Bard Billot on the Baron and Babs
A Weekend in the Country
So it was that Baron Luxon
accepted a weekend offer
of pheasant hunting in the countryside,
from his ancient ally Lady Babs of Kuriger.
Lo, he left Queen’s Landing in good cheer:
for the humble and oppressed peasants
had risen up and surrounded the High Keep
with their ninety six wheeler, air-con
farm carts with Apple CartPlay surround sound,
heated seating and fine chrome detailing.
He waved as he galloped past their pitchforks
on his trusty war steed Titanic;
and thus did the sweet aroma of victory
drift into the Baron’s nostrils.
Up into the hills he and his retinue
made their winding way,
where the gorse grew wild and free,
and the rabbits and possums
gambolled on the eroding meadows.
But the road soon grew rocky
and the hills dark and dusty
and the only sound was the wind
blowing in the eerie rock formations,
and the dismal ringing of Tweet alerts
on iPhones.
Finally The Baron reached the ancestral seat
of the landholding gentry of House Kuriger.
There at the gates lay twenty cattle skulls
and a rusty sign swinging
on a barbed wire fence, which read:
“Welcome to Ponderosa Ranch.
Abandon all hope ye who enter.”
The Baron remembered his visits
as a fresh faced young nobleman,
and thought uneasily to himself
“Ill fares the land!”
And there by the heaped skeletons of cows
stood a crone, hidden by a Swanndri hood.
“Good Crone!” sallied forth Baron Luxon,
“where can one find pheasants
in these dreary parts?”
The Crone pointed silently across
to the broken bad lands.
So on the Baron rode,
yet he could not shake the strange feeling
that the Crone was familiar to him.
There they drew up to the River Rubicon.
On the opposite side, pheasants sat
in long rows on the branches of dead trees:
but the pheasants looked and sounded
suspiciously like vultures.
The Baron frowned, for the weekend
was not going as he had hoped.
He sniffed again, for the aroma of victory
was growing stronger and stronger.
“What is this confounded stench?”
he demanded as they forded
through the dank and clouded torrent.
Then the Baron looked down:
and Lo, his great white steed Titanic
was drifting sideways in a fast flowing,
neck deep cascade of cow shit. Victor Billot has previously felt moved to compose Odes for such luminaries as Wayne Brown, Bishop Brian, Jacinda Ardern, Mike Hosking, and Garrick Tremain.
