by Rhys Hughes
“That’s the only one I’m aware of,” confirmed Twistoff.
“But why, boss, why?”
Twistoff stood up, pushing his chair back as he did so. He shuffled off with lowered head, dragging one leg behind him, rubbing his professorial knee as he went, a figure of infinite sadness, not infinite exactly as far too many intricate mathematical paradoxes would arise from that, but deep in the doldrums all the same.
He muttered to himself as he went.
“Clangers aren’t mistakes. They’re creatures. Half mouse, half anteater, half pig. Extraterrestrials. Dwell on a distant planet, a hollow world, even more hollow than our own. Access to the inside is enabled by portholes at the base of meteorite craters. Not steel portholes, but a more exotic metal. Technetium maybe, which is radioactive, but that probably doesn’t bother them. The clangers have been observing our world for aeons. Who knows what they want from us?”
Abortia respectfully plucked at his elbow. “You said something about France!” she whimpered.
Breath plucked his other elbow. “Why, boss?”
“Yes. Why France?”
“We have a right to know!”
Twistoff stopped in his tracks, didn’t react violently to this insolence, merely rolled his clay eyes at the ceiling, focussed them on a point a mile above heaven and declared:
“We’re going to The Big Rumoured Gathering. We have no choice. I don’t have much time left. I know it sounds audacious, but if we infiltrate that festival we can strike a blow for Britain against France such as hasn’t been struck since Waterloo!”
“But once there we’ll be trapped,” cried Breath.
Abortia nodded vigorously.
“We couldn’t escape if we wanted to! Waterloo…The history book on the shelf is always repeating itself.”
“What book?” frowned the golem.
She blushed. “Think it was just a song lyric.”
Twistoff wagged a finger. “Smuggle them in undetected or not at all! I am sorely disappointed. Did you forget what you learned about the art of inserting them into prose?”
“Sorry, Mr Bellow, I’ll try harder.”
The golem wiped hazardous sweat out of his eyes. His horn stump was weeping. Clearly it was a sissy.
“We’re going to France and that’s my last word! Not precisely the last one, because I’m still talking, but I’ve seen the line-up of the festival and it gives us a perfect opportunity to butcher some of the finest and most evil musicians in existence. But it’s more than that. Recently I heard a rumour that République Nutt will be in the vicinity. Can you imagine that! True, I started that rumour myself, but it’s too good an opportunity to miss. This mission will be my swan-song.”
He paused for effect, then added, “Without the swan, because I’m not a fan of fowl, and without the song too, because music is foul, and I’m not a fan, as I just said. But French things will be obliterated and that’s the most crucial thing, don’t you agree?”
They did. Because of fear, fanaticism and stupidity!
Better reasons than most…
* * * * *
Eyeful’s back. Comment allez-vous?
The golem and his friends aren’t the only Francophobes who have ever walked on the surface of the Earth. Not by a long cheese! Plenty of others have come and gone, most dramatically the Nazis. When they invaded the capital in 1940, a patriotic citizen cut my lift cables so that Hitler would have to walk up all my steps to reach the summit. No easy ride for him to my iron peak! But in fact Herr Hitler never even tried to climb to my first level. What a boring dictator!
There are plenty of other tyrants alive in the world right now who are far less indolent and who would jump at the chance to bound up my steps and conquer my top in the name of their own egos, the Russian Tsar, the Belgian King, the President of Canada, to name just three examples, but I’m straying off the point, something I have a tendency to do. Hitler hated me so fiercely that just before his troops were forced to retreat from Paris he ordered the city’s military governor, General Dietrich von Choltitz, to demolish me with explosives.
The General disobeyed that command…
I know that Twistoff Bellow would demolish me if he could. In fact I feel sure he’ll make a token attempt when he passes this way. He’s bound to pass through Paris, as it lies on a straight line—at least for the purposes of this novel—between London and Strasbourg. And even in truth it’s not so far off, certainly within the margin of a reasonable detour. Now clouds are gathering around the crown of my head. They probably want to bring me news of distant places. Seems they have some gossip passed to them by the aurora borealis, who got it from the solar wind, so it must concern a location far in outer space.
While I try to make sense of what they are saying, I’ll let you in on one of my little secrets. I have others, of course. Anyway, I always absorb a lot of knowledge from the people who stand on me decade after decade. I overhear much of what they say. Not just romantic conversations between young lovers, disputes between married couples, banter between friends, but important stuff too. Apart from that, readers accidentally drop books over my side: that has been known. And some of those books land on my girders in inaccessible places and the rains come and wash the words they contain into my very structure.
Into my form, deep into my iron soul…
That’s how I got to know all about Homer and the Trojan War. A copy of The Iliad fell onto a riveted strut, was mushed by drizzle, pattered and pittered to a nourishing intellectual soup that poured into my microscopic cracks. So I read all about Achilles and Hector and Helen. Then I laughed in disbelief. My laughter is a dead ringer for wind-assisted whistling. All that time ago, thousands of years, someone had possessed the foresight to name their son Paris, to name him after a city that wouldn’t be built until the Greek Empire was in ruins!
Talk about plagiarism by anticipation…
Should I be flattered, offended or frightened by this odd coincidence? You don’t think it’s weird? Listen. The equivalent would be if you were to randomly name your child Shugbits or Hiperhips, as perhaps you already have, and thousands of years later a capital city was erected with exactly that name! You’d be alarmed and surprised, don’t deny it, and you would try to discover what connection, if any, existed between your child and the future metropolis with the identical name. I’m the most lovely object in Paris, so who was Paris?
That’s the question that burned my iron mind.
Burned it for long years!
Long in terms of duration, not in terms of physical length. I’m not sure years can be measured that way. But I still don’t know everything, despite my utterly immense learning. Gradually I acquired most of what there is to know about Paris the Man, as opposed to Paris the City, and I’ll recite some of it here for your dubious delectation. Paris was the son of the king of Troy. It was Paris who shot an arrow into the heel of Achilles, making it difficult or impossible for him to win a sprint against a tortoise, as Zeno the philosopher pointed out.
Paris eloped with Helen, who was the queen of Sparta. I bet you knew that already, but I bet you didn’t know that his birth was considered very unlucky for Troy because of a prediction made by a holy man, who urged his parents to kill the baby to save the city from ruin; however the parents didn’t have the heart to do the deed themselves, so they entrusted the task to a local herdsman, who took Paris onto a mountain and left him there to die of exposure. But a bear looked after the child and when the herdsman returned a few days later and saw Paris was alive he took him home in a rucksack to adopt as his own.
That’s right. The name ‘Paris’ means rucksack!
An anticlimax, is it not?
Next time you suggest to your girlfriend or boyfriend that you go for a romantic trip somewhere special, if that’s something you’re ever likely to do—and looking at you now I surmise it isn’t, no offence—why don’t you mention the beautiful city of Rucksack as an option? Report their reaction back to me, please. Tee hee!
Okay, it’s not that funny, but I’m a tower, not a comedian, so bear that in mind. Now I’ve lost the gist of my tale. Ah yes, Paris the man grew to be strong and handsome. It so happened he was invited to be the judge in a beauty contest. Unfortunately for him, the contestants were goddesses. He chose Aphrodite as the winner and so incurred the wrath of the other divine ladies, so more bad luck.
After that he eloped with Helen and the Trojan War started and other things happened and so forth.
Now the clouds are talking to me…
* * * * *
On the planet Antichthon, which orbits the sun at the same distance as the Earth does, but on the far side, so the two worlds can never see each other or even communicate by radio waves, in the Duchy of Laxhumbug, a tiny state wedged between Frunce and Jermknee, the Grand Duke himself was listening to his scientific adviser, a man called Vomisa Caasi. The Duke’s name was Lohengrin Smirka.
“Are you sure the sun has cancer again?”
Vomisa Caasi bowed deeply. “I’m afraid so. My instruments confirm it and there seems no hope of the tumour shrivelling up, but there’s a chance it can detach itself and become a planet on its own. The first time the sun was ill we could afford to send afrits—fire genies—to perform the crucial surgery that saved its life, but now our coffers are exhausted and we must sit back and merely observe.”
Lohengrin Smirka nodded and sighed.
“Why are people always nodding and sighing in this novel,” he asked with a pout, “and pouting too?”
“I don’t know,” confessed Vomisa Caasi.
“No matter. More important than all that is my memory of seeing the removed tumour floating free of the sun and cooling into a world that we call Htrae or sometimes Earth.”
“I never call it Earth,” protested the scientist.
“Neither do I,” admitted Lohengrin, “but that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to really get at is that it was a marvellous sight! I recall that we were both very excited and that you wondered if life similar to ours might one day evolve on its surface.”
“That’s true, I did,” reluctantly conceded Vomisa.
“Full of ideas, you were.”
“I was. And still am.”
“In fact,” continued Lohengrin Smirka, leaning forward on a rocking chair that wasn’t quite a throne, “I seem to remember that you even began speculating that life might already exist there, that through some trick of spacetime the denizens of Htrae would perceive our own planet to be the one that formed from the detached tumour, and that they would consider themselves to be responsible for training the afrits for the operation and sending them into space.”
“I was drunk at the time,” mumbled Vomisa.
“No, you were sober!”
“Drunk on enthusiasm, I mean!”
Lohengrin Smirka waved an imperious hand. “No use trying to get out of it now. I’m replaying the scene in my mind and it’s precisely the way I said it was. But why would you suggest something so weird, so unlikely, so wasteful, in such a short subchapter of a much longer work? I’m rather troubled by the ramifications.”
Vomisa Caasi pointed and cried, “Look!”
“What is it? What’s there?”
“A clanger! In the corner! It scuttled into a hole in that wall. There are clangers in the palace! Help!”
The Duke was impressed. “Nice distraction!”
“The old ones are the best…”
* * * * *
Bonjour! That was the item of gossip the clouds told me. I don’t believe a single word of it. I don’t even believe they got the story from the aurora borealis, who got it from the solar wind. I know the kinds of stories told by those phenomena and they’re all dirty. No, it was a pointless anecdote or maybe it was an in-joke, a reference to another book by the same author set on a planet that’s Earth’s mirror image, a sort of promotional passage. If that’s the case, I think he’s a creep and bound to get his readers annoyed soon, if they aren’t already.
There’s a commotion down below. I conclude that Twistoff Bellow’s retinue has reached me already.
Yes it’s him. He’s frothing. I predict a riot.
I suppose I serve as a symbol of everything he hates the most, and not just hates but admires too—which must make it even more unbearable for him. When he looks at the Eiffel Tower he also sees a baguette, a bottle of fine wine, a sexy girl, three things invented and perfected in France. I am the sclerosis of his odium.
At least I think that’s what I might be…
I’ve been keeping a close watch on him and I know exactly what he’s been up to since the lecture with the trickery expert. He left London that same afternoon, as he said he would, and persuaded his colleagues to go with him, I don’t know how.
Probably with threats of extreme violence!
He also coerced the entire human staff, every secretary, boffin, clerk, chef and security guard, of the Applied Eschatology Agency into making the risky voyage, but first he explored the dusty vaults of the Ethnology department, the place from whence he took his kpinga, until he found a pair of Sumerian war-chariots in perfect condition that he ordered to be hoisted up to ground level.
These chariots became his mode of travel.
Abortia and Breath occupied one; and the golem took another all for himself. His human workers were tethered to the vehicles on long cords and had to do the pulling. Twistoff flicked a long whip over their hides, stripping the clothes from their bodies, bleeding many of them to death even before they had reached Dover. The ferry crossing to Calais was a brief respite for these saps.
The golem had turned fully psychotic!
The Eschatological Crusaders had enough supplies with them to last one month at most. Breath was responsible for bringing the pretzels and the cold mushroom risotto. Abortia’s kitbag contained a bottle of sherry she had purchased in London. Twistoff’s luggage consisted of his kpinga and a keg of virgin olive oil.
By the time they reached Paris their army of slaves had been reduced by a quarter, yet the golem didn’t cease whipping for a moment, and even forced Breath on pain of death to extrude an ectoplasm whip and whip his own men-beasts of burden.
Two figures followed not far behind.
Unknown to the golem, the rumble of ancient chariot wheels directly outside the windows of Buckingham Palace had alerted the Queen to the fact something intriguing was going on. She dressed hurriedly and woke her satiated lover, Scarydung Chinwag, and together they raced out into the street in warmish pursuit.
Like two pied pipers trailing rats…
“But they’re going to France!” objected Scarydung, as this fact slowly sank in. “We must turn back.”
“I feel compelled to go all the way,” snapped the Queen.
“Too dangerous, ma’am!”
“How dangerous exactly? What are the stakes?”
“We might be destroyed!”
“Is that all?” lisped the Queen, adjusting her crown. Then she gripped his arm and cried, “What does it matter if we are destroyed so long all is destroyed along with us?”
“You’re right, your majesty!”
“Shall we laugh for a bit?” asked the Queen.
“Sure, why not.”
“You go first then, pal.”
Scarydung threw back his head and laughed a loud and thrown-back headed laugh. “Ha ha ha! He he he! We’re not going to work through the entire sequence, are we?”
“No need for that,” said the Queen.
“Hi hi hi! Ho ho ho!”
“Hu hu hu!”
* * * * *
Twistoff Bellow dismounted from his chariot directly under the brooding mass of the iron tower and shook his fists up at it. His fury was enormous and his clay muscles were in a constant state of tensing and relaxing, so it seemed he had developed nervous tics all over his body. He clutched one of the girders and shook it.
“You won’t bring it down that way,” said Breath.
“Then I’ll us
e explosives!”
“We didn’t bring any with us,” pointed out Abortia.
Twistoff turned on her with a frown so deep that a landslide started on the gradient and many potential thoughts were obliterated. “My life is an explosion waiting to happen. I am not a golem: I am dynamite! Allow me to demonstrate, you fœtal fool!”
And he ripped off his right ear with his left hand…
“Yuck!” gasped Breath.
“Eyeful an ear, truth for a truth!” the golem said obscurely, as he fixed the severed ear to one of the tower’s legs. “Just like chewing gum, but I need a volunteer to light it.”
Abortia and Breath remained silent.
Twistoff turned to regard the humans harnessed to the chariots and he asked if any of them were smokers. Misunderstanding the reason for this question and assuming they might be treated to free cigarettes, several of the slaves raised their hands.
The golem selected one, freed him with a sweep of his kpinga and the fellow stumbled forward. Yes, he had matches in his pocket, he carried a box everywhere, like most smokers. Twistoff commanded him to touch a flame to the earlobe. The fellow probably believed there was a fuse that would give him a chance to run for cover, but as he went to fulfil the task Twistoff retreated to a reasonable distance. Abortia and Breath took their positions behind his wide back.
A match was struck, a flame came into being, the clay lobe was licked by a tongue of heat. Instantly there was a minor explosion, a sharp crack rather than the dull thud the golem was expecting, and the mangled body of the enforced volunteer was flung past him. At the same time a jagged shard of iron whizzed into Twistoff’s right eye. He fell down, yelped and clawed painfully at his face.
Abortia and Breath were at a loss what to do. They stepped forward to help, looked at each other, stepped back. Luckily the shard wasn’t molten, otherwise the entire golem would have detonated. With a fatalistic groan, he sat up and tried to blink. The shard was now a substitute eye, but one that couldn’t see anything.
And tears would rust it. Best not to blub!
He grumbled through tightly clenched teeth, “Bloody typical! And the tower was barely damaged!”