Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  ‘Is this necessary?’ the professor said mildly, without looking up from his book. ‘All that is required is that they fight, not that they understand.’

  ‘Wrong, smartarse,’ Mr Laertides snapped back. ‘Got to know what they’re fighting for, or it’s not a fair re-enactment. Motivation, see? All right,’ he went on. ‘Time for some introductions. In the blue corner, King Hring of Rogaland, armed with the two halves of the axe Battle-Troll.’ Ricky Wurmtoter smiled weakly; Mr Tanner’s mum, face expressionless, dropped a tiny curtsey. Old battleaxe, Paul thought; Viking humour was clearly no better than goblin humour, in fact marginally worse. ‘And in the brown corner - that’s you, Paul, sorry - King Hroar of Vestfold with Tyrving.’

  There was an interval, maybe three-sixteenths of a second, during which Paul just stood there thinking, What’s the stupid git talking about? Then it hit him like a falling tree.

  ‘Me?’ he said.

  ‘You,’ Mr Laertides confirmed. ‘After one thousand, four hundred years, so I guess you could call it a grudge match. Well, don’t just stand there like a prune. Get your sword.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Paul replied with intense feeling. ‘I’m not fighting any stupid duels.’

  Mr Laertides nodded over his head to Vicky; she swept past Paul, snatched the sword up off the ground and thrust the hilt end into his hand. He managed to grab hold of it just before it could slip through his fingers and skewer his foot. ‘You’re pathetic, you,’ Vicky hissed at him. ‘And don’t even think of trying to throw the fight, because if you do—’ The sword bucked suddenly in his hand, wriggling like a live fish and sweeping round, nearly carving off his chin. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

  ‘Crystal,’ Paul muttered anxiously.’Only, I’m not terribly good—’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Vicky sighed. ‘That’s the whole point, you don’t need to be. Just don’t drop me - leave the whole thing to us, it’s what we’re for.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Mr Laertides confirmed. ‘In fact, it’s best if you don’t try and participate at all, just let Vicky here take control. Vicky, by the way, isn’t short for Victoria.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Victory,’ Vicky explained irritably. ‘Now, can we please get started?’

  Paul tried to step backwards, but something felt wrong. To be precise, wet. Stepping backwards, he was walking into water.

  ‘Which is why they had their duels on small islands,’ came Mr Laertides’s voice, now apparently far away in the distance. Mr Laertides himself was nowhere to be seen; nor were Vicky, Mr Tanner’s mum nor the professor. Just Ricky, standing in front of Paul, very still. ‘On a small island,’ the voice continued, ‘there’s not a lot of scope for creative running away. Means you either stand and fight, or you drown. Unless you’re a really good swimmer, of course.’

  Paul tried to move his feet, but they seemed singularly lacking in bones. He wobbled and had to use the sword to prop himself up. Ricky was apparently doing deep-breathing exercises; at any rate, he seemed uncommonly reluctant to start the fight, which struck Paul as rather odd until he remembered the spectacle of his alter ego, Psycho Boy, only just failing to slice Ricky into pastrami. Except—

  Except nothing. There was, of course, no way in Hell that Paul could even begin to make sense of all this. But it was beginning to dawn on him that the vicious and extremely competent swordsman he’d watched earlier had, on some level at least, been himself, Mrs Carpenter’s little boy, the one who’d always been picked last when they chose teams at school. It was therefore quite possible that Ricky knew quite a lot more about what was going on here than Paul did himself. If Ricky was - dear God - scared of Paul, he was bound to have his reasons. Scared of him, scared of the sword . . . That at least struck him as reasonable. If he’d understood the living-blade business correctly, he was there as little more than a sop to the laws of gravity, a hand for the sword to sit in while it did its stuff; basically a base of operations for the loathsome thing, a main à terre. And hadn’t someone told him at some stage that Vicky was Ricky’s ex-wife?

  No wonder the poor bastard was sweating.

  Even so; there has to be a limit. There comes a point where the reasonable man, even if he’s a born coward, has to draw the line against the insweeping tide of weirdness and say, That’s it, that’s my lot, I will humour you no further. Paul had been killed by goblins, sent halfway across the country to look at trees, been patronised by fridges, framed for murder, stranded in an alternate universe apparently made out of custard and forced to believe in the existence of the Great Cow of Heaven. Participating further would simply be encouraging them, and he wasn’t going to do it.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the calm blue sea behind him. Theo Van Spee had made it, and presumably controlled it, and Theo Van Spee didn’t want the fight to happen. It was worth the risk, even if he wasn’t what you’d call a human fish. Van Spee’s synthetic ocean wouldn’t let him drown, it was more than its job was worth. ‘Bye, then,’ he called out to Ricky, who stepped back and winced. Then Paul dumped the sword - getting rid of it was like ditching chewing gum, it really didn’t want to leave his fingers - and ran down the beach into the water.

  Just for once, he reckoned as the sea welled up under him and took his weight, he’d guessed right. The water cushioned him like a lilo, and somehow each successive wave got out of the way of his face so that he didn’t get a mouthful of brine. He began to doggy-paddle, and soon had enough weigh on him to tow a water-skiing Barbie doll. Screw Mr Laertides and the rest of them, he thought; somewhere, all this wet stuff had to have a dry edge. All he had to do was keep on sploshing about until he reached it. Elegant in its simplicity, though he said it himself.

  An arm shot out of the water eighteen inches from his head. The shock made him flounder; he should have panicked and gone under, but the sea pushed him firmly back, like a mother trying to convince her toddler that the noisy, scary party was actually fun. The arm sliced through the water at him, shark’s-fin-style. He tried to avoid it, but no dice. Its hand - he knew it from somewhere - grabbed itself a generous handful of his hair, and yanked him back.

  ‘Ow,’ Paul wailed, and then the sea fed him a mouthful of salt water, like an impatient mummy cuckoo feeding its young. The hand in his hair dragged harder, pulling him under with a level of force that was beyond the power of doggy-paddle to resist. As the waves closed round him, he shut his eyes tight and breathed out through his nose, to keep it from filling up with sea.

  ‘Say you’re sorry,’ Vicky hissed.

  Never mess with a mermaid in a maritime context. Paul opened his mouth to comply, but it flooded before he could get further than ‘So—’ Luckily, Vicky seemed happy with that, and let go of his hair. He bobbed up, spitting out brine, and she punched him in the eye.

  That sort of broke Paul’s concentration, and the world went rather vague for a while. When he came round he was lying on the beach on his back, with Vicky leaning over him, looking worried. He looked up at her and groaned.

  ‘Context,’ he said. ‘I hate context.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Think about it.’ Paul felt his jaw; like a Bedford van, it wasn’t perfect, but it worked. ‘I’m not allowed to leave, right?’

  Vicky nodded. ‘Now get up and fight,’ she said.

  ‘Or what? Or you’ll hit me again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He grinned. ‘And if I do as I’m told, Ricky’s going to kill me. Gosh, tricky one. I may have to think it over for a whole millisecond.’

  ‘Don’t be so feeble.’ She grabbed his wrist and yanked hard; Paul yelped and scrambled to his feet. As he did so, he noticed that there was something sticking to his right heel; automatically he reached down and pulled it off. It was a dark green leather bookmark. Without thinking, he stuffed it in his trouser pocket.

  ‘Nice game plan,’ he grumbled. ‘Dislocate my sword arm, inspirational stuff. You should get one of those hooded fleeces with “coach” on the back.’


  ‘For crying out loud, stop whining,’ Vicky replied. ‘And how many times have I got to tell you, leave everything to us, don’t interfere and we’ll be fine. We’ve been waiting thirteen hundred years for this, remember.’

  ‘When you say we—’

  She stuck the sword in Paul’s hand, closed his fingers round the hilt and shoved him in the small of the back. He stumbled forward, and by the time he’d got his balance back, he was standing no more than three feet away from the cutting edge of Ricky’s axe.

  ‘Hello,’ Ricky said unhappily. ‘So here we are again.’

  ‘Again?’ Paul shook his head. ‘You may be, I’m not. Look, there’s obviously been the most colossal balls-up, but if you and I just chill for a moment, talk it over, sort it out like rational human beings—’

  Ricky swung at him with the horrible axe. Paul felt the edge, sharp as a needle, trace a line across his forehead. ‘Fuck!’ he shouted. ‘That hurt.’ But then his own arm jerked out straight, as if the sword was a huge, boisterous dog wanting to be walked, and he watched in horror as the cutting edge grazed Ricky’s cheek, shaving a small patch of his designer stubble.

  ‘Jesus, sorry,’ he gasped, ‘I really didn’t mean—’

  Ricky lunged. Paul felt himself sway out of the way - actually, it was like being batted in the stomach with a large invisible pillow - and his annoyingly wilful arm swished a fearful horizontal blow at Ricky’s neck. Just as he thought he’d killed the poor bastard, Ricky’s axe-head got in the way, and there was a noisy clang of steel on steel. Paul tried to jump back out of the way; his body tried to obey, but his feet stayed planted. Fortuitously, his failed attempt coincided with a furious sweep from Ricky, which turned it into a perfectly judged evasive manoeuvre.

  ‘Ricky,’ he yelled. ‘Stop it. This is stupid.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ricky grunted back, avoiding a murderous downward slash by the thickness of a cigarette paper. ‘It’s not up to us, don’t you see?’

  Paul saw all right, but there wasn’t a lot he could do. Each time he tried to lower his sword, step back or turn around, Ricky’s axe would dart past him, converting his move into an appropriate response.That, he couldn’t help thinking, was insult to injury with insult sauce. Meanwhile, his poor abused arm was putting up one hell of a fight; even Paul could tell it was hot stuff, and considerably better than the show Ricky was putting on. When Ricky was a fraction of a second late with a high parry, and the edge of Paul’s sword nicked his shoulder with a revolting chunky snicking sound, it was almost more than Paul could bear. Sure, he told himself, dying won’t be fun; it’ll be back to that horrible dark place with no walls or floor, and Mr Dao’s bridge club and gradually fading away, like the end of a song. But one of these days, sooner or later, he was going to die anyway; it was inevitable, and there was nothing he could do about that. Killing Ricky, on the other hand, was something he didn’t have to do, not now or ever, and if there was any way he could avoid it, he would.

  Paul did his best. He tried letting go of the sword hilt, but it stuck to his hand like chewing gum on a shoe. He tried holding still when the sword wanted him to move, but the sword kept winning. He tried yelling out what he thought the sword was about to do, so Ricky could dodge or parry or counter-attack, but he didn’t know nearly enough about swordfighting and just made things worse. He tried jamming his foot down on a large stone, hoping he’d turn his ankle over and go crashing to the ground, but all he succeeded in doing was kicking the stone into Ricky’s face, nearly knocking him off his feet. It was hopeless; any moment now a cut or a thrust was going to get past Ricky’s fragile-looking guard, and there was nothing Paul could do to stop it, because every deliberate mistake he made got forcibly converted into brilliant defence or remorseless aggression. It’s not fair, he howled at himself. The only time in my life I’m really good at something, and I don’t want to be.

  And then, in the tiny interval between Ricky’s feeble counter-cut and his own ruthless feint, leading inevitably to an opening in Ricky’s guard on the left-hand side of his chest, Paul figured it out. The sword, it seemed, could predict his attempts to throw the fight and could transform them into winning moves. It didn’t trust him, obviously, and was wise to the few half-baked ploys that made up his entire repertoire, itself a vague collage of images remembered from watching Mel Gibson in Braveheart, before he fell asleep halfway through. But what if he deliberately tried to win? Would the sword stop him and make him do the fight its way, or wasn’t it devious enough for that?

  If he did nothing, Ricky would be dead meat in about thirty seconds.

  Screw it, Paul muttered to himself, and launched an all-out attack on Ricky’s head. He swung the sword and hacked as hard as he could. Just as he’d hoped, Ricky dodged the cut easily, then drew back his arm for the counter-attack. About time, too, Paul told himself, and waited for the sharp steel to slice into him. At least it’d be quick, and then he’d have nothing to worry about apart from some dead guy trumping his best cards on a bid of two clubs redoubled.

  Ricky didn’t attack. Instead he stood there, his left hand clamped to his right wrist, his teeth gritted with strain, Dr Strangelove with a huge meat-cleaver. He was trying desperately to say something, but he couldn’t get his mouth open wide enough to make himself understood. Paul was pretty sure it ended in -un, but that was the best he could do.

  ‘Fun’? At any other time, maybe, but Ricky didn’t look like he was enjoying himself much. Not ‘gun’, because they were both using more basic instrumentation; or was Ricky trying to tell him to pull his gun out from his shoulder holster and blast him while he was still able to keep the sword from doing its stuff? Or ‘bun’, perhaps, referring to the poisoned custard slice. Sun, pun, nun—

  ‘Forfuckssake’ exploded from Ricky’s mouth. ‘Un!’

  Tun, spun, shun, my kingdom for a rhyming dictionary, run. ‘I can’t,’ he whimpered, ‘this fucking stupid sword won’t let me. I wish I could, but—’

  ‘Uck,’ Ricky said with feeling, as his right hand forced itself down half an inch. ‘Ill. Ill now.’

  Me too, Paul was about to say, but he figured out the context just in time. Here we go again, playing Scrabble in the jaws of death. Bill, fill, spill, mill, nil—

  Kill.

  ‘I can’t,’ he whispered. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Ill!’ Ricky shrieked, as his left fingernails gouged out bloody furrows of skin from his right wrist. His eyes were screwed shut. Paul could feel the unbearable pressure of Ricky’s will-power concentrated on him, ordering him to stick the sword into his opponent’s chest. ‘Please.’

  Well, it’d solve a lot of problems.

  No. Couldn’t be done. Paul couldn’t send someone else down there, where he’d been. He could feel his own arm dragging at its socket, the tendons ripping away from the bone, the muscles tearing, but it was still his arm, and he could make it do as it was told; because even magic couldn’t achieve the impossible, and killing Ricky was, quite simply, something he was incapable of doing. A pity, really, because one of the two of them wasn’t going home, and Miss Hook had managed to hammer enough basic arithmetic into Paul’s skull to make the implications of that appallingly clear. If he couldn’t kill Ricky, he himself was going to die. In about three seconds.

  ‘Tell Sophie I love her,’ Paul said. ‘All right, she knows that, but tell her anyway. Oh yes, and could you see to it that someone picks up my grey suit from the dry-cleaners and takes my library books back? That’s about it, I think.’

  ‘Alls,’ Ricky sobbed, and his right hand tore free. Paul watched the blade come straight at him, most of the way.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  They’d put up a banner. It was big and white, slung between two poles, and it read -

  WELCOME BACK, PAUL CARPENTER.

  There was also a brass band, and an honour guard of spectral warriors in full dress uniform, and a thin, shadowy crowd, and the grey outline of a little girl who presented him with a bouquet of insubstan
tial flowers, while the onlookers applauded, soft as an echo, and the band played a Souza march. And, of course, there was Mr Dao, who came out from the crowd and stood there and looked at him and said, ‘You again.’

  ‘Yup.’ Paul nodded.

  ‘And are you planning on staying this time? Because I don’t like to complain, but some people treat this place like a hotel.’

  ‘I’m staying,’ Paul said firmly. ‘You can count on that.’

  ‘Right,’ said Mr Dao, and the crowd, brass band and banner vanished into dark grey swirls. ‘No offence, Mr Carpenter, but I must express my relief. Your various comings and goings have caused us, let’s say, a degree of administrative difficulty. Made all the worse, of course, by the fact that I was not at liberty to tell you the whole truth, in case it prejudiced the outcome.’

  Paul frowned. ‘The whole—Oh, you mean that stupid duel thing. It was really that important?’

  Mr Dao looked at him solemnly, then nodded. ‘Very important indeed,’ he said. ‘Without exaggerating, it was a matter of life and death. Come here and I’ll prove it to you.’

  Nothing better to do; so Paul followed him, a hundred paces or so over, under and through nothing, until they reached a doorway. There was no door to go in it and no wall for it to fit into; just a doorway, and screwed onto it a brass nameplate, such as you see outside posh offices.

  THE BANK OF THE DEAD (A wholly owned subsidiary of the Allied Toronto & Winnipeg Banking Corporation)

  ‘Oh,’ Paul said. ‘Is that a good thing?’

  Mr Dao almost smiled. ‘That word and its antonym have no meaning here. It is just a thing, neither good nor bad. But until it was sorted out, we found it hard to know what to do. Who do we report to? Do we pay out the profits to the shareholders, or to ATWBC Head Office in St Lawrence? Now, at last and at least, all that has been resolved and we know who we are. And of course,’ he added, with a slight smirk, ‘the world above has been changed for ever out of all recognition. Fortunately, that is none of my business, or yours. You’re free from all that now. You see, there are benefits.’