MINDAZA

12. KHALLEL'S DEATH

One man threw the young girl aside as if she were a sack of grain, and pulled his sword from its scabbard.
"And who do you think you are?" he asked casually.
Mindaza could tell he was an expert because of the familiarity with which he held his long and brightly used sword. Mindaza realized without thinking that he also had a weaker left leg from an old injury, and scars on his face.
"I am here, to stop your wrong doings!" Mindaza replied in a loud voice. But the man was still moving near to her, there is no fear in his face.
"So you are a hero?" one man said and smiled. He was holding a jar, and he looked drunk.
"I think you are lost, or maybe I should kill you now, ugly girl?! "
The man takes the initiative to move first, and attack Mindaza with his sword and says, "This is your last day in this cruel world."
The statement sounded exaggerated. With low swords and raised heads, the soldiers from the north gave a snort and moved forward.
Mindaza felt the defender stir in her grasp and waited until the Northern men were close, turned and ran. His coarse laugh followed her, rising as she stumbled and fell.
"What we do here is a pleasure, and, of course, that includes sightseeing, drinking and eating. But you came to fight for this village?!" the man explained and sighed.
"But you are killing innocent people, even children and old people you sympathize with. Where is your mercy? If I can say anything, you are indeed a dangerous wild animal, and all of you must be exterminated." She said. Mindaza's words make other warriors irate about killing her.
"Fight girl!" another warrior from the north shouted, and laughed.
"Yeah right, this is my fight!" Mindaza told herself. When she managed to get herself back up from the ground.
The man loomed over her as she rolled onto her back and stared upward. Almost casually, he poised his sword above her throat, but the slight hesitation as he picked his spot granted Mindaza an exact time to kick out his weak leg and swing as he winced.
The blade took the man on his left side between his third and fourth ribs, and blood spurted in a crimson cloud. Mindaza twisted her sword, withdrew, stood up, and finished him with a single thrust to his heart.
Because of that, the other northern warriors were eager to oblige. Three of them were drawing swords and rushing toward her, while a fourth released his axe from a log of wood and wandered over to enjoy the slaughter that was to happen. This man smiled with his two silver teeth.
Mindaza waited for them to get near. She could temporarily ignore the man on the left because he was blocking the man in the middle's sword arm. As a result, she swiped across the much more threatening man's eyes on the right and kept swinging, catching the next man's nose and neatly splitting it in two with the defender's tip.
There was just one man left to kill after he yelled and grasped at his face. When the warrior's allies fell by his side, Mindaza could see the hatred in his eyes. She was aware that he was too furious to be calm.
"Come on Northern warriors! You like this bloody killing, right?"
Mindaza taunted and stepped aside to give herself more space to swing. The Northern warriors roared some incoherent oath and charged straight at her. Their action seemed to move in slow motion, with her sword swinging from behind her head.
She raised her sword, deflected its blow, felt the impact of steel on steel, whirled it in a semicircle, and then flicked it upward and sideways.
Another warrior sword was ripped from their grasp and sent spinning into the air. He stared for an instant, but recovered and lunged forward, straight onto Mindaza's sword as she spit him through the throat.
After witnessing the death of his companions, the axe man was more cautious. He shifted his weapon from hand to hand, circling Mindaza to look for her weakness before committing himself to fight.
"I will be the last warrior that will end your precious life" the axe man said. His neck sounded like he was exercising by twisting it left and right. He brought his two fists together, and his big arms came out.
Mindaza waited for him even though she was tired, but more alert, unsmiling, as she felt the power of some kind of "thrill" through her. At last, the axeman advanced, feinting low toward her legs before stepping back and delivering an overarm swing that would have cloven her skull and travelled right down her body.
Mindaza's blade sliced through the wooden handle of the axe, leaving the warrior with twelve inches of useless ash wood. When Mindaza recovered, he feinted at his eyes and sliced with a wicked under-and-up cut that emasculated him and continued upward to gut him cleanly. The axeman fell to the ground and stared as his intestines coiled around him, and so his face turned in horror images, until his last breath.
It took an hour for Mindaza to fight for these northern men, her first fight, and her first victory. She smiled, thinking that she was excited about telling her mother.
Later on, she heard the whir of the thrown spear, inclined her head, so it passed harmlessly. Mindaza looked at where it came from.
Two arrows were next, their flights like the screaming of demented wind, but Mindaza flicked one from the air and ignored the second.
"I don't want to harm any other life!"
Mindaza yelled, as the Northern warriors of men formed a semicircle around her, with the flames and smoke from the burning village rising behind them, flickering orange against the purple-bruised clouds of the sky.
As the warriors approached, they showed her their evil smile. Mindaza shifted her weight to her left foot, so they had to alter their attack, crossing one another in their eagerness to kill.
Mindaza waited until they were so bunched together that they blocked each other's sword arms, then she stepped forward with controlled swings of Defender that took the legs from three warriors and left them screaming on their stumps.
The next warrior hesitated for a second and directly cost him his life, as Mindaza drew her sword directly through his throat.
"Leave them to me!"
A nearly toothless grin shone on Khallel. He drew his two-handed sword from its scabbard on his back and slashed diagonally downward, cutting a warrior nearly in half.
Mindaza nodded, as her appreciation as the other northern men turned to run.
"You're not late!" Mindaza said and took a deep breath. She told Khallel, who held out a restraining hand. The sword spun, blade over hilt, once, twice, three times before it lodged in the spine of the running man.
Mindaza watched the Northern warriors fall. She did not see the spear that a young warrior hurled until it thrummed past, with the shaft catching a glancing blow on the side of her head. She yelled and dropped, clutching at her injury.
A few of the warriors heard her scream and witnessed her fall, but most of them chose to run forward, roaring for their lives.
Mindaza could not get back to her feet. Dazed, she saw Khallel take seven steps forward and stand, sword poised, to meet them.
"Khallel, be careful!"
Her voice was slurred, her vision blurred as she watched events unfold.
Khallel was like a rock, a chunk of granite around which the tide of Northern men surged and broke.
While Mindaza forced herself to her feet as Khallel felled the first man with a short stab to the groin, ducked the swing of an axe, slashed the Achilles tendon of a third and cracked the top of his helmet onto the nose of the next.
Mindaza took a step forward and stopped in sudden panic. She was not a warrior! She was an island girl; she had never seen a sword until only a few days ago and had certainly never killed a man before today.
Khallel laughed as he crossed swords with a lithe, red-haired man, gasped as his opponent nicked his neck, and roared in triumph as he thrust his blade into the man's chest.
Mindaza took a step backwards, shocked at the raw blood and shattered bodies of the battlefield. This horror was much worse than anything she had ever imagined; worse than her worst visions of hell.
Two warriors attacked Khallel together, one on either side. He parried the blow from the man on his right, but swung left just an instant too late to stop the young man's blade licking in at the level of his kidneys. His roar of pain raised the hairs on Mindaza's neck.
"Khallel, are you okay?"
She covered her mouth with her hands as the Northern warrior's sword rose and fell. Khallel is like an old man now, a plaything to these active young warriors. They killed him slowly, chopping him to pieces as he collapsed, and laughing as his blood flowed.
In time, the spiral queen came. The slogan rose high in the air.
"The Spiral Hunters!" a warrior suddenly yelled. Mindaza heard it.
A group of men and women that Mindaza had known all her life were now wielding swords and axes with as much aplomb as the most doughty of champions. They came in a wedge formation with Sulaya leading the rest. All of them crashed into the Northern warriors, and hacked them down in seconds.
"Mother!"
Mindaza could not prevent herself from shaking. Tears scored her face and dripped from her chin.
"I am sorry.. I got him killed."
Sulaya stood over Khallel's body.
"He chose the warrior's path and died in combat," she said quietly. "It was his time. You had nothing to do with it."
"If I hadn't..."
Sulaya put two fingers across her lips.
"You don't have to worry about what might not happen, Mindaza."
Sulaya said and she stepped back.
"It should be the northern warriors" Mindaza explained.
"That's the rule of a warrior. Without you, d is only a sword. But without a defender you are only an island girl, so next time, never let your defender go."
"I want to go home and never fight again.!"
Mindaza shook her head, still in tears, staring at the scene of horror and the butchered corpse of Khallel. "Never, ever!" she added.
Sulaya retreive Khallel's sword and threw it at Mindaza.
"Clean that blade, and keep it safe"
Mindaza saw that Ganadara spat on the nearest body of dead northern warriors.
"Did you think she had bested the northern warriors in a fair fight?" Ganadara asked Sulaya.
"She had a lot to learn,"