Grumble and Gasp: Of Crowns and Carrion Birds Chapter 1 Part 1
Chapter 1 of Grumble and Gasp is available here for your free enjoyment. If you find yourself liking the story and wanting more, the full novel is available on Kindle and Amazon.
Of Crowns and Carrion Birds – Chapter One: Dead Queens and Worse Things
by Brude Bowyer
They say history was penned by a mad monk who cared little for facts, and that we are nothing more than the idle sketches he scrawled in the margins.
If that were true, the monk must have had a cruel sense of humor when he drew the life of the captain of the Queen’s guard, Cornelius Grumle.
The palace was under attack. It was, by all measures, a ridiculous attack.
When the Mad Monk created the world, he had drawn living things of all shapes and sizes, but he seemed to take particular delight in creating strange, and frankly, irritating creatures. Tonight, the creature in question was an elephrat. It was the size of a prize pig, had the furry body of an overfed rat, the tusks and trunk of an undersized elephant, an inexplicably luxurious mustache, and seemed to be permanently panicked by its own existence. The Duchess of Farsh, in a fit of sentimental exhibitionism, had smuggled it into court among her retinue and told everyone it was her “little darling.” No one had dared contradict her, largely because she was married to a general and also because she had once had a bishop horsewhipped over a game of cards.
Now her “little darling” had broken loose during the prince’s late banquet, knocked over the Lord High Librarian’s chair, and was currently stampeding down the east corridor, pursued by six of Her Majesty’s finest, all of whom had just enough training to know what an emergency looked like and not enough to do anything useful about it.
Captain Grumle assessed the scene with a martyr’s sigh. All he really wanted was a stiff drink and a seven-hour argument with his mattress, but it seemed fate had conspired against him once again.
The pursuit was easy to follow. There was a straight line of carnage: a shattered formerly priceless vase, the ruins of three ceremonial suits of armor, a trail of sticky footprints where the elephrat had stepped in the custard, and two unconscious footmen. The sound reached him as a kind of low rumble, followed by the scream of someone who’d just discovered that, while ivory is lovely on a piano, it is less so when it’s buried in your lower intestine.
Grumle arrived just in time to see the beast round the landing. Behind it, the six guards had been reduced to five, then four, as each tripped over the detritus of courtly excess. The duchess hurled herself down the hallway close behind, a tidal wave of purple silk and perfume.
“Don’t you DARE hurt my baby!” she screamed, her arms flung wide as if expecting to stop the entire affair by sheer maternal willpower.
The duchess’s war cry echoed up the corridor. Grumle, who had stopped running two decades ago, let out another sigh and moved to cut the creature off at a deliberate, aggravated march. He stepped past one of his fallen men who was attempting to get up from the ground while simultaneously loading a crossbow.
“Permission to shoot, Captain?” gasped the guard, pink-faced, fumbling with the string.
“Only if you want to explain to the Queen why you put a hole in her tapestry,” Grumle replied. “Your aim’s garbage, Danner.”
The crossbow was lowered with a mumbled curse as Grumle entered a cross corridor.
Ahead, the main passage narrowed and then sloped sharply toward the Queen’s private apartments. This, Grumle knew, was by design: any attack had to funnel through a bottleneck before threatening Her Majesty. Unfortunately, the architect had never considered attacks by rodents of unusual size, or improbably small pachyderms, and certainly not the pair in one destructive package. The elephrat charged into the bottleneck, tusks gouging strips from the frescoed walls, and there it paused, sniffing, trunk shivering as it met Cornelius Grumle face to face.
At the far end, Grumle planted his boots, straightened his battered tunic, and leaned heavily on his spear.
The elephrat squealed, pawed the ground, and sized up its final obstacle. There was a brief, silent negotiation within its fear-marinated brain between the instinct for self-preservation and the absolute conviction that if you charged at something hard enough, you could make the world change shape to fit you.
A second later, the Duchess entered the standoff at the heels of the only two remaining guards. “Stop him!” she shrieked. “My precious boy! Don’t you dare—”
But it was too late. The elephrat, perhaps acting instinctively from the shrill voice of its owner, let loose a trumpet blast that set the Queen’s crystal chandelier ringing, then thundered down the hall at Grumle.
He didn’t flinch. He simply lowered his spear, wedged the butt against his heel, and leveled the point right at the beast’s center mass. It was a maneuver old as war and twice as effective: use the other fellow’s weight against him.
He waited. He watched. The gap closed, twenty paces and closing.
“For the love of the Pierced God, please!” the Duchess sobbed. “Don’t hurt my little darling, he’s all I have!”
Grumle looked from the charging beast to the blubbering duchess and exhaled in exhaustion. In one motion, he let the spear drop, stepped aside at the last moment, and grabbed the creature’s nearest tusk in both hands as it passed. He was instantly yanked off his feet and dragged down the polished corridor like the sack of bones that he was, but he held on.
The elephrat trumpeted in surprise. Its legs windmilled, scraping furrows in the tile, and its trunk tried to wrap around Grumle’s torso. He ducked, twisted, used the leverage of a misspent childhood and bad knees to swing himself up onto the beast’s back.
The ride that followed would have broken a lesser man. The beast bucked, spun, and slammed its bulk into every available wall, but Grumle stayed astride, grimly determined to outlast both beast and gravity. After being bodily crushed into the wall for the third time, he finally got a good grip on both tusks and began to twist. The animal, sensing the end, redoubled its efforts, but Grumle had broken the will of meaner things than this, and he had never, ever lost a contest of stubbornness.
The struggle ended at the doors of the Queen’s antechamber. Grumle, now bleeding from the few places that weren’t bruised, finally wrenched the elephrat’s head sideways. With a thud, it collapsed. Grumle flopped onto his butt, still holding the tusks, and pulled backwards, cursing and muscles quivering, as the animal heaved and struggled to rise.
The six guards, now miraculously restored to full number, arrived and stared dumbly at the scene.
“By all means, men,” Grumle spat. “In your own time.”
The soldiers recovered and immediately set about trussing the creature with every belt, sash, and decorative cord within arm’s reach. The Duchess collapsed against a column and wept, loudly and with a keen practiced to shatter glass.
Grumle sat up, spat out a mouthful of fur, and wiped his face with the back of his hand. The guards looked at him as if he’d just single-handedly slain a dragon. In the stories they’d tell, perhaps he had.
He ignored them.
“Captain, you all right?” Danner asked, awed.
“I’ll live,” Grumle said. “Not sure about the decor.”
He gestured at the wreckage: shattered tile, a mural now improved by the addition of a perfect elephantine silhouette, and a guardrail twisted into a shape not found in nature.
“Should we, uh, alert the Queen?” another guard ventured.
Grumle considered this. He considered the dawnless hour, the fact that he hadn’t slept in three days, and the knowledge that, if the Queen was awake, there would be another hour of apologies and explanations in his future.
“If she didn’t wake from this ruckus,” he responded. “She needs the rest as much as I do. Let her sleep. Clean this up. House the Duchess’s little darling securely in the stables. And if any other wild beasts break in tonight, do not hesitate to call someone else.”
The men scattered, eager to comply.
Grumle rose, groaned, and popped his shoulder back into place with a sound like a snapping bow string. He shot one last glance at the elephrat. It looked back at him with the glazed, tragic dignity of something that knew it was not, and never would be, the king of anything.
Grumle saluted it out of commiseration before limping off towards his quarters.
***
The day ended, as it often did, back in his room with the clatter of old armor and the unrepentant snoring of a dog built for siege warfare.
Captain Grumle peeled off his breastplate in increments. First, the leather ties, knotted by some recruit who thought “tight enough to stop a bear” was sound doctrine. Then came the groan and pop of metal, echoed by his own aching shoulder as it protested free from his shirt linen. The undergarment with so much sweat and memory caked into the fibers it could probably stand up and salute on its own. He set the breastplate on the desk with a soft thunk, then exhaled. The breath came out half a cough, half an exhausted sigh.
His room was exactly as luxurious as a broom closet, and roughly twice as clean. The bed was narrow and short, the kind that punished tall men with cold feet. His desk doubled as a shelf for armor, whiskey, and a single lit candle. The walls were bare, save for a simple rood honoring the Pierced God, and his old spear he had just remounted above the door. The weapon’s shaft polished smooth as river stone by calloused hands, the steel head nicked and pitted, but still sharp enough to end a story. His trunk, dented and mildewed, doubled as a bench and, in his more imaginative moments, a footstool.
And then there was Doorstop.
She lay across the entry with the kind of obstinacy that, in better times, would have inspired statues. Six hundred fifty kilograms of brindled canine muscle now going to flab, fur, and old battle scars, each one commemorated by a notch in her ear or a patch where nothing grew.
She dominated the room, taking up more space than his bed and making the already spartan quarters feel suffocatingly small.
When choosing a mount, most officers preferred a horse, for the speed, the stature, the way it made their capes flutter just so. A few swore by riding snails, citing reliability, natural armor, and a smooth ride. Grumle had never seen the appeal in either. For his part, nothing beat the loyalty of a well-trained war dog. Doorstop didn’t complain, didn’t spook, and only occasionally ate part of a prisoner.
He had never even considered riding a battle rooster. No one respected an officer riding a rooster.
Grumle grabbed his ration of whiskey. He skipped the glass, squatted beside Doorstop, drank deeply, and set the bottle on a paw the size of a fuzzy-toed dinner plate. A gentle rap on the dog’s snout with two fingers didn’t even earn an eye-flutter from the massive mastiff.
“Could have used your help tonight, old girl,” he said. “We still have a week before retirement. You are still on duty, and don’t forget it.”
Doorstop snorted her derision. It sounded like a minor landslide.
“Seven more shifts, then we’re free,” Grumle said, laying his head back, and he grinned, the way only a man who hasn’t truly smiled in years can grin: thin, skeptical, and bone tired.
He drank and let his head loll back against the doorframe, looking past Doorstop out the slit window. The capital city, Camulos, slept below him like an inkblot spilled from the pen of the mad monk himself. In the distance, moonlight traced silver streaks across the lake’s surface, just visible from up here.
The Queen had promised him a cottage on that lake five years ago. Whether as a reward for services rendered, or out of a lingering sense of guilt, he couldn’t say. One room, four walls, a dock that sagged like a drunk’s smile. The paperwork was somewhere in his trunk, and every so often, he took it out and read it carefully, as if it might take flight if held too long.
“Can’t believe next week you’ll be a dock dog,” he told Doorstop. “You, who once bit a broadsword in half. You, who pissed in the Duke’s fountain. You, who—”
She interrupted with a floorboard-rattling fart, long and unrepentant.
Grumle nudged her with his knee. “You’re right. You’ll definitely do better in wide-open spaces.”
He left the now-empty bottle for her. She licked it once, judged it unworthy, and rolled onto her side with a meaty flop that strained the door frame.
Grumle slumped onto the edge of the chest and tugged at his boots. They came off slow, leather creaking, his feet protesting every inch. When the second boot finally slid free, he wiggled his toes in the cool air with a groan fit for the grave. Toes splayed, he flexed them once, twice, luxuriating in the small mercy of tootsie freedom. Steel and duty weighed a man down. Bare feet and bad whiskey were the only comforts left to men like him.
He scraped at his stubble, felt the familiar terrain of scars. He wondered idly, dangerously, what he’d do when the uniform was gone. What would he talk to Doorstop about when there were no more shifts to count, no more palace corridors to march? The cottage was real, but the rest of it, the peace, the quiet, the notion that men like him could ever retire, was as thin as the mattress on his bed.
He blew out the candle. The dark came quickly, but not quietly. His knees popped as he stretched. The sheets were cold, but that was a mercy; he slept hot.
Grumle lay there, hands behind his head, cataloging the night sounds: Doorstop snoring like a bellows, the wind clicking in the chimney, the distant march of armored boots. A castle never slept, not really. Most nights he didn’t either.
As if to prove the point, just as he closed his eyes, a pounding on the door snapped them back open. The sound sharp and quick.
Grumle sat up so fast he bit his tongue. Doorstop’s head snapped up, fur bristling, hackles standing like a regiment at inspection.
The pounding came again, louder. A man’s voice, high and breaking: “Captain! Captain Grumle!”
He stood and groped for his spear above the door, using it to prod Doorstop, who had, true to her name, planted herself directly in the path of the exit.
“Move, you great lump of gristle,” Grumle hissed.
Doorstop did not move.
He wedged the butt of the spear against her belly and heaved. She grunted, and for a moment he thought she’d bite the shaft in two. Instead, she rolled a quarter-turn, enough for Grumle to squeeze past. Her tail, battered and bent, lashed once and smacked him on the shin in passing.
“Captain!” The voice outside was less patient now. “It’s urgent!”
Grumle drew the bolt, but only opened the door a crack. “Who is it?”
“Rell. From D shift. Sir.”
“I thought I made it clear I was not to be…” Grumle’s complaint died on his lips as he took in the soldier’s haunted expression.
“Report.”
The words came out in a rush: “You’re needed at the Queen’s chambers. Now. They… there’s been—” The voice faltered. “She’s… She’s—”
Grumle didn’t wait for the remaining answer. He threw the door open, catching the boy, barely seventeen, full in the nose with a crunch. The kid went down hard, eyes already watering.
Grumle crouched beside him, iron grip on the boy’s collar. “What happened?”
Blood poured from Rell’s already swelling nose, his breath hitching, words thick, voice full of cotton.
“Th‑they said you’re t’come, Cap’n… now. Sh‑she’s dead.” He tried to sniff, choked instead. “Th’ Queen’s dead. M’urder’d in her bed. An’ they… they found that monst’r, th’ Queen’s Crow, right there at th’ scene.”
Grumle’s body acted before his mind could catch up. He snatched the helmet from his trunk, slammed it over his head, and rammed his boots into place. Doorstop, reading the sudden violence in the air, shook herself to full alertness and blocked the hallway before he could.
“No,” Grumle snapped. “Stay.”
She glared, but obeyed.
He barreled past the boy, muttering, “Sorry about the nose lad.” Over his shoulder, as an afterthought.
Rell scrambled to his feet, blood streaming from his nose, but Grumle was already gone. The corridor was a blur. Stone walls, torchlight, the echo of running feet. Behind him, Doorstop bellowed once, a sound that might have been a bark if it hadn’t been filtered through thirty generations of siege breeding.
Grumle didn’t look back. He ran, spear low, head down, every muscle remembering the need, the urgency, the old purpose.
The Queen of Prydein was dead.
And if that was true, nothing good would ever happen again.
Thanks for reading. Chapter 1 of Grumble and Gasp is available here for your free enjoyment. If you find yourself liking the story and wanting more, the full novel is available on Kindle and Amazon.
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