The Countess de Gulpa admonishes her courtiers to bear in mind that only the ringleaders deserve exemplary punishment. The rank and file will make useful slaves.
"Oh, Minny is so kind," coo the courtiers. "Minny is so kind."
Reports are coming in. The rioters have been surrounded and will surrender in a few hours. These reports have been sent out by General Darg, who is certain of a final victory and does not want the Green Guards or, worse still, a regiment of useless courtiers getting in the way and tarnishing his glory. On the other end, the reports are further falsified to curry favor with the countesses.
The Empress of Yass-Waddah holds aloof from these rejoicings. She knows that whatever the outcome of the battle, her power is gone. She is, in fact, making plans to flee the city in disguise with a handful of faithful eunuchs.
The Empress intends to leave behind a little present for the countesses, a basket of sleeping kundu.
The dreaded kundu is a species of flying scorpion. The body is covered by need-sharp back-slanting red spines. The jaws are razor-sharp and designed for burrowing like a mole cricket's. The venom that drips from the hairs and the tail-stinger causes instant paralysis. Then the kundu sheds it wings and burrows its way up body orifices and deposits its larvae in the intestines, the liver, the kidneys and spleen so that the paralyzed victim is eaten alive. Unlike other scorpions the kundu is diurnal, remaining comatose during the cold desert nights and being slowly roused to activity by the heat of the day.
Perhaps I will win the torture contest in absentia, the Empress thinks.
The second day saw substantial gains for the insurgents. The little people who can climb like monkeys, moving from roof to roof with their poison dart guns, carrying cylinders of chlorine and sulfur dioxide, flushed the Paries out of the buildings around the square, which were then occupied by the insurgents and the renegade Heroids. Darg and his troop, however, remained in occupation of the buildings along the side streets and continued to block entrances from the Casbah. Dimitri knew better than to attempt to force a passage through these narrow streets with troops on the roofs of buildings five and six stories in height—an error that cost the police heavy casualties in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. Then rioters on the roofs of buildings along the narrow streets of lower Manhattan defeated armed police contingents with cobblestones and other missiles.
General Darg, still sure of ultimate victory, even if a long siege was involved, refused to ask for reinforcements and sent back reports that the situation was under control. However, there were still a few pockets of resistance.
The third day dawned like a bleary red eye. An old woman brought a basket of exquisite golden figs to the kitchen door of the Countess's palace. Under the figs, the kundu were still comatose from the icy chill of the night.
Will Hollywood never learn
In Ba'dan both sides are looking for a showdown. Darg, because he knows that he cannot conceal the actual state of affairs much longer. Dimitri, because he feels that a state of siege is not to his advantage owing to the numerical superiority of the enemy and their readier access to supplies and weapons. So both generals evoke every aid they can summon through magic rituals.
As the sun climbs higher, the square looks like Hollywood gone berserk. Roman legionnaires under Quintus Curtius are fighting French riot police. Vikings and pirates battle crusaders and Texas Rangers. Old western gunfighters shoot it out with the Black and Tans and Kenya Special Police. Hannibal's elephants charge a train of 1920s Marines on their way to protect the assets of the United Fruit Co. Battle cries and songs ring out. Peons with machetes decapitate lynch mobs ... mucho bouncing heads, meester. Battle cries and songs ring out with grunts and bellows, war whoops, bagpipes, the reek of horses, chili and garlic....
"La cucaracha la cucaracha
Ya no quiere caminar
Porque no tiene porque le falta
Marijuana por fumar."
Pancho Villa's men shoot down a helicopter from Operation Intercept. An army of Chinese waiters charge out of a false-front chop-suey joint with meat cleavers, screaming: "Fluck you! Fluck you! Fluck you!" They reduce narcs and Mafiosi to hamburgers. Poison darts from Indian blowguns wipe out a Klan rally. Nigger-killing southern lawmen are hacked to pieces by naked Scythians on horseback.
Audrey is in the very thick of it, changing costumes every few minutes. Now he leads a detachment of amok Malay youths with krisses against the Shah's Savak. Next Audrey, on a great black horse in medieval armor, charges down the streets of Middletown skewering religious women and lawmen on his lance. Then he is a shootist with his custom-made 44 double-action revolver leading the Wild Bunch to break up an auto-da-fé in Lima. Now he boards a Spanish man-of-war with cutlass and laser gun. Machine-gun bullets, poison darts, arrows, spears, boomerangs, bolos, throwing knives, cobblestones. Rockets whistle through the air, sharp smell of weeds and dry heat from old westerns, snow and ice with Viking ships, amok Malays trail muggy heat and jungle smells, pirates blow in with a sea wind and a whiff of rum and spices, pitchmen and camp followers spread out their wares, false-front saloons, whorehouses, taco stands, carny booths with root beer and spun sugar, sod-roofed huts serving chicha, chick-peas and roast guinea pig, street performers passing around the hat and picking pockets—pea under the shell, now you see it now you don't ... shift partners round and round—Malay youths with krisses skewering religious women, shootist with custom-made Kenya Special Police in his nostrils, southern lawmen are hacked to Hollywood and gone, and a grinning boy passes around a bloody Stetson.
"Nominate your poison, gents."
Klansmen clutch their throats and turn black.
"We don't serve niggers in here!" thunders the bartender. "Take them outside because they stink. Take them to the Nigger Morgue."
Boys in medieval codpieces have set up a catapult. Roman soldiers break down doors with battering rams, impervious to the bullets, which break against clear classic light with a whiff of ozone.
Raids and prisoners ... Rape of the Sabine ... Romans sweep in on a women's rally and carry the bitches away, screaming and kicking, an old western posse is lynching a Neanderthal man, KGB and CIA agents bustle scientists and enemy agents into cars or sweep down and hook them into a silent chopper like actors pulled offstage, Inquisition Police drag jet-setters out of cocktail lounges, and the Green Guards are busy with their nets.
"Oh I want that one ..." coos a courtier.
Audrey leads an army of twelve-year-old boys carrying banners of colored silk ... POLTERGEISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE!
They stand now, still as stone, in a sickening uneasy calm. As the barometer drops and drops, slowly a black cloud gathers over their heads. A little wind stirs brown hair across the mouth, brown lilacs and brown hair, ruffling through hair yellow as corn silk, through auburn, orange, russet and flame-red hair and black Pan curls....
WIND WIND WIND
A sighing sound, a whistle, a shriek, hair standing straight up now as a black funnel whirls around their slender bodies tearing cobblestones up from the street, screaming hurricanes of broken glass as the boys ride this bucking whistling wind—it's known as a "space horse." You let it carry you all the way out, glass blizzards stripping flesh from bones, tossing bloody bones through the air with street signs and branches, masonry, stones and timbers—the whole city is flapping and shredding.
Thousand-mile-an-hour winds—the fences, barbed wire, and massive iron gates hemming in the Casbah are tearing loose ... flying wire decapitates screaming crowds. Pan, God of Panic, rides the wings of Death as the torn sky bends with the wind, prop sky tearing, shredding—incandescent force—the pure young purpose blazes like a comet....