Hugh Cook - The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster

Thus Guest spoke. And, unspoken, but adding sincerity to his cause, was Guest's belief that he himself should have been the anointed heir to the ruling throne of the Collosnon Empire. Yes, Guest Gulkan thought himself a better man than his brother Eljuk, and was bitterly resentful of the fact that Eljuk was destined to inherit the empire.

So Sham Cham was convinced; and the lives of Guest Gulkan and his companions were made safe against arbitrary execution; and the army continued its advance.

That advance came to an abrupt halt in early summer, some distance short of Babaroth, when scouts reported that Lord Onosh was waiting by the Pig River to receive them in battle.

Sham Cham's next trick was to send Guest Gulkan to meet with his father in a peace conference.

Ah, Witchlord and Weaponmaster in conference! What a sight to behold! Sken-Pitilkin was at that conference, and duly beheld the sight. More foul and savage language was exchanged between father and son than could be comfortably contained by less than a quire of parchment. Then, having at last exhausted their confrontational resources, the pair got down to business, and Guest Gulkan gave his father the benefit of his recently acquired wisdom in political economy:

"Ontario Nol says you should shit on people. But I say that's not enough. I think you should positively bathe them in dung. A general manuring, that's what I think. It's like Nol, only more so."

"Who then is this Ontario Nol?" said Lord Onosh.

"That's my secret," said Guest.

In the face of his son's intransigence, Lord Onosh asked his imperial advisers to prove out Nol's identity, but they were unable to give him any clues as to the genesis of this dangerous lunatic.

"Then," said the Witchlord Onosh, "that's enough of this nonsense. Let's have no more talk of this madman Nol. Just tell me what you want and be done with it."

"I speak for Sham Cham and Locontareth," said Guest. "What we want is to keep more of our own for ourselves. We say it's not enough to get shitted on, not even by the emperor."

The peace conference continued on this note until the Witchlord Onosh gave up all hope of getting any sense out of his enemies. Thus Lord Onosh withdrew to the strength of his army; and Sham Cham, angered by the Witchlord's intransigence, gathered his forces and marched them in good order toward Babaroth, determined to meet the Witchlord Onosh in battle and to defeat him.

Tax: the tribute which the periphery of the Body Politic contributes to the center, and which the center in its wisdom redistributes to the periphery, with the resulting circulation ideally improving the overall health of the political organism.

Unfortunately the sundry parts of the Body Politic are typically less co-operative than the mouth, heart and fundament of the average human-in-the-flesh, as lack of suitable pain receptors often makes the center insensitive to the sufferings of the periphery. Early in the reign of the Witchlord Onosh, such insensitivity led to the ill-fated rebellion of the Geflung; and a continuation of such insensitivity later precipitated the tax revolt led by Sham Cham of Locontareth.

The town of Babaroth stood a little to the north of the Pig River. It stands there no longer, for the region in question was afflicted by a severe earthquake last year, and by all accounts the town has been entirely destroyed.

Still, when Witchlord and Weaponmaster found themselves as masters of opposing armies, Babaroth was still standing, and serves as a convenient landmark for the action. Let it be noted, however, that the town could not be seen from the battlefield, nor the battlefield from the town, for a forest stood between them.

(Is it really necessary to make this point? Unfortunately, it is, for the realms of scholarship are the scene of much unseemly quibbling, as scholars often seek to shred a great and generous intellectual tapestry by pulling on the smallest and most insignificant of its loose threads. Therefore, at the risk of seeming pedantic, let it be made quite clear that this history does not claim that Babaroth was ever situated precisely at the confluence of the Pig and the Yolantarath, and acknowledges, rather, that a diligent surveyor would have found it some 4,000 paces to the north of the Pig, with a goodly stretch of trees between river and town).

When Sham Cham reached the Pig, he found the single bridge across that tributary was held against him by Lord Onosh.

While some geographies claim the Pig to have been bridged in three places, and others declare it to have been bridgeless, the the truth is that the Pig's bridges varied in number according to the destructive force of the floods of each spring thaw. When the Weaponmaster came in arms against the Witchlord, there was only the one here-mentioned bridge within fifty leagues of the confluence of the Pig and the Yolantarath.

The Weaponmaster, who bore himself as proudly as if he were the very leader of the army, sat on horseback by Sham Cham as that revolutionary leader surveyed the Witchlord's forces. The disposition of those enemy forces seemed clear enough. Some baggage wagons were lined up on the southern side of the Pig, with the Witchlord's army encamped in amongst these wagons and in the dark of the woods on the river's northern side.

Sham Cham set guards and scouts to watch his flanks, prepared his own troops to meet any sudden frontal sally by the enemy, and then in a moment of sudden doubt he sent a swift-riding scouting party galloping to the south, just in case his enemy was somehow setting about engulfing his forces in some prodigious encircling move. Then the bold and brave Sham Cham sent forth his mother-in- law to demand the Witchlord's surrender.

Sham Cham's mother-in-law had a tongue so formidable that the revolutionary leader was sure its scourging effect would provoke her butchery. However, to Sham Cham's disappointment, his mother- in-law returned from her dealings with no more damage than the besmirchment of her boots by a trifling amount of horse dung; and she advised Sham Cham (and seemed to derive some considerable pleasure from imparting the advice) that the Witchlord had sworn to personally castrate him, then to bugger him with a bayonet.

"A bayonet?" said Sham Cham, who had never heard of this weapon. "What is a bayonet?"

"A kind of dog trained for the purpose of rape," said his mother-in-law, who never admitted ignorance on any subject.

"No, my lord," said Sken-Pitilkin, who in company with Pelagius Zozimus was attending on this council, and who in the daring of his scholarship was prepared to prosecute the cause of truth even in the face of someone's mother-in-law. "A bayonet is not a dog. Rather, a bayonet is a species of detachable knife sometimes found attached to a crossbow. It has a blade triangular in section, nicely designed for -

"

"A knife, is it?" said Sham Cham. "Very well. If the thing be built for buggering, then let the Witchlord prosecute it to its purpose. I will happily accept that as the penalty of failure. But I have no thought to fail. Since the Witchlord will not surrender, we must perforce smash through his army. Smash, storm, shatter, seize the bridge, then push through the forest to Babaroth."

"In this matter, my lord," said Pelagius Zozimus, somewhat disturbed by Sham Cham's briskness, "performance may not be as easy as speech."

Zozimus had long fancied himself a military expert of sorts, and hence was quicker to put forward his opinion than was Sken-Pitilkin, who ever preferred the conquest of the irregular verbs to any elaborate schemes for the bloodying of bayonets and the heaping up of the dead. However, despite his scholarly proclivities, the sagacious Sken-Pitilkin was far from innocent of the studious organization of institutionalized bloodshed; and, though Sken-Pitilkin ever believed that the proper place for a cook is in the kitchen, he was inclined on this occasion to believe that the slug-chef Zozimus had a keener apprehension of military difficulty than did the revolutionary leader from Locontareth.