Beth Gellert
24-07-2006, 16:01
Portmeirion, Durcodi Parliamentary Protectorate, Western Geletia
A carnyx (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/carnyxhorn.jpg) blast rung out across The Village, then two more joined it, a chorus taking a deep breath from antiquity to produce a clarion sound on a new dawn.
The sound had turned the disciplined ranks around the SPQR standard into a natural chaos of forage before the seeking blade of a hunter-gathering Gelóangh, had given fair warning before the sack of Delphi, and had wailed on and on as the proto-Geletians migrated in one of history's most epic blood marches, seeking through the dismayed empires of Armenia, Parthia, the Guptas, and the Tamil kings before the sacred trumpets proclaimed a fortress established of this continent in the Indian Ocean: Geletia.
Come, the rabble! Cried the infamous warhorns, Come, and think of Salvador!
This was the yearly event of commemoration for a famous battle pitting the Celtic protégés of the Soviet Union against their Prince, his Parliament, and Iansisle's Shieldian Empire. Llewllyn had been driven from the mainland like a flightless fowl into the sea before the world-shaking arrival of a thousand Norwegian rats. A dirty heaving mass of gnashing teeth and deviousness, the rodent peasants, increased and incensed by a steroid called Sovietism, got into the foundations, crawled through the vents, poured up from the sewers and crashed down from the attic and routed the Parliamentarians, leaving the Prince to dash about like the headless chicken he'd become. The rats were set to fling themselves upon the tides and give chase as Llewellyn washed-up on Victoria Salvadoria when on came the Iansislian relief force, an advance fleet of warships and troops. The battle was joined as the rebels uncovered Moscow's missiles and flew against the enemy with victorious force, so the Commonwealth's records have it.
The foreigners retreated in disarray and far fewer number than in which they had intervened and the clucking Prince would never return from his exile on the last rock left for the rats to colonise. Many count the day a strategic defeat, for Sovietists today forget that their objective then had been the invasion and conquest of Salvador, and then of Victoria, but that an entire fleet was scattered and close to wholly destroyed while the revolutionaries suffered casualties few enough to be counted on one hand is more than enough for the Battle of Salvador to be celebrated as the final emancipation of gutter-rat.
This year, though, is there not something in the air? Riding, perhaps, on the profound tones of the carnyx three? As we remember, was that victory one of justice for the slaves, or, after all, might it have been the crowning achievement of king rat?
Through Portmeirion's (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/portmeirion.jpg) streets so hectic would come, each year, the thronging masses. They would follow the carnyx, the rats behind the piper, flashing toothy smiles, shrieking, drinking, singing, shooting the sky with their old rifles.
This year, then, as lenses looked and microphones waited in a hush, what was this rhythmic sound beside the harmony of the horns? Not the clamour of the rabble, but the synchronised planting of ten thousand right feet, followed by the same on the other side, and then again the right. The rats were marching, orderly, uniformed.
What? The global media was alarmed, journalists stood frightened. They -many capitalists, monarchists, detractors to the anarchistic Soviet Commonwealth's model and Geletia's whole revolution- were deep within Beddgelert, expecting to see a party of a scale worth recording in pictures, a minor story to cover for an slow news days this week, a study of the uncouth and incapable Communist Celts. Instead they saw an army of incredible scale. The stature of the men and women was always intimidating, a typical Geletian warrior stood two metres tall even before spiking his hair or donning a decorative helm, and their numbers were great -better than seven billion heads on the continent today- but they had seemed self-involved, drunk and incapable, dirty and stupid in the preception of those who thought them a curiosity.
This was supposed to be the Durcodi Parliamentary Protectorate. Here, Adiatorix ap Llewellyn, son of the exiled prince, presided over a governing body associated with Victoria and Salvador. Royal authority and protection extended over the province, and the Salvador Day marches were an increasingly innocent reminder of what might have been. The Sovietists marched by mutual agreement with a Princely state that could not afford the cost of war and so pretended inferiority and accepted annual indignity as the rather lower price of peace. The rabble came and went, once a year, and...
The warhorns had ceased to sound. Journalists looked about, wondering at the cause of a new commotion in the assemblage of the townspeople.
Chivo! It's Chivo!
A man was being almost pulled apart, it seemed to be out of desperate admiration rather than malice, and showered with confetti. Chivo (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/Chivoconfetti.jpg), a key figure of the revolution, fallen into obscurity when anarchy prevailed and the most vocal and famous fighters became no more important than any other happy rat in the equitable family. Chivo was walking back, struggling through the crowds, towards the soldiers, who had ceased their march with the dying of the trumpeting.
This, then, must be Parliament's licence to run the lives of the Durcodi finally revoked. The Parliamentary Protectorate surely was now part of the Indian Soviet Commonwealth. The whole of the mainland, united, save for the small Oceanian enclave. More than seven billion Soviet citizens
One of the carnyx players was gone. A woman was holding-up his druidic robes and screaming hysterically. She had Chivo's vestment.
Attention turned quickly to the remaining hornblowers. Their covers would have been torn from them by the masses as camera crews looked on and recorded the event for all the world, and so, wisely, they too disrobed. Both wore the same white-trimmed black suit seen on Chivo- formal-wear for anarchist fighters back in the revolution, apparently started when one fighter, invited to accept a very formal surrender by princely forces in the east, having only his black uniform and camouflage, emerged with the enemy's white flags tied off on his wrists and draped over his shoulders, unable to carry them all, so keen had been the surrender of a great many individual royalist units.
Their faces uncovered, the crowds looked upon the two, and then erupted.
IGO! IGO! IGO! IGO! IGO!
A carnyx (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/carnyxhorn.jpg) blast rung out across The Village, then two more joined it, a chorus taking a deep breath from antiquity to produce a clarion sound on a new dawn.
The sound had turned the disciplined ranks around the SPQR standard into a natural chaos of forage before the seeking blade of a hunter-gathering Gelóangh, had given fair warning before the sack of Delphi, and had wailed on and on as the proto-Geletians migrated in one of history's most epic blood marches, seeking through the dismayed empires of Armenia, Parthia, the Guptas, and the Tamil kings before the sacred trumpets proclaimed a fortress established of this continent in the Indian Ocean: Geletia.
Come, the rabble! Cried the infamous warhorns, Come, and think of Salvador!
This was the yearly event of commemoration for a famous battle pitting the Celtic protégés of the Soviet Union against their Prince, his Parliament, and Iansisle's Shieldian Empire. Llewllyn had been driven from the mainland like a flightless fowl into the sea before the world-shaking arrival of a thousand Norwegian rats. A dirty heaving mass of gnashing teeth and deviousness, the rodent peasants, increased and incensed by a steroid called Sovietism, got into the foundations, crawled through the vents, poured up from the sewers and crashed down from the attic and routed the Parliamentarians, leaving the Prince to dash about like the headless chicken he'd become. The rats were set to fling themselves upon the tides and give chase as Llewellyn washed-up on Victoria Salvadoria when on came the Iansislian relief force, an advance fleet of warships and troops. The battle was joined as the rebels uncovered Moscow's missiles and flew against the enemy with victorious force, so the Commonwealth's records have it.
The foreigners retreated in disarray and far fewer number than in which they had intervened and the clucking Prince would never return from his exile on the last rock left for the rats to colonise. Many count the day a strategic defeat, for Sovietists today forget that their objective then had been the invasion and conquest of Salvador, and then of Victoria, but that an entire fleet was scattered and close to wholly destroyed while the revolutionaries suffered casualties few enough to be counted on one hand is more than enough for the Battle of Salvador to be celebrated as the final emancipation of gutter-rat.
This year, though, is there not something in the air? Riding, perhaps, on the profound tones of the carnyx three? As we remember, was that victory one of justice for the slaves, or, after all, might it have been the crowning achievement of king rat?
Through Portmeirion's (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/portmeirion.jpg) streets so hectic would come, each year, the thronging masses. They would follow the carnyx, the rats behind the piper, flashing toothy smiles, shrieking, drinking, singing, shooting the sky with their old rifles.
This year, then, as lenses looked and microphones waited in a hush, what was this rhythmic sound beside the harmony of the horns? Not the clamour of the rabble, but the synchronised planting of ten thousand right feet, followed by the same on the other side, and then again the right. The rats were marching, orderly, uniformed.
What? The global media was alarmed, journalists stood frightened. They -many capitalists, monarchists, detractors to the anarchistic Soviet Commonwealth's model and Geletia's whole revolution- were deep within Beddgelert, expecting to see a party of a scale worth recording in pictures, a minor story to cover for an slow news days this week, a study of the uncouth and incapable Communist Celts. Instead they saw an army of incredible scale. The stature of the men and women was always intimidating, a typical Geletian warrior stood two metres tall even before spiking his hair or donning a decorative helm, and their numbers were great -better than seven billion heads on the continent today- but they had seemed self-involved, drunk and incapable, dirty and stupid in the preception of those who thought them a curiosity.
This was supposed to be the Durcodi Parliamentary Protectorate. Here, Adiatorix ap Llewellyn, son of the exiled prince, presided over a governing body associated with Victoria and Salvador. Royal authority and protection extended over the province, and the Salvador Day marches were an increasingly innocent reminder of what might have been. The Sovietists marched by mutual agreement with a Princely state that could not afford the cost of war and so pretended inferiority and accepted annual indignity as the rather lower price of peace. The rabble came and went, once a year, and...
The warhorns had ceased to sound. Journalists looked about, wondering at the cause of a new commotion in the assemblage of the townspeople.
Chivo! It's Chivo!
A man was being almost pulled apart, it seemed to be out of desperate admiration rather than malice, and showered with confetti. Chivo (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v148/Chivtv/NS1/Chivoconfetti.jpg), a key figure of the revolution, fallen into obscurity when anarchy prevailed and the most vocal and famous fighters became no more important than any other happy rat in the equitable family. Chivo was walking back, struggling through the crowds, towards the soldiers, who had ceased their march with the dying of the trumpeting.
This, then, must be Parliament's licence to run the lives of the Durcodi finally revoked. The Parliamentary Protectorate surely was now part of the Indian Soviet Commonwealth. The whole of the mainland, united, save for the small Oceanian enclave. More than seven billion Soviet citizens
One of the carnyx players was gone. A woman was holding-up his druidic robes and screaming hysterically. She had Chivo's vestment.
Attention turned quickly to the remaining hornblowers. Their covers would have been torn from them by the masses as camera crews looked on and recorded the event for all the world, and so, wisely, they too disrobed. Both wore the same white-trimmed black suit seen on Chivo- formal-wear for anarchist fighters back in the revolution, apparently started when one fighter, invited to accept a very formal surrender by princely forces in the east, having only his black uniform and camouflage, emerged with the enemy's white flags tied off on his wrists and draped over his shoulders, unable to carry them all, so keen had been the surrender of a great many individual royalist units.
Their faces uncovered, the crowds looked upon the two, and then erupted.
IGO! IGO! IGO! IGO! IGO!