“We’ve been blundering around in circles,” Mari told them. “Esus has confused us and now one of his sons comes.”
“I’ve slain Nephilim before,” said Lod. “If Esus is a First Born, his sons—they’re half-animal, you say? Have you ever seen one?”
“To do so is to see death,” whispered Mari.
“These sons are murderous savages, eh?” Lod muttered. “Did Esus rut with a bear, a panther or with a great sloth? Are these so-called sons even capable of speech? They wouldn’t be Nephilim. No, if they are half-animal, that would make them Emim, terrors.”
“What are you saying?” whispered Hul.
“Elohim rewards the brave,” said Lod.
The scream or hunting cry sounded closer than before. It must be traveling fast, and that boded ill for their survival. No doubt realizing that, Mari moaned in fright, while Hul swore under this breath.
“This way,” Lod whispered. “But move quietly.”
Lod led the way and Hul brought up the rear. Their feet slued in the mucky soil, and soon water sloshed around their ankles. Here and there, reeds grew. Then they stepped out of the infernal darkness. It was as if they walked through a wall, this one composed of densely packed leaves. As they emerged from the leafy wall, they saw that beyond them spread a glimmering lake of bright motes and a hellish moon the color of burnt blood. The lake or swampy pond brilliantly reflected the stars and the Blood Moon high in the night sky. After the murky forest, the brightness of it startled them.
A ring of the giant trees surrounded the lake or the swampy pond. It was like a wooden amphitheater, the water like a gigantic bowl.
Lod bent low. “Ripples,” he whispered. “It… moves that way.” He pointed in the direction they’d been traveling. “That way is the river.”
“If this is a lake, why is it so shallow?” Hul asked.
“No lake,” whispered Lod. “The Hiddekel overflows its banks. This is the runoff and only looks deep because of the starlight. I suspect at its deepest that it’s only a few feet.”
“Should we wade through it or skirt along its edge?” asked Hul.
The screaming cry of rage sounded very close now. It came from behind in the forest they had just exited.
“Head through the middle,” whispered Lod. “But don’t run. This creature has moved fast through the forest. It will move much faster than we can. So it’s senseless to wind ourselves trying to outdistance it.”
“We should hide,” Hul said.
“There is nowhere to hide,” Mari said.
Lod could see her better in the moonlight. Her hair was disheveled, but her features looked even lovelier in the night. Her formerly white linen dress was torn in places, exposing flesh.
Lod led the way toward the middle of this sprawling pond. There was grass underfoot, not mushy soil or reeds. It told him this was a normal area flooded with water. A lake would have a different bottom. As former rat bait, he knew about watery textures. That had been so long ago in Shamgar. He had often fought while afloat in those canals. With bare hands and a fierce desire for life, he had faced one-hundred-pound rats, misshapen creatures of monstrous dimension, at least compared to a normal rat. He didn’t want to discover what sort of monstrosity tracked them now. If—
“Look,” whispered a horrified Hul.
Lod twisted around as Mari gasped.
Out of the forest stepped an anthropomorphic beast of hideous aspect. It had size and shape like a giant white ape of the Hanun Mountains. It was seven feet tall, maybe taller. It was hard to tell because it didn’t walk fully erect. It had similar shoulders as a white ape. They were of massive proportions and it had a hairy torso. Long arms dangled and terminated in curved claws like a great sloth. It shuffled upright on short hind legs, bowed and thick. The long arms had outsized knuckles, and supporting the claws were fingers like a giant lemur. Its head was ghastly, with a protruding snout like a wolf or a great cat, with a low sloping forehead. The two triangular-shaped ears swiveled toward them and then lay flat against its skull, perhaps indicating rage.
The beast threw its head back and screamed, seeming then like a humanoid lion.
“What is it?” whispered Hul.
“It is a son of Esus,” Mari croaked. “It has come to collect my soul for its father.”
With a swift tug, Lod freed his short sword and notched knife.
“Are you mad?” whispered Hul. “We cannot face it and hope to survive. We must run for our lives.”
“Then run,” snapped Lod, his eyes fixed on the abomination.
The beast went to all fours and moved easily and smoothly, shuffling like a white ape of the Hanun Mountains. Lod had no doubt that if the beast desired, it could run fast on its four limbs. He noticed that its fur was slick as if the beast had sweated. And now a foul odor drifted to them.
“It stinks like a boar,” said Hul. He had his axe out, gripped with both hands and his feet braced wide.
It was then Lod noticed the leather belt that circled the creature’s furry waist. A heavy wallet was attached to the belt. And a big stone club was thrust through a loop. The head of stone was massive. If it hit either of them, it would shatter their bodies and perhaps obliterate their faces into wet pulp.
“It’s armed,” Hul whispered in horror.
Behind them, Mari was quietly weeping, with her face in her hands.
“Woman,” said Lod. “Help us fight the beast, and you may live to see the sunrise.”
Mari lifted a tear-streaked face. “Fight?” she asked weakly. “You cannot slay the god’s son. This is the night of the Blood Moon. He has come to collect our souls.”
“That one knows nothing about souls,” said Lod. “That stench…. I think he saves putrid meat in his wallet. That’s the only place he plans to put us, other than in his cannibal gut.”
“That thing isn’t human,” Hul protested.
The beast, creature, son of Esus, whatever it was, halted abruptly. It drew itself up into a two-legged stance. The beast regarded them, and the lips on its protruding snout drew back to reveal heavy fangs.
“Meat,” the creature said in an odd, tortured manner, using lips, jaws, tongue and vocal cords never meant to utter human speech. “Come. Crawl to me, meat.”
“It speaks,” said Hul, in horror.
The creature snarled, and it snatched its stone-headed club from its belt. It pointed the stone club at Hul, and said, “You, meat.”
“It’s a demon,” whispered Hul. “It understands us.”
Lod never took his eyes from the beast. He had no doubt that it was swift. Its size, its immense muscles, its no doubt animal strength… he had only one hope against a thing like that. When it rushed to kill them, he had to plunge his short sword into its chest and hope to pierce the heart. A single blow from that stone club would obliterate any of them. To believe he could hack it to death—no, the single, stabbing blow was his only chance for victory. He had to goad it into rushing them. He had to make it desire their deaths with a mindless bloodlust. It looked like an animal. If the Zimrian legends were true, it was half-animal, the offspring of the High Born Esus and a beast.
Blasphemy of nature, enemy of man and foe to Elohim, Lod hated the creature and he feared it.
“Emim,” Lod said.
The hideous head swiveled toward him.
Lod waded through the ankle-high water. He motioned with his sword. “Well, come on then. It’s time for you to die. With such a hideous appearance as you boast, you must wish for a quick end to your misery.”
The anthropomorphic beast snarled another of its hunting cries. It lifted the heavy mallet high into the air. Then it launched itself at Lod, who had devised further insults to try to goad it. Instead, the monster nearly caught Lod by surprise. It moved in a three-legged gait with astonishing speed. It held the stone club high. Water splashed around it, the drops cascading in the starlight.
It had to outweigh a man by three or four times. It was surely stronger than any five m
en. Lod’s blood chilled as the creature loomed before him like a charging rhinoceros. Lod clenched his teeth together. He gathered himself, knowing he had this single chance for victory and needing perfect timing and execution.
Then it all happened in a blur. Lod hurled his knife. The creature ignored it, even as the blade gashed its hairy skin. The heavy stone club came whistling down. There was no possible hope of parrying such a heavy weapon. Lod ducked, but he didn’t hurl himself out of its path. He toyed with death, and he felt the heavy air brush past him as the club missed by less than the thickness of his blade. The terrible creature was before him. Lod threw himself at it, aiming his short sword, stabbing, grabbing the hilt with his second hand and plunging the steel into a vast region of muscled pectoral. The blade slid between iron-hard ribs and surely slammed home into the meat of the heart.
In the tense seconds that followed, the creature dropped its club and mauled Lod. It grabbed him, the fingers crushing and pulping flesh. It twisted Lod so his tendons stretched to snapping. His muscles were yanked and his bone-ends nearly wrenched out of their sockets. If the brutal punishment had gone on any longer, Lod would have likely been torn apart. Instead, the blade stuck in its heart did its deadly work and killed the monster.
It bellowed, and it pitched forward into the water, nearly drowning Lod as it drove him down underneath its bulk.
“Help me!” shouted Hul.
Lod groaned in agony as Hul and Mari dragged him out from underneath the giant carcass. Blood seeped from his torn flesh. It hurt to move. Lod realized that the beast would have manhandled all three of them in short order if it had lived. Its strength had been phenomenal.
“You slew a son of Esus,” Mari whispered in awe.
Lod gasped painfully from where he sat in the water.
“Can you move?” Hul asked.
With terrible determination, Lod worked up to his feet. He swayed. A lesser man would never have survived those few grim seconds in the beast’s embrace. His iron-hard muscles and heavy bones had absorbed brutal punishment, the near limit of their capacity.
“You’re bleeding,” whispered Mari, who dared touch his bloody neck with her fingers.
Lod stared at the immense beast lying in the water. He never wanted to face something like that again. To judge his attack so finely—
Lod shuddered, and that forced another groan from his lips.
“We dare not wait here,” Hul said, looking at him closely.
“No,” Lod whispered. “We must get to the boat and cross the Hiddekel.”
Mari stared at him. She glanced once more at the awful beast. She nodded slowly, and she came to Lod.
“It was not a god, was it?” she asked. “It was just another monster like the thag. But this monster could speak.”
“It was greater than the thag,” Lod said.
Mari nodded, and said, “Let me help you.”
It hurt Lod to lift an arm onto her shoulder, but he managed.
Hul returned the thrown, notched dagger. The sword in the beast’s heart—none of them could turn such a heavy corpse.
Mari helped steady Lod. Then the three of them continued to wade through the shallow lake. Hul took the lead. Lod limped and Mari did what she could to help him.
-10-
Crossing the swirling black waters at night proved a harrowing ordeal. The Hiddekel raged with powerful currents, driven to a frenzy by the spring melt. Their formerly hidden boat bobbed in the crazed grip of surging waves and deadly crosscurrents.
Despite his aching bones and wrenched joints, Lod took the oars from Hul and battled the river. His waterborne skills were tested to the limit. By the time they reached the Kish shore, Lod’s iron limbs throbbed with fatigue. Even his mighty frame and fierce will could sustain so much and no more. Hul dragged the boat into hiding. Lod floundered into a tangle of thick grass and slumped to his side. In seconds, he slept like one dead.
***
During those last hours of the Blood Moon as Lod slumbered and Hul kept guard, terrible wickedness occurred across the black waters in the Zimri Forest.
A miasma of evil rose like a drifting vapor from around the blazing fires of the gathered Zimrians. Despite his battered appearance and hoarse, rope-burned voice, Amalaric waxed eloquent, with the afterganger of Jarn Shield-Breaker gripping his shoulder and invading his soul with beguiling, spellbinding words. The forest warriors watched mesmerized, horrified to witness this embodiment of living death.
Harsh chants soon rose from around the heaped bonfires. Slowly at first and then with greater fever, a mass hysteria gripped those listening to Amalaric. Warriors danced. Shamans shrieked and sacrifices died screaming on hastily built stone altars. Wildly beating hearts were torn from gory chests. The shamans hurled the twitching organs onto the flames. Some beat even there, cooked, sending tendrils of greasy smoke into the night sky and a vile stench rolling throughout the encampment. The wicked smell intoxicated the dancing warriors. They chanted to Esus. Their fervor helped fuel an awful spell, the miasma that drifted from the gathered throng.
The vaporous evil floated across the raging Hiddekel. It was a portent of vile sorcery, seeking, searching for hearts and minds to beguile. Hatred, violence, terror, panic and lust. Searing, wicked passions stirred with intensity.
The Blood Moon held sway in the darkness, and only with reluctance did the seemingly burnt moon relinquish its dominance of the heavens.
The roaring bonfires consumed the sap-rich logs, leaving gray ashes and cooling embers. The dancing warriors collapsed with the dawn. The shamans stumbled into their huts. Amalaric and the afterganger disappeared, perhaps to plot in some damp hole while the sun ruled the day.
It was a cold day, however, with drifting fog on both sides of the Hiddekel River. Strange clouds blocked the fiery orb of the sun, and stranger emotions motivated the hosts of various souls.
A Kishite peasant in his hut erupted with rage over his undercooked porridge. He had shouted at his wife of twenty years yesterday concerning the same thing. This time, his stool flew back. He lunged for his cudgel, planning to threaten her into obedience. But his wife let her tongue lash with criticism concerning his slovenly ways. The cudgel whistled and thudded many times, leaving her dead on the dirt floor. The peasant went to his field, satisfied that finally justice had arrived in his hut. He didn’t have long to enjoy his sentiment, as an angry ox disliked the tightness of its harness and gored him to death.
A scoundrel in the Assur encampment slipped into a merchant’s tent, plotting theft. Instead, he drew his dagger and plunged it into the slumbering guard’s kidney. Two days ago, the guard had cuffed him across the back of the head for a misspoken word. The thief became so enamored with his vengeance, that he roared curses at the twitching man.
Soon thereafter, guards hauled the thief before an officer of Assur. The officer pronounced death. In less than an hour, the thief swung from a gibbet, crows squabbling amongst themselves around his head for the choice morsel of his eyes.
The warlord of Assur awoke that morning and decided he had finished waiting for the brutes across the river. It was time to make these lazy Kishite bastards help pay for the upkeep of his host. So he roared orders, demanding his spearmen to pull up stake and march inland. He would billet his officers in proper homes and live off the land’s bounty to supply his spearmen with sustenance.
Later that afternoon, Lod, Hul and Mari discovered the dead thief dangling from the gibbet. The corpse was quite alone, staring with eyeless sockets at the scattered debris of the abandoned camp. The army’s direction of march was easy to determine. They followed it, weary and irritable, hating the cloudy day.
***
Three days after the Blood Moon, guards admitted Lod, Hul and Mari into Naram-Sin’s chambers.
The warlord of Assur had marched west to Lagash, a wooden-walled settlement of Kish situated on the top of a hill. It boasted nearly seven hundred Kishites and a local hetman with a large wooden house. The bulk of
the Assurite host camped at the bottom of the hill in tents and lean-tos. Oxen and milk cows roasted over large fires, and there were many young Lagash maidens sprawled in the dirt in the grip of a drunken spearman. The Assurite officers were billeted in the choicest homes of Lagash. That still meant mud-walled houses badly crawling with lice and infested with mice. Lod witnessed more than one officer sitting outside the house, titled back in a chair as he guzzled whatever alcoholic drink the man had found in his host’s cupboards.
The hetman’s home had wooden floors and contained several tall wine jars imported from Shurrupak, in Shinar to the south. The wine jars were taller than the son of Esus Lod had slain. They were kiln-baked, glazed and showed artistic scenes on the sides, beginning with a shield-carrying spearman in recline. Lod suspected that an appreciable portion of the hetman’s wealth was the red wine in the jars and the exotic pottery itself.
As Lod, Hul and Mari were ushered through the house, a weeping serving wench stood on a ladder. She unwound a string, lowering a jug into the tall jar.
Lod had mostly recovered from the grim mauling he’d sustained. The left side of his face was still badly discolored with purple and yellow bruises. He could move without pain now, but his muscles were sore. Given another few days, he would be as fit as ever.
Hul wore a cocky grin and strode proudly as befitted a conquering barbarian. Before rushing to see Naram-Sin, he had insisted on paying a Kishite woman to wash his garments and polish his leather. His furs looked as soft as a wolf’s shiny pelt and the oiled leather had a rich sheen when the light struck it just right.
Lod had purchased a new garment for Mari, a simple Kishite dress that reached down past her knees. She went barefoot, but had washed herself as they’d waited for Hul’s clothes. She had combed her long hair so it gleamed.
Now they stood in Naram-Sin’s chambers, the hetman’s best. It had a stone fireplace. Logs crackled there, heating the room nicely. Naram-Sin sat on a sturdy wooden chair at the head of a table. His officers were ranged on either side of him, sitting on benches. They feasted on jellied eel, roasted mutton and millet cakes, with garlic, beets and mustard, and silver chalices filled with the hetman’s finest wine. The silver implements and chalices were part of the warlord’s campaigning equipment.
The Lod Saga (Lost Civilizations: 6) Page 19
