from a horde of foemen, would that be considered grounds for his elevation in rank?"

The Duque-Grande nodded vigorously. "Of a certainty, but at least two noblemen must witness the act."

Morre went on. "You claim friendship of old with Don Humberto and you recognize his predicament. Were you presented ...