Guns of the Gods

Excerpt

Out of the Ashes

Old Troy reaped rue in the womb of years
For stolen Helen's sake;
Till tenfold retribution rears
Its wreck on embers slaked with tears
That mended no heart-ache.
The wail of the women sold as slaves
Lest Troy breed sons again
Dreed o'er a desert of nameless graves,
The heaps and the hills that are Trojan graves
Deep-runneled by the rain.

But Troy lives on. Though Helen's rape
And ten-year hold were vain;
Though jealous gods with men conspire
And Furies blast the Grecian fire;
Yet Troy must rise again.
Troy's daughters were a spoil and sport,
Were limbs for a labor gang,
Who crooned by foreign loom and mill
Of Trojan loves they cherished still,
Till Homer heard, and sang,

They told, by the fire when feasters roared
And minstrels waited turns,
Of the might of the men that Troy adored,
Of the valor in vain of the Trojan sword,
With the love that slakeless burns,
That caught and blazed in the minstrel mind
Or ever the age of pen.
So maids and a minstrel rebuilt Troy,
Out of the ashes they rebuilt Troy
To live in the hearts of men.

Yasmini

"Set down my thoughts not yours if the tale is to be worth the pesa."

The why and wherefore of my privilege to write a true account of the Princess Yasmini's early youth is a story in itself too long to tell here; but it came about through no peculiar wisdom. I fell in a sort of way in love with her, and that led to opportunity.

She never made any secret of the scorn with which she regards those who singe wings at her flame. Rather she boasts of it with limit-overreaching epithets. Her respect is reserved for those rare men and women who can meet her in unfair fight and, if not defeat her, then come close to it. She asks no concessions on account of sex. Men's passions are but weapons forged for her necessity; and as for genuine love-affairs, like Cleopatra, she had but two, and the second ended in disaster to herself. This tale is of the first one that succeeded, although fraught with discontent for certain others.

The second affair came close to whelming thrones, and I wrote of that in another book with an understanding due, as I have said, to opportunity, and with a measure of respect that pleased her.

She is habitually prompt and generous with her rewards, if far-seeing in bestowal of them. So, during the days of her short political eclipse that followed in a palace that had housed a hundred kings, I saw her almost daily in a room—her holy of holies—where the gods of ancient India were depicted in three primal colors working miracles all over the walls and where, if governments had only known it, she was already again devising plans to set the world on fire.

There, amid an atmosphere of Indian scents and cigarette smoke, she talked and I made endless notes, while now and then, when she was meditative, her maids sang to an accompaniment of rather melancholy wooden flutes. But whenever I showed a tendency to muse she grew indignant.

"Of what mud are you building castles now? Set down my thoughts not yours," she insisted, "if your tale is to be worth the pesa."

By that she referred to the custom of all Eastern story-tellers to stop at the exciting moment and take up a collection of the country's smallest copper coins before finishing the tale....