Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (51 page)

Out of the corner of
his eye, Mikhail noticed Immanu shudder at the memory of the eighteen dead
Halifians buried near his ship. 

“Mikhail, what of the
two weapons that you carry with you?” Immanu asked.

“You don't have the
means to replicate these weapons at your disposal,” Mikhail said.  “They
require materials and processes you haven't yet begun to master.  Even if you
did, I'm not sure I'm allowed to teach you.”

“May I see it?” 
Farzam pointed to the sword.

Pulling the sword from
his scabbard, Mikhail held it flat and passed it to Farzam.  The blade caught
the light and reflected it around the room.  To a stone-age culture, it might
as well have been the interstellar hyperdrive of a command carrier. 

Immediately following
that thought, Mikhail realized he'd just unearthed another memory.  He'd been
sent here on a mission from a command carrier when his ship had been shot
down.  Unfortunately, any additional information to go with that memory
fragment so he could
complete
that mission remained unhelpfully blank.

“This is a sword,”
Immanu said.  “The weapon sung about in the legend.”

“Impressive!”  Farzam
ran his finger along the blade.  He yelped as he accidentally sliced it.

~ * ~ * ~
* ~ * ~

June – 3,390 BC

Earth:  Village of Assur

Jamin

As soon as the others
left, Jamin, who'd been eavesdropping from his room, lay into his father.

“Why are you putting
him
in charge of training our warriors?”

“Because he is the
best at what he does,” Chief Kiyan said.

“-I- am the best!”
Jamin said.  “The only time I have ever seen him use a spear was at the
solstice festival!.  He doesn't even know how to hunt his own food with one!”

“Where he comes from,”
Chief Kiyan said.  “They can afford to maintain a standing army.  I don't think
he has ever
had
to provide for his own upkeep before.  Just defend
everybody else’s.”

“He is a drain on our
village resources!” Jamin said.  “He can't hunt.  He can't fish.  He doesn't
know how to herd goats or sheep.  And he doesn't have a trade.  I overheard
Needa tell her friends at the well the other morning that he is eating them out
of house and home!”

“He has worked
extremely hard helping the other villagers plant their fields and dig levies,”
Chief Kiyan said.  “And he hauls more water to the fields than a dozen men put
together.  He is
trying
to pull his own weight.” 

From the look in his
father's eyes, Jamin didn't have to hear him utter the unspoken words 'you
should too.'

“When
we
want
to spend more time to train,” Jamin growled, “you say you don't have the
resources to maintain a standing army.  But when
he
says he wants to
host warriors who aren't even from our village, you do whatever he wants!”

“He has knowledge of
technology we can't even dream of,” Chief Kiyan said.  “And he is a deterrent. 
There's a reason our village is the only one which hasn't been attacked.  The
Halifians are afraid of him.  They are
not
afraid of
you.
”

“The Halifians don't
attack us because I treat them with respect!”  Jamin jutted his chin into the
air to hide his twinge of guilt.

“You have consorted
with our enemies,” Chief Kiyan's eyes bored into his  skull.  “And given them
resources that would have been better kept inside this village!  Resources you
stole
from
me
!  They turned around and used my money to purchase
these new bows and arrows from some distant tribe.”

“I saw a threat,”
Jamin crossed his arms in front of his chest.  “And I took steps to eliminate
it.”

“I saw an ally,” Chief
Kiyan said.  “And I took steps to bind that ally to our people as closely as
possible.  It's the difference between a warrior and a chief.”

“A warrior defends
against all enemies,” Jamin snarled, “and fights all that come at him so that
none dare touch him!”

“And a
leader
builds
coalitions so that no one wishes to come at him in the first place,” Chief
Kiyan sighed.  “Jamin … you can't rule a village at the point of a spear.  You
can temporarily win it.  But unless you learn to play nicely with others,
you'll never to be able to hold onto it.”

A gust of wind blew
the down the skylight with a small howl.  '
Listen to your father.  You know
that he is right…'

“No warrior worth his
testicles will train with a bunch of girls,” Jamin warned.  “Just you watch! 
This ridiculous experiment will fail!”

“We shall see,” Chief
Kiyan said.  “I admit that his demands are unusual.  But he knows how to use
this new technology and we don't.”

“Let
me
be the
one to teach the warriors to defend us,” Jamin pleaded.  “I'm the best warrior
you have.  It should be
me
leading our warriors.  Not this outsider!”

“I gave you leave to
practice as many extra hours as you wanted,” Chief Kiyan said, “and you
didn't.  Do you think people haven't noticed you spend all of your time sneaking
through the shadows following Ninsianna?”

“Who told you that?”

“It's no secret, son,”
Chief Kiyan said.  “It's not healthy.  You've become obsessed with her.”  He
gave Jamin’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze like when he'd still been a young
boy.  Jamin’s anger collapsed. 

“I still love her,”
Jamin said.  “I can't believe she dumped me for that demon.”

“You
have
to
let her go,” Chief Kiyan said.  “She has made her choice, and she has chosen
him
. 
This is not a battle you can win.” 

“It’s not right,”
Jamin said.  “How she treated me.  If she didn't love me, then she never should
have led me on the way she did.”

“Stop looking at this
as
your
way versus his,” Chief Kiyan said.  “Although he has few
memories of his past, I've been a leader long enough to recognize that the army
he comes from dwarfs anything we could ever imagine.”

 “How do you know he's
not lying?” Jamin asked.  “
Everybody
lies about how brave they are.”

“
He
says
absolutely nothing about his past,” Chief Kiyan said.  “He doesn't remember. 
But I'm not blind.  Whoever this emperor is who he still swears fealty to even
though he can only vaguely remember him, he possessed the resources to build a
sky canoe large enough for
two
of my houses to fit inside for a single
soldier.”

“The sky canoe is
broken,” Jamin said.  “We only have his word it flies between the stars!”

“Every person in this
village saw that ship come out of the heavens,” Chief Kiyan said.  “Just
because it's broken
now
doesn't mean there are no other warriors with
sky canoes like his.  And then he has a stick which fires lightning.”

“So
he
says,”
Jamin said.  “How come he never uses it?”

“He used it against
you,
”
Chief Kiyan said.  “You were terrified the day he shot lighting at you.”

“He has not used it
since,” Jamin said.  “We were startled by his appearance.  That's all.  I'm not
sure
what
we saw.”

“Ninsianna had a
vision of his sky canoe being smote out of the heavens by darkness,” Chief
Kiyan said.  “And then she had a second vision where evil beings come in a
second sky canoe to consume our world.”

The wind gusted
through the open window like an inferno, filled with heat from the merciless
sun.

'Ki's agent has
failed.  The Evil One is coming…'

Jamin forced himself
to ignore whatever conversation kept filtering in through the walls from
outside the house.  It didn't help. 

“Crazy meanderings
nobody can verify!” Jamin said.  "It's all pretty convenient, don't you
think?  First
he
appears, and then his girlfriend makes up wild stories
about even
scarier
demons so that we will accept him.”

“I don't like the way
things have been transpiring outside of this village,” Chief Kiyan said.  “The
Kemet traders saw stars fall upwards,
into
the sky, as they traversed
the great desert, not down.  Given the winged ones appearance and the legends,
preparing for the worst is prudent.”

'You -must-
prepare…'

“Have you all gone
mad?” Jamin blocked his ears to tune out the whispers which filtered through
the walls.  “Will you listen to yourself?  Swords of gods and sky canoes and
sticks that shoot lightning and demons that consume the earth?  Just because we
stumbled across
one
winged freak doesn't mean the world will come to an
end.  You're playing right into his hands!”

“Jamin,” Chief Kiyan
said.  “If you don't want to train under him, that's fine.  Put your concerns
into actions, not words.  Stop following Ninsianna around and train the other
men to use a spear and atlatl.”

“My warriors are
already the best!” Jamin bragged.

“Not
your
warriors,”
Chief Kiyan said.  “The
village
warriors.  All of the young men and
women you've been bullying and putting down all these years because they are
not as quick to learn as you are.  You need to teach
them.
  If the
strife Ninsianna foresees comes to our village, we need more warriors than the
handful you have hanging on your every word.”

“But the others men
are inept,” Jamin said.  “It takes
forever
just to teach them the
simplest thing.”

“Do you want to be
chief of this village someday, or not?” Chief Kiyan said.  “Because the chief
doesn't have the luxury of picking only the best.  He has to work with what
She-who-is has given to him.  I'm giving you the opportunity to prove that you
can do a better job of preparing our village for attack than the winged one
can.”

'Think how the
others will look up to you when you're prepared for the dark times to come…'

“But…” Jamin ignored
the villager's voices being carried on the wind and picked up the slender
arrow.  “These are just sticks.”  He snapped it with one hand.  “They are but
twigs.”

“No buts,” Chief Kiyan
said. “You think you can do better?  Prove it.”

Jamin stalked out,
shaking his head to be rid of that annoying ringing in his ears.  His father
was right about one thing.  It was time to get off his rear end and train his
warrior troop in earnest.  Hunting down Siamek and the others, he told them
what he'd in mind and enlisted their support. 
Nobody
wanted to train
with a bunch of girls.  They would make certain of it.

~ * ~ * ~
* ~ * ~

Galactic Standard Date:  152,323.06 AE

Sata’an Empire:  near Alliance Neutral Zone

S.R.N. Tsalmaveth