Chapter 15

Now, I have never seen a ‘motion picture’ or a show on television, as Old Grampy described those ancient wonders of his boyhood, when there was electricity and a thousand other then-modern marvels – before the Yellow Stone disaster. As a boy living in that past golden age just before the disaster, Grampy had adored the Old Westerns, either at a movie theater or on television. Over the years he had told and retold the plots to me of his favorites, of the brave settlers being attacked by savages – but at the very last moment, the cavalry would arrive, charging in to rescue everyone! The settlers would be saved, the girl would kiss the hero, and happily everyone would ride off together into the sunset. Well, it was about sunset and oddly enough, I ... well, we ... did have a cavalry, albeit a rather small and still inexperienced one!

Nearly a week ago, my small scouting company from Ft. Salina had been sent back to herd along the refugees from Gypsum, but either they had made remarkable time getting there and then back down here, or perhaps they’d skimped a bit on following their original orders. Almost invisible, in the gloom of the evening and the storm, was my horse Blackhawk, and with Jodi on her own mount, hotly following his path. I could hear him sounding off, long before anyone could see him,

My horse had been chasing after me, apparently, since the very moment I had been teleported away during my battle with the high priestess, following a mental connection with me halfway across Kansas. He tirelessly chased me afterwards from over a hundred miles away, catching up slowly, until his arrival now ... quite when we needed him (and his mounted cavalry followers) the most. Unable to restrain Black and keep him from racing after me, Jodi had wisely decided that my horse knew where I could be found, and she sent a rider back to hastily recall the cavalry escort to follow her trail to my whereabouts.

In a chaotic conflict with visibility measured in just five yards or less, the guy mounted on a charging horse swinging a cavalry sabre most definitely has the better advantage, and they grimly carved down every horde soldier near the train. The brigade assaulting us was either cut down into the mud or soon put entirely to flight, with only a pair of friendly losses to its our own meager force.

“Well, it’s been a royal fucking bitch tracking your ass down!” Jodi snarled, only half in jest, glaring at me in my sickbed as she stood in the doorway of the bullet ridden caboose, glaring at the still bleeding Nancy now pressed close to my side. She’d manage to crawl over to join me so that we could become, as she had anticipated, all too soon, joined again together in death ... one way or another. Amie and Tania looked none too healthy either, still laying together on the blood soaked floor trying to stem the other’s wounds.

“Just how the fuck did you end up south of Witchita? I think we all rode across half of the damned state tracking you down, skirting the town first to the southeast and damned if you didn’t end up going to the northwest then. Well, now we’re here ... and about five miles north of us is damned near everyone in Ft. Salina that could put one foot in front of the other and bear a gun, well most of them have guns anyway. And just what the fuck did you do to Witchita? We were just trying to ride past the western outskirts and people kept slowing us down trying to surrender to us! They then told us where to find you, by following the railroad tracks and mounds of dead bodies heading all north. And now, that’s starting to happen here too, with the whole damned horde trying to give themselves up as prisoners! It’s taken us forever to catch up with you!”

“We’ve been a bit busy here ourselves,” Amie sharply replied, with her M-1 pretty much pointed right at Jodie’s head, cradled from her hip. She didn’t know this intruder, but she recognized a Witchhunter, and she wasn’t sure at all yet if she was friendly. Tania hadn’t enjoyed this introduction much either and she still wasn’t quite sure if she was going to be trouble. Neither girl could really stand on their own but leaning on each mother they could just manage to stand up so that they could interpose their bodies protectively in front of mine.

“It’s all a rather long and complicated story ... and I’d move your gun out of Amie’s face, if I were you, Jodi. She’s short, like you ... but she can be just at least as mean and vicious as you, and she’s had a really rough week. And shooting her would just really piss off Tania here ... and that’s a whole heap of trouble that you don’t want. We’ve all just lost a very, very close friend earlier today so no one’s in the mood for any bullshit. So, everyone holster up the irons and let’s get everyone off this train and into some sort of shelter, if there’s anything of that sort to be found around here. Then some food might be a good idea, next ... and then Jodie I’ll tell you the full story.”

As for shelters, well ... there wasn’t much of that around here. There was one old stone house that had been recently renovated to minimal habitability standards, up at the crest of the eastern slope about fifty or sixty yards east of the train, and since that was the nearest building with a roof, that’s where I ended up, on a bed of wet, freshly cut ryegrass. There was an old ruined town, Moundridge, about a mile further north up the tracks, and that’s where the refugees got escorted towards, at least to rest and heal up. They’d taken their share (or more) of casualties and if the horde hadn’t had a medical camp already established there, with a trio of ‘former barbarians’ actually claiming to be trained practicing doctors, not to mention a cadre of experienced nurses, we might have ended up losing nearly half of them to their wounds or later infections. The former slaves had also lost a full quarter of their starting number as casualties, but this was far better luck than we optimistically could have hoped for, saving as many of them as we did.

As for the horde? For the most part, they couldn’t surrender fast enough. Companies of well-armed men would surrender (gleefully) to a pair of threadbare Ft. Salina armsmen and boys bearing rusty pistols with barely a few dozen rounds of ancient or hand-reloaded ammunition between them. The death of their commanding High Priestess had seriously fractured their overall command structure (not to mention blowing up most of their officers in the stadium arena) with seemingly no one left willing or able to give orders. As for their morale being quite in the toilet, the spreading knowledge that the Witch-Lord (me) had destroyed their high temple, with all of their religious and military leadership as well, completed the job.

Sure, there were some die-hards with a few minor priestesses left, but they were a distinct minority, perhaps comprising at the most ten percent of the surviving horde numbers. These die-hards were all running hard for their lives now, and as far away from us (and me) as their feet or a captured horse could carry them before collapsing. The Green priestesses and their horde were done for, here in Kansas.

There would be no shortage of bandit gangs in the hills and wilderness wastes this fall and winter, but one by one they’d eventually either all be rooted out or else the survivors would travel on elsewhere, further south or west, to go bother someone else. The Oklahoma-Texas Republic was plenty organized enough to deal adequately with those sorts of renegades!

My very first act upon being taken off of the train on a stretcher was to watch as a group of my cavalrymen solemnly dug a proper grave for Lorrie, on the hillside ridge facing the railroad tracks and the sunset. I’d let Amie and Tania pick the exact burial site and no one felt like saying very much as we put her deep into the ground, placed within an oversized horde weapons chest for a coffin. We cried a lot, over the next few weeks and months, while sitting next to her grave, but at that moment we found that we had no tears left to express our grief with.

Secure now in an acceptably soft bed under roof that didn’t leak too much, I related to Jodi, along with Ruth, who had been safely kept out of danger with the main Salina field force, my various adventures of the last week. I made formal introductions of both Amie and Tania, not to mention Nancy and the rescued group of young witch-girls to everyone ... but I could sense that Jodi was immensely disconcerted by all of this. Perhaps it was plain simple jealousy ... and maybe it mostly was that, finding that I had so many new (and prettier) lovers now present with me, but I could sense that something else entirely was bothered her as well.

Being our only witch-healer, Jodi stuck around just long enough to quickly heal all of the girl’s worst injuries, and then medically pronounce me a complete and utter mess. Yes, if I had stood up to join the fight in the caboose, I would have very likely punctured a lung and probably quickly died. Even now, I was told that I would spend at least the next few months in bed. Magic can help bones mend quicker, that’s true, but when you nearly puree some or most of your internal organs, Mother Nature’s remedy of rest, tended to be the most effective treatment.

“Get used to pissing in a pan, because you’re banished to this bed for at least the next two months ... maybe longer, until you’re mostly healed, but you’re going to delicate for a months longer, at least springtime before I’d risk getting onto your brute of a horse. I’ve done what I can but the internal injuries just need time to rest and heal. The other ladies, including that bitch that someone said was your ex-wife, are all healing up from their wounds nicely, so your harem of girlfriends will all be dancing in no time,” Jodi muttered with an attempt at humor that she didn’t genuinely feel in her heart, right after she finished the final magical healing session on my battered frame. I’d been drugged insensible for most of them, as the various broken bones and torn muscular bits of me were physically (and then magically) wrenched back into proper place. It was a lot of work for her, and she constantly reminded me of that; there wasn’t much of me from my left shoulder down to my knees was in original operating condition. Without Jodi’s magical healing, one of the former horde doctors later told me, it was likely that I never would have survived the first month after the injuries.

She predicted significant lingering long-term pain in my future ... and she wasn’t wrong. I also no longer had Lorrie or her gift to deal with that, so I spent much of next three months either drugged up or doused with rye liquor (which I’d never had much of a taste for) and I was just about as grumpy as Brock’a, my dire-badger, before she dug herself and her kits into a winter’s den, to hibernate there until spring.

As for Jodi, once she was certain that her healing gift could do nothing more for me, she packed up enough travel provisions to last her for at least two weeks and she rode off very early one morning heading east ... without so much as a word goodbye to anyone.

I was either too drugged up, too filled with pain, or too annoyed to soon much care. No one would leave me the fuck alone and just let me rest ... let alone try and heal up in peace and quiet!

As a functional field army, the Horde was completely done for. That just left the political problems left as to what to do with the thousands of prisoners-of-war, not to mention the tens of thousands of former slaves, and other assorted refugees. Somehow ... this was now primarily my problem to deal with as well!

Kansas, as a historical state and political entity, hadn’t existed since the moment the Yellow Stone had exploded, now about sixty years ago. Sure, there were towns and villages scattered all over, but there was no central authority. Perhaps the Witchhunters in Kansas City to the east, might claim that they were the authority, but not even the most arrogant one of those bastards had ever claimed to be the top boss in charge of things they weren’t within actual eyesight of. They didn’t do mundane things like just run villages and towns, or even hunt local bandits – it probably wasn’t in keeping with their image of fighting evil and it would also cut severely into their work-time, spent mostly screwing the more comely village maidens.

Now, Ft. Salina had been saved and the horde had been run entirely out of Witchita. More importantly, the very source of the witch-taint had been removed from this entire region of the state and now the city and lands within hundreds of miles of us were ripe for full reoccupation. A generation of slaves had been working ceaselessly, clearing the streets and tilling fields around Witchita, until they were free from the thick layers of covering volcanic rock and ash. Twenty years of hard forced labor that now (in my opinion) could benefit everyone! Now, from what I had seen myself and had heard since reported to me since, the opportunities for profitable homesteading were limitless. Already, nearly everyone on our refugee train had returned with the train to Witchita, and seemed included to rebuild and stay there for the long term.