Vũ Đàm Linh
(Mazerlin)
New Member
BORED OF THE RINGS
THE SURPRISING SHEEP AND OTHER MIND EXCURSIONS
"Do you like what you doth see . . . ?" said the voluptuous elf-maiden
as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded,
shadowy glories within. Frito's throat was dry, though his head reeled with
desire and ale.
She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated
boggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy
toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of
her.
"Let me make thee more comfortable," she whispered hoarsely, fiddling
with the clasps of his jerkin, loosening his sword belt with a laugh. "Touch
me, oh _touch me_," she crooned.
Frito's hand, as though of its own will, reached out and traced the
delicate swelling of her elf-breast, while the other slowly crept around her
tiny, flawless waist, crushing her to his barrel chest.
"Toes, I _love_ hairy toes," she moaned, forcing him down on the
silvered carpet. Her tiny, pink toes caressed the luxuriant fur of his instep
while Frito's nose sought out the warmth of her precious elf-navel.
"But I'm so small and hairy, and . . . and you're so _beautiful_," Frito
whimpered, slipping clumsily out of his crossed garters.
The elf-maiden said nothing, but only sighed deep in her throat and held
him more firmly to her faunlike body. "There is one thing you must do for me
first," she whispered into one tufted ear.
"Anything," sobbed Frito, growing frantic with his need. "Anything!"
She closed her eyes and then opened them to the ceiling. "The Ring," she
said. "I must have your Ring."
Frito's whole body tensed. "Oh no," he cried, "not that! Anything but .
. . that."
"I must have it," she said both tenderly and fiercely. "I must have the
_Ring!_"
Frito's eyes blurred with tears and confusion. "I can't," he said. "I
mustn't!"
But he knew resolve was no longer strong in him. Slowly, the elfmaiden's
hand inched toward the chain in his vest pocket, closer and closer it
came to the Ring Frito had guarded so faithfully . . .
Contents
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE -- CONCERNING BOGGlES
I It's My Party and I'll Snub Who I Want To
II Three's Company, Four's a Bore
III Indigestion at the Sign of the Goode Eats
IV Finders Keepers, Finders Weepers
V Some Monsters
VI The Riders of Roi-Tan
VII Serutan Spelled Backwards Is Mud
VIII Schlob's Lair and Other Mountain Resorts
IX Minas Troney in the Soup
X Be It Ever So Horrid
FOREWORD
Though we cannot with complete candor state, as does Professor T., that
"the tale grew in the telling," we can allow that this tale (or rather the
necessity of hawking it at a bean a copy) grew in direct proportion to the
ominous dwindling of our bank accounts at the Harvard Trust in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. This loss of turgor in our already emaciated portfolio was not,
in itself, cause for alarm (or "alarum" as Professor T. might aptly put it),
but the resultant threats and cuffed ears received at the hands of creditors
_were_. Thinking long on this, we retired to the reading lounge of our club to
meditate on this vicissitude.
The following autumn found us still in our leather chairs, plagued with
bedsores and appreciably thinner, but still without a puppy biscuit for the
lupine pest lolling around the front door. It was at this point that our
palsied hands came to rest on a dog-eared nineteenth printing of kindly old
Prof. Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_. Dollar signs in our guileless eyes, we
quickly ascertained that it was still selling like you-know-whats. Armed to
the bicuspids with thesauri and reprints of international libel laws, we
locked ourselves in the _Lampoon_ squash court with enough Fritos and Dr.
Pepper to choke a horse. (Eventually the production of this turkey actually
required the choking of a small horse, but that's another story entirely.)
Spring found us with decayed teeth and several pounds of foolscap
covered with inky, illegible scrawls. A quick rereading proved it to be a
surprisingly brilliant satire on Tolkien's linguistic and mythic structures,
filled with little takeoffs on his use of Norse tales and wicked phoneme
fricatives. A cursory assessment of the manuscript's sales appeal, however,
convinced us that dollarwise the thing would be better employed as tinder for
the library fireplace. The next day, handicapped by near-fatal hangovers and
the loss of all our bodily hair (but that's another story), we sat down at two
supercharged, fuel-injected, 345-hp Smith Coronas and knocked off the opus
you're about to read before tiffin. (And we take tiffin pretty durn early in
_these_ parts, buckaroo.) The result, as you are about to see for yourself,
was a book as readable as Linear A and of about the same literary value as an
autographed gatefold of St. Simon Stylites.
"As for any inner meanings or 'message,' " as Professor T. said in his
foreword, there is none herein except that which you may read into it
yourself. (Hint: What did P. T. Barnum say was "born every minute"?) Through
this book, we hope, the reader may find deeper insights not only into the
nature of literary piracy, but into his own character as well. (Hint: What is
missing from this famous quotation? "A ---- and his ----- soon are ------."
You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!)
_Bored of the Rings_ has been issued in this form as a parody. This is
very important. It is an attempt to satirize the other books, not simply to be
mistaken for them. Thus, we must strongly remind you that _this is not the
real thing!_ So if you're about to purchase this copy thinking it's about the
_Lord_ of the Rings, then you'd better put it right back onto that big pile of
remainders where you found it. Oh, but you've already read this far, so that
must mean that--that you've already _bought_ . . . oh dear . . . oh my . . .
(Tote up another one on the register, Jocko. "_Ching!_")
Lastly, we hope that those of you who _have_ read Prof. Tolkien's
remarkable trilogy already will not be offended by our little spoof of it. All
fooling aside, we consider ourselves honored to be able to make fun of such an
impressive, truly masterful work of genius and imagination. After all, that is
the most important service a book can render, the rendering of enjoyment, in
this case, enjoyment through laughter. And don't trouble yourself too much if
you don't laugh at what you are about to read, for if you perk up your pink
little ears, you may hear the silvery tinkling of merriment in the air, far,
far away. . . .
It's us, buster. _Ching!_
PROLOGUE -- CONCERNING BOGGIES
This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its
pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity
of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since
anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede
that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort
whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets, and who grow up to be muggers,
dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of
Prof. Tolkien's interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting
the kind of scorchmarks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion
of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have
collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by
placing Prof. Tolkien's books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them
countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include
a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells
account of Dildo Bugger's earlier adventures, called by him _Travels with
Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth_, but wisely renamed by the publisher
_Valley of the Trolls_.
Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have
decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale
market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of
pastoral squalor. They don't like machines more complicated than a garrote, a
blackjack, or a luger, and they have always been shy of the "Big Folk" or
"Biggers," as they call us. As a rule they now avoid us, except on rare
occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or
hunter. They are a little people, smaller than dwarves, who consider them
puny, sly, and inscrutable and often refer to them as the "boggie peril." They
seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering
creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. As for the boggies
of the Sty, with whom we are chiefly concerned, they are unusually drab,
dressing in shiny gray suits with narrow lapels, alpine hats, and string ties.
They wear no shoes, and they walk on a pair of hairy blunt instruments which
can only be called feet because of the position they occupy at the end of
their legs. Their faces have a pimply malevolence that suggests a deep-seated
fondness for making obscene telephone calls, and when they smile, there is
something in the way they wag their foot-long tongues that makes Komodo
dragons gulp with disbelief. They have long, clever fingers of the sort one
normally associates with hands that spend a good deal of time around the necks
of small, furry animals and in other people's pockets, and they are very
skillful at producing intricate and useful things, like loaded dice and booby
traps. They love to eat and drink, play mumblety-peg with dim-witted
quadrupeds, and tell off-color dwarf jokes. They give dull parties and cheap
presents, and they enjoy the same general regard and esteem as a dead otter.
It is plain that boggies are relatives of ours, standing somewhere along
the evolutionary line that leads from rats to wolverines and eventually to
Italians, but what our exact relationship is cannot be told. Their beginnings
lie far back in the Good Old Days when the planet was populated with the kind
of colorful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see
nowadays. The elves alone preserve any records of that time, and most of them
are filled with elf-stuff, raunchy pictures of naked trolls and sordid
accounts of "orc" orgies. But the boggies had clearly lived in Lower Middle
Earth for a long time before the days of Frito and Dildo, when, like a very
old salami that suddenly makes its presence known, they came to trouble the
councils of the Small and the Silly.
This was all in the Third, or Sheet-Metal, Age of Lower Middle Earth,
and the lands of that age have long since dropped into the sea and their
inhabitants into bell jars at the Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not Odditorium. Of
their original home, the boggies of Frito's time had lost all records, partly
because their level of literacy and intellectual development could have been
equaled by a young blowfish and partly because their fondness for genealogical
studies made them dislike the notion that their elaborately forged family
trees had roots about as steady as Birnham Wood. It is nevertheless clear from
their heavy accents and their fondness for dishes cooked in Brylcreem that
somewhere in their past they went west in steerage. Their legends and old
songs, which deal mainly with oversexed elves and dragons in heat, make
passing mention of the area around the Anacin River, between Plywood and the
Papier-Mache Mountains. There are other records in the great libraries of
Twodor which lend credence to such a notion, old articles in the _Police
Gazette_ and the like. Why they decided to undertake the perilous crossing
into Oleodor is uncertain, though again their songs tell of a shadow that fell
upon the land so that the potatoes grew no more.
Before the crossing of the Papier-Mache Mountains, the boggies had
become divided into three distinct breeds: Clubfoots, Stools, and Naugahydes.
The Clubfoots, by far the most numerous, were swarthy, shifty-eyed, and short;
their hands and feet were as deft as crowbars. They preferred to live in the
hillsides where they could mug rabbits and small goats, and they supported
themselves by hiring out as torpedoes for the local dwarf population. The
Stools were larger and oilier than the Clubfoots, and they lived in the fetid
lands at the mouth and other orifices of the Anacin River, where they raised
yaws and goiters for the river trade. They had long, shiny, black hair, and
they loved knives. Their closest relations were with men, for whom they
handled occasional rubouts. Least numerous were the Naugahydes, who were
taller and wispier than the other boggies and who lived in the forests, where
they maintained a thriving trade in leather goods, sandals, and handicrafts.
They did periodic interior-decorating work for the elves, but spent most of
their time singing lurid folk songs and accosting squirrels.
Once across the mountains, the boggies lost no time establishing
themselves. They shortened their names and elbowed their way into all the
country clubs, dropping their old language and customs like a live grenade. An
unusual easterly migration of men and elves from Oleodor at this same time
makes it possible to fix the date the boggies came on the scene with some
accuracy. In the same year, the 1,623rd year of the Third Age, the Naugahyde
brothers, Brasso and Drano, led a large following of boggies across the
Gallowine River disguised as a band of itinerant graverobbers and took control
from the high King at Ribroast. * [* Either Arglebargle IV or someone else.]
In return for the King's grudging acquiescence, they set up toll booths on the
roads and bridges, waylaid his messengers, and sent him suggestive and
threatening letters. In short, they settled down for a long stay.
Thus began the history of the Sty, and the boggies, with an eye to the
statutes of limitations, started a new calendar dating from the crossing of
the Gallowine. They were quite happy with their new land, and once again they
dropped out of the history of men, an occurrence which was greeted with the
same universal sense of regret as the sudden death of a mad dog. The Sty was
marked with great red splotches on all the AAA maps, and the only people who
ever passed through were either hopelessly lost or completely unhinged. Aside
from these rare visitors, the boggies were left entirely to themselves until
the time of Frito and Dildo. While there was still a King at Ribroast, the
boggies remained nominally his subjects, and to the last battle at Ribroast
with the Slumlord of Borax, they sent some snipers, though who they sided with
is unclear. There the North Kingdom ended, and the boggies returned to their
well-ordered, simple lives, eating and drinking, singing and dancing, and
passing bad checks.
Nonetheless, the easy life of the Sty had left the boggies fundamentally
unchanged, and they were still as hard to kill as a cockroach and as easy to
deal with as a cornered rat. Though likely to attack only in cold blood, and
killing only for money, they remained masters of the low blow and the gang-up.
They were crack shots and very handy with all sorts of equalizers, and any
small, slow, and stupid beast that turned its back on a crowd of boggies was
looking for a stomping.
All boggies originally lived in holes, which is after all hardly
surprising for creatures on a first-name basis with rats. In Dildo's time,
their abodes were for the most part built above ground in the manner of elves
and men, but these still retained many of the features of their traditional
homes and were indistinguishable from the dwellings of those species whose
chief function is to meet their makers, around August, deep in the walls of
old houses. As a rule, they were dumpling-shaped, built of mulch, silt, stray
divots, and other seasonal deposits, often whitewashed by irregular pigeons.
Consequently, most boggie towns looked as though some very large and untidy
creature, perhaps a dragon, had quite recently suffered a series of
disappointing bowel movements in the vicinity.
In the Sty as a whole there were at least a dozen of these curious
settlements, linked by a system of roads, post offices, and a government that
would have been considered unusually crude for a colony of cherrystone clams.
The Sty itself was divided into farthings, half-farthings, and Indian-head
nickels ruled by a mayor who was elected in a flurry of ballot-box stuffing
every Arbor Day. To assist him in his duties there was a rather large police
force which did nothing but extract confessions, mostly from squirrels. Beyond
these few tokens of regulation, the Sty betrayed no signs of government. The
vast majority of the boggies' time was taken up growing food and eating it and
making liquor and drinking it. The rest of it was spent throwing up.
_Of the Finding of the Ring_
As is told in the volume previous to this hound, _Valley of the Trolls_,
Dildo Bugger set out one day with a band of demented dwarves and a discredited
Rosicrucian named Goodgulf to separate a dragon from his hoard of short-term
municipals and convertible debentures. The quest was successful, and the
dragon, a prewar basilisk who smelled like a bus, was taken from behind while
he was clipping coupons. And yet, though many pointless and annoying deeds
were done, this adventure would concern us a good deal less than it does, if
that is possible, except for a bit of petty larceny Dildo did along the way to
keep his hand in. The party was ambushed in the Mealey Mountains by a roving
pack of narcs, and in hurrying to the aid of the embattled dwarves, Dildo
somehow lost his sense of direction and ended up in a cave a considerable
distance away. Finding himself at the mouth of a tunnel which led rather
perceptibly down, Dildo suffered a temporary recurrence of an old inner-ear
problem and went rushing along it to the rescue, as he thought, of his
friends. After running for some time and finding nothing but more tunnel, he
was beginning to feel he had taken a wrong turn somewhere when the passage
abruptly ended in a large cavern.
When Dildo's eyes became adjusted to the pale light, he found that the
grotto was almost filled by a wide, kidneyshaped lake where a nasty-looking
clown named Goddam paddled noisily about on an old rubber sea horse. He ate
raw fish and occasional side orders to travel from the outside world in the
form of lost travelers like Dildo, and he greeted Dildo's unexpected entrance
into his underground sauna in much the same way as he would the sudden arrival
of a Chicken Delight truck. But like anyone with boggie ancestry, Goddam
preferred the subtle approach in assaulting creatures over five inches high
and weighing more than ten pounds, and consequently he challenged Dildo to a
riddle game to gain time. Dildo, who had a sudden attack of amnesia regarding
the fact that the dwarves were being made into chutney outside the cave,
accepted.
They asked each other countless riddles, such as who played the Cisco
Kid and what was Krypton. In the end Dildo won the game. Stumped at last for a
riddle to ask, he cried out, as his hand fell on his snub-nosed .38, "What
have I got in my pocket?" This Goddam failed to answer, and growing impatient,
he paddled up to Dildo, whining, "Let me see, let me see." Dildo obliged by
pulling out the pistol and emptying it in Goddam's direction. The dark spoiled
his aim, and he managed only to deflate the rubber float, leaving Goddam to
flounder. Goddam, who couldn't swim, reached out his hand to Dildo and begged
him to pull him out, and as he did, Dildo noticed an interesting-looking ring
on his finger and pulled it off. He would have finished Goddam off then and
there, but pity stayed his hand. _It's a pity I've run out of bullets_, he
thought, as he went back up the tunnel, pursued by Goddam's cries of rage.
Now it is a curious fact that Dildo never told this story, explaining
that he had gotten the Ring from a pig's nose or a gumball machine--he
couldn't remember which. Goodgulf, who was naturally suspicious, finally
managed with the aid of one of his secret potions* [* Probably Sodium
Pentothal.] to drag the truth out of the boggie, but it disturbed him
considerably that Dildo, who was a perpetual and compulsive liar, would not
have concocted a more grandiose tale from the start. It was then, some fifty
years before our story begins, that Goodgulf first guessed at the Ring's
importance. He was, as usual, dead wrong.
BORED OF THE RINGS
I
IT'S MY PARTY AND I'LL SNUB WHO I WANT TO
When Mr. Dildo Bugger of Bug End grudgingly announced his intention of
throwing a free feed for all the boggies in his part of the Sty, the reaction
in Boggietown was immediate--all through the messy little slum could be heard
squeals of "Swell!" and "Hot puppies, _grub!_" Slavering with anticipation,
several recipients of the invitations devoured their little engraved scrolls,
temporarily deranged by transports of gluttony. After the initial hysteria,
however, the boggies returned to their daily routines and, as is their wont,
lapsed back into a coma.
Nevertheless, jabbering rumors spread through the tatty lean-tos of
recent shipments of whole, bewildered oxen, great barrels of foamy suds,
fireworks, tons of potato greens, and gigantic hogsheads of hogs' heads. Even
huge bales of freshly harvested stingwort, a popular and remarkably powerful
emetic, were carted into town. News of the fête reached even unto the
Gallowine, and the outlying residents of the Sty began to drift into town like
peripatetic leeches, each intent on an orgy of freeloading that would make a
lamprey look like a piker.
No one in the Sty had a more bottomless gullet than that drooling and
senile old gossip Haf Gangree. Haf had spent his life as the town's faithful
beadle, and had long since retired on the proceeds of his thriving blackmail
racket.
Tonight, Fatlip, as he was called, was holding forth at the Bag Eye, a
sleazy dive more than once closed down by Mayor Fastbuck for the dubious
behavior of the establishment's buxom "B-boggies," who were said to be able to
roll a troll before you could say "Rumpelstiltskin." The usual collection of
sodden oafs were there, including Fatlip's son, Spam Gangree, who was
presently celebrating his suspended sentence for the performing of an
unnatural act with an underage female dragon of the opposite sex.
"The whole thing smells pretty queer to me," said Fatlip, as he inhaled
the acrid fumes of his nose-pipe. "I'm meaning the way Mr. Bugger is throwing
this big bash when for years he's not so much as offered a piece o' moldy
cheese to his neighbors." The listeners nodded silently, for this was
certainly the case. Even before Dildo's "strange disappearance" he had kept
his burrow at Bug End guarded by fierce wolverines, and in no one's memory had
he ever contributed a farthing to the Boggietown Annual Mithril Drive for
Homeless Banshees. The fact that no one else ever had either did not excuse
Dildo's famed stinginess. He kept to himself, nurturing only his nephew and a
mania for dirty Scrabble.
"And that boy of his, Frito," added bleary-eyed Nat Clubfoot, "as crazy
as a woodpecker, _that_ one is." This was verified by Old Poop of Backwater,
among others. For who hadn't seen young Frito walking aimlessly through the
crooked streets of Boggietown, carrying little clumps of flowers and muttering
about "truth and beauty" and blurting out silly nonsense like "Cogito ergo
boggum"?
"He's an odd one, all right," said Fatlip, "and I wouldn't be at all
surprised if there weren't something in that talk of his having dwarfish
sympathies." At this point there was an embarrassed silence, particularly from
young Spam, who had never believed the unproved charges that the Buggers were
"scroll-carrying dwarves." As Spam pointed out, real dwarves were shorter and
smelled much worse than boggies.
"That's pretty stout talk," laughed Fatlip, wagging his right foreleg,
"about a body what's only _borrowed_ the name of Bugger!"
"Aye," chimed Clotty Peristalt. "If that Frito weren't the seed of a
crossbow wedding, then I don't know lunch from din-din!" The roisterers all
laughed aloud as they remembered Frito's mother, Dildo's sister, who rashly
plighted her troth to someone from the wrong side of the Gallowine (someone
known to be a hafling, i.e. part boggie, part opossum). Several of the members
took this up and there followed a series of coarse* [* Coarse to anyone except
a boggie, of course.] and rather simpleminded jests at the expense of the
Buggers.
"What's more," said Fatlip, "Dildo's always acting . . . mysterious, if
you know what I mean."
"There are those that say he acts like he's got something to hide, they
say," came a strange voice from the corner shadows. The voice belonged to a
man, a stranger to the boggies of the Bag Eye, a stranger they had
understandably overlooked because of his rather ordinary black cape, black
chain mail, black mace, black dirk, and perfectly normal red glowing fires
where his eyes should have been.
"Them what say that may be right," agreed Fatlip, winking at his cronies
to tell them a punchline was coming. "But them that say such may be wrong,
too." After the general hilarity resulting from the typical Gangree gaff died
down, few had noticed that the stranger had disappeared, leaving only a
strange, barnyard odor behind him.
"But," insisted little Spam, "it _will_ be a good party!"
To this they all agreed, for there was nothing a boggie loved more than
an opportunity to stuff himself until he was violently ill.
The season was cool, early autumn, heralding the annual change in the
boggie dessert from whole watermelons to whole pumpkins. But the younger
boggies who were not yet too obese to trundle their hulkish selves through the
thoroughfares of the town saw evidence of a future treat at the forthcoming
celebration: fireworks!
As the day of the party drew nearer, carts drawn by sturdy plow-goats
rolled through the bullrush gates of Boggietown, laden with boxes and crates,
each bearing the X-rune of Goodgulf the Wizard and various elvish brand names.
The crates were unloaded and opened at Dildo's door, and the mewling
boggies wagged their vestigial tails with wonder at the marvelous contents.
There were clusters of tubes mounted on tripods to shoot rather outsized roman
candles; fat, finned skyrockets, with odd little buttons at the front end,
weighing hundreds of pounds; a revolving cylinder of tubes with a crank to
turn them; and large "cherry bombs" that looked to the children more like
little green pineapples with a ring inserted at the top. Each crate was
labeled with an olive-drab elf-rune signifying that these toys had been made
in the elf-shops of a fairy whose name was something very much like "Amy
Surplus."
Dildo watched the unpacking with a broad grin and sent the young ones
scampering with a vicious swipe of a well-honed toenail. "G'wan, beat it,
scram!" he called merrily after them as they disappeared. He then laughed and
turned back to his boggie-hole, to talk to his guest within.
"This'll be one fireworks display they won't forget," cackled the ageing
boggie to Goodgulf, who was puffing his cigar rather uncomfortably in a chair
of tasteless elvish-modern. The floor around it was littered with four-letter
Scrabble arrangements.
"I am afraid that you must alter your plans for them," said the Wizard,
unsnaggling a clot of tangled hair in his long, dirtygray beard. "You cannot
use extermination as a method for settling your petty grudges with the
townspeople."
Dildo studied his old friend with shrewd appraisal. The old Wizard was
robed in a threadbare magician's cloak long out of fashion, with a few
spangles and sequins hanging precariously at the ragged hems. On his head was
a tall, battered conical hat sloppily covered with glow-in-the-dark cabalistic
signs, alchemical symbols, and some off-color dwarfish graffiti, and in his
gnarled, nail-bitten hands was a bent length of silvered maggotwood that
served doubly as a "magic" wand and backscratcher. At this moment Goodgulf was
using it in its second office as he studied the worn toes of what in these
days would be taken for black basketball sneakers. Hightops.
"Looking a little down-at-the-heels, Gulfie," chuckled Dildo. "Slump in
the old Wizard racket, eh?"
Goodgulf looked pained at the use of his old school nickname, but
adjusted his robes with dignity. "It is no fault of mine that unbelievers
ridicule my powers," he said. "My wonders will yet again make all gape and
quail!" Suddenly he made a pass with his scratcher and the room was plunged
into darkness. Through the blackness Dildo saw that Goodgulf's robes had
become radiant and bright. Odd letters appeared mysteriously on the front of
his robe, reading in elvish, _Will Thee Kiss Me in the Dark, Baby?_
Just as suddenly the light returned to the comfortable burrow, and the
inscription faded from the conjurer's breast. Dildo rolled his eyes upward in
his head and shrugged.
"Really now, Gulfie," said Dildo, "that kind of stuff went out with
high-button greaves. No wonder you've got to moonlight card-sharking at hick
carny shows."
Goodgulf was unperturbed by his friend's sarcasm. "Do not mock powers
beyond your knowledge, impudent hairfoot," he said, as five aces materialized
in his hand, "for you see the efficacy of my enchantments!"
"All I see is that you've finally got the hang of that silly sleevespring,"
chuckled the boggie as he poured a bowl of ale for his old companion.
"So why don't you leave off with your white-mice-and-pixie-dust routine and
tell me why you've honored me with your presence? _And_ appetite."
The Wizard paused a moment before speaking to focus his eyes, which had
recently developed a tendency to cross, and looked gravely at Dildo.
"It is time to talk of the Ring," he said.
"Ring, ring? What ring?" said Dildo.
"Thee knows only too well what Ring," said Goodgulf. "The Ring in thy
pocket, Master Bugger."
"Oooooh, _that_ Ring," said Dildo with a show of innocence, "I thought
you meant the ring you leave in my tub after your seances with your rubber
duck."
"This is not the time for the making of jests," said Goodgulf, "for Evil
Ones are afoot in the lands, and danger is abroad."
"But--" began Dildo.
"Strange things are stirring in the East . . ."
"But--"
"Doom is walking the High Road . . ."
"But--"
"There is a dog in the manger . . ."
"But--"
". . . a fly in the ointment . . ."
Dildo clapped his paw frantically over the working mouth of the Wizard.
"You mean . . . you mean," he whispered, "_there's a Balrog in the woodpile?_"
"Mmummffleflug!" affirmed the gagged magician.
Dildo's worst fears had come to pass. After the party, he thought, there
would be much to be decided.
Although only two hundred invitations had been sent, Frito Bugger should
not have been surprised to see several times that number sitting at the huge
troughlike tables under the great pavilion in the Bugger meadows. His young
eyes widened as he moped about observing legions of ravenous muzzles tearing
and snatching at their roasts and joints, oblivious to all else. Few faces
were familiar to him in the grunting, belching press that lined the gorgingtables,
but fewer still were not already completely disguised in masks of
dried gravy and meat sauce. It was only then that the young boggie realized
the truth in Dildo's favorite adage, "It takes a heap o' vittles to gag a
boggie."
It was, nevertheless, a splendid party, decided Frito, as he dodged a
flying hamhock. Great pits had been dug simply to accommodate the mountains of
scorched flesh the guests threw down their well-muscled throats, and his Uncle
Dildo had devised an ingenious series of pipelines to gravity-flow the
hundreds of gallons of heady ale into their limitless paunches. Moodily, Frito
studied his fellow boggies as they noisily crammed their maws with potato
greens and jammed stray bits of greasy flesh into their jackets and coinpurses
"for later." Occasionally an overly zealous diner would fall
unconscious to the ground, much to the amusement of his fellows, who would
take the opportunity to pelt him with garbage. Garbage, that is, that they
weren't stowing away "for later."
All around Frito was the sight and sound of gnashing boggie teeth,
gasping boggie esophagi, and groaning, pulsating boggie bellies. The din of
the gnawing and munching almost drowned out the national anthem of the Sty,
which the hired orchestra was now more or less performing.
"We boggies are a hairy folk
Who like to eat until we choke.
Loving all like friend and brother,
And hardly ever eat each other.
Ever hungry, ever thirsting,
Never stop till belly's bursting.
Chewing chop and pork and muttons,
A merry race of boring gluttons.
Sing: Gobble, goggle, gobble, gobble,
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.
Boggies gather round the table,
Eat as much as you are able.
Gorge yourselves from moon till noon
(Don't forget your plate and spoon).
Anything edible, we've got dibs on,
And hope we all die with our bibs on.
Ever gay, we'll never grow up,
Come! And sing and play and throw up!
Sing: Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble!"
Frito wandered past the rows of tables, hoping to find the squat,
familiar figure of Spam. "Gobble, gobble, gobble . . . he murmured to himself,
but the words seemed strange. Why did he feel so alone amidst the merrymakers,
why had he always thought himself an intruder in his own village? Frito stared
at the phalanxes of grinding molars and foot-long forked tongues that lolled
from a hundred mouths, pink and wet in the afternoon sun.
At that moment there was a commotion at the head table, where Frito
should have been sitting as a guest of honor. Uncle Dildo was standing on his
bench and making motions for quiet, wishing to make his after-dinner speech.
After a flurry of jeers and the knocking together of a few heads, every fuzzy,
pointed ear and glass eye strained to catch what Dildo had to say.
_My fellow boggies_, he said, _my fellow Poops and Peristalts,
Barrelgutts and Hangbellies, Needlepoints, Liverfiaps, and Nosethingers_.
(Nose_fingers!_ corrected an irate drunk who, true to his family name, had it
jammed into his nostril to the fourth joint.)
_I hope you have all stuffed yourselves until you are about to be sick_.
This customary greeting was met with traditional volleys of farting and
belching, signifying the guests' approval of the fare.
_I have lived in Boggietown, as you all know, most of my life, and I
have developed opinions of you all, and before I leave you all for the last
time, I want to let you all know what you have all meant to me_. The crowd
yelled approval, thinking that now was the time for Dildo to distribute the
expected gifts among them. But what followed surprised even Frito, who looked
at his uncle with shocked admiration. He had dropped his pants.
The riot that followed had best be left to the reader's imagination,
lame though it may be. But Dildo, having prepared by prearranged signal to
touch off the fireworks, diverted the rage of the townsboggies. Suddenly there
came a deafening roar and a blinding light. Bellowing with fright, the
vengeful boggies hit the dirt as the cataclysmic tumult thundered and flashed
around them. The noise died down, and the braver members of the lynch mob
looked up in the hot wind that followed at the little hill where Dildo's table
had stood. It was not there any longer. Nor was Dildo.
"You should have seen their faces," laughed Dildo to Goodgulf and Frito.
Safely hidden back in his hole, the old boggie rocked with gleeful triumph.
"They ran like spooked bunnies!"
"Bunnies or boggies, I told you to be careful," said Goodgulf. "You may
have hurt someone sorely."
"No, no," said Dildo, "all the shrapnel blew the other way. And it was a
good way of getting a rise out of 'em before I left this burg for good." Dildo
stood up and began making a final check of his trunks, each carefully
addressed "Riv'n'dell, Estrogen." "Things are getting hot all over and it was
a good way to start getting them off their obese duffs."
"Hot all over?" asked Frito.
"Aye," said Goodgulf. "Evil Ones are afoot in--"
"Not now," interrupted Dildo impatiently. "Just tell Frito what you told
me."
"What your rude uncle means," began the Wizard, "is that there have been
many signs I have seen that bode ill for all, in the Sty and elsewhere."
"Signs?" said Frito.
"Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year
strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap
crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts.
There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with
a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance
salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in
square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down
soggy potato chips."
"But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito.
"Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good
copy. But there is more. My spies tell me of black musters gathering in the
East, in the dead Lands of Fordor. Hordes of foul narcs and trolls have
multiplied and every day red-eyed wraiths skulk even unto the borders of the
Sty. Soon there will be much terror in the land from the black hand of
Sorhed."
"Sorhed!" cried Frito. "But Sorhed is no more."
"Don't believe everything you hear from the heralds," said Dildo
gravely. "It had been thought that Sorbed was forever destroyed at the Battle
of Brylopad, but it appears this was just wishful thinking. Actually he and
his Nine Nozdrul slipped out of the mopping-up cleverly disguised as a troupe
of gypsy acrobatic dancers. Escaping through the Ngaio Marsh, they pushed
their way into the suburbs of Fordor, where the property values dropped like a
paralyzed falcon. From Fordor they have been renewing their strength ever
since."
"His Dark Carbuncle of Doom has swollen and soon will come to a head,
covering the face of Lower Middle Earth with his ill humors. If we are to
survive, the boil must be soundly lanced before Sorhed begins his own
loathsome squeeze play."
"But how can this be done?" said Frito.
"We must keep him from the one thing that can mean victory," said
Goodgulf. "We must keep from him the Great Ring!"
"And what is this ring?" said Frito, eyeing the possible exits from the
hole.
"Cease thy eyeing of possible exits and I will tell thee," Goodgulf
reprimanded the frightened boggie. "Many ages ago, when boggies were yet
wrestling with the chipmunks over hazel nuts, there were made Rings of Power
in the Elven-Halls. Fashioned with a secret formula now known only to the
makers of toothpastes, these fabulous Rings gave their wearers mickle powers.
There were twenty in all: six for mastery of the lands, five for rule of the
seas, three for dominion of the air, and two for the conquering of bad breath.
With these Rings the people of past ages, both mortals and elves, lived in
peace and grandeur."
"But that only makes sixteen," observed Frito. "What were the other
four?"
"Recalled for factory defects," laughed Dildo. "They tended to shortcircuit
in the rain and fry one's finger off."
"Save the Great One," intoned Goodgulf, "for the Great Ring masters all
the others, hence is now the most sought by Sorhed. Its powers and charms are
shrouded in legend, and many works are said to be given to its wearer. It is
said that, according to his powers, the wearer can perform impossible deeds,
control all creatures to his bidding, vanquish invincible armies, converse
with fish and fowl, bend steel in his bare hands, leap tall parapets at a
single bound, win friends and influence people, fix parking tickets--"
"And get himself elected Queen of the May," finished Dildo. "Anything he
pleases!"
"This Great Ring is much desired by all, then," said Frito.
"And they desire a curse!" cried Goodgulf, waving his wand with passion.
"For as surely as the Ring gives power, just as surely it becomes the master!
The wearer slowly changes, and never to the good. He grows mistrustful and
jealous of his power as his heart hardens. He loves overmuch his strengths and
develops stomach ulcers. He becomes logy and irritable, prone to neuritis,
neuralgia, nagging backache, and frequent colds. Soon no one invites him to
parties anymore."
"A most horrible treasure, this Great Ring," said Frito.
"And a horrible burden for he who bears it," said Goodgulf. "For some
unlucky one must carry it from Sorbed's grasp into danger and certain doom.
Someone must take the ring to the Zazu Pits of Fordor, under the evil nose of
the wrathful Sorbed, yet appear so unsuited to his task that he will not be
soon found out."
Frito shivered in sympathy for such an unfortunate. "Then the bearer
should be a complete and utter dunce," he laughed nervously.
Goodgulf glanced at Dildo, who nodded and casually flipped a small,
shining object into Frito's lap. It was a ring.
"Congratulations," said Dildo somberly. "You've just won the booby
prize."
THE SURPRISING SHEEP AND OTHER MIND EXCURSIONS
"Do you like what you doth see . . . ?" said the voluptuous elf-maiden
as she provocatively parted the folds of her robe to reveal the rounded,
shadowy glories within. Frito's throat was dry, though his head reeled with
desire and ale.
She slipped off the flimsy garment and strode toward the fascinated
boggie unashamed of her nakedness. She ran a perfect hand along his hairy
toes, and he helplessly watched them curl with the fierce insistent wanting of
her.
"Let me make thee more comfortable," she whispered hoarsely, fiddling
with the clasps of his jerkin, loosening his sword belt with a laugh. "Touch
me, oh _touch me_," she crooned.
Frito's hand, as though of its own will, reached out and traced the
delicate swelling of her elf-breast, while the other slowly crept around her
tiny, flawless waist, crushing her to his barrel chest.
"Toes, I _love_ hairy toes," she moaned, forcing him down on the
silvered carpet. Her tiny, pink toes caressed the luxuriant fur of his instep
while Frito's nose sought out the warmth of her precious elf-navel.
"But I'm so small and hairy, and . . . and you're so _beautiful_," Frito
whimpered, slipping clumsily out of his crossed garters.
The elf-maiden said nothing, but only sighed deep in her throat and held
him more firmly to her faunlike body. "There is one thing you must do for me
first," she whispered into one tufted ear.
"Anything," sobbed Frito, growing frantic with his need. "Anything!"
She closed her eyes and then opened them to the ceiling. "The Ring," she
said. "I must have your Ring."
Frito's whole body tensed. "Oh no," he cried, "not that! Anything but .
. . that."
"I must have it," she said both tenderly and fiercely. "I must have the
_Ring!_"
Frito's eyes blurred with tears and confusion. "I can't," he said. "I
mustn't!"
But he knew resolve was no longer strong in him. Slowly, the elfmaiden's
hand inched toward the chain in his vest pocket, closer and closer it
came to the Ring Frito had guarded so faithfully . . .
Contents
FOREWORD
PROLOGUE -- CONCERNING BOGGlES
I It's My Party and I'll Snub Who I Want To
II Three's Company, Four's a Bore
III Indigestion at the Sign of the Goode Eats
IV Finders Keepers, Finders Weepers
V Some Monsters
VI The Riders of Roi-Tan
VII Serutan Spelled Backwards Is Mud
VIII Schlob's Lair and Other Mountain Resorts
IX Minas Troney in the Soup
X Be It Ever So Horrid
FOREWORD
Though we cannot with complete candor state, as does Professor T., that
"the tale grew in the telling," we can allow that this tale (or rather the
necessity of hawking it at a bean a copy) grew in direct proportion to the
ominous dwindling of our bank accounts at the Harvard Trust in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. This loss of turgor in our already emaciated portfolio was not,
in itself, cause for alarm (or "alarum" as Professor T. might aptly put it),
but the resultant threats and cuffed ears received at the hands of creditors
_were_. Thinking long on this, we retired to the reading lounge of our club to
meditate on this vicissitude.
The following autumn found us still in our leather chairs, plagued with
bedsores and appreciably thinner, but still without a puppy biscuit for the
lupine pest lolling around the front door. It was at this point that our
palsied hands came to rest on a dog-eared nineteenth printing of kindly old
Prof. Tolkien's _Lord of the Rings_. Dollar signs in our guileless eyes, we
quickly ascertained that it was still selling like you-know-whats. Armed to
the bicuspids with thesauri and reprints of international libel laws, we
locked ourselves in the _Lampoon_ squash court with enough Fritos and Dr.
Pepper to choke a horse. (Eventually the production of this turkey actually
required the choking of a small horse, but that's another story entirely.)
Spring found us with decayed teeth and several pounds of foolscap
covered with inky, illegible scrawls. A quick rereading proved it to be a
surprisingly brilliant satire on Tolkien's linguistic and mythic structures,
filled with little takeoffs on his use of Norse tales and wicked phoneme
fricatives. A cursory assessment of the manuscript's sales appeal, however,
convinced us that dollarwise the thing would be better employed as tinder for
the library fireplace. The next day, handicapped by near-fatal hangovers and
the loss of all our bodily hair (but that's another story), we sat down at two
supercharged, fuel-injected, 345-hp Smith Coronas and knocked off the opus
you're about to read before tiffin. (And we take tiffin pretty durn early in
_these_ parts, buckaroo.) The result, as you are about to see for yourself,
was a book as readable as Linear A and of about the same literary value as an
autographed gatefold of St. Simon Stylites.
"As for any inner meanings or 'message,' " as Professor T. said in his
foreword, there is none herein except that which you may read into it
yourself. (Hint: What did P. T. Barnum say was "born every minute"?) Through
this book, we hope, the reader may find deeper insights not only into the
nature of literary piracy, but into his own character as well. (Hint: What is
missing from this famous quotation? "A ---- and his ----- soon are ------."
You have three minutes. Ready, set, go!)
_Bored of the Rings_ has been issued in this form as a parody. This is
very important. It is an attempt to satirize the other books, not simply to be
mistaken for them. Thus, we must strongly remind you that _this is not the
real thing!_ So if you're about to purchase this copy thinking it's about the
_Lord_ of the Rings, then you'd better put it right back onto that big pile of
remainders where you found it. Oh, but you've already read this far, so that
must mean that--that you've already _bought_ . . . oh dear . . . oh my . . .
(Tote up another one on the register, Jocko. "_Ching!_")
Lastly, we hope that those of you who _have_ read Prof. Tolkien's
remarkable trilogy already will not be offended by our little spoof of it. All
fooling aside, we consider ourselves honored to be able to make fun of such an
impressive, truly masterful work of genius and imagination. After all, that is
the most important service a book can render, the rendering of enjoyment, in
this case, enjoyment through laughter. And don't trouble yourself too much if
you don't laugh at what you are about to read, for if you perk up your pink
little ears, you may hear the silvery tinkling of merriment in the air, far,
far away. . . .
It's us, buster. _Ching!_
PROLOGUE -- CONCERNING BOGGIES
This book is predominantly concerned with making money, and from its
pages a reader may learn much about the character and the literary integrity
of the authors. Of boggies, however, he will discover next to nothing, since
anyone in the possession of a mere moiety of his marbles will readily concede
that such creatures could exist only in the minds of children of the sort
whose childhoods are spent in wicker baskets, and who grow up to be muggers,
dog thieves, and insurance salesmen. Nonetheless, judging from the sales of
Prof. Tolkien's interesting books, this is a rather sizable group, sporting
the kind of scorchmarks on their pockets that only the spontaneous combustion
of heavy wads of crumpled money can produce. For such readers we have
collected here a few bits of racial slander concerning boggies, culled by
placing Prof. Tolkien's books on the floor in a neat pile and going over them
countless times in a series of skips and short hops. For them we also include
a brief description of the soon-to-be-published-if-this-incredible-dog-sells
account of Dildo Bugger's earlier adventures, called by him _Travels with
Goddam in Search of Lower Middle Earth_, but wisely renamed by the publisher
_Valley of the Trolls_.
Boggies are an unattractive but annoying people whose numbers have
decreased rather precipitously since the bottom fell out of the fairy-tale
market. Slow and sullen, and yet dull, they prefer to lead simple lives of
pastoral squalor. They don't like machines more complicated than a garrote, a
blackjack, or a luger, and they have always been shy of the "Big Folk" or
"Biggers," as they call us. As a rule they now avoid us, except on rare
occasions when a hundred or so will get together to dry-gulch a lone farmer or
hunter. They are a little people, smaller than dwarves, who consider them
puny, sly, and inscrutable and often refer to them as the "boggie peril." They
seldom exceed three feet in height, but are fully capable of overpowering
creatures half their size when they get the drop on them. As for the boggies
of the Sty, with whom we are chiefly concerned, they are unusually drab,
dressing in shiny gray suits with narrow lapels, alpine hats, and string ties.
They wear no shoes, and they walk on a pair of hairy blunt instruments which
can only be called feet because of the position they occupy at the end of
their legs. Their faces have a pimply malevolence that suggests a deep-seated
fondness for making obscene telephone calls, and when they smile, there is
something in the way they wag their foot-long tongues that makes Komodo
dragons gulp with disbelief. They have long, clever fingers of the sort one
normally associates with hands that spend a good deal of time around the necks
of small, furry animals and in other people's pockets, and they are very
skillful at producing intricate and useful things, like loaded dice and booby
traps. They love to eat and drink, play mumblety-peg with dim-witted
quadrupeds, and tell off-color dwarf jokes. They give dull parties and cheap
presents, and they enjoy the same general regard and esteem as a dead otter.
It is plain that boggies are relatives of ours, standing somewhere along
the evolutionary line that leads from rats to wolverines and eventually to
Italians, but what our exact relationship is cannot be told. Their beginnings
lie far back in the Good Old Days when the planet was populated with the kind
of colorful creatures you have to drink a quart of Old Overcoat to see
nowadays. The elves alone preserve any records of that time, and most of them
are filled with elf-stuff, raunchy pictures of naked trolls and sordid
accounts of "orc" orgies. But the boggies had clearly lived in Lower Middle
Earth for a long time before the days of Frito and Dildo, when, like a very
old salami that suddenly makes its presence known, they came to trouble the
councils of the Small and the Silly.
This was all in the Third, or Sheet-Metal, Age of Lower Middle Earth,
and the lands of that age have long since dropped into the sea and their
inhabitants into bell jars at the Ripley's Believe-It-or-Not Odditorium. Of
their original home, the boggies of Frito's time had lost all records, partly
because their level of literacy and intellectual development could have been
equaled by a young blowfish and partly because their fondness for genealogical
studies made them dislike the notion that their elaborately forged family
trees had roots about as steady as Birnham Wood. It is nevertheless clear from
their heavy accents and their fondness for dishes cooked in Brylcreem that
somewhere in their past they went west in steerage. Their legends and old
songs, which deal mainly with oversexed elves and dragons in heat, make
passing mention of the area around the Anacin River, between Plywood and the
Papier-Mache Mountains. There are other records in the great libraries of
Twodor which lend credence to such a notion, old articles in the _Police
Gazette_ and the like. Why they decided to undertake the perilous crossing
into Oleodor is uncertain, though again their songs tell of a shadow that fell
upon the land so that the potatoes grew no more.
Before the crossing of the Papier-Mache Mountains, the boggies had
become divided into three distinct breeds: Clubfoots, Stools, and Naugahydes.
The Clubfoots, by far the most numerous, were swarthy, shifty-eyed, and short;
their hands and feet were as deft as crowbars. They preferred to live in the
hillsides where they could mug rabbits and small goats, and they supported
themselves by hiring out as torpedoes for the local dwarf population. The
Stools were larger and oilier than the Clubfoots, and they lived in the fetid
lands at the mouth and other orifices of the Anacin River, where they raised
yaws and goiters for the river trade. They had long, shiny, black hair, and
they loved knives. Their closest relations were with men, for whom they
handled occasional rubouts. Least numerous were the Naugahydes, who were
taller and wispier than the other boggies and who lived in the forests, where
they maintained a thriving trade in leather goods, sandals, and handicrafts.
They did periodic interior-decorating work for the elves, but spent most of
their time singing lurid folk songs and accosting squirrels.
Once across the mountains, the boggies lost no time establishing
themselves. They shortened their names and elbowed their way into all the
country clubs, dropping their old language and customs like a live grenade. An
unusual easterly migration of men and elves from Oleodor at this same time
makes it possible to fix the date the boggies came on the scene with some
accuracy. In the same year, the 1,623rd year of the Third Age, the Naugahyde
brothers, Brasso and Drano, led a large following of boggies across the
Gallowine River disguised as a band of itinerant graverobbers and took control
from the high King at Ribroast. * [* Either Arglebargle IV or someone else.]
In return for the King's grudging acquiescence, they set up toll booths on the
roads and bridges, waylaid his messengers, and sent him suggestive and
threatening letters. In short, they settled down for a long stay.
Thus began the history of the Sty, and the boggies, with an eye to the
statutes of limitations, started a new calendar dating from the crossing of
the Gallowine. They were quite happy with their new land, and once again they
dropped out of the history of men, an occurrence which was greeted with the
same universal sense of regret as the sudden death of a mad dog. The Sty was
marked with great red splotches on all the AAA maps, and the only people who
ever passed through were either hopelessly lost or completely unhinged. Aside
from these rare visitors, the boggies were left entirely to themselves until
the time of Frito and Dildo. While there was still a King at Ribroast, the
boggies remained nominally his subjects, and to the last battle at Ribroast
with the Slumlord of Borax, they sent some snipers, though who they sided with
is unclear. There the North Kingdom ended, and the boggies returned to their
well-ordered, simple lives, eating and drinking, singing and dancing, and
passing bad checks.
Nonetheless, the easy life of the Sty had left the boggies fundamentally
unchanged, and they were still as hard to kill as a cockroach and as easy to
deal with as a cornered rat. Though likely to attack only in cold blood, and
killing only for money, they remained masters of the low blow and the gang-up.
They were crack shots and very handy with all sorts of equalizers, and any
small, slow, and stupid beast that turned its back on a crowd of boggies was
looking for a stomping.
All boggies originally lived in holes, which is after all hardly
surprising for creatures on a first-name basis with rats. In Dildo's time,
their abodes were for the most part built above ground in the manner of elves
and men, but these still retained many of the features of their traditional
homes and were indistinguishable from the dwellings of those species whose
chief function is to meet their makers, around August, deep in the walls of
old houses. As a rule, they were dumpling-shaped, built of mulch, silt, stray
divots, and other seasonal deposits, often whitewashed by irregular pigeons.
Consequently, most boggie towns looked as though some very large and untidy
creature, perhaps a dragon, had quite recently suffered a series of
disappointing bowel movements in the vicinity.
In the Sty as a whole there were at least a dozen of these curious
settlements, linked by a system of roads, post offices, and a government that
would have been considered unusually crude for a colony of cherrystone clams.
The Sty itself was divided into farthings, half-farthings, and Indian-head
nickels ruled by a mayor who was elected in a flurry of ballot-box stuffing
every Arbor Day. To assist him in his duties there was a rather large police
force which did nothing but extract confessions, mostly from squirrels. Beyond
these few tokens of regulation, the Sty betrayed no signs of government. The
vast majority of the boggies' time was taken up growing food and eating it and
making liquor and drinking it. The rest of it was spent throwing up.
_Of the Finding of the Ring_
As is told in the volume previous to this hound, _Valley of the Trolls_,
Dildo Bugger set out one day with a band of demented dwarves and a discredited
Rosicrucian named Goodgulf to separate a dragon from his hoard of short-term
municipals and convertible debentures. The quest was successful, and the
dragon, a prewar basilisk who smelled like a bus, was taken from behind while
he was clipping coupons. And yet, though many pointless and annoying deeds
were done, this adventure would concern us a good deal less than it does, if
that is possible, except for a bit of petty larceny Dildo did along the way to
keep his hand in. The party was ambushed in the Mealey Mountains by a roving
pack of narcs, and in hurrying to the aid of the embattled dwarves, Dildo
somehow lost his sense of direction and ended up in a cave a considerable
distance away. Finding himself at the mouth of a tunnel which led rather
perceptibly down, Dildo suffered a temporary recurrence of an old inner-ear
problem and went rushing along it to the rescue, as he thought, of his
friends. After running for some time and finding nothing but more tunnel, he
was beginning to feel he had taken a wrong turn somewhere when the passage
abruptly ended in a large cavern.
When Dildo's eyes became adjusted to the pale light, he found that the
grotto was almost filled by a wide, kidneyshaped lake where a nasty-looking
clown named Goddam paddled noisily about on an old rubber sea horse. He ate
raw fish and occasional side orders to travel from the outside world in the
form of lost travelers like Dildo, and he greeted Dildo's unexpected entrance
into his underground sauna in much the same way as he would the sudden arrival
of a Chicken Delight truck. But like anyone with boggie ancestry, Goddam
preferred the subtle approach in assaulting creatures over five inches high
and weighing more than ten pounds, and consequently he challenged Dildo to a
riddle game to gain time. Dildo, who had a sudden attack of amnesia regarding
the fact that the dwarves were being made into chutney outside the cave,
accepted.
They asked each other countless riddles, such as who played the Cisco
Kid and what was Krypton. In the end Dildo won the game. Stumped at last for a
riddle to ask, he cried out, as his hand fell on his snub-nosed .38, "What
have I got in my pocket?" This Goddam failed to answer, and growing impatient,
he paddled up to Dildo, whining, "Let me see, let me see." Dildo obliged by
pulling out the pistol and emptying it in Goddam's direction. The dark spoiled
his aim, and he managed only to deflate the rubber float, leaving Goddam to
flounder. Goddam, who couldn't swim, reached out his hand to Dildo and begged
him to pull him out, and as he did, Dildo noticed an interesting-looking ring
on his finger and pulled it off. He would have finished Goddam off then and
there, but pity stayed his hand. _It's a pity I've run out of bullets_, he
thought, as he went back up the tunnel, pursued by Goddam's cries of rage.
Now it is a curious fact that Dildo never told this story, explaining
that he had gotten the Ring from a pig's nose or a gumball machine--he
couldn't remember which. Goodgulf, who was naturally suspicious, finally
managed with the aid of one of his secret potions* [* Probably Sodium
Pentothal.] to drag the truth out of the boggie, but it disturbed him
considerably that Dildo, who was a perpetual and compulsive liar, would not
have concocted a more grandiose tale from the start. It was then, some fifty
years before our story begins, that Goodgulf first guessed at the Ring's
importance. He was, as usual, dead wrong.
BORED OF THE RINGS
I
IT'S MY PARTY AND I'LL SNUB WHO I WANT TO
When Mr. Dildo Bugger of Bug End grudgingly announced his intention of
throwing a free feed for all the boggies in his part of the Sty, the reaction
in Boggietown was immediate--all through the messy little slum could be heard
squeals of "Swell!" and "Hot puppies, _grub!_" Slavering with anticipation,
several recipients of the invitations devoured their little engraved scrolls,
temporarily deranged by transports of gluttony. After the initial hysteria,
however, the boggies returned to their daily routines and, as is their wont,
lapsed back into a coma.
Nevertheless, jabbering rumors spread through the tatty lean-tos of
recent shipments of whole, bewildered oxen, great barrels of foamy suds,
fireworks, tons of potato greens, and gigantic hogsheads of hogs' heads. Even
huge bales of freshly harvested stingwort, a popular and remarkably powerful
emetic, were carted into town. News of the fête reached even unto the
Gallowine, and the outlying residents of the Sty began to drift into town like
peripatetic leeches, each intent on an orgy of freeloading that would make a
lamprey look like a piker.
No one in the Sty had a more bottomless gullet than that drooling and
senile old gossip Haf Gangree. Haf had spent his life as the town's faithful
beadle, and had long since retired on the proceeds of his thriving blackmail
racket.
Tonight, Fatlip, as he was called, was holding forth at the Bag Eye, a
sleazy dive more than once closed down by Mayor Fastbuck for the dubious
behavior of the establishment's buxom "B-boggies," who were said to be able to
roll a troll before you could say "Rumpelstiltskin." The usual collection of
sodden oafs were there, including Fatlip's son, Spam Gangree, who was
presently celebrating his suspended sentence for the performing of an
unnatural act with an underage female dragon of the opposite sex.
"The whole thing smells pretty queer to me," said Fatlip, as he inhaled
the acrid fumes of his nose-pipe. "I'm meaning the way Mr. Bugger is throwing
this big bash when for years he's not so much as offered a piece o' moldy
cheese to his neighbors." The listeners nodded silently, for this was
certainly the case. Even before Dildo's "strange disappearance" he had kept
his burrow at Bug End guarded by fierce wolverines, and in no one's memory had
he ever contributed a farthing to the Boggietown Annual Mithril Drive for
Homeless Banshees. The fact that no one else ever had either did not excuse
Dildo's famed stinginess. He kept to himself, nurturing only his nephew and a
mania for dirty Scrabble.
"And that boy of his, Frito," added bleary-eyed Nat Clubfoot, "as crazy
as a woodpecker, _that_ one is." This was verified by Old Poop of Backwater,
among others. For who hadn't seen young Frito walking aimlessly through the
crooked streets of Boggietown, carrying little clumps of flowers and muttering
about "truth and beauty" and blurting out silly nonsense like "Cogito ergo
boggum"?
"He's an odd one, all right," said Fatlip, "and I wouldn't be at all
surprised if there weren't something in that talk of his having dwarfish
sympathies." At this point there was an embarrassed silence, particularly from
young Spam, who had never believed the unproved charges that the Buggers were
"scroll-carrying dwarves." As Spam pointed out, real dwarves were shorter and
smelled much worse than boggies.
"That's pretty stout talk," laughed Fatlip, wagging his right foreleg,
"about a body what's only _borrowed_ the name of Bugger!"
"Aye," chimed Clotty Peristalt. "If that Frito weren't the seed of a
crossbow wedding, then I don't know lunch from din-din!" The roisterers all
laughed aloud as they remembered Frito's mother, Dildo's sister, who rashly
plighted her troth to someone from the wrong side of the Gallowine (someone
known to be a hafling, i.e. part boggie, part opossum). Several of the members
took this up and there followed a series of coarse* [* Coarse to anyone except
a boggie, of course.] and rather simpleminded jests at the expense of the
Buggers.
"What's more," said Fatlip, "Dildo's always acting . . . mysterious, if
you know what I mean."
"There are those that say he acts like he's got something to hide, they
say," came a strange voice from the corner shadows. The voice belonged to a
man, a stranger to the boggies of the Bag Eye, a stranger they had
understandably overlooked because of his rather ordinary black cape, black
chain mail, black mace, black dirk, and perfectly normal red glowing fires
where his eyes should have been.
"Them what say that may be right," agreed Fatlip, winking at his cronies
to tell them a punchline was coming. "But them that say such may be wrong,
too." After the general hilarity resulting from the typical Gangree gaff died
down, few had noticed that the stranger had disappeared, leaving only a
strange, barnyard odor behind him.
"But," insisted little Spam, "it _will_ be a good party!"
To this they all agreed, for there was nothing a boggie loved more than
an opportunity to stuff himself until he was violently ill.
The season was cool, early autumn, heralding the annual change in the
boggie dessert from whole watermelons to whole pumpkins. But the younger
boggies who were not yet too obese to trundle their hulkish selves through the
thoroughfares of the town saw evidence of a future treat at the forthcoming
celebration: fireworks!
As the day of the party drew nearer, carts drawn by sturdy plow-goats
rolled through the bullrush gates of Boggietown, laden with boxes and crates,
each bearing the X-rune of Goodgulf the Wizard and various elvish brand names.
The crates were unloaded and opened at Dildo's door, and the mewling
boggies wagged their vestigial tails with wonder at the marvelous contents.
There were clusters of tubes mounted on tripods to shoot rather outsized roman
candles; fat, finned skyrockets, with odd little buttons at the front end,
weighing hundreds of pounds; a revolving cylinder of tubes with a crank to
turn them; and large "cherry bombs" that looked to the children more like
little green pineapples with a ring inserted at the top. Each crate was
labeled with an olive-drab elf-rune signifying that these toys had been made
in the elf-shops of a fairy whose name was something very much like "Amy
Surplus."
Dildo watched the unpacking with a broad grin and sent the young ones
scampering with a vicious swipe of a well-honed toenail. "G'wan, beat it,
scram!" he called merrily after them as they disappeared. He then laughed and
turned back to his boggie-hole, to talk to his guest within.
"This'll be one fireworks display they won't forget," cackled the ageing
boggie to Goodgulf, who was puffing his cigar rather uncomfortably in a chair
of tasteless elvish-modern. The floor around it was littered with four-letter
Scrabble arrangements.
"I am afraid that you must alter your plans for them," said the Wizard,
unsnaggling a clot of tangled hair in his long, dirtygray beard. "You cannot
use extermination as a method for settling your petty grudges with the
townspeople."
Dildo studied his old friend with shrewd appraisal. The old Wizard was
robed in a threadbare magician's cloak long out of fashion, with a few
spangles and sequins hanging precariously at the ragged hems. On his head was
a tall, battered conical hat sloppily covered with glow-in-the-dark cabalistic
signs, alchemical symbols, and some off-color dwarfish graffiti, and in his
gnarled, nail-bitten hands was a bent length of silvered maggotwood that
served doubly as a "magic" wand and backscratcher. At this moment Goodgulf was
using it in its second office as he studied the worn toes of what in these
days would be taken for black basketball sneakers. Hightops.
"Looking a little down-at-the-heels, Gulfie," chuckled Dildo. "Slump in
the old Wizard racket, eh?"
Goodgulf looked pained at the use of his old school nickname, but
adjusted his robes with dignity. "It is no fault of mine that unbelievers
ridicule my powers," he said. "My wonders will yet again make all gape and
quail!" Suddenly he made a pass with his scratcher and the room was plunged
into darkness. Through the blackness Dildo saw that Goodgulf's robes had
become radiant and bright. Odd letters appeared mysteriously on the front of
his robe, reading in elvish, _Will Thee Kiss Me in the Dark, Baby?_
Just as suddenly the light returned to the comfortable burrow, and the
inscription faded from the conjurer's breast. Dildo rolled his eyes upward in
his head and shrugged.
"Really now, Gulfie," said Dildo, "that kind of stuff went out with
high-button greaves. No wonder you've got to moonlight card-sharking at hick
carny shows."
Goodgulf was unperturbed by his friend's sarcasm. "Do not mock powers
beyond your knowledge, impudent hairfoot," he said, as five aces materialized
in his hand, "for you see the efficacy of my enchantments!"
"All I see is that you've finally got the hang of that silly sleevespring,"
chuckled the boggie as he poured a bowl of ale for his old companion.
"So why don't you leave off with your white-mice-and-pixie-dust routine and
tell me why you've honored me with your presence? _And_ appetite."
The Wizard paused a moment before speaking to focus his eyes, which had
recently developed a tendency to cross, and looked gravely at Dildo.
"It is time to talk of the Ring," he said.
"Ring, ring? What ring?" said Dildo.
"Thee knows only too well what Ring," said Goodgulf. "The Ring in thy
pocket, Master Bugger."
"Oooooh, _that_ Ring," said Dildo with a show of innocence, "I thought
you meant the ring you leave in my tub after your seances with your rubber
duck."
"This is not the time for the making of jests," said Goodgulf, "for Evil
Ones are afoot in the lands, and danger is abroad."
"But--" began Dildo.
"Strange things are stirring in the East . . ."
"But--"
"Doom is walking the High Road . . ."
"But--"
"There is a dog in the manger . . ."
"But--"
". . . a fly in the ointment . . ."
Dildo clapped his paw frantically over the working mouth of the Wizard.
"You mean . . . you mean," he whispered, "_there's a Balrog in the woodpile?_"
"Mmummffleflug!" affirmed the gagged magician.
Dildo's worst fears had come to pass. After the party, he thought, there
would be much to be decided.
Although only two hundred invitations had been sent, Frito Bugger should
not have been surprised to see several times that number sitting at the huge
troughlike tables under the great pavilion in the Bugger meadows. His young
eyes widened as he moped about observing legions of ravenous muzzles tearing
and snatching at their roasts and joints, oblivious to all else. Few faces
were familiar to him in the grunting, belching press that lined the gorgingtables,
but fewer still were not already completely disguised in masks of
dried gravy and meat sauce. It was only then that the young boggie realized
the truth in Dildo's favorite adage, "It takes a heap o' vittles to gag a
boggie."
It was, nevertheless, a splendid party, decided Frito, as he dodged a
flying hamhock. Great pits had been dug simply to accommodate the mountains of
scorched flesh the guests threw down their well-muscled throats, and his Uncle
Dildo had devised an ingenious series of pipelines to gravity-flow the
hundreds of gallons of heady ale into their limitless paunches. Moodily, Frito
studied his fellow boggies as they noisily crammed their maws with potato
greens and jammed stray bits of greasy flesh into their jackets and coinpurses
"for later." Occasionally an overly zealous diner would fall
unconscious to the ground, much to the amusement of his fellows, who would
take the opportunity to pelt him with garbage. Garbage, that is, that they
weren't stowing away "for later."
All around Frito was the sight and sound of gnashing boggie teeth,
gasping boggie esophagi, and groaning, pulsating boggie bellies. The din of
the gnawing and munching almost drowned out the national anthem of the Sty,
which the hired orchestra was now more or less performing.
"We boggies are a hairy folk
Who like to eat until we choke.
Loving all like friend and brother,
And hardly ever eat each other.
Ever hungry, ever thirsting,
Never stop till belly's bursting.
Chewing chop and pork and muttons,
A merry race of boring gluttons.
Sing: Gobble, goggle, gobble, gobble,
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble.
Boggies gather round the table,
Eat as much as you are able.
Gorge yourselves from moon till noon
(Don't forget your plate and spoon).
Anything edible, we've got dibs on,
And hope we all die with our bibs on.
Ever gay, we'll never grow up,
Come! And sing and play and throw up!
Sing: Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble,
Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble!"
Frito wandered past the rows of tables, hoping to find the squat,
familiar figure of Spam. "Gobble, gobble, gobble . . . he murmured to himself,
but the words seemed strange. Why did he feel so alone amidst the merrymakers,
why had he always thought himself an intruder in his own village? Frito stared
at the phalanxes of grinding molars and foot-long forked tongues that lolled
from a hundred mouths, pink and wet in the afternoon sun.
At that moment there was a commotion at the head table, where Frito
should have been sitting as a guest of honor. Uncle Dildo was standing on his
bench and making motions for quiet, wishing to make his after-dinner speech.
After a flurry of jeers and the knocking together of a few heads, every fuzzy,
pointed ear and glass eye strained to catch what Dildo had to say.
_My fellow boggies_, he said, _my fellow Poops and Peristalts,
Barrelgutts and Hangbellies, Needlepoints, Liverfiaps, and Nosethingers_.
(Nose_fingers!_ corrected an irate drunk who, true to his family name, had it
jammed into his nostril to the fourth joint.)
_I hope you have all stuffed yourselves until you are about to be sick_.
This customary greeting was met with traditional volleys of farting and
belching, signifying the guests' approval of the fare.
_I have lived in Boggietown, as you all know, most of my life, and I
have developed opinions of you all, and before I leave you all for the last
time, I want to let you all know what you have all meant to me_. The crowd
yelled approval, thinking that now was the time for Dildo to distribute the
expected gifts among them. But what followed surprised even Frito, who looked
at his uncle with shocked admiration. He had dropped his pants.
The riot that followed had best be left to the reader's imagination,
lame though it may be. But Dildo, having prepared by prearranged signal to
touch off the fireworks, diverted the rage of the townsboggies. Suddenly there
came a deafening roar and a blinding light. Bellowing with fright, the
vengeful boggies hit the dirt as the cataclysmic tumult thundered and flashed
around them. The noise died down, and the braver members of the lynch mob
looked up in the hot wind that followed at the little hill where Dildo's table
had stood. It was not there any longer. Nor was Dildo.
"You should have seen their faces," laughed Dildo to Goodgulf and Frito.
Safely hidden back in his hole, the old boggie rocked with gleeful triumph.
"They ran like spooked bunnies!"
"Bunnies or boggies, I told you to be careful," said Goodgulf. "You may
have hurt someone sorely."
"No, no," said Dildo, "all the shrapnel blew the other way. And it was a
good way of getting a rise out of 'em before I left this burg for good." Dildo
stood up and began making a final check of his trunks, each carefully
addressed "Riv'n'dell, Estrogen." "Things are getting hot all over and it was
a good way to start getting them off their obese duffs."
"Hot all over?" asked Frito.
"Aye," said Goodgulf. "Evil Ones are afoot in--"
"Not now," interrupted Dildo impatiently. "Just tell Frito what you told
me."
"What your rude uncle means," began the Wizard, "is that there have been
many signs I have seen that bode ill for all, in the Sty and elsewhere."
"Signs?" said Frito.
"Verily and forsooth," replied Goodgulf darkly. "In the past year
strange and fearful wonders I have seen. Fields sown with barley reap
crabgrass and fungus, and even small gardens reject their artichoke hearts.
There has been a hot day in December and a blue moon. Calendars are made with
a month of Sundays and a blue-ribbon Holstein bore alive two insurance
salesmen. The earth splits and the entrails of a goat were found tied in
square knots. The face of the sun blackens and the skies have rained down
soggy potato chips."
"But what do all these things mean?" gasped Frito.
"Beats me," said Goodgulf with a shrug, "but I thought it made good
copy. But there is more. My spies tell me of black musters gathering in the
East, in the dead Lands of Fordor. Hordes of foul narcs and trolls have
multiplied and every day red-eyed wraiths skulk even unto the borders of the
Sty. Soon there will be much terror in the land from the black hand of
Sorhed."
"Sorhed!" cried Frito. "But Sorhed is no more."
"Don't believe everything you hear from the heralds," said Dildo
gravely. "It had been thought that Sorbed was forever destroyed at the Battle
of Brylopad, but it appears this was just wishful thinking. Actually he and
his Nine Nozdrul slipped out of the mopping-up cleverly disguised as a troupe
of gypsy acrobatic dancers. Escaping through the Ngaio Marsh, they pushed
their way into the suburbs of Fordor, where the property values dropped like a
paralyzed falcon. From Fordor they have been renewing their strength ever
since."
"His Dark Carbuncle of Doom has swollen and soon will come to a head,
covering the face of Lower Middle Earth with his ill humors. If we are to
survive, the boil must be soundly lanced before Sorhed begins his own
loathsome squeeze play."
"But how can this be done?" said Frito.
"We must keep him from the one thing that can mean victory," said
Goodgulf. "We must keep from him the Great Ring!"
"And what is this ring?" said Frito, eyeing the possible exits from the
hole.
"Cease thy eyeing of possible exits and I will tell thee," Goodgulf
reprimanded the frightened boggie. "Many ages ago, when boggies were yet
wrestling with the chipmunks over hazel nuts, there were made Rings of Power
in the Elven-Halls. Fashioned with a secret formula now known only to the
makers of toothpastes, these fabulous Rings gave their wearers mickle powers.
There were twenty in all: six for mastery of the lands, five for rule of the
seas, three for dominion of the air, and two for the conquering of bad breath.
With these Rings the people of past ages, both mortals and elves, lived in
peace and grandeur."
"But that only makes sixteen," observed Frito. "What were the other
four?"
"Recalled for factory defects," laughed Dildo. "They tended to shortcircuit
in the rain and fry one's finger off."
"Save the Great One," intoned Goodgulf, "for the Great Ring masters all
the others, hence is now the most sought by Sorhed. Its powers and charms are
shrouded in legend, and many works are said to be given to its wearer. It is
said that, according to his powers, the wearer can perform impossible deeds,
control all creatures to his bidding, vanquish invincible armies, converse
with fish and fowl, bend steel in his bare hands, leap tall parapets at a
single bound, win friends and influence people, fix parking tickets--"
"And get himself elected Queen of the May," finished Dildo. "Anything he
pleases!"
"This Great Ring is much desired by all, then," said Frito.
"And they desire a curse!" cried Goodgulf, waving his wand with passion.
"For as surely as the Ring gives power, just as surely it becomes the master!
The wearer slowly changes, and never to the good. He grows mistrustful and
jealous of his power as his heart hardens. He loves overmuch his strengths and
develops stomach ulcers. He becomes logy and irritable, prone to neuritis,
neuralgia, nagging backache, and frequent colds. Soon no one invites him to
parties anymore."
"A most horrible treasure, this Great Ring," said Frito.
"And a horrible burden for he who bears it," said Goodgulf. "For some
unlucky one must carry it from Sorbed's grasp into danger and certain doom.
Someone must take the ring to the Zazu Pits of Fordor, under the evil nose of
the wrathful Sorbed, yet appear so unsuited to his task that he will not be
soon found out."
Frito shivered in sympathy for such an unfortunate. "Then the bearer
should be a complete and utter dunce," he laughed nervously.
Goodgulf glanced at Dildo, who nodded and casually flipped a small,
shining object into Frito's lap. It was a ring.
"Congratulations," said Dildo somberly. "You've just won the booby
prize."
.