Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga)

by Anna Erishkigal

  "Well ask him!" Zhila shouted in the manner of an elderly person who was partially deaf. She peered up from the vat she stirred like a mad scientist embroiled in an experiment, the odors that emanated from it as foul as her sister's bread was fair. Zhila was trying to perfect a new concoction called 'beer,' one which had used up what barley Little Nemesis had not devoured. Throughout the house were dozens of clay urns filled with Zhila's latest experiment.

  "Ask me what?" Mikhail asked.

  "Have you seen Gita?"

  Mikhail cringed. Ninsianna's cousin. The black-eyed girl had been the real recipient of Shahla's jealous fit before it had gone astray to target Ninsianna … and him by default … instead.

  "You know?" Zhila said. "The young woman who trains under you?"

  "She usually brings us a bucket of water each morning," Yalda said.

  "Before breakfast."

  "But she didn't bring us one this morning."

  "Didn't you see her today at practice?" Zhila asked.

  Mikhail wracked his brain. He had so many students he had a hard time keeping track of them all.

  "I can't recall," Mikhail finally said. "I never really notice her."

  A more honest answer would be the girl unnerved him. Those perceptive black eyes made him feel as though she could see all of his secrets … even the ones he couldn't remember.

  "It's not like her to be irresponsible," Yalda said.

  "She's here every morning," Zhila said.

  "Just after sunrise," Yalda said.

  The widow-sisters looked at each other, a displeased line marring their wrinkled lips.

  "We suspect it's the only food she gets to eat most days," Zhila said.

  Mikhail knew he wasn't the only person in the village the widow-sisters plied with bread and beer to get them to do things they were too old to do themselves. With bread so good, beer so tasty and company so pleasant, people were willing to pay a premium.

  "Perhaps she felt ill?" Mikhail asked. "Did you check her house?"

  Another look between them. An outright frown.

  "Merariy was our best customer until we refused to sell to him anymore," Yalda said at last.

  "We told him to go buy Ninkasa's sacred beverage elsewhere!" Zhila said.

  "He said she'd never come home and slammed the door in our faces," Yalda said.

  A look passed between the widow-sisters. Mikhail suppressed a groan. The last thing he wanted to do tonight was interject himself into somebody else's family troubles. He had no idea what had caused the fracture between Immanu and his brother, but the few times he'd dared inquire why they allowed a blood relative to dwell in such squalor, he'd earned a cold shoulder from Ninsianna.

  "He beats her," Zhila said.

  "He may have driven her out of the house last night and she had nowhere to go," Yalda said.

  "We checked everywhere in the village."

  "We fear…"

  "…the slavers may have gotten her."

  And there it was. The words they knew he would not refuse. Those stolen moments he hoped to capture with Ninsianna tonight if she was not too drained from her nightly shamanic training with her father disappeared.

  "It would be so easy for you to fly around the perimeter of the village and look for her," Zhila's rheumy eyes were pleading.

  A rueful sigh escaped his chest. The widow-sisters were forever bringing home birds with broken wings and strays. Like him. He was one of their strays. With times so troubled, nobody assumed a missing person had simply found some interesting game to pursue anymore.

  "Is it okay if I leave my other two buckets of water here?" Mikhail asked.

  "Of course," Yalda and Zhila said together.

  With a groan he lowered his buckets to their floor.

  "You'll tell Ninsianna where I went?"

  "You know," Yalda said.

  "We will," Zhila finished.

  He backed out their door and leaped into the air. The wind caught his wings and whispered for him to head southwest, away from the river towards the camps of the Halifians, who had finally begun to move further out into the desert now that the rainy season was upon them.

  Some instinct led him to the trickle of a stream bed which, once the rains came, would become a raging torrent. His heart caught in his throat as he spied a figure sitting upon the ground, wrapped in a tattered brown cape. Injured? Or had she fought back against her attackers and been killed?

  He searched for signs of her attackers and found none except an abandoned encampment in the valley two rises over, a recent move by the disturbances in the soil. Close enough that she may have stumbled upon their ranks and been surprised? Shifting his feathers to land facing the wind, he was relieved when the beating of his wings caused her to look up.

  "Yalda and Zhila sent me to look for you," Mikhail said. "They're very worried. They feared you'd been captured by the slavers."

  Her eyes were red-rimmed and lines of dust showed where her tears had slid down her emaciated cheeks. "Look what somebody did!"

  She pulled back her cloak which had been arranged on the ground around her as though it were a tent and there he saw them. The eagles. Shot through with arrows. Dead.

  "No!" The cry came out before he even had a chance to think. He kneeled before them, these magnificent creatures with whom he had shared the skies. "I thought these raptors were sacred to your people?"

  "They're not both dead," Gita sobbed.

  An arrow with Halifian markings on the fletching stuck out of the female's heart. Dead. But the smaller male had feathers plucked out in a small circle on one wing, the place Gita had removed the arrow, still alive. Gita patted him. He lay with his head resting against the larger female, eyes shut as though he, too, were mortally injured.

  "He let me remove the arrow," Gita cried, "but he won't let me carry him back to the village so the healers can look at him!"

  “It's okay, big fellow.” Mikhail moderated his voice to communicate he meant it no harm. “I won't hurt you. Let me look at your wing and see if there's something I can do to help, okay?”

  He touched this large, golden-brown bird with wings like his own, surprised it did not attack him, and examined it for other injuries. Gita had done a respectable job of staunching the blood so the raptor would have a chance of survival. The bird struggled as he tried to pick it up so he could carry it back to be tended, surprisingly strong for a bird he had only moments before mistaken for dead. It fought free, flapping its five-cubit wingspan in his face much the way he might fight to get free if someone tried to pick him up against his will, and crawled back up to its mate, nestling it beak into her feathers.

  "He keeps doing that," Gita wept. "He won't let me take him away from her."

  The eagle gave a sorrowful cry. Mikhail understood what the eagle was trying to tell them. Eagles took one mate for life. He didn't want to leave his mate. Gita patted the eagle, tears streaking out of those black eyes.

  “Come with us,” Gita said gently. “Please. She's gone. She can't feel you anymore.”

  The eagle shut his eyes and began to pant, as though willing himself to follow his mate into the dreamtime.

  "I found him like this yesterday afternoon," Gita wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "It didn't seem right to leave him here, so I stayed. I didn't mean to scare anybody. I didn't think anyone would notice I was gone."

  The eyes which looked into his were filled with sorrow. She'd been missing all last night as well? And nobody had gone looking for her? Not the other team leaders? Not him? Not even her own father when she'd never come home?

  What was it like? To be so alone?

  That gaping void he'd been sensing ever since his wife had become angry with him, that ancient wound not even his wife had been able to heal, yawned up like a bottomless chasm. This could just as well have been him cast into the desert to die, unnoticed, had his wife not been there to save his life the day his ship had crashed.

  Alone…

  That gnawing fe
ar which had been eating away at him, that it could still be him who was cast aside if Ninsianna ever grew tired of him, ate at him now. Something was wrong with their relationship and, because he could not remember things, he did not know how to fix it.

  The eagle sighed, a pathetic, mournful sound for such a magnificent creature. It cut into his heart, even the barrier of languages and species could not prevent it from being understood.

  "He just lost his mate," Mikhail said. "You cannot prevent him from following her into the dreamtime. Only to make him more comfortable while he does."

  "But his wounds are not mortal," Gita patted the body of the dead female. The fletching on the arrow betrayed she had been killed by the Halifians. "Ninsianna could heal him. I know she could! Or Needa. Please! Needa would not refuse!"

  “I can think of no fate crueler than being forced to live without your mate,” Mikhail said softly. “Eagles mate for life. He is willing himself to die so he can follow her.”

  Those black eyes that were so much like Ninsianna's, only black instead of gold, met his, glistening with tears. In those perceptive dark mirrors he realized the truth of his own words. He wasn't just talking about the eagles. He spoke about himself. There was a rightness about what the eagle was doing, following its mate into the dreamtime.

  “I can do nothing for him!” Gita cried. “Tell me what to do!”

  “Sit with him until he passes and give what comfort you can,” Mikhail said. “That’s all you can do for him. Forcing him to live without her would be cruel.”

  Gita sobbed. The rocks dug into his knees. He moved to sit down instead of kneel and flared his wings to block the wind from the sorrowful pair.

  “I will wait with you,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “Look at how he breathes,” Mikhail said. “His will is strong. He wills himself to die. It won't be much longer.”

  They sat there, only the eagles lengthening breaths, and Gita's occasional sob as she sang the same mournful song he'd heard her sing to comfort Shahla the night she had lost her baby. The sun dipped lower until Mikhail knew he'd missed supper and someone else would have assumed his duties as trainer. The eagle's breath came as a hiccough now, starting and stopping. Starting and stopping to the rhythm of Gita touching its feathers.

  It dawned on him that perhaps Ninsianna wasn't the only person in Immanu's family to possess the ability to hold someone here when they should have died?

  "Gita," he looked into her eyes. "You have to let him go."

  She looked down … her hand lingering on the eagle's feathers.

  “Téigh anois, deartháir,” Mikhail placed his hand over hers and spoke in the beautiful language of his people. "Agus do maité leanúint isteach an t-am aisling, agus a bheith le chéile arís. Chun nuair a thagann an lá a chailleann mé Ninsianna, ba mhaith liom a leanúint uirthi ann, freisin. Téigh anois ... agus a bheith ar son na síochána."

  Go now, brother, and follow your mate into the dreamtime, and be reunited. For when the day comes that I lose Ninsianna, I would follow her there, too. Go now … and be at peace.

  Gita tilted her head, listening to the words of comfort he gave the poor, unfortunate creature even though she could not understand the meaning. He didn’t translate it because what he said to the dying bird was deeply personal, but he knew on some level she understood what he had said. Her lip trembling, she took her hands off of the eagle and let it go. The creature's beautiful brown wings trembled as it gave one last sigh, as though relieved, and stopped breathing.

  “He’s gone,” Gita sobbed. “He didn't have to die! His wound was not mortal!”

  “Sometimes it's not about living,” Mikhail said gently. “He is with her now. Be happy for him.”

  He waited until Gita's crying subsided before he heaved himself to his feet.

  “Come … let's bury them together.”

  He took Gita's spear and used it to dig a hole. They placed the eagles side-by-side into a grave at the edge of the dry stream and said a prayer in the clicking Cherubim language, the only death-prayer he could remember.

  “Gather some stones,” he instructed her. “We will place rocks on their grave so no animal disturbs them.”

  Working together, they piled stones to make a cairn. Gita watched as he pulled a long primary feathers out of one wing and silently placed it sticking up into the grave.

  “So they have safe passage into the dreamtime.”

  He stared into those bottomless black eyes and sank into an emptiness so vast it felt as though the river closed over his head. Those velvet mirrors whispered not to fear the dark, but to breathe that deadly water into his lungs and embrace it. Something passed between them and echoed in that empty spot in his heart not even Ninsianna had ever been able to fill, that wound he did not dare examine because he knew it was too painful to remember. A kinship. Despite his joy at having found Ninsianna, he and Gita were very much the same.

  Alone...

  The last rays of the sun dipped beneath the horizon, leaving them standing in the dusk. It was unsafe to leave her to find her way back in the dark alone and Ninsianna would have his hide if he carried the scrawny young woman up into the air.

  “Come … I'll walk you back,” he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Yalda and Zhila have been worried sick about you.”

  They walked back to the village in silence, Gita's ability to find her way through the shadows without tripping uncanny. They parted ways at the main square with a murmured goodbye.

  He shot a glance at her lingering back and realized she had disappeared, as though she'd never been there.

  Chapter 59

  Galactic Standard Date: 152,323.11 AE

  Orbit – Haven-1

  Angelic Air Force

  Brigadier-General Raphael Israfa

  Raphael

  Brigadier-General Raphael Israfa strode through the launch bay of the Light Emerging, inspecting samples from the most promising planet they had searched to date. Enthusiasm for the mission had worn thin amongst a crew grown weary of the forced radio silence. It was hardest on the newer sentient species who had been reared in families.

  Raphael combatted their homesickness by rotating the men so every crewman got a chance to explore one of the new planets they were logging at a pace unheard of at any time in Alliance history. Each crewmen was granted the privilege of naming planets, moons, suns, plants and species after themselves or loved ones who they missed without regard for the stuffy lists of 'official' scientific classifications. Centuries from now, emerging sentient races would wonder how they had ended up with names such as 'Guggla's Pink FooFooBunny' or 'Liggleberm's Folly,' but it kept the fleet enthusiastic about their mission.

  Right now, Raphael stared down at the one which had jokingly been named 'Glicki's Little Sister.'

  "We'd like more time to explore the planet, Sir?" his science officer asked. Major Wur'zzz stroked the cage where a dog-sized insect with six legs and a greenish-brown exoskeleton looked up at them with prescient regard, as though it could understand them.

  They had found numerous pre-sentient races in this sector now that they were looking for them, but this was the most evolutionarily promising species they'd found to date. It had a definite social hierarchy, cultivated plants, used simple tools, and had three fingers with an opposable thumb. What had his Mantoid crewmen so excited; however, was how strongly the creature bore a resemblance to them. Other than the fact its arms were straight instead of bearing a natural 'praying' at-rest position, it could have been a young Mantid.

  Raphael examined the curious little creature. "Did you see any sign of a civilization?"

  "I'm sorry, Sir," Major Wur'zzz spoke through his voice enhancement box, pressing the button to articulate the 'hiss' in both 'sorry' and 'sir' which insectoid species had such a hard time pronouncing. "This planet was strictly pre-sentient. No regular features any larger than the clearing where we found this little guy."

  Raphael bent down to address to
the unfortunate creature that had just been taken as science experiment. The little insect was intelligent enough that the Emperor would declare it to be a 'species of interest,' perhaps even declare its entire planet a protected pre-sentient 'seed' world if the little guy was able to pass certain intelligence tests? By this time next week, space permitting in the marsupium of Jophiel's living needle ship that leaped from here to her command carrier and back again once each week, this little insectoid would be the topic of interest for an eager army of the Eternal Emperor's laboratory assistants.

  But not this week. This week, it was his turn to jump across the galaxy to brief the Emperor about his progress thus far. Oh, how he missed his son! And Jophiel! It was hard to tell which one he missed more? Uriel's antics made him smile, while Jophiel? He rubbed his chest, noting the feeling of expansiveness and longing. What could he say? He missed her because he loved her.

  "The Emperor will be thrilled to meet you," Raphael reassured their small captive. "If you don't destroy his garden, maybe he'll even set you free there once he's done studying you? It's very beautiful."

  "Should I bag him and tag him?" a lower-ranking Lieutenant stepped forward, also a Mantoid, and perhaps even more fascinated by the discovery of a pre-sentient insect species who resembled them than even his chief science officer. Bag-and-tag was shorthand for catalog the creature and put him into an observation cage for further study.

  "Do it," Major Wur'zzz sighed, understanding that Raphael did not have the luxury of granting his wish to explore the fascinating new planet. Not until they found Earth.

  Raphael moved on to examine the next shuttle. Each day his fleet flew thousands of sorties, fanning out as they explored the Orion-Cygnus spur of a broken spiral arm that had originated from a galaxy the Milky Way had swallowed so far in its past even Shay'tan didn't remember it. With 97 ships they were making good progress, but it could still potentially take years to find which planet Mikhail had crash-landed on.

  But at least now his species had hope…

  "Brigadier-General Israfa," Colonel Glicki's voice came over his comms pin. "The Light of the Emperor is reporting a situation. I've given preliminary orders, but I need you on the bridge."