Chapter 296 - Army of the Undead part 8

Again, I thought I was exempt from Zenzele's plans to whip us into shape.

Again, I was wrong.

"You may Share my memories," she said, "but the Sharing is not enough. If you wish to defeat your enemies, memory is not enough. The flesh must fight, and the only way it can learn to fight is through experience and repetition."

She was speaking, of course, of muscle memory, a term that would not be coined for twenty thousand years.

Muscle memory is another way to describe motor learning, which a process that consolidates a specific motor task into memory through repetition. When a movement or series of movements is repeated over time, a long-term muscle memory is created for that task, allowing it to be performed quickly and without conscious effort, like riding a bike or typing on a keyboard… or fighting.

No matter the knowledge we absorbed through the living blood, any foe we fought, if trained, would be faster than us. She explained this to all of us as best she could with our limited vocabulary.

"The flesh must learn," she said. "Even if the mind already knows. The flesh must act before thought, or you will all fall to your enemies. Your attacks will seem like the doddering of old men to your enemies. Their movements will be faster and more efficient, and they will strike where you are most vulnerable."

"You fight as mortal men fight," she said. This, after we had gone out into the desert to train. She addressed us from atop a dune, the moonlight glinting on her obsidian skin. "That would be fine if we were fighting mortal men," she continued, "but our enemies are not mortal men. They are t'sukuru, like you. Unlike you, however, they have been trained to kill other t'sukuru, and they have had much practice at it."

She paced in front of us like a restless panther as she spoke. I knew from our Shared memories that she had trained long and hard in Uroboros before the God King gave her leave to join his brutal raiders. And I knew that she would drive us just as ruthlessly. She would have no pity, least of all for me, but that was a good thing.

"If I wished to do it, I could defeat every one of you," she declared, sweeping her hand scornfully in our direction. When Morgruss scoffed, she thrust out her chest. "You do not believe I can do it? Why? Because I am a woman? Attack me, and I will show you the error of your convictions."

Morgruss was an old man when we made him an immortal, but he moved with surprising alacrity. He was on his feet and flying at her in an instant, fingers curled into claws, jaws agape so that his tusk-like fangs were fully exposed, ready to slice and tear into my beloved's flesh. It was all I could do to restrain myself from jumping to her defense.

Rather than leap into the air, as I suspected she would do, Zenzele slumped back. She seized ahold of the old man's tunic and threw him high into the air, using her muscular legs to propel him.

Morgruss went up and up, and then flapped his arms and legs as he returned to earth, his eyes comically wide.

Zenzele leapt as he fell and delivered a terrific kick to his head.

She struck him with such force that we all winced. Morgruss was flung away, spinning like a dervish, and smashed into a neighboring dune with a great puff of dust.

The Orda slid slowly down the side of the dune, sand crumbling over his limp body. The old man's head lolled like a flower with a broken stem.

Zenzele landed in a crouch. She rose and turned to look at her fallen opponent. Face down in the sand, Morgruss was making a low keening sound. "I have broken his neck," Zenzele said. "Even though the living blood will heal his injury, he will be paralyzed unless someone sets his neck on right. This is what our enemies will do to you if you do not know how to fight them. They will strike at your neck and back to paralyze you. They will snap off your arms or legs so that you cannot strike back at them. And once you are incapacitated, they will destroy you, or—" and she glanced at me—"they will quarter your body and take you to the God King as a trophy."

"T'sukuru strength is derived from the earth," she went on, after we had gone and restored Morgruss. We had to rebreak his neck so that it could heal properly. The living blood had fixed it in its damaged state. Even so, he moved clumsily for a day or two afterwards, as if his brain were not correctly wired to his limbs.

"When you fight the God King's warriors, they will try to throw you into the air. Or they will strike you while you are leaping through the air. They may use a weapon we call a straith, which is a rope with a hook tied on the end of it. They will surround you and catch your limbs with their hooks and hoist you off the ground, and then they will break you apart."

That was a tactic the Oombai had tried on me. I suppose I was lucky I had escaped it.

Zenzele looked at us solemnly.

"We do not know why a t'sukuru loses his strength when he is removed from the earth, but that is the way of it, and you must learn to take advantage of this weakness."

That was how Zenzele and her band of raiders had defeated Ilio and I in the Tanti forest. They had ambushed us, attacked us in midair, kept us from fighting on the ground until we were exhausted.

Of course, vampires have no mystical connection to the earth. It does not matter whether our feet are touching the ground or not. Our strength is physical. What she was talking about, and did not have the language to accurately convey, was leverage. Positional advantage. The ability to place yourself against a fixed object and push.

It is a thing your modern popular fiction rarely depicts when portraying feats of superhuman strength. One can exert little force without an object to push against. Unless he were extraordinarily heavy, your Super-man could no more lift a bus by its bumper than you could, not unless he had leverage.

But we didn't need technical language to practice the application of it.

And practice we did. All night, and for the next several months. We practiced offense and defense. We practiced on the ground and in midair. We practiced singularly and in groups.

We practiced crippling one another, though we had to be careful not to fatally injure our more vulnerable training partners. The most lethal portions of our education were practiced upon Eris, Zenzele and I—our group's resident Eternals.

We submitted to the indignity of it with stoic resignation. Though having my head ripped off or my heart pierced could not kill me, nor could it truly harm Eris or Zenzele, it is never a pleasant thing to experience. In fact, it is excruciating, not to mention humiliating. But we could see the necessity of it. We had to be experts at killing, every single one of us, if we hoped to defeat the God King and his zealous sycophants.

I allowed them to decapitate me, again and again. I was quartered, disemboweled, my arms and legs torn from my body.

We practiced until we could kill and maim without conscious thought. Until the movements were imprinted in our very cells—as Zenzele had said they must be.

We also learned how to restore one another in the midst of battle. Zenzele taught us to fight in groups, to keep an eye on our partners so that we could form a protective circle around a crippled ally. In the event that one of us were seriously injured, a member of the squad could fall back into the protective ring and quickly put our fallen comrade back together again—or Share with them at the final moment, if the injured warrior could not be healed.

It was another form of immortality.

The idea comforted the blood drinkers who were not so resilient as we three Eternals, especially Petra, the most fragile of our cabal. Even if they fell in this war with the God King, they knew their thoughts and experiences would not be lost to death's dark maw. A part of them would live on in the mind of the one who had Shared with them.

The term "immortal" is a disingenuous one, for very few of us are truly immortal. The Orda had already realized this. We are long-lived, yes. Hard to kill. Yet, for even the weakest blood drinkers among us, the Sharing offers hope of true immortality.

It is a great comfort, even for "gods".