“You sang beneath the locust tree,
Forgetful of hunger and hate:
‘It has always been it will always be!—’
Even then we were at your gate.”
-Verse 6
CIVILIZATION:
Bee, daughter of Darvan, Chief of the Bull Clan, protector of Ar, picked her silver lyre and softly sang. The sun was merely cresting the unseen horizon, far beyond that broad wall she had never passed beyond. A muse moved her, to sing of Dawn, how She did not fear the Sun. Inspired by her own red-painted nails, skin soft and over-pale, she sang:
“Oh Rose-Fingered One,
Why must lonely Bee wane so pale,
While you, child of Great Sun,
Streak so golden hale?”
A sharp pin pricked her at the base of her skull, beneath her now famous, black curl of hair, “Bitch, blaspheme not beneath the Holy Tree what keeps your thin skin so fair! Sing the hymn of Diligent Glee! You are to share the bed of the living God!”
Another pin pricked her behind the ear as she turned from her felt mat and tossed her tresses back, glaring up at Mother Blood, Matron of the Bull Clan, boss bitch of a hundred noble girls and harrowing witch of a thousand slave girls. To her own surprise, as she looked up from her knees to the terrible crone, as strong as a normal eunuch, font of her mortal terror since she first resisted the tress comb on that hard knee, Bee smirked.
Thee old witch flinched! So Bee poured on the bitter cup of faded age: lifting her own perfect bust she batted one amber eye in disdain at the old cow’s sagging udders, to what the witch flinched again. Tossing her hair, her Crown and Glory, of which but thin strings were left under the bonnet of Mother Blood, across her own supple shoulders, she composed some more slave girl doggerel in affront of her lifelong oppressor:
“Ruled by a witch,
Poor, lonely and pale,
This shaded, lovely-tressed bitch,
Prayed for a wolf to take her on a savage trail!”
The pin pricked her again, and she tossed her head, the pin flying to cling on the court stones, inspiring her to more fallen art, “May his savage thrust hurt more than a pin; a blow struck against her own overbearing Kin!”
Mother Blood moaned like a slave on the wheel, sobbing in her hands even as the brazen bulls at the Gate of Their Fathers rang. A savage cry came from the ramparts above where the leaves that sheltered her from the sun failed to muffle the triumphant call of something terrible come.
…
BARBARISM—
The arrows sank deep into the feet and faces of the Brassmen. The Wolves had crept all night, flat as mice, a finger at a time. Then, when the red rays of vengeance were cast by the witch who summoned the sun, they had risen and feathered the big men. One had lumbered in his shining turtle shell, feathered with many arrows, to a brass bull, and beat it’s belly with his hammer, the totem of his office.
The Brassmen, moaning and crippled before the Great Gate; forty starved Wolfmen in hides gray to black, took the brick walls, twenty climbing monkey-like, securing the gate towers, twenty looting the swords and shields of the dead and dying, yawning the unbarred gate.
Only one man, Brand, followed his heart, up over the wall, by the corner that grinned dull with iron bars, under the turret of the guard who watched the fields. His thirst did not yearn for the blood of the Gaties, but for those who ran the chain gangs.
Fat Gob, emerged yawning, his whip in hand—Brand’s spear transfixing his skull through his yawning yap!
Shoving the fat one inward upon the smith who was heating his tongues for fresh fetters—no doubt to shackle Brand’s scheming sister—Brand kicked in his remaining teeth, grabbed the tower sword from above the hearth, and sang downward and crosswise across that thick neck to send the Smith’s head tumbling into the fire. Girting the sword belt, glancing at the dagger its companion, Brand grinned, recalling how often Fat Gob had fingered that dagger before heating the pummel that had burned that brand into his cheek. He could feel that image of Ar, the triangle to the sun, that man-made mountain…
Something soft—a sound—started him.
A sweet, soft voice, the likes he had heard at dawn before, wafting from the Bull Garden as he was driven by the lash towards the greedy earth, sang to a harp, plucked with some defiance below and to his left—where he knew said Garden to rest.
Brand pushed out through the far door and looked down, through the leaves of a well-watered locust tree, where a soft, fair, beauty, as white as the Moon, kneeling on a felt carpet, strummed defiantly, laughing on her harp, an old hag scolding her, an unmanned fellow of the black lands reaching ashy hands to take her off.
His spear hand rose and fell, casting the iron point and ashwood haft through the soft brown body aquiver.
The hag screamed in a grumbled way as girls and matrons scattered about the garden and Brand leaped down next to the hag. Shoulder butting the crone against the wall where her neck snapped, Brand stood in stark admiration of a naked woman the likes of which no naked land could breed.
She met his steely gray gaze with eyes allure with amber simmering in sunken seas. A general shout went up as she dropped her heart and bared her throat.
Casting her waist over his shoulder, tearing out his spear, he stalked, not running, as if he owned the city, towards, and through the gate manned by Wolfmen straddling slain Brassmen. Her hair brushed his legs. His gaze frightened the lash men aside. Forty throats roared, “Brand of The Wolf!”
