“You raped the grapes of their purple soul
For your wine cups brimming high;
We stooped to dregs of the muddy hole
That was bitter with alkali.
-Verse 2
CIVILIZATION:
The linen did not lie flush across the wrist that reached for the proffered cup of spilling red silver. “Steward, have this robe replaced before tomorrow’s libation,” he slurred in unhurried grace.
‘It is wine, after all, and will deaden the wretched call,’ he mused as he raised the cup to his lips.
“Oh Prince,” insisted that terrible priestly mouth above and behind, as the bowl of the Sun, of gold couched in brass leaf, was interposed between princely cup and thirsty lips, “Oh Prince, forget not Our God,” spake his lifelong instructor.
Bell, Prince of Ar, complied with as much grace as a man who had never known discomfort could manage, pouring God’s portion, just more than half, as indicated by the bobbing dolphin within the silver cup, into that Golden Bowl.
He looked around, saw the three candidates for his prenuptial bed, two poor wenches and the soldier’s daughter, for to busy his besotted lust tonight. An impulse, perhaps from God, stirred him to speak, “High Priest, Father of Mind, is God ours, or are we His?”
“Oh Prince of Ar, Between the Double River, we are His creations, his mere slaves.”
He looked at the women, a notion taking him, “I will sleep alone tonight, in hopes of a dream—I no longer dream, Holy Seer. These women, they should tread the grapes, crush the spirit of the wine and come to me with stained feet—this would, I think, please God, whose thirsty creature I am.”
A fatherly hand came to his shoulder, “This is wise: your study buds within you, Oh Prince.”
The soldier’s daughter had a wide, cheeky face, big feet and udders, he noted, with chagrin. The farmer’s daughters were not plump enough, he grumbled within. The Priest as always seemed to read his mind and ordained, to the Bedstead Matron under her owlish night cowl, “Mother of the Brides, have them sing the Lament of Dolphina, until their tears mix with the grape, there sweet sweat as well—all day and all night, to return here for libations.”
He drained the cup, wondering if this was God’s spell, gazing within at the man riding the dolphin cow upon the wave up to Holy Ar: “An angel of God she was?” Absently wondered Bell, as the brides were conducted, naked, out through the wool tapestries curtaining the marble Throne Room.
The Priest himself refilled the cup, half with water, half with wheat-grass tea, “My Prince, you are the sixth and tenth Scion of Ar, who Dolphina chose to guide, of all the ships adrift, upon the Heaven-sent tide.”
Doubts oft-hidden welled within, ‘What Prince would ride a sea beast?’
…
BARBARISM—
His feet felt the white rim with a soft relish, the thick callouses of his soles telling of a bitterness that held the black poison below in Hell’s dank burrow. Up ahead he saw Guide upon the Giant’s Mound, where the kings of old were buried in their ships what must have floated here on the Wave Ago. The old gray beard, limp with sore sense, kindled the sacred fire there. The smoke would, so the old deep seer said, show them the way out of this bald warren of burned rock and bleached block.
Shrewd was at his side, Kick bundled on her back basket, whining like a wolf pup. The sun burned down momentarily through the dark circle of clouds, igniting the brand on his cheek stamped there by the Brass Men. Her voice was more sure than the whipped beast within who had nearly broken in the toil den of those wicked men, “Brand, you came this way—you know the path.”
“Was buy night, dogs and men on my trail.”
She touched him tenderly upon his deep scarred cheek, “MY MAN cannot be lost—where he is, is the way! It was dark, you say? Close your eyes, shut out the burning face of day!”
Eyes closed, the growl in his crawl returned to him. He knelt in the white chalk and sipped at the hole he had found, a hole he fancied where he had once drowned a brass-collared hound. He plunged his hands into the weary hole, washed his face and—he dragged his hands, feeling for his harried past.
His belly was now full of the bitter stuff. His soul recalled that it gave him scented sweat when he had further fled from the brass men. He touched the brass hound lead that tied his loin cloth below his naval—that trophy that sang silently also in the scar tissue that webbed about his left arm where the beast had gnawed as his knife sank home.
The sun was now cloaked in deep dusk cloud and Guide screeched, “Under the coming clouds—to the Brass Sea, the Curse Made Mountain on its lee!”
Brand turned, leaning on his spear, regarding the long file there threading out of the rust-chalk canyon, “Youths on me, a drink, then double-time. This is the Well of Hounds—we are near; drink, come…”
First off, he nodded to screeching Guide, who lurched in crooked glee around his owl bone fire. Brand loped off under the river of gray cloud pushing up the canyon, realizing, that once it spent its fury in the hinterlands, that those not yet through to the Grass-ringed Land of Brass would float dead among the sedge and weirs that guarded the mouth of this pass.
Up! Up!!
Red rock and ocher dust crunched under his feet, the storm-gray iron point of his spear rocking in a hand thirsty for red deeds.
He heard Woewolf over-taking him, then breasting him, turning with that hungry grin. Brand nodded for his nightside man, to lead them to the Brass Land.
