The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children (16 page)

. . . . . . . [Lions, leopards, lynxes, panthers] bleating goat as bait bait of beef lungs. . . .

. . . . . . . . . loved he loved to chew the meat of all creatures: of bears and boars of weasels and all sorts of birds: sparrows, hawks, robins, magpies and storks. The need for meat. The need need man’s need for meat blood spurting fountain in screams of ape meat bush lizard chimpanzee bush meat. Two rows of white teeth tear. Bush meat wild cat creatures roasted ribs flesh half-burnt half-raw meat bush plucking out elephants’ embryos eye of jackal stewing pot of hippopotamus rip and dig through pain-bright crimson. He wished to net up the fish from the sea and have dead birds rain from the sky. . . . . . . Sometimes he would, in imitation of the Sioux Indians, don a wolf or other animal skin
robe, and quietly sneak up on an animal and kill it kill slaughterous obsession dress in pastels pink gown hose kill snatch life power fire guns cut with knife or skewer with harpoon big fish flying bird then those who slither land those live in prairies those meadows see them crumple under gunblasts collapse down dead lovely kill slaughterous flowers perfume of slaughter music-glory of hunt with bow and arrow he could kill. In Australia he hunted like a bushman, dipping his arrows in beetle poison, euphorbia, snake venom or the reddish-yellow caterpillar called ngwa, prepared into a cardiotoxic poison looking like currant jelly.

IX.

October. Emma stood on the lawn. Sad eyes. She wore a velvet gown. An apple was balanced on her head.

“
Stand still!” Caernarvon cried. “We don’t want to miss now, do we?”

“
Yes, dear. I am trying to stay very still.”

He held up the Belgian breechloading needlefire target pistol, a Montigny & Fusnot, grasped tight the fluted grip and took aim. Squeeze trigger. PAN!

The gun went off; woman fell to ground.

“
Damned lousy shot!” Caernarvon growled.

The apple was undamaged, but Emma had a bullet in her skull. Her soul flew out from her body. It hovered nearby for a moment, observing the form in which she had lived, and the husband with whom she had bedded, and then rushed off to the nearby forest where two deer were rutting. The buck’s neck was swollen with lust. Having mounted the creature’s semen, the soul of Emma entered the hot womb of the oestrous doe. There she stayed warm throughout the winter and later, in June of the following year, was reborn as a fawn. She lived in the forest, eating its grasses, drinking from its cool, melodious brooks, and grew strong and beautiful.

Caernarvon came. Armed as always. In search of meat. She was grazing, chewing grass. When she lifted her head the rifle flashed. The hind fell to the ground, a ball through its brain. Caernarvon approached the downed animal. He removed his coat and rolled up his sleeves. After turning the carcass over on its back with the rump lower than the shoulders, he pulled out his knife and cut the animal’s throat, bled it. Then, cutting through the hide, he opened up the body cavity and cut out the lungs and the tender heart. He skinned it while the flesh was still warm and that night enjoyed the venison.

X.

“
. . . So there was nothing for it but to eat him,” Jefferies continued, with a gesture of manly resignation. “Nastiest damned dinner I ever did try.”

“
That is what you get for eating a Frenchy,” Caernarvon said from behind the smoke of his cigar. “I would rather have one good stout Englishman in my larder than a dozen Frenchmen.”

Jefferies smiled thinly. After three arduous years in the deepest jungles of South America, he could not help but hope for a bit more respect when retiring to his gentlemen’s club for a bit of sanitary relaxation.

The waiter came with a tray on which was set a decanter of whisky and glasses. It was Lieutenant–Colonel Reginald Wroth, of the Royal Marines, who did the honours and handed the drinks around.

Jefferies shrugged his shoulders. “Oh, come now,” he said. “God created all men alike—and I would think to eat one is as unpleasant as the next.”

“
One as unpleasant as the next? Why, not in the least. A good piece of English meat is never unpleasant. . . . It was when I was stationed in Egypt, under Sir Garnet Wolseley, that I first tried it. . . . A number of us were stationed at a desert outpost between Qasr al-Farafirah and Sitrah. . . . Though at the time I am actually speaking of, we were only two,—myself and a young corporal by the name of Tub. . . . The rest of the battalion had had some bad luck. . . . Russian roulette and all that sort of thing. . . . Damned game was all the rage back then and I was fortunate enough to routinely come up the winner. . . . The corporal was there because his religious obligations had not permitted him to indulge in games of chance.”

“
Sounds like a wearisome fellow,” a voice murmured from the depths of an armchair.

“
Yes,” added Wroth, “I remember when I was stationed in India back in ’92, we used to play Russian roulette with fireworks—seeing who could hold the things in their mouths till the fuse ran shortest, and it was rather fine fun.”

Caernarvon smirked with a hint of disdain, took a drink of his whisky and continued.

“
Well, the corporal was not what you would call lively company, but he was a good enough sort with a rifle. . . . When the rebels came I believe he shot the heads off a solid six brace. Disposed of them in a workmanlike manner we did. . . . A spirited enough little party we were having, shooting them from the fortification walls, and I believe we could have kept it up all summer if we had not unfortunately run out of provisions.”

“
Didn’t you have any biscuits?”

“
None.”

“
Well, that is bloody criminal. It is the army’s obligation to provide——”

“
Oh, settle down will you! Let’s not start hearing any sniping of that sort.”

“
Yes,” added Jefferies calmly. “I would like to hear the rest of the Captain’s little tale.”

“
Well, to cut a long story short—I am a man who needs meat. We had eaten every rat in the place, and there were only two pieces of flesh left: myself and Tub. ‘Flip for it will you?’ I said;—but he insisted that he would not gamble. So be it. I sawed off his arm with my clasp knife and cauterised the wound with a flaming stick. The limb I roasted over the fire, seasoning it with a little gunpowder. I’ll be damned if it wasn’t the finest piece of flesh I had eaten since I disembarked at Alexandria. . . . Tub admittedly was a bit pale while dining, and did not seem to relish the meal as well as myself.”

XI.

The animals knew that he was their enemy. Elephant mothers cursed him for slaughtering their children and, when he approached, even wolves, with their keen sense of smell, fled away in fear. The serpents often considered how best they might assassinate him. Cobras were sent to plunge their fangs into his thigh, and huge boas to strangle him, but he, like some great king, always seemed to be able to foil their plots.

Rattlesnake.
He smashed my brother’s skull in with a stick.

Tiger.
He is strong and difficult to kill. He shoots my kin and strips us of our skins.

Grouse.
When he comes my sisters tremble. I tell them to keep still, but in panic they fly off and come falling to the earth, soft bloodied balls.

Rattlesnake.
. . . If I could shoot him full of venom . . .

Tiger.
. . . If I could shred him with my claws . . .

Elephant.
My tusks could gore him.

Grouse.
My grandfather told me that man is most difficult to kill, even for condor or eagle, and prophesied ten-million massacres for our kind.

XII.

New Guinea. Incessant rain. He was there to hunt the tree kangaroo. Bang bang hunting wet but good. And then they came. Some with bone through nose. They lashed him to a pole and carried him off, horizontally, back to their village. Women dressed in banana leaves. The children played with him, jabbed him with sharp sticks, threw stones. The chief wore a necklace of seashells about his throat. When the weather cleared time to eat.

Caernarvon stood upright, naked in the pot, the water now heating from the flames beneath. Beating of drums. Some natives danced monotonously around him, bodies glistening with sweat. Others looked on, tongues dangling from hunger-wet mouths. They ate away his flesh comma
gnawed his bones period the chief ate out his brains like a giant poached egg comma while his daughters were given the hands which were very choice to eat period he threw the innards the liver etc. to his vassals comma as one might scraps to a dog three dots and then the muscular parts of his body were given to the village boys so that they could absorb his power.

XIII.

There were different hells. Some were small, no larger than suitcases, and within were crammed tens of thousands of beings, crushed together in a horrible vortex of claustrophobia. Others were vast, millions of miles high and millions wide, their floors covered with razor-sharp blades and walls made of white-hot flame. There were hells in all shapes, some triangular, some in the shape of clovers. Maze-like, hells within hells, a chaos of stairways and tunnels. There were a seemingly infinite number of them, stacked up, jammed together.

Now we see: Emma, as shimmering being. She holds sword aloft. Below her a black shadow, something like an empty black bag. It is Caernarvon. He is descending.

He treads through fiery crimson, past lakes of pain and jungles of sharp shards and spines; now wades through streams of blood and rivers of pus, the banks of which are thick with strands of string-like worms and thickets of maggots. The captain transformed, jaws huge,
bristling with aciform fangs and dripping death, slavering blood. His moustaches long shaggy tendrils and his belly, protruding from the jacket of his uniform, a second gaping maw. The sinners, the bad priests, the rich, line up before him: and with a huge sledge hammer he pounds in their skulls, drinks their brains like oysters, rips out their intestines and gorges himself. Some, terrified, manage to scurry away, and these he pursues with an immense meat cleaver, scarcely smaller than himself, which he sends swinging into their backs, splitting his victims down the middle.

A Murderer
(as his skull is cracked like a nut). Hhhhhaaaagggghhhhh!

A Pair of Devils
(dancing off to one side). Pè pèèèèèèè pèèèèèèè!

A ball of stinking jelly rolls in from behind a fountain of flame. It is Roscommon. We can see his face: recognisable though massively distorted features. Caernarvon gurgles with glee. It is always pleasant to meet an old acquaintance when abroad. He reveals a pair of red-hot iron tongs and with these proceeds to pull out Roscommon’s tongue. He now dips him into sauce before biting off his head.

[
Exeunt
.

Molten Rage

I.

Smelted. Molten carrion crucible whirring sound. The machine moved the ladle, an enormous metal bucket, forward on the end of a chain. They guided it with their hands.

“
Stop!” the foreman cried.

Two rows of large, cylindrical moulds were lined up on the floor.

Massimo was short, with broad shoulders, a thick neck and the eyes of a villain. He had previously worked at an industrial foundry where they made grey and ductile iron castings, but had been fired;—had often arrived late; insubordination to the tune of alumino-silicates and dedusted stuccos.

Now he worked at Fonderia Artistica Bausani.

He loved to see it as it poured. Copper, 10% tin, trace of zinc. They tipped the ladle. Hot lucent orange mud flowed into the opening of a cylindrical block, filling it until its blazing tongue drooled over the top.

They moved from one to the next, down the line, filling them with the liquid bronze.

“
I like fat women.”

“
The capitalist can live longer without the worker than the worker can live without the capitalist.”

“
The bodies of those beasts, whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest for sin, are burned without the camp,” said Ugo, the patina man.

Each one spoke his own thoughts, without paying the least attention to what the others had to say.

At 6:30 the work was over.

Massimo got in his car, started the engine and drove.

The foundry was located in one of the ugliest areas in the world—on the outskirts of Milan. Huge factories and industrial complexes dominated the landscape, filled the air with an almost unbearable stink. The roads were strewn with nests of small billboards, the skyline perforated by the hooked necks of machinery cranes. Huge smokestacks rose up into the cement-coloured sky and new, shoddily constructed buildings sprang up from great furrows of upturned earth.

*

It was Friday. He did not want to go back to the lonely squalor of his apartment, so toward the city centre; manipulated his little vehicle through the oozing sludge of traffic: trucks roared by like angry rhinos, coughing out clouds of black diesel smoke, scooters buzzing around them like flies, wind inflated the shirt of a young man, streets a river of strange monsters—great engines encased in husks of metal—slobbering black oil over the corrupt pavement and filling the air with their shrieks. Indeed, the entire human race seemed enslaved by an insatiable mechanical hunger—men willing to kill, not only each other, but babies, old men and women, in order to feed these creatures in whose bellies they perched like half-digested herring.