SWORD OF KHAN- PART I
Night...
Distant cries in the steppe...
A woman giving birth in a yurta...
Rumors of war and victory in distant lands...
A Tartar chief, Temujin-uge, defeated and made prisoner by Yesugei-baatur...
The birth of the child remembered by the name of the father's vanquished enemy...
A baby boy... Born at Deli'un-boldaq on the river Onon... With a clot of blood in his right hand...
Temujin...
Vaggie waked up in a pool of sweat, breathing heavily.
...What just happened!? The cave, I couldn't see shit, then-
Vaggie remembered firmly holding something hideous and sticky in her right palm, but... there was nothing there.
She looked around. She was in a bed, in a yurta, in the middle of the night. Was she back at the camp? But why?
The place was almost exactly like the yurta she had woken up in that morning... Unless it was several mornings ago and she had been unconcious for days...
...Someone has to be around here...
She was going to get out of bed when she froze...
Seeing that she wasn't in bed alone...
...
For long, long moments, Vaggie just stared, stunned and somewhat terrified, seeing that a beautiful woman she had never seen before was fast asleep next to her...
A woman? Maybe a woman: she didn't look older than sixteen...
(Unbeknownst to Vaggie, while she was indeed sixteen, she was one year older than her husband...)
A young Mongolian beauty with long braids of black hair...
...What the...
Taking a hold of herself, she get out bed slowly, carefully, taking great pains to make sure she would not make a sound.
She got dressed, took the armour, sword and spear she assumed were hers (she couldn't find a rifle anywhere for some reason...) before walking out of the yurta...
...
It was a moonlight night near the river, wich flowed between the mountains and the forests...
She was clearly in an ordu, not much bigger than the camp near the river Onon...
Looking around, she froze- she recognised the mountains! And the clearing...
It was the exact same spot near the Burkan Kaldun! What happened to the other camp? And to everybody there? Where was Charlie!?
A young man, looking concerned, approached Vaggie...
"Temujin, are you alright?"
'What?' Vaggie thought, dumbfounded...
'Did this guy just adress me like... a man!?'
"I, uh..." Vaggie's mind was racing, "...must have exaggerated with the kumys yesterday..."
"You are not well, my friend, for you are speaking nonsense! There's no such thing as a man who has had too much fermented-"
The man, named Boortsu, suddenly fell silent. A noise in the distance had caught his attention...
Hoofsteps, many hoofsteps. From the forest...
...
It all happened faster than Vaggie could have thought possible.
The alarm was sounded too late. They were already upon them!
The Merkit!
...
They charged into the ordu howling savage war cries in the darkness.
Some rode horses, others were astride their war reindeers. Many wore horned masks or helmets ghastly adorned with reindeer antlers. They hold torches to throw around and set the yurtas on fire...
The were northern raiders from the dark, frigid, primal forests south of Lake Bajkal...
...
'Finally! Something I can deal with...' Vaggie thought as she hold her spear to face the incoming horde...
"They are too many, Temujin!" Boortsu exclaimed, "We must make it to the horses and head to..."
"TEMUJIN!"
A little girl's voice!
Just hearing her voice, Vaggie started to... remember!?
Like that absurd nightmare she was having right before she woke up! Only now it was crystal clear...
'Temulun! Where is she!?'
Vaggie spotted a terrified six year old girl.
Her little sister!
"GET DOWN!"
She grabbed the girl just as a Merkit blade flashed past them, missing their heads!
She run, holding her sister, until they saw a woman coming toward them astride a horse.
The little girl recognized her before Vaggie could remember...
"Eej!" she cried.
Hoelun took her daughter in her lap, the horse would take them to safety in the mountains...
The woman turned to Vaggie, "The Merkit are here for Borte! Where is she?"
Borte!?
Vaggie remembered now. Borte was her... his... wife... OH FOR FUCK'S SAKE, THE SLEEPING GIRL IN THE YURTA!
In that moment, Vaggie could have told Hoelun that there was no time to lose, that the Merkit would have captured Borte alive if they found her and that they needed to survive so that she could lead a rescue mission, even if it meant leading an army, to get her back...
That would have been the reasonable thing to do...
What Temujin would have done...
'MIERDA! I SHOULD NOT HAVE LEFT HER ALONE!'
Vaggie rushed back to the yurta, amidst the savage raiders and the burning tents...
She arrived to see it was catching fire. She entered regardless...
Borte was gone!
'STUPID VAGGIE, STUPID!' she scolded herself, 'OF COURSE SHE WOULD NOT JUST STAY HERE!'
She run outside, shouting at the top of her lungs.
"BORTE! BORTEEEEEE!"
"TEMUJIN!"
...
She had not made it to the horses in time...
A Merkit warrior, much bigger and stronger than the other raiders, had grabbed her by the hair...
He wore a monstrous mask, made partly of a whole antlered reindeer skull, which entirely covered his face...
And he was riding away, with Borte kicking and screaming, astride an enormous, prehistoric reindeer from the primal forests...
"OH NO YOU DON'T!"
Vaggie threw her spear at the massive beast.
The blade went right through the reindeer's neck. The monster fell forward, sending both rider and prisoner tumbling into the ground.
As Vaggie run toward them, the enraged Merkit was already getting back up...
With an upward swing of her sword, she cut through the colossus' mask!
He gave a monstrous roar of pain, his massive hands covering his face, as bloody fragments of the shattered mask fell on the ground...
He lowered his blood-soaked hands, revealing the horrendous, brutish features of one of the Hairy Men of Ib, the Siberian beastmen!
"You ugly motherfucker belong in a museum, next to the Piltdown Man!"
The monster, towering over Vaggie, grabbed his enormous mace...
Vaggie dodged the first hit. And the second. And another. Her speed was no match for a hulking brute...
"Missed me! Too slow! Are you even trying?!"
Neither could keep this up for long.
One swing of the mace went far too close to Vaggie's head, making her lose her balance and fall to the ground...
The beastman was panting, but undeterred. He lifted his mace once more...
Vaggie smirked.
"You know what? Let's see if you can hit me if I stay right here!"
One moment and the mace would fall, crushing Vaggie like a bug.
The point of a spear emerged from the monster's chest!
He started gurgling blood and came crushing down with all the weight of a pile of boulders.
...
Borte simply stood there in wide-eyed shock. Like she could not believe what she had just done...
She barely felt that she no longer held the spear in her hands.
The spear she had thrusted with a strength she would not have dreamed to have.
She fainted, collapsing to the ground.
"BORTE!"
Vaggie hold her in her arms at last.
...
The Merkit raiders, upon seeing that their tribe's champion had fallen, panicked in a confused route -but not without managing to take a booty of captured horses and cattle with them.
They vanished into the forest as quickly as they had appeared. There would be no point in pursuing them the following day, for they knew the darkest, most secret paths of the forest...
"Temujin..." Borte said with the faintest voice, "...You came for me..."
"Of course I did! I-"
Vaggie hesitated, realizing that she had learned from the once Baron Ungern the story of how it really happened...
"I don't care if none of this is real, if this is all a dream in a magic cave! You are real enough to me!"
...
The dream vanished, leaving only Vaggie alone in a magical steppe under the stars...
...with the knowledge that she would rest before another dream would begin...