In Patience To Abide Bk 2 Chap 3

CHAPTER 3

"Kildar. We have customers."

"Right," Mike said, rolling over and heaving to his feet. Damned joints.

The Keldara weren't the only ones having a lie-down. After the sun set and the temperature dropped Mike had gone over to 'his' container, gotten some chow, chatted with the Keldara, who were all keyed up as kids on Christmas Eve, and then had some horizontal time. Cat naps were wonderful things when you were a commander. He was truly starting to get too old for this shit. But the bunk was comfortable and the Keldara kept the chatter down. Most of the senior team members were also combat napping. They understood the axiom of get rest while you can.

Most of them had been part of collection teams bringing in infected. But Mike's former arrangement with Donauri had pretty much shut that down before Tblisi got bad. Some of them had been on the extraction mission and had seen what full zombie swarms were like. But most hadn't. And they were really looking forward to fighting them. Especially since it would be cold steel.

Mike understood it, intellectually, but he really didn't get the emotional aspects. He also understood that and why. Americans had no real history of cold steel. America had been settled after gunpowder was the pre-eminent form of weaponry. Fighting with swords was, if anything, antithetical to Americans because 'swords' meant 'European nobility.' Anything not gunpowder was 'the other.' Bows? Them Red Savages Devils. Swords? Pussy English officers in the Revolution. Spears? Who uses a spear when you gots a gun, son? It wasn't that there weren't people who were into sword fighting in the US. But it wasn't the way that the Keldara viewed cold steel.

The Keldara had a warrior tradition dating back so far it was impossible to track. But that tradition, up until very recently, had been all about cold steel. Firearms were, to them, a second best. They used them extremely well, but their attachment to axes was more like the Japanese attachment to katanas. They struck a special part of their cultural heart. The Japanese and the katana. The Ghurka and his kukhri. The Keldara and his axe.

You had to be an old culture to truly understand. America was not an old culture.