The Young Dictator

by Hughes, Rhys

  Tubbs narrowed his eyes at her. “What do you mean?”

  “The surviving skargills are bound to go and fetch reinforcements. The human guards here are fanatical and I know for a fact there’s an armoury where they can equip themselves with deadlier weapons than just tridents and swords. Crossbows, for instance!”

  Tubbs licked his lips uncertainly. “But we deserve some sort of party, don’t we? After all we’ve been through!”

  Jenny nodded. “Of course you do. But let’s concentrate first on getting out of here in one piece. I promise you that if we can reach Buckingham Palace without being slaughtered, then I’ll throw a massive party for you all. There will be jelly, trifle and sweets! Lots of alcohol and dancing and even pillow fights. Anything you like!”

  Tubbs saw the wisdom of this. “Very well, Miss Khan! I am at your service. You word is my command…”

  “That’s more like it,” said Jenny approvingly.

  The other slaves shuffled their feet and nodded. They knew that there wouldn’t have been much fun in getting drunk on wine while shackled at the neck to each other anyway. And so—

  The echo of marching feet sounded in the corridor.

  “The human guards are coming!”

  “What shall we do?” Tubbs lifted his scimitar.

  Jenny looked around the kitchen. Her eyes saw something balanced on an unlit stove. What was it? A massive pressure cooker! She looked down at all the weapons lying scattered on the floor. “I have an idea! Gather up as many of those things as you can!”

  The slaves hurried to obey. It was tricky coordinating their movements without the aid of the drum rhythm to keep them in step with each other, but they managed without too many accidents to collect armfuls of blades and pointy instruments and spiked maces.

  Jenny had removed the lid from the pressure cooker.

  It was as large as a bank safe. The lid had an elaborate locking device, but she worked out how to open it fairly quickly. Now she began pouring water into it with a bucket, keeping both taps of a nearby sink running at full blast. She knew that time was running out even faster than the liquid was shooting out of those chrome pipes.

  “Put all the weapons into the pressure cooker!”

  The slaves did so. At least one hundred assorted tools of war ended up inside the enormous cooking vessel.

  “What’s this? Are you making skirmish soup?”

  Jenny frowned at Tubb’s question, not understanding it. “No, but there is no time to explain. The guards will be here any moment now.” A final bucket of water was added and then she replaced the lid and locked it into place. She found a box of matches and lit the stove, turning the gas up to maximum. Suddenly there was a shout.

  “You are all under arrest! Surrender or die!”

  The human guards had entered the kitchen. A few of the skargills who hadn’t been killed were with them. Just as Jenny had warned, the guards were equipped with crossbows and even blunderbusses. If a fight started now, the slaves would be massacred!

  “Very well. We won’t offer you any resistance,” said Jenny, and she came forward with her hands held up.

  “Do you all surrender?” barked the chief guard.

  The slaves nodded meekly.

  One of the skargills stepped forward. He was battered and bruised and one of his arms hung limply by his side, obviously broken in many places and useless. He glowered at Jenny.

  “She’s the leader! I recognise her. She’s smarty-pants!”

  The chief guard snorted. “Oho!”

  “What are you going to do?” blurted Tubbs.

  The chief guard fixed him with his beady eyes. “You will all be spared and returned to your duties as galley slaves. But we intend to make a bad example of your leader. Crucifixion!”

  “I beg your pardon?” gasped Tubbs in horror.

  “Yes, we will crucify your leader. That will be a stark reminder to you never to attempt a rebellion again…”

  The skargill jabbed the fingers of one of his good arms at Jenny. “She is the one you seek. She’s smarty-pants!”

  Suddenly, on an impulse, Tubbs stepped forward.

  “No, I’m smarty-pants!” he cried.

  There was a brief pause. Then one of the other slaves shouted, “He’s lying. I’m smarty-pants, not him!”

  More of the slaves began calling, “I’m smarty-pants!”

  “That’s not true. I am! It’s me!”

  “No, I’m smarty-pants!”

  Jenny was overwhelmed with emotion. She was deeply touched by the incredible loyalty of these brave men.

  But the chief guard only twisted his mouth.

  “Is that so? All of you are smarty-pants? Well, in that case, I will have to crucify every single one of you!”

  The slaves began weeping. Some of them felt snots come out of their noses, that’s how upset they were.

  “Wait a moment!” protested Jenny, but her voice was too weak to be heard above the general lamenting.

  Then there was a deafening explosion!

  The pressure cooker had burst!

  Fragments of steel flew everywhere, cutting down many of the slaves and most of the guards and all the surviving skargills. Tridents, scimitars and maces were propelled at incredible velocity into walls and skulls and soft bodies, often passing through a person and continuing on the other side, sometimes hitting a new victim.

  When the steam had cleared, Jenny shook her head.

  She was dizzy but unharmed.

  Only six slaves were left alive and about twenty guards.

  The chief guard was one of those who had survived. A scimitar blade had taken off his right leg but he balanced very skilfully on his left and Jenny knew that he was probably going to be a formidable hopper and not easy to outrun even in this condition.

  “Well, there are less of you to crucify now,” he said, “and less of us to do the hammering, but no worries!”

  They were led outside and nailed one by one to the door of the Houses of Parliament. Their writhing bodies would be a discouragement to all other slaves not to attempt to free themselves.

  Tubbs was the first to be pinned to the wood. The spikes were driven through his wrists and feet by a burly guard with a sledgehammer. Jenny was saved for last. A figure scuttled up.

  Jenny blinked. It was Old Young Eyes. He cried:

  “What are you doing? Stop! Stop!”

  The chief guard sneered at him. “What do you want?”

  “I have been sent by the Queen. Don’t you know who this is? Jenny Khan, former ruler of the Milky Way!”

  The chief guard rubbed his eyes. “I admit that she does look a little bit like her. But she must be an impostor.”

  “No, no, she’s the real thing!” blared Old Young Eyes. “You mustn’t crucify her or harm her in any way. If you do, the Queen will have you hung, drawn, sketched, painted and then quartered. And then the artworks that depict you will also be quartered!”

  The chief guard hesitated. “Do you have any proof that the Queen has sent you? This might be another trick!”

  Old Young Eyes pulled out a note and handed it to the chief guard. It said, DON’T YOU DARE HURT JENNY KHAN. BAD STUFF WILL HAPPEN TO YOU IF YOU DISOBEY ME! The chief guard reacted instantly to this warning. “Don’t crucify her! Set her free!”

  They did so and Jenny went to join Old Young Eyes.

  “Wait! Jenny!” croaked Tubbs.

  But Jenny obviously didn’t hear him. She allowed herself to be guided by Old Young Eyes back to the palace. She didn’t look back even once as the crucified slaves called out to her.

  “That was a disaster!” she said to herself.

  Old Young Eyes gazed at her sympathetically. “It’s never easy doing stuff like that, you know. Rebellions and overthrowing the establishment is risky and needs to be planned properly.”

  “Come off it! What do you know? You’re a weights and measurement man! You have no experience of ruling.”

  “But I have read Machiavelli.
Every last word!”

  “So have I, as a matter of fact.”

  “All the same, if you proceed without planning you are bound to come unstuck. In other words, you’ll fail!”

  Jenny shrugged and asked how the Queen knew she could be found in the Houses of Parliament. But the answer was simple. It was because she had already announced her intention to go there and free Tubbs, so when Jenny hadn’t returned by dinner time, the Queen had got worried and sent Old Young Eyes in search of her, with the note for good measure, just in case Jenny had got herself into trouble.

  “Which is exactly what you had done,” he said.

  They reached Buckingham Palace but the place was in chaos. Directly overhead was a fleet of enemy spaceships.

  “Oh no! The invasion has started!” gasped Jenny.

  “You’re prepared for it, surely?”

  “Well no, actually, I’m not. I never got round to making any plans. It’s like my homework. I kept putting it off.”

  “Oh dear, we’re in the soup now,” said Old Young Eyes.

  “Worse even than dinosaur soup!”

  “I beg your pardon, girl?”

  “Just a private joke between me and myself.”

  The Queen came out of the palace, her thighbones creaking loudly like the timbers of a ship in a fierce storm.

  “Thank goodness you’re back! Come inside quick!”

  Jenny and Old Young Eyes ducked into the palace just as a ray zipped down from one of the spaceships and blasted a smoking crater in the spot where they had both been standing.

  “Buckingham Palace is armoured,” the Queen explained.

  “Armoured?” wondered Jenny.

  “Yes, like an armadillo. The walls and roof can’t be penetrated by any sort of space ray. They are too tough.”

  “That’s good to hear,” remarked Jenny.

  “The invasion fleet arrived about ten minutes ago. They have issued a message saying that they intend to totally annihilate London if you aren’t given to them within the next hour.”

  Jenny blinked. “You aren’t going to betray me?”

  The Queen was astonished. “Of course not! Have I ever given you any reason to doubt my loyalty? I’m going to stand by you until the bitter end. I left the others in the banqueting hall.”

  The three of them hurried there. The banqueting table had no plates or spoons on it, but was covered with bits of machinery, cogs, levers, cranks and wires. While Jenny watched in fascination, a servant brushed past her with a muttered apology and emptied the contents of a large box onto the surface of the table. More components.

  “What are you doing?” Jenny asked incredulously.

  “I have given orders to my servants to fetch as many spare parts from the various palace junkrooms as they can find. The plan is for us to build a really mad weapon to fight back with.”

  “You think you can invent a brand new weapon in just an hour? Isn’t that a bit ambitious even for a Queen?”

  The Queen glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. It was a skeleton clock and therefore went well with her skull. “Forty-eight minutes now, to be precise. But yes, that’s the idea.”

  Jenny glanced at the figures seated around the table who were picking up cogs and fitting them to other cogs, connecting batteries to whisks and garlic crushers, taking toasters apart. One of them was Maya, the proven genius; Chairman Meow was also involved; the third figure was unknown to Jenny. He was a scowling pale man.

  “Who is he?” Jenny pointed with a sharp finger.

  The Queen nodded. “Ah, he’s one of my most competent advisors. In times of emergency I unfreeze him from the block of ice where he’s kept and rely on his help. His name is Scarydung Chinwag. Allow me to make proper introductions. Shake hands now!”

  Jenny extended her hand and said, “I’m Jenny Khan.”

  Scarydung sneered. “Peculiar name!”

  “He’s rather unfriendly, isn’t he?” Jenny whispered as she turned back to face the Queen. The Queen nodded.

  “Extremely. But he’s clever and efficient too.”

  One of the servants entered the hall and said, “Excuse me, but there is a crowd of angry citizens at the door. They want us to surrender Jenny to the aliens. The aliens have promised that if Jenny is sacrificed, they won’t have any need to obliterate London forever.”

  The Queen considered this proposal. “The answer is no, we’ll never be so fickle and shallow as to hand Jenny to her Gran. Her Gran is pure evil! Lock the palace doors and pour barrels of boiling oil onto the crowd from the roof and upper windows. That ought to disperse them. The citizens of this land must learn to be responsible!”

  The servant bowed and raced away to carry out these instructions. The screams of the scalded citizens reached their ears about five minutes later. Clearly barrels of oil were kept on the boil just for such an eventuality. It didn’t seem feasible to heat up an entire barrel to the boiling point in such a short space of time. Maya suddenly said:

  “I’ve just invented something! Take a look at it!”

  They did so. It resembled a whisk that had gone dancing with a kettle and had somehow melted into it. “What is it?” cried Old Young Eyes as he leaned forward for a closer inspection.

  “It’s a doodah-mega-whiskatron!” declared Maya.

  “How does it work?” asked Jenny.

  “You just turn the handle, like this!” said Maya.

  She did so and the contraption fell apart. But the Queen had invented a weapon of her own. “Here is mine!”

  “What’s this one called?” muttered Old Young Eyes.

  “The blast-omatic-superdoopa-fizzlestick!” said the Queen. She aimed it at the ceiling and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened, nothing at all. Scarydung Chinwag rose to his feet and said, “But see what I have created!”

  “Doesn’t it have a name?” persisted Old Young Eyes.

  Scarydung nodded. “Zippy-zapper!”

  He worked the handles and they squeaked. That was all.

  Jenny sighed. “Let’s just face it, we are no good at inventing weapons under these conditions. I might as well walk outside and give myself up. Gran can destroy me with one of her rays but at least London will remain intact. That’s the right thing to do…”

  “Wait!” It was Chairman Meow who interrupted.

  “What for?” Jenny was gloomy.

  “I can shoot beams from my claws, remember?”

  Jenny nodded. “Ice radiation.”

  “Exactly! And I’ve just recalled what these ice beams can freeze! Just now it entered my fluffy head!”

  “Not peas? Bank funds? Clocks?” said Jenny.

  “No, no, no! Spaceships!”

  “Spaceships?” Everyone jumped to their feet.

  “Yes indeed. Spaceships!” Chairman Meow began dancing, a dance as unfashionable as his pink flea collar. “It can freeze them so cold that they instantly turn brittle and shatter.”

  “What are you waiting for?” cried the Queen.

  “Just you watch me!” he replied.

  He ran off and they crowded at the windows. Smouldering citizens lay on the ground, encased in cooling pitch and oil, but high above hovered a vast armada of enemy spaceships. Then Chairman Meow appeared and he seemed to be growing larger. It was no illusion. His body expanded and it was only a matter of a few seconds before he was taller than the palace. A physical miracle such as this was probably nothing special to a denizen of the year Infinity AD, Jenny told herself.

  When Chairman Meow was approximately as high as the tallest tower in London, he unsheathed his claws. Beams of frozen light sputtered from them like accelerated icicles. They touched the spaceships and froze them so rapidly that they shattered into millions of little pieces. The spaceships were caught by surprise and didn’t retaliate in time. One by one, they fell from the sky, crashing into houses below.

  “Hurrah!” cheered the Queen, Scarydung, Old Young Eyes, Maya and Jenny. Fragments of metal rained down.

>   Chairman Meow lashed his enormous tail in a victory dance and with it he knocked down an entire street. But already he was shrinking again, a normal cat once more, apart from the fact he stood up straight on his back legs like a human and was from the future.

  Jenny rushed out and gave him a big hug. And although he was not an ordinary pet but the greatest dictator who had ever lived in the history of the entire universe, he purred in her arms.

  The Queen and the others came out of the palace doors. “Amazing! What a performance! Bravo, you clever puss!”

  Chairman Meow bowed modestly and his whiskers twitched. “It was nothing. Just doing my duty, that’s all.”

  They laughed at this as if it was some big joke.

  “What shall we do now?” asked Old Young Eyes as he squinted at the destruction all around. A lot of London was missing. “Shall we offer help to the injured and homeless citizens?”

  The Queen and Jenny considered this carefully.

  “Nah!” they answered at last.

  “We need to do something,” said Scarydung.

  This was true. So Jenny said:

  “Gran’s body must be found and brought to me. She will doubtless be among the dead aliens. Search diligently through the wreckage of every spaceship. Until I see her mangled and horrid corpse with my own eyes, I won’t believe she is really defeated.”

  These were sensible orders and the Queen arranged for forty servants to go out and start searching. Then she went back inside the palace and Jenny, Maya, Old Young Eyes, Chairman Meow and Scarydung followed her. They soon had tea and buns.

  After he finished his last bun, Scarydung grumbled. “I suppose I have to go now and be frozen yet again?”

  The Queen nodded. “Afraid so. But I’ll thaw you out the next time we have an emergency, don’t worry!”

  As he left the banqueting hall, Jenny asked, “How often does he get to be thawed out, that poor fellow?”

  The Queen frowned as she considered this question. It took her a few minutes to do the complicated calculations on her bony fingers, but at last she said, “On average, once every 167 years. But wait! Can you hear that rumbling noise? What the heck is it?”

  There was indeed a very low and insistent bass note coming from deep inside the belly of the palace. The building began shaking. Furniture and ornaments jumped around, crockery shattered, pictures fell off the wall, a suit of armour in the corner toppled over.