The Iron Tempest by Ron Miller Read Free Book Online Page A

Enlil: “My vagina is too small; it knows not how to copulate! My lips are too small; they know not how to kiss!”). Inanna-Ishtar was there, singing, “My vulva is moist soil; who shall be my plowman?” There were also gods and goddesses she did not recognize, whom for no special reason she assumed to be products of the heathen East—of the pagan Hindoo perhaps, who knew no better, or maybe the strange deities that must haunt Zeilan, Cathay, Manji or black Ethiopia. Among them, though of course she did not know it, were the Great Goddess Danu, first among the bloodthirsty love goddesses of the Irish, whose voracious appetites did not distinguish between mortal or immortal, and Lady Grainne, whom Merlin the magician knew all too well, and wild-eyed Freyja who by some quirk of shadow and light seemed to be offering Bradamant her talismanic necklace, the erotic magic of which had been infused by the four dwarves Freyja had slept with. Nor did Bradamant recognize Amma-Sky-Father and Amma-Sky-Mother, the Djanggawul and their daughters the insatiable Wawilak sisters, Shotkaman-Agwi and Betman-Agwi, Sky-Father Rangi and Earth-Mother Papa, Xochipilli and Xochiquetzal and the voluptuously evil Tlazolteotl. She did not know that the mosaics, whose glittering tiles winked like the golden eyes of passionate reptiles, represented the most voluptuous scenes from The Perfumed Garden and The Arabian Nights . The sloe-eyed houris with wasp-waists and joyful melon-breasts, who indulged themselves with singularly gymnastic abandon with their eagle-faced, black-bearded lovers, became weirdly alive under the shifting light; it was a submarine scene, filled with languid, sinuous, shadow creatures. Bradamant fell into a kind of reverie, fascinated in much the same way one cannot avoid gaping at a bad accident, or perhaps as the doomed bird is mesmerized by the cobra’s slow metronome. The figures writhed before her eyes. The coarse stone glistened like coral or oiled flesh, the intertwining limbs supple and subtle as eels. The rhythm of the ponderous ballet began to invade her.
    The dark, eagle-faced, black-bearded men reminded her of Rashid, they were very like Rashid, and she could hear someone singing and she was certain it was his voice:
    She hath breasts like two globes of ivory,
    like golden pomegranates, beautifully upright,
    arched and rounded, firm as stone to the touch,
    with nipples erect and outward jutting.
    She hath thighs like unto pillars of alabaster,
    and between them, there vaunts a secret place,
    a sachet of musk, that swells, that throbs,
    that is moist and avid.
    Was the song about her ? Was it really Rashid singing to her? Bradamant, a prude who had no real natural talent for prudery, a puritan by training and habit rather than disposition, found herself dizzied, disoriented, torn between lust and loathing, prurience and embarrassment. She was a devout Christian scarcely eight centuries removed from uncounted millennia of pagan barbarism. From her own unnatural repression, from her subconscious world of ancient dreams and myths and fantasies, sprang an unexpected eroticism; sublimated sexual emotions that were as irresistibly instinctual as they were denied bubbled, fizzed and frothed like a fermenting wine, as though someone had suddenly shaken a sparkling champagne. And she fought that, fought it like a drowning man fights that final, fatal inhalation of fishy brine. And in the act of that denial—which had lasted all two decades of her life—Bradamant was as obsessed with sex as was her church, which was in turn as obsessed with sex as no other church before it, as obsessed with sex as the Egyptians were obsessed with death. Her mouth was suddenly dry and she licked her lips with a leathery tongue. The thirst seemed to pass through the length of her body like a hot wind, as though she were threaded on a white-hot wire. She discovered a song piping in her brain and though she had never heard the words before, she