The Verminian Invasion
by mamapolo
Long, long ago in a kingdom far, far away there lived a king and his queen and their tiny princess. Actually, it wasn’t all that far away, in the
It was a castle of modest proportions, but the grounds were spacious and pleasant, great oaks shading the gardens on hot summer days. Just out of sight a tiny river ran along the border of the kingdom and on quiet evenings the peeper frogs sang long intricate chorales while the bullfrogs provided percussion and fireflies glowed gold against the dark pine trees. The forests of the kingdom teemed with wildlife, so abundant that strange and mystical creatures often appeared on the castle grounds. The queen and the princess (the king was most often away, doing whatever it is kings do when they are not at home) dearly loved sitting quietly under the broad oaks, watching the creatures. Deer with their blinding white tail-flags browsed serenely. Rabbits hopped busily about and sometimes staged elaborate bunny-games, two rabbits facing each other from a stone’s-throw distance until the end of a silent count-down, racing headlong at each other, stopping just in time to compete in high bounding leaps, lofting up and over each other, swapping ends in mid-air and racing away to begin the dance again. The bunny-games made the princess clap her small soft hands in delight.
The fields of the kingdom were small because the only inhabitants were the royal family, great quantities of food were not required. The land was fertile, though, and lovely. Near harvest time the tomato vines sagged under the weight of the large ruby fruits, emerald bell peppers gleamed from between the leaves. The lacy green tops of the carrots fluttered over orange pumpkins the size of hassocks and rows of corn stalks rustled sweetly in the breeze, the silken tassels flying like standard banners. The kingdom’s herds were likewise small, a white ill-tempered goat named Ivy and her two snowy-coated elfin sons, Rocky and Bullwinkle. A dog or two always snoozed in the sun near the castle porch, a grey-and-white tabby cat batted at dust motes milling in a shaft of sunlight. Life was good.
It came to pass in the fullness of time that black days fell upon the kingdom. Just over the border, a high lonely gray stone castle rose from the bank of the tiny river, and sometimes it blocked the sun. The forbidding structure had once been the home of a king who owned a huge enchanted dragon with teeth like boulders and eyes of fire.Wagons of wheat and oats rolled in through the castle gates, the bushels of grain were poured into the dragon’s mouth and she munched and chewed and groaned and spat out soft-milled flour into big sacks, which were loaded back onto the very same wagons and taken to markets to help feed the people. Later, the dragon found more talents and sucked in the water from the tiny river and spat out electricity, which lighted the homes in the valley and heated the ovens of the people. But the dragon died and the castle had been abandoned before personal computers were a twinkle in anyone’s eye and with no ruler and no workmen, it had fallen into disrepair. Sometimes the princess and the queen would hear a dull “whuff” as a large siding stone fell from an upper casement of the abandoned castle. Wooden platforms and rafters were devoured by dry-rot and dangled dangerously from the high ceilings. Neighboring kingdoms began to fear that small boys and daring stripling lads might be badly injured as they explored the ancient evil castle and so it was decided the castle must be destroyed.
Broad-shouldered men with bright yellow tortoise shell helmets rode in on enormous orange battle elephants. The elephants put their shoulders to the walls of the castle and heaved mightily, again and again until the walls began to shudder. Again and again the elephants pressed their mighty bodies against the castle, which finally groaned in defeat and collapsed on itself, sending a cloud of grain dust and chaff and antiquity mushrooming into the air. The men then directed the elephants to load the stone from the castle walls onto great shiny iron wagons and then all of them went away. The queen had quite a time of it for a few days, what with all the dust and fine ancient flour sifting through the air onto the castle curtains and floors and furnishings.
Finally the queen descended into the castle kitchens one day to find that the window sills were not inch-deep in flour dust and the curtains were not once more gray with the detritus of a century, and she smiled in relief and made a breakfast of eggs and cheese, bread and cold milk for herself and the princess. Later, hand in hand, they walked to the edge of the castle grounds and plucked fat blueberries from the vines that romped and chuckled down a grassy bank and ate them with whipped cream and sweet cake. It was the last golden moment at the castle for a long stretch of time.
While the ladies of the kingdom were eating blueberries and sweet cake with cream, a hostile force was gathering just beyond the kingdom’s borders. The demolition of the ancient castle had left homeless hordes of vermin: rats and mice and spiders and bats and snakes. The disaster that befell their home had driven them into the surrounding forests, where they shivered miserably on cool fall evenings and searched vainly for enough sustenance for their vast numbers. They became that most dangerous of crowds, the one that has nothing left to lose. Vermin generations are much briefer than human time and e’er long the young vermin had forgotten all of the civilizing rules that had governed their parents’ behavior and they vowed to take another castle. The nearest castle was the one wherein lived the king and queen and princess, and the young verminous rabble-rousers devised a plan.
The first sign of trouble was noticed by the queen when she stepped out on a dull October morning to fetch the broadsheet that published all the news of neighboring kingdoms and was delivered by fairies, she thought, because she never saw them. She suspected fairies because of the whimsical way they delivered the broadsheet – on wet mornings lying on the soaked grass unprotected, on dry mornings carefully encased in a transparent membrane and placed precisely on the castle’s welcome mat.
When the queen stepped out of the castle door, she was met by a weird and creepily beautiful sight. Glistening dew-glittered spider webs, lacy and mathematically precise, draped the iron railings on the castle porch, curtained the opening down the stairs, covered every nearby oak and pine like the mantillas of church-going ladies. Webs stretched across the castle lawns as far as the eye could see. The queen used a broom to clear away the webs blocking access to the porch steps and shakily retrieved the broadsheet from the lawn. By the time she and the princess had finished breakfast and cleared away the dishes, the porch steps were webbed over again. It was a bit frightening. The queen expected Stephenus of King to appear at any moment for his signature cameo role.
That night began a span of unseasonable cold autumn rains that deluged the little kingdom and surrounding territories. The run-off ditches that paralleled the avenue leading to the castle were swollen to over-flowing. The vermin hordes took full advantage of this natural phenomenon and mounted a night attack by sea.
The heavy rains knocked the gay colored leaves from the trees and swept them into the ditches. Pirate rats, with bandanas knotted about their brows and rakish eye patches, leaped onto the swirling leaf-rafts and poled them along with cattail stems. At the avenue that approached the castle, an underground viaduct passed the water from the ditch under the avenue, and quickly debris from the small flood blocked the viaduct and created a perfect natural landing. The pirate rats poled their rafts to the blocked viaduct and swarmed out of the ditch, daggers clenched between their prominent white teeth, and crept silently if wetly toward the castle, where the queen and the princess slept unsuspecting. (The king was still away on some sort of business.)
Adrenaline-junkie mice climbed up the oaks near the castle and then rappelled down onto the roof using strands from the gazillion spider webs. They found a small aperture in a high window and dropped softly into the attic.
Squadrons of bats, their leathery wings snapping as they flew, squeaked inquiringly at each other and navigated their way through the night to the castle chimney, where they found access.
Submariner snakes, black snakes and garter snakes and probably some other less appetizing flavors, wiggled soundlessly down the ditches and slithered up the castle walls, insinuating themselves under the siding and there finding secret passageways into the heart of the castle.
The commando mice left the attic to the bats and secured the perimeters of the castle. The rats claimed the basement rooms. By the time the princess and the queen awoke, the occupation was a fait accompli.
The queen padded sleepily downstairs to prepare breakfast while the princess performed her ablutions. The queen did not notice the large bright-eyed mouse sentry in the Swedish ivy hanging basket by the sink, nor the one sitting atop the sugar bowl on the table. She DID notice the one that jumped into her hand when she reached into a drawer for a dish towel. She shrieked in surprise, but then stopped; knowing that screaming is just silly and only causes more confusion. The screaming went on, though, and she put a hand to her throat to make sure her scream shut-off valve was operating correctly. It was, but still the screaming. She realized it was a more distant scream than her own. The princess! The queen took the stairs two at a time, racing to the royal water-closet where she found the princess standing on the lid of the commode, screaming while she stared at a half-dozen bikinied mice water-skiing in the bathtub, behind one of the princess’ wind-up bath toys.
The queen, because she loved her daughter very much, bravely passed by the water-skiing revelers and scooped the princess up into her arms. She ran awkwardly from the water-closet, down the hall and into the master suite of the castle, dancing between rodents and assorted creepy-crawlies like a competitor in a tire obstacle-course.
In the days before cell phones, there was no way to contact the king, and so the queen and the princess lived in fear for a full day, commissioning the castle dog and cat to keep the vermin at bay while the princess slept in the royal couple’s bed and the queen sat watch, her eyes growing heavy and grainy with exhaustion, but her adrenaline kept pumping nicely by the frequent foot-races between vermin and house pets. The vermin always seemed to win, ducking by a whisker into a tiny hole under the baseboard or racing up an English ivy to disappear behind the curtains. The dog and cat were nervous wrecks, and fell into sporadic snoring dozes, their feet jerking spastically as they chased mice in their sleep.
By the time the king arrived at home, chaos reigned supreme. Tiny hooker mice in red satin shorts or acid-green silk gowns slashed to the navel from both ends strolled the upper castle hallways, hips swinging and tiny voices squeaking ribald invitations to the sailor mice. The boy mice fell into silly brawls over the favors of the mice of ill repute. The queen dozed off briefly and awoke to find the castle dog trussed up by a string of Christmas lights, serving as festive illumination for the little mouse hoedown on the rag rug beside the bed. The family cat, although full of consternation for her own safety, still found the dog’s plight highly amusing. The rats broke into the cupboard that held a few bottles of holiday cheer and since they didn’t know their limits, were soon swinging drunkenly from the wagon wheel chandelier in the kitchen, or stumbling up the stairs hand in hand, two by two, whispering and giggling, to reel into dark corners to pursue sordid encounters.
The sound of the king’s chariot door slamming shut below her window was a sweet, sweet sound. The queen lifted the sleeping princess and flew to her king, who was tired and cranky from his travels, which nearly always involved stopping at roadhouses or taverns. The taverns must have been exhausting because they left the king very sleepy. He pooh-poohed the queen’s tales of marauding rodents and staggered off to the bedchamber.
The next morning, the queen was sitting on a kitchen chair, her slippered feet on the chair rung to avoid the bustling morning crowds of shopping mother rodents, the princess on her lap, when she heard the king bellow from the bedchamber above. She tried to judge whether she could make her way through the furry and bewhiskered mice, with their shopping baskets dangling from their arms, the baskets bulging with bread crumbs and bits of cheese, strawberries and chunks of carrot, and what looked like tufts of Keeshund fur, probably to line nests comfortably. The queen closed her eyes for a moment, hoping the dog was hidden safe under a couch. She decided she would stay right where she was. The king would be hungry soon enough, and would himself grace the kitchen.
Sure enough, his royal self dragged groggily into the kitchen, the brilliant sunlight from the kitchen window lasering his reddened eyes. He threw his arm over his eyes and hissed like a vampire. Using the rude language that kings sometimes use, he informed the queen that he had woken to find a sleek fat mouse sitting on his pillow, combing its whiskers with a comb purloined from the royal jeans’ pocket and fixing him with a steely gaze. It was time, he pronounced, to mount a defense.
The queen, who herself thought it was long past time to mount a defense, agreed with royal grace. The king dispatched her to the local provisioner, where barrels of nails and kegs of screws lined long aisles and hammers and saws and screwdrivers dangled on hooks from the wall. She purchased a king’s ransom’s worth of traps and returned to the castle. The king examined her purchases and found fault with a few, as was his usual kingly way, but instructed her to set the traps every darned where. He Himself, He said, was going back to bed.
The queen, who was very bright in some ways, but not so much in others, struggled with the traps. Each time she felt she had finally successfully set a trap, she would make a move to position it in a strategic spot on one of the mouse superhighways that ran east and west, north and south, throughout the castle. At that point, the trap would somehow go off, not only threatening her royal fingers, but catapulting the bit of cheese or ham that she had used to bait the trap. E’er long, the mouse shoppers had abandoned the produce and perishable stalls that enterprising rats had set up on the kitchen floor and followed the queen, deftly retrieving the special treats she was lofting into the air on a regular basis. It began to look like the tossing of a bouquet at a wedding, with anxious spinsters scuffling to catch the prize.
The queen summoned every ounce of her considerable courage, developed over a couple of decades’ living with the king, and carried the princess upstairs to the bedchamber to wake His Royal Self. She carried with her the last cup of coffee, the rest of the pot having been filched by a cluster of beatnik mice that had set up a tiny bistro near the stove, with
She woke the king with trepidation, presenting him with the offering of the mug of coffee to assuage his anger. She told him she was unable to set the traps successfully, and humbly requested his assistance.
The king was angry to be woken, but then he was pretty much angry all the time anyway. He grudgingly agreed to descend.
Back in the kitchens, the king impatiently demonstrated the proper trap-setting method, how one held the bale with one’s thumb while installing the selected bait item, draped the hook over the bale and held the hook with one’s thumb while depositing the trap in the appropriate spot. Then, he said, warming to his lesson, the unwary rodent would come by (the queen looked about the kitchen, teeming like a Saturday marketplace, with exhibition rat wrestling matches near the blender, a mouse politician in a top hat haranguing a scraggle of hecklers from atop one of the princess’ building blocks, and thought they pretty much all looked unwary, which made her hopeful.)
The king continued his demonstration, pointing to the square of cheese in the trap, and said, “When the little @#$*(% takes the cheese, the hook flies off and the bale snaps down. Whap! Dead mouse.”
“Whap,” the queen echoed dubiously and found she liked the sound. “Whap. Whap! WHAP!” She wondered dizzily if there were toxic fumes in rodent feces that were causing her damage.
“Stop saying ‘Whap!’” the king groused. He lifted one of the set traps. “Here, I’ll show you. Grab the cheese.”
The queen looked at him. “No!” she said. “It’ll smash my finger.”
The king looked disgusted, never a good situation. “It will not. I’m holding the bale.”
Timidly, the queen stretched out her hand and seized the bit of cheese. “WHAP!” the bale snapped down on her thumb with a painful bite.
The king laughed heartily. “You should see your face,” he chortled. He sobered again, an unusual state for the king. “Now you know how it works. I’m going back to bed.”
The queen, having been duly punished for rousing the king from his royal slumber, nodded, trying to ignore the fierce throbbing in her thumbnail. She went to setting the many traps all about the house, being careful to place them where the princess or the dog would not experience harm. The cat was pretty much on her own, but she had been warned repeatedly about leaping on to the kitchen counters anyway. By the time the queen’s thumbnail had developed a rich and royal purple colored bruise that would be painful for weeks, the traps were distributed, and she loaded the princess into the royal chariot and left for a neighboring kingdom, hoping the traps would work their magic in their absence.
As the poet said, the best laid plans of mice and men aft gang agly, and upon the queen’s return to the castle, she found that this plan of men AGAINST mice could not have ganged agly-er. The traps had been stripped of their food treasures and had been pressed into service as a rodent fortress, bound together by strands of spider web, which were, of course, in abundance. The vermin had declared their borders, which bisected the castle kitchens. The vermin side of the no-fly zone included the refrigerator, stove and pantry. The royals’ side encompassed the trashcan and not much else.
As she dithered on the threshold, unable to decide on a course of action, she heard an unkingly shriek from the royal bedchamber and then the thunder of royal feet down the castle staircase. The king himself appeared before her, eyes huge and round and terrible, a large rat trap dangling from his beard. “ENOUGH!” he roared.
Because kings do nothing except, well, rule, he ordered the queen to send out an alarm to a conclave of warrior monks that their specialized assistance was needed posthaste. Obediently, the queen did so, and in the blink of an eye (well, a large eye that takes about 48 hours to complete a blink), a contingent of monks drove down the avenue to the castle in their brightly painted chariots that identified them as Knights of Terminix.
They dismissed the royal family unceremoniously and began their assault with tanks and hoses and large tents with which they draped the castle.
The king hied himself to the nearest roadhouse and the princess and the queen went to a place of lodging where they slept peacefully for the first time in many days, although the queen still jolted awake nervously when a strand of hair brushed her cheek.
The jangle of a bell in the queen’s temporary lodgings heralded the announcement by the Knights of Terminix that the enemy was vanquished and the royal family could return without fear to their residence, which they did.
The last of the Knights were just leaving the castle, carrying burlap sacks full of the bodies of the verminous invaders. The queen spent many hours sweeping down spider webs and sweeping up spider carcasses, and plucking the occasional overlooked body of a mouse from a teacup in the cupboard, and then many more hours washing every conceivable item in the castle, which made her very thankful it was not a large industrial-sized castle. The only remaining evidence of the invasion was indisputable proof that some snake, probably a black snake by its size, had escaped the traps and poison and pointed sticks and the other weapons of the Knights. The royal family never saw the snake itself, but found abandoned skins, six feet long, draped over a box in the attic, over a pipe on the basement ceiling, once threaded through the Swedish ivy in the kitchen.
And life continued apace for a while, but the magic spell that had held the queen in thrall for half her life had somehow weakened, and when the princess reached her maturity and began to consider obtaining her very own kingdom, both the queen and her daughter left the castle and went out into the great wide world to seek their fortunes.
Legend has it that the king and the black snake live yet in the castle, to this very day.
The End
Email this story 
Print Story 
Add to reading list
