PRELUDE TO JUSTICE

Many who have read my material might realise just how much I despise my own gender becauze of its treatment of women in history, even back to ancient times...

Circa 10,000 BC

The Medicine Man adjusted his wolverine head-dress and scattered a few weeds onto the fire, amongst the cooler embers away from the fiercest flames where they'd simmer and smoke. They smelled good and made the pink cockatoo on a flaming branch, the one that hadn't been there moments ago, spit in his eye. He loved that cockatoo for the way it was only there when he was high with the weed-smoke that filtered from the reeking embers through his wolverine mask and into his brain.

Away from the tongues of fire it was cold with a raw wind rattling through the Old Forest like it did during the dead of winter. He could tell how cold it was when he let his eyes light on the women, too young to be amongst the Wise Women snuggling in the relative warm and too old to be kids. These young women were suffering as young women ought. Their skins were puckered with cold, their teeth chattering and their exposed breasts blue.

One of them was Iggle. He liked looking at Iggle, always had, and now with the smoke from the weeds rollicking inside his head he fancied doing something about it. Something on his flesh stirred like it always did when he fancied doing something about Iggle or any one of her young clones.

She'd be all for it. Of course she would, being dragged from the raw winds into his lean-to palace by her greasy hair and shagged as soon as being looked at. She'd get a little warmer and he'd probably have a new son before next year was out. A man was measured by the number of his sons as well as the length of his tackle. A man could be proud of his seed. It did good work. Somehow - the mechanics were unknown - it crafted the future.

He left - with only the merest hint of reluctance - his honorary place in the warm and grabbed hold of the divine Iggle. Roughly. Like he didn't care for her - and he didn't. He didn't really care for anyone. Why should he?

She was painfully cold.

“Get orf!” she remonstrated with her rough, coarse voice, struggling. But it didn't mean much. It was the done thing, for the women to protest before being taken. What were women anyway? Besides being a treat for the eyes when the eyes needed a treat they were no more than the rubbish left over when a man's seed had produced sons. And they prepared meals, of course, did silly, domestic stuff like that. Useless stuff once the meat had been gorged. So he slashed her across the face and scowled deep into her eyes.

His palace - a lean-to affair, big enough for two at a pinch and warm like toast what with the piles of furs scattered across its floor - was a relief for a moment, but Iggle didn't want what was to come. At fifteen she'd already had too many kids. And she guessed that by seventeen she'd be dead. It happened. Why in the name of the weed gods had she been born a woman? Why couldn't she have been a hirsute man, strong of limb and long of tackle and queuing for the wolverine mask like the youths out there? This medicine man wouldn't last for ever, but the next would be as bad and she wanted to be, to actually inhabit the flesh, of that next. Whoever he might be.

But she had tits and no rampant length. It wasn't fair - but then nothing was fair, the cold, the howling winds, the bitter winter, the crafty old Medicine Man who was already showing signs of arousal.

Some bloody party this! Just a crowd of weed-high youths and a self-appointed Medicine Man even more weed-high, and a cold, cold night.

She hated it.

So she bit his penis. On a sudden impulse, her jaw firm. And she bit it hard. With sharp teeth. Right through the damned thing.

She'd done it before to another obsessed male, and knew how much it hurt by the frenzied look in the wretched man's eyes. And now she could see that same frenzied look in the flickering half-light as she stared contemptuously through the slits in his wolverine head-dress.

She'd drawn blood. She could taste it, foul on her tongue, the blood of a Medicine Man.

And her subsequent, guaranteed, inevitable death would surely be some kind of relief when he recovered enough for his pain to turn to anger, as it surely must.

She sighed at the thought, and awaited justice.

Man's justice.