The Mammoth Book of New Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  Even I, old hand as I am, haven’t quite bargained for the procession of Giant Monstrosities that come filing out of the Visitors’ Entrance. When Lizard Bayliss, Engelbrecht’s pessimistic manager, catches sight of them he tries to beat it back to the Changing Room, but the crush of characters is too thick.

  It’s our kick-off. It takes a bit of doing to sort us all out, but by the next full moon de Mille has us well in hand. I’ve been given a cosy little assignment, narking to the Central Captain’s Committee on the Wing Forwards, so I take Engelbrecht under my wing and pilot him.

  The whistle blows and Melchisedek takes the kick. Nebuchadnezzar follows up and gathers it. He passes to Nero, Nero to Attila, Attila to the Venerable Bede, the Venerable Bede to Ethelred the Unready, Who knocks on into a crater. De Mille screams for a scrum. Engelbrecht tries to climb down into the thick of it. “You keep out of that,” I tell him. “The ideal! A Dwarf trying to scrum down between Henry VIII and Cetewayo. You’d get pulped.”

  De Mille rolls the ball down an inclined plane right into the centre of the great heaving mass. Anak and Harold Hardrada, our hookers, get their toes round it. But our frail human forwards are too light for those great Martian thugs. We can’t possibly hold them. Our only hope is to heel out quickly before they can crush us against the sides of the crater. It doesn’t take Charlie Marx, our scrum-half, long to twig this, and as we peer down over the lip we can hear his harsh bark of “Heel! You teufels! Heel in the name of History!” And heel they do, but only just in time. As Charlie Marx gathers the ovoid from Bismarck’s boot, our front line breaks and the Martian phalanx comes crashing through. Marx slings it back to Fred Engels, his fly-half. Then he’s down in a sea of boots and backsides. “You’ve got to hand it to old Charlie,” says Tommy Prenderghast, “he may be nasty tempered but he’s the nippiest scrum-half in this world or the next. Well, we’d better be heading for Goal. Can I give you chums a lift?”

  But Fred Engels has seen it coming and had time to get his life-line organised. He passes it up to Gladstone who makes a present of it to Blondin. And before you can say “I told you so,” Blondin’s away out on his tightrope with the Giant Ball at his feet. It’s a great moment, one of the greatest in the history of the game. The field is in a frenzy and the Band can think of no more fitting token than to strike up the Second Movement of the Supersonic Symphony, which brings down the other half of the stand.

  We’re out of the crater but still on the defensive. Unfortunately, it’s not been possible to fix Blondin’s tight-rope to a strategic point, and he has to find touch. Still, we recover a good bit of ground, and it’s a lovely run of Blondin’s, especially when you remember that for the last five miles he’s being worried by a pack of pterodactyls loosed from a string-bag by a Martian bobby-soxer.

  At the line-out it’s our ball, but it falls into bad hands. Stavisky catches it and passes it to Bottomley, Bottomley to Jabez Balfour, Jabez Balfour to Charlie Peace, and Charlie Peace to Jonathan Wild, losing ground all the way. Jonathan Wild slings a long one to Judas Iscariot, who sells the pass to the Martian Threequarter line, and they get into their stride. For a surrealist football-fan, no doubt it’s a lovely sight to see this far-flung line of giants racing across the jet-black surface of the Moon with the Ball flashing from one wing to the other and back again. For us, who’re supposed to stop them, it’s slightly different. I’m too busy taking notes of shirkers’ names myself, but Engelbrecht insists on showing what he’s made of. With a grunt of defiance he hurls himself through the air and catches hold of a Martian Three Q’s bootlace. He hangs on like grim death, taking fearful punishment as he’s dragged over the lava.

  There’s nothing to stop them now except Salvador Dali, our Full Back. Some of us doubt the wisdom of our skipper’s choice of such an avant-garde type for such a die-hard position. But we’ve got to hand it to old Salvador. He tries Everything. As a last attempt to stop them he even camouflages the Goal Posts as a Giant Gallows with some very tasty objects from his studio strung up from the cross-bar. Neither – though some of his less charitable team-mates say this is because he’s got stuck in the chest of drawers with which he’s been protecting his person – does he flinch from the ultimate sacrifice of a flying tackle. Useless, of course. A brief splintering crash. Then the Martian Three Q touches down between the goal posts.

  As we all crowd together in the Goal Mouth there’s a multitude of doleful faces such as never was seen since the Last Trump. I’ve just handed in my list when Charlie Wapentake jogs my arm and points to the Id and Chippy de Zoete chatting to Pierpoint, the Public Executioner. We know what that means. Somebody’s going to swing for it.

  The Martians convert and we migrate back to midfield. Soon after the kickoff Vivekananda finds touch. But our luck’s out. At the line-out Zerubabel tips it back to Origen, but Origen passes to Julian the Apostate, who starts running back. Luther and John Huss trip him up and start a plucky dribble. They’re joined by Calvin who picks up and passes to Wesley. For a glorious moment it looks as if we’re going to get somewhere. Wesley jinks like a rabbit, sells the dummy to three enemy forwards. But he hasn’t got the legs. He passes, and one of the Plymouth Brothers knocks on. This time the enemy forwards get the ball and wheel with it. Charlie Marx empties his pistol again and again into the back row of our scrum in an attempt to stop the rot.

  10 – nil, and the game’s only in its first light-year. Some poets start a passing movement. Chatterton passes to Keats, Keats to Shelley, Shelley to Byron, Byron to Wilde, who muffs it. There’s a lot of tittering in the loose. The Martians get it back to their Three Q’s, and there’s no stopping them. They run through us like a dose of salts, cock snooks at the Easter Island statues which Dali has brought up to guard the Goal Mouth, and score again.

  After that it’s a procession and they score as they please. Full backs are tried by the dozen only to have rings made round them.

  At half-time the score is astronomical, and Wing-forwards are being shot in batches in the Changing Room.

  Towards the end of the Interval, Engelbrecht, Lizard Bayliss, his manager, and I, are reclining in our bivouac, toasting our toes at the core of a crater, when Charlie Marx and Fred Engels limp past. “There’s only one way, knabe,” we hear Charlie say. “We must give them the old Trojan horse.” “All very well,” says Fred, “but there’s not much room in there.” “Room for a little ’un,” says Charlie. His eye lights on Engelbrecht. “How about it, junge?” he says, raising an eyebrow. “Care to volunteer for an interesting mission in History’s service?” And before we can remonstrate he marches off to the Changing Room.

  We come out for the second half dizzy and defeatist. But the moment they kick off it’s clear that a change has come over the game. The Ball is taking a hand. It won’t roll right for the Martians nohow. They muff pass after pass and in the scrum our hookers get it every time. It’s as if it’s grown a little pair of legs of its own. Soon comes our first try. Charlie gathers it clean as a whistle and passes to Fred, who punts for the open field. Stenka Razin and his band trap it and take it on with their feet. There’s a fierce loose scrummage in a crater, but Guy Fawkes has got a map of the Underground. The Ball seems to beckon him on. They surface just in front of the Goal, and Jack Cade slips over for a touch-down. Goliath, the new full back, takes the kick. The Ball grazes the cross bar, but instead of bouncing off it seems to hang there in the air. Then it drops over.

  The Score is 5555–5. Things are looking up. The Id commutes the sentences of one in ten of the doomed Wing Forwards to Life in the Scrum. Soon after the kick, Hannibal gets it and blunders right through with his footballing elephants. Goliath converts.

  All that epoch the same tactics are repeated. We’re using our feet like dancing masters. It’s 5555–5550 now. Not long to go. Some unlikely characters have scored, even Heliogabalus, Bishop Berkley, and Aubrey Beardsley.

  De Mille is looking at his travelling clock. He’s lifting the whistle to his lips with both hands
. Sorrowfully, Lizard Bayliss folds up the special edition of the Fly-Paper with Engelbrecht’s Obituary notice and wipes away a tear. “If only he could have lived to see this,” he says.

  Charlie Marx is giving the forwards their final pep-talk. “A Spectre is haunting Football!” I hear him bark. “The time has come to convert the Feet of History into the History of Feet! Forwards of the World! Pack Tight! You have nothing to lose but your Shins!”

  The Martians try hard to find touch with a terrific root, but the Ball drops back into play. There follows one of the sweetest pieces of combination in History. Lecky passes to Gibbon, Gibbon to Tacitus, Tacitus to Josephus. Josephus slings a long pass to Isaiah, who punts ahead. Samuel catches it and passes to Lot, Lot to Noah, who gives it to Cain. Cain tries to keep it but it slips sideways out of his fingers. Abel dribbles it over the line and Adam falls flat on it.

  Goliath has strained a tendon and the Id orders Dali out of the Morgue to take the kick. He asks me to place for him.

  As he adjusts the angle to his liking I hear Engelbrecht’s voice speaking to me from inside the Ball. “What’s the score, chum?” it says. “I’ve rather lost count.”

  That night, at a little private ceremony in the Changing Room, attended only by Charlie Marx, Arnold of Rugby, and the Politbureau of the Selection Committee, Engelbrecht receives the highest award of Global Football, the crypto-Cap.

  As soon as the ceremony is over he’s smuggled out of the Changing Room in a tiny coffin.

  FOWL PLAY

  Steve Redwood

  When I woke up in a cage that, judging from the smell, might have just come from a poultry farm, my mind was at first completely blank. I knew I had never before been in this room, illuminated by hundreds of candles, and with walls decorated with unusual and somehow sinister-looking symbols.

  I didn’t recognize the woman staring in through the bars, or the blindfolded man sitting beside her, with an expression of malevolent triumph on what I could see of his face. I had a feeling, though, that I might have seen them both before, perhaps even recently.

  Could the woman be my wife? Had I perhaps refused to do the washing up? Or performed my conjugal duties too perfunctorily? I didn’t want to ask her directly because, if she were my wife, she would surely be offended that I wasn’t aware of the fact, and might nag me: a mere cage is no bar to a woman’s tongue.

  Perplexed, I scratched my cheek. As I did so, I felt a deep curved scar gouged into it, and I noticed that my lips were terribly hard and swollen. So bad had been the wound that some skin was still hanging loose.

  Ah, this was a clue to my identity! The scar pleased me. It showed I had lived dangerously. I felt a tremor of excitement. Perhaps I had fought a duel. Could I conceivably be Robin’ Darktree, the notorious unforgiving highwayman? Or Spermicidal Whiskers, the infamous pirate whose one-eyed glare could unman the most virile enemy? Perhaps I had fought many duels, in which, due to my speed and uncanny dexterity, I had never so much as received a scratch. Except for that one occasion, I suddenly seemed to remember quite clearly, when I had been challenged by an enigmatic, deadly, and mercilessly sensuous woman – much like Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Mask of Zorro – because of some classically tragic misunderstanding. My code of honour, of course, wouldn’t allow me to raise my sword against a poor defenceless woman.

  “Never,” I had declaimed, my voice liberally sprinkled with nobility, “will I raise my sword against a poor defenceless woman!”

  “Villain!” cried the feisty daughter of Don Diego de la Vega, “hiding behind a fictitious code of honour when what is really holding you back is my deliriously decadent décolletage and the flashing-dragonfly-wing flimsiness of my attire which, in this rather pretty clearing in the forest coming down to the sea, in the early morning light, with the frost glinting on the bark of phantasmal beech trees like a poignant memory, and the sun straining to get round the trees in order to caress me with its lascivious rays, barely hides my maddeningly provocative curves from your marvelling eyes! En garde!”

  Yes, it was chivalry which had stopped me defending myself when she had lunged with her delicate rapier.

  Or had that sun deliberately got into my eyes?

  A sudden wild idea brushed me, like Kandinsky having an afterthought: there was something about that woman sitting in front of me, watching me from behind those dark glasses, something about her stance and fulminating figure . . . Could she be the same one who had given me my scar? Could she be Elena de la Vega herself? Had her heart been won by the way I had stood there, my grey eyes calm and ironic, ignoring the blood gushing from my left cheek?

  But immediately that memory was submerged by another.

  I was actually an astronaut! Captain Pilchard Stopdrooling. Yes, now it all came back to me. My God, that had been a tough life! Defending Earth from the scum of the universe is not all quips, noises in a vacuum, and strange hair styles. I remembered those sadistic bastards Kuiper and van Allen giving our ship a damn good thrashing; catching a hacking cough in the Oort Cloud and then falling into a coma; getting slimy diseases in worm holes; developing suppurating accretion discs; suffering from an excess of trapped solar wind.

  But, on the other hand, the things we had seen! Pulsars, quasars, binaries, gas giants, blue giants, red giants, red dwarfs, yellow dwarfs, white or “degenerate” dwarfs . . .

  I felt a flush of fear! Of all the degenerate dwarfs, Engelbrecht had been the worst. There was so much bad blood between us that people slipped and slid in it if they came near. A sinister squat pugnacious interstellar assassin who had no choice but to keep his head low and his ear close to the ground, a real heavy who came from a dwarf star with a ridiculously eccentric orbit which had rubbed off on him, and who had vowed never to be eclipsed by lesser luminaries. He’d had to change his somewhat right-wing politics after an acute red shift in his adopted star system. His first exploit had been to capture and cork a Betelgeusian ghost, which had greatly aided spectral classification. He’d just returned cock-a-hoop with one of the rings of Saturn, but the lack of oxygen there hadn’t gone to his head, and, drunk on sidereal time and spiritual vacuum, he told tall stories and boasted that there was nothing he couldn’t do. So he had been challenged to bring back a mythological creature, so that it could be stuffed and put in the Sages Hall of the Surrealist Assassins Club in Smallsphere, his home planet.

  But then that memory was replaced by another. No, I must have been confused. At last I realized who I really was: Squeeze Thews, the new Hemingway, the international sportsman and celebrated breaker of records, wind, and hearts, with a ransom on my rakish testicles that increased with every balcony successfully and swashbucklingly scaled. I deliberately sported a rum-hither look to intrigue and intoxicate the maidens. I had melancholy muscles and terminally romantic toes and tendencies. Ladies nipped at my lip, and napped on my lap, and complied when I implied. Other adventurers cried out, “Kiss my steel!”, but they weren’t naked. I preferred to miss meals and steal kisses. I climbed trees and had epic conker fights with Baron Cosimo while Calvino wasn’t looking. I dived and goggled at mermaids as they passed by with the fluidity of elusive dreams, and pursued them with pumping thighs and frantic flippers. I hunted down universally infamous villains and, now and then, wrestled leap years to the ground. For relaxation, I challenged disabled snails to races, or tramped mountain ranges looking for lost valleys and mythologies, and fairies shyly embracing inside four-leafed clovers or snuggling up in old boots. I nibbled nuts gingerly where the condor flies, and sipped carajillo, and curried favour with spicy South American ladies.

  Yes, yes, and I now remembered I had a half-brother, Hymen Simon, who used music and poetry and romantic tales where I used muscle and endurance. His weapons were languorous lutes and impetuous mandolins. He minstrelled his way into women’s hearts and parts with a broken harp dropped by a weeping Fallen Angel. He ardently pursued women round the world, a tireless retiarius seeking to ensnare them with nets woven from the fervid fibr
es of his poetic soul, hoping to bring them down with lassos of whirling words and lariats of lush swirling compliments! He promised nights of passion in Vienna, Sienna, Rome, Paris, Bangkok, Mecca . . . But one night he was arrested in Rio, and accused of being a Troublesome Troubadour. They cunningly paraded Copacabana beauties in front of him, and when his frumious tongue was hanging out far enough, snipped it off, snicker-snack, hoping to turn his soaring cynghanedd metres into plodding feet of iambic clay. They used the gold to make rings, one of which now adorns the delicately shy finger of a sleeping princess. But the words and music still gushed relentlessly out of his eyes, so they had to pluck them too, notes, motes and all. They left him writhing on the ground, in pain as they thought, but a passing entomologist pointed out that the man’s seemingly random movements suspiciously resembled a bee’s courtship dance. He was therefore further charged with “Apiarian Aping Without Due Authority”, and had his legs broken. He now had neither honeyed words, glances, or tics.

  As I shuddered at the thought of those twitching limbs, I was suddenly jerked back to the present. The blindfolded man moved the malevolent triumph from his face to his tongue.

  “Ah, Mr Isk,” he said, “I suppose you’re wondering what’s happening. People who find themselves in cages at the beginning of stories often do that. Well, you are the victim of a fiendishly convoluted plot hatched up by myself and a wench I was generous enough to tumble a long time ago, Catherine Meaty-Zones here, now a powerful witch, whom you mistook for a lady of similar name and bosom. You’re in a cage because you’ve been turned into – forgive me, I really don’t know how to break this gently – a chicken, destined to be my dinner for the next few days. Spermicidal Whiskers, Pilchard Stopdrooling, Squeeze Thews, Engelbrecht the Degenerate, and so on, are all characters I’ve invented. I poured the stories into your ear while you were drunk, so that you would forget who you really were, and therefore be unable to resist a Transformation Spell. Still, they have also helped you to forget your predicament for a few hours: dreams to help you pass the time; it’s quite an Aboriginal idea, you must admit.”