Sword of the Gods: The Chosen One (71 page)

"Why should we
follow you if you can't remember anything?" Firouz, asked.  "Aren't
we just wasting our time?"

He stopped and made
eye contact with two elite warriors standing side-by-side, Firouz and Dadbeh. 
Young men whose first act upon seeing him for the first time had been to attack
him.

"I don't know how
well these skills will generalize to teaching
you,
" he said with
unabashed honesty.  "This is a different world, with different weapons and
different rules than the world I come from.  But if we all work together,
perhaps we can come up with something that works?  Because the way things are
going right now isn't working out so well.  Is it?"

The two men shifted
uneasily on their feet.  Two pairs of eyes turned to Siamek for guidance. 
Siamek hesitated, and then gave them a nod.  The young men looked Mikhail in
the eye and grumbled agreement.  It wasn't a standing ovation, but as Kiarash
had predicted, without Jamin here to stir up discontent, the other warriors
would give him a chance
to prove his point … or fail miserably. 

"I just spent all
morning hauling water to my field," an older man complained.  "And I
still have to go home and repair my goat fence.  And then after that I need to
haul even
more
water to my fields because by nightfall every ounce of
water will have evaporated.  When will I find
time
to do this training
you speak of?"

Agreement went through
the men.  There was a
reason
so few belonged to the elite warriors. 
Only those whose families had the luxury of allowing their sons to be someplace
other than bent over in the fields usually became part of the elite.

"My first day  in
this village, Chief Kiyan informed me that Assur doesn't have the resources to
maintain a standing army," he said.  "Unfortunately, that has not
changed.  We are in the middle of the growing season and the water isn't going
to haul
itself
into our fields so that our crops don't wither and die. 
But we were just attacked.  If we can't hold onto our lands, then planting them
serves no purpose."

"If we don't
plant food," an older man with many children said, "we'll starve. 
What good is staying on our lands if our children starve to death come
winter?"

"Yeah,"
another man said.  "They don't
have
to evict us.  All they have to
do is harass us until we starve
ourselves
to death!"

"I have no
recollection of ever having to plant my own food," Mikhail said. 
"The only thing I can recall is training to be the very best soldier I
could be."  A dissatisfied grumble went through the men.  "
However,
the Emperor's armies are not the only warriors I ever trained with.  Before
I was sent to train with the Emperor, I trained with another race of warriors. 
The Cherubim.  For some reason, that training has survived strongest in my
memory.  Amongst the Cherubim, there is no such thing as idleness.  Every
single thing they did was designed to serve two purposes.  To get done some
chore.  And to keep their fighting skills sharp so that, at a moment's notice,
they could drop everything and go defend the Eternal Emperor."

His eyes turned
inward.

"One of the few
memories I have is of encountering a gardener on my way to class," Mikhail
said.  "She was an ancient woman, too old to be kneeling on the ground pulling
weeds.  As she weeded, she moved all four of her arms in a different direction,
carefully pulling out the weeds as though she were deep in a trance.  I asked
her what she was doing and she said it was the most important lesson a Cherubim
novitiate could ever learn.  She made me kneel down in the dirt
with
her
and taught me this movement, even though I only have two hands and she had four
of them."

Mikhail moved both of
his hands in a circular motion, first one and then the other.  He then added
the movement of his wings she'd made him learn even though, without hands at
the knee-joint of his wings the way that Shay'tan had, he'd never been able to
pull any weeds with those limbs.  He turned back to the warriors scrutinizing
him with a curious expression upon their faces.

"I found out
later that the reason there were no female Cherubim in any of my classes was
that there
are
no female Cherubim.  Except for one.  Jingu.  The
Cherubim queen."  There was a murmur amongst the men.  "The mother of
the guardians of the Eternal Emperor herself saw to it that I would always know
how to defend myself, as small and weak as I was compared to my Cherubim
mentors."

He turned to Siamek.

"Stab me with
your spear."

"Wh-what?"

"I want you to
stab me with your spear."

"But …
really?"  Siamek gave him a half-hearted jab.  Mikhail knocked it to one
side with a fan block which looked remarkably similar to the weeding movement.

"I want you to
stab me for real," Mikhail said.  "As though I were a Halifian.  And
you … and you … and you.  I want you to stab me as well.  All four of you.  At
once.  Go for it."

After much hesitation,
the men began poking at him with the butt-end of their spears.  It had been a
long time since he learned this exercise, but the Cherubim had so deeply
instilled the movement into his muscle memory that he was able to effortlessly
deflect each and every jab.  It helped that these men didn't
really
want
to hurt him.  An appreciative murmur went through the group.

"You were taught
that by a queen?" Dadbeh asked.

"I was taught to
weed
a garden
by the queen," Mikhail said.  "I didn't find out it was
a defensive kata until later, when Master Yoritomo threw me into the middle of
a group of older students and told them to go at me.  Compared to the Cherubim,
I was quite the scrawny little runt.  I think Jingu wanted to make sure I
didn't get too badly chewed up and spit out."

"Weeding?"
Dadbeh laughed.  "You want us to learn to … weed?"

"Keep stabbing at
me," Mikhail challenged.  "I can keep it up all day."   

The warriors gave it
their best shot, their attempts at jabbing him increasing from mere
half-hearted jabs to fairly ferocious, coordinated attacks once the warriors
realized he was getting the better of them.  After nearly five minutes of
nonstop jabbing, they finally admitted defeat and began to good-naturedly joke
about learning to weed.  Mikhail ordered them to line up once more, and then
carefully unsnapped the pulse rifle from his holster and held it flat in both
of his hands. 

"I can't explain
why She-who-is erased all memory of learning to use
this
weapon, even
though if you stick it in my hand my body knows what to do with it, and yet I
can recall, in intricate detail, my time spent weeding the garden with the
Cherubim queen."

He stuck the pulse
rifle back in its holster.

"Why don't you
use
that
weapon to defend us?" Siamek asked.  His expression was
not one of disrespect, but curiosity.  The twenty-million credit question every
man in the village wanted to know.

"You have a story
about a man who finds a magic tallow lamp?" Mikhail said.  "A spirit
appears and gives the man three wishes.  This weapon is like that.  I used up
two of my wishes the day your men attacked Ninsianna because I was too badly
wounded to defend myself.  I'll not use it again unless I'm desperate because I
only get so many wishes and then the spirit won't grant them for me
anymore."

Shame flushed the
swarthy man's face.  Mikhail broke eye contact, not wishing his distrust about
elevating the young man to a position of authority to show,
nor
to have
his answer appear to be an accusation.  That first meeting had tainted every
experience that had followed like rancid meat.  If he was going to train these
men to defend the village, he needed to be a better man than Jamin and move beyond
his anger.

"I can't tell you
why I don't remember how the sky canoe you all saw fall out of the sky got
here," Mikhail said.  "And yet I can remember marching with a group
of men and women just like you, for hours on end, until it felt as though our
legs would fall off and we would die of thirst."

He bent to pick up the
two buckets of water he'd hauled up from the Hiddekel River earlier today.

"To fend off our
enemies," he said.  "We need to work together and figure out what
you
know, and what
I
know, and somehow put it all together so that the
next time the Halifians come at us, we'll hit them so hard they will never
again attempt to evict us from our lands."

The men gave a hearty
cheer.

"That means we
must pull double duty," he said.  " We need to get creative about how
we foster the skills we need to fight together as a team.  The archers use
these … water buckets … to help them build up the strength to draw their bows. 
Since we all need to march down to the river and haul water to our fields
anyways,
I thought it would be the most appropriate place to start.  Agreed?"

"How will hauling
water help us fight Halifians?" one of the older warriors asked. 
"It's just … water."

"The first thing
any soldier must learn is how to think as a
unit,”
Mikhail said. 
"Not an individual.  Therefore, when we go down to the river, instead of
walking, we'll march in lockstep, as though we are all shamans performing a
sacred dance, and carry the buckets of water like … Pareesa?  Get up here! 
Demonstrate what the men are supposed to do!"

"Yes, Sir!"
Pareesa pranced up like a gazelle and gave him a wink.  The little imp enjoyed
the attention.  She stood with one hand on her hip, her attitude cocky as she
lifted one of the buckets in a bicep curl Mikhail had taught her."

"That doesn't
look hard!" Dadbeh said.

"That's
right."  Pareesa stepped up to stand directly in front of the elite group
of warriors and held both arms out at her sides in a 'T'.  "If a skinny
little girl like
me
can do this, then it should be a piece of cake for
the boys, right?"  She accentuated the word
boys
to insinuate she
didn't find them to be men.

"We can do better
than
you,
little girl," Firouz teased.

"Then go ahead
and try," Pareesa taunted.

Although Pareesa was
only twelve years old, some of the warriors were not that much older.  Young
enough that their hackles raised at the insinuation she still thought of them
as little boys.  It was not the inspiration Mikhail
hoped
would motivate
the men to practice in earnest, but he would take it.

"Let's get
started!" Mikhail barked.  "Siamek?  Please lead the first group down
to the river."

Their first march was
sloppy and the lines were anything but crisp, but by the time they hauled the
twentieth bucket of water into the fields, the clomp-clomp-clomp of their
leather-wrapped feet hit the soil in unison.  The sun slipped beneath the
horizon and the dusk grew so dark that they would have bumped into one another
had it not been for the sound of their feet and the off-color marching songs
Mikhail taught them to help them keep the beat.  By the time they were done,
the men were tired, but feeling as though they had accomplished something.

They broke for the
night and went home.  

~ * ~ * ~
* ~ * ~

Late-July - 3,390 BC

Earth:  Village of Assur

Ninsianna

With a sigh of
relief, Ninsianna plunked down her basket of vegetables and wiped the sweat off
of her brow.  Out of the sun ... at last!  With the sun well past its apex, the
temperature
should
have begun to cool, but this time of year the heat
was reluctant to release its grip upon the land.  Mikhail used to help her
perform the back-breaking labor of weeding the garden, picking rhinoceros
beetles off of the plants and dropping them into a bowl of water to drown the
ravenous cousins of the scarab beetle before they could devour their crops. 
But along with his newfound prestige as commander of the village defenses came
a deficit of time.