The Triple Goddess

by Ashly Graham

  Jugs fidgeted impatiently until they were ready. ‘Good. We will now administer the oath. Hold up your right hands—tush!, simpleton, try again. Oh God. The other one, the other one. Better. Do you solemnly and faithfully swear that ye will never blot the Royal Escutcheon or dishonour the name of Cucurbita pepo, the noble marrow? Dash it, we can’t hear you. Again, you pussies, louder. That’ll have to do. Some of our best friends are marrows, you know. Oi, not so fast, not so fast, you can’t go until we’ve signed the Charter. Rolls! Where’s Rolls?’

  The Master of the Rolls approached, preceded by a pageboy with his portable desk hung like a street vendor’s tray on a leather strap round his neck, and the King rooted through a collection of quills. ‘Where’s our best pen, Rolls? No, not that goose today, not Ferdy—Rodney. One must not show favouritism or they sulk and the quills fall out before they’re ready.

  ‘Ah, there’s a Rodney. Writes better than all of ’em does dear Rodney, but mum’s the word, eh Rolls?, you neigh the form. No, the buttercup ink today, we think.’ Jugs dipped the point in a pot of yellow ink. ‘“Signed this day”...what is the date?—thank you Rolls—“da di da by our hand, Jacobus Tertius Rex”. Shake sand on it...not on me, old boy, on the parchment.

  ‘Where is the Great Seal…in the zoo?. I said, “In the zoo,” Rolls: now would be the moment for a spot of laughter. Oh never mind, it wasn’t that funny. Master of the Rolls, melt the wax and affix the Great Seal of the Realm. On the parchment, Rolls, not me! Judas H. Priest. Sorry, Archbishop. There we go.

  ‘Right, when it’s dry roll it up, send it to the scriptorium for illumination, and cause copies to be posted throughout the City. At last, job done. Phew.’

  The King, emerging from his pavilion, was now free to refocus his attention on the enemy above, which had returned from the fifteen minute double espresso break stipulated by Union rules.

  Heralding the recommencement of hostilities, owing to an excess of caffeine in the veins of the catapult crew, the boiling contents of a lead bucket landed on the grass to the rear of the besieging force. James winced as the green blades withered in agony, and gasped as the receptacle, falling short of the oil, conked a newly inducted Marrow Splunger.

  The score was eight-zero, and things were looking grim for the royalists. It was high time for Jimbo to show the fibre of his being; of which, thanks to his diet, there was a-plenty.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A sizeable crowd of citizens had now formed behind the Beef...Marrow Splungers, well out of range of anything that might be brought to bear against them from the battlements. News crews were bringing in TV cameras, network choppers were hovering overhead, and the event would shortly be broadcast live to the world and possibly even beyond Dover.

  Suddenly, HRH was struck with a ripsnorting idea. ‘“Cry ‘God for Jimmy! England and St George!”’, His Henrician Highness hollered, slapping his anointed shanks. ‘We do think that we have got it. By that other George, the Third, we have got it!’ And he gave thanks for the seaweed in his diet, which did such wonders in keeping his brain cells inventive. Though his very inbred sense of decorum then returned, along with his equine expression, he remained bubbling underneath, so smitten was he with his brainwave, his bonzer scheme.

  In ringing tones, Jugs called for The Fiddlers Three.

  This Fiddlers Three was very different from the successor to the mediaeval trio the King had called for when Arbella had accepted her post, which had originated in the employ of Old King Cole. Although out of respect for tradition it included three violinists dressed in antique costume, they were out of place and inaudible amongst the green-uniformed massed band that it now consisted of.

  The musicians took quite a while to form up, to the jeers of those on the battlements; but when everyone was in place and the sun came out for another dekko at the assembly, despite the affront to his superbity he was impressed by the rank upon rank of gleaming brass, and decided to stay.

  There were saxhorns and flügelhorns, and bugles and cornets. There were mellophones, trombones or sackbuts, and trumpets, and every generation of tuba, bombardon, euphonium and baritone, serpents, cimbassos, and sousaphones. There were vuvuzelas, or stadium horns. Only the French horns were missing: by royal decree they had been declared politically incorrect like everything else of Gaulish origin, and flattened into cymbals.

  All members of the wind family were present and correct: fifes, flutes, piccolos, clarinets, oboes and the English horn [not cor anglais], bassoons, and saxophones. There were a dozen bagpipe players, and the same number of accordions. An organ was connected to an electrical cable run from an alcohol-powered generator.

  The percussion department included everything that was designed to make a distinctive sound when blown, cracked, clashed, bashed, clacked, rubbed, scraped, shaken or swung, or when struck with a mallet or stick or the fists. There were side-, snare-, and bass, and bongo drums, and tom-toms, and a fearsome array of timpani or kettledrums. There were triangles, gongs, whips, tubular and other bells, klaxons, slide- or swanee whistles, and kazoos. In addition to a carillon (the heaviest of musical instruments), there were castanets, a celesta, chimes, cymbals, a glockenspiel, a xylophone, güiros, maracas, marimbas, rattles, tabors, tambourines, and wood blocks.

  At the sight, if not necessarily the sound of the latter instruments, James Blades, the famous percussionist, had he not already died and gone to Heaven, would have done so prematurely.

  After much crashing about and cursing as it got organized, the musical battery was ready to hit the airwaves. The Marrow Splungers, meanwhile, looked on and pretended that their Commander-in-Chief did not have bats in his belfry. (In fact, bats, Chiroptera by the hundred, were exactly what Jas. had in mind.) The King pursed his lips and blew until his cheeks bulged bigger than the bullfrog performing features of the famous trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie; and the high-pitched whine that he produced was so piercing that people clapped their hands to their ears.

  Bliss it was to the nonplussed crowd when the sound ended, but the sound was still in everyone’s head and blood trickled from a few eardrums.

  After being received by the King, and kneeling to kiss his hand, the musical director and conductor of The Fiddlers Three withdrew to mount a podium, where he raised a baton that was two feet long and fluorescent green. To warm up and get the attention of those atop the White tower, he brought the band into an ironic rendition of John Philip Sousa’s At the King’s Court.

  What those aloft did not at first notice was that the musicians had put on enclosed headphones—Bose QuietComfort 3’s—which they were carrying like wartime gasmasks in pouches at their sides. Runners were distributing pairs of the headgear to all those in the offensive groups, and pageboys doing the same to the courtiers and members of the royal household.

  The headphones were of the noise-cancelling kind designed to block out all sound; for as James handsomely acknowledged, sometimes the King’s Musick, especially the timbre of the avant-garde (stet) Royal Plant Music that he composed himself, was too emotional for his subjects to listen to without breaking down, especially when it was played at volume levels exceeding 80 dbSPL.

  The Lord Chamberlain brought the King his own custom-designed set of the larger Bose QuietComfort 15 headphone—Jugs could only take so much of the American Sousa—the ear-cushions of which were made from the skins of gourds from the royal gardens, stuffed with pith from the giant reed Arundo donax.

  The observant sun, sensing that something noisy was in the offing, took the precaution of summoning two fluffy cumulus clouds to attend him on either side.

  The defenders, who had ceased their activities in order to mock when the music broke out began to lose their sense of humour after the third repeat.

  When a tuba player succumbed to an arrow shot by Arbella herself, Jugs lost it. His force was now down nine. ‘We want that woman fed to our giant begonias!’ he screamed, shaking his fist at her. To maintain the level of decibels, a replacement player hurr
ied onto the field blowing into his own mouthpiece to warm it up.

  Added the King portentously, ‘Bring...on...the singers!’

  A line of disgruntled-looking operatic stars trooped onto the scene. Summoned to attend His Majesty, they had had to cancel their performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, that evening and forfeit their fees.

  Each of the famous artists was large of girth. The dewlapped soprano, Fatima Mount, who came out bearing a box of cream-filled pastries and wearing more, was heavy enough to cause a list in an ocean-going liner when she turned over in her bunk. The mezzo had been filled from a tap that someone had forgotten to turn off. The tuxedoed hot-air balloon of a tenor, Encoro Gravapotti, was straining so hard to slip his moorings that the sun feared for an unscheduled eclipse.

  There was hope for the bass: although he did not wear his two hundred and fifty pounds lightly, if he laid off fatty foods and ran round himself ten times a day for a month, he might save a regional opera house the cost of reinforcing the stage for Boris Godunov.

  But since slenderness is considered prejudicial to loud singing, today the foursome was ideal for Jugs’ purpose, and he listened approvingly as they loosened their vocal cords by singing The Honoured Dead in unison with the Fiddlers; following which the soprano got her voice, but nothing else, in shape doing the battle-cries for The Ride of the Valkyries.

  Then it was back to Sousa. During the fourth rendition of Tally-Ho! a furry creature flew overhead and dipped its jointed wings to the sovereign before homing in on Ignacio Pesci and, glomming onto his neck with its claws, biting through the skin of his throat with its sharp teeth. It was a giant vampire bat, D. draculae Morgan, the leader of many that were to arrive over the ensuing minutes in response to the King’s call to action.

  The Neapolitan nasty’s natural colour faded: it was the first of many Procol Harum whiter shades of pale through which he would pass over the next couple of minutes as he failed to dislodge the creature with his scrabbling nails and the blood drained from his jugular vein and coursed onto the ground.

  Squadron after squadron of chittering bats arrived. There were so many of them that the caves they lived in were rendered batless and devoid of squeak, their mounds of guano—the source of Jugs’ phaeton fuel—unaugmented. The bats had been promised a good meal, had travelled a long way, and were very hungry. They were accustomed to getting first bite of the King’s executed felons before the flesh was tossed to his pet piranhas, family Characidae, subfamily Serrasalminae, in the Buck House swimming-pool.

  As the other bats shredded the Mediterranean murderer’s clothes to get at the other fleshy parts of his body, the vampires did not say Grace; nor did they wait until everyone had been served, make polite conversation between bites, and wipe their mouths with napkins. They had no use for cutlery, or palate-cleansing sorbet, and unlike Oliver Twist they did not say Please when they wanted more. They had not heard of the apophthegm “Enough is as good as a feast”, and if they had they would have strongly disagreed.

  One strangulated ‘Mamma mia!’ later, Pesci was dead. The score was now nine-one, and a very big “one” it was.

  ‘Stonking!’, ejaculated His Majesty. ‘Brill!’

  Arbella of the White tower was stricken at the loss of her hatchet and stiletto man. But although boiling oil and arrows were useless as a defence against so many of these winged bloodsuckers, unfortunately for the bats, as familiar as they were with the blood groups of A, B, AB and O, and Rhesus Positive and Negative, Ignacio Pesci had been in a haematological category of his own owing to the high concentration of sulphur-rich Allium sativum—garlic—in his system. Pesci used to chew raw bulbs of the stuff and breathe into the faces of his victims as he tortured them.

  And now, as instead of the honey-like blood that to them tasted much sweeter than the wine celebrated in the song by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow, and the vampire bats recognized the to-them abhorrent flavour of the only substance to which they were violently allergic, garlic, they came over queasy and departed en masse in as great a haste as they had arrived.

  King James was delighted by the success of his beau strategem, or to be PC his jolly good wheeze, which considerably improved morale on the royalist side. After consulting the sun, who was about to retreat behind a cloud and sulk because he was being ignored but cheered up at being acknowledged, if only to establish the time, and elected to remain onstage, Jugs switched on the digital radio in his headphones and took a quick break to tune into a BBC Radio 4 interview with the celebrated gardener Percy Thrower.

  Then, in a dramatic change of mood, after a tender rendition of Bonnie Annie Laurie to honour the King’s Scottish roots or rhizomes, the band switched to an arrangement by James himself—he fancied himself a veritable Frederick the Great of Prussia as a writer of music—of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, played inside-out with a wailing vocal accompaniment.

  As a composer manqué who had been diverted by divinity, His Royal Highness alternately gnawed and waved a desensitized carrot in un-time to the music, pleased that his work should be getting public attention. Had they been in a concert hall it would have been enough to bring the house down.

  The conductor redoubled his arm-waving and increased the tempo as the singers competed with each other to make themselves heard in a pièce de non-résistance (aargh!) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the ground- and window-breaking composer of electronic and aleatory or controlled chance serial and spatial music, which the King had rewritten backwards with repeats da capo al fine ad nauseam to be played at a decibel level of 115 dbSPL, i.e. louder than the average rock concert.

  By now word of what was occurring in London EC3 was being broadcast live via the media, and people were streaming out of the Monument and Tower Hill tube stations, and piling off buses, in hope of witnessing the event.

  Amongst them was the music critic for The Spectator, a staunch monarchist who wet himself with enthusiasm as he listened to the King’s improvements upon Stravinsky, and Stockhausen, and called his editor on his mobile pleading for an extra five thousand words allocation of space for a puff article that he would supply in addition to his weekly review; and for a gofer to be sent with a three-pack of cotton Y-fronts from Marks & Spencer, so that he could nip behind the wall of a tent and change his underwear, and in the event the bladder mishap repeated itself, without missing a beat.

  Richer Sounds on London Bridge was doing a frantic trade in headphones, and the manager was calling for as many extra pairs as possible to be brought in immediately from the other stores round the city.

  The band’s non-stop performing began to take its toll: musicians swayed and collapsed from exhaustion and heat—the sun, having decided to stay at his zenith so as to get the best view, was getting hotter by the minute with excitement—and had to be replaced by others from the Royal College of Music who had been doing the musical equivalent of champing at the bit by blowing into mouthpieces, sucking on reeds, rosining bows, and tuning or untuning their instruments. As enthusiastic as they were, one by one they too were compelled to retire, with embouchures cracked, lungs heaving, arms aching, and hands blistered. Some had to be revived at the aid station that had been set up in one of the tents.

  Three full days and three full nights this went on around the clock. In vain did the Tower’s occupants try to harpoon anyone who ventured too close to the walls with spears to which rope had been attached, so that they might be hauled up and stripped of their headphones. In vain did they slingshot banknotes wrapped around stones at their tormentors, in an attempt to bribe them to stop, or dispatch them aural prophylactic protection; and messages offering them anything, from money and possessions to their sisters’ flesh, if they were to lay down their sonic arms.

  Nothing was effective in blocking the awful noise. Earplugs and candle wax were of no use; nor was submerging themselves in baths and breathing through straws; nor was banging pots and pans together; nor was sandwiching themselves in mattresses or wrapping towels round their heads;
nor was whistling or hooting through their fists or shouting on the theory that creating a barrier of friendly noise might bring relief; nor was turning stereos up to maximum volume, or tuning radio receivers to so-called easy-listening programs on BBC Radio 2 or Classic FM podcasts of Smooth Classics at Seven; nor was trying to meditate or imagine that the royal racket was beautiful and that they could not hear enough of it.

  When the prisoners, as they now regarded themselves, retreated to shut themselves in the thickest-walled rooms on the other side of the Tower, it was as if they were still outside. Everything failed utterly to overcome the instrumental and vocal assault, or reduce the cacophony, which seemed no longer to be coming from outside but from within their heads.

  Arbella and her valiant but now impotent Italian importees crammed padded helmets from the armoury on their heads. They donned casques, heaulms, bascinets, cervellaires, barbutes, sallets, armutes, sugarloafs, and chapels de fer…all to no avail. Oh! that there were still barrels of gunpowder at the Tower, or the saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal with which to make it; and cannon on the roof of the White tower, which could be used to requite Jugs’ homage to his ancestor James I’s demonological savvy with a back-at-you rendition of the 1812 Overture...or deafen themselves in the process.

  As the war of attrition wore on, nobody in the Tower was able to sleep or eat. This music, far from being the food of love, was the genetically modified nourishment of monsters.

  Conductor after conductor fell off the podium, and had to be borne hence and a new one installed, but the band never took a break. There was more militant Sousa: Esprit de Corps, The Crusader, The Gladiator, The Dauntless Battalion, Oh! Warrior Grim, Sabre and Spurs, and The Thunderers…and Stars and Stripes Forever, which was egregiously unpatriotic, but Jugs had authorized it being played because the tune and beat were so fine: Ta dah, ta da dah, ta da dah-ah-a; ta da dah, ta da dah, ta da dah-ah-ah. Ta-da.... Oom-pa, oom-pa, bam bam, poom poom. End, repeat, end, repeat.