by Tom Holt
Danny shook his head. ‘Maybe you’re missing the point here,’ he said. ‘Here I am, cast adrift in an open boat, dying of hunger and thirst...’
‘Ah,’ said the head, ‘got you. What you’re really concerned about here is some really constructive inheritance tax planning, possibly involving the creation of an offshore trust. Silly of me not to have realised that before.’
‘But I don’t want to die,’ Danny screamed. I—’
‘Well,’ said the head patiently, ‘in that case we can adapt the package to allow maximum flexibility by making the fullest possible use of the annual exempt giftable sum. I wish you’d said, by the way. I hate to rush you, but time is money, you know. Now...’
Danny sank back into the dinghy and groaned. The head peered back over the rail at him.
‘Hello?’ it said. ‘Is that a deal, then?’
‘Go away.’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said go away. Bog off. Sink.’
‘I don’t think I quite heard you. You do want the pension policy, don’t you?’
‘No.’
The head looked shocked. ‘You don’t?’
‘No.’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
‘Well!’ The head wrinkled its brows. ‘Suit yourself, then. Look, if you change your mind, you can always fax us on 0553 ...’
Danny rolled over on his face and started to scream; he was still screaming nine hours later, when he was picked up by the captain of an oil tanker. When he told the captain of the tanker about his experiences with the strange ship, the captain nodded grimly.
‘I know,’ he said, and shuddered. ‘I’ve seen it myself. The Flying Channel-Islander, we call it.’
Danny was half-dead from dehydration and exposure, but he was still a journalist, and a story is a story. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said.
‘It’s horrible,’ the captain replied, crossing himself. ‘Really terrible things happen to people who sight her.’ He paused, his eyes closed. ‘Terrible things,’ he repeated.
‘Such as?’
‘Well,’ the captain replied, ‘some of them die, some of them go mad, some of them live perfectly normally for five or six years and then run amok with machetes. Some simply vanish. Some of them...’
‘Yes?’
‘Some of them,’ said the captain grimly, ‘even go and buy the insurance.’
3
Between the town of Giles, to the north of the Tomkinson Range, and Forrest in the Nullarbor Plain, lies the Great Victoria Desert. It is hot, arid, desolate and merciless; and whatever the Creator had in mind when He made it that way, it most certainly wasn’t human beings.
It’s a really awful place to be if you’ve got toothache.
‘I’ve got some oil of cloves in my rucksack,’ said Sir Pertelope. ‘Supposed to be very good, oil of cloves. Never seemed to do me any good, mind you, but maybe I’m just over-sensitive to pain.’
‘Mmmm,’ replied his companion.
‘There’s some aspirin in the first-aid kit, of course,’ Pertelope went on, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend that, because it’s water-soluble, and since we’ve run out of water ...’
‘Mmmm.’
‘Needless to say,’ Pertelope continued helpfully, ‘if we found some water it’d be a different matter altogether. But somehow...’ He looked up briefly into the steel-blue sky and then turned his head quickly away. ‘Now my aunt Beatrice used to say that sucking a pebble—’
‘Shut up,’ said Sir Lamorak.
Offended, Pertelope shifted his rucksack on his shoulders and pointedly walked a few yards to the east. Then he stopped.
‘If that’s north,’ he said, pointing due south, ‘then England is seventeen thousand miles away over that big jutting rock over there. Fancy that,’ he added. He stood for a moment in contemplation; then he shrugged and started to walk; for the record, due west.
They were trying to get to Sydney.
For two men who had alighted from an airliner in Brisbane several months before, this shouldn’t have been too great a problem. True, neither of them had been to Australia before, but they had taken the precaution of buying railway tickets, advance-booking their hotels and securing copies of What’s On In Sydney before leaving England. Their problems had started at Brisbane Airport, when Pertelope had left the little bag containing all the paperwork behind on the airport bus.
No problem, Pertelope had explained. All we have to do is hitch a lift. The Australians are a notoriously friendly, hospitable people who take pleasure in helping travellers in distress.
Sixteen hours along the road, they had indeed managed to hitch a ride on a truckful of newly slaughtered carcases as far as St George, where the lorry driver had finally thrown them forcibly from the cab after Pertelope had insisted on singing Vos Quid Admiramini in his usual nasal drone. After a short pause to regroup and eat the last of the bag of mint imperials that Lamorak had bought at Heathrow, they had set out to walk as far as Dirranbandi. It’s hard to explain concisely how they came to be thirteen hundred miles off course; the best that can be done without embarking on a whole new book is to explain that in the back of Sir Pertelope’s National Trust Diary was a map of the world; and that although Pertelope had heard about Columbus and the curvature of the earth, he had never been entirely convinced. The central premise of his navigational theory, therefore, was that the centre of the world lay at Jerusalem, and that maps had to be interpreted accordingly.
Pertelope looked at his watch. ‘What do you say to stopping here for lunch?’ he asked. ‘We could sit under that rock over there. It’s got a lovely view out over the, er, desert.’
Although Death had been trailing them pretty closely every step of the way, in the manner of a large fat pigeon outside a pavement cafe, the nearest he had come to cutting two more notches in his scythe handle had been fifty miles west of the Macgregor Range, where Pertelope had inadvertently knocked over the rusty beer-can containing the last of their water while doing his morning exercises. They had wandered round in circles for two days and collapsed; but they were found by a party of wandering aborigines, whom Lamorak was able to persuade that his library ticket was in fact an American Express card, and who had sold them a gallon of water and six dried lizards in return, as it turned out, for the right to borrow three fiction and three non-fiction titles every week from the Stirchley Public Library in perpetuity. From then on, it had simply been a matter of lurching from one last-minute borehole to another, and sneaking up very quietly indeed on unsuspecting snakes.
Pertelope had, however, refused to harm the Paramatta horned python they’d finally caught after a six-hour scramble among the rocks of Mount Woodroffe, pointing out that it was an endangered species. It was shortly afterwards that Lamorak’s upper left molar started to hurt.
‘Now then, let’s see,’ said Pertelope. ‘There’s ...’ He unslung his rucksack and started to go through its contents (three clean shirts, three changes of underwear, a copy of What’s On In Sydney with a bookmark stuck in to mark the details of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, a Swiss Army knife with six broken blades, an electric razor, a pair of trousers, a tennis racket, a mouth organ, two flannels, a towel, Germolene, oil of cloves, a packet of plasters, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, entero-vioform tablets, nail scissors, a quantity of ladies clothing ...).
‘What have you got in your pack, Lammo?’ Pertelope enquired. ‘I seem to be fresh out.’
Lamorak unshipped his head from his hands, said, ‘Nothing,’ and put it back.
‘Oh.’ Pertelope frowned and scratched his head. ‘That’s awkward,’ he added. ‘I suppose we’ll have to look for roots and berries and things.’ He looked round at the baked, sterile earth. It had been a very long time since anything had been so foolhardy as to entrust its roots to so hostile an environment.
‘Pertelope.’
Sir Pertelope looked up. ‘Yes?’ he asked.
‘There’s always cannibalism, you know.’
Pertelope blinked. ‘Cannibalism?’ he repeated.
‘That’s right,’ said his companion calmly. ‘You know, eating human flesh. It used to be quite popular at one time.’
Pertelope thought for a moment, and then shook his head.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he replied firmly. ‘Not after all we’ve been through together. You’d stick in my throat, so to speak.’
Lamorak stood up. ‘That’s all right,’ he said quietly. ‘I quite understand. Now then, if you keep absolutely still it won’t hurt a bit.’
A small cog dropped into place in Pertelope’s brain. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘A joke’s a joke, but let’s not get silly. I mean, people can get hurt larking about, and...’
Lamorak smiled, and lunged at him with a small stone. Hunger, thirst and toothache had taken quite a lot out of him, but he only missed by inches. He landed in the dust, swore and raised himself painfully from the ground.
‘Lizards,’ Pertelope was saying. ‘I’m sure there’re plenty of lizards about, if only we knew what we were supposed to be looking for. Trouble is, the little so-and-sos are masters of camouflage. Would you believe it, there’s one species of lizard in the New Hebrides...’
He leant sideways, and the haymaking blow Lamorak had aimed at him wasted its force in the dry air.
‘Shut up about sodding lizards and help me up,’ Lamorak growled. ‘I think I’ve twisted my ankle.’
‘It’s your own fault,’ Pertelope replied, ‘lashing out at people with whopping great rocks like that. Anyone would think ...’
Lamorak jumped to his feet, thereby giving the lie to his own earlier statement, and tried a full-length tackle. As his full length was only a little more than five feet, he failed.
‘Lamorak,’ said Pertelope sternly, ‘you do realise you’re making a most frightful exhibition of yourself. What would a passing stranger think if he saw you now?’
‘Depends,’ Lamorak panted in reply. ‘If he knew what I’d had to put up with from you ever since we left Birmingham, Bloody good luck to you, probably.’ He hurled the rock, which landed about two feet away, and then sat heavily down.
‘Really!’ said Pertelope, offended.
Lamorak drew in a deep breath, looked for a moment at his scuffed and bleeding palms, and sighed. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘We’ll make a deal. You take the compass, the map, your rucksack, my rucksack, the whole lot, and I’ll stay here and die in peace. How does that sound?’
Pertelope shook his head. ‘Don’t you worry,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I’m not just going to up and leave you, you can count on that?’
‘Really?’
‘Really.’
Lamorak nodded, and then stretched out his trembling hand for the rock once more. Pertelope kicked it away, and then went and sulked under a sand dune.
It didn’t last, though; Pertelope’s sulks never did. Thus, when Lamorak had just fallen asleep and was already dreaming rapturously of a swimming pool full of frosted beer surrounded by club sandwiches, Pertelope sat down a few judicious feet away, extended his right leg and prodded his companion in the ribs.
‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Something’ll turn up, you’ll see.’
Lamorak groaned feebly and turned on his side. Pertelope shuffled a little nearer.
‘Apart from lizards,’ he said, ‘there’s snakes, and a sort of small bird. Actually they’re quite rare these days, because of the erosion of their natural environment by toxic industrial waste; so we’ll only eat those as a very last resort. But like I said, there’s lizards and...’
‘Mnnn.’
‘Or perhaps,’ Pertelope continued, ‘we’ll be rescued by a party of wandering aborigines, although really you shouldn’t call them that, because really they’re a very ancient and noble culture, with a very sophisticated neo-mystical sort of religion that makes them in tune with the earth and things. Apparently...’
‘Pertelope,’ Lamorak said, ‘I’m lying on a packing case.’
‘Well then, move a bit. I read somewhere that they can walk for days at a time, just singing, and come out precisely where they intended to go, just by harmonising their brainwave patterns to the latent geothermal energies of ...’
‘It says Tinned Peaches, Pertelope.’
‘Sorry?’
‘On the lid,’ Lamorak replied. ‘There’s a label saying Tinned Peaches.’
There was a momentary pause.
‘What did you say?’ Pertelope enquired.
‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ Lamorak shouted. ‘Come over here and look for yourself.’
Between them they scrabbled the half-buried case out of the ground, and broke the screwdriver blade of Pertelope’s Swiss Army knife levering off the lid.
The crate was full of tins of peaches.
‘Quick,’ Lamorak hissed, ‘Give me the bloody penknife.’ He grabbed it and feverishly flicked at the tin-opener attachment with his brittle thumbnail.
‘Hang on,’ said Pertelope, turning a tin round in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Lammo, but we can’t eat these. It’s a pity, but ...’
Lamorak froze. ‘What the hell do you mean, we can’t eat them?’ he said. ‘Okay they’re a bit rusty, but...’
Pertelope shook his head. ‘It’s not that,’ he said firmly. ‘Look, see what’s written here on the label. Produce of South Africa. I’m afraid ...’
Lamorak gave him a very long look, and then put the penknife down.
‘That’s it,’ Pertelope said. ‘I know it’s hard luck, but what I always say is, principles are principles, and it’s no good only sticking to them in the good times, because...’
He was still talking when Lamorak hit him with the tin.
The Fruit Monks of Western Australia are one of the few surviving branches of the great wave of crusading monasticism that originated shortly after the fall of Constantinople in 1205. The Templars, Hospitallers and Knights of St John have largely disappeared, or been subsumed into other organisations and lost their identity; but the Monachi Fructuarii still cling to their ancient way of life, and their Order remains basically the same as it did in the days of its founder, St Anastasius of Joppa.
Legend has it that St Anastasius, inspired by the example of the soldier who gave Christ the vinegar-soaked sponge on the cross, set up his first fruit-juice stall beside the main pilgrimage route from Antioch to Jerusalem in 1219. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the brightly coloured booths of the Order were a familiar sight the length and breadth of the Holy Land; and after the Fall of Acre ended the Crusader presence in the Middle East, the monks turned their attention to the other desert places of the earth. Dwindling manpower has, of course, severely limited their operations, so that nowadays they have to be content with depositing cases of canned fruit at random points, relying on Providence to guide wandering travellers to them.
In 1979, the Order was taken over by an Australian-based multinational food chain, and coin-operated dispenser machines are gradually replacing the simple wooden packing cases; but the process of rationalisation is far from complete, even now.
It was a suitable moment for reconciliation.
‘Have a tinned peach,’ Lamorak said. ‘If it helps at all, it doesn’t taste South African.’
Pertelope raised his head, and lowered it again almost immediately.
‘What hit me?’ he enquired.
Lamorak shrugged. ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ he said through fruit-crammed cheeks, ‘but it was a tin of peaches.’
‘It was?’
Lamorak nodded. ‘Probably fell out of a passing aeroplane. Or maybe they’ve got a serious peach glut problem here, something to do with the Common Agricultural Policy. Anyway, it fell on you, and out you went like a light. Pity,’ he added, ‘that Sir Isaac Newton’s already scooped you on gravity, otherwise you could be quids in. Never mind,’ he concluded, and burped.
‘Lammo,’ Pertelope whispered, ‘I’m hungry.’
‘I can believe that,’ his companion
replied. ‘Pity you can’t eat these peaches, really, because ...’
There was a silence, broken only by the sound of Lamorak’s jaws. For a man with serious toothache, he seemed to be able to cope perfectly well with the chewing process.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ Pertelope ventured cautiously, ‘that a lot of tinned stuff that’s supposed to come from South Africa is only tinned there. It’s actually grown in the Front Line states, apparently.’
Lamorak nodded. ‘Well-known fact,’ he replied. ‘I read it somewhere,’ he added confidently. ‘Dirty trick, if you ask me.’
‘Absolutely,’ Pertelope agreed; and then said, ‘How do you mean?’
‘Economic sabotage,’ replied his companion, shaking his head. ‘The Pretoria regime puts their fruit in South African tins so’s nobody’ll buy it, thus undermining their economic development. It’s time people did something about it.’
‘Yes. Um. Like what?’
‘Like eating the fruit,’ said Lamorak, handing him the tin. ‘That’ll teach them, eh?’
About half an hour later the two knights collapsed, surrounded by empty tins, and lay still.
‘We’d better bury them, you know,’ Pertelope murmured.
‘Sorry?’
‘The tins. Can’t just leave them lying about. Pollution.’
Lamorak thought about it. ‘In theory,’ he replied.
‘I mean,’ Pertelope continued, ‘this is one of the few completely unspoilt natural environments left. We owe it to the next generation ...’
‘Yes,’ Lamorak muttered, casting an eye across the desert landscape, ‘right. Unspoilt.’ He shuddered slightly. ‘You get on with it, then. I’m just going to get a few minutes’ sleep.’
He rolled on to his back and closed his eyes. Then he sat bolt upright and grabbed Pertelope’s arm.
‘Bloody hell fire,’ he hissed, and pointed. ‘Look, Per, over there.’
Pertelope narrowed his eyes. ‘Where, Lammo?’
‘There.’
‘Oh, yes, right. What am I supposed to be looking for?’