The Triple Goddess (25 page)

All members of the wind family were present and correct: fifes, flutes, piccolos, clarinets, oboes and the English horn [not cor anglais], bassoons, and saxophones. There were a dozen bagpipe players, and the same number of accordions. An organ was connected to an electrical cable run from an alcohol-powered generator.

The percussion department included everything that was designed to make a distinctive sound when
blown, cracked, clashed, bashed, clacked, rubbed, scraped, shaken or swung, or when struck with a mallet or stick or the fists.
There were side-, snare-, and bass, and bongo drums, and tom-toms,
and a fearsome array of timpani or kettledrums. There were
triangles, gongs, whips, tubular and other bells, klaxons, slide- or swanee whistles, and kazoos. In addition to a carillon (the heaviest of musical instruments), there were castanets, a celesta, chimes, cymbals, a glockenspiel, a xylophone, güiros, maracas, marimbas, rattles, tabors, tambourines, and wood blocks.

At the sight, if not necessarily the sound of the latter instruments, James Blades, the famous percussionist, had he not already died and gone to Heaven, would have done so prematurely.

After much crashing about and cursing as it got organized, the musical battery was ready to hit the airwaves. The Marrow Splungers, meanwhile, looked on and pretended that their Commander-in-Chief did not have bats in his belfry. (In fact, bats, Chiroptera by the hundred, were exactly what Jas. had in mind.) The King pursed his lips and blew until his cheeks bulged bigger than the bullfrog performing features of the famous trumpet player Dizzy Gillespie; and the high-pitched whine that he produced was so piercing that people clapped their hands to their ears.

Bliss it was to the nonplussed crowd when the sound ended, but the sound was still in everyone’s head and blood trickled from a few eardrums.

After being received by the King, and kneeling to kiss his hand, the musical director and conductor of
The Fiddlers Three
withdrew to mount a podium, where he raised a baton that was two feet long and fluorescent green. To warm up and get the attention of those atop the White tower, he brought the band into an ironic rendition of John Philip Sousa’s
At the King’s Court
.

What those aloft did not at first notice was that the musicians had put on enclosed headphones—
Bose QuietComfort 3’s—
which they were carrying like wartime gasmasks in pouches at their sides. Runners were
distributing pairs of the headgear to all those in the offensive groups, and p
ageboys doing the same to the courtiers and members of the royal household.

The headphones were of the noise-cancelling kind designed to block out all sound; for as James handsomely acknowledged, sometimes the King’s Musick, especially the timbre of the avant-garde (stet) Royal Plant Music that he composed himself, was too emotional for his subjects to listen to without breaking down, especially
when it was played at volume levels exceeding 80 dbSPL.

The Lord Chamberlain brought the King his own custom-designed set of the larger
Bose QuietComfort 15 headphone
—Jugs could only take so much of the American Sousa—the ear-cushions of which were made from the skins of gourds from the royal gardens, stuffed with pith from the giant reed
Arundo donax
.

The observant sun, sensing that something noisy was in the offing, took the precaution of summoning two
fluffy cumulus clouds to attend him on either side.

The defenders, who had ceased their activities in order to mock when the music broke out began to lose their sense of humour after the third repeat.

When a tuba player succumbed to an arrow shot by Arbella herself, Jugs lost it. His force was now down nine. ‘We want that woman fed to our giant begonias!’ he screamed, shaking his fist at her. To maintain the level of decibels, a replacement player hurried onto the field blowing into his own mouthpiece to warm it up.

Added the King portentously, ‘Bring...on...the singers!’

A line of disgruntled-looking operatic stars trooped onto the scene. Summoned to attend His Majesty, they had had to cancel their performance at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, that evening and forfeit their fees.

Each of the famous artists was large of girth. The dewlapped soprano, Fatima Mount, who came out bearing a box of cream-filled pastries and wearing more, was heavy enough to cause a list in an ocean-going liner when she turned over in her bunk. The mezzo had been filled from a tap that someone had forgotten to turn off. The tuxedoed hot-air balloon of a tenor, Encoro Gravapotti, was straining so hard to slip his moorings that the sun feared for an unscheduled eclipse.

There was hope for the bass: although he did not wear his two hundred and fifty pounds lightly, if he laid off fatty foods and ran round himself ten times a day for a month, he might save a regional opera house the cost of reinforcing the stage for
Boris Godunov
.

But since slenderness is considered prejudicial to loud singing, today the foursome was ideal for Jugs’ purpose, and he listened approvingly as they loosened their vocal cords by singing
The Honoured Dead
in unison with the
Fiddlers
; following which the soprano got her voice, but nothing else, in shape doing the battle-cries for
The Ride of the Valkyries
.

Then it was back to Sousa. During the fourth rendition of
Tally-Ho!
a furry creature flew overhead and dipped its jointed wings to the sovereign before homing in on Ignacio Pesci and, glomming onto his neck with its claws, biting through the skin of his throat with its sharp teeth. It was a giant vampire bat,
D. draculae Morgan
, the leader of many that were to arrive over the ensuing minutes in response to the King’s call to action.

The Neapolitan nasty’s natural colour faded: it was the first of many Procol Harum whiter shades of pale through which he would pass over the next couple of minutes as he failed to dislodge the creature with his scrabbling nails and the blood drained from his jugular vein and coursed onto the ground.

Squadron after squadron of chittering bats arrived. There were so many of them that the caves they lived in were rendered batless and devoid of squeak, their mounds of guano—the source of Jugs’ phaeton fuel—unaugmented. The bats had been promised a good meal, had travelled a long way, and were very hungry. They were accustomed to getting first bite of the King’s executed felons before the flesh was tossed to his pet piranhas, family
Characidae
, subfamily
Serrasalminae
, in the Buck House swimming-pool.

As the other bats shredded the Mediterranean murderer’s clothes to get at the other fleshy parts of his body, the vampires did not say Grace; nor did they wait until everyone had been served, make polite conversation between bites, and wipe their mouths with napkins. They had no use for cutlery, or palate-cleansing sorbet, and unlike Oliver Twist they did not say Please when they wanted more. They had not heard of the apophthegm “Enough is as good as a feast”, and if they had they would have strongly disagreed.

One strangulated ‘Mamma mia!’ later, Pesci was dead. The score was now nine-one, and a very big “one” it was.

‘Stonking!’, ejaculated His Majesty. ‘Brill!’

Arbella of the White tower was stricken at the loss of her hatchet and stiletto man. But although boiling oil and arrows were useless as a defence against so many of these winged bloodsuckers, unfortunately for the bats, as familiar as they were with the blood groups of A, B, AB and O, and Rhesus Positive and Negative, Ignacio Pesci had been in a haematological category of his own owing to the high concentration of sulphur-rich
Allium sativum
—garlic—in his system. Pesci used to chew raw bulbs of the stuff and breathe into the faces of his victims as he tortured them.

And now, as instead of the honey-like blood that to them tasted much sweeter than the wine celebrated in the song by Bobby Scott and Ric Marlow, and the vampire bats recognized the to-them abhorrent flavour of the only substance to which they were violently allergic, garlic, they came over queasy and departed en masse in as great a haste as they had arrived.

King James was delighted by the success of his beau strategem, or to be PC his jolly good wheeze, which considerably improved morale on the royalist side. A
fter consulting
the sun, who was about to retreat behind a cloud and sulk because he was being ignored but cheered up at being acknowledged, if only to establish the time, and elected to remain onstage, Jugs switched on the digital radio in his headphones and took a quick break to tune into
a BBC Radio 4 interview with the celebrated gardener Percy Thrower.

Then, in a dramatic change of mood, after a tender rendition of
Bonnie Annie Laurie
to honour the King’s Scottish roots or rhizomes, the band switched to an arrangement by James himself—he fancied himself a veritable Frederick the Great of Prussia as a writer of music—of Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
, played inside-out with a wailing vocal accompaniment.

As a composer
manqué
who had been diverted by divinity, His Royal Highness alternately gnawed and
waved a desensitized carrot in un-
time to the music, pleased that his work should be getting public attention. Had they been in a concert hall it would have been enough to bring the house down.

The conductor redoubled his arm-waving and increased the tempo as the singers competed with each other to make themselves heard in a
pièce de non-résistance
(aargh!) by Karlheinz Stockhausen, the ground- and window-breaking
composer of electronic and aleatory or controlled chance serial and spatial music, which the King had
rewritten backwards with repeats
da capo al fine ad nauseam
to be played at a
decibel level of 115 dbSPL, i.e. louder than the average rock concert.

By now word of what was occurring in London EC3 was being broadcast live via the media, and people were streaming out of the Monument and Tower Hill tube stations, and piling off buses, in hope of witnessing the event.

Amongst them was the music critic for
The Spectator
, a staunch monarchist who wet himself with enthusiasm as he listened to the King’s improvements upon Stravinsky, and Stockhausen, and called his editor on his mobile pleading for an extra five thousand words allocation of space for a puff article that he would supply in addition to his weekly review; and for a gofer to be sent with a three-pack of cotton Y-fronts from Marks & Spencer, so that he could nip behind the wall of a tent and change his underwear, and in the event the bladder mishap repeated itself, without missing a beat.

Richer Sounds on London Bridge was doing a frantic trade in headphones, and the manager was calling for as many extra pairs as possible to be brought in immediately from the other stores round the city.

The band’s non-stop performing began to take its toll: musicians swayed and collapsed from exhaustion and heat—the sun, having decided to stay at his zenith so as to get the best view, was getting hotter by the minute with excitement—and had to be replaced by others from
the Royal College of Music
who had been doing the musical equivalent of champing at the bit by blowing into mouthpieces, sucking on reeds, rosining bows, and tuning or untuning their instruments. As enthusiastic as they were, one by one they too were compelled to retire, with
embouchures
cracked,
lungs heaving, arms aching, and
hands blistered
. Some had to be revived at the aid station that had been set up in one of the tents.

Three full days and three full nights this went on around the clock. In vain did the Tower’s occupants try to harpoon anyone who ventured too close to the walls with spears to which rope had been attached, so that they might be hauled up and stripped of their headphones. In vain did they slingshot banknotes wrapped around stones at their tormentors, in an attempt to bribe them to stop, or dispatch them aural prophylactic protection; and messages offering them anything, from money and possessions to their sisters’ flesh, if they were to lay down their sonic arms.

Nothing was effective in blocking the awful noise. Earplugs and candle wax were of no use; nor was submerging themselves in baths and breathing through straws; nor was banging pots and pans together; nor was sandwiching themselves in mattresses or wrapping towels round their heads; nor was
whistling or hooting through their fists or shouting on the theory that creating a barrier of friendly noise might bring relief; nor was
turning stereos up to maximum volume, or
tuning radio
receivers to so-called easy-listening programs on BBC Radio 2 or Classic FM podcasts of
Smooth Classics at Seven
; nor was
trying to meditate or imagine that the royal racket was beautiful and that they could not hear enough of it.

When the prisoners, as they now regarded themselves, retreated to shut themselves in the thickest-walled rooms on the other side of the Tower, it was as if they were still outside.
Everything
failed utterly to
overcome
the instrumental and vocal assault, or reduce the cacophony, which seemed no longer to be coming from outside but from within their heads.

Arbella and her valiant but now impotent Italian importees crammed padded helmets from the armoury on their heads. They donned casques, heaulms, bascinets,
cervellaires
, barbutes, sallets, armutes, sugarloafs, and
chapels de fer…
all to no avail. Oh! that there were still barrels of gunpowder at the Tower, or the saltpetre, sulphur, and charcoal with which to make it; and cannon on the roof of the White tower, which could be used to requite Jugs’ homage to his ancestor James I’s demonological savvy with a back-at-you rendition of the 1812 Overture...or deafen themselves in the process.