Monday, September the 20th, 2004

back to: title, date or indexes

hear this 

Anaxagrotax

My name is Anaxagrotax, and I am the last survivor of a vanquished horde. Like the rest of my horde, I am neither an smooth man nor an hairy man, but somewhere in between. Our vanquishment was bloody and violent, as you might imagine. It was also very, very noisy, what with the clash of steel and the roar of cannonades and the howling and wailing of the wounded. I pray to my strange gods that never again will I witness such carnage.

To my chagrin, it took only a single morning to vanquish my previously unconquerable horde. As dawn broke on that terrible Thursday, there were thousands of us, hooting and whooping, daubed in the Paint of Ferocity, sharpening our implements and grunting a lot. We were well fed, tough, fearless and bent on conquest. By noon I was the only one left, hiding in a patch of bracken, and, I confess, shuddering in terror and grief. I was also bleeding from a contusion on my forehead and possibly slightly concussed. All around me the moorland was a scene of corpses and hacked-off limbs and blood.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling a little more myself. A stray hen had wandered into the bracken, and it was good to know that I was not the last living thing on earth. Poultry can be consoling in such circumstances. I reflected that as a warrior in a barbaric and bloodthirsty horde I ought to have expected things to turn out this way sooner or later. I was quite certain that our vanquishers had now left the scene to go and vanquish elsewhere, so I stood up and, saying goodbye to the hen, began walking away from my dead and, in some cases, still dying comrades in the direction of the palace. Perhaps it was callous of me to ignore the groans of those who were still alive, whose souls had not yet been plucked from their bodies by the hideous bat-faced god Beb and placed in his capacious pouch. Try not to judge me by your own moral code, if you have one.

By nightfall I had reached the stream that runs into a pool near the palace. I sat down on a tuffet and lit a cigarette. The moon was full and there were so many stars visible that they set my brain dizzy. I looked across the fields at the palace. Reassuringly, the usual bonfire was blazing on the roof. A bold water rat came to give me the once over, but soon scuttled away. I stubbed out my cigarette and made my way towards the palace at last. Gusts of wind dishevelled my hairstyle despite all the grease I had caked it with that morning. It seemed so long, long ago. As I took my final weary steps towards the gigantic wooden gates, my heart leapt when I saw that a great golden banner had been hung from the crenellations. “Welcome Home, Anaxagrotax!” it read, in letters of vermilion and blue. As I beat my great muscular fists on the palace gates, midnight struck. Thursday was over.