Castle Gugo's Billious King

 Ringrot sat on a stool in the meagre shade of his buttress.

He grasped his halberd to stop himself falling off the seat, but he couldn't stop himself falling asleep.

The sun was intolerable at the top of the castle and his was the very last door to guard of the whole vast carbuncle.

A thousand privvy doors inside and out, the castle sat atop a massive edifice looming over the tiny village far below like a drunken giant loosening his belt.

Ringrot's door lead to the last lavatory at the summit, the final chance to take a piss before the clouds hit you in the face like a wet mop.

A single stone gargoyle kept him company on the ledge, across which the sewage would have run and tumbled far down below over the spattered rooves of the village. 

It would have been the gargoyle's great pleasure to let King Gugo's thick royal urine burble over it's granite back and cascade like a yellow waterfall to the distant depths, but the King had never relieved himself this far up at the castle's peak. Not once.

Indigestion was Gugo's bane and the pain stopped him dead wherever he was in his fastness. He had never set foot on the final floor, his billious gut a bag of lizards screaming for relief there and then, which came as a salve of two distinct halves: first, slowly chewing a bucketful of chalk and second, taking an enormous pee, occasionally punctuated by an eye-watering dump, which the villagers in the vale dreaded more than anything.

It was the duty of the thousand sentries to maintain a bucket of fresh chalk at all times, keep a clean lavatory replete with fresh water, an arse towel and a tidy gargoyle's back.

Failure to do any of these when King Gugo came by would technically result in an unspeakable punishment of the worst possible kind. No sentry had ever had to face the King's wrath, as the castle was a palace of pristine piss-pots waiting for that royallest of flushes.

Ringrot soldiered on, despite never having been visited in his entire life as a sentry. Neither had his father, not his own father before him. Like all doormen they were family business passed from one generation to the next, the family living in the room behind the lavatory. Births, deaths, marriages, the lot. All happening behind the chalk bucket and the gleaming pot.

Ringrot's family lived just so too, kissing him goodbye every night with a cup of broth and bringing him buttery bread and tea in a morning. They weren't allowed to use their facilities. It was the job of the wife to carry the slops the thousand floors down in two huge pales every week to the well in the middle of the keep, where the stinking morass plunged below into an unimaginably vast cavern spraying the resident bat flocks with peasant shite. Those shitty bats adored the constant sloppy showers and had grown incalculably large with the surplus of nutrients raining into their cess-pit mouths.

Sometimes they flew as far as the cloud-kissed tower, where Ringrot sat and landed on his miserable gargoyle, licking their wet wings and sticking their tongues out at the doorman, who never took offence and responded in kind, bearing his hairy pallid arse with a hearty chuckle.

Echo-locate that you furry fucker! That's my shit you're covered in!

Laughing so loudly up there in the Gods, Ringrot nearly always fell over the edge of the ledge to the bastions far below, no doubt passing hundreds of bare arsed sentries on the way down. It was a sobering thought and he vowed to keep his wits about him when those pesky flying mice came to visit in the future.

It was also the job of the wife to return up the thousand floors with fresh chalk for the King's aggrieved belly. His indigestion was the stuff of legend in the castle and the wives exchanged tales of its magnitude as they snaked up and down the eternal staircases. Only Ringrot's wife couldn't add anything. She had no tale to tell. Gugo had never rumbled in their crows-nest loo and she felt somewhat disgraced. It was her born duty to alleviate the regal tum and help her husband evacuate his humongous noble bum.

Alas, worse than that, they remained the only family who never seen the King at all, never mind his arse. Not once. Never. It was to their undying shame that they had never clapped eyes on Gugo. Anyone could turn up and claim to be him.

Which alas, is just what happened one frightfully snowy night in late December, when an abundant, portly and extremely jocular fellow landed on Ringrot's ledge, wearing finery in crimson with trims of white fur and a huge red cap. 

Holding his gut he moaned to high heaven. 

Perchance kind sir, on this dreadful eve, should you have a lavatory free. I am terribly off-course from my festal route and my insides are playing hide and seek. I have eaten a thousand turkeys and a thousand geese, mince pies and egg nog.

Assuming, quite naturally, that this huge individual was King Gugo himself, stumbling at last upon his humble commode, the perfected rite was put immediately into effect.

Mother! The Chalk!

The Scarlet giant gulped down the powder, but it did no good. He was already full of bones and pressing like a steam hammer, which powdered out into the thunderpot like a massive long and tapered fox stool, white, dry and flaky. There was no way it was rolling over the wincing gargoyle, so Ringrot's wife chopped it up and stored it temporarily in her spare pales.

The porcine chuckler gave his thanks and promised to return the following year on the very same night and suddenly he was gone, as if lifted away in the blizzard.

Phew! We did it dearest. At last we dealt with the King's ablutions and can hold our heads with pride from this day forth. The toilet has been flushed.

But as with most cases of mistaken identity, the real King bared the genuine arse not an hour later at the uppermost privvy, the door of poor Ringrot.

Ringrot! Ringrot! Where are you lazybones! Attend to my raging tum at once!

Completely befuddled and staring at the real King, his mouthing lolling, Ringrot began to babble.

But! But!

Not yet Ringrot. My butt comes second. Now where's my chalk. My innards are a bastard tonight! 

We have no chalk Sire!

What! No chalk!

No.

This is insurrection, sedition, mutinous treachery and more. There can be no excuse for not having chalk and therefore I condemn you and your family to be it's substitute. Perhaps, just perhaps, your brittle bones will suffice if I chew slowly. Now get your entire family to line up so that I may eat them.

A queue formed in front of Gugo, his ten chins wobbling as his folded guts groaned like mud wrestlers. 

First up was the family mouse. Then the rat. Then the budgie and finally, the cat. Then came the children three, who began to sweat and moan.

Suddenly a large shit-flecked bat landed to the gargoyle's complete displeasure and chirped. 

The King, momentarily distracted, turned to face the thing, considering whether to digest it too.

This briefest of pauses allowed Ringrot's wife to drag out her large pales of the earlier stranger's arid droppings, so dry and white to be easily mistaken for ...

Chalk! We have some Sire! My husband was but confused.

So! Ringrot! The lady of the house has saved your bacon eh! Give it here, my entrails are revolting!

King Gugo downed the bony cess and chewed on it a fair good while.

Mighty feathery chalk that Ringrot but calming all the same. My belly's settling like a damn good custard.

Now to have an enormous shit, after which you will wipe my arse clean Ringrot.

And so it was the Ringrots had fed the King the stranger's shite, tidied the mighty crack and thus joined the hallowed ranks of the royal brush.

They laughed and danced around the empty buckets.

The gargoyle laughed too, as the Monarch's immeasurable log flumed over its back in a bubbling yellow tide and plummeted onto the gagging villagers running every which way far below.