Sword of the Gods II: Prince of Tyre

Chapter 10-1

Chapter 10

September 3,390 BC

Mesopotamian Desert

JAMIN

The son of the village chief paused as he reached the crest of the hill, thankful he'd listened to his intuition about where the Halifian tribe would pitch their tents. This late in the season, the arid plain which sat between the two great rivers grew harsh from lack of water, expunging the nomads who survived by herding flocks of goats and sheep.

His enemies…

Funny. Staring down at their pathetic tents, little more than goat-hides strung across poles too short to stand up in anyplace except the center, he had a hard time summoning the hatred he should feel towards these people. Ever since the winged demon had taken up residence in his village, the Halifian threat didn't seem all that pressing. A pair of dark-winged eagles circled above him. If what Immanu claimed was true, She-Who-Is was watching.

"If my father knew I consorted with our enemies," he said to the eagles, "the tribunal would evict me for certain."

The muscle beneath his cheek twitched in tempo to the constant anger which boiled through his veins. He was here to seek information about the real threat his own people were too stupid to see. These people knew Mikhail's people for what they were … slave owners … the ones paying gold for kidnapped Ubaid women. With his father as bespelled as his former fiancé, it was up to him to prove what the Angelic was really up to before it was too late.

He shifted the weighty pottery which sat strapped between his shoulder-blades in a pouch he had, much to his chagrin, adopted from his enemy. Knapsack, the winged demon called this contraption. The Assurians twittered over the technology he bestowed upon their village as an afterthought, clever things that pleased the simple-minded fools but never gave them any real advantage … like the firestick he'd used to shoot lightning at him while his ship had smoldered. Jamin wasn't fooled! The night he had tried to rescue Ninsianna, he had looked into the winged creatures eyes and seen something so dark and powerful it had instilled him with a sense of horror.

The Halifian's finally spotted him. He was no stranger to these people, but neither was he welcome. They tolerated him because he brought information about their mutual enemy.

With a whistle and a shout, the people of the desert herded their families into the fragile tents, little protection against an atlatl or spear. Men lined up behind their shaykh, aiming the newer technology given to them by the Amorite slavers. Amorites were the next link in the supply chain that funneled his women to Mikhail's people, the middlemen Jamin sought an introduction to for real this time. He waited until Marwan stepped to the front of the group of related tribe members, the unaffiliated raiders long gone from their midst, and moved towards him to parley.

Jamin slowly lowered the ceramic urn to the ground and stepped back, far enough to show he could not rush to pull out a hidden weapon. It was a dangerous dance he played, consorting with the desert cobra, but one he had learned via necessity, steps his father, the Chief, had never understood.

"Salam," Jamin greeted their shaykh, Marwan, in the Halifian language, leader of this family group of 30 or 40 related individuals. He was a hard man, with a beak of a nose that only accentuated the s***h that ran across his cheek like a second mouth, an ancient scar given to him by none other than Jamin's father.

"And so the boy who would be chief comes back into our midst," Marwan's cold eyes bored into him with distrust. "And bearing gifts."

"Something special," Jamin held his hands in front of him to show they were empty. "Take a look."

"I could kill you and take it anyways," Marwan said. Once upon a time that comment would have been delivered with a sneer, but not now. They had been playing this dance for months and both knew the other understood the steps. With the mercenaries gone to eke out their existence until the rains came, Marwan needed only to impress his kin.

"You could," Jamin acknowledged. "But you won't."

"Tell me why?" Marwan asked.

"Because the people of the desert are not the honorless dogs my father would have us believe," Jamin said softly.

"Dogs need to eat," Marwan said.

"I have brought food," Jamin said.

"We have gold to buy all we need," Marwan said.

Jamin glanced down at the hungry looking children peering out from beneath the flaps of the flimsy tents. Marwan wore a colored robe of woven cloth, not the fringed kilt Assurian men wore, and it looked to be new. The other men wore robes of a peculiar design he had never seen before, a sign of wealth, but the baskets which should have been filled with grain from the ongoing harvest lay empty. No Ubaid would trade with these people, nor would the Uruk to their south. The goat herd which had, only months before, grown larger with infusions of Amorite gold, now looked ragged and hungry.

"You are in luck, then," Jamin said. "For gold is what I seek."

Marwan glanced back at the kinfolk standing ten paces behind him, bows and spears aimed at the enemy who had the audacity to travel into their midst. The bows were lowered, but the two spears remained pointed in his direction, their implication clear.

"How do I know there are not cobras in this jar?"

"It is said that the people of the desert move faster than any cobra," Jamin said. "And can charm the snake to sleep with a maiden's song."

Marwan laughed as though he found this funny, his grin exposing a snaggletooth lined with black rot. The men behind him laughed as well, although Jamin did not understand the joke. He knew better than to laugh along with them lest they think him a fool.

"Perhaps you know something of our people after all?" The shaykh relaxed, although what he had said that pleased the desert leader he had no clue. Marwan stepped up to the ceramic urn, a burden that weighed at least sixty shekels, and pulled his obsidian blade. "Any tricks, and my men will kill you."

Jamin nodded.

The shaykh knocked back the lid and leaped back, watchful for the cobra he truly expected, and then waited until he was certain no snake would emerge before stepping cautiously to see what was in the jar.

"What is this?" Marwan dipped one finger in the yellow liquid.

"Oil," Jamin said. "Pressed from the stalks of flax."

"Oil?" Marwan glanced back at the men who stood at his back. "This whole jar full?"

"You have something I need," Jamin pointed to the sack which jingled at Marwan's belt. "I have brought something you need to pay for it."

"This jar will fill our needs for an entire year," Marwan said.

In Assur, such a jar would barely meet the needs of a wealthy family such as his for a month, but the people of the desert lived simple lives, bringing no more than they could carry from grazing ground to pasture. Even by Halifian standards, though, the empty grain baskets cast outside the tents, lids off because there remained nothing left to eat, was desperate. The people of the desert might be clever raiders, but the people of the river knew how to stand together, like the levies they built to hold back the spring floods.

A fluttering of pride warmed his breast. The emotion was short-lived. His people wanted not him, but the false sense of security granted by the demon which had fallen from the sky. The hatred he had nurtured for seven long months, that dark thing which pursued him into his dreams with its bottomless black eyes, bubbled to the surface. His fist clenched in tempo with the twitching of his cheek, this anger he had nurtured his entire life, but had not found form until the winged demon had taken his stick.

Marwan had seen him react thus enough times to understand what he was after.

"We have no more men to send against your winged demon," Marwan said. "There are too few of us left to stand against him and the sanctions brought against us by the Ubaid chiefs have left us short of food."

"Six women were just taken from Qattara," Jamin said.

"That was not us," Marwan said. "What do you think we are? Magicians? Qattara is leagues from here."

Jamin had suspected that to be true. His trips out to treat with the shaykh of the rival Halifian tribe had yielded a few epic blunders, the biggest being to invite the vipers into his midst to rid his village of Mikhail, but his contact had yielded other information as well. Rather than being a coherent tribe, they were more like jackals, small family units that banded together when convenient, but usually surviving each family on its own, to live or die according to the whims of the all too infrequent rain.

"You would have taken them if you could," Jamin said.

"Yes," Marwan gestured towards the empty baskets. "A shaykh needs to feed his people. But this time, it was not us. It wasn't just you the Amorite slavers double-crossed during the last raid, but us as well."

Unlike the Assurian tribe, where his father's word was law, a shaykh's influence could only be counted on to the circle of his brothers and sons. You could treat with one Halifian, but it would not prevent his cousin from a different group of tents from coming against you despite assurances from their so-called leader. On the other hand, once you formed blood-ties to a shaykh, amongst that immediate group of tents, his word was law. Violation of that law would result in instant death.

Given his father's preference for the winged demon, Jamin found himself attracted by the Halifian code of honor which valued blood ties over the law. It was the way things should be in Assur.

"Come," Marwan gestured. "We are chewing over a problem and perhaps you can be of use to us?" The Halifian leader made a show of tossing his robe over one shoulder and walked back towards the largest tent, leaving the precious jar of flaxseed oil behind.

Jamin was not fooled by the show of bravado; to turn one's back upon one's enemy. It was another step in the intricate dance of contacts who lingered between the status of friend and enemy, to show he was not afraid. The spears aimed at him gripped tighter. Marwan's intense stare at his second-in-command's eyes, the hand casually resting under his tunic, showed he was ready to turn and bury an obsidian blade into his heart with a single nod from his trusted second.

Jamin stared up at the two dark-winged eagles, circling closer to the enemy encampment, watching every move. Messengers of the goddess the Ubaid called these raptors, but all he could think of was how closely their wings resembled those of the demon who had fallen from the sky.

'Spies,' Jamin hissed to the mated pair. 'Begone.'

As soon as he stepped forward, two men rushed to collect the prize. The rest followed, hands clenched at their belts, ready to stab him if he so much as twitched. He was surprised when Marwan stopped in front of his own tent.

"Inside," Marwan gestured.

Jamin glanced from one Halifian to another, certain it was a trick. The closest he had ever gotten to Marwan's tent was the outer fringe. From the grim expression on the other men's faces, it was no trick. Jamin gulped, cognizant of how alone he was whenever he came out to treat with his father's enemies. He had heard stories about what could happen in the tent of a desert shaykh.

The floor was carpeted with luxurious felt rugs, the topmost one a bright scarlet that was rarer than rare, the more humble ones beneath layered to soften the rocks which made their way skyward from the desert sand. There were banners of the same woven cloth as the men's robes along with colorful pottery Halifians tended to avoid because the fragile urns did not adapt well to a nomadic lifestyle. New. Everything in this tent was less than six months old, material wealth purchased with gold reaped from the slave trade. Ubaid slaves, although Jamin knew they were not the only tribe being hit.