Fanfare for the Common Hamster: Chapter Twenty-One: The Battle of Weasels Pit

Welcome to the 21st extract from FFTCH. If you enjoy it, and wish to know how it ends, just leave a comment saying so, and I’ll e-mail you the entire chapter free and gratis. If you fancy the book or e-book, click on the Flaccid Felicitation at the foot of the page. This will take you to my Lulu.com page.

Actually this particular chapter is one of the longest in human history, and if you were thinking of requesting just one chapter – this would be the one to ask for. Just thought I’d mention it.

122            Chapter 21: The Battle of Weasels Pit

Somewhere deep inside Densely Dense Wood a horn blared plaintively. No sooner had the single note been carried away upon the breeze, when another mournful monotone sounded to replace it.

This, the captain of the Hamster Heath Heathen Sod-ball team, couldn’t help but notice, despite the fact that his Offensive team were singing very rude words to the popular sadomasochistic country songs Ruby, Don’t Slap Me Round the Privates and I Haven’t Stopped Choking Yet (Since You Lassoed Me On Our First Date).

It had come to the attention of Matti Furstrom too as he negotiated the torturous route through the thick forest at the wheel of the leading team bus. Likewise Darkwood Dunce, Brother Alfonso Dos Fresas, Felicity Bugler, her mother – Brenda, and Roosevelt Teabiscuit, as they all clung to the roof rack with a tenacity unparalleled.

Even Algy Timber, sweating profusely as he wrestled a recalcitrant second team bus along the same stretch of (apparently) never-ending woodland track, could clearly differentiate between one honk and another. And to Fabian Strangefellow and several attentive cheerleaders upon the roof rack of Algy’s vehicle, it was obvious that they were being watched, and that messages that warned of their approach were being sent
by the only auditory means available. Only Primrose Pickles – trussed up safely inside the baggage hold with the Heathens’ kit – was unaware of the real possibility that the enemy was, even now, preparing for battle. Consequently she was the only living creature upon the expedition that didn’t, at some point upon their journey, gulp nervously.

***

There was some enthusiastic nervous gulping taking place in the Town Banqueting and Hoopla Championship Hall of Far Kinell also. Each time a distant horn bellowed its warning, several of the militia-hamsters cast worried glances out of the window.

Perfidity Gallowsmith snorted her contempt at them. ‘To think’ she thought inwardly, ‘I probably showed them my furry breasts a night or two ago. If I’d known how cowardly they really are…’ She left the thought hanging: Mooney was speaking for the first time since she’d administered Law Master’s Justice to his testicles.
But far from some kind of snide remark, Perfidity was surprised when Mooney simply said, “Those horns: Do they really warn of a rescue party for me?”
“Just as I had envisaged.” The Law Master crowed her best.
“But surely no one likes me enough to do that?” Mooney appeared utterly perplexed by the situation. “I thought that I was certain to die.”
“You are.” Perfidity roared, “You don’t imagine that The Stix will succeed in their worthless endeavour, do you? No – you die – upon schedule – with as little dignity as possible.”
She then instructed her most trusted lawmen to take Mooney to the Dunking Chair – from which he would be fed to the sewage-outfall pike.

123

This time it was Tybrow Mooney’s turn to gulp nervously. He wasn’t enamored with the idea of being eaten: But he hated the thought of getting all covered in village-shit far more.

***

Matti, being the lead driver, saw them first, and skidded his bus to halt upon the dusty track that passed directly through the centre of Far Kinell. The sight of the vast rag-tag army that confronted his Hamster Heath Heathens almost made him turn aside, and set off in the direction of Near Kinell, which he’d spotted from the hill, and which appeared to be enjoying an exciting newt-wrestling match and bucking-cavy contest upon the far bank of the turgid river. But any thoughts of flight were themselves put to flight by the words of his team captain who leaned over his shoulder to peer out through the front window…
“They don’t look so tough.” he said, “And look – they aint got no groin protection. We can take advantage of that.”
And so the would-be Hero of All Lemmingdom restarted the motor, engaged gear, and drove forward – to engage the combined might of Far Kinell and Weasels Pit in a titanic battle that would result in an outcome that was so far beyond the protagonist’s imaginings that their intellects might as well have been nothing more substantial than the most flimsy toilet paper ever made. Or something closely approximating it.

***

Meanwhile, whilst all the events of the last two days had taken place, poor Margarita Hummingbird had remained alone in the corral that adjoined Rootley’s ghastly hovel upon the hill that overlooked Weasels Pit. Growing ever lonelier, and having eaten all the available consumables in her stall, the chubby cavy had decided to find both food and company in the adjacent Densely Dense Wood.

By the sheerest fluke she had chanced upon an enchanted glade filled with aromatic bluebells and the sound of chattering dung beetles. She’d scented the air with her sensitive snout, and picked up another smell that seemed oddly out of place. So, wandering blindly through the long stalks, she had fallen into a wide, and deep, depression at the glade’s centre that was filled with waving rhubarb fronds, and lined around its rim by a luxuriant collection of the most exotic fungi in all creation.

“Holy shit!” she’d exclaimed as her gaze alighted upon her favourite nibble – but which, unfortunately, had an adverse effect upon her gastric system, and the consumption of which Darkwood Dunce had banned.
But the sight of so many slender rhubarb stems was too much for the cavy to resist.
“Hey, it aint like Darkwood’s here right now.” She’d reasoned, and so set off at a gallop with a swelling desire that would not be denied.

The lumbering rodent had only just sank her mighty incisors into the trunk of the sweetest-looking sapling, when she had cause to very nearly loose off one of her famous cavy-pellet projectiles.

124

“Hey, sexy thang,” a voice had spoken suddenly from somewhere inside the stand of rhubarb trees, “I sho’nuff thought I had Danglydong Dell all to my sweet self. How’s it hangin’, babe?”
With that a tall, rather stoned-looking male hamster, with the largest, fuzziest, and most amazingly spherical head-fur, stepped into view. He appeared to have a smoking pencil protruding from between his bi-furcated lips.

For a moment Margarita was dumb-struck. When she finally regained control of her oral muscles it was only to blow a raspberry, go all coy, and say, “Oh I aint no sexy thang: What’s ya name, sugar?”

Well the being called himself Brutus, and explained that he was hopelessly lost in some foreign land. He then explained that he’d been happily smoking one of his ‘magic mushroom’ cigarettes in his ‘home’ version  of Danglydong Dell, when he’d gone into a trance-like state: And then he awoke he found himself it another, almost identical place – but one that was utterly ‘wierdsville’ to him.
“Far out, man.” he ended.

Margarita, being able to grasp alien concepts within a nanosecond, understood Brutus’s problem instantly. “You’re a Walker between Worlds!” she blurted, “Just like Joan Bugler!”
Well Brutus may have been stoned, but he recognized the name Bugler in an instant. “Hey, mama, ya aint speaking of a fat girl with facial furniture, and a mama named Brenda, are ya?”
Margarita was amazed, and said as much. Then she added, “So how’s it you know this gerbil, Brutus?”
“I’m a bus driver.” He replied, as though it explained everything. Then when he realized that it didn’t, he added, “I take Brenda to her swimming lessons in Chunderland. She don’t pay nuthin’, if you catch my drift: We just do a whole lot of rogerin’.”

‘Rogering’, Margarita understood, meant non-reproductive sexual intercourse. She gagged slightly at the thought of inter-species sex, but then recalled that the ways of many countries were very different to her homeland of Sponx, and should be treated with respect.
“Yuk!” she spat, “That is so gross!”

Then she espied the smoking pencil again. “Hey, that looks like fun: Can I have some?”
Brutus smiled a smile of such toothiness that Margarita nearly swooned. “Sure,” he said, offering his spliff upon the end of his tongue, “You sho’nuf wont be disappointed.”

And, of course, she wasn’t.

***

125

The Law Master – Perfidity Gallowsmith stood with her paws upon hips, and watched the vile Dunk Master strap Tybrow Mooney into the same Dunking Seat that the wart-coated toad had carried upon its slime-moistened shoulders all the way from Weasels Pit.
She urged the creature to greater speed by repeatedly kicking it in the area that she guessed approximated it anus. She did this because she had noticed the ripple of fear that had spread through her ‘army’ at the approach of the three vehicles from Hamster Heath. She too had felt that moment of fear as these three impossible devices had driven into town – with their Axle’s eyes ablaze with an evil inner light of such blinding luminosity that she wondered if somehow the Stix hadn’t harnessed the
power of the sun itself. And where were the stag beetles or cavies that provided the means of propulsion? How was it that they moved at all? They had no skids!
But then another thought chased away the fear: Unless the three mysterious vehicles were larger on the inside than they were on the outside – her ‘army’ outnumbered the Stix by at least five to one. Perhaps twenty-seven. And they were armed with daggers, cudgels, and most importantly – crossbows.
“No,” she said to herself, “Victory is assured: They have only shiny spades: What possible use could they be?

***

But even as the Hamster Heath Heathens were kitting up in their Sod-Ball uniforms, and the lawmen of Far Kinell and Weasels Pit were checking the tension in the elastic bands of their crossbows, events in Densely Dense Wood were occurring that would have an effect upon the outcome of the imminent battle…