ENTENTES APOCRYPHAL: THE NEAR JUNTA OF JUDITH AND HOLOFERNES

By Quillon42

Infiltrating the camp of these condemned unwashed had proven to be markedly easier for the incandescent Israelite who had alighted only some time before. Slyly she slipped through the forbidding defenses, she completely cognizant of the decapitative dangers that lurked upon every inch of this enemy's lair…the lady running the gamut regardless and making it all the way to the beside of the bastard whom she sought out now. There would be no brute who could keep Judith from carrying out her mission on the part of the Almighty at this point, as she caught sight of her sleazy sleeping target.

Proffering a prayer to the Lord once more here, and wishing herself good fortune otherwise as she whisked up the vile blade that would evict the slimy spirit from the body of the horror named Holofernes, the lady readied herself, she reaching now for the follicles upon her foe's head, she fixing to force the sword through the stalks of veins running through the neck of this nefarious evil general. All it would take now was another step, and another stroke, and the tide of the Israel/Assyria war would turn…she would be hailed as the heroine of her people indeed…

…yet then it came to pass that, just as Judith raised her weapon to whack the warrior, the terror threw his head around at the last instant, he zeroing a gaze upon her that spoke sentiments of being deceived, of being betrayed…

…of being more incredibly aroused that he had ever before experienced.

In the hour preceding his abrupt awakening, the haughty general Holofernes had nightmared so noxiously, his brain braised by wicked whimsies of a woman wielding something sharp, something to lacerate his larynx, to thresh his thyroid, to eviscerate his esophagus most evilly. Then the image of incubi inducting him into an afterlife most agonizing, one consisting of flesh-flagellating flames and serpents surrounding, spiraling in from all sides, for all time. This would all be occasioned upon his person, lest he allowed his alarm internal to issue, imminently.

And so he sat bolt upright now, the man marking the maiden who might have deposed his pate from the congress of his constitution, the seductress who might have sentenced his soul to an eternity of the infernal.

"Judith…my lady…verily the Lilith of my libido…"

The woman stopped where she stood, lowered her sword as she looked into his alluring eyes. Those pecan-brown peepers were gems with a Goliathlike glint…they were bijous with the brilliance of all the bait of Babylon…indeed they were jewels ejaculated from the orifices of Jezebel.

Yea, as much as the impulse pumped within her to press on with her mission, the irresistible infidel's Draculaic deek made Judith relent and doff her defenses, like an apple-pursuit-exhausted Atalanta, overjoyed that a myth-making race had finally been lost; like a battle-bested Red Sonja, now bereft of her virginal vow; like Lady Lisa from friggin' Pixels, having finally found her life's love in the obese, obnoxious effing Josh Gad…

…she at any rate abandoned her plan then and there to terminate this formidable fright, the lust at sixtieth sight here (after their dalliances the day previous) now too much for the infiltrating mistress. Still she minded the enemy, watching for any sort of sudden motion on his part, the lady ready to hush out a homicide with merely her hands if she had to do so.

Knowing, then, she could have had his head at any instant (and not the head he was hoping she would have, that was for certain), Judith adjusted herself a moment, she listening to what her would-be-victim had to vend out to her.

"Nephilim of my nervous system, forsooth, hear me now," hailed Holofernes to the warrior of a woman, he casting a hand out to her, a pleasant palm in place of a furious fist. "I propose that, rather than take the top off of me most ignominiously…rather than have me fall so foully in the name of your nation…I humbly propose that you and I should align ourselves so that Nebuchadnezzar may kneel against our collective camps.

"Old Chad, you see, has proven too much of a miser, and a miserable head of state on top of that," the general continued. "And I rather think it's time that that noggin…be negated, in place of my own.

"After we take him down, I will become the badass of Assyria, and lead my people in a new direction away from yall. And you can still return to your people victorious, with the head of said Chad in mine's place. What do you say?"

Judith thought on this for a Methuselean minute now. For sure, she wouldn't have to get her hands dirty at all, if Holofernes wanted Nepukebuzzard's head that badly. And she'd still have a human crown to carry back to camp.

(Well, in terms of dirtying hands, she might still have to mow down a number of foot soldiers on the way through the havens of heathens, but anyway. Perhaps she could even beat down the king's wife to boot…)

The adventuress agreed to the pact.

In the days to come, Judith and Holofernes joined their forces in terms of their persons and their platoons, they penetrating the palace of the profane with Biblical assiduity. In the time it took to whisper a shibboleth into a sow's ear, the apocryphal pair had crashed into the chamber of Chad…all while the king was about to embed his betrothed with the most intimate kind of instrument.

Eagerly the postdiluvian trespassers took advantage, and trounced the tyrant and his wife with a vicious quickness. The hot seat of Assyria now deserted, Judith looked to her slaughtering sibling-in-arms to take the throne with acrid alacrity.

But then it appeared to the lady, as she saw Holofernes hoofing toward the bed bared of its imperial occupants, that the man sought to rest upon another article of royal furniture for a spell.

"What do you say to…an all-out junta now, Judy, my sensual Songstress of Solomon?"

The man was minus his mail at the moment, he lying under the blood-dried covers with only what he wore upon his awakening into this world…but with only his head and shoulders showing over the baronial blankets (ironically, as far as the would-be-beheadress that was Judith had been concerned).

She shook her head and laughed.

"Gehenna No, my good man."

And sourly the soldier looked at her this moment. After having unconscious dreams of decapitating her instead, and winding her in fire and fer-de-lances…the new Assyrian sire was sore, that was to be sure…but while he was waking he cared for this countess of carnage so, that he could only imagine her languishing anachronistically in an inferno of cheese whiz and rubber peanut-brittle-cylinder pythons…which still somehow so turned the archaic conqueror on.

Well met, and well parted, in any case, the two walked one another to the outskirts of the Assyrian land, and bade one another farewell. Judith would still jaunt away with a hoary head to show to the Israelites—with the noodle of Nebuchadnezzar an upgrade over the head of Holofernes which she had originally sighted. (She cherished as well the scalp of spouse Amytis, which she hacked off herself while Holo had chopped at the Chad…but the dame's dome she would keep for herself, to go all Salome on it as she wished.)

For her glorious triumph here, at any rate, the wily widow was rewarded with her own land in the Israelite kingdom. This she would have known by two names now, with one after herself, Judithaea…and the other Menassehria, which she claimed to have attributed to her passed husband Menasseh…

…but which she secretly dedicated to that dapper man of Assyria who helped to make her legend throughout the ages to come.

AFTERWORD

I've mentioned my sensitivity to gender relations before in other story afterwords and such. The thing I probably feel most sensitive about is intergender violence; on one hand, I can get behind the idea that male characters should not strike female ones, as that would be reflective of the social ills of abuse of women in real life.

On the other hand entirely, though, it doesn't compute to me that it should be perfectly acceptable for women to slaughter men in stories, if not something glorious. The Biblical story of Judith is the original gangsta of this glorified kind of violence, and even though, yes, Judith is on the side of good, and Holofernes officially on the side of the bad guys, it still bothers me the way some versions of the story treat it. After all, some versions have the person who kills another in his sleep (i.e. Judith) be lionized, while the unarmed and even unconscious homicide victim here (i.e. Holofernes) goes to Hell with fire and snakes and all around him and it's supposedly oh so wonderful.

Thus bringing this full circle to some of the imagery in this story, whether serious or silly, and why I wrote this. You can call BS and all, but I'm not out to take the wind out of the sails of female empowerment. I'm just calling BS myself on the idea that men slaughtering women is abominable, yet at the same time women slaughtering men is glorious; I'm calling out that double standard.