This had gone on for years, the giants and mantises attacking and raiding Goshon, and the warriors of Goshon protecting themselves enough to keep their population and way of life alive. Still the giants and mantises came, and the population of Goshon shrunk while the population of their enemies grew.
I quizzed Choona some more, and it was, to say the least, a baffling discussion.
“So how do you fight them?” I asked.
“When they come, we fight,” Choona said.
“You say there are many more of them than there are of you?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So they come, and breach the walls, and you fight them, and they take slaves and retreat?”
“That is correct.”
“And then you go after them, to rescue the captives?”
I had an idea what the answer to this would be, as I had learned some of their culture’s thinking in the time I had been training the warriors, but I wanted to know for sure.
Choona considered this. “It is thought to be pointless to go after them.”
“You were rescued.”
She nodded. “Booloo escaped. You helped him. He came back for me, and you were with him.”
“So, why don’t your people do that, come for the captured ones I mean?”
“Because it is pointless.”
“You are home, and so is Booloo.”
“Once the giants have us, that does not happen.”
“But it did.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to Booloo, he went back for you, and I was with him. He chose to do things different.”
This confused Choona’s way of thinking. I realized it wasn’t lack of intelligence, it was culture. Their culture was accustomed to fending for itself in the city, but outside the city, if something happened to one of their people, they were on their own, unless one or two warriors chose, by their own choice, to do something out of the ordinary. It was a thing that happened, but according to Choona, not often.
I found this way of thinking frustrating. “But why don’t you just go after the captives?”
“It is not done,” she said.
“Except when it is.”
“Yes. But that is the choice of the individual. Not the King or Queen. Not the city.”
Our discussion was becoming circuitous, but I tried to stay with it.
“Why?” I asked. “Why is it only done now and again. Why is it not always done?”
“Because it is not done.”
I knew I was repeating myself, but I couldn’t help but think if I phrased the question simply, and correctly, I would receive what I thought of as a more common-sense answer.
“No one goes after the captives?” I asked.
“Sometimes. But not far. This is our home. We live on the forest around us, and we live in Goshon. We do not go into the lands of the giants, and we certainly do not go into the lands of the Dargats.”
“You should.”
“But why? Once captives are taken, they rarely come back.”
“But sometimes they do.”
“Sometimes they escape,” she said.
“Or they are rescued.”
“Yes.”
“But no one goes after them as a force, as an army?”
She walked to the window and pointed. Where she was pointing was the forest on the other side of the bridge. “We go there, and a ways beyond that. No more.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“It is how we do it.”
“Change it.”
She gave me a perplexed look.
“Why?”
I took her hands and led her to what served as a couch. When we were seated, I continued to hold her hands. I said, “If we go after them, we turn the tables. Instead of waiting for them to attack, we can attack them. If a few warriors now and then are rescued, than why not many by a larger force?” She thought about it.
“No one has ever done that,” she said.
I tried not to sigh too audibly.
“Did you make me the leader of your warriors?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You have great skill.”
“Do you trust my judgment?”
“Of course.”
“Then, what you have to do is discard cultural barriers that have kept you in the position you are in now with your enemies. This way of thinking may even have been beneficial in the past, may have become a way of doing things because at one point it worked well, or well enough. It’s not working now. Gradually, you, and all of your people, will be enslaved or destroyed. Bravery, and even skill with weapons, is not enough against enemies like this.”
She nodded slowly. “We have considered this.”
“But you haven’t changed. If you do something and it isn’t working, and you keep doing it, you get the same results. You know that, right?”
“We still exist.”
“Yes, but you are being slowly whittled down, like cutting chunks from a large tree. No matter how big the tree, if you keep cutting, it will fall down.”
“And then grow back.”
I realized that on this world my analogy was not a good one. The growth rate was so tremendous you couldn’t get ahead of it.
“Let me put it like this. The cultural reason you do not leave the city is buried in memory. You do not even know why it is that way anymore, do you?” She wrinkled her pretty brow.
“Because it has always been that way. The gods made us that way, and left us that way, and we follow the law of the gods.”
“But you are warriors. You worship The Warrior Star.”
She let go of my hands. “We are warriors.”
“No doubt. But you have to be proactive warriors.”
I had spoken in her language, but not knowing any other word for proactive, that was the word I had used. I tried to explain it to her in her language, but found it difficult.
“We shall take the fight to them first,” I said.
“But it has never been done that way.”
I was becoming frustrated.
“Then, Choona, my dear one, we will change things, you and I, and Booloo, and the warriors of Goshon.”
Chapter Ten
Meditation and the Arts of War
Before the King and Queen, I presented my ideas.
The Queen said, “But we have never done it that way before.”
“It would go against custom,” said the King.
Choona was with me, and so was Booloo.
Booloo, an immediate convert to the idea, said, “Brax saved us from our enemies. His training of our warriors has improved them dramatically. He has discarded many old methods, and his new methods are making our warriors superior. Perhaps it is time we change some of our views.”
“But those views are what make us . . . us,” the King said.
“Yes,” Booloo said, “but Father, there are a whole lot less of us now. Once we fought a certain way against a certain enemy. But the Dargats, the Juloons, and the Norwats are a different kind of enemy. They have killed many other clans all across our great forests. To the best of my knowledge, we are the last of our kind.”
The Queen said, “We protect our walls. We stay in our place.”
“Commendable,” I said. “No one should want war or start war or war against those who are not threatening them. But these creatures have come to you and taken your people for food, for slaves. It is time to take the fight to them.”
I was amazed at how complicated this was for them. It seemed obvious to me. But to those of the city of Goshon it was not. What would have been a silly discussion at home was dead serious here.
“Father,” Booloo said. “All things change. It is the way of the jungle. It grows. It dies. It rebirths. But there must be something left of it, a seed, a root, a stalk, the breath of the plant (he was referring to the pollen) to bring it back. When we are gone our bones will not rebirth our flesh. Our stalks will be dried
and rotted.”
“They will become one with all others,” said the King.
“Yes,” Booloo said, nodding. “But it will not be our people. Our people’s remains will be no different from the remains of all things.”
“That is the way of all death,” the King said.
“Yes, Father,” Choona said. “But it is not the way of all life. It is change. It is different. But I see Brax’s way. His way is our way now. He is the trainer of our warriors. His is the greatest sword we have ever seen. He is Goshon now.” The King and Queen sat silent for a long time. The King looked at the Queen. Something passed between them that only passes between those who have lived with one another so long words are not always necessary.
“Very well,” said the King. “It is strange, but if this is what Brax believes, we will take the fight to them.”
Each night after training the warriors, I went about my ritual, and before bed, I meditated as Jack Rimbauld had taught me. Choona still meditated with me. She wanted to learn the ways of meditation because I told her it was part of what Jack Rimbauld had taught me, and that it made me a better warrior.
I was mostly speaking in a rote way, because, except for a certain calm that meditation gave me, I had yet to glean the real merits of the art. And then, one night, while I was meditating, and was in a deep state, Choona said, “Brax.”
I opened my eyes. I was looking down on her.
“You . . .” she said. “You . . . you are floating.”
And so I was. I was a good six feet off the ground, hovering in the air, legs crossed, nothing to support me. The moment I realized it, I crashed painfully to the floor.
“I was not sure I believed you,” she said. “When you told me your master trainer could float in the air, and make many of himself. But, you, Brax. You were floating.”
I gathered myself together and sat on the couch, stunned. “I was,” I said. “I was indeed. And I was not sure I believed it when I told you either.”
She laughed.
“I am more than a little glad that I did not turn out to be liar,” I said.
We soon went to bed, chattering excitedly about what had happened. It took awhile, but finally we ceased talking, and Choona drifted off to sleep. I could not sleep. I arose, went to a spot beneath the window, and sat cross-legged, and concentrated, and this time, immediately I rose up from the floor. I went up and down at will for some time, practicing. I begin to think about all that Jack had taught me. If I could do this, why not astral projection, all manner of skills he had possessed.
I was so excited I couldn’t sleep that night.
Despite this lack of visitation from Morpheus, I was energized the next day. I fenced with warrior after warrior, finding that I was moving with greater ease and skill than ever before. I couldn’t decide if years of practice had finally paid off, or if it was that along with a combination of the environment that accelerated my skills. The only thing that mattered now was that I was different, and better.
The next night, while Choona slept, I sat before the open window in my cross-legged position, tried to send my thoughts out across the city, over the walls and the web bridge, back the way we had come, back to where I had first seen the giants.
Nothing happened.
I thought about it longer and harder, and then, in my mind, my naked body was moving through the forest, or rather the forest was moving through me. I was still sitting cross-legged, but it was as if I were a ghost. I opened my eyes. It was not all in my head. I was in the air and I was traveling swiftly, right through tree trunks and boughs and vines and all manner of growth; traveling through them without so much as rustling a leaf.
I was a spirit, an astral body flowing across this world of great vegetation with the swiftness of thought. My mind sought out my target. I came to a monumental tree. It was the size of a continent, and on it lived the giants, the mantises, and most importantly, the Dargots, and among the Dargots, more importantly, The One. I could sense him the way animals sense oncoming rain.
I can’t explain how I went there, as it was a place I didn’t know. But my thoughts were pulled across that vast expanse toward The One, as if it were calling me to it as diligently as I was trying to find it.
It touched me, probed with its mind. It was as if The One was a boulder and I was a river, and I flowed around it. Images flashed in my mind; they came from all directions, so fast I couldn’t organize them: I saw the Dargots, The Masters, on the necks and backs of the giants. I saw the mantises, lurking about on the fringes, clothed in shadow, and then . . . once again, I felt before I saw . . . The One.
I saw a great pile of human skulls and broken bones and desiccated corpses, living humans who thrashed and withered and appeared little more than mummies, the naked bodies of hundreds, the bones of thousands, and on top of them, writhing and twisting, was something I could recognize as a Dargot, but different, larger. It was The One. A thing that was like them, and not. Monstrous, dark as the night, oily as the slick on-water remains of a sunken tanker. Forty feet high. Its long, dark tentacles waved at the air and the suckers that lay beneath them drew at the air as if they could pull it completely out of being, suck the atmosphere, and the world, and the very moon and stars, and the blackness of space into it. Roots near its base coiled and uncoiled, dripped the gooey remains of the humans below them.
Closer and closer I came, traveling across the gap between space and time, hurtling toward The One. Those tentacles reached out and touched me, the roots caressed me, a dry tongue flicked out of what served as its face, and tasted me. I felt as if my brain were being shocked with an electric current. Foul sensations, like the rotting innards of the dead licked about in my brain. I could momentarily feel what it felt, a kind of dark superiority, a brilliance of mind that was directed toward the simplicity of one single purpose—survival.
There was a sensation of falling down a long, cold, dark tunnel, followed by exhaustion; it was as if my brain cells struck an invisible wall and exploded in all directions.
And then—
—nothing.
When I awoke, Choona was wiping my brow with a wet towel.
“Brax, are you sick?”
“No,” I said. “I am far worse than sick. The Dargots and their lackeys. And The One. They are coming. We must go forward. As soon as possible.”
In the morning I set about pushing the Goshon warriors hard. We worked the pikes, we worked the swords. We drilled as a wall of men and weapons, learned to break apart and attack, and come together and attack.
As the night came and The Warrior Star rode high in the sky, I led the warriors off the training field and out into the city plaza. There were perhaps no more than three thousand, but we filled the plaza.
In the camp of the Dargots I had sensed many more. Counting the giants, the mantises, and The Masters, and The One, they were perhaps ten thousand. They were formidable, but there wasn’t any true organization about them, just a hive mind that directed them in a general manner; there was no individuality of thought.
I climbed up on a prominent stone wall that surrounded a fountain spewing water. I pointed up at The Warrior Star. Criers throughout the group carried my words across the mass of humanity as I spoke.
“Tomorrow, we will go after our enemies. We will go after them before they come to us. You are the warriors of that star. You are trained, and you have the hearts of true warriors. I pledge by that star that I will lead you into battle. I will say, come after me, warriors, follow me, not go after them and I will wait here for you. I will be there with you. All of us, together, as one.”
Tallo came forward. He stepped up on the rim around the fountain and touched my shoulder.
“I have known this man, Brax, for only a short time. But he is a great warrior. He is a great teacher of the arts of war. You know that. You have seen. I will follow him anywhere. That is my word, and that is all of my word.”
Then the commanders in the army, the men and women who directed gr
oups of our soldiers, came forward, and each in his turn promised me their support, and vowed to die in my service. They bowed before me, and I went to each of them, took hold of them and helped them to a standing position. I walked back to my place on the fountain, and I called those leaders up, men and women. I had them stand on the fountain wall with me.
“No warrior here bows before another warrior,” I said. “It is a new time. It is a new war. And we are the new warriors. We are one.”
Choona came forward. She was dressed only in a white sarong. The light of the moon and The Warrior Star made it luminous. Her dark body and red hair were like a beautiful sculpture.
She said, “As of this moment, I, Choona, and my brother, Booloo, we are warriors, like you. We are not the Prince and Princess. We are warriors, and we too will follow Brax into battle, and we will fight to the bloody end.”
A wild cheer went up.
As we used to say in grade school: It was on.
Chapter Eleven
Preparations
The next morning the warriors of Goshon—with the exception of a well-trained skeleton force left to protect the city—were riding their beetles or marching outside of the walls, heading toward the enemy. Individual warriors had done this sort of thing, guerrilla tactics, but never as a group, never as a war party. For them, this was an amazing event, and it was going against all they had been taught as part of their survival.
Sojan the Swordsman ; Under the Warrior Sky Page 18
