Category Archives: Stories

The Tale of the Muttons Part IV

Just as the whales were getting really nervous, certain enterprising Unmerry Ones began digging in the ground for a new liquid* which they called “Oy y’all!” after the cry they uttered upon finding it. Oy y’all had, like Cole, taken hundreds of millions of years to form, and had once been tiny creatures and algae that had fallen to the prehistoric ocean floor and been buried under mud and sediment. Like Cole, it contained enormous reserves of energy, and like Cole, it was sold and burned as quickly as it could be pumped out of the ground. With the help of government tax breaks (not to be the last) Oy y’all, suitably refined, soon became the fuel of choice for Mutton lamps and lubrication.

There was one annoying by-product of the refining process, an extremely nasty form of Oy y’all which the Unmerry Ones called Gaz O’Lean and the Angry-Sackmen called Pet Roll. This stuff was too revolting for any use except to kill lice on Mutton children’s heads (what became of the children is not recorded) and most of it ended up being dumped in streams and rivers. This was irritating to the Oy y’all barons, not because they cared particularly what happened to streams and rivers (most of them would soon have their own swimming pools) but because the Gaz O’Lean wasn’t making them any money. Something would have to be done about that.

Meanwhile, back in the Old World, a quiet revolution was taking place. Two revolutions, to be exact, one a foot or so behind the other. For a long time far-sighted members of the flock had been toying with the idea of a Mutton-powered wheeled method of personal transport. They had begun by simply making a model of one of their four-legged friends, adding wheels where its hooves would have been, and scooting the contraption along with their feet. This had the dual effect of wearing out their shoes far more quickly than ordinary walking would have done, and of creating great hilarity among the Mutton onlookers.

But the visionaries were not down-hearted (a little bruised from time to time, but not downhearted) and over time they gradually got rid of the more anthropomorphic aspects of the contraption, replacing the animal’s body with a simple triangular framework, discarding two of the four wheels and adding pedals, brakes and air-filled tyres. The machine was no longer a hobby-horse, pedestrian curricle or velocipede; it was a Byk, and everybody wanted one. Even the Angry-Sackmen’s queen, a less bellicose monarch than old Bus, ordered a specimen of the three-wheeled variant to pedal herself around the palace gardens.

It wasn’t queens, though, or even the writers, artists and philosophers who took up Byking with such eccentric enthusiasm, who benefited most from the new invention. For the first time, ordinary Muttons, who could never have afforded to buy or look after a saddled animal of their own, could travel significantly further and faster than their feet could carry them. The Byk was, and still is, the most efficient form of Mutton transport ever, was cheap to buy and didn’t need stabling, feeding or rubbing down when it got too hot. The combination of the Byk and cheap train travel meant that city-dwelling Muttons no longer had to live in huddled hovels close to their workplaces; they could move out a few miles to healthier, more spacious houses where their children could breathe clean air and drink clean water. In the countryside, Muttons could Byk beyond their own villages in search of love, ending centuries of enfeebling inbreeding.

For female Muttons the Byk was especially liberating; suddenly they were throwing away the ridiculous tent-like contraptions they had been clothed in and exploring the world beyond the chaperonage of their fathers and husbands.

Of course, not everyone liked the Byk, least of all the wealthiest of male Muttons. What was the point of being stinking rich if it didn’t mean that you could travel further and faster than the slightly smelly poor? Where was the great benefit of masculinity if mere females were to revel in the same freedoms? Worst of all, the Byk was losing them money. More and more young Muttons were spending their free time pedalling about the countryside, spending almost nothing except a few pennies on a bit of bread and cheese. Sales of tobacco, alcohol and other luxuries were plummeting. There was money to be made in Byks themselves, of course, but it wasn’t the kind of easy pickings that the rich Muttons liked, not like the money gushing out of the ground in the form of Oy’all. Indeed, the name of one Oy’all-dealing Mutton, known as Flockaseller for his habit of bankrupting his neighbours, had already become synonymous with obscene and frankly ridiculous levels of wealth. There had to be something that Flockaseller and his cronies could do to get ordinary Muttons off their Byks and back to the important business of spending money they couldn’t afford on stuff they didn’t need. And if that something could involve getting rid of the unpleasant, unwanted Gaz O’Lean, so much the better.

*New to them, that was; other, quieter Muttons had been using it for four thousand years or so.

The Tale of the Muttons Part III

Meanwhile, a couple of hundred years earlier, certain of the Angry-Sackmen and their neighbours, who were being persecuted or oppressed or just felt like a change of scene, had taken to the big boats and travelled across the ocean.  There they reached a place they called the New World, though it had probably been there as long as the rest of the planet.  It was a green and fertile country full of  wholesome plants, diverse wildlife and peaceful Muttons who didn’t know about gunpowder or chicken-pox.
So very soon the travellers stopped being persecuted and oppressed and learned how to do a bit of p&o on their own account.  They became known as the Unmerry Ones, probably due to indigestion after eating the bison and wild turkeys.  The Unmerry Ones were a bit behind the Angry-Sackmen when it came to burning Cole, partly because they had inherited half a continent of virgin woodland and partly because a few million darker skinned Muttons had very kindly crossed the ocean to help out with the harvest.
But they were soon to catch up, with the help of some more ancient black stuff. It all started quietly enough.  For many centuries, especially since reading in bed had caught on, the Muttons had been experimenting with different ways of lighting their buildings.  They’d tried various vegetable oils, beeswax, tallow and lard (more inconvenience for their four-legged neighbours), alcohol, turpentine and whale blubber (most unfortunate of all for the whales, who were almost extinct on the planet after a few years).

The Tale of the Muttons Part II

The Angry-Sackmen had two main interests in life: selling things and fighting.  Their success in combining these was really quite impressive.  They could fight other tribes, steal all their stuff and then sell it back to them; fight other tribes because they wouldn’t buy the Angry-Sackmen’s stuff and even sell weapons to other tribes then fight them in order to get the weapons back again.  This was called making the planet a safer place.

Unfortunately, since the Angry-Sackmen lived on an island, all this selling and fighting needed a lot of big boats, and by the time of Good Queen Bus, who had a particular grudge against the nearby Spangles* the forests on the island were looking somewhat bald.  The rich therefore decided that the black stuff, which was now known as Cole, wasn’t so utterly infra dig after all, so long as it was only the servants who actually had to touch it.

Over the next few centuries, quite a lot changed for the Angry-Sackmen.  They found lots of new ways to make stuff and kill things (mainly other Muttons, but they also liked to find species that looked in danger of dying out and make quite sure of it).  Many of these new techniques had actually been used by other tribes for thousands of years, but because they lived in different parts of the planet and weren’t quite so keen on selling and fighting, the new ideas hadn’t reached the Angry-Sackmen before. Or sometimes the other Muttons had told the Angry-Sackmen all about their discoveries but the Angry-Sackmen hadn’t listened.  (The stories say that this was because the other Muttons had different coloured skins or  different names for their Divine Being, but I don’t expect you to believe anything quite as preposterous as that.  There must have been some rational reason that’s been lost in the translation. )

One of the things that the other Muttons had known about for hundreds of years was Cole, and how useful it could be, not only for keeping their homes warm but also for heating up metal to make things. It took the Angry-Sackmen a while to grasp the idea, but once they did, they certainly made up for lost time.

The interesting thing about Cole was that it was old; really, really old, far older than the Muttons themselves.  It had once, long ago, been simply masses of individual plants, but over hundreds of millions of years, covered with water and mud, the plants had  transformed themselves into this extraordinary rock.  You might expect that the Muttons, once they realized this, would have been stunned by the antiquity of Cole compared to their own short history, overawed by its power and potential and fascinated by the series of miracles that had brought it about.

Nah.  They just wanted to get it out of the ground and burned up as quickly as possible.  This didn’t always prove that easy.  To get hold of good quality Cole, the Muttons had to dig deep pits in their planet and go down with primitive tools to chop it out.  It was a dangerous business, with poisonous gases, tunnels ever likely to collapse, unexpected fires and underground watercourses ready to flood the mines and drown the Muttons working there.  It was in trying to suck this water out of the mines that the Muttons first used their latest invention: the Stee Men Djinn.

(click to see the Stee Men Djinn in action)

The jolly wheeze with the Stee Men Djinn, from the point of view of mine-owning Muttons, was that not only did it dry their pits, but it required lots and lots of Cole to keep it going.  Within a few years the Muttons were using the Djinn for everything; in their big boats, in self-powered coaches that ran on rails, and most of all in machines that could make more and more stuff to sell.  It  could make every dream come true; at least for the rich Muttons, the ones who owned the factories and travelled first class on the railways and steamships.  For the others, those sweating down in the mines and suffocating in the ceaseless factories, things weren’t quite so jolly.  But it was all Progress, and only the muddiest of sheep would bleat a complaint.  The Angry-Sackmen, despite being such a tiny island,  led the way in adoration of the Djinn; during what they called their nineteenth century they burned nearly half of all the Cole used anywhere on the planet.

*Her idea of a jolly dare was to send her boyfriends out to steal the Spangles’ stuff-laden boats. If they did it nicely, she made them into Knits; if not they were known as P’rats and forced to converse with parrots and drink quantities of rum quite in excess of the government’s recommended levels.

The Tale of the Muttons Part I

Once upon a time, on a planet something like our own,  there lived a dominant species.  We might call them the Muttons, as they were inclined towards woolly thinking and tended to follow one another into awkward places.

The Muttons walked on only two of their limbs, which was quite an advantage, as it meant that they could use the other two for wielding tools and carrying things.  They soon found, however, that carrying things was rather like hard work.  Even so early in their history, the Muttons had developed a general distaste for work and so they were much heartened by a couple of discoveries made by the proto-intellectuals of the flock.

The first discovery was that, by bribery, threats and a certain lack of imaginative sympathy, the Muttons could persuade other, usually four-legged, species to carry things for them.  What was more, some of the more suggestible species were even cajoled into carrying the Muttons themselves, including those who were quite big enough to walk.

The second thing the Muttons found out was that discs and spheres were a lot easier than other shapes to push along the ground.  It followed, as one ewe after another, that things balanced on top of circular shapes were also easy to move, and that things balanced on top of circles pulled along by four-legged species were a positive doddle, leaving the Muttons plenty of time to develop the alternative pastimes of warfare, poetry and recreational drugs.

With the benefit of these innovations, along with a few minor serendipities to do with travelling across snow (sledges and very hairy four-legged species) and water (sails, oars and fellow Muttons unfortunate enough to have been born into the wrong tribe), transport, agriculture and trade trogged along quite happily for many millennia.  And, for the rare occasions when the Muttons weren’t out moving things around, they had come across a third Useful Thing which was to make their home lives a good deal jollier.

This, as the astute reader will no doubt have guessed, was fire.  Fire kept away the less amenable of the planet’s co-inhabitants, warmed the chilly Muttons in winter, helped them to see in the dark and  enhanced the variety and taste of their cooking, which had previously consisted of variations on the theme of salad.  Fire required fuel, but for the first couple of hundred thousand years there were plenty of trees on the planet, which could be cut down and cheerfully burned.  A few Muttons found lumps of black stuff in the earth which burned more slowly and quietly than wood, but among the tribe we know best, the Angry-Sackmen, the grubby black stuff was left to the poor, who couldn’t afford to be finicky about their fingernails.