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Heavy artillery, aerial strafing, and bombardment are all very well, but there comes a time when you must go in there and clean a city out, and for that, I personally prefer to use a sword. For one thing, you don't get killed while you are reloading.

Why does the human mind insist on multi-tasking? Since fighting for my life took only half of my brain, the other half was free to distract me. I don't know why they call it "thrust, beat, and parry".

The next opponent was coming in on my left. I blocked him with my shield and hacked his arm off. That was definitely "hacking." Poor bastard. Why didn't he just stay home? Why couldn't they have just accepted our offer? We said that if they would free all of their slaves, we would take care of these people, send them home, and leave the inhabitants of Alexandria alive and in peace.

Faced with an overwhelmingly powerful Army, Navy, and Air Force, why was that so hard to accept? Well, yes, we had also demanded their obedience, but we had been very nice to the other places that had gone along with our program. We'd even left their leadership intact.

So, I just hacked his arm off. The next one was to my right. Small bugger. My sword knocked his aside - okay, that's "beating," but then I swung for his breastbone and damned near cut him in half. That was definitely "hewing." When you cut something down, you are "hewing." Okay, now a low forehand to this man's leg and a backhand to that guy's leg. That's a "backhand." So there I was, hacking and hewing and backhanding my way through an army of men I didn't know and didn't particularly want to kill, in a back alley of a city that I never really wanted to conquer.

Battle is tiring work. Half of the battles in history must have ended because the combatants were just too damned tired to swing their swords one more time. Unfortunately, my bright golden armor and polished sword seemed to attract a lot of attention. If I died on this vacation it would be because I was overdressed.

I badly needed to disengage and rest my arm. Unfortunately, my backward steps encouraged my opponents to rush harder at me and caused more work. Thankfully, red and white uniforms moved in front of me and closed the line behind these last two opponents. One went down to a throat slash. The other backed up and got a surprised look on his face when he backed into the Christian soldier who had closed the line behind him. If he had dropped his sword, he would have lived. As it was, I had to be very careful to cut him down and not take out my own man behind him. My sword is very sharp.

It was made for me by Tom, my time traveling uncle. Well, actually, he was my second cousin, but he was older than me, and I'd always called him "uncle." Since it was a one off, and used technology far beyond anything that we could duplicate, I was the only person who could get one.

Basically, it was a good, watered steel scimitar that had been split in half, the hard way. Then a fifty angstrom thick layer of pure diamond had been placed down the whole length of the blade, and the sandwich had been permanently bonded together. There was no way that we could make another one, here in the Thirteenth Century. Or in the Twentieth, for that matter.

Then I was able to step back a few paces. I dropped my sword to waist height and stood there panting. The battle was moving slowly away from me. If you ignored the pain, loss of blood, filth, cold, hard labor, hacking and hewing, this was not the worst vacation that I had ever taken, but I decided that next year I would go fishing.

I wished that I had some arrows left. My bow weighted less than my sword, and it doesn't attract the unwanted attention that a firearm does.

The whole thing had started one day in my castle, or palace or whatever it was.