As the provincial sipahi ride off back towards camp, looking for someone to lend them some cash, another body of horse approach. Suddenly, the force lets out a wild cacophony of 'waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh!', 'eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeegh!', and 'hubbahubbahubba!' sounds.
'Who on earth are these noisy hooligans!' cries Hospodar Casimir.
'Delli irregulars, my lord', replies General Bulbous. 'Crazy loons; slack-jawed nutters; the wildest, strangest, most addle-bonced fighting men ever to ride a mount backwards and then wonder where their horse's head had gone'.
'Savages one and all', says Bulbous dismissively. 'Torturers and bloody-handed butchers!'
'Well', says Casimir, shrugging, 'it's important to have hobbies'. Bulbous coughs nervously, recollecting suddenly that if Casimir wasn't himself technically a torturer and a bloody-handed butcher, that was only because the hospodar had written the laws in ways that made what he did 'legitimate corrective action'.
'The sorts of fellows that steal sweets from babies', adds Bulbous changing tack.
'That doesn't make them loonies', says Casimir, who himself hadn't always been on the right side of the 'theft from babies' debate. 'Children should probably eat less sugar, I think'.
'Frothy-lipped beasts, all too willing to slay the defenceless!' tries the general.
'Meh', says Casimir unconvinced. The hospodar himself generally interpreted the principle of 'women and children first' less as a moral imperative and more as a targeting priority.
'They like living in Mittelheim', says Bulbous.
Casimir chokes and almost falls from his cushions. 'Hare-brained crackpots!' he splutters. 'Bare-bottomed bone-heads!' he adds. 'Move these lackwits on!'
No comments:
Post a Comment