Saga Of The European King

Commander Flightfeather was having a miserable time. He'd been pretty good at running Brussels, the Capital City of Europe, since he was a nice guy and thought of others. The King had been wise, like always, to leave him in charge.

Europe's new friends, the birds, lived on every rooftop and steeple and their numbers ever grew. Bird scientists were constantly coming up with new forms and colours that bird-children could be incarnated into, and whenever a new form was made public there was a big celebration and everyone got drunk - but not too much. Gadfly and Formation, the leaders of the birds, sat with Flightfeather on The Big Important Council Of Europe and helped to tend to the hundreds of things that needed doing in Europe every day. When the King had still been around, The Big Important Council Of Europe didn't do much except listen to what he had to say and then go away and do it. But since the King had been away, the Council had become kind of unruly and argumentative. Sometimes there were disagreements and the meetings would go on for simply ages. Everyone disagreed with Commander Flightfeather on just about everything. If he suggested that the military service age be lowered to ten (which was really quite old by bird standards and the garrisons were dangerously understocked), some Minister or a Baron would say that that wouldn’t do. If he put forward the motion that would extend the number of slices of bread that must be swallowed in the Ordeal of Bread to two slices instead of the traditional one slice, then some Lord or High Protector would find something wrong with that, too. It wasn’t fair. The King had named him as the custodian of Europe and he was sure that he knew what was best for everyone and that the King was sure of it too.

Making things worse for poor Commander Flightfeather was the duo of Jacob Hillmounter and Timothy Clashradish. They had barged into Brussels some time previously with a thousand men or so tagging along behind them, declared that the King had sent them to watch over Europe until his return and then just went and moved into Laeken Palace and started shouting orders at people until they got the idea. The royal physicians ascertained that Jacob and Timothy were of a very high level, which gave credit to their boasts of having decimated an army of the undead on the dark fields of Romania. Because the undead were very difficult to fight and yielded a lot of experience points when defeated, Timothy and Jacob were actually on a higher level than Commander Flightfeather himself, who hadn't been out adventuring in a number of years. Monsters had been easier to kill back in his day.

Timothy and Jacob instantly antagonised Commander Flightfeather through a number of very rude actions: they rearranged the furniture in the Castle, spent ages in the bathroom in the morning (they always went in straight after each other, no matter what the queue order was), demanded that the cooks prepare horrid army food all the time, wore their big, dirty outdoor boots in the living room, stayed up far too late, often left the Castle without saying 'goodbye' or telling him where they were going, got their laundry mixed up with everyone else's and never doing the washing up. Now Commander Flightfeather was a nice guy, so he didn't want to complain too much or too loudly about any of this. He didn't like to be the one to cast the first stone. He knew that occasionally he himself would leave the cap off the toothpaste or forget to bring the pegs in off the washing line (causing the springs to rust), so he let it all slide. But what he really could not stand was the way they behaved at the Council meetings.

Yes, they'd got themselves seats on The Big Important Council Of Europe very quickly. They'd grown quite popular with the people and the aristocrats alike. The town criers said that Timothy and Jacob had that 'can-do' spirit and devil-may-care charm that the King so exemplified. People missed the King, you see, and Timothy and Jacob had been in direct contact with the King more recently than anyone else in Europe. Timothy and Jacob brought this fact up a lot. I mean, Commander Flightfeather was nice and all, and the people were all being nice to birds from now on, but it need not be said that birds shit EVERYWHERE. The people of Europe asked themselves if they really needed a custodian who would poo all over the place. It seemed to suddenly be a very important issue to them.

So at every meeting of the Council, Jacob and Timothy got a bigger say than they had got in the last one and Commander Flightfeather could set fewer laws and move fewer concentrations of troops around and oversee fewer new taxation regulations with each passing week. It all came to a head in one fateful meeting where it seemed like everyone on the Council was lobbying for something really big and expensive and getting really unreasonable about it. It seemed like they were all taking it out on Commander Flightfeather.
All he wanted was to get the funds and the manpower build a statue of the King. The statue would be erected at the main gate of Brussels – right at the spot where the King had faced the gypsy hordes way back in Chapter 18. The statue would be thirty feet high from base to pinnacle and take the form of the King strangling a gypsy. Spittle would erupt from the gypsy's throat on the stroke of every half-hour. This spittle would be pumped through a trough that was often spat in by the gate guards. At one point, the proposal had been for a statue of Roxy Tripfoot in the moment of her halting the oncoming gypsy horde by declaring her allegiance to the King, since there were already statues of the King or the King's forebears all over Brussels. This proposal was beat down, however, because the remnant of Mechanicus' Engineering Corps could not figure out a way for the statue of Roxy to spurt anything out on the stroke of every half hour. Besides, the Sculptor's Guild said that statues of girls were too hard to do. It wasn't much to ask. Statues had been built before. They could rustle up some bits and pieces to trade to Islamaland in exchange for the materials and there you go. But suddenly everyone in the room wanted that same money and manpower for some damn thing that wasn't even important.

The Church, for instance. Commander Flightfeather still wasn't exactly clear on what it was the Church did. He knew that Priests were involved and that a Priest was a kind of low-key wizard who specialised in buffs and could be dual-classed into a fighter and were generally pretty useful to have around, but he didn't understand why the Church needed another new Cathedral built. They said that they had invented a new kind of architecture and needed to hire out a quarry and get a whole squadron of smiths and glassblowers to make a several huge arrays of stained-glass windows depicting the King and his Adventure Friends standing beneath a gigantic image of the King's father's face. Commander Flightfeather, incidentally, was not to be featured alongside the King's Adventure Friends, since Colonel Glowfist's image would now take up two windows. The cost of this was far in excess of the statue that Commander Flightfeather wanted and the Church wanted all the money and labour that Commander Flightfeather had in his power to give.
The trade unions, on the other hand, wanted to fund a war against the banking unions, as was their way. Since this would destroy every aspect of Europe's way of life, the representative of the trade unions was shouted down before he could even explain how badly the banks had stiffed them. Plan B, as far as the trade unions were concerned, would be to build a big new conference centre were they and the banks could talk it all over and forge a new relationship based on an entirely new network of corruption and avarice. This conference centre would have to have a lot of floors, working elevators, and mirrors on every wall. The cost of building this would be about equal to that of the cathedral.
The birds, meanwhile, decided that they would need a home base if they were going to keep on living in Europe. This home base would take the form of an aviary and would be situated across the whole of the city of Luxembourg. The birds wanted the people of Luxembourg move somewhere else. They didn't care where. The city would be demolished and turned into a wetlands with plenty of seeds and grasses to munch on. They also would need a sizable portion of land and the employ of the Engineering Corp and ten thousand cats for the development of a new kind of super-cat – one that was loyal and subservient to birds but was disproportionately murderous towards rats, which were an egg-eating blight upon the world and needed to be eliminated. Everyone was kind of stunned at this one but the birds fought quite bitterly for it in any case.
But Timothy and Jacob wanted something else entirely. They wanted nothing less than to restore Europe's depleted army to its former glory and then double it. This would mean the recruitment and the training of one and a half million young men into the military services. The problem was that Europe didn't have a million and a half young men. There weren't as many people back then. Jacob and Timothy had a plan to get around this niggle: they would buy some barbarian tribesmen from the outskirts of the Kingdom Of Sharing. This was shocking and it was expensive. It was European Law to never deal with those guys unless they were sacking a major city (or just about to), since they were weird and packed with disease. Timothy and Jacob argued that European Law was all about making Europe strong and that their proposal would make Europe stronger than it had ever been before. Then they just generally argued whenever somebody said anything. It looked like things were going to go their way.
The Bible-makers, however, just wanted more red. They had run out. Their delegate was ignored. His voice was drowned out with all the shouting.

So the arguing over whose proposal was the mightiest went on and on and on. It got personal really quickly and then the factions became entrenched in their positions. Two hours into the spat, a messenger boy ran into the room. He had a shaved head and fell onto the stones when he entered the room. Nobody noticed him for a good ten minutes or so. He just stayed on the floor with his bald head pressed to the cold stones. Commander Flightfeather was the first to notice him and he stopped in the middle of shouting at Timothy to walk over to the boy and bring him to his feet. The messenger boy barked out his message as soon as he was on his feet. This is how the messenger boy system worked.
“Commander! There's a contingent of black men at the gates of Brussels! They want to talk to you, Commander!” said the boy, then he ran out of the room to absorb some other message. Commander Flightfeather glanced over at the bickering Council, said,
“I've got something important to do,” then swept out the door and to the city gate. What he found there was quite surprising.
Waiting patiently outside the gate was a tall, dark-skinned man in a brightly-coloured cloak and an outlandish hat. He was smiling. Behind him was a vast phalanx of shining, muscular, coffee-coloured power. Each man in the phalanx was attached by a wooden beam and a chain to a full score of others. The scores were lined up, very neat and fine, for Commander Flightfeather's inspection. He estimated a headcount of over two hundred thousand. While he was counting, the tall man in the cloak strode up to him, grabbed his claw and shook it vigorously.

“Howdy, Commander. I was told ta find the fella who looked like a bird. I'd reckon I'd be right in assuming it were you.” said the tall man. Commander Flightfeather just kept on moving his claw up and down. He didn't quite know what to do. The stranger laughed. “As one queer-looking fella to another, I've gotta say that I've never seen the likes of you before. You are a sight. I would not hesitate to call you beautiful, Commander.” Commander Flightfeather coughed then retracted his hand. “Oh, I hope I haven't been overly charming towards you, I'm just one to speak my mind.” smiled the stranger. “Let me be a stranger no longer. I'm the Angel Cowboy. I'm a close friend of Mr. Will Smith from across the way. What you folk might call an 'Adventure Friend,' which sure is the cutest turn o' phrase I ever heard. All these fine young men you see behind me, trussed up all dramatic-like, they're the finest slaves that the Smith Dynasty has to offer. Seems that you and I have a mutual friend, you see. Some old boy called 'The King,' you ever heard of him? Yeah, I thought so. He's staying at our pleasure right now and we're taking real good care of him. But he's a busy man, you and I know, and he's got some business to attend to that we're lending a hand to. When he's all done with that, he'll be on his way back to you, right as rain. In the till-then, we'd like to kick off some of those formal trading alliances with your green and lustrous nation you have here. These slaves I mentioned, they're one of them 'gestures of good intention and will' that I hear are well appreciated the world over. You willing to accept this here gesture, Commander?”

Commander Flightfeather had to pause a minute to absorb everything the Angel Cowboy had just said. He looked at the vast assemblage of slaves that stood before him. He thought of the statue he wanted and then he thought of all the things that the Council were fighting about upstairs.
“H-how many are there?” asked Commander Flightfeather.
“Half a million to a man, sir. And plenty more where these boys came from, and you'll find our prices to be mighty reasonable.” said the Angel Cowboy. Commander Flightfeather made some quick calculations.

“Guys! Guys!” shouted Commander Flightfeather as he ran back up the stairs into the Council meeting room. When he burst into the room, the fighting halted and he was met with many angry glares. They bounced right off of him. His Happiness Armour was impenetrable. “It's a miracle!” he gasped while waving his arms about. “Come and see!” he said before running out again. Presently, he was joined at the gates by one Council member after the next. He had to explain what they were looking at at least ten times but he didn't care. Five hundred thousand slaves. What they didn't use for labour, they could sell! Everyone could get what they wanted now, except possibly the birds, whose request had been frankly outrageous. Everyone on The Big Important Council Of Europe hugged each other until they could hug no more. This would be the beginning of a beautiful new age of stuff.

If there was one thing that was loved by every European, it was getting new stuff.

End Of Chapter 73