This morning I was reviewing last winter's serial—ever so imaginatively titled Winter—and paused just after the passages below, and said to myself, "There has to be a wicker man waiting for me out there, soaked in lighter fluid by a coven of rabid feminist bitches—no you're just getting paranoid that the Xs will all bump into each other at the sex toy shop."

In any case, my messed up mating aside, I am certain that my resurrection of the Roman male psyche in the serialized novella Winter is the most unapologetically misogynistic literature produced by this damaged brain. I promise that Winter will not grow to novel length, which is the first impulse of the female author—or new England she-male horror writer—to turn something penetratingly hard into something accessibly soft.

I have tried to write the Roman scenes as accurately as possible, with the equipment based on the latest traditional and experimental archeology. What I was really concerned with was getting the Roman masculine psychology right. You may disagree with the level to which the later has been achieved. However, if I am accurate here, it explains why Rome ruled for so long, and when it fell, the nature of the missing element.

If you are interested in following the serial Winter click on this link.

If you just want a glimpse into what I believe was the key to Roman success, then read on.

The wind howled maddeningly about his head, whipped the tattered blood-crusted cloak about his shoulders angrily, and whistled like all of Pluto’s shades through the iced gore-caked boots strapped about his ankles. But the separate, higher, icy wind above the dark hulk of the mountain behind and above them, moaned like nothing ever heard back across the Mare Atlantum, moaned as if Jupiter above had been smashed in the balls by some Breton god. In essence, he had to admit, that is what had happened.

Thirteen hill forts into their accursed hunt, and still they had not got their hands on the screaming, scheming bitch that had cursed Vespasian, and by extension, every man of Legio II Augustus. She had howled her curses from the bloody banks of the stream that ringed Hill Fort Seven. He found himself wondering what the name of that place might have been in the native tongue, and then brought himself from the wind and fatigue-induced trance.

He shook himself, permitting his anger to warm him in this deathly cold gale. Seven days past he had been detached from the First Cohort by Vespasian himself, with ten men and the vexing Greek, to pursue the sixty or more Breton dogs that had gathered about the accursed women, those but a fraction of the thousand or more who had sold their life at Hill Fort Twenty to pave her way to freedom with their bodies.

On the mountain above, Titus was surely dead by now, guarding the descent. The horde of locals would soon be upon them.

He pointed with his rod down to the rocky shore where the woman—a small indistinct figure, wrapped and borne as she was like a coddled babe by her long-haired fur-clad handlers—was even then being put aboard a wind-tossed boat that would only accommodate her and half of her ten remaining followers. Those who would remain were already preparing to die on the water-lashed rocks and pebbles below. As he pointed, he slapped the slight womanly shoulder to his right with his callused hand, battle-worn and cracked like dried mud after these seven days of pursuit, in winter, a winter that had suddenly come upon them unannounced. He noted absently that he did not sound himself, sounded already dead, “Greek, can you calculate or divine their landfall so that we might follow in that other boat up the way, or must we rush them, and swim if need be?”

The large voice boomed from the small man, “I am not named ‘Greek’ Centurian, but Plutarch. And I cannot read the will of the gods without a sacrifice. You had me waste the last of my falcons divining the ascent of this damned mountain. Now the sea! What am I to befriend Neptune for you now, after you spat in his eye from the mountaintop above?”

He heard a cry above, which was noted by Felix to his right, on the other side of the vexing Greek priest, who seemed a whore to every god in butt-poking Olympus. Virtius cared for no gods other than Mars and his father Jupiter, who were, likely as not, to spit in the dust while your throat was slit in the end. He spit again into what the Greek had called ‘the Breathe of Neptune’. “I curse that butt-poking fisherman of a damned second-rank god and piss in his drink.”

The little Greek just moaned while Felix nodded to the remaining four legionnaires to be ready for a rush from above, a place that could not be seen in the morning mist as it whipped around the base of the mountain like a dancing girl’s skirt.

Virtius steeled himself and gave the nod to Felix that he had given so many times before, as he gave up on beseeching the Greek on behalf of the gods, which he had done for no other reason than to placate his superstitious men. But even they had grown weary of this ‘Egyptian load of metaphysical crap” and that ‘Greek bit of superior wisdom’, and what have you.

His voice seemed his again as he bellowed above the wind, feeling the tear in his abdomen below his heart from heaving that last big-assed Breton off the heights, “Men—brothers—I, Virtius Manipes, Priest of this shit temple, in this shit place, in this shit land, on behalf of your shit shades, hereby beseech Mars, the only god in heaven likely to give a shit about our shit lives!”

The sound of Felix’s gladius whistling up from its vagina could scarce be heard among the windy dirge, but the whipsaw sound of that willow-switch of a Greek neck being cleaved, separating that ceaselessly yammering head from the white-cloaked body that had borne it for these past seven days—so much to his ire—sounded like justice in the Morning of the World!

As the men’s eyes widened, and Felix held the startled looking head gloomily aloft so that Virtius had to look up at it like it was some fancy masked Greek oracle, Virtius barked a question to the head in his best line-of-drill tone, “Oh Greek shade, tell me, do we take the spare boat—and maybe get rundown in the process by those hairy bastards above—or do we cast our bones with that slut Fortune and try and stop this accursed boat before it gets a sail up?”

The men chuckled, with old Hasti grinning with his five remaining teeth, as Felix—his old mail smashed into his upper arm so brutally by some Breton shield that links were as yet imbedded in the flesh—played along and twisted the dripping head this was and that, to face each boat, separated as they were by two bow shots. Felix then brought the men to a roaring laughter with his imitation of the Greek priest. Felix, the most muscular, and deepest voiced standard-bearer in the legions, intoned, “Oh dear me Centurian, I lost my little phallus and don’t have anything to comfort my soft hand. Perhaps I should ask old Neptune!”

With that Felix hurled the prissy Greek head over a stone’s throw. As the men cheered, Virtius bellowed, “And Neptune saysssssssss…”

After two long heartbeats and uncounted Ss the head plummeted into the sea, a little closer to the spare boat than the one on which the accursed screamer was being loaded. Virtius pointed with his rod at the spare boat, which was looking pretty beat up as it bobbed against the crude stone and rope tie-up post, “…the spare boat men!”

Off they ran, in a diagonal descent along the steep mountainside, toward the pebble-paved beach, with Breton sling stones from above beginning to fall among them. They laughed as they ran, like boys at play rather than like men on their last day.

If you would like to continue following the story, a 'racial memory horror fantasy' which see-saws back and fourth between Contemporary America and the Ancient British Isles link here.

If you aren't the story reading type and would just like to read the following combat scene, click on the link below.