Casca 2: God of Death (16 page)

A distance of two hundred feet separated them.

Teypetel, too, sized up the man confronting him. From this distance Casca did not seem so godlike....even if he did wear strange armor....

Teypetel's
white pointed teeth sparkled. "Are you the one called the Quetza?" His speech had a slight sibilance to it caused by the sharpened teeth.

Casca stepped out a few more steps.

"Yes, molester of small boys and dogs, I am the Quetza."

Taken aback by the repeated offense and wondering,
How did he know about the dogs?
Teypetel paused. But quick anger rose to his face, making his head feel as though he had drunk too much pulque, and in that anger he caved in the skull of his own nearest guard. The brains splattered on his feet. He roared: "Come forth and fight! Let us do battle here." Even in his rage he was rational enough to note that in the open his troops could easily butcher the few warriors with the one called Quetza.

Casca laughed, his voice sneering as he replied:

"No such deal, lard ass. You come to us. If you have the guts. And from here I can see that you have enough for at least six fat women."

Enraged,
Teypetel broke the neck of a novice priest who had come too close to his massive right hand. Summoning his captains to him, Teypetel began to give them explicit orders that the foreigner was to be taken alive.

While this was going on, Casca took the spear from his aide. It was a good weapon, iron-tipped, stout ash stock. Expelling a deep breath in a long controlled burst as the shaft left his hand, Casca hurled the spear. It arced across the distance between him and the Olmec king.

Teypetel looked up in time to see the shaft arcing toward him, giving him a hell of a fright. He threw the leader of his center forces in front of him. The iron blade went into the warrior's back and protruded a full arm's length from his chest, the point of the spear stopping just short of the Olmec king who quickly scuttled back to the rear ranks. No one could throw a spear that far. Not one that heavy....

Aw, crap.
Missed him,
Casca thought.

As
Teypetel retreated, Casca's jeering voice followed, taunting: "What's the matter, lard ass? Afraid?"

Reaching the safety of his rear ranks,
Teypetel screamed in blind fury: "Kill them! Attack!"

The legions of the Olmec obeyed. They raced to overrun the few pitiful soldiers who confronted them, their voices rising in animal cries. Predominant was the call of the hunting jaguar. The drums urged them on.

The center of the Olmecs moved in to crush Casca's force, and the horns began their pincer movement. But Teypetel had miscalculated. The wings were in confusion. They could move – but to where? They could not surround the whole city. The buildings would break up their formation. So they waited.

The
center closed to one hundred feet, and when they did, Casca gave the order for his men to fall flat on their faces while the archers behind loosed waves of arrows over them straight into the faces and bodies of the overconfident Olmecs. The thin reed arrows found their way into the eyes and open mouths of many screaming warriors. The Olmecs paused. Casca leaped to his feet and ordered his men to conduct a fighting withdrawal. They led the Olmecs deeper and deeper into the confines of the city along the broad, building-banked thoroughfare. Casca and his men would run back to get ahead of the Olmecs for a space, then fall to the prone position as the archers let fly another wave of arrows. Leapfrogging in this manner they hurt the Olmecs, not enough to stop them, but enough to drive them wild with frustration.

Gradually Casca led back to where the main body of his army waited. The
Olmecs would have run two or more miles, while his own troops would be fresh for the fight. It could make a difference, equalizing Casca's disadvantage of smaller numbers.

An arrow bounced off the back of Casca's
armor. Several of his men had fallen. As the Olmecs reached Casca's casualties, those seriously wounded were speared to death; those who would live were held for the coming sacrifices.

As the
Olmecs poured into the city their ranks were ever more congested by the width of the streets, forcing them to crowd in on one another in a great, uncontrollable mass.

The Olmec officers screamed in frustration, trying to get control of their men, but it was too late. The units were mixed. They were following only those directly in front of them. Behind the melee,
riding his enormous litter, Teypetel entered the city bellowing for his men to kill, kill. In his excitement he took the whip from one of his slavemasters and lashed the backs of the litter slaves into bloody ribbons as they struggled and gasped through open mouths, laboring to carry the tremendous load of the litter with its obese passenger.

Casca's men had fallen back now to the front ranks of the waiting Serpent soldiers. Breathless, they found their way to the rear as the ranks opened to let them pass, then closed again. The oncoming wave of the
Olmecs met the closed wall of the Serpents. The Olmecs stood for a moment frozen in time, face to face with the Teotec, unable to move. The oncoming ranks of the Olmecs then pushed their brothers against the Teotec line. The screams of the fighting masses of men flooded the air, drowning the death cries of those who fell.

The Vikings stood firm in the rear, their weapons ready.
Holdbod the Berserker, was almost beside himself with frustration. Swaying back and forth on his heels, he cried for Olaf to let him go, that he would kill enough for everyone. Tears running down his face in anguish, he obeyed Olaf's order to stand firm, but the strain on him was terrible.

The sheer weight of the Olmec masses was more than Casca's men could withstand. Step by step the
Olmecs forced the Teotecs back – but now a rain of missiles began falling on them from the rooftops, from the force Casca had stationed there; the old ones were lending their support. A chamber pot still filled from last night's use broke the nose of an Olmec captain who broke into a frenzy as the filth ran into his mouth and down his chest. The old man responsible cackled and jumped up and down in glee. The protesting Olmec's agony was stilled by a flint-tipped spear pushing out the back of his skull.

Casca stood in the front ranks for a moment to let his soldiers see him, and with the aid of his
Gladius Iberius he chopped off the heads of a dozen weapons and slew even more of the Olmecs, the thick-bladed Roman sword slicing through the thin armor of the Olmecs, laying chests and heads open.

The
Olmecs in the front were sucking air through open mouths, laboring to breathe. The long run was taking its toll, but to the eyes of Totzin it appeared that the Olmecs were winning. After all, they were in the center of the city. He signaled to his men to join the Olmecs. They did, but these traitorous Jaguar soldiers of Teotah soon found themselves inextricably mixed with the Olmecs. Hundreds were cut down in the confusion by their new allies.

Totzin
disappeared....

The time was now.

Casca suddenly screamed orders above the clamor of battle.

The ranks of the Serpent soldiers immediately fell back on themselves, running to the rear to regroup, leaving a vacuum that the confused
Olmecs filled.

The
Olmecs halted, transfixed by the sight before them, the totally unexpected.

Giants.

Giants with shaggy faces and light-colored hair – wearing a shiny skin the Olmec's stone-tipped weapons bounced off without doing any damage. Terrible beings with shining weapons that sang above their heads and sliced through all who got in their way.

The Vikings.

Casca's "anvil," they stood rocklike and solid and carved the men opposing them into unrecognizable facsimiles of humanity. The Olmec spirit broke at the indestructibility of these fearsome apparitions who uttered strange cries to strange gods ... "Odin!"... "Thor!" and shouted "Casca! Casca! Casca" as they moved forward, a knot of steel before which everything died. In their terror the Olmecs broke and began to fight their way back down the long thoroughfare – anything to get away from this place of slaughter. In their frenzied rush to get away, those in front killed those behind. The panic spread like wildfire. The Olmec units collapsed in on themselves. Thousands were trampled underfoot as their brothers fought to get away from the horrible shining ones behind them.

The Vikings were magnificent. Foremost in the field of slaughter were Olaf and Vlad. They blocked the thrusts of spears and stone-edged clubs with their shields. They parried and thrust and chopped and sliced through everything in their path.

And then Holdbod the Berserker leaped in front, jumping over a pile of dead Olmecs.

The manic rage was upon him. Nothing could stop him now in his desire for blood. He raced out into the heavy mass of retreating
Olmecs crying for Thor to give him strength to kill more and more. His great sword rained a destruction upon the Olmecs such as they had never imagined could exist. Endlessly he killed. An Olmec captain leaped in front of this monster to stop him. Holdbod wrapped his great arms around the man as he would a child and through tear-filled eyes thanked Odin for this gift, alternately crying and laughing, he snuggled the smaller form of the Olmec against his chest and squeezed, unmindful of the Olmecs trying to tear him loose from their captain. The Olmec chieftain gave a long ululating strangling cry as his ribs collapsed and crushed in on themselves, his head back in an arc of pain. Holdbod squeezed the life out of him, not feeling the cuts from the obsidian blades or the half-dozen arrows protruding from his back. He dropped the Olmec, regained his sword, and the great blade began to swing again ... up and down ... up and down ... endlessly.

Casca joined him, his short sword doing equal, if not quite as bloody, work. Casca was sparing in his strokes, making each one count, while
Holdbod fought mindlessly. He even turned on Casca, knocking his leader to the ground and standing over him, his great sword raised above his head ready to slice this fallen foe to separate pieces. A hand grasped his wrist. "Brother, hold." Vlad the Dark's quiet voice broke the blood film around Holdbod's mind. Looking down at Casca and recognizing him, Holdbod began to sob uncontrollably.

Casca got to his feet and hugged
Holdbod's hairy shoulder. “No fear, brother. It's not my time. Now, go and rest. Leave some of them for the rest of us."

Still sobbing,
Holdbod walked unseeing to the rear. The rage had come and gone. Only his wounds were unfelt. The arrows in his back waved and bobbed up and down like some obscene gesturing.

Once to the rear, he fell unconscious.

Vlad took his place in the forefront, his great axe doing at least double duty. If anything the quiet intensity of this deadly stranger struck even greater fear into the hearts of the already panic-stricken Olmecs. All semblance of order disappeared in their ranks. Blind panic ruled now. Teypetel had lashed his bearers until they had collapsed, spilling their load into the street of death. Rising, the greasy, bulbous monster tried to stop the blind retreat of his legions, cutting down man after man with his copper blade, but to no avail. They streamed past him in mindless terror.

"Dog fucker, I am here."

Turning, Teypetel, god and king of the Olmecs, faced Casca the stranger and god from the sea. A chill ran through his bowels. Was this a god? Before he could answer his own question, Casca was upon him, his blade slicing away the haft of Teypetel's axe. Teypetel, god of the Olmecs, wet himself as he turned to flee. Casca threw his Roman short sword at the back of the terrified king, knocking him to the earth already sticky and claylike with the blood of thousands of his followers.

Casca grasped the bald head of the downed king and raised him to his knees. Placing his own knee in the Olmec's back along the spine, he pulled the grotesque head back. "Well, you piece of shit, it's time for you to meet your ancestors." Casca placed his scarred, sinewy hands together, interlocking the fingers. The butt of a hand on each side of the obese king's temples, he began to squeeze. As he pushed in, taking ever deeper breaths, the muscles in
his own back snapped and crackled with the strain.

But the tremendous pressure was being transmitted to the king's brain case.
Teypetel squirmed and sobbed, promising anything if only the Quetza would stop squeezing.

His answer came, quicker than he had expected – but not in the way he wanted it. With one great expulsion of air the skull of the king of the
Olmecs cracked along the fracture lines – like the shell of a turtle – and began to cave in upon itself, sharp pieces of the brain case knifing into the living brain itself. The whole skull gave way and Casca's hands were holding only a reddish gray, bleeding mass of bone and ruptured brain tissue.

Several Olmec captains had been looking back, already terrified by the pursuing
Teotec and their fearsome allies. When they witnessed Casca's gruesome dispatch of their former king, that was the final straw. No longer trying to maintain even the semblance of cohesion, they fled blindly back the way they had come, every man for himself, leaving thousands of their brothers dead or in the process of being put into that state by the avenging Teotec. Even the old men and old women had descended from the rooftops to aid in this effort. The old women especially seemed to delight in bashing the brains out of wounded Olmecs. Compassion was a commodity reserved for their own.