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  “I’m a chicken? Then I’m not a writer or a lunatic?” I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not. So what I’d thought was an enormous scar was in fact part of my beak and the loose skin my wattle! I scratched my comb in dismay, producing a rather tuneless twang, like Bob Dylan on a foggy Monday.

  “Pah, you have the desire without the fire, the quills but not the skills. Your stories creak more than Mr Flay’s knees in Gormenghast or the Queen’s smile after a right royal eructation during her Christmas Day Speech. Your most rounded characters are still as flat as old beer. I’m the only decent writer around here. My name is Stark Antonym Zanahoria, as I’m sure you now remember. Everywhere I am lionized, and roar my appreciation. I thrive on contradictions, and glow with red hair, crude wealth, and logical impossibilities.”

  “A chicken?” I tried to stop bobbing my head.

  “Yes, Cat here did the Spell, and put you in this cage. Remember that article you wrote in Rhondda Quarterly last month? Saying that my work wasn’t worth chicken shit, and that more nuggets were to be found in a dilapidated McDonalds than in the whole of my work? Didn’t you wonder why so many of your ‘memories’ concerned ships or spaceships? It’s because you had unknowingly taken my ideas on board. But brilliant ideas in the head of a hack are like listeners to a Fidel Castro speech: they get bored and shuffle towards the back of the crowd, and in your case they’ve reached the edges, and are slipping out through your comb! You’ve come a cropper, bach! The few ideas of your own that you still have are hopelessly half-baked, so it’s time to wring your neck, I’m afraid, and then finish cooking you. Though your prose is notoriously indigestible, I’m hoping your thighs are not.”

  “But why? What have I done to deserve this?”

  “Written so badly, so predictably, so unimaginatively, that there was a serious danger that you might have got elected to the Swansea Literary Academi instead of me, since the last thing they want is internal competition. That’s why they praise Dylan Thomas so much, so no one will notice the new poets and novelists. I intend to murder you, to make sure I get the only vacant seat, and because I’ve never liked you. But murdering humans, even ones as mortally tedious as you, is frowned upon, and punishable by law, even in Wales. There’s no penalty against killing chickens, though.”

  “Why are you wearing a blindfold?” I squawked, playing for time.

  “It was Cat’s idea. She knows I’m a sensitive soul, and so she suggested I put it on before you woke up, in order not to see myself spilling your blood. It is easier to live with oneself when one does not witness one’s crimes. I’m surprised more murders aren’t committed by blind people, or at least cross-eyed ones. I know I’m a toad, but I’m not going to risk you crossing me, or pushing me into a hole. Proffer me the plump or scrawny neck of that chicken-livered coward, please, Cat, that I may kill, cook, slice, and dice him.”

  But now, suddenly, I really did remember everything. The poor fool didn’t know that the real conspirators were Cat and myself!

  I gave an evil laugh, and curled my beak with contempt.

  “Ha, Zanahoria! Your commination I have allowed, but comminution is going a midge too far! Cat, remove his blindfold!”

  “Just a minute!” cried the witch imperiously. She reached behind her, and produced a thick manuscript, which she held under Stark’s head. She then tore off his blindfold while I stuck my head through the bars of the cage.

  Stark Antonym saw me, was immediately sick all over the manuscript, and staggered around in agony before collapsing to the floor.

  “Take that, carrot-face!” I cried. “I am no broody rooster, but a moody monster! Didn’t you notice my name? Basil Isk? I am a cockatrice!”

  “O clucking shell!” he groaned. “But that’s impossible!”

  “Not logically, only empirically so!” I crowed.

  “Mendacious meretrix!” gurgled he, fixing his seared eyes on Cat. “May slugs beget bugs in your double-D dugs!”

  “Silence, loquacious loony!” she snapped back, glaring at him with scorn and fury. “In my youthful innocence I worshipped you, Stark Antonym, and your writing, full of flame and fantasy and frowning opposites: I grew giddy with desire chasing after twists and turns in your stories, where juicy metaphors lurked in silk-bed ambush behind every sensuous simile. My only desire was to surrender my tender flesh to you and live with you for ever; I even loosened my virtue a little bit beforehand, so that you would have no difficulty finally relieving me of it. But when the moment came, all you did was furtively fumble me on the Mumbles, breathlessly mount me on the Brecon Beacons, and then abandon me to pursue and bedazzle rich salon hostesses all over Europe. Had you left me anywhere else, the sandpaper of time might have smoothed away my spleen and filed down my fury, but you left me in Swansea! Swansea! I vowed then not to simply measure out my life with coffee and love spoons, but to take revenge on you. It took a long time, but eventually I became a witch.

  “Knowing that both you and Basil Isk would be in Swansea to present your latest works in the hope of getting elected to that seat in the Academi, which really belongs to another, I arranged to meet you both for a drink in The Englishman’s Severed Head. I pretended I had forgotten your crime against me. My whole object was to get you at my mercy – which, by the way, is also a fictitious quality, but in this case a winning one!

  “Of course, you and Basil pretended, in front of me, to be delighted to see each other, and claimed you had only really come to Swansea hoping to have the pleasure of witnessing the election of the other to the vacant seat.

  “But before we met, I had told Basil my plan: to pretend to turn him into a chicken, but in reality to turn him into a cockatrice. He confessed he was too afraid to lay a hand on you himself, but that he felt he could see his way to looking you to death! Just as you, Stark, said you feared to murder a man in cold blood, but that killing a chicken, especially when blindfolded, was no crime.

  “So when we met up, and while you two were smiling with false camaraderie, slagging off all the other Academi members, we got Basil drunk, as he had already agreed. You filled his head with your stories to take away his remaining personality, and then you helped me carry him back here to my home. I sent you off to the kitchen to prepare the cooking sauces and mix the stuffing, while I did my Transforming. I told you that after eating him, and keeping back a bit of chicken soup for our souls, we could then recline together on a soft luxurious bed made of his plucked feathers. “Yes,” you joked, thinking yourself very witty, “as the bluesman Mississippi John Hurt almost sang, ‘Make me down a pullet on your floor’.”

  “But instead of a chicken, I really created a cockatrice – my contact lenses and rather sexy Dolce & Gabbana glasses protect me from its gaze – and now its hideousness has, as I planned, caused you to vomit all over your manuscript, which you dare not now present to the fastidious judges. In any case, you are unlikely to live more than a few hours.”

  As my rival groaned and shuddered in the corner, I cackled with delight.

  “That’ll teach him! Now you can transform me back like you promised, Cat, I’ll get the Academi seat, and then we can marry in church and live happily ever after, and have two children, maybe three, and send them to a good school where they wear respectable uniforms, and bring them up properly to learn their catechism and know their place, and then we’ll have pretty blue-eyed grandchildren and a garden and poodle and lace curtains.”

  I fluttered my wings and waggled my wattle suggestively, and stuck my beak through the bars to give her a little peck on the cheek.

  “Back, hack!” she shouted, “or I’ll break your drum sticks! You will never lay a hand on me, or an egg in me, either! Away, fowl creature!”

  “But what’s this? What about our agreement? What have I done?”

  “What have you done? Stark Antonym just told you! You have less imagination than an undarned grey sock! Oh, if you knew how I suffered at school because of you! Your insipid Liking Among The Dandelions was a set
text, as was your eye-closing Behind the Scenes in Milton Keynes. Three teachers resigned, rather than have to teach it, and another actually died of a fatal yawn in front of us while trying to explain the hidden significance of Ethel’s daily shopping trips. We girls read Richardson’s Pamela in the toilets for a bit of excitement, and underlined the naughty bits in Jane Austen. Your soulless works ruined romance for me, delayed my first period by a year, and gave me inverted nipples! My life was meaningless until I met Hymen Thews at a fencing class.”

  “Hymen Thews? You mean Hymen Simon, don’t you? Or Squeeze Thews?”

  “No, I don’t. Stark Antonym has a strong imagination, that I can’t deny, but his soul, like yours, is devoid of romance. Only rabbits and turnips really excite him. On principle he is all negative, nihilistic. Hymen Thews on the other hand is a real writer who not only never got the recognition he deserved, but is also the most romantic man alive, the only one worthy to lay his craggily exciting head on my savage Welsh breast. So much larger than life is he that Stark in his fiction unconsciously divided him into two, the Cloven Lover: Squeeze Thews the man of action and Hymen Simon the poet-musician. And so great was his jealousy that in his stories he always had them bumped off – in one novel, Squeeze died of gingrene from too many biscuits, and Hymen, while his legs were still broken, was tied down in the sun until his back was bright red, and then, naked, forced to join in the Pamplona bull run.”

  “But . . . you’re saying all my ‘memories’ were real, then, even though they weren’t my own? But Captain Pilchard Stopdrooling can’t be real! Or his arch-enemy Engelbrecht the Degenerate Dwarf!”

  Her smile was more sinister than a chess board in a badly-financed operating theatre.

  “Oh yes they are! After countless skirmishes, they decided to fight it out once and for all, man to dwarf. They stared each other up and down – Pilchard finished first – took deep valiant breaths, and were dropped in the local Grudge Crater on the Moon. But Engelbrecht, coming from a dwarf star, was so heavy, even there, that with each movement he sank more and more into the lunar surface, and as for Pilchard, he didn’t dare get too close to the dwarf for fear of being trapped in his gravitational pull. They were too intelligent not to recognise zugzwang, so they agreed to a stalemate, and were taken back on board the Referee’s spaceship, where they took another deep breath and to each other, expressed mutual admiration for a gallant opponent, and became the best of friends.

  “Which is why I chose to take my revenge in this particular way. Since Pilchard just happens to be my uncle, he asked me if I had any ideas on how to help out his newfound chum. Engelbrecht was finding it difficult to locate any mythological beings in his part of the galaxy – apparently, they’re a delicacy on certain planets, and have been hunted to extinction – and was in danger of being thrown out of the Smallsphere Surrealist Assassins Club. The back-stabbing there takes place after public exposure and expulsion, and all members, friends or foes, are expected to join in. That’s another reason why I turned you into a cockatrice instead of a mere chicken. But you should feel honoured: I told Pilchard to tell Engelbrecht that I had hatched you from one of the fatal eggs laid by Bulgakov. So, although it is obvious to all you are not a great writer, you can at least claim to be the progeny of one.”

  “Oh vile villainess! But I’m not afraid. You said yourself Engelbrecht is too heavy to move even on the moon, so here he’d be as helpless as a boiled foreskin on a hook in a damp vestry.”

  I realised I was still infected by Stark.

  “That was some time ago. Engelbrecht went on a diet for this mission. First he tried losing electrons, but found after a week his weight was just the same, of course. So then he cut down drastically and pluckily on carbohydrates and protons, and after losing about 300 septillion of the latter – that’s a good 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 amu – he found he’d lost about a pound. Which, being a dwarf, was a fair percentage. He tested himself out last week in a boxing match, and clocked up a resounding victory against a remarkably sprightly grandfather clock. I don’t think a mere cockatrice will give him much trouble. I’m pretty sure your lethal gaze won’t work on extraterrestrials, though I’ve bought him a few pairs of short contact lenses, just in case.

  “Anyway, I’m only keeping my promise to you: I told you that I had influence in the Academi, and that if you helped me in my plan – since Transformation Spells only work if the subject isn’t resisting – I would make sure you went far. Well, so you shall! With Engelbrecht! He should be here soon. If you’re lucky, he might get here before Stark starts to reek.”

  So saying, she picked up my cage with one hand, and hurled me through the door behind her. A moment later, Stark Antonym’s still-twitching body landed on top of me. I looked up, and then had to squeeze shut my eyes. Oh horror of horrors! It was a hall of mirrors! If I so much as opened my eyes for a second I would be violently ill at the sight of myself. Trapped in a cage, and as good as blind, how could I hope to resist capture?

  I had one last hope. If Engelbrecht and Pilchard and Hymen Simon and the rest were all real, then that meant Spermicidal Whiskers and Robin’ Darktree also existed. I could expect little help from the former – he would be useless against women, except unborn ones – but if I hadn’t been the one to receive the enormous scar from Catherine Meaty-Zones, then I must have been reliving the memories of Darktree the scandalously pitiless highwayman. He might, faced, fazed and amazed by her décolleté, have forgiven her in the chivalric heat of the moment, but when he got home and tried to shave, he would almost certainly have painfully nicked his underlying pitilessness. What if he were on the way here now, seeking dire revenge? If he killed Cat, her spell would be broken, and Engelbrecht would see that I was just a hapless hack, and leave me in peace.

  A poultry hope, it is true.

  At that moment, triumphant laughter came from the other side of the door, followed by what sounded exactly like a particularly treacherous witch being passionately kissed by a man with melancholy Machiavellian lips and a Brazilian-sounding limp.

  And pretensions to literary respectability.

  THE DEATHS OF ROBIN HOOD

  Rhys Hughes

  Nina, the Queen of the Amazons, wants to go somewhere different this year. She is bored with Lake Karatis, despite its giant snakes. She has wrestled most of them anyway. She uncorks her little god and whispers into the jar: “Any suggestions for a holiday?”

  The shape inside heaves like a bosom. “The Forest of Sherwood.”

  “Where in all Scythia is that?”

  “Beyond its western horizon. Cross the Caucasus and follow the Black Sea coast with the Pontine Mountains on your left. Turn sharp right at Byzantium. I don’t know the way from there. You’ll have to ask. Perhaps the Emperor can help you.”

  She frowns and rattles the jar. “Not in Scythia, you say? Well that’s original. But what’s so special about this Sherwood Forest?”

  “It’s the home of an outlaw.”

  “But I’m always catching those and poking them with spears!”

  The shape within seems to chuckle. “This one is different. He is the Prince of Thieves. He steals from the rich and gives to the poor. You are very rich and so he will try his luck with you. He is fearless and has the luck of a legend. A good match.”

  “You are right, little god! It has to be better sport than monstrous serpents. I shall pack my things at once. But how do you get to learn of such strange people and events? After all, you’re stuck in there all day.”

  “I dream about them, mistress. I was the Khazar god of dreaming before you captured me. Now my people never dream. And they are too tired to sleep.”

  Nina replaces the cork. She is almost excited.

  The Sheriff of Nottingham is a villain, but he just follows orders, so it isn’t his fault. Following orders is much harder than following a road. You have to leap from one instruction to the next, never knowing where they are taking you, like stepping stones over a river of scorpion
s, either marching packed tight down a dry channel, or else floating on broad leaves, depending on the season, but a difficult feature to cross all the same, and always a suspicion that the next stone will tip up and throw you greaves over helm into the torrent of sting. And the poison forming little tributaries.

  “Guy of Gisborne! Come in here at once!”

  “Yes, your Sheriffness?”

  “Can you guess what I’m doing now? Three guesses!”

  “Um, being a villain?”

  “Damn it! How do you keep winning this game? Take a draught of mead as your reward. Now then, I have a problem. I can’t follow these orders.”

  “King John asked you to dress in lingerie again?”

  “Would to heaven he had! No, Guy, this is far more awkward than that. See this letter I’m holding? No, not in that hand, which is under the table. This hand! That’s right, in front of your face. I know these Norman helmets make you cross-eyed with their nose-guards. Anyway, it was delivered a few minutes ago, don’t ask how, all right carrier pigeon if you must know, and it has come all the way from the Emperor of Byzantium, Isaac II Angelos.”

  “Oh, him. We don’t owe him any allegiance, do we?”

  “I wish we didn’t, because he has asked me to expect an honoured guest, the Queen of the Amazons. I’m supposed to put her up here in my castle and introduce her to the outlaw Robin Hood. She wants to challenge him to a fight.”

  “That will save us the trouble, won’t it?”

  “No, no, no! Don’t you remember? You mortally wounded him yesterday!”