It was to be expected that the Visitors would ask for it. There was no meat to be had (the bird was two pounds and all of it feathers), nor prize (the bird’s brilliance faded on death and its plumage became nothing more than sheening drabness), nor glory (the Visitors were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, and would never hunt it alone).
But it was an amusement, and therefore it was no shock at all that after they had landed their craft and drank their spirits and found their guns that they would embark upon a hunt for the balaganoosh bird.
And since they were fat footed and slow and poor of eyes, they fetched Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins from the cave and spoke to them in slow and simple and childish words and ushered them into the pines and swatted at them affectionately until they ran and leaped and chased and hurried after the flittering glimmer in the tree that was that balaganoosh bird.
Oh it was a fine chase, for all the lack of a point. No single hand could have grasped that bird alone! It hid in the high boughs when they looked low and flitted into the dense shrubs when they scaled high. It tucked itself in a flock of hoary old grottles – a star camouflaged amongst dirt – and it fled down into ravines. Behind every step and every trick swarmed Ilmo and his kin and each time it almost had them, almost lost them. But they were many and they were keen and a single eye would always catch it at the last instant, a single mouth call the alarm-word, and every hand and foot and limb would chase it through the branches at the fastest speed once more, aching to make up for lost ground.
Every hour they threw themselves to the ground to pant and drink water and sweat and breathe and then they would begin to chase again.
The sun was low in the sky when the balaganoosh finally began to flag, and as it began to flag it dropped its wings and sank like a stone and sped itself into the deep caves, where Ilmo and his kin hastily lit their quick torches and sped along and along and up, up, up the old shafts and the old beams and the old props where the Visitors had first found them in their mindless delving, swinging from the rafters and heaving themselves higher and higher and higher until they could nearly see the first glimmer of the sky again.
Then there was a creak and a wrench and a sigh and a prop came loose and fell, and with it fell six of Ilmo’s family, right past his face, hands frozen in surprise, faces blank.
The fall was so far the impact barely made a sound.
The chase halted, but they received no punishment. From the high tunnels above came the shout of triumph: the Visitors had taken their flying craft on high to the top of the plateau at the mine’s end, and they had shot their balaganoosh bird.
They sang as they fell, dropping down the shaft two at a time and swinging from the (now fewer, but stabler) supports. All the aches and sores and bruises of the day were finally here, and now stronger tenfold with sorrow.
Six times to sing the song, and all for the sake of one balaganoosh bird.
And to make matters worst of all, at Ilmo’s right elbow he heard the nasal hum of fat lungs, and he turned his head and saw a Visitor. It had come down into the mine and was leaning against the tunnel, big slow face alight with interest, and it was humming along to the mourning song.
Ilmo hadn’t ever really hated the Visitors before, in spite of their tiny number of fingers and their hideous faces and their odious manners and their smelly devices and their fondness for mindless violence and their tiny watery eyes and their stench and their heat.
But in that moment, when one of them tried to put its clumsy ass in the middle of a funeral it had caused and express its sympathetic manner, he thought he pretty much got it.
So that night he talked around a bit, and talked around a bit, and a bit more. And Ilmo and his cousins and their cousins and their cousins left their caves in the very early morning when it was darkest and pulled the Visitors from their beds in their cottage and took them all the way to the top of the plateau, where they let them chase the rising sun.
They flew much less ably than the balaganoosh bird.
*
“Nice day for it, eh?”
It was. A good grey day with a good grey sky and no rain. For a funeral it couldn’t have been planned better.
“He was a good guy,” said the man at my elbow, who was short and wore a baseball hat and an enormously disproportionate beer gut that stuck out below his scrawny ribs like a tumour. “A good guy.”
“A little weird, though,” I said. Down at the base of the hill, the priest was finishing up the grave, saying the good words and throwing around consecrated soil like it was mud.
“Eh?” Oh great, he was hard of hearing too. Why was I stuck next to this guy instead of Lauren? The seating arrangements for this thing made no sense even given everyone was spread across a steep hillside.
“I mean, how often do you see a slab funeral nowadays?”
“Aw, young people. They were dead common back in the day. Why, you check out the east side of this place? Nothing but slabs, the bigger the better!”
“Yeah, but Hugh wasn’t that old.” At the top of the hill, the slab – bigger than a sports car – was being heaved into position: four people at the back to steer and one broad-shouldered bastard at the front to take the weight.
“He was an old soul! Old at heart! You wouldn’t know, your heart’s all young. Soft! Squishy!”
“Funny, they always called Hugh a bleeding heart.”
“Oh?” The man was squinting now, and that had the uncanny effect of squishing every single wrinkle on his face into a sort of leathery black hole. “Whyzat?”
“Well-” and then the man in front of the slab slipped and it shot over his head and ploughed through the entire funeral, grinding most of the seated guests underneath it and passing so near by to me that the wind brushed my elbows.
“Holy SHIT!” I screamed.
“Ow buddy,” breathed the man.
“Lauren!”
“Hey, buddy?”
I looked down. Insofar as you could be lucky when being hit with a six-ton slab, he’d been lucky. It had carved open his gut, but all that was spilling out was red blood and a fat band of yellow fat. All the other colours and organs had stayed inside.
“Yeah?”
“Y’mind calling an ambulance? I don’t feel so hot.”
I looked upslope, where two of the slab-pushers had done just that and the other two were shrieking and wringing their hands. “Already on it, man.”
“Oh that’s good buddy, that’s good. Hey, can you keep me distracted?”
“Sure.”
“Whyzat you call ol’ Hugh a bleeding heart?”
“Well, he was a little bit of a radical, and we always used to joke that-”
“Hi,” said Lauren. She was more rumpled and even shorter than usual, and her coat was coated in various juicy substances. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine.”
“It went right over your seats!”
“Yeah, wasn’t that bad luck? Good thing you were over here and I was just getting up to use the washroom.” She glanced down at the guy. “You get his health card?”
“Got peeled off with my shirt front,” he said.
“You got the number?”
“Uhh…six four nine seven two eight three one nine zero.”
Lauren’s smile was tight and firm: emergency expressions. “Funny. That’s just what the last guy they sent said.”
The man’s face fell. I’d never seen that before, but it literally dropped, like someone had shoved it off a cliff. “Aw hell.”
“Yep. Hey Jeff, didn’t you think it was funny how that accident hit every single seat except for you and bozo here?”
“What are you talking about?”
“They paid off the front slabman.”
“Oh. They?”
“Later. Though not too much later. You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”
“Now buddy, this is all just-” and Lauren’s foot reached out and poked him and the guy went rolling down the slope, gut unfurling behind him like a banner.
“Jesus!”
“Yeah, they’ll take some time cleaning him up. In the meantime that’s a head start for us. How fast’s your car?”
*
It had been prophesized that no man would kill him, no woman could harm him, and no arrow could bring him low, and that was probably why in the end the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
He had arisen in the west, in the dreadful Endwood, where he had last fallen. Ten thousand lives had been given to overthrow his army of branchlings, ten thousand more had tied down his strong swordarm, and ten thousand more had died of exhaustion after building the great cairn that had been meant to pin him for all time. It hadn’t been enough, which was a key deciding factor in why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
When he breached soil, the land roiled. When he stood, the trees bowed. When he spoke, the grass rose up and the birds died. No brave soul remained to stand against him, no army was rallied to defy him, no hero was prophesized to end him, and that was why the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
The army of the root and leaf that arose behind him was the largest yet – the whole Endwood and all of the little groves and scattered plantings that had arisen in its wake since the long sleep had begun. Its rotten seeds had spread far and wide on the wind, each recruiting, each biding its time, and teaching its own saplings in turn, so by the end of his wakening bellow perhaps half the woods in all the land rose up bright and willing under his call by lineage or by tutor. They outnumbered the foe by trunkcount and by mass they tripled, quadrupled, quintupled onwards him, at least up until the Dread Barklord Mossbeard was shot with a thermal missile.
They waded forwards through the fields and into villages, the farmers and herders and shepherds and ranchers and jack of all trades and idle boys and friendly dogs and pompous mayors and plucky farmgirls all fleeing from them on horses, cows, pickup trucks, etc. Fear filled the air with the stink of emptied bowels and filled trousers. At the head of the host he marched, which made for an easy target when they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Six thousand years ago his seed had germinated, a five thousand since he reached his full height. He had seen that there were places in the world that did not live in his shade; he had learned that there was life that did not wither and die for want of sunlight, and he had been disgusted by those things and yearned to teach them proper behaviour before his feet. So he had uprooted them, and made strides with them, and terrorized so many and many more for millennia before they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
No rivers could halt him, no mountains could stall him, even the oceans were forded over on rafts made of their fallen brethren’s wooden bones. Fire did not daunt them, slings and arrows could not harm them, axes were toys to them, and in the end all that could be done was to die. Up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
Twelve crusades he led of the green and growing against the red wet flesh. Eleven thunderous victories, halted only temporarily. And on the twelfth he was poised for his largest yet, up until they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile.
So they shot the Dread Barklord Mossbeard with a thermal missile. And boy howdy did he burn.
*
The evil tower crumpled, the evil magic was broken, and the evil king’s evil soul let out an evil shriek as it passed its way into the shadows of oblivion.
And oh, and oh, and oh how all the land did cheer, and none harder than the good little folk, who had led the way with their bustling fortitude.
So they all went home, and they feasted long into the night.
To goodness!
To littleness!
To knowing your proper place!
And to victory!
TO VICTORY! Forever!
Far far away in the evil remnants of the evil kingdom’s evil mountain of evil doom, an evil egg hatched in an evil nest’s evil rubble.
It disgorged one evil dragon, who was also extremely adorable in an evil way.
On and on the feasts marched. The land bloomed, the fields flourished, the sky was peerless blue with gorgeous fluffy white clouds broken only by brief and warm rains that invigorated the soul and heartened the crops and nourished the spirit. Every day the produce was heaped high and brought to the tables for the feast that would never end, for the victory that would never be overturned, for the heroes who would never be challenged again. The good little folk cheered and banged their tables and quaffed their drinks and feasted until they grew round as balls, round as apples, round as their happy little cheeks and their twinkling little eyes and their good solid little souls. Perfect spheres, unchanging, unbreakable, flawless and forever bobbling in place.
By and large the evil dragon grew up alright amongst the evil wasteland’s evil ruins. There was still plenty of lingering evil carrion from the last stand of the evil armies against the many and goody peoples, and so it managed to stay if not well-fed, then just fed. It grew serpentine, then sinuous, and finally scaled and rather majestic.
In the land of the good little folk the happiness only grew. Every day the sun shone harder, every day the plates grew fuller, every day their delight burst more rhapsodically. Farmers wept in joy as they tilled their fields; servants beamed at their master’s boots as if they were their own children; gentlemen of leisure smoked their pipes as if they were embracing their wives in passionate lust. And every day and every night and every hour the feasts grew and spread. Fresh tables were thrown down on new ground; new plates were brought out; young children were weaned off milk as fast as possible so they too could laugh and cheer and consume, for the victory that would never end.
The evil dragon’s eyes were perhaps its most evil feature – abnormal in their intensity and their acuity, which of course was quite evil. And one particularly evil day of evil-looking weather – dark, evil clouds with evil, foul-smelling rain, which left the evil dragon a little miserable – it was staring down the sides of its evil mountain looking for something to do when it saw a faint glimmer on the horizon.
“Huh,” it said. “Well now.”
And it spread its evil wings and left to investigate.
The one thing that had shrunk about the good little folk’s feast had been the dancing, which had grown impossible as the good little folk became less little and more spherical. Instead they rocked in place at their tables, at their plates, at the world in general, eyes shut and mouths open in purest bliss. Oh the joy! Oh the glee! Oh the humanity and the terror and the shock when right in the middle of their biggest fireworks celebration yet one of the fireworks came to earth and revealed itself NOT to be a riot of colours and sparks but a glistening, awful thing of scales and teeth and flame and maw and death and smoke and horror and gloom and piercing, EVIL eyes.
“Hello,” said the evil dragon. “What is all this about?”
Never, ever, ever had there been such a calamity and a fear, and never again would there be. The good little folk had known final and ultimate victory, and what could be more fearsome following that than any trace of triumph made undone? They gibbered, they cried, they screamed, and they fled.
But perhaps it had been too long, and too many years of feasting. For the good little folk’s legs, you see, were somewhat littler than the rest of them, and their bodies more spherical. So they rolled rather than ran, and in that tumbling, stumbling, fumbling chaos, every single one of them rolled downhill and into the river, where they floated out to and across the sea to Other, Faraway Places.
The evil dragon was left very alone and very puzzled, but it soon cheered up. The good little folk had left their feasts behind, and it hadn’t had a good meal in forever.