These Demented Lands Read Online Free PDF Page A

breathing of the cow was at my chest; I gave out a wee yelp of scaredeyness then stepped backwards to see if the others had seen me do it.
    I walked up to them and plonked myself down. ‘Jesus, I’m famished,’ I says.
    â€˜It’s not just
you
!’ the bearded one started howling and with a thung the crossbow at his thigh went off while I dived sideyways, holding myself away from the cinders’ edges. We all heard the arrow hit, registered the pause, the ground shake out in the night; the first thump was the beast’s knees coming down, the second big bump the body keeling side-wise.
    Using a burning branch in his outstretched arm, the Leader led the way till we came to the carcass; the arrow had gone right in between its eyes.
    â€˜Jesus, the lead beast, you’ve gone and killed our lead beast, you crazy good-for-nothing.’ The Leader shook his head. You could see the black blood in the hair on the dead cow’s forehead, arrow stuck out.
    â€˜How are we going to lead them?’ the girl one was going.
    â€˜The hell with that, lets roast this one,’ I says. The other three stared at me in the burning torch-light over the black, wet carcass.
    The Leader and the bearded one were eating with the dark blood still up to their elbows, fingers stuffing the thin meat strips into their mouths.
    â€˜I did a four-year stint in the Fleshers up at Far Places; that’s how come I know these lands and I know your man Brotherhood at The Drome.’ Leader chewed.
    â€˜I’m nothing to do with him, I’ve never met the guy.’ I shook-shook my hand cause I’d burned my little finger on the hot meat again.
    â€˜Oh. You just don’t look like one of the regulars at his hotel. I used to deliver the meat there. He would alwayscollar you, y’know? This weird way of just launching in to stories, as if they were directed right at you; he wouldn’t do it to me but I heard him doing it to the younger wives up in the Observation Lounge at nights, fire burning just like this – Brotherhood, the Sanctions Buster, trying to get a rise out the girls, talking
history
, his face just hidden, back in the shadows: “. . . so you’re not familiar with that daughter? Her fate is well documented. I’ve researched it all. I used to be partial to a bit of research; the dusted golden bibliotheque light falling down on me, the worn desk, the place across from the main doors where I could take a café au lait and smoke a local brand. Ah, the daughter; she fell pray to the Parisian mob in that best studied of years for a little insight on human nature. 1789 and the mob had practised forms of revenge on their former oppressors, or shall we say tyrants, for what is life but a choice of tyrants and tyrannies? Anyway rape was very much in the air and this daughter, this particularly milky aristocrat, was cornered in her palace – some palace, I forget now and it doesn’t matter anyway. You can imagine the cake those men made her eat after they tore away such fine silk and lace,” and somewhere like here, Brotherhood would pause for effect, “. . . so fair her skin, some scholars have documented that even the women of the mob felt compelled to ride on her as sliding figureheads along with their men. To the universal disappointment of these avengers, the young girl fainted, or perhaps even died under their attentions so they dragged her into the courtyard where the servants and the girl’s parents were standing, captured. In front of the eyes of the girl’s mother and father, the revolutionary factor severed the headand limbs of the daughter. One seditionary lay the remaining torso before its mother and father, removed his breeches, found the torso’s true part still intact and, in the firelight, to the howls of his comrades, that individual made a new kind of love to the headless, legless, armless trunk. Imagine the scene if you