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As the shadow of his majestic adiposity looms closer, one surprising facet of this interminable procession at least provides you with some relief.
You were expecting to be overwhelmed by the smell, the olfactory assault of a most loathsome stench of human waste. Instead, as you prepare to withhold your breath in anticipation of the blubbery mass of the Naked Mountain, you notice that Lord Grotius is in truth quite fragrant.
His sycophantic hooded attendants are fastidious in aiding and performing his ritual ablutions, anointing his eminent form in perfumes and glistening unguents, swinging thuribles of sweet misting incense before his path, and swiftly harvesting and collecting in spittoons and chalices the drenching drool and saliva that trickles down from his gargantuan, whale-like meaty bulk. If there is a slight tang of fishy entrails and watery intestinal feculence, you cannot detect it at all. Lord Grotius smells of ointment. Like strawberries, given by a loving mother.
As the rippling distended mounds of flab wriggle closer, you observe for the first time too the concubines of Lord Grotius. There is a long train of these women, moon-like beauties - previously eclipsed behind the enormous inflated rotundity of his girth. (You think strangely of the Sun King in Mariamne's fantastical myth). They are led by a woman bearing a banner, a standard of the Trade-Fallen, trailing long pennants with the sigils of the Old Five Hundredfold, lost Names of forgotten gods.
You remember the Oath and the Light, the Oriflamme venerated by the Oration - yet the Five Hundredfold Banner borne by this concubine is not the proud martial blaze of vermillion that you would expect.
The standard hoisted by this woman is of such a sinister darkness of red, a shade so benighted, it might as well be a banner of mourning.
