Oct 13 Death of a Warrior

The grizzled old warrior stood on the edge of the cliff and gazed out to sea, his sword hung heavy on his waist and his clothes flapped madly in the wind.  His eyes were deep and weary, his skin weather worn and wrinkled, his hair long and grey, its original colour lost many years before.  He still stood tall and erect, with his spine pulled up to its full height, his powerful posture always belied his age………….. 

He felt the earth at his feet and remembered the blood and bodies yielding to it over the years…….. the battles against the marauding tribes from the Northern Lands, the ferocity of their leaders, the fear gripping his vitals when the warning fires went up to tell of their coming, the sheilded boats looking like hungry dragons wending their inevitable way to take their sacrificial bodies back for their demonic rites……  Many of the present tribes now had children and fierce youths looking just like the marauders as a result of the rapes and the fact that some of the prisoners stayed and mixed…..

His joints ached as he remembered the fighting, and the injuries, he remembered the fire of anger in his belly as he thought of the damage his enemy had done to his village, how his sword ached to kill and how he had argued with the elders that negotiation was useless and to destroy them was the only way.  He felt shame as he remembered pushing the elders to one side and leading the young off to battle, how it seemed the more they killed, the more came……..

He remembered the wise women, blessing the swords, healing the wounds and giving protective spells and charms to the warriors, the constant training and preparation for battle, the relocation of the village off the road and into the valley for the concealement and then strategic building of the fortress and the look out positions on the hill tops, the bonding of old enemies to ward off the invaders, so much war, so much carnage, so much death…… 

As he got older he realised that he would not change anything, he was hailed as a hero for a measure of success in repelling the invaders but he knew that he was in fact responsible for some of the mayhem…..  When he finally tired of the blood and death he tried negotiation with a little more success, but then who knows what that will lead to in the long run, already the young bucks are arguing that talking is getting them nowhere and that a call to arms is the only answer…….. 

The power of the sea called out to the warrior, he remembered his own voyages out to bring back food when the crops had failed and the raiders had stolen the stores, he remembered raiding villages to ensure their own survival and doing to others as they had done to them, in sheer bloodlust he had killed children and raped women because it was the only way that they could be feared enough to meet little resistance and ensure that the villagers would head for the hills next time they saw them coming……..  But it was also more than that, in the heat of battle a man became nothing more than a crazed animal…………

The wind was biting cold and the warrior felt the chill to his bones, he knew his time was coming.  He had spent more time in death than life recently and was becoming unsure which was more real…….  The earth was pulling his bones, the sea his fluid, the air his breath and the night sky his spirit, he knew it wouldn’t be long.  He knew that it was useless to wonder why there was so much pain and suffering and knew that without it there could be no joy and peace, you could not know one without the other, he was looking forward to being wrapped into the cloak of Herne to free himself from the pain of life……. 

He had come to realise that whatever he did, he would have little influence on any matters in the long run, that whatever mankind did, they could not compete with the universal forces around and within them.  That the same old cycles would reassert themselves again and again, this was natural law, we were all products of Mother Earth and she fed off herself.  The food chain meant that we all fed off each other, yielding our mortality to the drive for nourishment and reproduction of others.

He knew that time was not real, he could think of all of his past life over dinner, so to him he was really only one meal old, the longest period of time was the now, in which everything was held, the past, present and future, the wise women had explained this to him when he was younger and they were healing him after a battle……. and as he had spent much time recently in the death world, preparing himself to be in the timeless state……. he understood much better now…….

In his meditation he joined with the spirits of all the warriors, they had lived on through his training and taught him from the spirit world, they would help transport him from his mortal remains…… he joined with his hawk, to allow his spirit to soar and enjoin a sharpness of mind beyond the human ken…….  With the concentration taught to him by the Shaman he could be all things from all time……..

As he turned with his back to the sea, and he gazed across the land, he remembered the early morning dragons breath lingering across the valley……….  swirling lazily along the ‘dragons back’ and into and then around the ‘energy vortex’ created by the magicians in the stone circle the night before, the standing stones acting as ‘earth mirrors’ for the magicians to reflect their energies….

As he strolled back to the village, the earth pulling heavily on his legs, preparing himself to be impaled on the tip of the ambitous young bucks sword, the same boy that he had persistently saved as a youngster from the invaders, he wondered if at some time in generations to come whether a future warrior would stand on the same cliffs and join with his thoughts…………  and whether when there were enough…… if wisdom would arise to truly change things…….

Steve Rowe

Steve Rowe is a highly successful Martial Arts instructor - an International Neigong, Qigong and Tai Chi Teacher and an 8th Dan Karate with many other senior dan grades in other martial disciplines.

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