The Sword of Rule

By Mitch Bouchette

Intrigue, treason, and conflict - a tale for the ages! The characters come to life and the reader is there in the middle of the action. Mitch Bouchette tells this tale of conquest, treason and love as only he can. The action, adventure and romance pulls the reader into the lives of three couples separated by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. From an assassination attempt on Newen and Izel in their mess-American homeland to the confrontation between Newen and the Viking in a fight to the death in Iceland in 850 AD. The story will capture your imagination as the modern day Museum Director connects her lover's discoveries on a glacier in Iceland in 2020 AD with the conflict between Newen from the Land Between The Waters and the Viking Aenar.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mitch Bouchette
• Release date: Aug 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005278731

Mitch Bouchette

Mitch Bouchette bring s wealth of background knowledge and experience from his travels throughout Europe, Africa, Latin America and South West Asia. He is a linguist and has an insatiable curiosity; so it is not surprising that he has made a lifetime study of people, places and cultures and he weaves his observations into the fabric of his writing. He is self-described "closet academic" with a track record of serious publications in the international relations arena (under another name - we don't want to bore you with those academic papers).His current works of fiction capitalize on this background to present stories of people connected by events past and present. "Thanks for sharing your time with me and I hope you enjoy the stories!"

Book preview

Chapter 1: Newen

Author's note: I must explain that our Viking tale begins several thousand miles away Circa 850 A.D. in Meso-America in the pre-Colombian world of the area that would some day be known as the Yucatan. The adventure starts with a love story, an assassination attempt and a birth in the wee hours of the morning.

Newen had fallen for Izel from the first time he ever saw her and had been in love with her from that moment on. Like most young men he noticed her physical appearance first, but when he fell in love it was with her indomitable spirit and fiercely independent streak. Granted, there was an unmistakable sensual air about her and, with fair skin that tanned a lovely olive shade in the sun, he could not take his eyes off of her from the first time he saw her.

He was entranced then, and he was entranced now, by the unruly chestnut brown hair that framed her nearly perfect face. He got lost looking into the biggest, greenest eyes he had ever seen. And, when she moved the world stopped to watch her. She exuded a sexually charged energy in the most innocent of her movements and all the young men wanted her, as well as a good many of the older men.

It had taken all the wit, persistence, and self-control that Newen possessed to court her, and a good deal of luck to win her hand in the end. He praised his good luck in finding her and his good fortune in taking her for his bride.

Nothing made him happier than to just lie beside her in their bed and feel her warmth and her subtle movements beside him under the covers. She moved in a feline and sensual way against him . . . usually. They lay together right now but this was not another lazy, sensual night; and something was terribly, dangerously wrong.

Izel moved on the bed beside him. He was aware of her . . . and he was instinctively aware of a danger that was also in the room. His senses were on fire but he felt it more than he heard it. It was in the air and he could smell the first hint of the smell of death that was to come. An almost imperceptible sound had awakened Newen instantly and totally.

The blood raced in his veins as his pulse quickened and every one of his senses reached out for information on the yet unseen threat, as his warrior’s animal instincts screamed for him to flee. But he would not flee. He was not known to be one to panic, and he was not given to fright.

He was Newen. He was Newen Yooko bin Irepani of the house and line of Irepani Nima. He was the fourteenth in a line of warriors who had ruled since the time of the judges when Irepani Nima, the Great Founder, had led the people to the land between the waters. And they had settled near the people who spoke Yoko or Choco, in the land that would someday be called Yokot’an, or later Yucatan.

But right now Newen Yooko, which meant the force of the tiger, the Tiger King, lay on his bed in a cold sweat. He dared not move because any movement on his part might give away the slim advantage of being awake. He was a veteran warrior and he knew that battles were won or lost by such slim advantages. He also feared that whatever, or whoever, it was that he sensed had already entered the room.

He felt the clammy wetness in the middle of his back and he was aware of the man-smell in the bedchamber that was not his own. Pretending to snore loudly and rolling to his other side, he opened one eye and scanned the moonlit room. All appeared to be in order . . . and then he heard it again. There was the soft, unmistakable scrape of a leather sandal and the pad of a bare foot on the stone staircase below. So, he reasoned, his mind racing, sandals and bare feet, there were at least two of them. They, whoever they were, had halted suddenly, probably to listen; so he knew they were also careful. The barely audible sounds told him they were also alert to his movements. This would not be easy.

Newen reached for Izel Hiutonal, whose name meant the one precious light, under the skins that covered them on the bed. He touched the inside of her thigh with the flat palm of his hand. He knew Izel would feel the cold sweat in his palm and she would know this was not an early morning caress. This was a warning he gave her; it could be nothing else.

He knew that she would realize there was none of the gentleness and softness in his touch that she had come to expect. This was especially so now that her belly was large and she was near the end of her time. He felt her stiffen the muscles of her leg in response. He knew her and he knew she wanted to leap from the bed and run but she would not.

She would know that there was an unknown danger close at hand because her husband had not spoken a word. He could feel the tension throughout the length of her body. She was afraid for herself and for him and for the unborn child within her and he knew it would be with great effort that she would lay quietly still and wait.

Newen Yooko bin Irepani, the Tiger King, made a mental shift that moved him from the role of prey to the role of hunter. The adrenaline coursed through his system as he eased his short killing sword from its resting place beside the bed. The grip was made of alternating pieces of wood and animal hide and fitted to his grip – it was a comfort to him now to feel the heft of it.

With the sword firmly in his hand, he rose from the bed and stole quietly toward the door leading down the staircase. The sword felt good in his hand and he took comfort in the knowledge that it was sharp enough to scrape the hair from his face. It was unique in appearance and had become identified with him during his reign and him with it.

****

A younger Newen had argued with the metal smith for a day and a half before the old craftsman had agreed to cut a groove down both sides of the center of the blade. The groove, that would today be called a fuller, allowed the blood to flow from a wound even before the blade was withdrawn from its thrust. To make matters worse, in that discussion that seemed so far away, the young king wanted not a straight or true edged blade but one with curves like ripples along the edge so that it presented a snake like edge.

The old craftsman had been sure these eccentricities would weaken the blade and cause it to break and he was after all a master of his trade with a reputation to protect. Such non-standard blades were not unheard of but were considered bastard swords and many assurances were demanded and given. If the blade did break, the young king would not disclose who had made this particular bastard sword in such a ridiculous manner.

Once satisfied that his good name was secure the old man had finished installing the blade and topped the grip with a sharpened gold knob as a pommel to crown the handgrip. The gold pommel was the weight that gave it balance and acted as a bludgeon, a skull crusher, when necessary.

****

Tonight it felt good, and it felt reassuring in his hand. And if not for the imminent danger and the tension in his limbs, which made his movements resemble those of a strange and deadly creature, Newen might have thought himself a humorous sight to watch. He was a large man who normally walked with the ambling gait of a wrestler, but right now, at this moment, he now moved across the floor of his bedroom like a large cat stalking his prey.

With the stealth of a tiger his muscles rippled and flexed as he moved to the blackness of the doorway. He thought for just a split second how much this was like waiting outside the opening of a cave for the beast within. Just out of the moonlight, at the door, poised to strike, he was as ready as he could be.

He knew that Izel would neither move nor speak until it had begun. She would not move until her movements would not give him away to whoever was on the stairs. She understood the need to maintain any advantage he might have. She was also intensely and painfully aware that three lives hung in the balance and she knew that he was the best chance they all had of surviving this night.

His muscles twitched in anticipation and anxiety even as his mind raced. He hoped these unknown assailants would not simply launch a volley of arrows blindly into the bed from the doorway. If he and Izel were still alive tomorrow he would place a high footboard at the end of the bed so that would be less of a threat in the future, if there were a future!

The first of the intruders slipped into the room. Newen slashed his sword quickly but quietly across the man’s neck nearly severing the head from the body. In the throes of death the corpse stepped once more forward as it fell, dying, its life’s blood spilling in the King’s bedchamber. Immediately, on the back swing, Newen thrust toward the midsection of the second intruder.

The force of the blow drove this larger unsuspecting intruder back and he staggered, falling off the blade. The blade stayed firmly, held in by a powerful grip in the King’s hand. But the attacker was clutching his stomach and screaming in pain.

From the darkness of the staircase, a war club leapt from the hand of a third assailant as he charged up the stairs. The blunt missile caught Newen squarely in the chest with a dull thud and Newen stumbled backward into his bedchamber in a vain attempt to keep his balance. The third assailant reached the top of the stairs in that instant and drew his own knife intending to finish off the still falling King.

The attacker had a momentary advantage and was so sure of his victory that he was making a mental count of the gold he would receive for this murder. Then the glint in the would-be assassin’s eye changed from blood lust to surprise, and finally to horror. The assassin sensed it but never saw it coming. The slim, almost delicate, wooden shaft entered through his chest and stopped only because it struck the back of his ribcage. His heart had already stopped beating as he clutched the arrow protruding from his chest and fell. He fell driving the shaft of the arrow even further through his body.

Izel dropped the crossbow and started toward Newen. All the emotion of the last minutes began to well up inside of her and her breathing came in irregular gasps. She stepped around the body but almost slipped in the blood on the floor when she saw her husband begin to move on the floor she halted suddenly.

Izel changed direction, and headed for the window. The cool freshness of the night air did not come quickly enough. Amid the relief she felt, that she and her husband were alive; and the horror of the stench and smell of death, she held fast to the windowsill and began to retch and vomit.

Newen made his way to his feet and walked in a half daze, rubbing his bruised chest, to her side. He stood there a moment continuing to rub the bruise that was forming in the middle of his chest. Then he reached out his right arm around Izel’s shoulders to support her and lend her his strength. They stood there a while just holding each other and shivering in the early morning chill.

No words were spoken because no words had to be spoken. His love for her was as obvious as hers for him. He had saved her life and she had saved his. As the first lights of dawn began to break over the horizon, they escaped the horror and the stench of death walking arm in arm, he assisting her, down the stairs and out of the bedchamber.

****

Later that day as Izel lay resting under the watchful eye of a physician, Newen made his way quietly across the courtyard. The predawn activities had left him physically tired and emotionally drained, but mentally very awake and very angry. It was as if someone had rubbed salt into the exposed nerve of a wound.

Every fiber of his being was raw and alert. He had faced death more than once in battle but never had he been subjected to anything as reprehensible as this attempted assassination as he and his wife slept. He crossed the paved courtyard and entered the side of the Great House. He surveyed the comfortable seats and the polished stone tables and spoke his thoughts aloud, Later this day I will sit in this room and look upon the face of the man who is trying to kill me and end my line.

With every breath his anger grew. What kind of a person would send three assassins to slay a man, and his pregnant wife, and unborn child while they slept? This had to be resolved and prevented from occurring in the future.

As he wrestled with his thoughts Izel, who was at the end of her term, would give birth to the fifteenth in a line of Kings, Tayel bin Newen of Izel. Tayel was a good name for it meant sacred song in the language of the Mapuche. Izel had first heard this name from her father as he addressed an old friend who visited from time to time. Her father’s friend was a trader from the far south Andean region and he was of the Mapuche people.

If the gods were willing he would someday be Tayel bin Newen Yooko bin Irepani Nima and he would rule this land where they had all once been Chontali which meant strangers in the language of Nahuatl. This was a land where many people came together from different dynastic families and kingdoms. But theirs was a different sort of kingdom and Newen was a good leader and he knew his son would someday also be a good leader as well.

Chapter 2: Tim

In The Hotel Today In Iceland (Circa 2020 A.D.) Here We see the end, that we might understand the beginning. . .

Tim was naked except for his boxer shorts and he was in his room at the Loftleider Hotel in Reykjavik, Iceland. Timberlake Hunter walked over to the window and pulled back the curtain to take a peek outside. The view from the window made him shiver visibly as he wrestled with his original intention for making this trip, which was to climb the glacier. But the day was cold and grey with a low sky that threatened snow at any moment. Hell, he thought, you could almost see the snow crystals forming in the air.

He had never seen any place on earth as cold and inhospitable as this place was. It could be, and often was, an ugly and cold place to be; except, of course for the warm and inviting, tall, blonde women; one of whom was lying on his bed right now waiting and watching him. This fact made his decision to stay exactly where he was a lot easier. He came to an immediate decision. They would stay in the hotel one more night and then he would make the trek to go up to climb the glacier in the morning.

With that resolved, at least in his own mind, he pulled two cigarettes from a pack in the pocket of his rumpled dress shirt that hung over the back of the desk chair. He lit them with the gold lighter his ex-wife had given him and walked back toward the blonde. On his way to the bottle of Oban, his favorite scotch whiskey, in his overnight bag, he passed the bed and gave one of the cigarettes to the blonde.

She inhaled deeply and stretched in a feline way as he poured a little more than two fingers of the amber liquid into a glass. He enjoyed this one vice more than his other vices and inwardly shook his head in consternation at the Icelandic opinion that all whiskey was whiskey; which is why you had to be very specific with the bartenders, that is unless you enjoyed drinking scotch and coke.

Back in the moment, he looked down at her pretty face framed on the pillow by an aura of soft blonde locks. His gaze wandered over her breasts, her flat tight stomach and finally at the shock of blonde hair between her legs and he smiled. She returned his smile. They had absolutely nothing in common, including the language. She could barely pronounce his name and he didn't even try to pronounce hers. He had met her last night on the dance floor and it had been lust at first sight. His lack of linguistic ability had not been a major drawback. They had managed well enough to communicate, so maybe they had at least one thing in common after all.

****

Tim did not understand, nor did he pretend to understand the grand strategy of the United States of America. So who was he to question why it had brought him to this remote volcanic outcropping in a distant corner of the world in the coldest part of the North Atlantic? However, in his humble opinion one of the few good things about that Department of Defense decision to build a radar station here, and then to put someone in Iceland to run it, was that the people had very relaxed moral standards when judged by American standards.

In fact if you judged them by US standards, they were absolutely shameful. Of course, if you judged Americans by Icelandic standards, the Americans would appear terribly inhibited, prudish, and more than a little bit uptight. Unfortunately, with the limited population of a few hundred thousand people, the number of women was not infinite from which to choose. On the other hand it was more than tolerable if you liked blondes. In fact if you liked blondes it was quite nice.

Fortunately, the tour of duty was only a year and a half long, and there were tens of thousands of women in Reykjavik from which to choose. Or, more likely there were tens of thousands of women by whom you could be chosen. The later was far more likely than the former, and was in fact more often the rule than the exception. Also fortunate for Hunter was that he liked blondes.

This stay in the hotel was a holiday from his duty station at a small radar installation about an hour's drive to the south, just outside of Keflavik, Iceland. Kef, as his buddies referred to it, was a fishing village on the west coast of Iceland and it was an interesting place to visit for about a day and a half, but boring as hell for the rest of the time. For Timberlake Hunter, future ex-Air Force Officer, it was going to be boring for about sixty-three more days and then he would be winging his way back home to the land of round door knobs. But round door knobs weren't the only thing to which he was looking forward. Tim was a bachelor and liked women, a lot.

And, back in the US there was also a larger variety of women and they were women with whom he could actually communicate. Back in the U.S. he could actually use words both he and they understood and he could talk to them. Not that Tim was opposed to occasional sex with beautiful women without the requirement to talk afterward, but he did enjoy a little conversation once in a while. And yet, here he was again in a hotel room with a woman with whom he had not been able to communicate beyond their apparent mutual physical attraction. Hmmm, so maybe she too liked occasional sex without the requirement to talk afterward. This realization occurred to Tim as a passing thought but he did not put much energy into it or its implications..

****

As he came to grips with his last two months in Iceland, he was trying desperately to accomplish the few things that could be done on the island nation so his year would not seem a total waste. The fact of the matter was that he had spent the vast majority of his time the past ten months in the officer's lounge playing poker, drinking whiskey, and picking up women. Although, in truth, as previously noted, one could seldom actually pick-up the mo-Jennies; they almost always picked you up.

The men, called mo-Jacks by the military, made a fine art out of fishing, drinking, and playing chess. When they weren't pursuing these art forms they made a living out of overcharging for everything else. It was their persistent overcharging that led the British, who had preceded the Americans here, to nickname them mo-Jacks. The unit of British currency was called the jack and the Icelanders were always asking for more.

Hunter took another drag from the cigarette and smiled. The men in the stores tried to overcharge for everything, but the women, on the other hand, didn't charge at all for their time and their interest. Maybe they just liked to have a good time with someone who didn't smell like fish. The blonde obviously thought he was smiling at her so she winked at him and his smile broadened. He went back to the side of the bed and let his eyes wander again looking her up and down.

She was not beautiful in the Hollywood sense of the word. But, he saw, she was nice and well shaped and physically fit and trim, and there was something about her that made him just stop and stare. And besides, he wanted to have a clear head tomorrow when he went up the glacier. Right now, he could think of no better way to clear his head.

Hunter prided himself on having the self-discipline to overcome the double handicap of growing up with a southern education and a questionable attitude. Now a rare fit of conscience, to which he was sometimes susceptible, had inspired him to embark on this trip to climb the glacier. The glacier had receded in recent months revealing terrain and objects that had previously been hidden. They had been hidden below the ever-crawling and ever-receding glacier and there had even been several finds in the area. This trek would at least give him something about which he could tell his folks back home when they asked, What did you do in Iceland for a year and a half?

But, as the view from the hotel room window suggested, the weather was really bad today, and the glacier would still be there tomorrow; on the other hand, the blonde was here now and might not be here tomorrow. He finished the scotch, set the glass down, and lay back down beside her to see if he could learn a little more Icelandic. It really was like no other language he had ever encountered.

****

The Glacier

The next day Tim was in a foul mood. The new day had begun entirely too early and the weather was still as bad if not worse than the day before – and the blonde was gone. His breakfast had consisted of undercooked eggs and overcooked sausages. His car had not wanted to start and took some coaxing and now here he was. He was hanging from the side of a wall of ice, sweating despite the cold, and suffering through the remnants of a hangover that would just not seem to quit. He was starting to wonder exactly why he had ever thought this was a good idea in the first place.

His