In Which I Meet A Great Thunder Bird

After several joyous hours of gorging and wining, my face had turned purple and my waistline was thrice its usual size. I was staggering around the bonfire trying to find somewhere to wee, but every dark corner was occupied by lecherous couples engaged in rampant canoodling and/or unbridled fondling. Eventually I decided there was nothing else for it and whizzed in a pair of old boots I found under a bench.

I sat on the bench after, and sighed. I missed Astra. The alcohol, far from lessening my troubles, had only served to magnify them.

“Oh Astra,” I sighed aloud, resting my face in my hands and glumly observing the partygoers. The festivities never ceased in Inebrium, Toot had informed us. Day and night, the party reigns. Some people probably found this lifestyle perfect, I supposed. But as I sat in the gloom as pissed as a newt, the joyful shrieks and the distant smashing of bottles just made me feel lonely.

A figure staggered towards me, away from the bonfire, and vomited loudly in the very same pair of boots I’d just relieved myself in. The person’s pungent aroma of horses told me the drunkard was Glob. She sat down next to me and wiped her mouth.

“Glob, art thou old enough to drink?”

“Nah,” she replied.

“Thou ought to be careful, lest thou art spotted by–” I trailed off, realising I was the highest authority within a thousand miles. I shrugged. “Never mind. How is thy head?”

“Better now,” said Glob. “ ‘Ow come tha’s sat ‘ere by thi’sen?”

“Glob,” I said.

“Sorry. Why are you ‘ere on yer own?”

“I am worried about the queen.”

Glob didn’t say anything, leaving me to wallow in the sticky mudpools of my anxiety. People who don’t say anything are dangerous. They shirk the rules of everyday conversation, and we norms who are bound by the laws of conversational etiquette feel obliged to fill their silences for them. We end up speaking twice as much as is natural, purely to avoid lengthy silences, and in the end the silence would have been far preferable to the alternative: we reveal twice as much as we intended.

“I miss her,” I went on. “Didst thou ever converse with her? She did make me convulse with laughter in a manner that no man or woman in all my kingdom ever did, ‘ere our first meeting.”

Glob sat idly, looking down at her grubby bare feet. I did not know whether she was listening, but it mattered not.

“I would do anything for my queen. I would give my life. All is forfeit without her love.”

Finally, Glob looked up at me. For the first time since leaving the castle, her expression changed from her usual stoic glare. Emotion crossed her face, only for a second, unless it was simply the shadows cast by the nude revellers that were currently leaping over the bonfire and whooping with animalistic fervour as they singed their genitals. If I wasn’t mistaken, Glob’s face momentarily bore the faintest hint of a smile. Then, in a mouse’s heartbeat, it was gone. Glob stood up and went to join the others by the fire.

I sat alone and sighed, trying in my stupor to conjure the details of Astra’s face. I couldn’t help but torture myself; peering inside each keyhole as I wandered down the lonely corridor of dark ‘what ifs’. Astra was a tough girl, I reminded myself. She could always look after herself. I tried to cling to this reassuring notion, but it kept slipping just out of reach, and no solace was afforded me. And then I was joined on my bench by a plump man wearing a kilt.

“Evening friend,” he smiled, sighing as he reclined and rested his hairy legs. He had a heart tattoo on his ankle that read ‘Mam’. Then he pulled out the boots he’d left under the bench, slid his feet inside with an audible squelch, and emitted a very shrill, very long shriek.

*****

High above the dunes, higher than the clouds, wearing a halo of moonbeams, a great thunder bird coasts on lazy summer winds.

Its slow wings beat the air with such force that the sand far below is churned up as it passes over. The dunes are silent. The insects and lizards and sentient Sprung trees of the desert have learned to flee the dreaded whomp of the thunder bird’s approaching wings.

This particular thunder bird is in a very bad mood. It has had an unsuccessful day of hunting. It scooped up a couple of desert foxes and sucked the marrow from the bones of a long dead camel, but that is the thunder bird equivalent of skipping breakfast and lunch and having a Twix for dinner. The thunder bird’s stomach is rumbling.

The great beast’s keen eyes spot the bonfire three miles away. It has seen the fire many times before, but it knows to keep its distance. The ravenous glow of the flames scare thunder birds away. But this one is very, very hungry. It begins to circle the fire down below, rising higher on warm air currents to avoid scaring its potential prey with the downbeat of its wings. It has learned this over a long and illustrious career in murder.

The thunder bird’s eyes detect intense activity below. Countless lifeforms are buzzing frantically  around a large pool. The great bird is hungry, but it is afraid. The creatures below are large, and they move quickly. They might be dangerous. The thunder bird circles the oasis in large, slow loops. Finally, it spots movement in the dark, away from the fire. Two figures are resting away from the others. Weaklings. Stragglers. Prey. The thunder bird hesitates still; they are large, and they may be powerful.

Then the fatter of the two emits a shrill scream that carries upwards on the breeze and rattles around the bird’s ears. The thunder bird’s pupils shrink to the size of needle points. The fat one is wounded. An easy target. The great thunder bird dives.

*****

“What kind of bastard does that in someone’s shoes? I only bought them last week!” the plump man cried, wringing glop out of his socks.

“Truly, to use another’s boot as a privy, ‘tis barbaric,” I mumbled into my chest.

“I should bloody well– oof!” said the plump man, as a very large gust of wind ruffled my hair.

I turned to him, but there was nobody to be seen, just the smelly boots. I shrugged, assuming he’d slunk back to the revelry. I took another swig of wine and sat with my head in my hands, the dark world spinning gently. Then something dropped onto my head and obscured my vision.

I sat still for a moment, stunned, then peeled it away as it had an unpleasant whiff. I held it up and found it was a kilt. Odd. I wandered where it had come from, and glanced behind me. There was nobody there. I stood up, my kingly instincts telling me something was amiss.

“Plump man, where art thou?” I warbled, twirling around.

The partygoers were still dancing, oblivious, but something in the atmosphere had changed. The air was tense and charged, as though a storm were overheard. I looked up and saw nothing but stars. The hairs on my arm were standing on end. I drew my sword and twirled around.

“Plump man, I think you may have lost your kilt,” I called, trailing off into silence. “Plump man?”

From the blackened dunes there came an almighty screech, and an object flew towards me at a dazzling pace. There was no time to flee; I closed my eyes and thrust my sword before me with all my might, skewering whatever it was. Wincing, I peeled open my eyeballs and inspected my sword. Shish-kebabbed on the end of my blade was a leg; a calf and foot, with a ‘Mam’ tattoo.

I began to scream, but an odd sight strangled my panic in my throat. The sand bank I had been staring at began to move. It rose slowly, higher and higher, towering over me. The light of the bonfire danced off its features, and as the sands shivered and parted, I found myself nose-to-beak with a gargantuan bird.

Its golden feathers crackled with static electricity. Its beady eyes stared unblinking into my own. I am not embarrassed to admit that at this point I was pant-shittingly horrified – but I am a King! I had to save my Astra, and no monstrous death bird was going to have the satisfaction of watching me shudder in my britches.

“H-hello there, bird-friend.”

The thunder bird stared at me.

“Thou hast presently chomped an acquaintance of mine. That was most uncouth of thee. I take it as given thou will now vacate this oasis, as thy belly be full.”

The beady eyes bored into my own in silence. I saw that they were not evil eyes, though they bore an animalistic indifference commonly mistaken for malevolence: sharp and wary and quick and hungry. The bird didn’t hate me, I realised. Far from it; it simply wanted to tear me to shreds in order to eat me for its own sustenance which, to be fair to the creature, more than you could say about human violence. We shank one another just for the hell of it.

“Now, be gone, bird.”

It cocked its head. Perhaps it was beginning to understand me.

“Shoo…?”

And then the big massive bird bit my hand off.