Expecting Someone Taller Tom Holt

by Expecting Someone Taller (lit)

  Thus it was that Malcolm found himself condemned to embark on his new life with the face and body of Siegfried the Dragon-Slayer, also known as the Most Handsome Man. He could not help remembering the pigeon's warning about this, but it was too late now. Not that Malcolm objected in principle to being the most handsome man who had ever lived; but the sight of ravens (or crows, or blackbirds; he was no ornithologist) filled him with horror.

  Meanwhile, he fleshed out his new character and by deviousness and contrivance of which he had not thought himself capable acquired the necessary documents and paperwork. In order to give his new self a history (multi-millionaires do not simply appear from nowhere) he had to Tarnhelm himself at dead of night into the computer rooms of half the public records offices in the country, and since he knew next to nothing about twentieth-century machines, he accidentally erased the life histories of several hundred people before getting the result he wanted. Finally, however, he ended up with everything he needed to be Herr Manfred Finger of Düsseldorf, the name and identity he had chosen. Again, the German aspect was ill-advised and unintentional; he had wanted to be a foreigner of some sort (since in Somerset it is understood that all foreigners are mad, and allowances for eccentric or unusual behaviour are made accordingly) and had chosen a country at random. That he should have chosen Germany was either yet more carelessness or else the Ring trying to get its own back on him for making it do good in the world. He was not sure which, but was inclined to the first explanation, as being more in keeping with his own nature.

  Herr Finger was soon familiar to all the inhabitants of Combe, who were naturally curious to know more about their new neighbour. As local custom demanded, they soon found a nickname for the new Lord of the Manor. The various members of the Booth family who had owned the Hall from the early Tudor period onwards had all been known by a variety of affectionate epithets—Mad Jack, or Drunken George—and the periphrasis bestowed on Malcolm was "that rich foreign bastard". Such familiarity did not, however, imply acceptance. Although it was generally admitted that Herr Finger was not too bad on the surface and no worse than the last of the Booths (Sir William, or Daft Billy), it went without saying that there was something wrong about him. He was, it was agreed, a criminal of some sort; but whether he was an illegal arms dealer or a drug smuggler, the sages of Combe could not be certain. The only thing on which everyone was unanimous was that he had murdered his wife. After all, none of them had ever seen her in the village...

  * * *

  "And what time," said Wotan, "do you call this?"

  Loge, his hands covered in oil, climbed wearily off his motorcycle and removed his helmet. "It broke down again," he said. "Just outside Wuppertal. Plugs."

  Wotan shook his head sadly. Admittedly, it had been on his orders that the immortal Gods had traded in their eight-legged horses and chariots drawn by winged cats for forms of transport more suited to the twentieth century, but he expected his subordinates to be both punctual and properly turned out. Cleanliness, he was fond of asserting, is next to godliness.

  "Well, you're here now," he said. "So what do you make of that?""

  Loge looked about him. There was nothing to see except corn-fields. He said so.

  "Well done," growled Wotan. "We are unusually observant this morning, are we not? And what do you find unusual about the corn in these corn-fields?"

  Loge scratched his head, getting oil on his hair. "Dunno," he said. "It looks perfectly normal to me."

  "Normal for August?"

  "Perfectly."

  "It's June."

  Loge, who had spent an hour wrestling with a motorcycle engine beside a busy autobahn, did not at first appreciate the significance of this remark. Then the pfennig dropped. "It's two months in advance, you mean?"

  "Precisely." Wotan put his arm around Loge's shoulder. "Good, wouldn't you say?"

  "I suppose so."

  "It's bloody marvellous, considering the weather they've been having this year. And why do you suppose the crops are doing so very, very well? In fact, why is everything in the world doing so very, very well? Answer me that?"

  Loge instinctively looked up at the sky. Thunder-clouds were beginning to form.

  "Someone's been interfering?" he suggested.

  "Correct!" Wotan shouted, and the first clap of thunder came in, dead on cue. "Someone's been interfering. Now who could that be? Who on earth could be responsible for this new golden age?"

  From his tone, Loge guessed that it couldn't have been Wotan himself. Which left only one candidate. "You mean the Ring-Bearer?"

  "Very good. The only force in the Universe capable of making things happen so quickly and so thoroughly. But isn't that a trifle strange in itself? Wouldn't you expect the Ring to do nasty things, not nice ones? Left to itself, I mean?"

  Loge agreed that he would.

  "So you would agree that anyone capable of making the Ring do what it doesn't want to do is likely to be a rather special person?"

  Wotan had picked up this irritating habit of asking leading questions from the late and unlamented Socrates. Loge hated it.

  "In fact, someone so remarkable that even if he didn't have the Ring he would present a serious danger to our security. And since he does have the Ring..."

  Wotan was trembling with rage, and the rain was falling fast, beating down the standing corn. "We have to find him, quickly," he roared. "Otherwise, we are in grave danger. To be precise, you have to find him. Do you understand?"

  Loge understood, but Wotan wanted to make his point. "And if I were you, my friend, I would spare no effort in looking for him. I would leave no stone unturned and no avenue unexplored. And do you know why? Because if you don't, you might very well find yourself spending the rest of Eternity as a waterfall. You wouldn't like that, now would you?"

  Loge agreed that he wouldn't, and Wotan was about to develop this theme further when it stopped raining. The clouds dispersed, and the sun shone brightly, pitching a vivid rainbow across the blue sky.

  "Who said you could stop raining?" screamed Wotan. "I want lightning. Now!"

  The sky took no notice, and Loge went white with fear. Everyone has his own particular phobia, and Loge was terrified of fish. As a waterfall, he would have salmon jumping up him all day long. He would have prayed for rain if he wasn't a God himself. But the sky remained cloudless.

  "That does it!" Wotan smashed his fist into the palm of his left hand. "When I'm not even allowed to rain my own rain because it damages the crops, it's time for positive action." He stood still for a moment, then turned to Loge.

  "Are you still here?" he asked savagely.

  "I'm on my way," Loge replied, jumping desperately on the kickstart of his motorcycle. "I'll find him, don't you worry."

  Loge sped off into the distance, and Wotan was left alone, staring angrily at the sun. Two coal-black ravens floated down and settled on the fence.

  "Nice weather we're having," said Thought.

  For some reason, this did not go down well. "Any result?" Wotan snapped.

  "Nothing so far, boss," said Memory.

  "Where have you been looking?"

  "Everywhere, boss. But you know we can't find the Ring-Bearer. We can't see him, or read his thoughts, or anything like that."

  "God give me strength!" Wotan clenched his fist and made an effort to relax. "Then what you do, you stupid bird, is go through all the people of the world, one by one, and when you find one whose thoughts you can't read and who you can't see, that's him. I'd have thought that was obvious."

  Thought looked at Memory. Memory looked at Thought. "But that'll take weeks, boss," said Memory.

  "So what else were you planning to do?"

  The two ravens flapped their wings and launched themselves into the air. They circled for a moment, then floated over the world. All day they flew, sweeping in wide circles across the continents, until Memory suddenly swooped down and landed beside the banks of the Rhine.

  "Stuff this," he said to Thought. "Why
don't we ask the girls?"

  "Good idea," said Memory. "Wish I'd thought of that."

  "It must have slipped your mind." The two birds took off again, but this time they flew only a mile or so, to a spot where, about a thousand years ago, a certain Alberich had stopped and watched three beautiful women swimming in the river. The ravens landed in a withered tree and folded their wings.

  * * *

  Under the tree, three young girls were sunbathing, and for them the Sun Goddess had saved the best of the evening light, for she was their friend.

  "Flosshilde," said one of the girls, "there's a raven in that tree looking at you."

  "I hope he likes what he sees," replied the Rhinedaughter lazily.

  Wellgunde, the eldest and most serious of the three, rolled onto her stomach and lifted her designer sunglasses.

  "Hello, Thought," she said, "hello, Memory. Found him yet, then?"

  The ravens were silent, ruffling their coarse feathers with their beaks, and the girls giggled.

  "But you've been looking for simply ages," said Woglinde, the youngest and most frivolous of the three. "It must be somewhere."

  "I'm always losing things," said Flosshilde. "Where do you last remember seeing it?"

  "You sure it's not in your pocket?"

  "You've put it somewhere safe and you can't remember where?"

  Wotan's ravens had been putting up with this sort of thing for a thousand years, but it still irritated them. The girls laughed again, and Memory blushed under his feathers.

  "If you don't find him soon," yawned Flosshilde, combing her long, golden hair, "he'll slip through your claws, just like clever old Ingolf did. By the way, fancy Ingolf being a badger!"

  "He'll get the hang of the Tarnhelm and then no-one will ever find him," purred Woglinde. "What a shame that would be."

  "Good luck to him," said Wellgunde. "Who wants the boring old Ring, anyway?"

  "Dunno what you're being so bloody funny about," said Memory. "Supposed to be your Ring we're looking for."

  "Forget it," said Woglinde, waving her slender arms. "It's a lovely day, the sun is shining, the crops are growing..."

  Memory winced at this. Flosshilde giggled.

  "...And it's been so long since Alberich took the beastly thing that we don't really care any more, do we?" Woglinde wiggled her toes attractively, in a way that had suggested something far nicer than measureless wealth for thousands of years. "What do we want with gold when we have you to entertain us?"

  "Save it for the human beings," said Memory.

  "I wonder what he looks like," said Wellgunde. "I bet you he's handsome."

  "And strong."

  "And noble. Don't forget noble."

  "I never could resist noble," said Woglinde, watching the ravens carefully under her beautiful eyelashes.

  "We came to tell you that we'd heard something," said Thought. "But since you're not interested any more..."

  Wellgunde yawned, putting her hand daintily in front of her mouth. "You're right," she said. "We're not." She turned over onto her back and picked up a magazine.

  "Something interesting, we've heard," said Memory.

  "Oh, all right," said Flosshilde, smiling her most dazzling smile. "Tell us if you must."

  Even Wotan's ravens, who are (firstly) immortal and (secondly) birds, cannot do much against the smiles of Rhinedaughters. But since Memory was bluffing, there was nothing for him to do.

  "I didn't say we were going to tell you what we'd heard," he said, archly, "only that we'd heard it." It is not easy for a raven to be arch, but Memory had been practising.

  "Oh go away," said Flosshilde, throwing a piece of orange peel at the two messengers. "You're teasing us, as usual."

  "You wait and see," said Memory, lamely, but the three girls jumped up and dived into the water, as elegantly as the very best dolphins.

  "We know something you don't know," chanted Flosshilde, and the Sun-Goddess made the water sparkle around her floating hair. Then she disappeared, leaving behind only a stream of silver bubbles.

  "I dunno," said Thought. "Women."

  The ravens flapped their heavy wings, circled morosely for a while, and flew away.

  * * *

  By a strange coincidence, a few moments after Flosshilde dived down to the bed of the Rhine, three identical girls hopped out of the muddy, fetid waters of the River Tone, at the point where it runs through the centre of Taunton. A few passers-by stopped and stared, for the three girls were far cleaner than anyone who had recently had anything to do with the Tone has any right to be. But the girls' smiles wiped such thoughts from their minds, and they went on their way whistling and wishing that they were twenty years younger. Had they realised that what they had just seen were the three Rhinedaughters, Flosshilde, Wellgunde and Woglinde, they might perhaps have taken a little more notice.

  5.

  ONE OF THE things that slightly worried Malcolm was the fact that he was becoming decidedly middle-aged. For example, the ritualised drinking of afternoon tea had come to mean a lot to him, not simply because it disposed of an hour's worth of daylight. He had chosen half-past four in the afternoon as the best time for reading the daily papers, and from half-past four to half-past five (occasionally a quarter to six) each day he almost made himself feel that he enjoyed being extremely nice and bored stiff, for he knew that all the good news that filled the papers was, in one way or another, his doing.

  Today, there was any amount of good news from around the world. Malcolm could sense the frustration and despair of the editors and journalists as they forced themselves to report yet more bumper harvests, international accords and miraculous cures. Admittedly, there had been a freak storm in Germany (banner headlines in the tabloids) and some crops had been damaged in a few remote areas. Nevertheless, he noted with satisfaction, this minor disaster was not entirely a bad thing, since it had prompted the EEC to draft and sign a new agreement on compensating farmers for damage caused by acts of God. So every cloud, however small, had a silver lining, although these days it was beginning to look as though only a very few silver linings had clouds.

  Malcolm tried to work out what could have caused the freak storm in the first place. He picked up the Daily Mirror ("German farmers in rain horror") and observed that the storm had started at three o'clock their time, which was two o'clock our time, which was when Malcolm's new secretary had finally managed to corner him and force him to sign five letters. He resolved to be more patient with her in future, and not call her a whatsisname under his breath.

  His tea was stone cold, but that didn't matter; it was, after all, Only Him. That was a marvellous phrase, and one that he had come to treasure. When one has suddenly been forced into the role of the Man of Sorrows, self-pity is the only luxury that remains. In fact, Malcolm had no objection whatsoever to taking away the sins of the world, but it was useful to keep an option on self-pity just in case it came in useful later. He poured the cold tea onto the lawn and watched it soak into the ground. In the crab-apple tree behind him, a robin perched and sang excitedly, but he ignored it, closing his mind to its persistent chirping. He had found that the little birds liked to come up to him and confide their secrets that they could not share with other birds, and at first he had found this extremely flattering. But since the majority of these confidences were extremely personal and of interest only to a trained biologist, he had decided that it would be best not to encourage them. After a while, the robin stopped singing and went away. Malcolm rose to his feet and walked slowly into the house.

  Combe Hall was undoubtedly very beautiful, but it was also very big. It had been built in the days when a house-holder tended to feel claustrophobic if he could not accommodate at least one infantry regiment, including the band, in his country house. Its front pediment was world famous. Its windows had been praised and reviled in countless television series. Its kitchens were enormous and capable of being put to any use except the convenient preparation of food. It was very grand, very mag
nificent, and very empty.

  Malcolm had always fancied living at Combe Hall on the strict understanding that his wish was never to come true. Now that he was its owner and (apart from the legion of staff) its only resident, he felt rather like a bewildered traveller at an international airport. The house was bad enough, but the staff were truly awful. There was no suave, articulate butler and no pretty parlourmaids; instead, Malcolm found himself employing an army of grimly professional contract cleaners and an incomprehensible Puerto Rican cook, whom he was sure he was shamelessly exploiting in some way he could not exactly understand. After a week, Malcolm left them all to it and retreated to one of the upstairs drawing-rooms, which he turned into a nicely squalid bedsit.

  As a result, he felt under no obligation to assume the role of country gentleman. With the house had come an enormous park, some rather attractive gardens, into which Malcolm hardly dared go for fear of offending the gardeners, and the Home Farm. Ever since he could remember, Malcolm had listened to the Archers on the radio—not from choice, but because they had always been there in his childhood, and so had become surrogate relatives—and his mental picture of agriculture had been shaped by this influence. But the farm that he owned (now there was a thought!) whirred and purred with machines and clicked and ticked with computers, filling its owner with fear and amazement. Yet when he suggested to the farm manager that the whole thing might perhaps be rearranged on more picturesque lines and to hell with the profits, which nobody really needed, the farm manager stared at him as if he were mad. Since then, he had kept well away from it.

  But with his new property came certain ineluctable responsibilities, the most arduous of which was coping with his new secretary. On the one hand, the woman was invaluable, for she ran the place and left him alone for most of the time. Without the irritations and petty nuisances of everyday life to contend with, he could keep his temper and make the maize grow tall all over Africa. But for this freedom from care he had to pay a severe price: his secretary, who was American and in her middle forties, had clearly made a resolution to be more English than anyone else in the history of the world. Her convert's passion for all things English gave her the zeal of a missionary, and it was obvious that she intended to Anglicise young Herr Finger if it killed her. And, like many missionaries, she was not above a little persecution in the cause of the communication of Enlightenment.