‘The poor soul,’ thought Richard as the Russian sailor continued to squirm and moan at Levsky’s booted feet.
‘What fine boots, of soft red doe hide, fringed with ermine below the knee—how I would like such boots, if my ankles were not shattered to bits and requiring these damnable medicals!’
So ranted Sir Captain Richard Mogadishu Barrett, [0] as he descended into the inward critiques and micro-myopic observations that occupied his fanatic mind at such times. It was his special curse, which he had shared only with the terrible crusader within; that when peril was nigh, time for him slowed, the world and its moving parts were bared to him, even as War barred the normal folk from such understanding. Richard could see the earth turning ever so slightly and also the magnetic sphere that was its aegis, only at such times, when details blurred for the rest of humanity, which apparently did not include Levsky.
‘Perhaps we are beasts of a kind?’
‘How else do we so callously ignore the terrible agony of our loyal fellow at our feet?’
Slowly, Richard’s telescopic mind focused within Time.
‘Perhaps, my lack of peripheral perception cursed me to a singular arm to mirror this singular focus?’
‘Focus.’
‘!NO!’ sang a hideous peep of razor cutting thought.
His body shook and quivered.
‘Yes!’ he thought, and “YES!” he spoke, cold, cool, strident, as the flames of the dying air ship back-lit a titanic avian form emerging with singed feathers from the outer flames. Those inner flames engulfed another such Phoenix of a titan, burning and screeching horribly among the melting men and burning gas, canvas and rubber—the aluminum itself melting like a great whale-formed Icarus made of candle wax.
“YES!” roared Levsky, like a drunk Turk calling a dancing girl to his cushioned throne.
What emerged, wattle-like, a head so heavy that it hung forward some seven feet from the ground, was a green bird. The plumage, where it was not singed, was emerald. The monster stood an easy 12 feet. It’s wings expanded, shaking off sparks and some smoldering feathers, each feather as big as a Somali shield, to a span of some 24 feet.
Richard’s ‘leisurely nigh mind’ as he thought of his fanatic focus, noted that it would not be such a good flier, only a marginal winged thing. Yet its giraffe-like legs were coils of great strength, talons larger than elephant feet, its tail feathers flexing like the back-fin of a whale. The talons at the base of the great legs, legs that joined the forward leaning mass of barrel-like plumage, scraped and tore the thick turf of the liftway to shear into the rocks below, picking one up, a rock the size of O’Neal’s large Gaelic cranium, and threw it forward.
Richard braced for God Almighty’s judgment, standing stark still, as he saw Levsky did three paces to his right, both of them with pistol upward and at rest.
Levsky might have gotten off a good shot at this range of a hundred paces, with that telescopic Kalishnakov dueling pistol with its 32 inch barrel. But there was a greater battle being fought here, a battle for control of their minds.
The speed of the hurtling rock was in excess of the best baseball pitch or football penalty kick. Richard saw it leave the talon as the thrower, that great bird of over ten feet in height, skipped with its other talon, taking a ten-pace one-legged hop, then gripping the turf and some grinding rocks underneath, pitched a speeding underhand.
Richard saw that rock, larger than his modest Norman skull, coming directly for his face.
‘May it take off my head and not deprive me of the remaining arm!’
He lost the ability to track the oncoming missile, it seeming to freeze like a photograph as it was released from the titanic talons.
Then he felt it thunder by in the same instant it disappeared from his sight, burning a glass black skid mark on the leather band of his service cap just above his ear, which likewise earned a skid mark, not unlike when he fell from his tricycle on the event of riding it down the stairs to the kitchen when he was a tyke.
Levsky barked a harsh laugh, “We must duel some day, Captain!”
Richard grinned, “After we swap firing irons, of course, Commander!”
Levsky laughed harshly and sneered, “Damned bird of hell!” and the deep punch of his Kalishnakov pierced the air, the bullet sizzling into the breast of the beastly bird. The bird stuttered on its one talon, its terrible red eyes glaring over and to either side of its wicked two-feet beak. With a psychic declaration of ‘!MEREST FOOD!’ invading his mind, it leaped at Richard.
He grinned from within his fortress of nigh serenity.
The wings spread for dynamic flight. But the Russian bullet, a rifle round of 7.62 millimeters, if he recalled from his dueling class, with Dutch-armed Schulz in Philadelphia, had disabled the powerful left wing. The beast was able to glide for its mark, and that mark was not Levsky, who was busy chambering a second round into the best oiled breach Richard had noted in action.
Something large and terrible died in the fire behind the Phoenix and it shuddered, like Svetlana had when her namesake ship had been attacked. The great bird’s glide was crooked, taking it to the left of Richard, who pivoted, tracking it over the bead of his revolver. As it landed, a mere ten paces off, a mere one beast hop from him, Richard fired. The round took the creature in the beak, punching a hole in it and causing its red eyes to glower a deeper crimson.
Levsky’s gun punched the sky behind him and the top of that great arched head, feathered in yellow, now gouted red, the crown of the skull taken off, revealing a brain much larger than should inhabit the idiot skull of a bird.
The bird turned in rage, looking at Richard, ignoring Levsky as he chambered another round.
Richard, cocking his 0.50 caliber revolver for another shot, felt his thumb fail in the action. Looking at his thumb he saw it cramp as a scree of hate pierced his mind, ‘!MONKEY OUR FOOD!’
In a white hot rage that this thing had caused his thumb to cramp by dastard way of some avian mesmerism, Richard crunched his lips, grit his teeth, dropped his pistol, and drew the colmarge sword, the right honorable sword that “Wolf Hound” Barrett had taken from traitor George Washington some 250 years ago.
‘I must thank LaFano for being too lazy to bear it and insisting by way of decorum on affixing it by the baldric! So Gaelic sloth and Norman steel forge on against evil!’
The great terror bird seemed offended, above all its agony, with Richard’s ‘thoughts.’ It screed at Richard as its left talon was wrecked by a well aimed Russian shot. The thing then listed onto it right talon, extending its left like a bleeding set of three Kyber knives at the advancing swordsman.
‘!MONKEY!” the enemy into his mind pined.
Another round from Levsky plunged into the breast of the great bird, which now leaned forward on its one good talon, which grew more huge as Richard stepped up to the great bird, which opened its scissor like beak to engulf him, lunging down and forward with a primordial hunger, its head twice as large as that of the greatest draft horse.
Richard side-stepped right with his right foot, then pass stepped right behind that with his left foot—and both broken and braced ankles held!
As Richard pass stepped, the terrible beak sliced off what would have been his left arm—if he had retained one for its dining pleasure!
‘God works in wonderful ways,’ he thought at this Satanic parrot, as he heel pivoted on his right, swinging his left and back side completely around, and thrust the point of ‘Ole Right Colmarge’ [1] through the eye of that monstrosity, the sword foible quivering, the fort of the blade fish tailing, and the hilt punching that great ostrich-egg sized eye into ruin!
Not a thought.
Not scree.
Nothing but a half ton of hateful sinew, beak and feathers hitting the turf at his feet as his sword slithered free.
‘Monkey, aye,’ and he grinned, at home in his nigh-found soul again.
…
Notes
-0. Barretts were not christened with a middle name, that identifier reserved for acts of renown and dignity in service to The Crown.
-1. This most honored Barrett heirloom seemed to have been possessed of a jealousy for the heavy caliber pistol, being such a rude loud weapon of such weight, which was more convenient to carry aboard ship, carriage and up spiral staircases. Richard would make note of this in light of the sword not running out of ammunition at Mogadishu, and credit angelic intervention with the failure of his thumb. No thumb hex by a big bird would ever be admitted in the telling of the battle. Rather an agent of the Almighty and the Queen of Arms, the sword, would be credited, for Richard, though not a Catholic, did not fancy that he rated direct attention from God.
