It was said to be the most ancient city in Canaan—perhaps the oldest in the world, though certainly not the most grand. Its walls were mighty. That was grand enough in the military sense. The stronghold above the River Jordan must be taken if he was to take the land it guarded like a sentinel house.

He listened to the rattle of his men’s harness, the clank of their war-sickles, the clatter of their spears, and the low murmur of doubt that crept like a creeping coward in the night passing the watchword of defeat.

No, this is not necessary. Since you walked out into the wild with The Deliverer and returned alone with his message, they have hailed you as God’s Salvation. Just fix them with the awful look and they shall mind your word.

He raked their ragged ranks with his searing eyes. They were eager and seasoned killers, who had long understood that their victories were had through his skill, his ruthless purpose, not as the women and children and elders had so foolishly thought, due to The Deliverer’s relationship with God.

He hefted his Hittite sword; straight, broad and true it was.

He measured them one man at a time; a man among men; the top man; the big man that none crossed and lived.

He nodded over his shoulder at the high-walled town and spoke from the belly, “You are my rams of war. I will not have you break your heads on those walls. Maintain ranks on the ridgeline and send back word to The People to be on their guard and stay encamped. I’m off to scout the walls for some weakness. Await my return.”

As he walked off they stood silently behind him—looking to one another he guessed. The last time he had come back from a vision quest alone he had been hailed as the successor to The Deliverer, even as the old prophet’s breath yet clung to the hands that had strangled him. He had no plan—not a thought that might extradite him from this dilemma. He simply had the hope that an answer would come to him alone on the rocks above the enemy enclave. Or, failing that, that his return alone would imbue whatever less than satisfactory solution he put forth with confidence.

He scaled the neck of land that overlooked the approach to the place, hoping for some inspiration.

He looked up to a refuge where a lookout should have been, where shepherds surely kept a watch in the days before walled towns, where a sentry should have been stationed by the king of this foolish town. A serene piping, as if the very wind that scoured the Sinai whispered from afar, called, seemed to beckon him like a lover.

He walked boldly, seething with superstitious dread, to the cluster of boulders. As he neared the flute piped lower as if to draw him closer in the way that a spy whispers in the night.

Soon he was among the boulders, among the sentries of Jericho; two large well-armed slingers who might have taken him easily. Instead they stood before each other, each a hand on the other’s shoulder, each a blade in the other’s heart—locked staring eye-to-eye in mutual death. They stood in the open, not propped up against a rock. He saw and heard that they stood not of their own power, but at the command of The Piper’s song, for he sat on a rock besides the deathly heroes locked in their embrace.

The Piper was a small black man with a large round hairless head and a broad forehead and pointed rat-like chin. His mouth was a black slit. His feet had never known sandal or boot, and were very large, the feet of a giant. The ears of The Piper seemed upside down with the lobe above. His broad nose was offset by his wide deep-set eyes which were rimmed in white with great glassy black pupils floating like irises in a pool of liquid marble. His hands were large with pointed black fingernails as sharp as knives of glass.

The man blinked at him and the effect was as if he were struck by a bull. He reeled back drunkenly. Then, he recalled who he was, and growled, “Who are you devil? And why, since you have silenced my enemy’s sentries, do you buffet me?”

The great eyes blinked and the little rat mouth expanded to a vast grin displaying a set of large white teeth. The voice was somehow liquid in nature, as if the man—if man he was—spoke through a watery medium, “So the wind does buffet the locust.”

“Locust!” he raged.

The great eyes blinked again, and he was soothed of anger, even as the man spoke, “So sorry—‘King Locust.’”

The man then resumed his piping and he felt himself drawn like a puppet toward him, swaying with the song rather than walking in the most direct way. He now stood before The Piper and next to the dead warriors still standing in the death grapple. The Piper then stopped his song and flashed a palm. Within the palm of that broad little hand of dusk was an empty eye socket! The Piper than whispered through the pipe as he held it between his lips and flashed another similar hand, “Oh, King Locust, eyes for me please.”

The Piper then continued piping and the man called King Locust stepped to the larger man and deftly used his Hittite sword to cut out an eye, seemingly knowing how to extract it with the root intact, the method somehow conveyed in the wordless song of the pipe. Both eyes of the larger man who stood facing Jericho were thus removed. He then stepped to The Piper, in the manner of a worm on a baited fisherman’s hook, and held out his offerings. The Piper did not accept, but rather changed his tune. When he did so the eyes seemed to come to life and squiggle out of King Locust’s hand and scurry into the palms of The Piper like so many serpents.

The Piper, his song complete, now stood, flashed his palms at King Locust—palms that housed darting eyes that seemed confused—and then removed the pipe from his mouth, a pipe that was in fact the long leg bone of a large man worked into a flute.

“Oh King Locust, you God get he want—no curse you. Blessing for a question answered—city for you for trade made.”

“You can get me into Jericho?”

“You dare ‘King Locust?’”

“What is the question?”

“Why you kill Deliverer?”

“He was weak. Old, wanted to make peace, to settle among these dirt grubbers.”

“What you do Jericho?”

“Kill every man, woman, child and beast—curse the earth upon which it stands.”

“You men walk around Jericho, seven days come. You return here before sun high.”

He looked above and saw he had but a few hours to give the order and return. Joshua of the Isrаelites was not one to hesitate when action was called for. Within the hour he had given the order, threatened death, promised victory, and had returned to The Piper, who sat now upon the shoulders of the eyeless warrior corpse playing a song that caused the horror to sway rhythmically.

He looked down into the plain to see his men marching toward the city. He waited until the first hundred began the circuit and said, with a note of the tyrant’s irritation with wizards in his voice, “What now Piper?”

For answer The Piper blew furiously on his pipe, and no sound came fourth. Within moments though, the walls of Jericho were swarming with the town’s dogs, leaping to their doom outside the city walls.

When the dogs had all leaped to their death the goats climbed the city walls and leaped also. Within the city a great baying of larger less nimble livestock could be heard, apparently dashing themselves against the inside of the great cedar gate.

The song of the pipe changed to an audible, warlike tune that echoed down across the plain. Soon the men of Jericho were crowding the walls, leaping to their death headfirst.

The Piper, seemingly in ecstasy seated on the shoulders of the swaying corpse, changed to a beautiful tune as if all of the maidens in Egypt sang a love song. How he missed Egypt. Collecting taxes for Pharaoh had been preferable to managing this miserable lot. But they were his now, the best to be made of them. Soon the women of all ages were crowding the walls and flinging themselves head first from the high ramparts, smiles upon their faces, songs of love on their ruby lips.

The Piper then changed his tune to that of merriment, of childish joy. Soon the boys and girls of all ages were skipping and dancing upon the wall, each and every one doing a nice little dance step before leaping to their death, giggling until they cracked to pieces at the foot of the mighty wall.

His first hundred had barely finished one circuit of the wall when the last infant of Jericho had tottered from the battlement. Joshua was suspicious. “You said seven days. We were to march for seven days. This thing is already done. What trick is this?”

The little man looked down at him from the shoulders of his now stationary corpse. “I no pipe seven days. You walk seven—for curse. You people go in, curse be you.”

“What is the trade made you spoke of?”

“Trade made.”

“What trade was made?”

“You power you…you people me, King Locust.”

“Stop speaking in riddles!”

“Stop? Me just start!”

“Who are you?!?”

“The Wind, King Locust, The Wind.”

“What is my price!?!”

“No price you King Locust—you people; you ‘miserable lot,’ oh ‘God-is-salvation.’”

“A curse on my people means a curse on my sons, my descendents!”

Feeling betrayed Joshua drew his sword to cleave the devilish little Piper from his grisly seat. Instead, as The Piper started an as yet unheard tune, Joshua began to walk in a lurching fashion toward the now empty corpse-bounded city. He staggered out from among the rocks against his own will, and cavorted like a leaf blown erratically on the wind down the lonely slope toward his horror stricken troops…