Lizard World by Terry Richard Bazes Page B

stand upon a knoll, we descried from afar a bonfire and a multitude of hovels which I did ween to be the capital city of this salvage potentate. Erelong we did progress thither and, traversing a rude bridge across a foetid stream infested by crokadells and painted salvages in canoos, did find ourselves amidst a throng of shrieking fiends whose hair, bedone with top-knots, exhaled a singular smell of pisse. Indeed this village, if it were such, did offend the nose. For ’twas little better than a sewer besprinkled with some forty houses -- tho’ to call them houses were the veriest hyperbole. For in sooth they were not more than rude huts of mud and bark, with hides of beasts for doorways before which crouched a multitude of dirt-smeared babes and toothless, naked dotards whose beggarly, aged infirmity was quite beyond compare.
           “Here’s harlots enow for the lot of us,” now says this Simkyn Potter.
           For such was the mirth of these salvages at our arrival, that presently some thirty well-nigh naked women, whom I did learn hereafter were the unfortunate slaves and chattel of this prince, did commence to dance and sing before the bonfire, making all manner of lewd gestures, thrusting their buttocks and exposing their privities howsomever this cruel prince did command. For ’twas all too plain this barbarous Emperor did but reckon them as swine which he did mean to share as proof of his hospitable bounty. Yea, full soon as they had done with this infernal dance, a score of these unfortunate females, lifting up those beast-hides which engirdled them, did fall down straight upon the hands and knees. For these salvages do couple upon all four like cattle and in this wise did they mean to bid us welcome. Wherefore my mariners were greatly heartened, for they had been at sea these seven months and did rise to the sport forthwith.
           The salvagess Satchunk, of whom I spake before, anon did leave off shouldering my chair and, raising up the skirt of squerrell’s hyde with which she was begirt, did likewise stand awaiting on all four -- whereby I was most cruelly vexed, whether to renounce the dignity of a gentleman or to refuse the hospitality of this most salvage and dangerous prince.
           Fearing to provoke his majestick ire, I arose to the task. Notwithstanding which, Master Thorogood, my erstwhile tutor, did most tiresomely remonstrate and bestride back and forth amongst us and expostulate upon sin and the fires of perdition to such a frightful extremity that methought he was like to foul his breeches. Natheless, these salvage wenches did continue to disport with us, in plain view upon the sward and talking amongst one another all the while, as if ’twere no more to them than to make curtesie.
           It now befell, after I had disported with this salvagess and drunk the noxious beveridge which she did proffer for my pleasure, that I was seiz’d -- when I lay adown to sleep -- with a most strange and frantick fever. I did neither entirely sleep nor wake. But in a half-dreaming, extravagant delirium meseemed I was yet again in England and that the Duke my father was a crokadell -- and whereas ere this methought that if the Prince of Orange should become King I might contrive to brand my brother for a Papist and a traitor, now did I shiver with fear that I would die amongst these salvages and never have the dukedom. Such was the feaverish confusion of this frenzy that methought (whilst in truth I lay on ground beneath the stars) that the bonfire of these salvages was my cousin Fawncey’s antique volume which I had stolen and ’twas this book which thus did burn and beckon. Of course ’twas but a scurvy trick of fancy. But thus in my fever did I rave and think myself again in England and remember me of that morning when I blinded my cousin Fawncey and filched his precious book.
           Young Fawncey had ever been a confounded fool, and altho’ I had liefer buggered a