Chapter XXII: The Hillmen Triumph

The plain was strewn with the terrible harvest of battle, over which, in the clear morning sky, wheeled and wheeled countless vultures, waiting, waiting.... Some, with flapping of wings and clumsy hopping, had alighted. Some, with bald repulsive necks and heads stretched forward, were already tugging with cruel beaks at something hidden by their clumsily flapping wings.

Warok saw nothing of this, only the absence of fighting, which had moved around to the west while he was attending to Garram. The foot of the spur must now be hiding the battle. He ran, and as he ran, thought. Why had the enemy retreated in that direction, which led only to the pass up into the Hills? Why had they not fallen back toward their reënforcements in the Plains? There could be only one explanation: a traitor must have shown them the pass!

Then, of a sudden, he understood much that had puzzled him. The Fulani leader must have started to take his troops up the pass to the west while on the east the Hillmen were waiting for the rising sun to help their attack. Once the Fulani force were spread in a thin line along the narrow path up the pass, the leader in front of them would be quite unable to keep touch with what was happening in the rear.

Which also accounted for the ease of the Hillmen’s victory over their much more numerous and better armed opponents. The enemy rear guard alone had been engaged! The main body of the Fulani must by now be nearly at the top of the pass, protected by the unscalable cliff face from the Hillmen in the foothills below. A warrior chief, his honest mind had not counted on treachery. That had been the weak point in his plan. As he rounded the foot on the spur he saw that his conjecture was right. At the mouth of the pass confused fighting still went on. The remains of the Fulani rear guard were covering the entrance of the last of their main body into the rocky path, and once safely in the pass they should be able to hold it against any number of Hillmen, for there were many points in the path that only one man at a time could pass.

Warok saw that the head of the twisting black line of the enemy had climbed almost to the top of the pass. There was no other way up into the hills for many miles on either side. The Hill forces were caught in the foothills, helpless to stem the tide of the Fulani advance. The old chief groaned aloud, for nothing now lay between the cruel enemy and the peaceful Hill villages where women and children would be working and playing in the morning sun.

Others had grasped the situation. Old warriors, frantic at their helplessness to defend their villages, blamed Warok to his face for leaving the pass undefended. Still others, less privileged by their age and honors, gathered in futile, scowling groups, muttering to each other the things they dared not say to the old chief’s face. And all, mixing threats with entreaties, demanded of him a miracle, that he should find some means of stopping the enemy’s advance upon the Hill villages. Cold and hard, Warok stood before his judges. He was scarcely aware of them, of their many words. With all his will he was trying to tear from his mind some plan to retrieve the disaster.

“Gather all warriors! Cease this talk!” his stern command stilled the babble. “Re-arm swiftly from the dead and wounded.” His glance sought a man among the mob. “You, Loka, will re-form the force under its village leaders and lead it with all swiftness to attack the camp of the Fulani in the plains below.” Murmurs began to arise, questions.

“O Warok, I have never feared battle, but what is the use of attacking the Fulani in the plains when by then the other force of Fulani will be killing and capturing our wives and children in the Hills?”

“None doubts your courage, O Loka. If you cannot capture the camp, at least set fire to it. If even this is too much for you, then make smoke fires in the bush near the camp and defend these fires with your lives. For on the smoke will hang the safety of your homes, your wives, your children!”

“But how will revenge benefit us?” Loka was puzzled. “And why this child’s play with fires and smoke?”

“O fool,” Warok thundered, “are not the women and horses of the Fulani to them as your women and cattle are to you?” The old chief grew angry at the delay in what must be done at once if at all. “If the Fulani on the hill see the smoke as of their camp being attacked and burned, will they not turn again to defend it, leaving our villages till later?”

Warok knew how utterly his people could be relied upon to carry out the idea once it was planted in their thick skulls. To attempt to lay down the details of their task would only arouse the resentment of this federation of independent--very independent--Hill villages. Without further words he drove them on their way.

Meanwhile, till smoke rose from the Fulani camp in the plain, time was on the old warrior’s hands. Turning toward the pass again, he grinned and spun his ax sparkling in the air. With a rallying shout he led a wedge into the small rear guard, cutting them off from the mouth of the pass. Then, leaving his followers to deal with the little isolated group, he plunged up the pass, ax in hand, his chain mail twinkling in the sun. At the first bend he came across the tail of the enemy’s force. Two men he sent crashing down the precipice and had sprung like a human leopard on the third before he could turn to defend himself. Uneventfully but steadily Warok ate into the tail of the column, man by man falling to his ax or being sent hurtling down to the depths below.

At a bend in the path he halted with a shout of surprise. The Fulani had not reached the head of the pass yet. Something seemed to be holding up the head of the column, far away in the distance. Even as he looked, the cause of the obstruction became clear. One of the scaffold-like bridges had been set on fire in front of the advancing Fulani! As he watched, it fell smoking and blazing out of sight into the chasm below. Whether accident or design had set fire to the bridge, the result was the same. There was now no way for the Fulani, or anyone else, to reach the hilltop by this path. They must retreat by the way they had come!

But why let them retreat? Where the old chief was standing was just such another bridge as the one which had been destroyed in front of the Fulani. If he could destroy this behind them, the huge force would be caught helpless on the path, unable to advance or retire. And even now the force was turning back. For some brief moments--the best in his warrior life--the old chief held the narrow pass against the enemy while behind him his followers loosened the timbers of the bridge. On his right the unclimbable cliff face, on his left a precipice, beneath his feet the bridge which his followers were even now destroying.

At a warning shout from behind, he sprang back across the loosened timbers. Before the stupefied enemy could cross, beams, timbers and decking were lifted shoulder high by willing Hillmen, then hurled crashing to the depths. The enemy was in the trap, and the trap was closed!

A giant scraping noise was heard. Then a crash. A boulder had dropped down the bare rock from above and burst on the rocky path. Warok and his followers moved swiftly back from their penned-in enemy. Rock dropped from a height explodes almost like a shell as it lands. As the Hillmen made their way back to the foot of the path opening upon the foothills they threw glance after glance back over their shoulders and shuddered. The path behind them and the chasm beneath were filled with the booming and crashing of giant boulders hurled from above. In this inferno, spread thinly along the rocky path which was cut off at both ends, the Fulani army cowered against the cliff face and awaited death.

Above them the old Rainmaker had not been idle. Debarred from battle because of his age and his priesthood, it was he who had thought of destroying the bridge in front of the Fulani advance. Now he had summoned all the women of the tribe. The bounding crashing boulders which thudded down the hillside upon the helpless enemy beneath had more mercy in them than had the hearts of the women who launched them. Frantically they labored. With poles, ropes, and bare bleeding hands they urged more and more massive missiles over the edge of the crag. The simple Hillmen had no mercy for these murdering and torturing slave-raiders, and even small children toddled to the edge of the crag and let loose handfuls of ineffective pebbles upon the enemy beneath.

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