The God Reborn

Chapter 15

Daniel and the acolyte girl had lain quivering in the freezing cold muck all day and through the night as the fiery explosions emanated from the unseen terrain to the South. Their misery was compounded by a cold, misty rain that fell from the late afternoon and into the night. He dared not light a fire, not with a horrific battle raging so close by, and it was all he could do to shiver under the blankets he had piled up around himself.

The acolyte had been sobbing and crying out for most of the afternoon. In her distress, the dying girl had spoken of her friends and family. She'd had a lover, named Julius, who had betrayed her. It seemed her father had betrayed her, too. Daniel was having difficulty following all of what the girl was saying.

But his lack of comprehension was now due to the fevered, incoherence nature of the girl's utterances, not the previously insurmountable language barrier. The more the girl spoke, the more Daniel had been able to understand. Her language bore many resemblances to his own. The cadence of the acolyte's speech was more musical, the consonants softer, and the grammar more nuanced. The vocabulary itself reminded Daniel of the words used in ancient songs and poems he'd learned around a campfire as a child. But it was becoming clear that the language Daniel spoke was a dialect of the acolyte's tongue.

Daniel had taken pity on the dying girl and brought her water and small bits of stale bread he'd recovered from among the dead warriors. But he knew there was little he could do for her. The wound would be fatal in the end. Eventually, as the sounds of the distant battle faded in the afternoon, the girl had passed out. He had done what he could to keep her warm and then he had slept.

Now with the new morning dawning, he pulled the blankets off of himself and crawled over to where the girl lay. Most likely, she had died during the night. He put his hand on her forehead. Still warm.

At his touch, the girl opened her eyes and moaned the name he had heard her say so many times the previous day. "Julius, my love?"

"I'm sorry," he said painstakingly in the acolyte's dialect. "I am not Julius. Here, would you like some water?"

The girl looked at him through barely opened eyes. "Who are you?"

"Daniel," replied Daniel flatly.

The girl looked confused and stared at the ground. Finally she looked back at him and said, "I hurt."

"It's all right," Daniel soothed her, suddenly letting out a single sudden sob. "It's all right. I'll take care of you. You remind me of my daughter. Where is my daughter? Why did the reborn god take her from me?"

The girl bore an expression of incomprehension. Daniel sighed deeply, and then, speaking slowly to ensure she could understand, told her the story of the night where everything had fallen apart.

He told her how Baruch and Caleb had burst into the farmhouse when Daniel was home alone with Naomi. "You send our warriors to die cheaply, traitor," Caleb had accused him in a voice slurred with alcohol.

Daniel had sent Naomi to hide under the bed and moved himself behind the table so that there would be a barrier between him and the two angry young men. Then he had carefully flexed the fingers of his good hand and put his palm on the table in front of him as he leaned forward, trying to avoid a confrontation.

But he'd failed, just as he'd failed to stop the two attackers without killing them. When the fight was all over, he'd seen Naomi cowering in the shadows. "Come here, my dear. Are you all right?"

Naomi had approached with trepidation. Daniel could see that her limbs were shaking, and she stepped across the bloody floor as if she was afraid she would slip and fall into a pool of gore. She shied away from his embrace, and he'd seen that his chest and face were covered in sticky blood.