The Parodies Collection

by Adam Roberts

  The Dragon of the North took it in its talons, and the four Dragons flew away.

  Stormclouds followed their tails, and spring rain fell on Taur-ea-dorpants, extinguishing the fires. And soon grasses grew in the scorched circle at the very heart of the forest, and out of the fertile ash came poppies and orange windflowers; but no trees ever grew in that space again.

  The spell was completed; and Sharon, in his tower of Cirith Connoli, felt a great surge of strength flow through his being. And he exulted.

  ‘The charm is complete!’ he called. ‘I am armed with total power, for the Dragons have promised me that I shall be lord over all Elves and Men, for as long as Elves and Men exist; and I am invulnerable to harm; and I am immortal; and I shall be victorious in any battle. This magic has no chink or loophole, but by the force of inevitability I shall dominate the whole of Upper Middle Earth. None shall escape.’

  And he gathered together his army, and prepared to march north over the River Raver and to subdue all the peoples of Upper Middle Earth.

  Of the Sense of Foreboding Experienced by Men and Elves

  Men and Elves watched with foreboding as the season curdled, and spring seemed to retreat. As the power passed from the Dragons to Sharon, so the sky grew bone pale, and a bleak wind came searching from the north, withering the green wheat and turning the white blossom to ice on the trees.

  And King Prorn III, Lord of Men, called his advisers about him. ‘Tell me why it is,’ he asked them, ‘that the season reverses? The land has become inhospitable; winter succeeds spring; bears and wolves prowl the woodlands, and only yesterday I slipped on some ice on my bathroom floor and barked my shin, very painful, that.’

  And the royal advisers could not explain it, except that it boded ill for the lands of Men. ‘Surely,’ they said, ‘Sharon is mustering forces, and war is coming.’

  ‘Then,’ said Prorn, ‘let it come. Though the land grows cold, yet the furnaces of our armourers will stay hot enough.’

  ‘Sire,’ said the King’s adviser, ‘let us send a messenger to the Elves of Taur-ea-dorpants; for if war comes, there should be alliance between our two peoples.’

  But the King grew angry at this counsel. ‘Elves? Never! I have sworn a great oath never again to have dealings with the Elves. Did not an elvish witch steal away my youngest son? Did not Queen Eve herself treat him as a criminal, threaten him with death, and cast him into the wilderness – where he wandered crippled in body and struck down by grief in his mind, even unto his lonely death?’ For Prorn, not knowing the true fate of his son, believed this to be the truth of things. ‘It was a black day for Men when Belend fell in love with that elvish sorceress, and it is better if Elf and Man keep themselves well apart.’

  ‘But if war comes . . .’

  ‘If Sharon invades,’ roared Prorn, ‘we shall meet him in battle and defeat him! We have fought him many times before, and always we have prevailed. The blood that my heart pumps is the blood of a noble line, for I am descended directly from Rokett the Man, who fought Moregothic himself in the wastelands of the north! And if the Elves trouble us, then we shall fight them too.’

  And Prorn ordered granaries stocked with all available food, and instituted rations for all his people. And he also decreed that all Men with the skill to work metal should aid the armourers; and the noise of hammer chiming on anvil rang out like bells across Mannish lands. Swords were crafted, and also spears; shields were fashioned from oak and covered with tanned leather. Parchment was painted with various public messages, including Careless Ork-Talk Costs Lives and Dig (in the Chest of your Enemy with a Spear) For Victory. The land was busy with preparation for war.

  In the elvish kingdoms of central Upper Middle Earth, however, the poisoning of the seasons was met with less incomprehension. For Elves, wise in the ways of nature and skilled at interpreting the flight of birds, knew that Sharon had upset the natural balance with some great spell. And they were filled with terrible foreboding.

  Worse, the elvish kingdom was afflicted by the wasting away of Queen Eve. Never before had an Elf fallen sick in this manner, and Elves had previously believed that such illness was the curse only of the mortal. Yet did she sicken, and her coughing shook her like a bough troubled by the winds, and with every cough there came blood into her mouth. Eleven years she sickened. Some said that this was a punishment for having mutilated her own daughter; and some said that it was part of the malign magic that Sharon worked to turn the season back from spring to winter, but none knew how to cure her.

  And after long suffering, Queen Eve died, the first Elf to die of anything other than wounds in battle. And though many thought her cruel, yet the Elves were stricken with grief.

  None knew how to go on; for elfkind had always been ruled by the line of Bleary, but now the only descendant of that line of royal rank was the simulacrum of Lüthwoman. And some said, ‘We must crown her Queen, for all that her head has been emptied by grief and madness’; and others said, ‘She can never be queen, for she lacks all will, thought or word, and is nothing but an eidolon; and how could she reign?’

  And meanwhile the two other great tribes of Elves, the Nodiholdor and the Man-Wëers, disputed amongst themselves what to do. Elsqare was one of the Nodiholdor, and he said: ‘Can you not read the signs in the natural world? War is coming, and we must meet war head on. Now is not a time for internal fighting between elf and elf; but we must unite and defeat the common enemy.’

  The leading Elf of the Man-Wëers was Túrin Againdikwittingdn, and his counsel was otherwise. ‘I say the Queen must be crowned, for Fate has provided us with her at this time. And if her reign is a silent one, and if she does not command us into battle, then this too is fated. Therefore, if Sharon comes, we should retreat, and let the Men confront him; go north, go west, and cede the land to him.’

  ‘Coward!’ called Elsqare in rage.

  ‘Rather caution, which you call cowardice,’ said Túrin, raging too after his fashion, ‘than the reckless wildness of the Nodiholdorim, which would bring destruction upon all elfkind.’

  And so a great division opened up in the heart of the elvish people. And Túrin declared that the eidolon of Lüthwoman was Queen, and readied his followers to leave that land; and Elsqare commanded his followers to prepare for war, and polish their very attractively designed armour, and make sure to clear all the dirt and grime from the lines of swirly engraving on the swords, and so on.

  Of the Breaking of the Storm

  Sharon bred new Orks from the mud of Moider!, and fashioned a greater army than any had yet seen. And he pondered long how to over-ruin the whole of Upper Middle Earth, and finally he was ready.

  In form he was a gigantic eyeball, so ungainly that it was quite a palaver moving him, actually; for this form was weighed down with the curse of Emu that had put him in this form. Yet he knew the Dragons’ magic guaranteed him victory in battle only if he himself were present. And so he planned and prepared for twelve months: and this period was the first winter year, for all through its length the season remained unchanged, and frost was in the ground.

  At the end of this year he used the Thing™, and his newfound Dragon power, to spawn a brood of eyeballicules. At the back of his eyeball-body was a spot to which would have been attached, had this been a regular eyeball in a regular body, the optic nerve; and with magic Sharon opened this as an orifice, and from it emerged a great stream of balls, some large as footballs, some small as insect eggs, and all sizes in between. A thousand flew out, and a thousand more, and every one was an eyeball of Sharon, through which he could see the world and influence its course. And these balls rolled about the floor in all directions, piled high. And Ork guards, running around in terror as they often did, did slip upon them, for they were roll-y under their feet as myriad marbles; and they did fall hard upon their snouts with cries of ‘U-hurg!’ and a clattering sound.

  And the eyeball-spawn of Sharon spilled from the casements, and ran down the staircase, and many of them rol
led clean away from the tower and were carried away by streams or picked up by birds. But birds that ate them could not digest them, for the Dragons’ magic made Sharon invulnerable to harm, and they died and their bodies rotted where they fell.

  So it was that Sharon’s eyes were disseminated throughout Upper Middle Earth, and many of them remain unaccounted for even today. Many ended up being mistaken for marbles by eager marblecollecting children – a terrible mistake to make, for though they somewhat resembled marbles, and grew glassier and harder over the ages, nevertheless they were distillations of Evil; and anyone who played marbles with them would be sure to lose. Lose, I say! With the terrible shame and despair that attends the loss of a game of marbles! Evil! Woe! Beware!

  And I say to marbles-players: you have been warned.

  This magical feat exhausted Sharon, and he slept for another twelve months. But he awoke, when eventually he did, to a new sense of the world around him, and a new power.

  Sharon made his final preparations for war and conquest. Because no living horse could bear to carry Sharon, he ordered his Orks to slay ten stallions, and after death they stitched them together, and reanimated them to create a single hideous frankenstallion. And this was the terrible steed of Sharon, the big-mouthed horse of Pan-tomby – for upon this dark large-toothed steed he desired to make tombs for all, and furthermore all his constituent parts had come from the tomb, so therefore did Pan-tomby become the name of his steed. And terrible was the gnashing and chewing and swallowing that attended this steed. And if you think ordinary horse flatulence is an unpleasant thing, you should have had a whiff of what came out of this undead quadruped. And, obviously, when I say ‘you should have had a whiff’ I mean ‘you should count yourself lucky that you never had a whiff’. Two words: desolate odours. Enough said.

  Sharon took one of his eyeball-sized eyeballs, which is to say a conventional-sized eyeball, and he clothed it in a cloak, and charmed a mailed glove to hold the rein. And above his non-existent head he crowned himself with the golden crown of Supper’s Ready, for he planned to devour the whole world. And he wore the Thing™ around his non-existent neck.

  So Sharon the Evil rode from the tower of Cirith Connoli at the head of a mighty Army of Evil, to claim possession of all of Upper Middle Earth.

  The first people of Blearyland to know of the coming of Sharon were the fishermen who dwelt on the western coast. For they fished, winter or summer, and where crops failed and fruit did not grow, Men and Elves both had traded with the fishermen. So they were doing alright, financially, thanks for asking. They got by. They were comfortable, I suppose you’d say. Actually, it’s not very polite to probe into their fiscal affairs, so perhaps we’ll leave that for now, if you don’t mind.

  One day a certain fisherman, called Wetman, was fishing in the dark mid-sea, alone in his coiled hull, when a huge-headed sea serpent rose from the waters.

  ‘Heed me!’ called this beast, and his breath came over the small ship as a stench of rotting fish, and Wetman saw the glistening roof of the monster’s mouth, and its baleen teeth. He trembled, fearing that his death was come.

  ‘Heed me!’ said the serpent. ‘I am Urd, and I dwell in the deeps of the ocean with my many sinuous kin. But I know this much about the dry land: the dead Men and the dead Elves of the dry land are buried in the earth, and their bodies sink slowly through the sightless ground as clods sink through water, only more slowly. And they pass eventually into underground rivers that though unseen still run, as all rivers do, to the sea. There I and my brood devour the bodies of the dead, for this is our food. Heed me! I bring fell news to the land of Men – I tell you that the age of Men and of Elves is drawing to a close. The Evil Lord has made a deal with the Dragons, and now no Elf or Man can resist him, for he is invulnerable and immortal and cannot be defeated in battle. Many will be slain in the days to come, and I say to you, and to all men, bury your dead, do not burn them in heaps. Because unless they are buried they cannot feed my brood, and if I am not fed then I shall be forced to leave the ocean and to slither across the lands in search of a meal. Heed me!’

  And Wetman, shuddering with fear and cold replied, ‘That’s very interesting, only, um, why are you telling me this?’

  And Urd said, ‘Aren’t you a mighty king amongst mortal Men?’

  And Wetman said, ‘No, I’m just a fisherman.’

  And Urd said, brightly, ‘Sorry! My mistake – crossed wires somewhere, I’m sure. Sorry to have bothered you.’ And he sank beneath the waves.

  When Wetman returned to his harbour home, dazed by this encounter and wondering how to relate it to his fellows, he discovered that the entire town was otherwise occupied. For a monstrous crowd of ocean salamanders, seawolves, marine warlocks and other horrors of the deep had come crowding out of the sea and were attacking the town. They came wet from the sea surge, and their hook-ended swords glistened, but they were strong with slimy muscle and they killed many.

  The survivors fled, and made their way to the court of King Prorn, bringing their terrible tidings with them.

  They were met by Men of the south, who brought terrible tidings of their own. ‘Sire,’ they said. ‘We have dwelt for generations past on the northern bank of the mighty River Raver, and so great is its flood that none might cross it; for the river is too wide to span with a bridge, and its turbulent waters make swimming impossible, and it is treacherous for boats. And for an age Orks have sometimes crossed in little boats, and we have sometimes fought with them, but only a few at a time can cross by this route. But now a dire fate has befallen us.’

  And the King did ask, ‘What?’

  ‘The River has frozen solid as far west as the Bend of E,’ said the Men of the south. ‘For we have had nothing but winter for twenty-four months, without spring or summer to thaw the chill. And now a mighty host of Orks has crossed the ice, and has driven all Men and Elves from the southlands. None have been able to stand against them.’

  At this terrible news, the cry of ‘Sorrow!’ was taken up in the streets of Mantown, and people left their houses and came into the open. ‘Should we fly?’ they said. ‘Gather our belongings and move north?’

  ‘No!’ said the King, standing in his stirrups to address the crowd in the main square, ‘we must not flee, or we will be forever on the run. We shall meet this army of Orks and defeat it in battle!’ And some of his people slipped away to the north with their most precious things in sacks on their backs, for a dread was in their hearts; and others ignored their despair and strapped on their armour.

  News of the advancing army of Orks reached Elfton as well; where the Coward Elves, as they were called, had long been making their preparations for departure. ‘The time has come,’ they said. ‘Why die in pointless battle? By flight we remain immortal.’

  And Elsqare and his elves replied, ‘Take your blank Queen and leave if you will. But is there anywhere to flee? It seems to me that you do nothing but postpone the inevitable end of all things.’

  And Túrin replied, ‘Must you always be so gloomy? Would it kill you to think positively just once?’

  To which Elsqare said, ‘I’m only saying . . .’

  And Túrin continued, ‘You’re a real mug-of-mead-half-empty sort of elf, aren’t you?’

  And Elsqare, rather wounded in his feelings, said stiffly, ‘I like to think of myself as a realist.’

  ‘Pessimist, rather,’ said Túrin.

  ‘At least I’m not a coward,’ snapped Elsqare.

  ‘Oh, you’re wild,’ said Túrin, perhaps speaking ironically, it’s not obvious, but certainly not meaning anything praiseworthy by the word. And Túrin left with his followers and they made their way west. But they encountered a marauding band of sea-monsters and Orks, and doubled back on themselves, trekking across the northern grassplains to Lothlomondwisky.

  The last army of Men, and the last army of Elves, marched out to meet the horde of Orks on the Plain of Crossed Swords. And there they arrayed themselves, on separate sides
of the battlefield. And neither army would so much as talk with the other, because each side blamed the other for the whole Belend and Lüthwoman thing. The Men viewed Lüthwoman as ‘no better than she ought to be’, which phrase the Elves did not quite understand but which they assumed was meant to be insulting. On their side, however, the Elves viewed Belend as a gigolo, a lounger, a chancer, and a seducer who had had his wicked way with the pure daughter of Queen Eve.

  The Men did say ‘Your elvish seductress brought about tragedy and the death of the King’s son.’

  The Elves did say ‘Well if it comes to that – your priapic young man brought about the madness of the Queen’s daughter and the death of the Queen and the ending of the royal line Bleary which stretched to the beginning of time, which trumps your distress I think. Besides, though the King’s son died – well, he was a mortal Man and doomed to die sooner or later. But Queen Eve was an immortal Elf, and did not deserve her fate.’

  The Men did consider this argument, and after much thought did reply, ‘Yah!’. And some of them did display their naked hindquarters to the elvish soldiers, who looked away with expressions of haughty disgust.

  And so there was no prospect of alliance between the armies, even though they faced the same enemy.

  And so it was that the army of Sharon swarmed over the horizon. It was the largest gathering of Orks ever seen under the skies of Upper Middle Earth. It stretched the whole of the horizon from east to west, and its troops poured on and on as if fed by a ceaseless source. Some Orks were albino-white and foul to see, and some were green-skinned and icky, and they had noses, some more than one. But many had only one functioning eye, having torn out the other in honour of Sharon their leader whom they honoured as a god, even though this resulted in them having greatly lessened depth-perception capacities. And they were armoured with heavy iron breastplates, and wore Le Creuset helmets of great weight and solidity.