Free No Other Gods by John Koetsier Page B

circled and watched, a few paces separated, each ready to pounce on any offered opening.
                  Now I was a little worried. Rast charging in knife first and brain second was one thing. Rast thinking about what he was doing and doing it patiently was entirely another — dozens of gutted corpses on the practice hall floor were evidence he was, in fact, a skilled knife fighter. And eager. Rast loved knife fighting, and considered himself an artist with a blade.
                  So I baited him.
                  “So, Rast. How many men did you have at the beginning of this battle? Four hundreds?”
                  I waited for his confirming nod, which came late, and grudgingly. He knew what was coming next.
                  “And you saw our numbers? Ten. Ten against your four hundred. And yet here you sit.” I gestured to the mass of reds on the ground by the canyon wall. “Why is that, Rast?”
                  He grunted, irritated, but resumed his circling, determined not to be thrown from his course. Determined not to be rushed, or angered. I closed the gap another half step, circling, patient, covering for feints and threatening my own assaults. The men in red grew louder, shouting encouragement for Rast. If he could win, they possibly, perhaps could somehow snag a victory out of this defeat.
                  Rast, circling, feinted, pulled back, and immediately pounced, striking to my knife hand. Again I rolled to my left, avoiding, simply keeping the blade between me and him. He paused his pacing, inflated his lungs, and shouted.
                  “You coward! Come here and—”
                  Instead of finishing his thought, he charged mid-sentence, hoping to catch me listening and waiting, and more than half succeeding. I avoided the deadly point of his knife but tripped on a tuft of grass. Turning the fall into a roll, I sprang back to my feet just as he managed to score my left arm with a long groove, parting the skin and drawing an immediate welling of blood.
                  “First blood!” he crowed, and show the red blade to his men, who responded with a deafening roar of encouragement, and were still hoping, apparently, to turn defeat into victory. “Hermes is going to like seeing you go down!”
                  OK, I thought to myself, tuning out the pain. Definitely time to end this. Abandoning the circling, I closed on Rast, who was not allowing the celebration of his men to distract him. Faking a direct strike at his face which would have exposed my knife arm — my right — I instead brought up my bloody left arm. Avoiding his defensive counterstrike, I flicked the arm up and at his face like cracking a whip, spattering his face with blood. Bonus points, I thought to myself: he’s even got some in his eyes.
                  Then came the real strike, but not at his head. With the blood in his face and the irritation in his eyes, his hands very naturally and instinctively came up and closer to his head. Waiting and ready for this, I turned my blade up and sliced the lower half of his arm from hand to elbow. Not pausing or drawing back, I twisted away from his reflexive counterstrike, not retreating back but instead turning right, coming beside him and with a continued seamless motion immediately behind him, still flailing partially blindly in desperation. Using the angular, spinning momentum I had built up in both twists, I buried my blade in far side of his neck, released it, then stepped away.
                  Rast twisted, fell to his knees, tried to speak. An strangled wet gurgling came out. He reached up to his neck, found the handle of the knife, and with a single convulsive motion, wrenched it out. He tried to whisper something, something I didn’t quite catch, then smiled viciously.
                  “You think this is