by Rhys Hughes
They looked up toward the ridge at him …
As the smoke cleared, Mario made a megaphone with his hands. Then he called out in a rich, sonorous voice:
‘Killing each other? Whatta mistake to make!’
‘Whom, then, should we be killing instead?’ asked Unkoo, his apelike voice full of displaced jungle irony.
‘Not me, that’s for sure!’ retorted Mario hastily.
The assassins and the fascists waited to hear his words, for it was plain by his stance he intended to make a speech. And that’s what he did. Italo-Mexican eyes shining, he declaimed:
‘Look at you! Magnificent men and women, but mostly men, for there are always fewer women attracted to militant groupings for some reason! It gladdens my poor heart to marvel at you. Yes it does, with your bloodlust and your rampaging viciousness! I am a simple man, a humble man, and I have only one ambition in life. Namely, to take over Spain and rule it like my onetime associate, the tyrant Huerta. You probably don’t know him. It doesn’t matter if you do or not, for he is beside the point. But what I want to say now is this: why not combine forces? Surely two malignancies are wiser than one? Think about it please!’
The two groups stared at each other, calculatingly.
Mario saw this and added:
‘Together you can achieve so much more than on your own! Together you can take over the entire world!’
Unkoo was the first to respond. ‘Unkoo say yes!’
There was a massed cheer.
Mario swelled with joy. He bawled out:
‘No longer shall there be two ordinary gargantuan legions! From this moment on, there will exist only one super-gargantuan legion! And that’s you lot! And I will command you!’
The bloodied and bruised fighters began dancing.
Mario held up a hand for restraint.
‘Before you celebrate overmuch, my friends, let us remember that this union must be washed in blood and pain to sanctify it! What better way of performing this profane baptism than by grinding to dust your first enemy in your new capacity as a single unit?’
‘Agreed! But who is that enemy? Tell us who!’
Mario pointed directly at me.
‘Him! Mr Lloyd Griffiths, the Welshman!’
‘Pen pidlan gawsog!’ I breathed softly. I was amazed that Mario knew my name. I didn’t recall revealing it to him. Maybe he had learned it from some unorthodox alchemical process.
I was on my knees; I jumped to my feet. I clicked all over.
‘Get that skeleton!’ trumpeted Mario.
Suddenly, the legion of nasties was bearing down on me!
They wanted to pulverise me.
What could I do? There was only one option.
Yes, I had a desperate plan.
Actually it wasn’t really a plan; just a reflex. My survival instinct was still strong, even though I was technically already dead. The anchor cast out by Distanto still lay on the sand. It was attached to its cable. I grabbed the end of the cable and started swinging the barbs of the iron implement around my head. It whistled angrily.
Faster and faster it rotated, generating a circle of doom with me at the centre. Nobody could step inside it!
My enemies shuffled ineffectually beyond the circumference of hissy iron. One fool stepped over the threshold and the anchor battered his skull to a flatness never intended by nature. He slumped and died; but still did I continue to spin the black mass. When I say ‘black mass’ I’m not referring to devil worship. It’s just a practical piece of anchor-description. Anyway, I was dimly aware of Distanto steering the airship until it hovered directly over me. This was very encouraging.
But I couldn’t stand there indefinitely, swinging that heavy anchor, for even skeletons get tired; there had to be some other way out! Then I knew what it was. I altered the angle of my swing, cast the anchor up, snagged the airship with one of its cruel barbs!
The point punctured the skin of the canopy …
Helium gushed out; propelled by this discharge the airship zigzagged through the torrid sky like a deflating toy balloon. If you have attended a child’s party, you’ll know what I mean …
I was still clutching the end of the line. Up I went!
Dragged behind the airship, I was flung about over the landscape. The escaped helium was everywhere; sucked into the lungs of the villains and desperadoes below, it made them squeak at each other like mafia mice. In my relief to be free of their evil machinations, I forgot that Distanto’s halo was still around my neck, training its own rope. The end of this rope was dragging over the ground, leaving tracks in the sand like those of a snake on its way home. Very unfortunate!
The end of this other rope passed near Mario Granieri.
Who reached out and snatched it.
And then yanked it hard.
I assume he hoped to dislodge me and bring me back down to earth; if that’s what he intended, he was cheated of his desired outcome, for harder was my grip on the anchor cable than the power of his tug. True, the halo tightened around my throat; I might have choked to death had I owned an uncrushed windpipe, but my neck was bare vertebrae. Still the helium gas poured out of the hole in the airship …
And that airship pulled me onward, my hands still gripping the anchor cable; and I pulled Mario off his feet. Higher we went, and so it happened that the grotesque Italo-Mexican became a more closely integrated part of my fate! Distanto struggled to control the airship; I struggled to keep hold of my cable; Mario struggled not to lose his grip on his rope. All three of us went sailing off together eastwards.
‘Blast them out of the sky!’ Mario screeched down.
His followers reloaded the cannon.
This time they used grapeshot, but the pellets only struck the rudder of the craft. No opportunity for a third volley; we were out of range. With a final fling of his authority, Mario cried:
‘Pancho Lackey is an idiot! Pancho Poncho, take over!’
A blade slid between the ribs of Pancho Lackey and the wielder of the knife in question laughed. He was the new chief henchman and he gritted his teeth above the dying body of the man he had just replaced. ‘Too bad, amigo, you were a steenking henchman.’
‘I speeet on your steenking grave,’ croaked Pancho Lackey.
Pancho Poncho wiped his blade clean.
‘That’s not nice,’ he said.
But he didn’t press the point. He was the new chief henchman. It was his responsibility to make decisions.
Before he had time to think, an unseen voice amid the crush of bodies cried, ‘Let’s follow the airship!’
It was a very hairy voice. It had a flavour of snow and ice about it, but it didn’t belong to Unkoo. Pancho Poncho blinked. It wouldn’t set a good example to the legion if the chief henchman, namely himself, appeared to be obeying the orders of a subordinate.
So he gestured at the retreating airship and boomed, ‘Have you been reading my mind? That was my idea too. In fact, I had it long before you did. So now, follow it, hombres!’
The improved gargantuan legion set off immediately.
Massed chaos; a horde of horror!
As for Distanto, he left the controls of the airship long enough to haul me up and through the hatch. I flopped like a bundle of sticks inside the gondola. He closed the hatch, trapping Mario outside. He surely assumed that the Italo-Mexican would eventually lose his hold on the rope, plunge from altitude to the ground and rupture.
But that’s not what happened. Mario was strong.
He climbed the rope to the closed hatch. Then he gripped the rivets on the side of the gondola and climbed those too. When he reached the roof of the gondola, he flung himself down.
Like a tinpot on a cool cat roof! Not quite like that.
I’m a skeleton. Forgive me.
The Third Prong
‘Looking a bit skinny, Mr Griffiths!’
That’s how Distanto attempted to cheer me up after I had recovered my senses enough to work out what he was doing. He was try
ing to open a sealed flask with a crowbar. I laughed to humour him, but in truth I felt more like weeping. So would you.
‘The worst thing ever to happen to me,’ I said.
‘At least you’re still alive …’
‘That’s very pertinent, Monsieur Faraway; but your comment doesn’t help to explain the why or how.’
He stopped what he was doing and mused.
The ends of his moustache were twiddled between his fingers; just the same way he had twiddled his nipple. Well, not really the same way. The moustache was waxed. He muttered:
‘Something to do with the brown trident-prong.’
‘My thoughts too,’ I agreed.
‘It had the power to return a dead person to life.’
‘Had? Don’t you mean has?’
Distanto frowned. ‘I just have a feeling that it can be used only once. I may be wrong about that, of course.’
‘A hunch, Monsieur Faraway, is that so?’
‘Exactly that, Mr Griffiths.’
‘Some sort of Lazarus Effect, so to speak?’
He nodded vigorously.
‘That’s precisely the crux of the matter. Think about the three points of that madman’s trident. One symbolised war; another symbolised holiness. Both war and holiness always promise to return. Does this make sense to you? People and institutions that have vested interests in holiness or war are forever predicting warlike or holy events in the near future. Holiness and war are fated to come back.’
‘I follow you so far,’ I admitted reluctantly.
‘So now,’ he continued, sitting on the flask he wanted open, ‘it seems to me that the third trident-point, the brown one, the one that stabbed into your flesh, represents that quality of “returning”. You have returned. Not as a ghost or a zombie, but as you are.’
‘And yet without a scrap of flesh,’ I sneered.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Your explanation sounds highly contrived.’
He wagged an admonishing finger. ‘No, no, Mr Griffiths. If this were all taking place in a novel or other work of fiction, then yes, I would say it was contrived! But we are real.’
‘I accept your point,’ I agreed, ‘in nearly the same way I accepted the vicious brown point of the trident.’
Distanto appreciated the symmetry of this remark.
I rubbed my bleary eye sockets.
‘In the real world, Mr Griffiths,’ Distanto continued, ‘all sorts of very bizarre things occur. They aren’t contrived, because no guiding intelligence has planned them. They are random events. That you are a skeleton is a harsh fact, not the conceit of some flippant author! The brown light has stained your bones, by the way.’
I scratched my skull. ‘No, I believe that is my fungal infection, finally exposed to view. Horrid, isn’t it?’
‘You still stink like an elephant’s trunk.’
‘That’s what my aroma resembles? No-one ever told me until now. I guess they deemed it kinder to keep it a secret. An elephant’s trunk isn’t so vile a smell. I feel happier now!’
‘Not so fast, Mr Griffiths! You don’t yet know what the elephant keeps in his trunk. It might be putrefying fruit or disembodied hyena gums. You didn’t think I was referring to the beast’s nose, did you? Oh dear! But bad smells don’t bother me too much.’
‘It is a relief to hear that, Monsieur. But—’
He anticipated my question. ‘What am I doing with this crowbar? I’m trying to open one of the flasks Dom Daniel gave me. It’s full of tropical seeds, that’s why. I require seeds!’
‘What for? You aren’t planning to grind them to flour to make an odd kind of bread, are you? I don’t need to eat now, by the way. I don’t have a stomach or guts or anywhere else to put an appetite. You aren’t planning to jettison them as ballast, are you?’
He shook his head. ‘We can lighten the airship later, if that proves to be necessary. But first I want to plug the leak in the canopy. We’ve lost a third of our helium already. As for our steering: the rudder was shattered by the grapeshot and can’t be fixed. We are heading east and can’t change direction. I don’t want to land here.’
‘Not in Spain? Where is your preferred destination?’
‘Nowhere in Europe, Mr Griffiths.’
‘Because of the coming war?’
‘You are very perspicacious. Do you know that word?’
I nodded, for I am a journalist.
He decided to test me. ‘What does it mean, then?’
‘Bathed in perspiration,’ I said.
He smirked. ‘Wrong.’
I tried again. ‘Flavoured like persimmon.’
‘That’s also incorrect.’
I was too weary and skeletal to make a third guess.
He cried, ‘Open at last!’
He had resumed forcing the lid of the flask; it came off and the seeds inside sparkled, or would have done had they been sparkly. He picked up handfuls of them, stuffed the pockets of his jacket; then he retrieved his halo, which rested on the floor.
‘Back in a minute or so, Mr Griffiths!’
And he climbed a metal ladder that gave access to a catwalk inside the canopy of the airship. From this catwalk, the helium bags were accessible to any technician who cared to deal with them. Distanto Faraway was his own technician; he came back down.
‘All done?’ I enquired casually.
‘Indeed so, but my halo is completely drained.’
‘What did you do, Monsieur?’
‘I planted the seeds of the Brazilian rubber tree.’
‘What was the point of that?’
‘So they would grow over the hole and plug the leak with sap. It’s the most ecologically-aware solution.’
‘But plants don’t grow that fast! It’ll take years …’
‘I accelerated their growth.’
‘How so, Monsieur?’
‘With the artificial ultraviolet light of my halo turned to maximum! It has given me a painful nipple and the halo is burned out; but it was worth it. The leak has been stopped!’
I greeted this news with bone-clicking joy.
‘You are back in control?’
He smoothed his moustache and replied, ‘Not really. The rudder, as I explained already, is broken; but I forgot to mention that some pellets of grapeshot also hit the engines.’
‘We are leaking diesel?’ I cried in alarm.
‘No. But they can’t be shut down. The wires that enabled me to control them from this console have been severed. So they’re stuck on maximum and we must wait for the fuel tanks to drain before attempting to land; the journey ahead is a mystery tour!’
‘What is the capacity of the airship’s fuel tanks?’
‘They are large, Mr Griffiths.’
‘But how far will we travel before they run out?’
He shrugged. ‘Hard to say.’
‘Give me a rough estimate, please!’ I pleaded.
‘In kilometres or miles?’
‘Miles are easier for me, Monsieur.’
‘Umpteen thousand.’
Quaint Little Pillage
History is a strange thing. And many strange things, in their turn, become history. Which possibly is why history is a strange thing. Who knows? As a skeleton, I wasn’t the same Lloyd Griffiths as the flesh man. My identity was the same, true, but something else had changed, something deeper. It seemed as if I’d been bartered for myself. I realise that’s a nonsensical and contorted explanation of the discomfort that saturated me, but I just can’t describe it in a meaningful manner.
Events didn’t care about that, however.
History had its own agenda.
The new, improved GARGANTUAN LEGION, which liked to spell itself with capital letters like that, followed the airship wherever it flew. Here were fanatics, devotees of unreason, violence and bile; lunatic men, with a few women thrown in, who had shredded the last shreds of compassion and mercy in their own hearts; now they cared only to shred the lives and
souls of those they labelled enemies.
But they had many enemies. Most of the human race!
Across Spain, they pillaged!
Over the mountains into France, through Switzerland, Austro-Hungary and Romania, went they. Like Cossack hordes, like rabid wolves, like the worst clichés you can think of, they ravaged, raped and slaughtered! Fired into a frenzy, they vowed to rescue their leader, Mario, and pestle me to a fine dust in a mortar in retribution.
They ran, rode horses, bicycles, scooters! They commandeered boats, goats and carriages. They skated.
Many of them fell in skirmishes with locals.
But they always fought hard.
And won many new recruits!
Pancho Poncho was in nominal charge and yet …
Unkoo led them, unofficially. He made sure my scent was permanently in his nostrils, even when the airship was over the horizon and not visible. His club bashed peasants and lords.
‘Unkoo smash! Unkoo crush! Unkoo do other stuff!’
And his followers chorused:
‘Follow the ape-man! Death to moderates!’
The only dissident was the assassin from England, who paused to sniff a flower in a meadow with the words, ‘Can’t we slow down and enjoy the scenery? Look at this buttercup!’
Instantly, a hundred weapons sundered him!
Unkoo screeched with power.
‘Onwards, valiant avengers! Doom to traitors!’
‘Doom, doom, wise ape-man!’
‘Up with atavism! Rationality, go home!’
‘And don’t come out again!’
Never had a horde swept across any land with so much viciousness. A gigantic landslide in the Caucasus buried half their troops under boulders and grit; but the survivors weren’t deterred in the least. There were many of them still, enough to turn any river red; not with beetroot or other such juice, but with blood, the blood of innocents! Having said that, Unkoo did bash beetroots with his club when he discovered them hiding in fields; for he believed that crops were weak.
‘True men only munch meat! Plants are scum!’
‘Wise Unkoo! Strong Unkoo!’
