Lod the Galley Slave (Lost Civilizations)

by Heppner, Vaughn

  Kron hissed through his horse-sized teeth.

  With his sword, Herrek beckoned Kron. It was an absurd but brave gesture, worthy of a Western plains charioteer.

  Kron drew his sword the way an iceberg might. The blade looked puny against his bulk. Herrek roared a desperate war cry and charged.

  The clash of steel, the blur of speed awed the sailors, reavers and Lod, who watched open-mouthed. Clearly, Herrek the Elonite was an artist of the blade. The clangor awoke in Lod admiration for the man. Herrek had strength and extraordinary skill. Unfortunately, he fought an elemental of destruction. The massive Nephilim met every blow, parried each trick and maneuver. He did it effortlessly, with his face and emotions seemingly blank. Herrek soon panted as sweat slicked his cheeks.

  The uneven fight stoked the fires in Lod’s soul. He knew then his reason for being. He must search the world for Nephilim and kill them.

  “Now let us fight,” Kron said. He increased the tempo. Herrek, with his lips frozen in a rigid smile, wildly twisted, ducked and parried with the clashing of sparks. His hair was lank, plastered to his sweat-dripping face.

  “Fight, little man,” Kron urged, and he beat his sword against the Elonite’s as if an anvil with a hammer. Herrek’s arm and sword swung back, leaving him exposed. Kron slashed his sword across Herrek’s chest. Sparks sprayed off the bronze armor and Herrek went stumbling backward.

  Kron lumbered after him, saying, “Let us make it your head next time.”

  Lod grabbed the gutting knife hidden under his tunic, the one tied to his leg. His head swam with visions of victory and hard-given vengeance.

  “None of that,” whispered a sleek vulture of a necromancer. Few had seen him enter and slip behind the rat bait. With mummy-dry fingers, the necromancer touched Lod’s arm.

  Lod cried out. His knife clattered onto the wooden floor. Then those horrid fingers latched onto his shoulders and the necromancer began muttering vilely into his ear.

  Herrek gave a belabored cry, clutched his sword with two hands as he desperately stove off Kron’s ringing hammer blows.

  “We serve Gog here,” Kron said, increasing the tempo yet again, forcing Herrek back. “The strong take from the weak.” Kron swung his mightiest blow yet.

  Herrek met it, and the extraordinary shock of it flung him against the wall. His eyes betrayed exhaustion and terrible defeat. Panting, he let his arms sink to his sides.

  Kron lumbered up, saying, “It is a good rule, a wise rule, the very law of life.”

  The necromancer screamed as Lod’s teeth sank into his pale forearm. Then Lod dashed free and across the room. Kron glanced over his shoulder. In that moment Herrek shouted wildly and struck. Kron effortlessly slid aside the blow, and he gave his full attention back to Herrek.

  Lod leaped upon a table and hurled himself at Kron’s massive back. It was like a bobcat leaping upon a bear. The braided eel-rope no longer clung to Lod’s leg. He had wrapped one end around his right fist and the other around his left. Lod crashed upon Kron. He whipped the eel-rope around the elephantine throat. He crossed his hands and yanked back with all his youthful strength. He drove his knees into the Nephilim’s back as his ropy muscles grew taut. Lod strained, heaving, trying to dig the eel-rope deeper into flesh.

  The Nephilim gasped, staggering. His eyes bulged. With his huge left hand, he reached back. Lod sank bloody teeth into the Nephilim’s palm.

  Herrek beat aside Kron’s blade. Then Herrek plunged his sword into the huge chest, twisted his blade and withdrew bloody steel as gore gushed out the horrid wound. Kron reeled drunkenly as Lod tightened his grip, choking off air.

  Whatever spell had held the tavern broke. At the terrible crime committed here, against a Nephilim, a son of Gog—pandemonium erupted. Men and women streamed for the door, clawing and fighting to get out.

  “No!” shrieked the necromancer, hate animating his normally lifeless features. From his skin-sack, he lifted a bleached skull as blood dripped from his forearm. His wormy lips twisted the air with forbidden words and flakes of bone drifted from the naked skull. Then all at once it whooshed, bone chips and fragments showering from his hands as an oily mass of vaporous evil billowed upward. The necromancer pitched his cupped hands toward Lod.

  As the necromancer did this, the one-eyed man who had held a cleaver, screaming and panicked like all the rest—who had retreated deeper into the tavern and was now one of the last to flee for the exit—bumped hard against the necromancer. From his blind side, the one-eyed man crashed against the spellcaster, not even aware that he was there. The one-eyed man didn’t stay to apologize, but deflected as he was, smashed head-on against a post and thereby dashed himself senseless, most likely saving his life.

  The necromancer stumbled while in the process of flinging his spell. The swirling, oily mass above him, the vaporous, faintly shrieking cloud, catapulted not at Lod as probably intended, but toward the milling sea of humanity clawing at the entrance.

  “No,” the necromancer said.

  Most in the crowd fell dead, tongues swelling blackly and eyes dissolving into a gory morass. One among them was the Black Lotus, the priest-assassin. Others fought with greater zeal as fiery pain dotted their skin with erupting sores. Inanna the Beastmaster was also caught within the spell. Outside an eagle screamed and a panther snarled, their wills freed from her formerly dominating control.

  The sequence of events was swift, unnoticed by the straining Lod, his face matching in a bizarre fashion the purple of Kron’s features. The strange roars, screeches and death cries mingled with the horrible shrieks and bellows of the crowd. Because of their depletion, more people began to gain the exit.

  Meanwhile Kron, with his eyelids fluttering, propelled himself backward, gaining speed. Lod sprang away, rolling between tables, just as the Nephilim thumped hard against a wall. Kron wheezed, and as he stumbled forward, bounced off the wall. He struggled to remain upright. His lifeblood soaked his leathers and dripped onto the sawdust-littered floor. In seconds, able to breathe again and regaining his balance, he raised his sword, although it wavered and trembled.

  “Come,” he said, in a terrible voice, while spitting black blood, “dare to engage me.”

  Lod grabbed a spear. Herrek raised his blade. The second Elonite, an older man, picked up a shield and joined them. The three closed in on the Nephilim.

  Then Lod caught a flicker of movement in the shadows. “Behind you!” he shouted.

  Herrek whirled around. The necromancer raised a curved dagger, rushing in. A single lightning slash from Herrek sent the necromancer reeling away, his throat spraying mist.

  “I will be avenged,” Kron whispered. His shaking arm dropped until the sword-tip clunked against the floor. He crashed to his knees.

  “Remember me in Sheol!” Lod shouted, as he charged.

  Herrek advanced, with the shield man beside him. Moving faster than the other two, Lod drove his spear into the Nephilim’s side.

  -6-

  Hours later, deep in the Temple, Gog learned the news. He brooded in darkness, knowing that a formidable enemy had just escaped his grasp. He had glimpsed the future and understood that those who served the one whose name he had never uttered called such as Lod, seraph.

  Apparently, it meant, “heart of fire.”

  Gog gave immediate orders to scour the swamps, but he felt certain that Lod and his two companions would win free in their stolen rat-boat. He had learned the news too late.

  There would come a day of reckoning, of this Gog was certain, and had even glimpsed that in his visions. He grunted, a sound that made the bound priests who had failed to capture Lod tremble in sick terror.

  Gog was patient. He had lived countless years, even as reckoned by the sons of Adam. When the accounting came…ah yes, then the madman Lod would pay in agonies yet to be invented. On this, Gog made a horribly binding oath.

  Only then did he turn his attention to these laggards, these priests who had failed him. He picked up the first and
grunted a second time. The hideous shrieks of the fool soothed the rage boiling in Gog’s soul.

  The King of Great Sloths

  Not all stories from the Pre-Cataclysmic Age were about Lod. Strange powers came down with the bene elohim and afterward with the shining ones who made war against them. Many of those powers departed after the end of the Thousand Years War. Some remained and altered the landscape and the animals in them.

  This is a tale of such a beast.

  -1-

  A ponderous great sloth shuffled through the primeval jungle. He had curved claws of such massive size that they forced him to slide his front paws forward on the sides. It was an awkward gait, not made for speed. The great sloth had the shape of a bear and the size of a mastodon. Like a bear, he could stand up on his hind legs. At such times, he hooked his claws around a tree’s branch and often yanked it lower so he could nibble on the choicest leaves. He stood then over twice the height of a two-legs. He had shaggy fur and skin tougher than link-mail. With his heavy molars, he crushed leaves and tender branches. He had also been known to drive leopards off their kill. Then he scavenged the carrion.

  In his passage through the jungle, the great sloth crushed ferns, snapped branches and brushed off bark as his tough hide scraped against trees. He panted, having shuffled for many hours. The pant was a heavy sound, and saliva dripped from his pink tongue. Despite the slowness of his shuffle, he moved fast in great sloth terms.

  He brushed against another giant tree. The tree groaned and bark trickled down like snow. A loud squawk rose from the great sloth’s shoulder. In the shadows of the primeval jungle, it was hard to determine what had caused the noise. The great sloth turned his head and moaned. It almost sounded like an apology. He tried thereafter not to brush against trees, at least not on that side.

  He was not just any great sloth. He was Old Slow, the King of Great Sloths. Distinct from beasts elsewhere on Earth, Old Slow reasoned in a way akin to two-legs. Perhaps as incredibly, he knew that he and his kind were different. All the higher beasts of the jungle within the radius of the celestial isle, within the radius of its otherworldly magic, had this reasoning capacity. The thinking beasts prized their elevated station. Although they had no script like the two-legs, their ancient legends told of the time of the celestials and the war on the isle. It was in the aftermath of the battle that had brought about the great change. The higher animals here also knew that someday evil-workers would attempt to take away their unique gift. The wisest among them had reasoned that only offspring of the celestials would dare try. Those offspring must surely die so that the beasts of the great primeval jungle could continue to reason, lest great sloths, leopards, wolves and others fall again into the brutishness of their kind in the outer world.

  The call had gone out, for the feared and prophesied day of evil had finally arrived.

  Why did it have to be in my lifetime? Old Slow wanted to know. He didn’t have many years left. He didn’t want this terrible responsibility. Yet he had accepted the mantle of kingship many years ago when he had defeated his father in the mating battle for the queen. Old Slow knew there were younger great sloths eager to fight him for the new queen. Soon one of them might match him in power. Not this year and not the next, but in the year after that he might lose. None of that mattered now because the evil day had arrived.

  Intruders had smashed their way through the jungle. Guardian leopards had died under a hail of spines and barbed darts. Old Slow had snuffled a leopard carcass a day ago. He had sniffed the spines. Worse, the feel of celestial magic had lingered in the air. Old Slow knew then that the messenger had been right. The intruders had brought slave beasts, creatures bound by magic to do the will of the celestial offspring.

  Old Slow burst through a clump of ferns and into a riotous field of gorgeous flowers. The bright colors hurt his eyes. The flowers blazed as if the petals were gold, ruby and sapphire.

  The celestial magic from the isle not only gave the higher animals reasoning power, but it had changed the trees, the ferns, flowers and grasses. They grew perfectly, and the closer the vegetation stood to the isle the healthier they remained.

  The squawk earlier made sense now. An ancient archaeopteryx rode on Old Slow’s right shoulder. The archaeopteryx had a toothed beak and colorful feathers. Its old talons clung tightly to sloth hide. The parrot-feathered archaeopteryx had been the messenger, and now guided Old Slow to the intruders’ camp.

  The King of Great Sloths slowed as his head swiveled. He noticed a gray scar that cut through the field of flowers like a scab. It seemed wrong here, a ribbon of earthen ordinariness in paradise.

  The ancient archaeopteryx, three times Old Slow’s age, squawked a complaint.

  Old Slow grunted and increased his pace. He shuffled through the flowers, crushed the juices from moist stalks. He panted. The flowery odors in his mouth suffocated him, too rich, too intense when all he wanted was fresh air. His eyes stung by the time he reached the gray scar, a stone road. Ancient builders had fitted cyclopean blocks into the earth as if constructing a wall in the ground. No blade of grass or weed grew between the cracks, so tightly fitted were the blocks and presumably so deep did they go. The road was wide enough for three great sloths shuffling shoulder to shoulder.

  Old Slow stopped and stared at the dirt churned upon the road. Animals never stepped on those stones. He spied footprints in the dust and he spied wheel tracks. The intruders had used the road. That was sacrilege.

  Old Slow bellowed, a hoarse sound. Then he continued to shuffle, picked up speed, tore plants and made dirt fly. He soon crested a rise and shuffled down a gentle decline toward a strange object.

  He saw an obelisk of black gneiss, with golden marks inlaid upon its glassy sides. The obelisk jutted upward half the height of the trees. Bones lay around it, gleaming bones and bleached skulls. Wolves often dragged half-eaten carcasses there, leaving the remains as an offering to the Old Ones. Old Slow considered it a barbaric practice, but on that score, the wolves were immune to argument.

  The golden marks on the obelisk were cruciform, wedge shapes that were a form of two-legs writing. The obelisk had four sides and a pyramidal top. Old Slow used to have no idea what the golden script said. None of the animals had, not even the ancient archaeopteryx.

  One of the celestial offspring had read it, however. Several days ago, he had spoken aloud the ancient words. A crow hiding in a nearby tree had overheard. The crow could mimic two-leg speech and was a master of languages.

  The words read:

  For a distance of one month and twenty-six days, I—Azel—have devastated the districts of Pildash. I spread salt and thorn-bush (to injure the soil). Sons of kings, sisters of kings, members of Pildash’s royal family young and old, prefects, governors, warriors, artisans, as many as there were, inhabitants male and female, big and little, horses, mules, asses, flocks and herds more numerous than a swarm of locusts—I carried them off as booty to Babel. The dust of Tubal, of Heshbon, of Er and of their other cities, I carried it off to Babel.

  A delegation of crows and the ancient archaeopteryx had conferred. What did the words mean? The key was the name “Azel.” That could refer to no other than Azel the Accursed, the long-ago chief of the bene elohim. Azel the Accursed had surely raised the obelisk in his days of glory. The other named places must have been ancient kingdoms destroyed by Azel and his hosts.

  With a dip of his head, Old Slow acknowledged what he considered the Wolf Shrine. The King of Great Sloths knew the old prophecy. When the golden squiggles of the shrine make sense, then the days of deadly battle lie near.

  Old Slow shuffled past the shrine. He must reach the others. He must see the intruder camp. Then he would lead the attack.

  Why did it have to be in my day? I don’t want the responsibility. Those were thoughts unworthy of a king, but they were his thoughts. He must fight in order to save this unique reasoning capacity for future generations of great sloths, leopards and archaeopteryxes. Old Slow roared h
oarsely, seeing no way out of the responsibility. Then he set his head down and shuffled with a will.

  -2-

  With his massive claws, Old Slow moved a branch. He lowered his snout and squinted into the distance. His eyesight wasn’t what it used to be. He saw the stockade. He also saw movement along the top. Those were indistinct shapes. According to the archaeopteryx, those were soldiers in red armor. It didn’t seem right that the ancient archaeopteryx should see better than he did. The parrot-feathered bird was three times his age. The toothed archaeopteryx—the only toothed bird Old Slow knew—would probably survive many years longer, too.

  Old Slow grunted as a chill swept through him. He hadn’t felt such a thing since his early years as a young male. The older males then, as now, fought for the privilege of mounting a choice female. His loins had stirred back then as the ripe musk of a female in heat had played havoc with his higher thoughts. As a younger bull, he had shuffled out of hiding and challenged an old bull for the privilege of mating with the gorgeous female who had wriggled her rump in a clearing. It had been a short fight. The old bull had smashed him back and forth until Old Slow had bawled in terror. When the old male let him up, Old Slow had slunk away in shame. The feeling he had felt then smashed one way and then another by that great old bull…some of that awful feeling returned now.

  From within the jungle, Old Slow squinted. The brown monster out there had the shape of a great sloth, but moved faster and seemed more dangerous. The beast was huge and moved with a rolling gait.