Captain walsh falls over (fragment)

They weren’t to know it, for true history had long ago been unknown to them, but the attacks that they made on the farmlands to their south were no longer against yet another of the small tribes or statelets that now patchworked the whole island with their small territories.

One of the Brazilian explorers, who later made a big academic reputation with a book about the island, suggested, unoriginally enough, that the attacks were like sticking pins in an elephant. The elephant might ignore one or two pinpricks, perhaps even ten or fifteen of them, but beyond that, at some inexactly defined point, the slightly perforated elephant would respond with massive force.

Actually this analogy was not quite right, what was happening down on the fog shrouded island in the estuary marshes, was that a blasted hacked and long-ago burned organism was, after a lengthy period of comatose recovery, starting to grow again. Like a buried tree stump putting forth new shoots, but only a little bit like that, because it was a matter of people re-inventing their history in the light of a new understanding of themselves. This owed much to previously ignored or forgotten understandings. It was renaissance and reformation.

There wasn’t much sign of either of these when the Lootinluton burned down a barn, having first stolen a horse and cart from it. They had loaded this vehicle with as much food, drink and other transportable plunder as they considered compatible with a swift escape back to the north. They were scarpering in this direction promptly because they wanted to be in the forest before pursuit could be organised. Once concealed by trees they could easily hide and, if necessary shoot up or down any band or farmers’ militia or even border guards sent after them. Out in the open fields they were nervous; a couple of them mounted on the fastest looking of the ponies that they had recently stolen were stationed behind the main group as a rearguard. These two looked back to the south as the dampish thatch of the burning barn caught properly and began sent up a churning black-grey column of smoke. They looked back at the dead man who they had left lying in the mud just outside the barn doors, as if expecting him to get back up and start raising an alarm. He didn’t, he was well dead, but he might as well have done, because the uprolling, swirling column of smoke would now be visible for miles around, proclaiming what the Lootinluton had done as clearly as any bell or siren.. In fact both the rearguards wondered why they had set the barn alight, but neither voiced this thought, since farm and other rural building arson was what one did when was in the Lootinluton. They faintly heard shouts and a bugle or horn blowing, so they trotted off along the route taken by the stolen cart.

That was the pinprick; this is how a message was sent up nerves to a brain.

About forty eight hours after the barn was burnt, a tired man put his hired horse in a stable nearby. He wanted to clean himself, to have a meal and to sleep, but before he could do any of these, someone brought him a message, a summons in fact, that he thought that he had to obey almost immediately. He stuffed a cold sandwich into his face, whilst getting a fresh horse. Then he set off again, almost as quickly as this narrative has described it. The ride that he was now commencing was much easier than the previous one. That had been a hurried rides across country which progressively became more wooded treacherous and dangerous. It had basically been a futile uphill ride and he felt fortunate that he and his companions had returned alive.

Now he was heading down hill and southwards mostly along clearly defined and well maintained tracks. The fresh horse more or less knew the way itself and he could doze off into half sleep as he rode along. In fact he was glad that there was a slight cold edge to the breeze which blew just enough to stop him nodding off totally and falling from the saddle.

As the tired man dozed and daydreamt atop the less tired horse, the countryside through which they passed changed. It became tamer, there were more houses and villages, there were more other people about; and after a few gentle rolling descents they came towards the wide marshy flood plain of a dirty old river. The air began to smell watery and slightly salty. The calls of sparrows, pigeons, thrushes and the like were supplemented by manic gull cries and the sandpiping of small shore fowl. There were willows, streams and ponds about, the road that the man was now riding down got muddier and wetter, the horse splashed and splattered down it into a hamlet of about ten single storey wooden buildings. At the end of this small street one such was slightly better kept than the others which had one glass window. A path beside it led to landing stage where punts and rowing boats of various sizes were moored.

The tired man dismounted and tied the reins of his horse to wooden railings set there for that purpose. Others came and spoke with him, a boat was arranged and a crew for it was found, a fee was paid and now, sitting in it as others rowed it down the creek to the main river, he let himself sleep at last, to the distant almost unregistered sound of a bittern booming in the reedbeds.

The tired man embarked is dreaming, of vast grey granite faces, of vast greygranite sheer slabs of rock and limestone and flint broken into differing patterns as it piles up high to the skigh. Of strange niches in the face of the slabs where some pines have rooted and grown, where wolves might still survive. He does not know the name of what he sees in his dream. He has always only been conscious in relatively moderate flatlands, where wrens flit between bushes and bitterns boom over the necks of their empty beer bottles. What are these high grey things stabbing the sky? His grand uncle once told him something about them, mountains he called them, ravens, choughs and eagles fly about them. Recalcitrants herd goats on their slopes and they have glinting windows too. And these ants, these small insects on the slopes and running in and out of the openings. Where had he seen them? He could smell the full tang of the sugar and dirt mixture used to sweeten the acorn coffee, and the rain through the thatch and the fug of unwashed clothes in grand uncle’s hovel. Back then there was still one solar panel in the village, made in one of wrecked palaces on Hay lane, but like everything else up there, it had eventually got burned and/or looted. The panel, when it was their turn to use it, could power one ancient DVD player and a flickering screen. And when the disc ran (only for about ten minutes max), it showed bomb blasts around some flat roofed and domed buildings in a dry sandy land. “Hah, hah.” His grand uncle had cackled.

The sleeper did not know what it meant, in dreams sometimes people who he had never met before spoke about the urgency and size of Royal Doulton urinals. “And now wash your hands!” a fringe faced, leaf eared bat flew directly at him screaming.

“Watch your hands, mate! Watch your hands!” Someone was really saying, a bearded man, one of the boat’s oarsmen. “Don’t puttem in ther watter, like vat! Crocs an’ big fucking pike rahnd here!” the gnarled boatswain explained. The now awakened sleeper now knew, he could feel the wetness between his fingers, and, though he no more knew what Crocs or pike were than he understood his dream, he took his hand back on board.

There was a slapping splash from the grey water near where the sleeper had, inadvertently, let his hand trail.

“Vicious fuckers!” the wizened inshore mariner opined, “Snap orl yore fingers orf and then stick vere eds aht and arsk for fucking custard! Heh, heh, heh!” he cackled at his own joke, but the wakened passenger did not appreciate it the seasoned salt’s humour as he glimpsed a broad scaly back or side turning just beneath the water where his hand had been. However he was distanced from these real or rumoured perils, as with a series of shouts, the boat was moored to a stinky green and black landing stage.

He was, sort of, helped ashore by the wrinkled but tanned coxswains , i.e.: they attempted to ensure that he slipped or plunged into the brown river, apparently by accident, when it seemed likely to them that he had no intention of tipping them. Although he wore riding boots and spurs, their attempts failed, and he was still standing upright as they rowed the boat away again into the powerful Thames current to collect another fare. He did however, fall over when he was almost at the landward end of the jetty, by then the boat men could not see him fall, and know that there is some justice in the world, because, even if there is, tossers like the almost senile waterboatmen should not know that it exists, otherwise how could they savour the tang of justified grievance, which although, strictly speaking salty and vinegary, was almost the only sweetness possible in their drudge lives.

A landward functionary helped the Captain to his feet, “Are you alright there ..er…Sir?” the guard anxiously asked, (he had been about to say “mate”, but his social stratification radar took in the fact that, although bleary eyed and travel stained, this man carried some middle-status weapons and gear), Furthermore, if one such individual was ferried here and came voluntarily, (as opposed to shackled and under armed guard), someone important must want to see him, he might therefore also, temporarily at least, be important himself.

“I’ve, ..er.. got an appointment, my name is Captain Walsh of Fryent.” The traveller said whilst attempting to brush some riverine slime from his trousers.

“Captain Walsh of Fryent!” the doorman bawled respectively. He was half-turning his head so that the sonic force of his shout was mainly directed almost backwards over his shoulder through the doorway of the vast, creeper festooned edifice behind him.

“Yuuuw!” or ”Wuuuw!”, a vague and indecipherable reply came to the Captain’s ears from inside.

“Go in Sir, report to the reception desk” was the interpretation that was given to Captain Walsh, he complied with it. And entered a shadowy, wetly pungent, cool space. It took several seconds for his tired eyes to adjust to the darkness inside the building and, for someone who seldom went into any building larger than a barn or a village temple, to the strange interior proportions and arrangements of this building. Its doorway was small, Walsh, though only 5ft 10ins tall, had had to bob his head slightly to enter through it: its floor area was probably about 29 yards square, although the shadows in the further corners of the room did not allow the Captain to discern whether it was actually square in shape or even straight edged. For some reason he suspected that it wasn’t and , looking up, he saw it was high, very high, over fifty yards perhaps, with beams of sun light crossing it in places from windows , or cracks and holes in its sides.

“Here, Sir!” a man called and turning towards the voice, the Captain saw a heavy stone or perhaps dark wooden desk in front of him, behind it a hooded Human (?) stood. The Captain walked up to the desk.

“You will be having an interview with the Marlon in the presence of Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth.” The hooded Human sombrely announced.

The captain was awestruck, such an important event, as he had heard, could lead to Death or Glory. He had never himself seen this Marlon, The Four Hundred And Twenty Ninth, and he was just beginning to describe himself as ‘middle-aged’; his father and grand father and two of his uncles and seen him/her/it in earlier incarnations. They had not described their experiences in detail, but they had told him about it when he was a boy; they seemed almost too overwhelmed to recall anything specific about the event, although they stressed its great importance to him. All his ancestors had explained to him the importance of the Marlon to the regeneration of the City. So he was not entirely surprised when his journey to the place where the meeting was to take place was elaborate, partly ritualised and deliberately confusing.

Initially the cowl-clad receptionist picked up a small rectangular carved piece of Portland stone. The Captain could not quite see all the detail of it as it was partly concealed by the functionary’s hand; but it seemed to be carved into a series of small regularly spaced squares, each with several tiny characters scribed into them. The Hooded human took a small wax taper, lit it from a candle that was on his desk and inserted the taper in a hole in the Portland stone so that it burned there.

Then he went (i.e. he ‘said’); “Pee-pee-pee. Peep.Peep-ee, Peep-ee, Peep-ee, ee-Peep.”

Whilst making these micelike noises, he was poking at different squares on the stone with his finger in a sequence that he appeared to have memorised. After a few seconds, he stopped poking the stone, and then exhaled as though he had just completed a complex and finicky task; however his exhalation extinguished the small taper in the stone.

“Fucking vegetarian cyclist!” he swore in a mutter just audible to the Captain, then turning his head to face as far behind him as he could manage, he shouted; “Message Abort!”

From somewhere in the interior darkness another voice replied repeating his words and adding; “Please Resend!”

Hoody relit the taper and went through the finger pointing handjive again and repeated the high-pitched “peeping" squeaky chant, but this time after he finished it, he managed to exhale less violently than before, so that the taper in the stone in his hand stayed alight.
Now he made an even stranger chant:
“Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Derr-derr
Berr-berr, Der….”

“CLICK!” Someone else shouted out of the darkness. It seemed to the Captain that it was the same person who had called out earlier when the hooded human’s taper had been extinguished.
“…..derr” the hooded one briefly continued and then his brain registered the reply.

“CLICK!” he then bawled. “Please send the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, a Captain Walsh of Fryent to audience the Marlon. CLICK!”

“CLICK!” was the reply.

“He’ll be ‘ere in a sec sir” the hooded said, turning to the Captain.

“er,… thanks” Walsh answered not knowing what else to say as the man before him seemed to think that he had done him some kind of personal service, although Walsh was not sure what it was.

At no time during their meeting could Captain Walsh of Fryent see the hooded man’s face so when the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager arrived, the Captain was almost surprised to see that he had a face. It was very, very pale, pointed hairless and angular. This man, who stood about 5ft 8½ins tall wore lensless and often string repaired spectacle frame and had a desiccated dead magpie strapped to the top of his scalp. Small whitish flies flew about him in a cloud. He was clad in yellowing cabbage leaves and stank. He held a flickering, spluttering light on a thin stick in his left hand.

“Foller me, foller the lie!” he said and without waiting to see if Walsh was complying, set off back the way that he had come.

Again the Captain realised, he was about to comply with the instructions and assumptions of others in a situation that he did not fully understand, nonetheless he followed the light held by the Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager away from the daylight, which he wished that he could have looked back at, but being scared of getting lost in the dark recesses of this place, did not.

Deputy Assistant Customer Care Facilitation Operative Manager, led him to a corner, and then, he thought, down a corridor. The DACCFOM was a slinky, (albeit stinky), and fast mover; so Walsh did not feel that he had time to stretch out his hands and use his sense of touch to confirm the fleeting impressions of his eyes and other senses that walls were closing in around , above , below and beside him. He followed the DACCFOM’s light for probably only two minutes at most although it seemed much much longer to him.

The DACCFOM stopped and they were in a small space, but a room rather than a corridor, although in the light of the DACCFOM’s taper. Walsh could yet again not surely discern its true dimensions. Two smooth metal doors were in front of the Captain; actually they were the pocked, pitted, scarred, battered and scratched remains of what once had been two smooth faced metal doors.

“This is the lift.” DACCFOM announced. “Captain, I have to ask you a question before you can use it” he continued.

“Yes?” Walsh responded.

“Have you eaten recently?”

This question was more difficult than it might at first seem for the Captain to answer. He ‘rewound’ his memories; what had he been doing when he had been asked to chase the Lootinluton? He remembered some tea and biscuits on a mosaic tray, but was it then or was it at the stables after he returned? Being obliged to participate in a sports team, being asked to ceremonially urinate on the compost heap of a new village school, needing to hire a ratcatcher, needing to regrind his pikeheads. These were all interrupted activities that he remembered from the recent past, but he had no idea what order they had taken place in relation to his call to martial duties regarding the Lootinluton, or where in the sequence the ingestion, or attempted ingestion, of foods and drink fitted in this. He came to the conclusion that, although he did not actually feel like it, he had probably not eaten or drunk for about five hours, apart from the odd drink of water or dry biscuit, he felt in his jacket pocket. Crumbs, only crumbs.

“No”. He said.

“How unrecently?” The DACCFOM asked.

“About five hours.”

“You have to have beans and cabbage” The DACCFOM announced. “sorry about that,” He apologised.” But you’re a Captain of Militia and I am sure that you understand that you have to emit methane under these circumstances.”

Again Walsh did not understand at all, but as some sort of deference appeared to be being paid to him, went along with it.

“Yes” He said.

“One moment, please. “ The DACCFOM produced a small wooden stool and gestured for the Captain to sit down on it. “I’ll pray for you. “He told Walsh, who sat and watched his produced a wad of white woolly textile from under his clothes which he inserted into his mouth. The cabbage clad man began speaking, perhaps praying, Walsh could not tell for the cloth wad inside the man’s mouth made it impossible to discern any single word that he said. Eventually he finished by uttering the sound “Urrrgh!”

Whilst he had been muttering and mumbling the DACCFOM had been rummaging around putting some beans and cooked cabbage in a bowl, and putting this bowl on a small wooden tray with some condiments. He spat out the textile wad from this mouth at the end of the prayer and held out the food to the Captain who took it.

“Season to your taste.” He was encouraged.

“Ta” he replied. “Spoon?” he asked

“Spoon? Spoon?” the DACCFOM mocked, “You are a Captain of Militia and you can’t even provide your own eating utensils!”

This insolent bollocks was too much for Captain Walsh. He carefully put the food down on the floor, then suddenly stood up, sweeping out his trusty glistening razor sharp blade and with one swipe cutting the dead magpie off the DACCFOM’s head.

“I wield a sword not a spoon!” Walsh yelled ferociously.

“H-hh-here’s a spoon sir” the trembling sub-bureaucrat whined as the deathly sharp point of Walsh’s weapon pointed at this throat.

“Thank you toe-rag.” The Captain said in tones more emollient than his recent actions, “Now let me eat this shit and do the necessary with no more lip form you, sonny, or I’ll have your guts for garters!”

He resheathed the sword ‘Yobcutter’, took a stained plastic spoon from the DACCFOM, resumed his seat on the stool, and ate the nasty vegetable broth.

Whilst Walsh ingested this mess of pottage, the DACCFOM went to corners of the room and dragged several life sized scarecrow like figures out to prop them next to the steel doors. These homunculi were symbolic of humans in a very rudimentary way; a hoop for a head, a stick for a spine, arms a simple crosspiece fixed on with string, legs a V shape. On these basic skeletons tatters of variously coloured clothes hung. The DACCFOM started mumbling again, perhaps to himself perhaps to the stick people.

“….one middle manager, a female secretary and a janitor,..oh…and three other nondescripts, they could just be passers-by. I don’t have to do that you know, strictly speaking a Captain of Militia only gets two nondescripts and it doesn’t specify middle manager….”

Although he felt like saying; “Just fucking shut up and get on with it!” Walsh did not utter these words, now that he had established some sort of top-dog butchness over the DACCFOM, he could afford to be patronising to the muttering sniveller.

“Thank you, I’m sure that you know what is appropriate.” He proffered a paltry coin to the cabbage clad one who he had recently threatened to kill.

“Your Honour.” The recipient of the fake charity falsely grovelled.

Walsh finished the cabbage and beans. The DACCFOM, levered open the lift door inserted the simulacra of employees into the small shiny chamber. The Captain joined them; with painstaking pushing and shoving the lift doors were closed.

“PPPPrrrpttttppFRRRPPPPPTTTTT” Walsh farted and without waiting for the DACCFOM to open the lift doors, clawed thrust, and pushed them open; perhaps fearing that in view of the earlier altercations, he might be left shut up in there.

“You out now, Captain.” The DACCFOM said. “The lift is out of order, I’m afraid that you will have to take the stairs. Doorway to your left.” He gestured to a doorway that had the letters ‘MRGN Y RS’ on a sign above it, Walsh walked through it.

It was a long climb and a hard one. Walsh was, in truth, not a fit man, he preferred dozing off on the backs of horses and sleeping boats bobbing on tranquil waters to the exertion of exerting himself. The more he climbed the stair the more his leg muscles throbbed and burned as if they were on fire inside, he panted and sweated. He puffed and blew more and more loudly with each step he struggled to mange; thus he disturbed bats, (pipistrelles and noctules), pigeons, rock doves, rock thrushes, flying mice, tree frogs lizards, silverfish, ants and dormice. These fauna were frightened from their comfortable, camouflaged roost and perching places by the puffy, farting Captain. He had to use his noble sword as a walking stick, he felt sick, but he carried on and on, up and up. Oftener and oftener, he had to rest, his heart thumping as though wishing to smash its screaming way out of his ribcage; the sweat pouring irritatingly down his spine and between his buttock cleft. Once the thumping had subsided he would push himself on again, one step, one step, ever upward on this low climb. To add irritation to the fatigue and unfitness, he could not just mentally ‘switch off’, (as he was so fond of doing), and climb like a chattering monkey riding on the shoulders of an an invincible iron-limbed robot. No, he made very step carefully, since, over the centuries, each riser of this staircase had rotted and been repaired in different ways. It was miraculous that the entire antique staircase remained in tact until now, but somehow it had. So whilst some steps might give way when the Captain trod on them, nearly all creaked or cracked, and all sent fragments of debris and dust back down the stairwell as he ascended. By now flobbing on and on like an elephant seal, Walsh eventually reached a small metal platform where there were no more stairs and one plastic chair.

Blown out and with small dots swimming around in front of his eyes, the Captain was staggering when he reached the top landing. He extended his hand to grip a railing and lean on it as he recovered from the climb.

“No, not that one! Grab the chair1” An unseen woman shouted.

The Captain looked at the railing that he had been intending to lean on, although still entire, it was severely rusted and corroded and the sudden imposition of a weight on it, especially a heavy one such as the Captain’s, would most like snap it and send anyone who was leaning on it plunging sown the stair well. So, as instructed, Walsh altered his lunge in mid-lunge and grabbed the top of the chair instead. However, this had already been broken by another obese and out of breath pilgrim to the Marlon and had only had three legs for the past 35 years or so. It therefore collapsed as soon as the Captain’s hand connected with it, bringing his full 18 stone body down beside it.

The hero falls a second time, now onto a dry and dusty artificial plateau rather than a wet and slimy surface as before. The metal panels of the landing sagged beneath Captain Walsh’s suddenly prostrate from, as well as adding more leaves of rust and other detritus to the stream of particles which continually floated down to slowly solidify with other muck below and allow this half-submerged skyscraper to start becoming firm land again. Also a few bolts and heavier pieces of metal popped out and fell down the stairwell and pining and cracking ricocheted from walls and rails on their way down.

This sound alerted a priestess (aka Customer care systems supervisor) who threw a grappling hook attached to a light rope woven from scrapcloth. The hook snagged on Walsh’s trousers and he had the indignity of being hauled prostate off the stair landing and into a small concrete floored room that opened on to it. The burly men who had done the hauling, the priestess’s assistants, now set about preparing Walsh for another, more perilous stage of this journey.

“You will now simultaneously fly and swim, something that, it can be argued, is achieved by many fish but few birds except Guillemots and perhaps cormorants.” The priestess announced to the captain, who wondered who was speaking to him and why she had chosen this time to give him some sort of natural history lesson. He did not get long to speculate about this, for the priestess’s duo of powerful henchpersons seized him, firmly strapped his arms to his sides and his ankles together. They pulled up his jacket but not down his trousers, as the syringes that each one deployed were powerful and so sharp as to be easily pushed through the leather bumpatch of Walsh’s leg apparel and thence to pierce his buttock skin.

“Arrgh! Errrgh!” he screamed, because they were big needles, carrying big doses of soporific drugs into Walsh, rendering him immediately unconscious.

He was picked up and held standing, his breathing was checked and his handlers made themselves sure that his nose and mouth were free from obstruction. A snorkel was stuffed in the latter and a bucket was strapped over his head. He was firmly clipped into a harness attached to a wheel which ran along an overhead cable that went out of a large window into the open. Someone blew a whistle loudly three times and from a distance outside another such whistle could be heard replying. Walsh was pushed out of the window.

He whizzed down the slack, concave cable which spanned the gap between the decaying remains of two ancient office blocks. At its nadir, the cable touched the grey-brown surface of the water that separated the two partially submerged buildings. When the metal wheel, attached to the harness from which Captain Walsh of Fryent hung, rotated it at first clicked repeatedly, then as slack-bodied Walsh speeded up as he approached the water’s surface, the clicks blended into a buzzing sound. This called the birds and once the birds were called, they called too, calling more birds and attempting to discourage others.

Crows cawed, jackdaws and rooks were slightly more tuneful, various species of gull sneered and hawed, ravens gave solitary ‘kronks’, ospreys mewed. However disparate these calls sounded their main meaning was,’food, (glorious), food’. This was because the cable run between the two towers that Walsh was embarked on as an inert and passive passenger was not solely used as a means of transport. The competing coalitions of priesthoods, sects, orders and sub-sects that controlled the various semi submerged towers that rose out of this swamp like acid-eroded tusks, used cable runs and other similar devices to execute and torture heretics. They also used them a fishing and corpse disposal devices, (sometimes simultaneously). The sound of something coming down the cable often heralded a meal for the birds and the denizens of shallows: fish .crocodilians, snapping snake-necked turtles, mutant lampreys and moray eels.

As Walsh whooshed down, these creatures assembled around his probable point of impact with the water, altered to possible lunch by the screeching and wheeling of their skybourne cousins. But, the servant-priests in the tower where Walsh was being sent had not intention of letting him become fish or amphibian dinner, because they knew that if they did, that was precisely what they would become. They therefore hauled hard fast and enthusiastically, chanting a rapid shanty the while:

“Heave, monks, heave!
And heave even faster!
If we don’t fish this bloody fucker out,
‘Twill be a disaster!

“So, heave, monks, heave!
Like there’s no tomorrow!
If this one gets eaten by the fish,
We’ll all suffer sorrow!”

Thus self-encouraged by this little ditty, the monks in the receiving tower hauled strongly on the rope attached to Walsh’s harness, so that, although he was, at one point completely under water, save for the tip of his snorkel, he was already in the process of being hauled out again, up the second half of the cable, into the second tower.

The monks of the second tower, who were doing the heaving, had generally found that the application of sufficient enthusiasm to their task at crucial moments generally served to get a bucket-protected human out uneaten, uncrowned but somewhat disoriented; (and the last was no bad preparation for the reverent state of mind required for a meeting with the Marlon.) however, in this instance, they had reckoned without Walsh’s spurs which had hooked an adolescent Cayman in the mouth.

They hauled and hauled and hauled and their load rose out of the brown smelly Thames more slowly than they had anticipated for it was not only Walsh of Fryent, it was Captain plus reptile.

It was hard graft for the muscular monks, but they pulled on with vigour, especially as they enjoyed eating alligators, pike, caymans and the like, and when they saw that a plump young juicy one was likely to come their way as well as the sodden Captain, one of them improvised another verse to their shanty:

“Heave, monks, heave
Heave like I urge yer!
When we’ve pulled this fucker in,
We’re going to have crocodile burgers!”

So Walsh and the four foot long cayman were hauled into the tower. The noise that the haulier monks had made with their extra verse, and excited shouting as their task was completed attracted the attention of a supervisory Abbot;

“Get the Captain untapped and get the bucket off his head and wake him up and bring his to the Doorwarden Obfusc Supernumary NOW!” This Abbot ordered as Walsh was winched through the window.

The abbot had sized up the situation through his spy-glass and suspected that the cable-run operator monks would leave Walsh to suffocate with a bucket over his head, whilst they dismembered, disembowelled, decapitated, skinned, cooked and ate the reptile speared on Walsh’s spur rowel.

Grudgingly and with mutterings under breath, the monks complied and the captain was de-bucketed, disharnessed, unstrapped, stood up and sat down. This processed entailed smashing the alligators head with a crowbar to detach it from the Captain’s boot. However, when this was done, something unprecedented happened. The beast’s skull split open, sure enough, but not with the crunchy splat of shattering done to reveal grey thinking porridge cells within. It split neater than a drilled block of hard limestone when wedges are hammered in. it split like it didn’t need to split, like it hadn’t split but had been opened by switch from side by something for its own reasons. It neatly bifurcated, there was no smell of blood or salt and two little men ran out.

These homunculi or avatars, (for that is what they were), glowed bright orangey-yellow and ran between the hauling monks feet and out onto the ledge of the window wherein Walsh had involuntarily entered.

“Nyaaahhh!” a greater black-backed seagull opined, diving down yellow beak open.

The gull got the first little man, slicing him/it to bits with beak’s edge; the second little man turned and blew the Gull’s head off with a miniscule atomic weapon. He was then recalled by his operator and vanished.

The supervisory Abbot and the haulier monks had not noticed nay of this. The Abbot was clamped into a rigid need to complete ritual, whatever else happened, that was his duty. He demanded Walsh be made ready and it was done; however some of the monks who were not engaged in this task, discovered that it was impossible to make crocodile burgers out of a computer controlled robot disguised a young r3eptilian predator.

“This is fucking inedible” One monk said, picking up the now floppy simulated cayman.

“Yuh” Another monk agreed, and then they threw the machine that might have ended this re-run of the dark ages out of the window.

“Splash!” It went, as it hit the Thames like a beautifully worked ancient chieftain’s shield or a dead baby.

In the meantime Walsh , sat on a bench, was slapped round the face and given a bowl to be sick in. they also gave him warm water to wash is face, flannels and a towel, and a cup of hot sweet tea. Wash blearily and gradually woke, bewildered as he washed and drank. He felt a bit sick and tired, although he knew that he had sort of slept, and had done so dreamlessly, which was unusual for him. He looked around. Another dusty grey room, n another strange building. He had been moved but he did not know how.

A priest in a neat, clean, fresh robe came up to Walsh. “Come with me Captain.” He said.
Slightly impressed by the divine’s unusual personal cleanliness, which often denoted high status and/or importance, Walsh complied, shivering slightly and reeking of river in his own soaked clothes, leaving a trail of small puddles as drips piddled off him to mark his progress to a place denoted as sacred.

As stated above, Walsh was only really used to the rustically simple interiors of various rural hovels, so the new room that he entered now, where seats rose up in high tiers before a large stage on the fourth side of the room was an uniquely novel experience. It was, or once had been a lecture theatre; its stage was mostly concealed behind a long thick blue curtain patterned with white pinstripes.

The Captain was led to a seat in the middle of the front row. Soon about twenty other dripping militarists joined him and were seated on either side of him or in the row directly behind. Shuffling and quiet voices alerted Walsh to the fact that he auditorium was now filling up. He looked round to see that the theatre was now mostly becoming full of monks, in several types of nasty habit, menacing in their pious watchful intensity. They were both guards and a congregation; witnesses and watchmen.

“The Man Agingdir Hector the Nine Hundred and Fifty Eighth!” A pompous Cannon boomed out in a fine tenor voice that rang like a clear bell. .

A thin man stepped forward into the torchlit space, between the Captain and the stage. Like the curtain his clothes were made of blue and white pinstriped cloth. He was bareheaded and clean shaven, he had long grey-yellow hair falling down over his shoulders. He began to speak and as he did so, a senior priest appeared behind him and poured warm glowing golden oil from a jug over his head. The oil flowed down through the combed hair over the pinstriped shoulders and permeated the rest of the speakers clothing. The speaker orated on apparent obliviously, and as the first priest’s jug ran out another priest replaced him and poured more oil from a jug that he held. Meanwhile the first priest knelt at the speaking man’s pinstriped trouser hem and collected drops of the oil that had flowed over him in small ornate glass. This sebaceous residue was a bit bluish in colour as it had taken some of the dye from Hector’s clothes. Once he had filled his glass, the first priest to the person at he end of the first row ,commending him to drink with gestures and muttering; “Be Unctuous My Current Bun”.

He repeated this procedure and these formulaic words with each person in the front row in turn and by now the second priest was collecting oil from Hector’s trousers and a third poured more over his head.

The three magi symbolising “Sum”, “Bloodynonsens”, and“Orother” now exchanged tasks in rotation continually through the service until all present had drank a drop of the oil that had been poured over Hector.

When this part of the ritual began, Hector spoke, spluttering and occasionally wiping oil from his mouth or eyes.
“Behold the Marlon, He is immense
Behold the Marlon, He is not insane.
And he does not have a spike on his head,
Like the large sea-going fish with a similar name.
But, less fame.
For he personifies in our humble eyes
Limitless sustained growth
For his fat comes from the freedom to consume everything
And his expansion is endless
And he does not hang upside down idly
Like a sloth
He is what he does; he grows and grows and grows forever.”

Hector repeated this strange mantra again and again until the ceremony ended, his speech and the muttering of the oiling priests formed a bizarre acapella background track for the ritual’s main event.
As oiled Hector sang the pinstriped curtain covering the end of the auditorium was raised by creaking monk-pulled ropes. When the curtain was furled and tied in the upper darkness near the ceiling, Walsh at first though that it had merely been covering another identical curtain, for a second large amount of pinstriped cloth was now revealed, but slowly Walsh realised that this cloth was different in shape and character. It was vaguely and curvedly pyramidal and at its apex, there was a white globule framed in hair with a thin equally white hose, which hung down from above, leading into the centre of it. This sight was so unusual to the Captain that it took him a minute or two to work out what he was seeing. He looked up at the hairy white globule more intently; it had two pairs of dark dots on it positioned almost like two eyes and two nostrils.

It was even as a pair of monks placed light bamboo ladders against the sides of the very chubby pinstriped pyramid and began to scramble up these ladders that Walsh understood that the was looking at a human face, the scared visage of Marlon the 429th.

One of the ladder-climbing monks then pulled the white hose out of the Marlon’s mouth. Marlon the 429th blew a few white bubbles, dribbled a bit of spittle and expectorated small splats of the cold dessert, (ice cream) that he had been almost continually ingesting up until then. The detached hose nozzle also lightly spayed some of the audience with the frigid confection until a monk tied a knot in it and it bulged slightly and then swung, vertically down about six foot to the left of the Marlon’s head.

“Urrr, urrr, urrr hurve thus turrble appetite on muh.” The Marlon said, in strangely soft, sibilant, but carrying voice, but before he could say any more, the second ladderbourne priest, had sharply pinched his nose, pried his mouth open and stuffed huge wads of cotton wool into his cheeks.

The Marlon continued speaking, but all that Walsh could discern were muffled senseless mutterings, which went on and on and on, he could not make out any discrete or comprehensible words.

The monks up the ladders, knowing how to interpret the secret speech of Gods (which was only vouchsafed to The Marlon), due to their years of intense training, and the more recent memorisation of a script written a week beforehand for this occasion by the Corporation, began to tell the audience a version of what Marlon the 429th was trying to articulate through the cotton wool

“Hark to the word of the Marlon!” the monk on the left hand ladder began.
“He is the obese oracle, who paddles the coracle of our economy.” The right hand one intoned the second line, and then one after this pair began intoning the mixture of age-old, time-encrusted tradition and new fangled pragmatic expediency which was the means of political and economic policy making in this ancient city.

“He is the best Chancellor that we can ever ever have.”
“Who advocate and maintains”
“Steady and sustained growth.”

The litany was then interrupted, (not entirely unexpectedly for those in the know, although it did not always happen this early in the proceedings). Just as the interpretation of the Marlon’s fluid mumblings into a rigid authoritarian discourse was getting going, it was interrupted by a vast and sudden sound

““PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPR
RRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTT
TPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRR
RPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPP
TTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“
PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRR
RPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTT
PPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRR
PPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPT
TTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRR
PTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTP
PFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRP
PPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTT
TTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“P
PPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRP
TTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPP
FRRRPPPPPTTTTT“PPPPRRRPTTTTPPFRRRPPPPPTTTTT!”

This was the sound of vast cliffs of buttock fat colliding and rapidly bouncing off each other, like flabby islands partly and temporarily separated by a forceful blast of fetid jet windair spurting Chinook-like from the huge cavern of the prophet's stomach as he drowned in his own fat.

A sultry, pungent rotten smell like pig choc ice wafted up, up and around. Small trickles of brownish liquid seeped out from under the hem of the prophet’s vast robe. The crazy crusaders, rabid dog soldiers, mad jihadis and bonkers bashi-bazouks in the front row (i.e. about five people), leapt up and shouting ecstatic cries, hurled themselves grovelling forwards in frantic attempt to lick the divine diarrhoea and actually participate in the mystic state of “trickle down”. Bouncer monks rushed up and dragged and shoved these nutters back into their seats.

As The Marlon was convulsed by his immense eructation and shook like a small alp in an earthquake, the monks up the ladders were severely shaken about but somehow hung on and maintained their positions, and as the holy disturbance subsided resumed their public reading of Marlon’s mind.
“Villages are violated.”
“And the villagers within them”
“Barns are burnt”
“Kine and carts are stolen”
“Our land is green but…”
“Presently unpleasant.”
“Our glades are not just the haunt of…”
“Warbling thrush”
“And cackling pheasant”
“There are theifs there”
“Polluting our air”
“With their hot greedy breaths”
“Containing our growth.”
“With a corset of crime”
“Undermining the trust”
“And cultural stannerds”
“That we share”
“Smelly nasty ASBO men”
“Are crawling everywhere”
“We must comb out these lice”
“From our city’s hair”
“Squash the lice and crack the nits”
“Until none remain”
“No one from Lootinluton”
“Shall trouble our domain”
“We’ll stomp Luton into the ground”
“Then we’ll stomp on it gain”
“So go out now bold soldiers”
“On this mission you are sent”
“And your commander for this one will be”
“Captain Walsh of Fryent!”