Thynnes let the priest go and his enemy fell to the ground. Once he reclaimed his sword, Thynnes skewered the priest in the chest as he walked away as casually as an old man plants a cane to bear himself up.
Gorias cleared out more of the priests, going low and hamstringing one with his left sword, but heard the bald man who didn’t dismount with the troopers demand of the archer, “Kid, what’s in that concoction?”
Jayred notched another arrow, laughed and replied, “Turak, I don’t know, lots of chemicals, a bit of flame and a great deal of prayer.”
The shortest of the robed figures reared back and lashed out at Jayred, unfurling the leather whip again. In a moment’s time, the whip wrapped about Jayred’s ankle as he stepped up to aim again, and tripped him. He stumbled and fell flat atop his missile, and it exploded under his body. Jayred’s blood splattered Thynnes’ boots and greaves.
Thynnes pointed at the shorter figure, whose hood came back to reveal a girl probably no older than Jayred. “Well, curse the luck, there goes our archer. Get her, Cyrus and Nahum, dammit!”
Cyrus did step up to attack the whip girl, but Nahum stopped, staring at the body of Jayred. Gorias saw the young archer twitch as he died and the realization on Nahum’s blank face of how fleeting life could be. The red-headed trooper had a harder look to him but Gorias guessed this the first time he’d smelt the guts of a friend.
Gorias confronted the one man who didn’t dismount. “Turak? I’d never figure you to shy from a fight.”
The bald man fished a flask from his waist belt, uncapped it and took a swig. “You all have it in hand. Looks like there’ll be plenty’a killin’ up the way, if they haven’t sent the perfumed pricks to the bone orchard and fled.”
Thynnes wore a disgusted look and mumbled, “Filthy mercenary.” He then eyed Gorias. “But you’re of royal blood way back. You are different.” Thynnes let out a sarcastic laugh as he gave mocking applause to the troopers finally disarming the young woman using a whip. They had the girl by the shoulders and brought her to the General.
She spat on Thynnes’ barreled chest and Gorias smirked, climbing back onto his horse.
Thynnes leered down at the girl and scratched his bearded chin. “You’re no Pryten, but probably a pirate witch.”
“I’m Noguria, daughter of…”
Thynnes grunted loudly, cutting her off as he went to his horse. “You’re just a girl in over your head.”
Gorias’ head swiveled around and he directed Traveler over to Noguria. He stabbed a finger at the jewel around her neck, and then leaned down low.
Cyrus’ face flushed and he exclaimed, “It’s an eye of the dragon! See the cut of the jewel?”
Before the others could close in, Gorias snatched the jewel in his hand and ripped the necklace off Noguria.
Thynnes got in the saddle, saying, “Your companions are dead and we don’t have time for prisoners. I’d run if I were you.”
Released, standing alone, Noguria licked her bottom lip, blood trickling from her teeth. She glared at Gorias as he prepared to go. She made an obscene gesture but Gorias ignored her.
Thynnes shouted, “The way you cut a swell with women is legendary indeed.”
“The manners in young folks is gettin’ terrible, maybe it’d be good if that story about the coming deluge is true, huh?”
“So much for you not killing anyone, aye?”
“Somebody always volunteers.”
As they closed the short distance to the base of the hill, Turak pointed, shouting, “Look up there! Magicks!”
Gorias frowned. “Ya’d think a guy so covered in tattoos to bring healthy and easy wenches wouldn’t be so scared of a few mages waving their pricks.”
“Piss in your helm, La Gaul,” Turak cussed him as they pulled up.
Gorias didn’t debate the concept of fear of magic with a healthy respect. Any warrior worth their swords and had lived a few centuries had passed near enough to a mage to learn to stay out of their way. With the burst of green flame over the crest of the hill, Gorias hoped it was one of the Queen’s wizards warding off their attackers.
An old saying came to Gorias as he watched two circular orbs tumble down the side of the hill: Heads will roll.
“Horse manure,” Gorias muttered as he swung a leg over his black stallion Traveler and set his boots to the tall grasses. Two heads came to rest not far from his position. “Heads don’t roll for shit.”
“Ryss,” Thynnes said, pointing at a figure in burgundy trousers and a doublet sporting frills on the sleeves. “He stands at the edge like he wants to run.”
Gorias drew the twin blades from scabbards in the pack on his back. “Am I supposed to know who the fuck that is?”
Thynnes replied, “He’s the consort of the Crown Princess back in the woods.”
The troopers dismounted again and Turak started to climb down too, but a coughing fit stopped his motions. The two soldiers closest to Gorias stepped up and then quickly took a step back. Gorias disregarded it, as they were young.
Thynnes had no mercy on his men, nonetheless. “Don’t fret on the twin blades of Gorias La Gaul, you young pukes. If they are taken from angels wings or not doesn’t mean squat.”
“General Thynnes, yer all heart.” Gorias threw back his washed out navy blue cloak and told the bald man off his horse at last. “Turak, we’ll all be dead before you get your fat ass up the hill.”
Turak drew a morning star from his saddle clasp and then a twin headed axe from across his saddlebags. “Good. A fool I was to ride along with you, La Gaul. This better be worth my trouble.”
Gorias led them up the hill toward the din. “How was I to know the whores who serviced us also did this assassination squad for the royal family of Transalpina?”
Thynnes sucked air and started to lag behind Gorias. “The devils talk in their sleep to the sluts?”
Gorias boots dug in hard as they ran, “Why the young want to impress whores with their actions is beyond me.”
A trooper made a joke about such men being politicians in training but Gorias couldn’t match the voice to a face. He barely knew these young ones. Thynnes, he’d met decades ago when on a drunken lark to topple pervert King Silex of Albion. The fact that the General rode in the party Turak and he ran into on the way to this festival was pure chance. The young troopers wanted La Gaul with them and gushed to meet the legendary fighter from Thule.
Ryss walked back out of sight the closer they came to the top of the knoll. His casual gait didn’t give the impression of worry. As they reached the crest of the hill that once supported the great stone circle many miles from the coast, Gorias thought that since he neared seven hundred years old, he’d not need to ever worry about acting the young fool again. Gorias loud war cry caused a brief pause to the action.
The flat top of the hill, about a half-acre in area, held a complex geometric pattern of polished logs and bodies, many still alive. Gorias ground his boot in the ring of gravel encircling the hilltop, denoting where the sacred ground began. He could see over the obstructions that the Queen stood in the center of the action, placid, hands folded in front of her teal gown. A flock of little girls surrounded Her Majesty and then a dwindling group of guards, using shields, swords and their bleeding bodies to stop an overwhelming force of men and women wearing the robes of priests. Gorias thought it a miracle Garnet still lived; perhaps the luck came from her wizards, who had seen better days by the look of them hugging the beams near to her, or the tenacity of her guards.
Gorias searched the carnage wrought by the flock of Pryten killers. Mildly, that idea amused him. The Prytens followed the ways of the Oak, and hated the Transalpinans for defiling their ancient stone circles and leveling their sacred groves. Gorias granted them that, not a belief in their system but anger at a superior civilization screwing them out of their land and sites. Garnet’s grandf
ather had leveled this hill of the stone slabs, the remnants of which formed the gravel ring about this place. The sacred oak grove? Well, that’s where the wooden beams came from that formed the sophisticated sphere of geometrically placed arches pleasing to the gods of Transalpina. Making an altar to a new god from the remains of an old god, Gorias mused, that reeked of bad business.
“They are but royalty, there are more of them in the world,” Gorias shouted and threw off his cloak and donned his helmet. He swiped his swords across each other, releasing an ethereal spark. “Come get a taste of me, you pigs, and live forever.”
The attackers of the royal party stepped back from their assault. They turned to face Gorias and a couple took pointed breaths. The sight of the towering man clad in blue dragon skin armor, wielding the lustrous short swords told them all his identity. Many whispered the name “La Gaul”, the fable on two legs, the primordial warrior and whoremonger that left his bloody footprints across the world and spat in the face of the idea of the coming apocalypse by water.
The boast of Gorias divided the attackers, for truly a many wanted what he suggested, a place in the legend of Gorias La Gaul. They desired the spot at the end, the role of the one who slays him.
Two Prytens with clean-shaven faces charged him first, each holding a dagger in their left hand and a short handled single sided axe in the other. Gorias reckoned these clean cut two the better spies of the plot, as a Pryten savage couldn’t get in close to royalty without being spotted.
“C’mon, you little punks,” Gorias waited, putting his visor down, bouncing on the balls of his feet as they drew near, each planning to come at him from a side. “Deliverance will come.”
As those with Gorias ran over the barrier and threw themselves into the great number of killers barely held at bay by the Queen’s men, the two attacked Gorias. He dropped to his knees and they swung their axes, not surprised by his move, but over committed in their initial attacks. Gorias blades slashed down at diagonal lines, slicing cleanly through each of their shins. He worked his swords up, and ran the blades up between their legs, each weapon driving into a Pryten crotch. These cruel strikes landed hard and ended abruptly in each pelvic bone. They each smashed their axes on Gorias’ body, the one on the left striking his shoulder, causing the axe head to bust off. The other struck Gorias’ helm and knocked it off, but also broke his weapon.
Gorias stood, ripping his swords up further in each man, scraping off their bones and into their lower abdomens. His mound of ashen hair flowing out from the askew helmet, Gorias pulled the blades out and the Pryten on the left folded. The other wobbled, hands to his crotch before Gorias hooked a boot under the man’s ankle and toppled him to the ground. He didn’t bother giving them the deathblow to the heart. With their pricks ruined and loops of intestines spilling out into the sunshine, these men wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.
General Thynnes and his troopers cut into the small army that attacked the royal party. Gorias saw that the Queen’s guards, while skilled, had forfeited their lives for their monarch, save for a few that still stood. Many lay on the few stone benches left from antiquity not ground into gravel for the outer ring. These guards shook in their death rattles, streams of blood painting the grass once used for sacrifice to olden gods.
Turak made the hill at last and swung his morning star at a running naked Pryten. The spiked balls of Turak’s weapon sank into the neck, chest and groin of a fleeing man. Turak yanked back, ripping the painted Pryten apart in three places. Turak didn’t advance just yet but took time to brain the ruined man with his axe, too.
“Dumbass,” Gorias spat. Turak killed the man twice, Gorias ruminated as he stepped further into the battle throwing a forearm smash into the face of a willing fighter. No use for overkill on a day like today.
One of the priests, a man much shorter than Gorias, leapt from behind a log configuration, but landed too close to him, swinging knives in each hand. Gorias couldn’t hit him with his swords, so he dropped them, put up his arms and caught hold like a lover in a passionate embrace. Gorias ignored the knife blows to his armor and stomped his left boot onto the Pryten’s sandaled foot. Although this shot hurt, it didn’t cause nearly as much pain as when Gorias grappled him close again and yanked up, still stomping down with his boot, dislocating the ball joint of the Pryten’s hip. Once he’d pushed off Gorias, the man fell, abandoning his knives to grab at his hip. Once Gorias snatched up his weapons, he flipped his swords about and drove them down like daggers into the Pryten’s ribs.
On either side of the Queen, an emerald glow resonated around two figures clinging to wooden pillars. No, Gorias noted, not hugging--adhered or joined to the wood planks. Both wizards of the Queen bit it hard, victims of superior magicks, Gorias assumed they were clerics by the shiny robes to the god Seaxneat melted to the sizzling skin of two locked in an eternal embrace with the beams. Though two naked women covered in Pryten woad and tattoos lay deceased not far from each ruined wizard, two more stood not far away.
“Just as in any fight,” Gorias said to Thynnes as he and the troopers surrounded the wizards. “They brought more guys, or girls.” He then noted abnormally long snakes slithering around the bodies of these two dead mages. They rose up on their thin backs, supported by forked tails that wiggled but never rattled, searching with eyes very much like any man, not serpentine striped. That alone would give a common man the chills, but Gorias kept on.
The troopers looked at their leader, eyes full of terror. In moments, the Pryten shamans started to giggle, thin serpent’s slithering about their necks and peering at the new arrivals. The soldiers started to shake violently.
Gorias felt the tinge of dark magick from these women, prickly on his whiskers like after a lightning strike. He and Thynnes exchanged a look before they struck fast with the swords in their right hands. Each man chopped a snake on the ground in half before they impaled a shaman, Thynnes striking through the guts, Gorias nailing the back, pushing his blade out the chest of his target. Thynnes worked his stab, twisting about in the body and shaking his own head around, saying, “Get outta my head, ya bitch!” fighting off the magicks of the shaman he struck. The General batted the head of the snake away with his armlet before it could strike him.
Gorias drew his blade out, but the lean snake encircled on his weapon, leaving its host to totter. He swished it in the air, vivisecting the serpent. Gorias then aimed with both swords at the wounded shaman, meaning to remove her head. Gorias blinked when his blades met at the neck bone and stopped. Perplexed, Gorias reckoned their magic strong enough to ward off his mystic blades that could pass through most anything alive. No one on the planet could channel their power much longer after a strike through the heart. Time showed him correct. Gorias felt the energy of that shaman, the very power of their god or demon, whatever gave them a point to focus their worship, pulled on his weapons. The invisible tug on his swords at the neck joints faded. Gorias heart fluttered but he dismissed it. His heart danced unruly more since he turned six hundred about a hundred years ago.
One of the Prytens stripped off his robe and leapt onto Gorias back, legs looping over the legend’s thighs. The Pryten made the blunder most did in stabbing at Gorias’ heart with a knife unable to penetrate dragon skin armor. Gorias knifed his swords into the ground and clenched the knees of his enemy. The assailant tried to gash Gorias’ throat with the knife he broke on the dragon plating, but Gorias slanted his head. The serrated edge of the ruined blade connected with Gorias’ bearded jaw, but scraped off on a jagged protruding bone hidden there. Gorias briefly thanked almighty God for a poorly healed busted jaw three centuries before and bit into the man’s wrist. Still holding his enemy fast, Gorias fell backwards as if he plunged in a lake for a lark. Gorias full weight and armor crashed back to the ground, using the man on his back for a cushion. The Pryten’s grappling hold released as the air left his body. Gorias wheeled over to his knees, and exposed the armlet o
f his armor, revealing the dew nail of the dragon there. The hooked nail passed across the Pryten’s neck and only gore remained in its wake. Gorias stood again, taking up his swords, giving the dew nail and the Adam’s apple stuck on there a mild look.
With most of the Pryten’s dead or battling soldiers, Gorias shook off his armlet and joined Thynnes. Both stood looking into the final altar spot, both with blood in their beards, the pungent air very thick with gases from the dead. A lone man in good clothes stood not far from the Queen, not a speck of blood or dirt on him.
“Ryss,” Thynnes whispered in a dismal voice, one not used on the noble families of the Queen.
All right, Gorias reasoned, he’s one of the royals left. Ryss glared with rage at those who surrounded Queen Garnet, a gaggle of little girls in white silk tunics and lacey scarves. All of them had long faces, brown eyes and flowing hair, but ranged in ages from toddlers to pre-teens. Over a dozen girls formed a protective wall around the Queen, but her stern manner told him she didn’t really hide behind them. If anything Garnet appeared as he remembered her: lots of starch in her panties, chin up, eyes clear, defiant, ready to accept his death surrounded by the maidens who attended her.
Ryss didn’t let a few kids stop him. He turned about and lay hands on the Queen. That move on Garnet would’ve caused shock in public, but most folks who’d be enthusiastically aghast lay dead all around. The girls, however, didn’t scream and scamper. No, they all attacked Ryss, each taking hold of a limb, a few at his midsection, all throwing punches and generally getting in the way.
Thynnes let his sword drop and gaped, along with everyone else on the hillside.
Blood and Steel: Legends of La Gaul, Volume 1 Page 10
