Tuesday, February 8, 2022 Aqrabuamelu compound, Flushing, Queens, New York, United States

The next day Ella waited for the axe to fall. They practiced rock and wall climbing with full tactical gear and boots on. It was hard and required trusting the rope more than actual climbing techniques.

Then hand to hand combat. Here Ella was the weakest, her months of training not even close to a match for the others having trained from a young age. That and the rules and goals were quite different. No grappling or mat work, locks and bars must be used for position and then let go, hooks and sweeps were fair game…

“In armed conflict you must get advantage and go for the kill. Grappling will get someone else coming over to shove a knife into you.”

So the rules were simply do what you need to do and defeat your enemy and then you could go help the rest of your team.

Practice weapons would be thrown in randomly to make the playing field more uneven and Ella became a huge fan of leg kicks to keep her distance. Her attempts at disarming ended up with endless red steaks from where the practice weapon would score on her. And those were always following up by Zaidu’s sword smacking down.

When they got to traditional weapons, Ella received a huge surprise when Zaidu grabbed the weapon out of her hand and held it, “Vermin, you have hands, so learn how to hold your weapon.”

She copied how he had held it. And still got it knocked out of her hand when Zaidu came by and knocked it with his sword.

“Too hard. Leave your hands pliable.”

Then he walked away. Ella almost froze, there hadn’t been an insult thrown in.

Zaidu walked back and forth correcting stances, hitting them with the flat of the blade when he was unhappy. He still growled and spat a lot, his hiss taking in a rasping quality when he spoke to her. He hit her harder with his sword and called her names all the time. But he started to teach her.

She then headed out to her classes wondering about what had happened.

That night Ella was walking the halls, trying to learn the labyrinth of tunnels. Each tunnel wound at different angles and elevations, and Adra had told her that there were scent trails that they could follow but Ella was incapable of sensing them.

She was wondering in a particularly windy bit of hallway when a hand dropped on her shoulder and she leapt forward and down in a roll to face behind her where she saw Bahu.

“Nice reflexes. Come with me.”

Bahu led her to a another gymnasium, a bit smaller and a circle on the ground where she set Ella on one side.

Then she walked over to a weapon rack and grabbed Ella’s sword staff and threw it at her and grabbed a similar one for herself

“Copy me.”

And she held the weapon. Ella copied and Bahu came over and adjusted her hands slightly.

Then Bahu grabbed her hands and twisted and the fine seam appeared and the weapon came apart into two pieces. A sword and a rod.

“What the hell? I didn’t know it did that!”

Bahu smiled and said nothing, separating her weapon in a similar manner.

Then she took a different stance which Ella recognized from Davcina’s two long knife training.

They took turns with stances, Bahu not saying a word, but whacking her with the rod when Ella did something wrong. Hard.

Then practicing basic strikes in the air for hours into the night.

At the end they kneeled as she did every day with Zaidu and Bahu began the ritual sayings aloud, but she paused after each phrase and waited for Ella to repeat it phonetically.

Afterwards, Bahu took her to the adjacent room, there were small bowls of fruit and salty-lemon water. Then into a central chamber which she called a apodyterium with stone benches and pegs where six doors branched off.

She set out for one door and there were two tables with two men standing there - Bahu stripped down and lay face down on one of the tables and motioned Ella to do the same.

Ella hesitated a moment, she wasn’t comfortable with the casual approach to nudity of the Aqramuabelu. One of the men handed her a robe without prompting and Ella stripped off her top facing away and put the robe on before stripping down.

She lay down and her attendant murmered in accented English, “I am going to pull down your robe to expose your back.”

Ella looked over to Bahu and saw she was being expertly oiled and massaged by her attendant and the temptation for some bit of luxury was too much for her to resist, she nodded yes and let herself go.

The man was an expert and she soon relaxed into a near drowsy state.

“I remember when Maximian and Diocletian started to build their baths and I was so curious about them, I traveled quite far to see them. This balneae, I had it built as a miniature version of what I remembered of it, before Arcsa came and besieged Rome with his friend Vitiges.”

Ella perked up a bit at Bahu’s statement. She had been snoozing despite the very aggressive, almost painful kneading. Bahu stood up, murmered something and motioned to Ella to follow her further.

Ella sat up, pulling her robe up and followed Bahu through a series of rooms. The first room had hot water and they stayed on briefly, the next cool water where they sat companionably. Bahu would occasionally dip into the steam room or sauna rooms and then come back to cool off, but Ella was content to soak.

“What you said earlier, you are all so… well, old.”

Bahu smiled, her eyes closed as she relaxed, but Ella took it as a sign to go on.

“Yes, many of us served Ekerri. I am not quite so old. I was made around your year 3200 BC.”

“Made?”

“Yes, we are all made through magic. It is why the four you are with are all that is left. As magic disappeared from the world, we could no longer replenish our numbers. We once numbered in the millions. Now we are in the thousands. We age very slowly… Arcsa is one of the original creche. As is Zaidu. The High Priestess is not that much younger. I am a baby compared to them. I was only in Kur for 200 years or so, almost nothing…”

“You know all this. It is why even if we were not programmed to follow you, we would. We wish to be a true people and reproduce as such. But our children are humans or deformed and non-viable.”

“You have human children?”

“Many over the years. All long dead from old age, or war, or disease or sheer accident.” And Ella now understood some of the tone she had heard when they talked about being a true people. The pure yearning in Bahu’s voice, the sense of loss… It all came through clearly. She knew Bahu had stopped having children because the loss was too much.

After some time, when Ella felt pruny, she emerged from the tub. They dressed in some linen robes, and Bahu guided her back to her barracks.

But before they entered, Bahu stopped her. She looked away, “Eleanor, perhaps this is too much to ask,” she hesitated.

Ella said, “Please…”

“Would you grant me a benediction?” Bahu whispered. And then blushed.

“You know I don’t know what I am doing, right? But of course, if my blessing has any meaning to you, it is yours…”

Bahu knelt and Ella looked down on her and then leaned over and gave her a kiss on her forehead. “I, if I am Innana-reborn, thank you.” She did not know what to say, and it felt too simple. But it felt right.

Bahu closed her eyes a moment and exhaled.

Later, when Ella lay in bed, she still wasn’t sure about being a divine being, but she felt good about the night.

The next night when Bahu came to train again, Ella finally felt a bit optimistic about her decision to be there.