Robert Rankin - Retromancer

‘Give me George the Fourth’s State Diadem, once worn by Princess Alexandria,’ said the drayman to me. ‘And empty your pockets too. I saw you slip the One Ring of Power TM, otherwise known as Isildur’s Bane TM, into your trousers.’

‘I never did,’ I said. But I had.

They crammed the golden regalia into sacks. The drayman fetched a wheelbarrow from his dray and they had me load it up. ‘Now push it to the dray,’ he said and I did not have any choice.

The sun was already going down, which came as some surprise. I did not know that we had been in the treasure house for such a length of time. But darkness was falling and searchlights were windscreen-wiping the sky. I gazed up at the barrage balloons that hung above the Tower. What exactly was the purpose of those?

And I sniffed at the air of wartime London and that air smelled grim.

‘You will not get away with this,’ I told my captors. ‘You should just make good your escape and have done with it. I will put back the jewels and we can just pretend that none of this ever happened.’

And the wielder of the gun clipped me hard on the head with it and counselled speediness of action in favour of unrequested jaw-motion. ‘Move it and shut it,’ he told me.

‘But-’ But I was wasting my time.

But then I heard the air-raid sirens sound.

‘Aha!’ I went in an I-told-you-so fashion. ‘Now you will have to stay put. You cannot drive this dray through the streets during an air raid.’

And then the blighters laughed at me. And the drayman, who seemed now to be doing most of the talking, told me that brewers’ drays always had free passage during these otherwise publicly restricted periods.

‘I am appalled,’ I said and I truly was. But they hastened me onto the dray and the drayman whipped at his horses.

And then those certain things that I had done before I followed the drayman and beefeater became manifest. And the drayman suddenly flew from the dray and was dragged at the ends of his reins across the courtyard by his horses.

For I had disconnected them from the dray. Which I, at the time, had thought rather clever. Although not quite so much at this particular moment, because at this particular moment both the beefeater and the gun-wielder set about me something wicked. Reasoning, quite rightly, that I was to blame for the painful fate of their comrade.

And when, at length, they were done with venting their collective spleen upon my person, they left the dray, gathered up their fallen partner in crime, led back the horses and reconnected them to the dray.

Which left me thinking that amongst the certain things that I had done, telephoning for the police should have been included.

‘What else?’ demanded the scuffed-up drayman now looming over me. ‘What else did you do?’

‘I loosened all the barrels so they would fall off when you went over a bump,’ I managed to say, though it pained me in many ways to do so.

I received a bit more kicking while the drayman retightened the stays that held the barrels in place. And then we set off.

Which would have been nice, I suppose, a jaunt on a horse-drawn brewer’s dray. Had my own circumstances not been quite so dire at that particular moment. And had not this dray been conveying the stolen Crown jewels away through the streets of London.

The drayman and the gunman sat up front.

The bogus beefeater sat upon my head at the back.

And the horses all went clip-clop-clip.

And searchlights beamed in the sky.

Presently we reached the East India Dock Road. Which led to the East India Docks. And unmolested we travelled with naught to be seen of folk on the streets but for the occasional group of firefighters loading crates of beer onto their tenders, or members of the Home Guard stripping lead from the roof of St Stigmatophilia’s Church.

And I sighed beneath the big bum bearing down upon my head and I felt quite disillusioned about the Blitz Spirit and hands holding hands and a nation united in a time of crisis.

‘This is a rotten world and a rotten age,’ I mumbled, ‘filled with rotten people doing rotten things and I hate it.’

‘Shut up,’ said the sitter and he farted on my head.

London’s docks had taken a brutal pounding from the Luftwaffe bombs. How anything could function now was well beyond me, but somehow it did, and a small tramp steamer lay at anchor somewhat out from the shoreline.

The villains, myself and the stolen booty were soon in a rowing boat and this was soon out into the river and alongside the steamer. Then we were shortly up and aboard and off down the night-shrouded river. They tossed me through a hatchway into a stinking hold and locked that hatchway upon me.

Which left me alone, to muse upon matters generally and draw my own conclusions as to how I felt about them. Specifically.

But I did not have too long to dwell upon man’s inhumanity to man and the unfairness of it all, because the hatchway suddenly opened and I found myself being hauled forth onto the darkened deck. I was most saddened by this hauling forth, as I feared that the fate awaiting me was that fate which had befallen many a cabin boy aboard a pirate brig.

But not as yet, or so it seemed, because I then found myself in the company of a rather pretty lady, who held up a ship’s lantern before me and asked me politely whether I would care to join her in her stateroom.

Which I did.

It was a rather well-appointed stateroom as it happened, done up in a somewhat antique style that put me in mind of illustrations I had seen of Captain Nemo’s sitting room in the Nautilus.

The rather pretty lady sat me down in a leather-bound captain’s chair and poured me a glass of red wine from a ship’s decanter. I viewed her as she did this and I have to say that there was something not altogether right about this beautiful creature. Which is not to say that there was something wrong, just something different. She had an ethereal quality about her. An other-worldly quality. And had I believed in such things, which as a rationalist I naturally did not, I might well have supposed that she was one of the fairy folk.

‘I really must apologise for the behaviour of the beastly men who captured you,’ she said. ‘I had not given them my permission to do so. They were simply to retrieve what is ours and return it to me. They will be punished for their transgressions.’

‘Right,’ I said and I nodded my head. ‘I have no idea at all what you are talking about,’ I continued.

‘You held the ring in your own hand,’ she said to me. ‘You know exactly what I am talking about.’

‘The Ring of Power TM?’ I asked. ‘Also known as Isildur’s Bane TM?’

‘The very same. A great sorrow exists in the land from which I come. A sorrow that can only be lifted when that which was stolen from us is returned. The Ring of Power TM.’

And I nodded once more, most thoughtfully. ‘I did think it was a little out of place amongst all the other jewels,’ I said, ‘them being real and it being the fictional creation of J. R. R. Tolkien TM. But then what do I know? Because after all, there is a war on.’

‘I am Princess Roellen of Purple Fane,’ said this lady to me. ‘My realm extends from the Mountains of Ffafiod to the Sea of Garmillion, encompassing the forests of Caecomphap and Pemanythnod.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘and pardon me for mentioning it, but none of these names, including your own, would appear to be trademarked.’

‘The meaning of your words is lost to me,’ said Princess Roellen, without the trademark.

‘The Lord of the Rings™,’ I said. ‘Although, now that I come to think of it, I do not believe it was published until the nineteen fifties. But if push comes to shove, I can always blame it on the Chevalier Effect. Could I have some more wine, please?’