Chapter Two #2
He wrestled for control of the situation, trying to throw off the weight of two heavy bodies sitting on his chest and legs.
He arched his back hard, twisted every way he could think of, but the fact was, he was wrung out.
After being run through the heart and then suffering his nightly torment, there was almost nothing left inside him.
Oh, he was immortal, but he felt every single solitary second of that immortality in one way or another.
Tonight it was in the injuries he had been forced to sustain.
They weakened him, made him vulnerable. And gods help him if by some rare chance one of these men was wielding a god-made weapon.
All it would take was a simple beheading by one such weapon and that would be the end of him.
Although, sometimes … at some very low times …
he wondered if that wouldn’t be for the better.
It would certainly end the torment he suffered night after night.
But who was to say he would not face an entirely new torment should he end up in the eight hells? At least alive there was some reprieve.
And so he fought. Oh, how he fought. He kicked and snarled, threw the both of them off himself, but they quickly pinned him down again.
Still, he did not go down easy. The two men were panting hard as they held him down, their faces battered from where he had managed to punch them, their bodies bruised likewise.
“Stay down, trega,” the one nearest his head snarled at him, calling him what the Krizans called foreigners to their lands.
The Krizan on Jaykun’s chest was built for sheer brute strength.
There was no grace to him, merely muscle and ferocity.
His bottom canine teeth, as with all Krizans, tusked up over his upper lip, and they were capped in a silvery metal that gleamed in the moonlight.
The Krizans liked to adorn their prominent teeth in all manner of ways, but the warriors preferred to keep them sharp to make the men appear more vicious.
A Krizan was not above biting his enemy.
His nose was flat, his nostrils wide. He looked a great deal like one of the morari Jaykun had seen on the jetty. He had on a sealskin hat, the floppy ends of it hanging over his ears.
“So, trega, you fall to Lukan! You are perhaps not so formidable after all!” he said in his guttural, heavily accented voice.
“I presume you are Lukan?” Jaykun said dryly. He had relaxed, saving his strength for an opening when it came.
“Lukan! Greatest of all the mighty Krizan warriors!”
“Your mighty warriors looked more like sleepy women out on that battlefield today,” Jaykun said.
The Krizan roared in outrage, spittle flying from his lips. “The demon trega leaders use sorcery to win their battles! Evil trickery!”
“I hate to break it to you, but we don’t have any mages with us at present. The most dangerous things we have along those lines are the mem healers. Not very dangerous at all, I’m afraid.”
“You are a liar, trega! All trega are liars and demons!” He hissed past his plump lips. “Now we will disembowel you and cut you into little pieces, painting a picture with you on the beach for the other trega to find in the morning.”
So they didn’t realize he was the trega leader. That was perhaps a good thing, Jaykun thought. Otherwise, they would have tried to kill him immediately, using him as some sort of trophy or whatever it was the Kriz ans liked to do to the leaders of an enemy force.
“Why don’t you all just give up already? We’re going to come over your walls tomorrow, whether you like it or not. No one else has to die if you simply open the gates.”
“We would rather die than let trega like you into our city, where you will kill our children and defile our women.”
“Trust me, we don’t want anything to do with your women,” Jaykun said. To be blunt, Krizan women were twice as ugly as their hideous male counterparts.
“Again he lies,” the second warrior said. “Who wouldn’t want the beauty of a Krizan warrior woman? Kill him. His words irritate my ears.”
“Yes, do get on with it,” Jaykun said with a sigh.
His blasé tone enraged the Krizan warrior.
He balled up his fist and punched it dead-on into Jaykun’s face.
And it hurt. There was no two ways about it.
Krizan warriors were definitely strong, if not exactly bright.
Had they been bright, they would have learned how to fight on land …
seeing as how they lived on land and not on the ocean.
The Krizan pulled a dagger from his boot and reared back to plunge it into Jaykun’s chest.
Oh no. Not that again, Jaykun vowed to himself.
He wrenched a hand free somehow, surprising his over arrogant attackers and reached to catch the downward plunge, his hand grabbing the meaty forearm of the warrior and stopping the dagger dead in the air.
The warrior seemed as though he couldn’t believe his eyes for a second, couldn’t believe that Jaykun had the strength to counteract his strike.
The two struggled for several long moments, the warrior pushing down, Jaykun staving off.
Then the softest little sound slid through the air. Like a musical note, only gentler and more beautiful. The Krizan warriors froze, and to Jaykun’s surprise, all the strength behind the dagger was gone. Instead the men were suddenly tripping over themselves to withdraw.
“Prava!” one said to the other, their eyes wide. Both men scrambled off Jaykun, turned, and ran. They were trying to run so fast that they fell more than once.
Jaykun sat up, at a complete loss to explain what had just happened.
Then he heard it again. That soft, lilting note. Like a laugh. The sweetest, most singsongy laugh he’d ever heard.
He got to his feet and peered out into the moonlit darkness.
That was when he saw a figure standing there in the moonlight.
A woman. She was slight of build, tall but slim.
She had long hair that whipped around her body in the ocean breeze.
He could not tell what color it was, only that it was dark.
It fell all the way to the backs of her knees.
It could cover her entire body, he found himself thinking.
And a good thing too, for she was completely naked.
She was dark skinned—again, an undetermined color—but it appeared to be an even and beautiful tone in the moonlight.
She had small breasts, curvy hips, and long legs.
And though he couldn’t make out her features perfectly, he knew she was quite beautiful.
Not a Krizan woman—she was too tall, too lithe, too pretty.
She came closer, increasingly revealing her beauty as she drew to within five feet of him.
She was smiling softly, her eyes running down the length of him, no doubt sizing him up just as he was assessing her.
She seemed … fascinated. She reached out as if to touch him and he jerked back. Her hand lowered.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said, her voice musical and sweet.
“Who are you?” Jaykun demanded of her.
“I saw you. Saw you burn. Saw the waters boil. How did you do that? Why would you do that? Do you enjoy it? Does it not hurt? Do you do that often?”
She barely paused between questions, leaving him a moment to get over the shock of knowing he’d been watched. He supposed it had to happen sometime, but he had not seen anyone in the cave. He could have sworn he was alone.
“Did the Krizan hurt your tongue? Can you not answer? Is the moon not beautiful tonight?” She turned her face up toward it, closed het eyes, and drew in a deep breath. She opened her eyes again and looked at him, and he saw they were a pale, silvery color in the moonlight.
“Who are you?” Jaykun asked again.
“Jileana. Who are you?”
“Jaykun,” he answered in turn. “Where did you come from?”
“From the beach,” she said. “Can you show me how to make the water bubble? I want to learn how to do it.”
“No, I can’t, and trust me, you don’t want to know how.”
She frowned at him in consternation. “Very well. If you don’t wish to share. Let’s go back to the beach. It’s safer there.”
“I would much rather go back to my encampment.” He eyed her nude state. “You shouldn’t be out here … unprotected.”
“Yes, it is not safe. Men make war.”
“I am one of those men,” he told her baldly.
She took a hesitant step back. “Are you going to make war with me and my family?”
“I … I don’t know who your family is. But I don’t make war on just anyone.
In fact, I prefer not to make war. When I first go to a city, I see whom it is they worship, then I try to convince them to let mems of my goddess set up temples there.
If they refuse, I become more … forceful in my request.”
“But my family worships Diathus. We have always worshipped Diathus.”
“The goddess of the land and oceans. That would make sense, coming from … Well, I assume you are from around here. But everyone should worship Weysa as well. For without conflict there can be no peace, of the mind, the body, or the soul. We must be conflicted from time to time so that we may make the best choices and judgments, making us stronger and more sure.”
Jaykun couldn’t believe he was in the saw grass philosophizing with a naked woman, but it didn’t stop him from doing so.
“You make a very good point. I shall have you speak to my father one day. He is quite learned and enjoys such debates. My mother as well.” She turned her head suddenly and looked back toward the beach. “I have to go now. Will you come back tomorrow night?” she asked.
“You can be certain of it,” Jaykun said wryly.