What he found out, as the training progressed, was that the Keldara were far from “simple farmers.” They took to military training as if they had been born with a rifle in their hands. Enthusiastic didn’t begin to cover it; he realized, quickly, that he had unleashed a monster.
The reason for their response trickled out, slowly. He still wasn’t sure he knew the whole story. But one part he found out even before the training began: the Keldara were not “true” Georgians; they were a living remnant of an ancient elite force called the Varangian Guard. The Varangians were Norse, mostly from Russia, hired by the Byzantine Emperors as their personal bodyguards.
In the Keldara, the fierce warrior spirit of the Viking was a present day reality. They had to survive as farmers, but at heart they were reavers and warriors that sought death in battle so that they could ascend to their heaven: “the Halls of Feasting”, Valhalla. They masked as Christians but practiced their ancient worship of “the Father of All”, Odin, in secret. Their preferred weapon was the axe and they trained with them as seriously as they learned to plow.
They were, in fact, born with a weapon in their hand. When a Keldara male was born, one of the ancient battleaxes the Fathers kept — axes handed down over literally millenia — was placed in his hands and the hands closed over the great hilt. The first thing they learned to grasp was a weapon.
The Keldara had always had a lord and that person had always been a “foreigner”, a mercenary who was not of the government that controlled them. Often they had been northern European adventurers, knights, cavalrymen, wandering bravos, over the ages the position and weapons had changed but not the pattern.
There was even a name for the person: Kildar.
Mike was but the latest in a long string of foreign mercenaries who had arrived, trained the Keldara in the latest innovations in bringing harm to an enemy and then used them to bring that harm.
That was fine with the Keldara. They just went on. As long as they had their beer, and incredible beer it was, and someone to kill in the name of their Kildar and for the glory of the Father of All, they were happy.
They were called by the locals, and even the Chechens, The Tigers of the Mountains. Simply saying those words to rural Georgians caused them to make the sign of the evil eye and shy away.
Mike swung the binoculars around the valley, idly wondering what the world would bring to the Keldara next. Chechens had come and been defeated, the Keldara being then right off their first day on the range. Another mission in Albania had started as a lie and been made truth by their burning spirit. The toxic result resided in the vaults of the caravanserai, a troubling burden he tried his very best to forget.
He looked down at the homes of the Keldara, low stone buildings with slate roofs and caught sight of a group of Keldara militia sitting outside their barracks, working on weapons and taking in the remaining light of the mild late-fall day. They seemed… happy. Why shouldn’t they be? It was a nice day, they had weapons in their hands and, for the moment, nobody was trying to kill them. Of course, they looked even more happy when people were trying to kill them and they were responding in kind.
Where, he wondered, would the Keldara descend next, following their Kildar aViking to bring fire and axe and ruin?
“I saw it, I tell you.”
Sion Kulcyanov was eighteen, just. Tall and more slender than the “standard” Kulcyanov look he had the Kulcyanov bright blond, nearly white, hair and blue eyes. He was considered probably the most handsome of the Kulcyanov’s with a squared chin that had a slight cleft, high Scandinavian cheekbones and eyes with a very slight epicanthic fold. His blue eyes were the most notable feature, though. “Striking” was the term that men usually used. “Piercing” was another. Women outside the Keldara girls normally just sighed.
Sion did not consider himself particularly handsome. And among the Keldara he really wasn’t. Oh, he was better than the average, perhaps the best looking among them. But the Keldara, male and female, were invariably so good looking people had a hard time believing it. He might be the “best” but in his general age group there were at least twenty guys that most women, internationally, would count as a “ten” for looks. And the low end was probably Shota, the great dumb ox, who would count as an “eight” in any normal society. A dumb eight. But an eight nonetheless.
Sion’s eyes might have looked nice but they had other assets. He was posessed of vision that was normally reserved for birds of prey. Far-sight was the term. Where other men had to use binoculars he simply… peered.
In America with his phenomenal reactions, high intelligence and incredible eyesight he’d have been a shoe-in for fighter pilot training.
In the Keldara he was spotter for the top team sniper, Lasko Ferani.
With his relative youth, few of the militiamen were much older but few younger, and his anomalous position, his status wasn’t the highest in the militia. Which was why he found the present argument slow going.
“The tigers have been gone for years,” Efim Devlich said, shaking his head. The machine-gunner was somewhat old in the teams at twenty-seven and well regarded. So his argument held more weight. “And there aren’t any anywhere around here. So, tell me, Pee-Boy, where did it come from and why hasn’t anyone else seen it?”
Sion had four kidneys, a not unusual, if unrecognized, mutation among the Keldara. It, perhaps, explained why they could drink so much beer without notable effect. That and the fact that they were given weak beer while still nursing. But one result of four kidneys was a tendency to have to urinate more often than normal. Sion had never quite lived down an accident he’d had when he was six.
“Well,” Sion answered, dryly, “it might be because I can see better, yes?”
The group chuckled and nodded. Just as everyone knew that Sion had peed his pants during Sunday Church when he was six, they also knew his eyesight was phenomenal.
“Well,” Efim said, shrugging, “I’ll believe it when I see it. Or hear it. They roar, you know, just like lions. We will know the tigers have returned when we hear their roar. Now, it’s time for dinner. I would suggest, though, that you keep this to yourself, Sion. Perhaps, if there was a tiger, he did not want to be seen. Not yet.”
“I will,” Sion said, shrugging. “But one day, Efim, you will hear the roar. Then you will know: the tigers have returned.”
Mike opened up the side gate of the harem garden and made his way through the dark yard, limping slightly. The path up the mountain was enough of a ballbuster but finding his way down, in the dark, was always tricky. The late summer blooms filled the air with a heady fragrance but he was concentrated on just making it to the back door. The trail down had been, as always, a ball buster. There was one spot on the trail that, no matter what he did, he slid. It was tough enough getting up, a slick portion of worn granite at about a sixty degree angle. There were a few finger and toeholds on the way up, but coming down in the dark the best bet was to just slide it. This time he’d done just that, taking his ruck off and letting it follow him down in a barely controlled slide. Fortunately there was a wide wedge of overlaying sandstone at the end of the section of granite and he and the ruck had arrived in one piece. If he’d slipped very far to the right, though, it was a fifty meter fall to the next more or less flat spot.
Very few of the windows were lit, which made making his way through the garden more a matter of memory than sight. Although the Keldara had ended up pulling more than two dozen girls out of the Balkans slave trade, Mike wasn’t about to bring them all back as part of his “harem.” They had been brought to the caravanserai, but only temporarily. He’d set the harem manager and Vanner on finding a spot for them and the two of them had tracked down a parochial girl’s school in Paraguay of all places that was willing to take them. Mike had also offered the girls currently in the harem the option of going and two of them had left.