Lucifer collapsed forward on top of Jamin. Jamin fought to hold the taller man up. The golden weapon fell to the ground before it could occur that perhaps this might be his only opportunity to kill him. Kill him? No. Lucifer could have killed him already and had not. Why?
Marwan's words came back to him. 'Perhaps if you make yourself indispensable to the lizard people, they will let you cut out the winged demon's heart after all.'
This was not the man he wanted to kill!
Jamin propped himself under Lucifer's arm and helped him stumble over to a downed log. The lizard men stood around, not sure what to do. Lucifer held his head in both hands as though he feared it would split in two.
"Cad atá cearr le liom?" Lucifer cried out. His eyes were fearful as though he had just woken up and did not know where he was. His eyes darted to the lizard people who surrounded them. Lucifer appeared to be more fearful of them than him. He clutched Jamin's hand as though he were in the water and did not know how to swim. Jamin stared into those silver eyes and froze.
"It's you?" Jamin touched the man's temple. His eyes were still silver, but it was as though he looked into the eyes of a completely different man. A man who seemed ... familiar. A man who had suddenly forgotten how to speak Ubaid.
Jamin wracked his brains. He had never paid much attention when Ninsianna conversed with Mikhail in his native language, but he remembered the one time another Assurian had touched Mikhail's wings where they'd been injured. What was it Mikhail had said to Gita? The incident stuck out in his mind because it had infuriated Ninsianna.
"Is féidir liom a bhraitheann tú, chol beag," Jamin painstakingly recited the words, tone-for-tone, and touched Lucifer's cheek the same way Ninsianna did to a patient whenever she wished to convey everything would be alright.
Lucifer clutched his hand more tightly.
"An bhfuil tú a aisling?" Lucifer asked. He tilted his head to one side, as though his vision was blurry, but he wished to see him.
"Is féidir liom a bhraitheann tú, chol beag," Jamin repeated again, praying that the words he recited meant something along the lines of 'I will not kill you while you are vulnerable' and not 'your breath smells like a stinky old goat.'
"Is féidir leat labhairt?" Lucifer's expression was one of awe. "Tá tú i ndáiríre créatúir mothaitheacha!"
A dirty-winged Angelic whom Jamin had noticed in the ship, but had not paid much mind, rushed forward and shoved Jamin out of the way.
"Céim ar ais," the dirty-winged Angelic snarled at Jamin. "Ní féidir leat a fheiceáil ar riachtanais an Príomh-Aire roinnt aer?"
The two cold-eyed goons who'd been guarding the entrance of the silver sky canoe dragged Jamin away from Lucifer. The dirty-winged Angelic pulled out a small white cylinder with the same kind of evil-looking barb at the end which had been attached to the tentacles Doctor Peyman had removed from his arms earlier and plunged it into Lucifer's neck. Within moments, the confused look on Lucifer's face disappeared, replaced by the self-assured man who had just taught him how to shoot a firestick. Lucifer stood up and flapped his wings like a rooster who had just won a cockerel fight.
"It seems we have a common enemy, little chieftain," Lucifer gave him a grin. "Mikhail Mannuki'ili went rogue nine months ago and has been interfering with the rollout of technology on this planet. -I- have come to punish him for his insolence."
Lucifer pointed into the sky where an oblong sky canoe moved towards the lizard-people's base of operations, then around him to where hundreds of troops carried not just firesticks, but amazing devices Jamin could not have dreamed up if he had spent an entire lifetime just trying to think of such fantastical things.
"Our Sata'anic friends wish to bring peace, prosperity, and comfort to your world," Lucifer said. "If not for Mikhail's interference, every warrior in your village could have one of these." He hefted up the golden firestick. "The lizard people will reward you handsomely if you help them eliminate him."
An image of how good it had felt when he'd fired the weapon and pictured Mikhail falling to the ground came into Jamin's mind. Yes. It was he wanted more than anything in the world. To carve out the bastard's heart who had carved out his heart first.
"I wish to kill him," Jamin clenched his fists, yearning for experience for real this time.
"You wish to carve out his heart?"
"Yes."
Lucifer signaled the white-winged Angelic who had handed him the firestick. "Eligor ... a thabhairt dom go scian?"
The burly, white-winged Angelic who Jamin had pegged as a mercenary pulled out the same rusty knife he'd pried out of his hands only minutes before. The one he'd liberated from Kudursin. The guard looked at him with intense scrutiny, as though he was trying to figure out what the heck was going on, as he handed the weapon back to Lucifer.
The knife...
Jamin licked his lower lip. Not a firestick. Not a sword. Not magical as Kudrsin had thought. But such a weapon was an edge over a similar weapon made of stone, lighter, more slender, less prone to chipping. A better weapon to kill one's enemies.
Lucifer pressed the knife back into Jamin's hand and closed his hand around the hilt on top of Jamin's. As he did, a most gratifying image of carving out Mikhail's heart the way one might carve out the entrails of a deer or boar after a hunt came into Jamin's mind. A shiver of excitement rippled through his body at the weight of that cool, smooth hilt pressed into his palm. He had a decision to make. Kill Lucifer? Or wait and see if the lizard people would give him a chance to kill Mikhail.
Marwan's words came back to him again. 'Perhaps you might make yourself indispensable to the lizard-people so they let you carve out the winged demon's heart after all?'
He glanced over at Lieutenant Kasib. Kasib wanted Lucifer dead, but he wanted Mikhail dead as well. What was it the lizard man had said? Assur lay in a grain-growing region they wished to preserve. Perhaps with his help, they could simply extract Mikhail from his village and not destroy it?
Jamin tucked the knife back into his belt.
Lucifer's gave Jamin a predatory grin.
"What do you want me to do?" Jamin asked.
"One does not hit a man of the Colonel's training head on and expect to survive," Lucifer's eerie silver eyes glittered. "If you want to kill him, we're going to have to figure out a way to get close to him without triggering all of his defenses."
"How?" Jamin threw his hands out in exasperation. "I have tried everything and failed!"
"Not everything," Lucifer touched Jamin's temple. "Tell me about this girl…"
Chapter 88
In your mouth and your urine
Constantly stared at you
The measuring vessel of your lord
(-What is it?)
Answer: beer
Babylonian riddle, circa 1,500 b.c.
November – 3,390 BC
Earth: Village of Assur
Angelic Air Force Colonel Mikhail Mannuki'ili
Mikhail
The entire house smelled of yeast, a pungent mix of fermenting liquids and the scent of baking bread, all intertwined with burnt cedar sticks and whatever other wood he could scrounge up to help Yalda stoke her fire. Someday he would be killed in battle and pass into the dreamtime. When he did, he hoped it would smell half as good as the widow-sisters house, mixed with the scent of Ninsianna's soap root and that decadent fruit which grew on vines called melons. Now that would be a pleasant place to spend eternity.
Yalda removed the clay lid from the beehive oven and gingerly peeled off the ball of dough she'd flattened against the interior wall, yanking back her hand as sparks shot up to avoid being burned. Like a hungry winged dog who begged for a scrap of supper, Mikhail sat patiently at their table, the usual unreadable mask he used to hide his feelings absent in his adoptive grandmother's house.
His stomach growled.
Yalda yanked her hand back, the prize flying across the room towards him with practiced ease. Being like any self-respecting man, Mikhail caught
it and stuffed it into his mouth before it even had a chance to hit his plate. His feathers rippled with satisfaction as the succulent taste of bread hit his taste buds. Closing his eyes, he prolonged the explosion of flavor.
"He likes to eat, this one does," her sister Zhila cackled, her lips sunk inward onto gums that had long ago lost their teeth. "So long as you keep his belly full, he is always content."
Yalda was the older of the two widow-sisters, a village elder and many believed the finest baker in the all the Ubaid lands. In her mid-seventies, her eyesight was still good, but bad knees meant she had trouble getting around. Her younger sister Zhila was still spry for a woman in her seventies, but her eyesight was poor, necessitating Yalda lead her. It had been Zhila, ironically, who had taught Mikhail how to throw a spear.
“This bread is delicious!" Mikhail's eyebrows rose in a hopeful stare as Yalda fished back inside the oven a second time, checking to see if the next ball of dough was cooked enough to eat.
With a chortling laugh, Yalda flipped the third loaf in his direction without warning. Mikhail snapped it out of the air like a hungry dog. With a groan of pleasure, it followed the first two down into his stomach, expanding into a pleasant fullness. Ninsianna had banished him from being underfoot, an irritation which pained him. The widow-sisters had once again taken him under their wings … well … he was the one with wings, but it had always been them who had sheltered him with acts of kindness, he a man without a family and they two old women whose husbands and sons had predeceased them.
"Are you ready to sample the fruits of your labor?" Zhila's face wrinkled into a mischievous smile. As she spoke, she gestured towards an enormous pottery urn, one of many the widow-sisters kept inside their house to brew the foul substances that fetched a great price in trade.
Mikhail gave the tall, thin-necked urn a wary sniff. Unlike the other batches the widow-sisters asked him to taste-test, this vat was the byproduct of fields he had planted in the spring, dug levies and hauled water to all summer, and battled rats and Immanu's dairy goat to harvest only weeks before. No matter how awful it tasted he would enjoy it, if for no other reason than half the take was his.
"Are you sure it's supposed to smell like this?" Mikhail wrinkled his nose. "This smells a lot stronger than the last batch."
“The traders from the Zagros mountains swear this is the sacred barley,” Zhila laughed. “Divine grain of the goddess Ninkasi."
"We paid a hefty trade to get the seed-grains and the recipe from him," Yalda said.
"He said it was too sacred to be sold," Zhila said. "But we plied him with samples of the other beverages we've fermented. Nothing loosens the tongue like a fermented vat of einkorn mixed with honey!"
Mikhail poked a long, hollow reed into the narrow neck of the jar, past the disgusting looking sludge that floated on the top of the potent mixture. The trick to sipping any such beverage was to place the straw perfectly in the middle. If you placed it too low you would suck up the heavy sediments which settled with grit-like density upon the bottom. On the other hand, if you sipped too high, the reed would become clogged with the spent grains. There was no paper on this planet and his tablet recorder had long ago run out of battery power, but Ebad had taught him how to roll out a small slab of clay to record trading-marks and tallies. Mikhail pressed sticklike marks into the soft clay so he could remember things, very important for a man such as himself whose memory was suspect.
"What's the recipe again?" Mikhail asked. He sat, knife poised over the clay he had just patted out, ready to record it in a simplified shorthand of Alliance cuneiform.
"First you bake a bread out of barley, and then crumble it into water to make a mash.” Zhila said.
“Then you let it sit a couple of weeks,” Yalda finished.
“It looks disgusting,” Mikhail took his first cautious sip. “But it tastes…”
“It’s not the taste we’re interested in,” Yalda laughed.
“But how much it makes your head spin afterwards,” Zhila finished her sister's sentence as the widow-sisters were prone to do.
“I’m not getting into a drinking contest with you two,” Mikhail's mouth ticked upwards into a rare grin. “I hereby concede victory and surrender my sword to two warriors who are far more capable than I am to consume ungodly amounts of alcohol.”
“And yet,” Zhila said.
“He keeps on sipping,” Yalda finished.
“My head has already begun to spin,” Mikhail said. “Although perhaps I am merely intoxicated with the decadent scent of Yalda's bread. Could I please have another piece?” With a grin, he shoved the next piece of flatbread into his mouth, washing it down with another sip … or five.
“When do you travel to the meeting of regional chiefs?” Yalda asked, her smile disappearing into the intense expression of an old woman who had seen it all. As the village's oldest living resident, Yalda had seen it all.
“Four more days,” Mikhail noted the alcohol made him feel relaxed. It had been a rough few weeks and he needed this, and his friends company, right now. “Pareesa will lose her students. Chief Kiyan has agreed to split up the B-team and send a pair to each allied village to offset the loss of warriors they intend to send us to cross-train.”
“They get trained warriors,” Yalda said.
“And we get untrained recruits,” Zhila finished, frowning.
“They won’t stay untrained for long,” Mikhail said. “Even Pareesa’s B-team quickly became better warriors than most of the A-team warriors in the other villages. We’re not the only village getting attacked. We just got hit a lot harder than the others this last time.”
“You should be proud,” Zhila said.
“Of your little weapon of mass destruction,” Yalda said.
“She has trained very hard to get your attention,” Zhila said.
“Ninsianna thinks …” Mikhail said.
“Yes?” Yalda asked.
“She's…”
“Jealous?” Zhila asked.
“Yes,” Mikhail said. “She thinks every woman in this village is … it’s ridiculous.”
“It’s not ridiculous,” Yalda said. “You just don’t notice.”
“If we were younger,” Zhila said.
“We would join the Mikhail Worship Cult, too,” Yalda gave a lusty laugh. Both sisters began to cackle.
The beer hit them in a funny way, an effect which would make their joint business venture highly profitable. The alcohol content forced him to put a humorous slant on things. The widow-sister's cheer was contagious, an emotion he desperately needed to feel right now in light of how distant Ninsianna had been lately, and for once, amongst friends, he decided to let it go and not force the emotion behind a wall. If he couldn't be himself around his two adopted grandmothers, then who could he be himself for? Certainly not Ninsianna! No matter what he did these days, it only seemed to make her angry.
“I keep hearing that term,” Mikhail gave the widow-sisters a wary look. “The Mikhail Worship Cult? What does that mean, exactly?”
“My dear sweet boy,” Zhila took both of his cheeks between her hands as though he were a little boy and planted a big, affectionate kiss onto his forehead, causing him to rustle his feathers with surprise.
“You are the most beautiful,” Yalda said.
“Handsome,” Zhila said.
“Enigmatic creature,” Yalda said.
“Who has ever taken up residence in Ubaid territory,” Zhila said.
“And you’re so in love with Ninsianna,” Yalda said.
“That you haven’t even noticed the way every female in the village,” Zhila said.
“Throws herself at your feet!” Yalda threw her cane at Mikhail's feet as though she pretended to throw a spear.
“Huh?”
“Oh, be still my beating heart!!!” Zhila said in a mock high voice, clutching her heart for emphasis.
“Here he comes!!!” Yalda put her hand over her brow as though she squinted into the sun and pret
ended to peer in the distance.
“Quick!!!” Zhila gestured for her sister to come.
“Let’s hit each other with sticks and maybe he will notice us!!!” Yalda reached down to retrieve her cane.
“Kiah! Kiah! Kiah!” Zhila feigned an attack with a wooden spoon upon Yalda’s cane, which Yalda held up as though it were a staff before collapsing, laughing, onto the bench next to Mikhail.
“Do you really think some of the women would train just to be near me?” he asked incredulously.
“Mwah hah hah hah haaaahhhhh!!!” the two sisters laughed so hard they clutched their sides and crouched as though they were about to pee their loin cloths. Yalda's wrinkled hand slapped upon the table, while Zhila desperately tried to catch her breath.
It started out as a tiny snigger, but Mikhail couldn’t help it. The longer they laughed, the more the emotion gurgled from someplace deep within his subconscious and twisted its tentacles into his body until even his formidable self-control began to slip. A chuckle escaped his lungs and snorted out his nose. Finally, when the widow-sisters didn’t stop laughing, he began to laugh as well, a deep, hearty laugh that had him clutching his sides to keep them from bursting apart.
“Stop,” he choked out between laughs, “please … oh, gods! How do you humans do this all the time? I can’t breathe!”
The sisters just looked at him, looked at each other, and then laughed even harder, causing him to laugh all the more. He had no idea how long he was unable to control the emotion which had hijacked his nervous system. Even his wings shuddered as the three of them sipped beer and laughed. After a time, their laughing finally subsided to an occasional giggly snort.
“Why do you think Zhila is so good with a spear?” Yalda asked with a crooked grin.
“It was the only way I could get my husband to notice me,” Zhila said. She pointed to a spear mounted on the wall, her favorite spear, the one she had told him she'd used to attract her husband in an all-male throwing competition.
Sword of the Gods: Prince of Tyre (Sword of the Gods Saga) Page 86