"Not when it is necessary," Papa looked down at the mouse instead of making eye contact. "But you should only use it as a last resort because dark magic comes with a terrible user price. Whenever you allow your own ego to divert the pathways set in motion by She-who-is, it could have unforeseen consequences down the road. Terrible consequences."
She could see by the dark light which married Papa's otherwise perfect spirit light that this was a power he had been burned by and struggled with. He reached into the cage. The disgusting vermin had soft black fur, rounded ears and quivering whiskers. Ugh! Mice deposited black turds in their grain, necessitating it be thrown out or it would bring disease. In a land with long periods of either too little rain, or raging floods, Ubaid lives depended upon the storage of their grain.
The mouse sensed her hostility and buried its face into Papa's hand. Ninsianna smiled. This lesson would be easy. She took a breath and pictured the mouse was her little friend.
"There, there," she crooned. "I won't hurt you. Let me pet you and see your cute little ears." She reached to take the mouse from Papa's hands. She knew from past experience that, the moment she patted it, it would settle down.
"This time," Papa grinned, "you don't get to touch the mouse. You must make it come into your hand willingly."
"But how am I supposed to soothe it if I cannot touch it?"
"That is the lesson, child."
Papa put the mouse down upon the carpet. It ran to the edge and stopped, every muscle straining as it tried to take that final step off the mat so it could escape and could not.
"How did you do that?" Ninsianna asked with wonder.
Papa's face was a mask of concentration.
"I have convinced it that its body won't obey its thoughts," Papa grunted, the strain of both concentrating and speaking obviously great. "But it is a delicate process, which is why we are using a mouse to learn this lesson and not one of your Mama's patients. If you push too hard, your test subject could die."
Occasionally she saw the same glimmer of gold in her father's tawny-beige eyes which resided in hers ever since the goddess had Chosen her to be HER voice. She saw the power that lived within her father, uncomfortable and rarely-used, but there nonetheless.
Why had her father chosen to reject it?
She scooped up the mouse and put it back into its cage. With a jagged sigh of pain, her father let go of the compulsion, pinching the bridge of his nose between his fingers as he massaged the red explosion Ninsianna could see in his spirit light of what had to be a horrific headache.
"Are you okay?" Ninsianna asked.
"We shall continue this lesson tomorrow, child," Papa's voice was strained. "It has been too long since I used this gift."
"Why don't you practice it?" Ninsianna asked.
"Because your Mama hates it." Papa lurched to his feet and felt his way to the stair which led to the second floor. Without so much as goodbye, her father staggered up to his bedroom to sleep it off.
If wielding the gift did that to him, she could see why Mama hated it, but she was the Chosen of She-who-is. A feeling of giddiness pushed at her as the goddess urged her to master this gift her father had refused to learn to wield on HER behalf. This gift pleased the goddess.
"Come here, little mouse," Ninsianna lifted the tiny creature from its cage. It stilled the moment she patted it, everything about her touch conveying reassurance that she would not hurt it, but this was not the gift the goddess wished for her to learn.
She put the mouse upon the floor.
It ran.
'Reach out with your spirit light, child, and make it stop…'
She pictured building a wall between the vermin's mind and its tiny body, compelling its legs to stop.
It froze, whiskers twitching.
"That wasn't so hard now, was it?" Ninsianna said. "Now come back to me so we can try this again."
The mouse did not return.
Ninsianna built the wall up higher. The mouse's whiskers stopped twitching, but still it did not move.
'Compel it to turn around…'
An image of a delicate spider web dancing from the mouse's head all the way down to its tiny legs came into Ninsianna's mind. Her wall prevented the light from getting to the creature's feet so it could not run away, but it would not compel the mouse to make them move. To get it to obey her, she must not only prevent the mouse from doing something, but also take control of that spiderweb.
She concentrated, trying to master the delicate framework which turned thought impulses into actions. Pain exploded into her brain, but she forced herself to push through it, the nagging vision of the Evil One compulsion enough to make her try.
"Come back, little vermin," Ninsianna hissed, recognizing there was a pattern to the way the mouse's thoughts compelled its muscles to move. She pushed her spirit light into the spider web and overwhelmed its instinct to run for its life.
The mouse shuddered and collapsed, twitching as, with its dying breath, it clawed one step closer to her. The room grew far away. The light beckoned to her, congratulating her on mastering her first lesson, the death of the mouse insignificant compared to the knowledge she had just gained. She let go of this world and slipped into the consciousness of She-who-is.
Pretty, golden playthings…
So pretty. Drifting. Drifting. She-who-is was thrilled Ninsianna was willing to do what her Papa had refused.
"Ninsianna? Ninsianna?"
It was a frantic Mikhail who found her collapsed upon the carpet, the dead mouse clutched in her hand.
"Mo ghrá," Ninsianna's lips curved up in a victorious smile even before she opened her eyes to stare into his blue ones. She reached up to smooth the muscle that twitched with worry in his cheek.
"Excuse me," Mama's face was a mask of anger. "I have a murder to commit." With a disgusted snort she marched upstairs to ream out Papa for teaching her about a gift he had sworn he would never use again.
"Just give me a moment," Ninsianna mumbled, wishing fervently her Mama was down here to give her a tincture to alleviate her splitting headache. "And I will make you some supper."
"The only place you're going is to bed," Mikhail picked her up as though she weighed nothing at all and cradled her against his chest as he carried her up to bed. Warm. Solid. Strong. It felt like being carried by a mountain of strength.
At last the yelling in the next room subsided. Ninsianna could hear Mama's footsteps clatter down the steep step and the sound of pottery clinking below.
"I do not like it when you try things I cannot protect you against, mo ghrá," Mikhail said. "I will ask Siamek to put the warriors through their paces. They will not suffer for my absence of just one night."
Her wan smile caused a knife of pain to shudder through her brain. "Go. You must not cease training because of me."
"You are injured," Mikhail said. "I will not leave you."
"The Evil One will not cease his plans because I foolishly tried to master the lesson on my own after Papa had ended it," Ninsianna touched his cheek. "Next time, I will wait until Papa teaches me, step by step, so I do not get this horrific headache."
"I pray your vision about this Evil One is wrong," Mikhail sank his nose into her hair, "but you have been right too many times for me to discount it. I will do whatever you think is best."
Train the village?
Or protect her?
She stared up into those blue eyes. An image of that great, dark wall Papa described, the one which lay between the day the Evil One appeared and what would happen next loomed up in her mind. Mikhail would not be here to save her. He had no idea she saw the future thus, because if she told him, he would refuse to leave her side for a single moment.
Terrible choices…
"Go!" Ninsianna ordered. "I will not give you an excuse to shirk your duties!"
Her return to her bossy self reassured him. With a rustle of feathers, he gave her a tender kiss and left her with a warm cloth pressed over her eyes to sleep it off. Her mind whirred.
First thing tomorrow morning, she would put out word she needed the village children to capture another mouse.
Lots of mice…
Chapter 36
October 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Colonel Mikhail Mannuki'ili
Mikhail
"Shay'tan's foot!" Mikhail hissed.
He should have known better than to trust the accursed creature! He never should have taken pity on her, rationalizing that perhaps the reason she felt compelled to escape each day was because being cooped up in a pen was boring. Foolish him! He had built things to keep her amused, little ramps and boxes to make the pen seem more like the rocky hills where wild goats liked to graze. Why, then, was he so surprised the little demon had repaid his thoughtfulness by using one of the boxes to leap right over the fence?
With a curse too vulgar to speak aloud, he took to the air, knowing where the little demoness would head. Sure enough, no sooner had he caught an updraft and leveled off when a commotion in the fields below caught his sharp eagle eyes. Dozens of villagers surrounded the Chief's field, shouting and cheering while a dark-skinned man with a spear stalked through the waist-high fields of grain.
Jamin. Preparing to kill his goat for the crime of leveling his father's field…
Little Nemesis stood in the middle, contentedly munching on the Chief's grain, clueless she was being stalked. Unlike Mikhail, who only dreamed of smiting the goat, mindful his wife would be less than pleased if he actually followed through on that impulse, the look of concentration on Jamin's face indicated he intended to follow through on his threat that if the goat got into their fields one more time, he would smite it and roast it upon a spit.
"Foolish goat!" Mikhail increased his speed, a dark-winged blur racing across the sky to intervene on behalf of a creature that did not deserve to be saved. Part of him laughed in glee, good riddance! Let Jamin smite the goat and take the blame. But the larger part of him said he would be damned if he let his adversary usurp him when it came to anything that was his, even if that something was a goat whose name he cursed every single day.
The shouts of the other villagers grew louder as they spied him racing through the sky. Jamin spied him, too, and made a rude gesture as he crept faster through the grass, a lion stalking its prey. Mikhail shouted for the goat to run, something the goat usually did the moment she spied him swooping hawk like from the air, but the goat glanced at him stupidly and resumed munching on her forbidden meal.
Jamin sprinted towards the prize, determined to bury a spear into her heart before Mikhail could get there to save her. This wasn't just about the goat. It was about him.
"Nemesis!" Mikhail shouted a warning. He pressed his wings against his back in a dive-bomb few Angelics would dare, the slightest miscalculation a death sentence. The wind whistled through his feathers as he pulled them tighter against his back to decrease the drag, his velocity so great his flesh trembled from the G-force.
Jamin let loose the spear, his aim deadly. He continued his sprint, his hand reaching into his kilt to pull out an obsidian blade, determined to finish the job.
On both sides of the field, villagers cheered, some rooting for Jamin, some for Mikhail, and more still for the goat who provided a daily source of entertainment in their otherwise tedious lives. Nemesis's head came up and stared at him diving toward her with innocent, velvet brown eyes, oblivious to the spear speeding towards her heart.
"Run!" he shouted.
She stayed.
Mikhail grabbed the goat milliseconds before the spear reached her, rolling with the creature clutched to his chest. Just for a second, the world went fuzzy, only the sensation of goat wriggling in his arms anchoring him so he did not pass out from slamming into the ground. With an indignant bleat, Nemesis squirmed out of his grasp and ran away.
"I will smite thee, accursed creature!" Jamin sprinted after her. "And roast thy flesh upon a spit in my father's honor!"
Mikhail forced himself to his feet, snorting dirt and stalks of grain out of his mouth and nose, and staggered after them. Jamin stabbed at her with his knife, but the same maneuvers Little Nemesis used to thwart his attempts to recapture her thwarted Jamin as well, fueling his rage.
"That's my goat!" Mikhail grabbed the fist which thrust down with a knife in its grip, straight for Nemesis's heart.
"You!" Jamin shouted. "I shall carve your heart out and give it to my intended!" His black eyes flashed with hatred as he turned the knife on him, thrusting for his heart as the heat of the hunt caused him to lose all reason and strike at the enemy he really wanted to kill.
Mikhail deflected the knife to scrape harmlessly downwards, cutting his shirt but not his flesh, but deflecting Jamin himself was not so easy. The young man was more than four cubits of muscle, trained from birth to hunt, and had once smote a lion using nothing but that same knife. Mikhail's knife sat uselessly in his boot, while Jamin's was in his hand. The cheers of the villagers turned to cries of horror as they realized the fight which had been brewing ever since he'd first appeared in their village was finally coming to fruition. Mikhail shoved him back.
"Don't do this."
The first law of survival was to never get between a hunter and its prey, especially in the heat of the kill, or you would become the target. Jamin lunged again, but this time Mikhail expected it. He deflected Jamin's arm to the side and twisted, using the momentum of his own body to send him flying. Jamin rolled and landed in a kneeling position, the knife already held in front of him for the next deadly thrust.
"Each day that demon escapes and eats our fields!" Jamin's hands gripped tighter around his obsidian blade, every muscle in his body screaming his intent to spring at Mikhail a third time, this time not just in the heat of the hunt, and bury the weapon into his heart. "Just as the bounty hunters who come after you are laying waste to our villages!"
"She is but a simple creature," Mikhail held out his hands to communicate he did not wish to fight. "Her offense was not deliberate."
"The law is on my side," Jamin bellowed with rage. "This creature deliberately targets my father's fields. She is to be put to death!" With the grace of a man who had hunted his entire life, Jamin was on his feet and airborne, only this time he targeted the goat that had caused all the problems, not Mikhail.
"Jamin!!!" a sharp call came from the pathway which led up the hill to the village. "Stand down!" The Chief hurried down, coming to see what the commotion was all about.
"How do you expect him to replace me as leader of our village defenses," Jamin pointed at Mikhail with his knife, "when he can't even control his own goat?"
"The fault is mine." Mikhail flared his wings so that the offending goat was no longer in Jamin's line of sight. "I failed to secure her pen. I will make reparations."
Little Nemesis chose that moment to come trotting up behind him and nuzzle his hands, looking for a treat.
"You see! She mocks me!" Jamin shook his fist.
"It is just a goat, son." Amusement wrinkled Chief Kiyan's eyes. "Although sometimes I wonder if goats do mock us." He gave his son a stern look that communicated '-I- am the Chief.'
The look of unadulterated hatred Jamin shot at him made Mikhail's blood run cold, his fist still clenched around his knife. It did not matter how reasonable he tried to be, he and Jamin had gotten off on the wrong foot and nothing, he feared, would ever heal that rift. That black pit of his own hatred rose in kind. Jamin had hired men to kill him while he had still been injured and vulnerable. That was not the kind of slight you tended to forgive.
"This is my field, son, not yours," Chief Kiyan said. He gave Mikhail a self-satisfied stare. "Once he finishes training our men to fight, he can make reparations by rebuilding my levies so that next spring's crop can be planted sooner."
Mikhail groaned. More back-breaking labor … in addition to rebuilding his own levies. The penalty the Chief had just enacted was far more reparations than it would have cost to simply sacrifice the goat and buy a new
one. But she was his goat and he would not give her up to his enemy so easily.
"Bah!" Jamin cursed. He waited until his father ambled off before clenching his fist in Mikhail's direction, uncaring that his father had ended up the richer from this bargain. "The next time I see that goat in my field, I will kill it. This I swear."
Mikhail retreated behind the unreadable expression the Cherubim had taught him to mask his feelings. He would never admit this was a sentiment they both shared. The difference was that Mikhail could control his temper long enough to remember … usually … that the accursed goat served a higher purpose … while the hot-headed Jamin was forever stalking off to seek revenge for whatever slight fueled the fires of his temper … whether that slight was deliberate or imagined.
The goat followed Mikhail back to the pen, as docile and obedient as a lamb, intelligent enough to realize she had gone too far. The villagers disbursed, their daily source of amusement gone … for now. Long after he herded her back into her pen, Jamin's accusation rang in his ears.
"How do you expect him to replace me as leader of our village defenses when he can't even train his own goat?"
Chapter 37
November – 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Shahla
"The Uruk are desperate for our flax-cloth," Shahla's father's voice drifted up from the main living quarters below. "Their weavers don't know how to retch the flax to make the fibers thin and soft. Their emissary gave us two epahs of einkorn for the measure I sent to them and promised another twenty in two weeks if we can bring them a bolt.
"Twenty epahs?" her mother squealed. "Twenty epahs? For one bolt of cloth? That's enough grain to feed a family through the winter!"
"We have enough grain already for our own family," her father said. "I shall hold this credit against the communal granary until the end of the rainy season, when those too stupid to store enough grain run out and become desperate, and then sell that for a profit as well."
"Oh, Laum! This trade is good for everyone."
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 39