by Adam Roberts
And for a long age the beings in Asdar were content under the light of the Sellmi.
But in Upper Middle Earth, the evil Sharon roused himself in the lightless dungeons of Winter-underland. And with the destruction of his Master Moregothic his power had diminished greatly. But though weak in evil he was still cunning; and he said to himself, ‘If I steal the Sellmi of Emu, then its potency will restore me.’ And Sharon then said to his highest-ranking Orks ‘I shall create a monster to terrify the world!’
And his Orks said, ‘Yes! yes, my lord, bring terror to the world with your evil creation.’
‘A dog,’ I think, said Sharon, thoughtful. 50
To which his Orks replied, ‘Um, OK, a dog, alright, I suppose so.’
‘I mean,’ said Sharon, hurriedly, ‘a really big dog. No laptop pooch. A man-in-a-suit size dog. Really big teeth. A scary dog.’
‘Scary, yes,’ said his Orks, warming to the notion. And they added, ‘Yes, why not. A dog – a hound, yes.’
And so Sharon created a monstrous dog; a huge beast with eyes like glowing coals and a hideous slaver. And he said to his Orks, ‘Actually I was thinking of giving him something truly terrifying – put down that tankard of blood-wine, Yrkh. I don’t want you to spill it on my leather carpet in terror when I say this – that’s right – I was thinking of giving my monstrous dog—’
‘Yes, my lord?’
‘What, my lord?’
‘—giving it – luminous fur!’ And the evil Lord Sharon looked about his followers with eager eyes. ‘What do you think, eh? Eh? Pret-ty terr-if-fying I should say. Don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s the most terrifying thing you ever heard of? Eh? What? Eh?’
And the Orks looked frankly nonplussed, giving one another eyebrow-shrugging looks in what they hoped was a surreptitious manner, said, ‘Er, very good my lord.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Sharon, earnestly. ‘Isn’t it, though? Puts the willies up me, I don’t mind telling you, just thinking about it. The fur is luminous you see.’
‘Right,’ said Yrkh. ‘Yes. I, er, see.’
‘Yes, my Lord,’ said another Ork, whose name has not been recorded by history. ‘Willies, yes.’
‘Ooo,’ said Sharon, shuddering. ‘Just the thought of it. It’s like regular fur, only . . . it glows in the dusk! Ugh!’
And the teeth of this monstrous hound were long and pointy, but worse than their pointyness was their colour, a sort of yellowy-cream colour with little brown flecks. Most horrible was the pong that emanated from them. And the name of this hound was The Hound of the Bark-Evil, this being the most intimidating name Sharon could think of. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘he is a hound of darkness and his very bark will be a bark of evil.’
‘Excellent idea,’ said the Orks, looking over their shoulders as if somebody they absolutely had to talk to right now had just walked into the room, even though no such person had in fact come in. ‘Terribly scary. No, really.’
And Sharon sensed that his underlings were not as scared by the whole luminous dog thing as he was, and said in a brisk tone, ‘Yes, well, there we go, hideous hound. But I’ve also, actually, been thinking – maybe we need a second hideous creature to aid our evil schemes. I mean, in addition to the dog.’
And he mustered his army of Orks, and corralled the warrior ants together in the lowest of the low dungeons. And with monstrous science, and with the eye-gore harvested from hideously tortured victims, and a mutant assistant called Igor, he produced a hideous monstrosity, a vast warrior ant, thirty feet high, with huge protuberant compound eyes and alarmingly snickersnack mouthparts. And this creature Sharon called Ughganggooligooligooligooliwojda-ant, or Ughgooglyant for short.
And Sharon led his army to the coast, and built a mighty port, which he called ‘Starboard’ just to be awkward. And here he ordered that, for miles around, the trees be felled, and the timber be cutted; and his Orks did ask, ‘You mean, oh Dark Lord, the trees should be fallen, and the timber cut?’ ‘Yes,’ said Sharon. ‘That.’
And the Orks built a great fleet of boats, shaped like ducks, with tall carved prows shaped like duckheads, and broad bases like ducks’ undersides, and a little sticky-outy platform at the back. And these ships were dedicated to Wickedness; and Sharon called these ships Duck-W for that reason. W for Wicked, you see? And he sailed through the cold waters of the Capital C13, and through the swell where the sea was green as turf and the hills of water shifted sluggishly, raising the ships up and dropping them down. And Emu, seeing this fleet approach the shores of Asdar, sent a great storm to sink the fleet; but the Duck-Ws were built robustly, and though the waters turned white, and waves thrashed and roiled, and the sea went all epileptic, yet still did they not sink.
‘How are they doing that?’ said Emu. ‘I deliberately put a bleeding great ocean between Upper Middle Earth and Asdar to prevent things like this. How are they managing to avoid drowning?’
‘They have built,’ said the valpac in subdued voices, ‘craft from wood, O Creator.’
And Emu said, ‘You mean to tell me that that wood stuff floats? Well split my liver with a brass harpoon, I had no idea.’
And the valpac said, somewhat sheepishly, ‘Um, didn’t we, er, tell you about the floatiness when we created the trees, oh Lord? I thought we did. I mean, we certainly meant to tell you. Perhaps it got crowded out by all the other things we had to tell you.’
And Emu did look very severely at them. And he did mutter to himself crossly, ‘Bloody great things, don’t look like they should float, honestly, incompetence, it really is.’
And so it was that Sharon led an army of Orks, together with a giant luminous dog and a monstrous giant ant, into the fabled paradise of Asdar. And battle was joined.
The valpac did flash through the sky like lightning, and they felled Orks with great strokes of fire from the clouds; but Sharon mounted upon the neck of his gigantic ant, or ‘gigantiant’ for short.14 And he galloped away over the hills of Asdar, with the great hound barking at its heels. Or, now that I come to think of it, perhaps not ‘heels’. I think I’m in the right when I say that ants don’t actually have, you know, heels; their legs probably go straight down to, I don’t know, hooves, is it? But you know what I mean; the monstrous ant – well, I was going to say ‘scuttling’, since I suppose that’s what ants do; but let’s be honest, ‘scuttling’ just isn’t a big enough word to describe the great lolloping strides of its twenty-foot legs.
And on the beach the valpac put terror in the hearts of the army of Orks, and destroyed their ships utterly, and chased them into the sea. But Sharon was not amongst the slain.
And soon Sharon and his gigant and his dog arrived in that part of Asdar called Isle of Langahans, where the great pole, not a lamp-post, honestly, more just a pole that happened to have a light-emitting object at the top of it, was situated.
And the hideous hound of Sharon did sniff monstrously at the base of this great pole, and then, again monstrously, did relieve itself by raising one of its monstrous legs. And the valpac went, ‘Urh, that’s foul.’
At which Sharon did laugh aloud, for he rejoiced in the epithet ‘foul’.
And Ughgooglyant did cut at the base of this pole with his terrible chitinous mouthparts, and did sever it through, such that it fell over with a mighty crash. And Sharon did wrap the fallen Sellmi in greaseproof paper and tuck it inside his Evil Jacket. And, casting through his mind for the right thing to say at such a momentous moment, he called aloud, ‘Aha! Ahahahah!’
And the Hound of the Bark-Evil did bark in an evil way, and did snap at anybody who came close.
And Emu said, ‘This is plain rubbing me up the wrong way and no mistake.’ And he did lay a trail of gigantic luminous sausages over the pastures of Asdar in a sort of meaty dotted line. And the hideous hound of Sharon gobbled up the sausages one after the other, and was thereby led away from his Master, and over a hill, where Emu was waiting with a frying-pan of monstrous size. And he did smite the great dog on
the head with this pan, and lay him low.
‘Sharon,’ he called, ‘your Orks have been pushed into the sea by my valpac, and your dog has been felled!’
‘Fallen,’ Sharon called back. ‘And I don’t care.’
‘Give way!’ called Emu. ‘Your blasphemous assault upon my paradise has been rebuffed. Your evil has broken over the rock of Asdar and fallen away like the fleeting ocean wave.’
But the laughter of Sharon was raucous and jibeish. ‘The Sellmi is mine,’ he called. ‘I shall carry it back to the fastness of the Winter-underland, where a great cleaver is waiting to cut it into many slivers – and with these fragments I shall grow strong. The power of your magic will sustain me for eons.’
‘There’s no escape,’ called Emu. ‘You are surrounded. Your ships have been destroyed, your army vanquished. Surrender!’
And Sharon called back, ‘You’ll never take me alive, Creator!’
‘Don’t be a fool, Sharon,’ called Emu.
And Sharon fired out half a dozen bolts of foul magic, and Emu and the valpac ducked their heads behind the hills of Asdar. And then Sharon spoke to his ant, saying, ‘I hereby promote you to queen.’
And Ughgooglyant sprouted great grey-silver wings, and launched into the air, carrying Sharon away from Asdar, and back over the wide waters of the Capital S15, to Upper Middle Earth.
The blessed beings in Asdar did watch him fly off with heavy hearts; and, since he was taking the Sellmi with him, darkness fell over the land of Westersupanesse. And Emu, Creator of all things, Supreme Being, did say: ‘Oh.’ And then did add: ‘botheration.’
The great ant Ughgooglyant landed in the mountains of Byk, in Upper Middle Earth, and Sharon did rejoice. ‘Yea, now I possess the sacred Sellmi, and it shall make me strong.’
As for Ughgooglyant, he, or perhaps I should say she as it turns out, tucked her wings back against her carapace and crawled into a deep cave in the mountainside, where he, she, it, whatever, laid many eggs, spawning hideous progeny that, although much smaller than their terrible parent, yet troubled the lives of Men and Elves for eons to come, spoiling their picnics, crawling in lines round the edges of their kitchens, and so on.
Emu was not pleased by this development. But, since the land of Asdar was cast into darkness by the loss of the Sellmi, his valpac could not see the expression on his face, and decided to be hopeful about things.
‘Well,’ said Emu. ‘First, I am seriously considering going over to Upper Middle Earth to have a word with that Sharon chap.’ And the valpac were astonished, for Emu had never before travelled to Upper Middle Earth, and the rumour had gone round that he didn’t like to travel actually.
‘But most pressing on my to-do list,’ said Emu, ‘I’m going to reroute this ocean so that it doesn’t lead directly to Asdar for any invading army that feels like floating here on those tree things that you made in Upper Middle Earth – and they looked so massive and heavy, too. Never crossed my mind that they’d be able to float in water.’
The valpac coughed, and mumbled something in reply here that was neither particularly audible nor supposed to be.
And Rhengo spoke up, saying, ‘If you reroute the ocean such that it no longer leads here, where will it lead?’
‘Oh,’ said Emu, airily. ‘I’ll link it through an interdimensional gateway, and it’ll turn up somewhere or other.’
13 Capital Sea. Sorry.
14 Or ‘gigant’ for even shorter.
15 Sorry. This should be C, obviously.
Of The Great Battle of Taur-en-Ferno and the Disembodifying of Sharon
For many generations, Elf and Man had lived in peace in Upper Middle Earth. But now Sharon the Evil rose from the ashes of Moregothic’s fall. With the great power of the Sellmi of Emu, he was restored in evil; and he was able to use the immense power of the artefact to create for himself an army of wicked creatures: Baldtrogs, Giants, Scalyticks, I-Spiders with Maia-lidlaiders, Lurkers, Shirkers, Berks, Urks, Orks and Southwogs. And he led this army out from the frozen north to attack the south, and so avenge the death of Moregothic in the blood of Men and Elves.
This great force cut a swathe of destruction up through Illbhavior, and then cut a second swathe back down through Lothlomondwisky. Then they cut half a swathe, well a little over half if I’m being honest, let’s say three-fifths, although it wasn’t precisely that fraction, a shade under, alright if you want the exact number twenty-nine fiftieths of a swathe of destruction up into Blearyland. And they mustered at Taur-en-Ferno.
And Lord Sharon triumphed, ordering his men to sing ‘We Are The Evil Champions’ in mockery of Creator Emu’s well-known predilection for singsongs and all that. But, try as he might, he could not coordinate the voices of half a million evil creatures, such that the song which should have gone
We Are The Evil Champions, My Friend
And We’ll Try our Hardest to Offend
instead sounded like a non-specific waah-wooh ocean of roaring that lurched upwards two tones and a semitone for ‘hardest’ but otherwise bore no relation to any tune known to man or elf. ‘Alright, alright,’ Lord Sharon ordered his horde, ‘that’s enough singing, blimey, what a racket.’ And there was silence for a little space, with a little muttering, but then you’d expect a bit of muttering with a horde of half a million.
And against this fearful foe was assembled the great Army of Light. I mean light in the sense of illumination of course, sunlight and goodness and such, not light as in ‘not heavy’. Some of these soldiers of the Light were very heavy indeed, let me assure you. I don’t, by the way, mean ‘fat’, when I say that. I was going for more a sort of spiritual gravitas, combined with some big swords and, you know, shields and things.
Anyway, not to go off the point.
Emu, Lord of Light, Creator of the Cosmos, arrived at Taur-en-Ferno three hours late, saying, ‘Sorry, sorry, something popped up at the last minute, what’s going on here then?’
Now the valpac, Lords of Light, Lieutenants of Emu, were Gion, Poll, Gorge and Thingo; and they had assembled together a great army of the Good: Elves, Men, Dwarfs and some others whose names and addresses have been withheld at their own request. And this army occupied the higher ground at Taur-en-Ferno, arrayed in great ranks of gleaming golden armour and silver spears. And their helms shone in the light, and the sunlight glistened off their helmets, which as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you are different things to helms, common mistake that, people always getting them confused. And their greaves were bronze. On their . . . um, legs, I think it is, that’s where greaves go. Shins, I think. Or perhaps they’re more sort of a codpiece. Anyway, anyway, that’s not the important thing: the important thing is that their armour was all very neat and lovely, shiny in the sunshine, and there was lots and lots of it, armour, I mean, because there were just loads of soldiers – thousands and thousands, all properly arranged in neat ranks. As opposed to Sharon’s army of evil beings, which was more like a rabble, people milling around, talking amongst themselves whilst their officers addressed them, and otherwise being disorderly. Really, behaving shockingly. Speaking with their mouths full. Scratching themselves. I’m sure you get the picture.
And Lord Poll, the valpac, knelt before Emu, Creator of the Cosmos, and said, ‘Sire, we were awaiting your coming to lead our mighty army against the forces of Darkness, here arrayed before us, that ye may smite them utterly from Upper Middle Earth.’
And Emu did say, ‘Right, lead the mighty army, I see. Well, that’s all very fine and dandy and, you know, excellent, but the thing is I’m more involved in the music line of things. Less army ordering-about, and more, you know, singing and such.’
And Lord Poll said, ‘But sire, your loyal men await your omnipotence to vanquish evil utterly and trample it before you.’
And Emu said, ‘I could do that, yes, could do that, of course. But, the thing is, well, to put it at its simplest, I’m a lover, not a fighter. And, besides, you’re doing such a good job here that I think I’ll
just – just—’ And mighty Emu did smile weakly, and look over his own ineffable shoulder at the lands of Westersupanesse from whence he had come as if he had just remembered something he had left there that he really needed to pop back for, right this minute.
And Lord Poll said, ‘But Lord, the army assembled by Evil Sharon is great, and mighty in its malignancy, and moreover has something of a hooligan look about it, like it’s all about to kick off.’
And Emu said, ‘Tell you what, tell you what, I’ll have a quick – you know, do a quick – parley thingumy, with Sharon. OK?’
And Emu, Master of Creation, did fly through the air over the host, taking the form of a hippogriff, and did reveal himself as Lord of Light on a patch of turf where Sharon happened to be standing.
And Sharon mocked the Lord of All. ‘Ha!’ he called, ‘look who it isn’t.’ And his crack-o-doom troops, the personal bodyguard of fang-toothed Wargs, echoed, ‘Har-har-har!’, which as you know I’m sure is the more withering and dismissive form of the more conventional ‘ha-ha-ha’. And Sharon mocked and jibed, saying ‘Well upon my soul if it isn’t the Lord of Creation. How nice of you to pop by. How well you’re looking. Did you lose weight?’ and other words of a similarly insincere and ironical nature.
And the fang-toothed Wargs said, ‘Har-har, good one, my Lord.’
And Emu, Prince of Creation, did say, ‘I’m warning you, your army is going to get a pret-ty blood-y nose if you insist on, you know, all the fighting and such.’