“Round were your bellies soft, soft your hand,

Soft with the fat of the earth;

Yours was the wealth of a smiling land

Ours the deserts dearth.”

-Verse 5

CIVILIZATION:

Bell’s soft hand petted the softer belly beneath his sleek silks. His right hand poured God’s portion into the greedy golden bowl. Inwardly he groused, ‘The Priest is fatter than I, wager you mirror of my soul, he slurps this nectar from beneath God’s altar like some pig in a sty!’

The white wine, the best, what didn’t botch his belly, was only dispensed when the God thirsted, leaving him, the soul of God’s city to slake in cruder gulps.

“Oh Prince of Ar, God is Good, God is Grace, may he continue to shine through you, the font of the Race.”

He nodded, that his diadem caught the light of the holy candles and impressed tonight’s prize. Her piercing green eyes flashed like a tigress. Her body, since scrubbed of the mud that caked her when Uncle Leopard lassoed her defiant hips, was deeply curved and lithe with energy. He thirsted for her like he had never for drink. Her little nose and pouting lips winkled with mischief—a scar slit that nose; mark of the slut, the whore brand of the Wolf Clans. This he had been told by he who held her leashed in a waistband of gold by a brazen chain.

He, Count Leopard Gate, smiled with narrow lips and narrower eyes, “Oh Prince, this wench of the Wolfpack, skulking in the snowy hills, seems to have fallen afoul of their prudish law. I here give the produce of this dawn’s chase.”

The Priest passed the bowl to an eunuch, and advised in a didactic whisper, “Oh Prince of Ar, it is time you have wed the fairest daughter of Count Bull. Please, do not affront that noble lady’s bed with this harlot of the wicked rushes.”

He could not take his eyes from her, from her body, so well displayed in her knees with hands fettered behind her back. She returned his appraising gaze, licking her savage lips. He looked to Uncle Leopard, who, among the counts had taken least affront from his tactical maneuver out of that Wolfpack ambush. Bell asked, “Uncle, if I do partake of this she-beast, might…” he paused as he looked at his soft belly compared to her lithe waist, “...might my adore for war be stoked, might I regain courage enough to ride down the wolfish rabble?”

“Oh Prince,” snarled Count Leopard Gate, “I have attained ferocious renown among the men who sire such as these, by rut in their own barren traces, to brand their faces! I seed and leave such of these staked to the war path—but look at her!” he growled as he yanked her to her feet and she snarled slant-ways at him with eyes of a murderess. “She is their best, and you are my Prince. She shall be yours—let her moans of submission carry from your window to the rocks that weened her; break her—as a portent that ye ‘will make o’ her sisters widows!”

The High Priest left in disgust. Two brown eunuchs hauled the wench to her feet, with Uncle Leopard’s admonition, “Chain her to the bed post and maintain your post at the door—she’s a cat ‘o claws!”

The woman hung up side down between their great brown hands, her black hair falling to the floor, her emerald green eyes looking into his as if he were indeed a fraction of God incarnate.

He stood, trying to ignore the soft jiggle of his wine gut, “Thank you, Uncle,” and trailed the eunuch’s, his scouts leading him to a conquest for which he admired his chances of victory.

BARBARISM—

She climbed the stony stairs from the Sack Canyon of Waterholes, within which the rabbits, the pine nuts and even the wild cats had been hunted out. The Brass Men dared not negotiate these narrow paths. Yet the Clan’s plight was bare, her milk giving out for Gaunt, clutching at her breasts as she climbed. ‘This old one must be pressed!’ she inwardly professed.

Within the time that it took to skin a rabbit, she had scrambled aloft, babe and all. There, below the first stars of night, in the light of the moon rising bright, stood, not Guide, but Brand. Her man had tricked her and gotten here by some other way. He stood, hard against the sky, his belly taught with hunger—he had not eaten in eleven days, the stubborn fool!

Guide, sat, rubbing owl bones, all but blind. At the sound of her, he tried to rise, and failed. Helped up by Brand, the man stood, shaking at the knees.

She dashed between them, scolding, “You must both eat. We need a Guide and a Spear!”

Brand looked at her like she hoped he would never look at another woman, “Shrewd, he is done—knew you would come.”

Guide looked into her eyes on the level, for he had shrunk since his fast had begun in sight of the Brass City. He pointed, with some last remaining strength, at the glimmering city, smoke rising to heaven, seated in the midst of that green plain, kissed by the broad river.

“See, Mother Shrewd, how the city eats its own,” pointing to the file of tiny forms disappearing into the glinting door in the wall, closed by brass men, who remained standing between two brass bulls.

“Yes,” she acknowledged, horror struck, hugging Gaunt to her breast as Brand covered her shoulders with his strong arm and intoned with that deep voice that made her insides moan, “My sister is in. She shall witch the King.”

Guide drawled weakly, handing her his owl bones, “It is time for wolves to dine!”

He turned and leaped over the cliff. When his bones were heard to break far below, they three shivered.