8. THE QUIET VICTORY

It doesn't have to be that a tyrant leads an honest people. Sometimes honesty can win.

All eyes were on Fart-fart, and even though he knew it would embarrass him, he farted. He had to. His high-fat diet produced more than its fair share of unwanted noxious gases, and there was only one way out for them. They blasted forth and almost smothered the crowd of good folks watching him.

“The man is a disgrace!” shouted one voice from the crowd.

“If he is a man!” suggested a second, a female one this time, one of those who had been captured and subsequently rescued by Owongo and Binflo.

Mika shouldered his way to the front of the gathering and stood before the glowering orange man, who in the slowly dimming light of late afternoon seemed to glow particularly brightly.

“I am a Blueknob,” he began, but before he could continue Fart-fart’s face crinkled into its absurdly vertical smile and he pooh-poohed him.

The Blueknobs were used to the odd comment and being pooh-poohed. After all, they spent most of every summer with their woad-blue genitals wafting in every breath of summer breeze, and there were some (all strangers) who found the sight amusing.

“I have come two days quick march across dangerous territories and with my three brave comrades falling to join the land of their ancestors on the way, and all in order to gain aid from others of my kind dwelling on the River Bank, and the last thing I want is for our great enemy with tangerine forelocks to take command!”

“I will be your leader!” grated Fart-fart, “for I have an army of savage men behind me and before me, and they will ensure that when it comes to the vote I am victorious! For they are foreigners from lands far in the North East and what I say goes!”

“We will have a fair election...” began Owongo, “and each man and woman will have an equal vote! That is the way of our people. Fairness and no corruption.”

“Bah!” almost laughed Fart-fart, “I promise you all manner of things if you choose me, for I have riches beyond your dreaming. And don’t forget how safe I am behind the mighty fortress walls that surround my mighty Fart-fart Tree-house!”

“Safe or not, you will not govern us,” Owongo shouted.

“You took me and would have ravished me,” put in Mirumda. “On the very day that I miscarried my first infant you would have ravished me! You said so, and those words were poisonous to me.”

“You’re a fair looking wench, and all fair looking wenches really fancy a night or two between the leathery sheets of my aromatic boudoir with me,” perved Fart-fart, “For I am considered by maidens from far and wide to be the mightiest of catches. Oh yes, they queue up at my tree-house for a chance to glimpse my riches and get their hands on my crown jewels. They love it, they do, each and every one of them, for I am the greatest lover the world will ever know...”

“You are a horror!” replied Mirumda, “and if I were to lie with you it would be with me tied down and unable to defend myself, and my big brave Owongo already dead, and even then I would struggle lest a wafting of your noxious breath corrupts me!”

“You’ll be the first, then!” shouted Fart-fart. “I know what ladies like! It is well known what I have said in the past and fervently believe. They like it rough, they do, they like it unexpected, they like it where they can’t do anything about it but lie back and think of the magic of the man doing it… Now tell me out there, is there a woman amongst you who would turn down a chance to cavort with me, Fart-fart the rich, Fart-fart the winsome, Fart-fart the glorious?”

Every female at that meeting raised a hand in response, and shouted me, me!

“I get the message!” he chortled, “You all want to be first between my sticky leather sheets! Like the fair sex everywhere you say the opposite of what you really mean. It’s a girlie thing. I thought the ladies of the River Bank were wise and made the finest of choices, and this is proof!”

“The question,” shouted Owongo fiercely, “had to do with turning you down and certainly not accepting you.”

“The fair folks have spoken. I hear their acceptance of me, and as the number of fillies outweighs the number of your menfolk … you can take it that I have counted … I take that as a vote of confidence in me as your leader. And I will guide you all to a freedom you never knew, once you have paid me.”

“We can’t have this!” whispered Owongo to Binflo, “the creature twists everything said to it. I have never seen a more resolute rejection turned, by him in an instant, into acceptance!”

“He has a certain skill with words,” muttered Binflo.

“No, my friend and neighbour, he has a strength with lies,” replied Owongo, “and we cannot have our happiness corrupted by a tissue of disgusting lies.”

“It seems to be happening, though,” pointed out Binflo as Beth-with, Owongo’s own mother-in-law (if he’d been married, that is, but he wasn’t actually married to Mirumda because marriage hadn’t yet been invented) pushed her way to the front of the gathering and smiled as sweetly as an elderly lady can. Remember, a lady of forty was counted as truly ancient, and Beth-with was almost that.

“Would you take me first, master?” she asked eagerly.

It was then that Fart-fart made his one fatal mistake. He might have accepted her offer and dragged her in the traditional way for toxic outsiders like him, by the hair until she screamed, and then ravished her behind the nearest bush. And she would have been truly happy as she gibbered away about love and the future and tomorrow whilst he sauntered off, grinning.

But he made his fatal mistake.

“I wouldn’t have an old hag like you, you foetid old crow!” he declared, “what good would one as wrinkled and past it as you do to my reputation? People would think that I was in need of habitation inside an old folks’ cave rather than my tree-house tower!”

“You disgusting old fart!” cried Mirumda, offended by the way he was treating her mother.

And that was enough to set a ball of sound rolling as a few at first leading eventually to everyone chorused you disgusting old fart until the air throbbed with their voices and even nearby trees bowed away to escape the worst of the blast of their combined breaths.

Behind Fart-fart was his small army of savages, his fixers and in reality his strength, and they heard the chorus as well and it struck them that their leader, besides smelling pretty dire when he expelled the gaseous consequence of his shocking diet all over them from his unsavoury rear end, hadn’t got the mastership and lordship over one and all that he’d claimed, and because they were supposed to be with him and had been seen by many to be with him, they slunk off to a man, leaving their former lord and master farting quietly to himself by Mirunda’s Mouthing Stone.

And that was bow tragedy along the River Bank was avoided and how a tyrant was disposed of before he truly hurt anyone. And it might have been so different. If the people hadn’t reacted as they did he might have even started a major war, caused unbelievable death and poverty, wrecked the environment for generations by lighting great smoking fires until the forest was no more and its wood in ashes, but he did none of those things.

Instead he sloped meanly away, hoping no-one would see him, his mind maddened by the need for revenge and his heart inside him like a block of ice like it had always been.

Once more he farted, then melted completely away, making for his Fart-fart tree-house where he might curl up and slowly try to repair his ego.

TO BE CONTINUED…

© Peter Rogerson 17.04.17