Rocks pressed into her back. Her heart pounded in her ears. Just because she had trained for this didn't mean she wasn't scared shitless! She floundered on the ground, feeling amongst the rocks to find her knife. Terror turned to exhileration as instead her hand found the handle of her spear.
A second shadow vaulted over the wall. A blade swung downwards, the wounded man's friend. She rolled and grabbed her spear just in time to avoid being stabbed by the second knife. She moved her spear diagonally, butt-end dug into rocks, and was thankful when the raider ran right into her spear. With a surprised screech, he stood there a moment, not sure what to make of the spear embedded in his belly, and then fell to one side.
"That's what you get for attacking somebody who never did you no wrong!" Pareesa taunted her attacker.
Was this what Mikhail called blood lust? If so, she would take it, because it sharpened her senses and made everything appear to be moving in slow motion. She yanked out her spear and swung to defend against the next attacker, exactly the way Mikhail had taught her.
“Aiyah!” Ebad shouted from her left.
He jabbed upwards with his spear as a Halifian cleared the wall, straight up through the gut and impaling the man's heart.
"Nice aim!" Pareesa shouted.
Ebad's victim stopped twitching immediately, unlike the first bastard she'd taken out who was still trying to grab her ankle. She did a hop-dance and stomped on the man's hand to prevent him from picking up his knife.
"Shit!" Ipquidad shrieked to her right.
The rotund young man barely missed being eviscerated. Only the fact he moved far slower than his opponent expected him to move saved his life. Ipquidad's training took over. The defensive move Pareesa had made him repeat again and again caused him to stab straight out as the enemy was still caught in the momentum of his failed downswing. With a shriek of pain the man fell. Ipquidad had the wits to pull out his knife and bury it in the man's heart, ending his misery.
Pareesa ducked to avoid a third attacker who circled her, blade held in front of him like a seasoned knife fighter.
"Mi aghjik?" the Halifian sneered as he recognized who he was fighting.
"That's right," Pareesa danced out of the way of a viscious jab and brought her knife down on his shoulder. "You were smote by a girl."
She kicked the man behind the knee using the exact same move Mikhail used to use to catch her unawares until she'd smartened up and yanked her blade out of his shoulder as he fell. The man grabbed at her, still trying to stab her. She plunged her knife downwards a second time, right into the back of his heart.
Beside her Ebad had taken out a second attacker and now circled around a third, his face gleaming in the sparse moonlight.
“Not bad,” she shouted. Ebad was getting better.
She leaped to Ipquidad's defense, where another enemy had climbed the wall and was circling the portly young man with a knife. Flint blades … no spears. These Halifians seemed to like their fighting up close and personal.
So did she…
All around her the B-team fought for their lives, three-against-one as the enemy sought to push past them and breach the village. Only the fact the mercenaries hadn't expected them to be lurking beneath the wall saved them. Mikhail hadn't been kidding when he'd estimated this group to be hardened fighters!
"Some are getting through!" Yaggit shouted from her far right.
Her heart pounded as she realized her adrenaline was running thin, along with her exhileration at catching this group unawares. How come she never got tired this fast in training? It was two against one now, perhaps a little less if you counted the extras she had taken out. They were nothing but the B-team, Assur's second-best squadron, dead last to be picked for all the team events. Why had she insisted on this position when she was only thirteen summers old?
And where the hell was her bow?
"Pareesa! Watch out!" Ebad shouted.
Pareesa leaped into the air and delivered a side kick to the enemy's gut who had just come at her with a spear. Okay. A few spears. So they did have spears after all … some of them. From his grunt of surprise as the man was knocked backwards, the last thing he'd been expecting was her to use some of Mikhail's Cherubim self-defense maneuvers.
Don't … let … up.
Mikhail's voice played in her head as she knocked the spear out of his hand before he could move the point upwards to jab her. She caught the staff-portion with the flat of her blade as he swung it down to clonk her over the head and turned, twisting so his spear turned loose in his grip. She yanked upwards, gained control of the enemy weapon, spun it, and then drove the spearhead into her enemy. The man shrieked, twitched, and grew still.
The next Halifian came at her. How many were there, anyway? She realized several of the enemy had stepped through them and were sprinting towards the hill, not pausing to help their friends. The enemy viewed them as a pesky deterrence, an obstacle on their way to the real mission. She hoped the archers dispatched them before they could breach Assur's not-so-impenetrable gate.
Pareesa side-stepped a fourth man who came at her with a spear, pulling her own spear out of the back of the last man she'd killed and using it to block his stabs exactly the way Mikhail had taught her. The man became frustrated and shouted obscenities, drawing the attention of his comrades with his shouts of 'mi aghjik.'
'Mi aghjik.' The girl. Uh-oh. Did she have a bounty on her head, as well?
“Fire!!!” Behnam shouted from the rooftops behind them, giving the archers the order to send fire-arrows into the hill directly behind them and giving them light to see who approached the village.
Small fires illuminated the figures crawling over the walls towards the pathway up from the riverbed and one by one burned out.
"Pareesa … look out!" Ebad shouted. He stabbed at the man who'd nearly gotten her, but did not kill him.
“Took you long enough,” Pareesa snapped. Ebad was no Mikhail!
“You’re welcome,” Ebad gave her a hurt look.
Pareesa, Ebad and Ipquidad backed up to stand back-to-back-to-back. Some of the Halifian's gave up the other B-team members and moved to dispatch that oddity, a girl who dared fight men.
"To Pareesa!" Yaggit shouted, but his men were too busy fighting attackers of their own to move to help her.
Five Halifians stabbed at her little trio. What the hell? She was barely five feet tall … why were they targeting her? Usually her attackers made the mistake of overlooking her because she was petite and female, but not today. It was as though the enemy had been advised to watch out for her and dispatch her. A sixth Halifian came at her.
"Goat shit!!!" Ipquidad squealed like a little girl. "We're all going to die!"
Chapter 69
November – 3,390 BC
Earth: plain outside Assur
Angelic Special Forces Colonel Mikhail Mannuki'ili
Mikhail
Mikhail flew through the inky sky, dispassionately noting how strong he felt and how many calories he had consumed at suppertime to give his shell energy to enter the next stage of battle. Pain, pleasure, cold or heat were merely signals to estimate how much wear he could get out of this body before it needed rest and healing. The hunt from earlier tonight had begun to fatigue him, but without the sensation of fear or pain, he could push this body much further than an ordinary man could, at least until something broke his concentration. It gave everything a quiet, peaceful feeling, as though the air buoyed him like the river he traversed above.
A flurry of activity from the fields beneath the village caught his attention. Two battles raged, the one he'd expected, and the one he'd calculated had a slim, but possible chance of occurrence because only someone who knew the village intimately would think to launch such an offensive. Who should he help first?
The one who needed it most…
He calculated the odds, then spread his feathers to soften the whistle of wind through them as he dropped in for a landing. One leg pointed lower than the oth
er like a fresco of an Angelic in some ancient temple, he descended to the earth as softly as a lover slipping between the sheets. The soft glow of moonlight reflected off his sword as it flashed downwards in the first downbeat of an internal orchestra to decapitate the first of Pareesa's attackers before his second foot even hit the ground.
"Bishamon' ten wa, eien no shifuku ni anata no seishin o michibiku koto ga arimasu," he whispered the familiar Cherubim prayer for the dead as his sharp, steel baton swung left in the second beat of the interal orchestra he conducted which only he could hear, just in time to stab the second man who came at him in the heart.
The prayer flowed from his lips the way one might whisper a comforting verse. His silver baton swung horizontally to the right in the third beat of the Cherubim killing kata, severing the arm of the Halifian who had been about to stab Yaggit.
Yaggit shrieked, realizing for the first time he had descended into their midst. The young man pointed his spear at Mikhail for a moment instead of the fourth Halifian who came at him, knife drawn. Luckily for Yaggit, the fourth Halifian realized Mikhail had landed in their midst as well and changed direction to come at him, instead of Yaggit, to collect his bounty.
Good.
Mikhail kicked the third Halifian missing a hand towards Yaggit so the man would not recover. Recovering his wits, Yaggit stabbed the man in the heart to make sure he did not get back up.
"Soshite kanojo wa - dare ga - sa reru yume no jikan ga eien no heiwa ni anata o kangei suru koto ga arimasu," Mikhail whispered the next verse of the prayer and resumed his deadly dance of death.
The fourth Halifian tried to stab him overhead, but Mikhail had not yet finished his deadly kata, a dance orchestrated to a 4/4 tempo. The Cherubim had taught him the dance so well that his sword swung into the upbeat and knocked the enemy's arm upward before the knife could make contact with his flesh.
Downbeat again. He tilted his deadly baton just enough to slash through his opponent's neck just as his wrist hit the ictus. The solid snap of his wrist took off the man's head and propelled it towards Pareesa like a gift laid at the feet of a lover.
'It is too bad you did not pick that one,' the odd thought skittered through his mind. 'She would have made a much more suitable empress.'
Pareesa's nose wrinkled in disgust at his gift of her life, this man's death. Her eyes met his, no words exchanged, simply gratitude. She kicked the severed head and responded the way he had taught her to respond, by ramming her spear into the next one of her attackers.
"She is too young," Mikhail said aloud to the voice in his head. He immediately swung his steel conductor's baton to the left in the second beat of the killing dance, the lethal stroke decapitating a fifth attacker and spraying Pareesa with the man's blood.
"Thank you," Pareesa said, then leaped to deflect a death-blow that nearly landed on Ipquidad. She was young, and inexperienced, but the voice in his head was right about one thing. Pareesa moved like a warrior queen.
"T'yevavor e satana!" one of the Halifians shouted, alerting the others the quarry they hunted now walked in their midst. The Halifians rushed at him, eager to collect Shay'tan's bounty.
"To me," Mikhail stepped back, away from the inexperienced warriors fighting for their lives. He would not have put them here without experienced fighters to anchor them had he seriously thought the enemy knew Assur's weaknesses well enough to comprehend how close the narrow drainage ditch provided cover to the north gate.
Up on the hill, the veteran warriors, Varshab and Kiararsh, fought far fewer attackers than they had anticipated, and were winning. Mikhail needed to even the odds here before flying off to lend his support to the desperately outnumbered Assurians at the south gate.
"Anata no seishin wa, anata no jinsei no kyōkun o mite, karera kara manabu koto ga aru," Mikhail whispered the next verse of the Cherubim prayer, starting a new stanza of the killing dance as he raised his sword above his head and swung his downbeat to slice from shoulder-to-gut on the next Halifian to come at him.
He whirled to his right, his wings fluttering behind him like a cape as his sword jabbed into the lung of the next enemy. And the next. And the next. And the next. Until his intuition whispered that he had reduced their numbers sufficiently that his nascent warrior queen could lead her fledgling hive to retake her territory.
His eyes drifted towards the river, to the place where the spring flood had undercut the riverbank so that the houses built above it perched ready to tumble down the hill. A sour note broke his concentration, a wayward instrument that did not belong in the symphony of the type of warfare these people were capable of waging. Without modern spelunking equipment, no man but an Angelic could scale that ledge.
Taking to the air, he moved to go help the next group of Assurians who needed him…
Chapter 70
November – 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Merariy
"Gita! Stop that pounding!" Merariy shouted in a drunken stupor.
He looked up from the table he had fallen asleep over, grasping his vat of pomace, the fermented second-brewing of the spent rinds of barley, olive skins, and fruit rinds to take another sip. It was a nasty-tasting brew, but it was all he'd been able to afford ever since the widow-sisters had refused to sell him any more beer.
"What the hell is making all that noise?"
He was a big man, once as muscular as his shaman brother, but two decades of non-stop drinking had caused that muscle to sag, his skin loose because whenever given the choice, he drank his meals instead of buying bread to feed himself and his daughter. He had wild hair, bushy eyebrows and eyes shaped like Immanu's, but instead of gold his eyes were two black river-stones surrounded by a sea of red veins, dark circles, and the jaundiced complexion of a man whose liver was beginning to fail him. Thus was the perpetual condition of Gita's father. Bitter. Angry. And drunk.
The pounding at the outer wall grew stronger, as though somebody were hitting it with a battering ram. Merariy's lips curled up in a sneer.
"This time girl I swear by gods I will put out those black sorceress' eyes of yours!" Merariy staggered to his feet, his balance unsteady. "Just like I did your mother!"
A portion of the wall collapsed inwards. The rotted mortar surrounding the mud-bricks was weak where he'd spent the Chief's money to buy mead instead of repairing the outward-facing wall as he was supposed to do. He'd thought himself clever, smearing ordinary dirt in the cracks to make it look like it wasn't ready to collapse instead of hauling proper clay up from the banks of the river and mixing it with goat dung to make the mixture strong.
Only his drunken stupor saved him when he fell behind the table and stared at the men who crawled through the wall. He had enough wits to lay still and cease his ranting. It was a good thing he'd spent all his money on pomace instead of oil for his lamp or they would have seen him.
"Duk’, harvatsel e hats’ahatiki tun," a brutal-looking man wearing Halifian clothing snarled. "Duk’, bzhshki tany. Duk’, hamozvek’, vor duk’ voch’nch’ats’nel gortsik’i steghtsogh - i gortsik’nery, yev voch’ miayn spanel gortsik’ Vesti."
A younger man paused and looked around the house. Merariy pressed his face into the floor, praying they would not smell the odor of the pomace he had spilled down the front of his clothing.
"Jamin indz spanel ayn mardy, ov aprum e ays tan mej," the younger man pointed around the room. "Na ts’ankanum e, vor indz ktrel ir ach’k’yery."
"Tesnum yek’ meky?" the brutal-looking man snarled and gave the younger man a shove. "Teghap’vokhel. Nakhk’an yes ktrel yen dzer ach’k’yery."
The men ran through his one-room hovel without seeing Merariy laying on the floor and yanked open the rickety door that led to inside the village. There were perhaps a dozen, dressed like Halifians, maybe fewer. It was hard to tell without lifting his face to look.
Merariy's heart raced as the brutal man stopped at the door and looked back before shutting it behind him. As soon as they we
re gone he pushed himself to his hands and knees and crawled through the rubble until he found his goatskin full of the bitter-tasting, fermented beverage.
"Gita!" he shouted, forgetting the village was even under attack. "Come here, girl! Look what you did! Come here and clean up this mess!"
There was no answer except the sound of the wind blowing in the hole in the wall which dropped off a cliff into the river and the sound of battles waging on both sides of the village.
"Confounded girl!" he muttered. "Leaving her poor old father alone at a time like this!"
Staring out the hole that led outside the outer ring of houses to the only place the Assurians had left undefended because no one in their right mind would scale that embankment, Merariy took another drink…
Chapter 71
November - 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Gita
"Hold the line!"
Gita cringed at the sound of bodies slamming into the men in front of her. Screams erupted on both sides as their rickety shields deflected the spears thrust at them by the raiders. Behind them, the second line of the wedge jabbed through the front shieldholders with spears, obsidian blades, and battle axes to smite the men being shoved into the teeth of the wedge.
"You! Press against the back to give them some leverage!" Siamek shouted, running up and down to shout encouragement to the terrified men. "You! Tighten up that gap! You! Push!"
"Fire!" Immanu shouted from the rooftops of the outer ring of houses behind them. A volley of arrows whistled harmlessly over their heads, into the middle of the enemies rushing towards their men. Only archers who could reliably make the 300 pace shot had been chosen to make the first volleys off the south wall, the far end of what most bows could reliably shoot. As the wedge was pushed back closer to the wall, more archers would be capable of making the shot without hitting their own men, but if they were pushed back that far it was the signal to retreat.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 70