Eric Flint - Mother of Demons

That must be Kopporu. She, too, realizes that the decisive moment is here.

The Utuku left began to collapse.

"Oh, shit," she heard Julius whisper.

She looked to the center, and held her breath. Joseph, Jens, and their small squad of shock troops had become isolated. Inexperienced in a large battle, using combined forces, they had overestimated the ability of the Pilgrims to keep pace with them. They were surrounded now by Utuku warriors. Here, in the relatively unblooded center, the Utuku battle commanders had been able to maintain a semblance of discipline and control. Now, seeing the demons finally immobilized, the Utuku took courage and began a frenzied assault.

The Mother of Demons watched her children begin to die. The combat was furious, the carnage incredible; and for every human boy who fell, a dozen Utuku were slain. Some strange, new, cold part of her mind took satisfaction in the fact. But Indira watched the blood gush from Harry Jackson's neck, half severed by a flail blow, and knew he would be dead within seconds; and remembered the time she had held him in her arms, trying to console a sobbing eight-year-old boy desolated by the death of the little owoc spawn he had tried to shelter. She watched an Utuku warrior, with her dying effort, wrestle Esteban Sanchez to the ground. Watched as the flails of other Utuku rained down upon him. Watched Jens try to save him, be driven back, then rally. Watched the methodical fury with which he butchered the Utuku assailing his comrade. Watched his heroic effort fail of its purpose. For even at that distance Indira could read the lifelessness in Esteban's body, when Jens finally reached him. Watched a cluster of Utuku surge over Ahmed Khoury and Ed Kincaid, stripping flesh from bones. And saw them recoil, their murderous work done, from Joseph's terrible vengeance.

The Pilgrims pushed forward, trying to break through to the isolated humans. The shield wall held them back. The Utuku warriors in the center were regaining courage, seeing the demons finally die. The Utuku flanks were now caving in completely, and Indira thought the battle would be won. But not in time to save the handful of boys trapped in the center pocket.

And now we're learning the oldest secret of war, she thought bitterly. No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.

Were it not for Joseph and Jens, she knew, the little pocket of human warriors would have been overrun by now. But those were the two strongest of the human warriors, the greatest, and they were now in the fullness of their rage, and their power, and their glory. And while a part of Indira's mind wept for her dying children, and another part quailed at the fearsome slaughter Joseph and Jens were wreaking in their downfall Some other part, some ancient part, some grim and savage part she had never known existed, tracing its long and twisted lineage back to the Incas and the Mahabharata, howled its banshee triumph and shrieked fierce exultation.

Die, cannibals, die. You face the true demons now. The great ones! The old ones born anew! The ones from the deepest pits of damnation. You do not know their names? I will name them for you, cannibals. Tremble! Wail! The one, you may call Shaka Zulu. The other, Ragnar Lothbrook.

It was only that part of Indira which kept her gaze steady, and her eyes dry. The Mother of Demons had sent her children into battle, and she would not flinch at their death.

A sudden movement to the side caught her eye. A figure was racing down the slope. Was already at the bottom. Was already crossing the plain. Was already approaching the battle zone.

"No gukuy can move that fast!" protested Julius.

"Watch, ummun," commanded Ghodha. "We too have legends."

To Indira, what followed seemed a slow-moving dream. Her mind felt suspended.

To the Pilgrims, Nukurren passed through their lines like a wraith, sweeping them behind her in sudden hope, hooting renewed confidence and determination. The Pilgrims poured into the great gaping hole Nukurren was tearing in the Utuku center, ululating, their mantles blue and black. Hesitation was cast aside, uncertainty scorned, all fear abandoned. Of high caste or helot birth, it mattered not at all. They were the Warriors of the Coil, now, the Flails of the Way, and there were none who could withstand them, led by their champion.

To Julius Cohen, biologist, Nukurren struck the shield wall like a charging grizzly bear, scattering warriors like so many leaves. During the carnage which followed, as Nukurren ripped through the Utuku ranks with mind-boggling ferocity, Julius found it impossible to think of her as a gukuy warrior armed with weapons. All his learned theories vanished. All his professorial estimates of the limitations of the molluscan Bauplan seemed a mirage. Watching Nukurren now, he could think of nothing, at first, but some great predator from the Terran past, a tyrannosaur stalking the earth of an alien planet. Until a different image came, of that dragon which lives only in the dark imagination of mankind.

To the Utuku also she was a monster beyond belief, whose fork struck like a flail and whose flail struck like the very lightning. Under Nukurren's blows, their shields shattered, their armor splintered, their tough mantles shredded like jelly, their blood gushed forth like fountains and their entrails shrouded the earth. Every blow of her flail, every stroke of her twofork, was kutaku. They could no more withstand her than they could have withstood the Great Kraken itself, and, in the mounting terror of her passage, their courage fled with the wind. Scarlet-mantled, half-paralyzed, they fell like gana beneath the flails of the Pilgrims who followed.

To Joseph Adekunle, and Jens Knudsen, and the other young men in the center who still survived, Nukurren came like something out of their distant past. An alien creature, bringing to life the history which they had learned, but not really understood; had heard, but not truly grasped. A misshapen, tentacled, colorless form, who brought them all the rainbow hues of their ancestry.

Separated from their origins by light-years and centuries, orphaned, cast adrift save for a handful of adults, the human youth finally came into their inheritance. All of it. The truths, the myths, the legends; and, foundation of them all, that bleak, unyielding, boundless courage which made all myths, all legends, and all truths possible.

They knew, now, the Spartans at Thermopylae; and the sunken road at Shiloh; and the impis at Isandhlwana; and Chuikov's 62nd Army in the shattered factories on the Volga. Despair and exhaustion vanished. Bleeding, bruised, maimed, they hurled themselves upon the shield wall which surrounded them. And broke it; and then slew, and slew, and slew, and slew.

The young men, fiery savage children of a gentle civilized mother, slew with neither ruth nor pity. Because they knew, now, in the freshness of their youth, what their mother was only beginning to accept, in the fullness of her wisdom.

Watching Nukurren come, they knew Horatius at the bridge, and heard Roland's horn at Roncevalles. They hailed Musashi's honor, saluted Pendragon on his throne; and knelt to Saladin's mercy. And felt, beneath their feet, shaking the very mountain, the giant Barbarossa, waking from his sleep.

But all Indira saw, or ever remembered, was floating beauty on a plain of death. The strange grace of an huge and ugly gukuy, scattering destruction like seeds of grain. The utter silence of a warrior, in the bedlam of a battlefield.

Above all, throughout the years to come, she remembered the shoroku of a helot born to hopelessness. That royal, imperial shoroku. The color of that scarred mantle, bearing the burden of a new world's hope as if it were but a feather. That gray, that beautiful gray, that glorious gray, that impossible gray. That gray which never wavered.