"Fydor! Why the hell have you left your post?"
The guard grabbed Fydor by a shoulder and spun him around—only it wasn't Fydor after all.
The Akkadian intruder had abandoned his Yeti cape for the furs of the sentry he'd killed—the late Fydor—and right now he was facing another of those guards, and rather rudely sending a stream of steaming urine at the man's legs.
The put-upon, peed-upon guard reflexively looked down at his breeches, giving Mathayus just the moment he needed to head-butt the bastard into unconsciousness. The crack of it echoed off the surrounding mountains like small thunder.
The guard dropped into the snow like the dead weight he was, and Mathayus returned to his current mission—that is, finishing the piss he was taking. A man could not go into battle, after all, with any distractions.
Within the log fortress, the captain was removing from the flames of the fireplace his scimitar, which he had heated up until the steel glowed a pulsing red. Grasping the scimitar's hilt, the captain fought his growing discomfort with some braggadocio, slicing the air all around Jesup, tauntingly.
"Which limb do I take first?" the captain said, not so much to the Akkadian as to the crowd, like a musician soliciting requests.
"The right leg!" one drunken warrior cried.
"The left!" yelled another.
Others seemed to prefer the arms, with preferences running (not surprisingly) to the right or the left.
Throughout all of this, the prisoner remained unmoved. The captain, for all his boasting before his men, was wondering: What does the Akkadian know that we don't?
Outside, another guard wore a pensive expression, as if he too were pondering that question; this was, however, an illusion, as—despite his wide-open eyes—the man was quite dead, propped up to appear to still be on guard, despite the spear of an icicle stuck into the side of his turban, a little blood around the entry, frozen and black now.
The man who had accomplished this, of course, was Mathayus, in a hooded cloak, who at the moment was climbing an exterior wall of the timber citadel, two ropes dragging behind him tied to a huge boulder that the Akkadian towed behind him. The weight of the boulder made the warrior's feat all the more difficult, as—two floors up now—he grasped for purchase between logs.
At that moment, the spread-eagled Jesup was watching the captain approach him with that red-hot scimitar. Soon its sizzling blade was just under the prisoner's chin. The captain flashed rotten teeth in a sadistic smile, as if to say, "I don't fear you or your big talk."
Jesup merely returned the smile.
And said, "Maybe the gods will have pity on you ... because my brother will not."
The captain tried to laugh at that, through his fetid smile; but the laugh caught in his throat—there was something deadly serious in the Akkadian's words that told the warrior this was no boast. And it was not.
For on the roof, at that very moment, Mathayus sat on the lip of the black-billowing chimney; in his hands, the boulder was held high over his head, as if he were trying to impress small children with a strongman stunt.
But it was not children he sought to impress— however childish the minds of these enemy warriors might be.
Taking a deep breath, Mathayus scooted forward and dropped down into the chimney, still holding that massive stone over his head, so that as he disappeared down, the boulder stayed behind, and plugged up the chimney, blocking it until only the tiniest wips of smoke found escape.
Almost immediately within the chamber below, thick black smoke began to plume outward from the fireplace. The captain forgot his prisoner, for the moment, and with everyone else in the room turned his attention to the massive stone fireplace and the gathering fumes.
Despite the dark acrid clouds already swarming to engulf the room, the captain bravely stepped forward, toward the threat, and when the arrow came streaking out from the billowing smoke, it was as if the captain had sought the death that now hit him so hard he was hurled like a snowball across the room.
Jesup smiled; the smoke smelled wonderful to him. He enjoyed the view from his place of honor, as three more warriors—standing at a counter drinking wine—were thrust off their feet by arrows from the fireplace, the smoke consuming air like ink in water.
The other warriors were on their feet, drawing their swords—if they wore them—or scrambling for them, if the weapons had been resting somewhere. The women froze, all thought of finding hiding places banished out of fear.
A quartet of warriors bravely charged into the blackness of the smoke, screaming war cries that got cut off in the clattering clash of steel on steel. Then the warriors stumbled out of the dark fumes; Jesup smiled wider, the wenches screamed, as the four men—headless!—pitched to the rough floor where blood spilled from their necks like knocked-over wine bottles.
The other warriors—while brave—were understandably unnerved by this, and in their moment of hesitation, Mathayus—his muscular frame cloaked in soot—stepped out of the puffing blackness, a massive bow in one hand, scimitar in the other. With the orangeness of flames glowing through the dark smoke, he was wreathed in a hellish aura, his pant-legs on fire, hood too, a demonic vision for these superstitituous fools to consider, along with the headless evidence of their fellow soldiers scattered on the floor before them.
Out of his soot-covered face came wide white eyes and a wider white smile—seemingly crazed— and he said, "I... am ... death!"
That was all it took.
The rest of the warriors, the wenches too, went running for the door, the effect almost comic as they crawled over each other, squeezing out the passage. Few of them bothered grabbing their furs, and ran willingly into the freezing wilderness.
"Hey!" Jesup said, struggling at his bindings. "Don't let them go!"
Mathayus, patting out the flames on his legs and hood, ignored this.
"I promised you'd kill them all," Jesup told him. "Don't make a damned liar out of me!"
Mathayus sighed, and snarled in mock disgust. "Lucky for you we share the same mother."
And the soot-covered Akkadian cut his brother's bonds.
Soon they were on horseback with the fortress in flames at their back—the logs burnt well. Jesup, poised to gallop to freedom, glanced at his brother, who had hesitated for some reason, those dark, piercing eyes studying the sky.
"What is it?" Jesup asked.
Slowly scanning the faded blue above, Mathayus said, softly, "I feel.. . like I am being ... watched."
"Well, if you are," Jesup said, "perhaps we should leave."
Mathayus shrugged, cracked the reins, and they pulled away, dragging behind them a wooden sleigh-like apparatus piled with dead warriors. They were mercenaries, after all, and had a bounty to collect.
And far away, in the fabled city of Gomorrah, a sorcerer in a winged collar, lost in a vision, indeed watched the Akkadian warrior called Mathayus.
Watched, and waited.
T
oday, many centuries after our tale was lived, the Middle East remains a cauldron of hate, fear and turmoil. How little has changed: before the civilizing time of the Pharaohs, centuries prior to Genghis Khan cutting his bloody swath, long preceding the conquests of Alexander, these barren lands somehow inspired conflict, a wasteland where a score of warring tribes sought dominion.
Imagine, then, a golden papyrus map of that region—at that ancient time, three thousand years before Christ, such a map would depict the entire known world—encompassing the fabulous storied kingdoms of Babylon, Mesopotamia and those most infamous of cities, Sodom and Gomorrah. Such realms seem the stuff of legend, yet ancient books of truth—the Bible is but one—say different; these were places as real as the world around us, and just as dangerous.