Free Casca 17: The Warrior by Barry Sadler

enemy moved up the hill toward the village and a number of Navola warriors formed up and began to dance and chant too.
    The enemy moved farther up the hill, stopped again, danced and chanted, and the men of Navola replied.
    When the Lakuvi warriors appeared at the top of the rise the Navola men moved outside the outermost of the three palisades and the two groups danced, chanted, and threatened each other.
    The Lakuvi men moved closer. The Navola men moved farther from the palisade to confront them.
    For some hours the two squads maneuvered about the open flat space outside the palisade, each seeking an opening that would make an attack worthwhile:
    Casca grew tired of watching the ceremonious maneuvering from his perch with the Rangaroa crew on the top rail of the outer palisade. Semele had confided to him his fear that the attack might have been planned in cooperation with Cakabau to test Navola's defenses, and prepare the way for a full-scale attack with the Bau chief's fearsome weapons.
    Casca turned from the maneuvers. The battle would not be joined unless one side felt sure of an advantage and of their skills. Forces and arms were so evenly matched that this might take a very long time.
    "Well enough," Casca said to himself, "but what if Cakabau should arrive with his muskets?"
    Navola's troops were led by Sonolo, and Casca admired the way his club-wielding warriors danced forward and back, maneuvered from one side of the small plateau to the other and back in aggressive feints or in response to threats from the Lakuvi warriors.
    But if Cakabau's men were to arrive, all Sonolo's brilliance would be irrelevant with the first shots. And Cakabau's men did not just kill one man. Their six muskets usually killed six men, and notoriously they might then go on a rampage, killing and eating great numbers of the enemy. The musket had radically changed the practice of war in the islands.
    Casca tried to think of how the crucified one's curse would keep him alive or bring him back to life if he were chewed up and digested in a dozen different cannibal's stomachs.
    Would he live on in some other form? Many different forms according to where the cannibal's bodies excreted his pieces? A number of soldier ants perhaps, with some sort of group consciousness that used to be Casca Rufio Longinus? He knew something very like terror as he thought about it. Nor did he relish the alternative prospect of underfed and overworked slavery on the Australian sugar plantations.
    He turned and ran... across the open space to the second palisade, where the lounging defenders glanced at him curiously... across the next open space to the inner palisade, and across the next space... past the chief's house, across the village square, past the houses and toward the inner rear palisade.
    He cleared the six-foot fence in his stride, the two horizontal rails and the outward-leaning slope of the fence assisting him, as they were designed to do.
    He cleared the next two palisades similarly, ignoring the surprised looks of the few warriors posted at the rear to guard against a sneak attack from this direction.
    He raced down the eastern slope of the hill until he was sure he was lower than the attackers on the western slope, then turned and raced back around the northern slope to come up behind and below the enemy warriors.
    He crept up the slope until he was within pistol shot of the three ranks of warriors with their backs to him.
    He put down his club and took the five-shot .38 from his jacket pocket, checked the load, and stuck it in his belt.
    "If I have to use you to win this, I'm just no damned good," he muttered.
    He looked along the line of broad, black backs, each with a huge, black club, and he patted the spare ammunition in his pocket.
    "But if it comes to it, I'd sure rather be no damned good than chopped up."
    He shook his head in astonishment. He hadn't felt like this in a long time, maybe a couple of centuries.
    "What the fuck is happening to me?