Saga Of The European King

The King, Axe Axewound and the thousands of animals that were following them around reached the city of Lamanai. They had battled several Viking patrols that day and, although the King’s rocket-hands made very good weapons in battle, he had been stabbed a few times in the fracas, as he lacked the protection of his favourite suit of armour, his enchanted robes, his glittery rings that he had looted off a giant Spaniard, his golden girdle of ambiguous usefulness, his magical earring, his speed-boosting bracelet and his boots that reflected electricity. The King was wounded and bleeding and needed a good night’s sleep to heal up. He refused help from Axe’s healer animals because he thought they were dirty.

They camped out on the outskirts of the city, away from the road. They were discovered by another Viking patrol in the middle of the night, but Axe was on top of it. When he returned to the campsite, bloody and panting, the King yawned and complained that he’d never get back to sleep at this point and so Axe might as well finish his story. The King was pretty interested to know how Axe and his animal friends got from the Natural Philosophy Airship to the southern continent of the United States. Axe folded his flaming axe back into a tent, climbed inside with the King, caught his breath and finished his story.

A heavily-armoured Natural Philosopher with a huge spring-loaded scalpel had borne down upon them with a scream. Axe Axewound had shouted out his sort-of pithy catchphrase and he and all his animal friends jumped at him. The heavily-armoured Natural Philosopher had some tricky moves and it was hard to jump over him, but Axe hacked him into bloody pieces fairly easily. With the heavily-armoured Natural Philosopher’s death, the invincible glass shields shattered and all of the old, ugly Natural Philosophers who had been watching suddenly changed their tune and got all scared. Axe’s axe flared dramatically. He howled right there and then, which was pretty terrifying, even to men of Natural Philosophy. Fire and howling animal-men will always be scary. He bit through the leather straps that were holding his girlfriend down and barked commands at his animal friends as he sniffed her all over and plunged his horrifying, glistening werewolf phallus into her soft flesh.

“Hunt them down! Every one of them! They are against Nature!” snarled Axe Axewound to his animal friends. He was making it up as he went along, but he was pretty sure that he was on the side of Nature and that things like mechanical insects and stuff that could fly were not natural. It was pretty poetic, when he came to think about it. The massive crowd of his animal friends split apart. Wolves, butterflies, tanukis, bears, horses, cats, dogs, birds, gnomes, mushroom people and every kind of rodent and insect went spilling this way and that, breaking up into little groups in order to hunt down a particular fleeing gentleman that they had picked out from the panicking mess. He finished up with his girlfriend, coughed softly, then added, “But leave Tchaikovsky to me!” The deadly woodland plague flew, galloped, prowled, crawled and leapt to its dreadful task.

Axe Axewound then breathed in deeply. He closed his eyes and searched the auditorium with his nose. Each Natural Philosopher was puffing out a cloud of panic pheromones and adrenaline that made it difficult to pinpoint any one individual, but Axe could still smell Dr. Tchaikovsky’s manic laughter. He was running through one of the emergency exits towards the escape rockets, bumping aside those with less fatty inertia than he, laughing all the way. He really was a profoundly strange man. None of the other Natural Philosophers that were running for their lives thought any of this was funny. They had gone into that auditorium with the intent to study a rare and beautiful marvel of Nature. With the knowledge they would have gained, they would have a better understanding of the world in which they lived, which they would learnedly disseminate to the public, combating ignorance and fuelling cultural and intellectual growth. Now they were going to get killed by an infernal rape-beast and its attendant cloud of unintelligent, shrieking murder. It didn’t seem fair or funny or poetic at all. If Dr. Tchaikovsky had only listened to the delegation of astronomers from Islamaland that they had hosted there on the airship some years previously, he could have used clay pots full of acid to power his mechanical creatures. But no, he had insisted on using woodland creatures and look at where it had landed everyone. If he’d used those pots, then the Present Day would probably be full of really cool, really advanced robots that can fetch your groceries for you and clean your house twice a week without drinking all of the tea. Everyone would be better off.

The Natural Philosphers didn’t really have much time to articulate this, however, as they fell foul to the rampaging beasts that had been intent on revenging themselves upon any manifestation of man since they’d been crammed inside a robotic crab or piranha or clam or something and made to hang around various locales, being annoying to visitors. And so the greatest minds in Medieval Europe were stung, gored, kicked, ripped, torn, toyed with, bitten, disembowelled and eaten in short measure. Even those that made it to the escape rockets were intercepted by swathes of birds, bats, bees and novelty flighted mammals. Dr. Tchaikovsky couldn’t even make it to an escape rocket. The corridors leading the hanger were impenetrable columns of gore, bone and viscera. He felt his mind snap, and then the unavoidable scent of human flesh roasting as a flaming axe cuts through piles of bodies hit his nostrils. He tripped over his own fat, unmanageable thighs and fell face-first into a puddle of lightly simmering fat and blood. He lifted his head to cry out for help, but his magnificent moustache was sodden with the insides of his colleagues and all he could do was add to the puddle with his vomit.

He waved his stubby arms around so as to roll himself over to his back. He was not aware that his bowels had evacuated and that was rolling around in his own seepage. All he could focus on was the approaching vision in black and the hellish cloak of flame that went before it. Three shapes, one that loped, one that slunk and one that fluttered, orbited the grim centre of Dr. Tchaikovsky’s new reality. Axe Axewound didn’t say anything before he dropped to all fours and chewed Dr. Tchaikovsky’s feet off. Tchaikovsky tried in his mind to reason with the beast, but no words would form in his mouth.

His belly full and the murderous business done, Axe Axewound scoured the length and breadth of the airship, gathering up the notes, documents, equipment and mechanisms that formed the bedrock of Medieval Natural Philosophy. He loaded everything he could find into an escape rocket and launched it all into the ocean. With this done, he tiptoed through the mangled bodies and sleeping animals and made his way to the engine room of the airship. He intended to destroy the craft utterly. He wasn’t thinking very clearly. He was all caught up in the poetic justice of Nature conquering Man, and how was chewing over the concept of being the embodiment of both these forces and reasoning that it was probably up to him to strike a balance, or something. Also, he’d been in enough airships that exploded after he’d killed everyone on board to think that it was a pretty standard process that just needed some helping along in this case. When he entered the engine room with his axe blazing fiercely, he found an old lion sitting in the middle of the room, waiting for him.

“You mustn’t destroy this craft, Prince Axewound,” said Trappy. “Our King is far away, trapped in another land. A land that is outside the loving embrace of Europe.”
“Who are you, old lion? How did you get here? I might kill you with my axe, you know.” Said Axe casually. Trappy just chuckled softly. It is incredibly difficult for a lion to chuckle, so he only did that on very special occasions.
“Your King is my King, Prince Axewound. He has spoken of me many times. I am Trappy, and every day I wait patiently for my King to join me in Heaven so that we can hang out together once more.” Said Trappy. Axe Axewound gasped. The King had good things to say about everyone, even gypsies, but most of all he said good things about his old friend Trappy, the lion. Axe Axewound had never met Trappy, as he was off doing stuff in Celtland concerning his family and his evil brother at that time, but he had heard a lot about him.
“Prince Axewound, I have configured the gears in this airship to take you directly to our King. Do not interfere with them. There is a great battle approaching, Prince Axewound. The King must fight in it, and so must you. It will be the hardest battle of your life. It will arrive to you in only a few moons. You must be by our King’s side by then.” Axe Axewound took this in. “I must go.” Said Trappy, and vanished.

Axe Axewound did not destroy the Natural Philosophy Community’s airship. He instead prepared himself and his animal friends for a long voyage. With the help of the larger animals, he gathered up all of the human remains left over from the massacre and stored them in the refrigeration chambers they had on board for doing Natural Philosophy with cold things. Not all of the bodies would fit in the refrigeration chambers, so he amassed a stock of salt from the laboratories and workshops and salted the meat so as to better preserve it. He knew about preserving food in this manner because every person in Medieval Europe knew how important it was to keep food around for a long time. There was a botanical garden on the airship, too, so the herbivores had something to nibble on and the mushroom people had something to infest, so long as he remembered to keep things watered. The trip was fairly long and Axe Axewound spent much of the time organising parties. They had to be quite lean parties, but they kept everyone socialising and made sure that the animals didn’t get bored or angry. He remembered to water the plants in the garden quite often and there were very few casualties all round.

Their cruise came to an abrupt end, however, when the airship was shot out of the sky by the President Of The United States. They crashed in the Badlands and they all had to walk the rest of way to find the King.
“I bet a lot happened on that walk!” said the King, back in the present.
“Not really,” said Axe Axewound, licking his lips. “We became cowboys at one point.”
There was a period of silence.
“When we meet Erik Rage-Eater!, we’re going to have the hardest fight of our lives.” Whispered Axe Axewound. “Trappy said so.”
“Hopefully, it won’t come to that.” Said the King. There was sadness in his eyes. He rolled over.
“I shall stand by your side, my King. My animal friends shall fight with me. No force is a match for our numbers and our might.” Said Axe. The King rolled over again and looked at Axe Axewound straight in the eyes. Axe Axewound, the savage beast, the destroyer of Medieval Science, was frozen by that gaze. The King could have strangled him and Axe would have been powerless to resist so long as those eyes were fixed on his.

“Thank you.” Said the King. “You have faced much. I trust you.”

Axe Axewound’s heart sang.

End Of Chapter 62