Jaycee Woods

Why does editing take so long? A draft sentence like–“She had been a female soldier of the opposite side; his enemy on the battlefield.”–can turn into the following clip. A new 700+ words added, but it remains rough. 🙂

The below is a clip from chapter 2 of Boudica and The Butcher.

**

Antigone struggled to open her eyes. She thought she had but only saw darkness. There were neither stars above nor the feeling of a breeze, so she reasoned that she lay inside instead of on the battlefield. Her last memory? Combat raging around her crumpled body. Her head ached.

She tried to remember what happened as her pulse thumped in her ears. Muffled voices and activity could be heard nearby, but she could not understand what those sounds meant. Antigone reached up to her throbbing head. She felt a cloth, maybe a bandage. Dried blood matted her hair around the dry bandage.

Her sergeant had ordered them to charge into the advancing Union line. Her whole squad lacked ammunition. Several of her comrades turned to run in panic only to be shot in the back by the advancing enemy. Antigone had no bayonet, so she charged raising her empty rifle like a club.

Jumping over the dead bodies of her former comrades, she advanced as others fell around her. Dead ahead the dark silhouette of a giant grew before her as he directed the Union troops to flank then encircle the rebel charge. Following her training, she screamed her battle yell to maintain her momentum as her mind screamed for her to flee.

Antigone ran straight at the giant as if drawn to him by magnetism. Within striking distance of the fiend who towered over her, she moved to strike down upon him with her rifle butt. His left hand grabbed her weapon in midair before her strike had gained sufficient momentum. She gasped breathlessly as his knee drove into her gut. Involuntarily, her body bent as the giant’s right hand struck down on her bare skull with the hilt of his blade.

She collapsed as a blinding light filled her vision before the blackness on the periphery of her vision grew as the light narrowed into a smaller and smaller circle. Her empty stomach flipped and flopped with threats of an eruption.

Finding herself lying on the ground as the battle spun around her, she watched the giant brutally slice through her comrades. She could not understand why her arms and legs no longer obeyed her command to rise. The battle din had been replaced by ringing in her ears. As her blood dripped into her eye, the battle in which she had become an observer instead of a participant took on a dark red hue. Exhaustion consumed her body as the battle shrunk to a small dot before winking out of her awareness.

Back to the present, she remained with her eyes open in the dark. Underneath, her fingers did not feel earth nor bedding, but fur. That made no sense to her as it was soft, warm, sensuous. Despite the mild ringing in her ears, she detected approaching muffled regimented footsteps distinct from the other meaningless sounds.

After the sound of moving canvas, an unexpected light blinded her. Antigone shut her eyes before narrowly opening them so her eyes might adjust. A lantern hung at the side of a silhouette of the giant. Unarmed, she shrunk into the furs in a vain attempt to hide herself from her enemy.

“Finally awake, lazybones,” the giant’s bass voice observed. “You are fine to move gingerly. The x-rays showed no fractures; your spine and neck were undamaged. When you were napping like a vacationer, my prick tests on your extremities demonstrated responsiveness so your nerves and muscles should be functioning.”

He put the lamp on a table within the large tent. In his green camo pants, he squatted beside her. Without warning or requesting permission, his fingers forced open her eyelids widely so he could examine the response of her pupils.

She observed that he was not actually a giant, but a tall man with the piercing gray eyes of an angel. She could not read his dog tags as they were tucked into his olive t-shirt. Without a word, he began taking her pulse. His large, rough, strong hands wordlessly communicated that any effort of resistance by her would be futile.

He rose to stalk about the tent. His stretching as he stepped made Antigone aware of his well-muscled body. In an unarmed contest of strength between them, she recognized that she had no chance even if she had been uninjured. Maybe she had no fractures as he had said, but her headache throbbed.