Friday, March 27, 2015

DYNASTY Z... A primordial clash of humans, gods and demon demigods

Opening excerpt


THE DEMON DEMIGODS surged through the Delta reeds.

They fell on our village, heavy infantry with padded armour, axes, khepesh sickle-swords and spears, as well as flaming torches. Their demigod-scent, sickeningly sweet, washed against the mud-brick houses of our Nile village and flooded down the alleys like streams from the banks of a broken dyke.

I grabbed the arm of a small girl at my side and ran between houses.

I heard a scream rise above the tumult like a panicked bird taking to the sky. My mother. She called out my name.

“Menes, run - fly to the reeds. Run!”

Run away to the reeds? When right in front of my startled eyes, an attacker’s blade fell on the neckof my poor old friend, the veteran bowman Pewero, and almost severed his head, while I stood holding the old man’s bow in my hands?

Chaos came with the attackers. There were screams, cries of warning and the drumming of feet. Villagers scattered, overturning baskets and smashing jars. Goats bleated, dogs barked and howled.

I turned to stone in the alley, along with the small girl beside me.

The khepesh-wielding demigod, with the body of old Pewero at his feet, fixed his eyes on me, at first human eyes like coals, then changing to the slivered pupils of a ram’s eyes in an animal’s head.

He was a broad-shouldered man with a ram’s head and spiral horns, yet the head of the ram kept burning and twisting into the visage of a man with a stubby beard.

Forever in a state of flux, the demon demigods were Lords of Manifestation, half-man and half-god. Born out of the licentiousness of the Neteru and the gods’ attraction to the beauty of the daughters of humankind, the Divine Misbegotten were a distortion of everything that was god and man. Because they were man and neter in equal measures, a civil war raged in their blood and their beings were locked and twisted in a perpetual struggle.

He raised his sickle-sword to strike at us.

This jolted me into action and I put an arrow to the bow. I saw fear invade the ram’s eyes as I bent the bow, drew the fletching to the anchor point of my chin and took aim.

A black, fleeing goat came bolting helter-skelter between the houses, its hooves flying. I glimpsed its darting shape from the corner of my eye and he saw it too. And then, before the command to release the arrow raced to my fingers on the bowstring, I saw the demigod shift. He cascaded from his human form towards the form of the running goat. This shift was said to be an action so fast that it was invisible to men, yet I saw it happen in a series of fluttering images.

I swung the bow and released the arrow, not at the demigod, but ahead of the fluttering images, leading my target. My arrow struck the goat high in the chest. Its forelegs crumpled without the creature giving a bleat, but now I saw the goat quiver and the demigod shifted again, this time departing the fallen goat and fluttering back towards his body. A cascade of images returned to the wall to manifest in a startled soldier who fell with a cry. My arrow pierced his body just above his armour padding.

The little girl at my side shrank against me.

A group of three attackers came upon us.

“There he is!” an ape-headed one chattered to others. “The godling child!”