by Tom Holt
Meanwhile, the second escape capsule roared away across the indescribable magnitude of Nothing, piloted by a ninety-seven-year-old child, straight as an arrow towards where he remembered the best pizza restaurant in the world used to be. The problem was that it wasn’t open yet; it wouldn’t be open for seventy years.
There was complete silence, except for the unicorn. It raised its head, saw the maiden of unspotted virtue, blushed, and said ‘G’day’ awkwardly, and started chewing the cud ferociously.
Then, very slowly, Lamorak reached out for Pertelope’s pack, took out the sponge bag and found the oil of cloves; then he drank it, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and smiled.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
‘Actually, Lammo,’ Pertelope hissed, ‘you’re not supposed to drink it, you’re supposed to—’
‘Shut up, Per, I know what I’m doing.’ Lamorak stood up, brushed dust off his trouser-knees and walked up to the maiden of unspotted virtue.
‘Swap,’ he said. ‘My unicorn for your apron. How about it?’
The maiden of unspotted virtue stared at him. ‘Have you gone out of your tiny mind?’ she said.
Lamorak raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t quite follow. Straight swap. You get your award for best nature programme, I get the apron, everybody’s happy. Where’s the problem in that?’
There are many cold places on earth, but few of them are as cold as two feet away from the maiden’s eyes. ‘Listen, whoever you are,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to make a serious film here. If I go home and tell my producer I’ve got ten minutes’ footage of live unicorns in the can, I’m going to spend the rest of my career filming the weather forecast. Now will you please both go away? You’re frightening the kangaroos.’
For perhaps the first time ever, Lamorak was at a slight loss for words. After considerable effort, he managed to say, ‘But it’s a unicorn.’ The maiden of unspotted virtue sighed.
‘Buster,’ she said, ‘I don’t care if it’s a performing woolly mammoth. I have my credibility as a serious wildlife presenter to think of. Understood?’
‘But it’s a—’
‘Quite.’ The maiden pursed her lips. ‘That’s fine. You take it along to the satellite boys, they’ll probably give it its own chat show. Meanwhile, some of us have work to do, so if you wouldn’t mind ...’
Lamorak said nothing. Even if he could have found any words appropriate for the situation, he’d have had difficulty saying them with his lower jaw hanging loose like a second-hand drawbridge. He shook his head in disbelief, turned away and sat down under a rock.
‘Excuse me,’ Pertelope said.
‘Well?’
‘I think,’ Pertelope said, ‘there may have been a slight misunderstanding here. You do have the apron, don’t you?’
‘What apron?’
‘Ah. So you’re not a maiden of unspotted virtue?’
A moment or so later, Pertelope picked himself up off the ground, rubbed his jaw and joined his colleague under the rock.
‘Something must have gone wrong,’ he said.
Lamorak nodded. ‘Wrong bloody maiden,’ he replied. ‘I mean, how the devil was I supposed to know there were two of ...?’ He broke off. A horrible thought had just occurred to him.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Of course. Why didn’t I realise?’
Pertelope looked up at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The football results. We must have misinterpreted them. Here, hand me your rucksack, quick.’
Pertelope did as he was told; and, while the maiden of unspotted virtue and her camera crew raced off into the distance, with a doomed kangaroo a mere ten yards in front of them, he thumbed through the Sports section of What’s On In Sydney.
‘Per,’ he said at last, closing the book, ‘you might have told me that Lightning Darren O’Shea had signed for the Paramatta Under-Twelves.’
Pertelope registered dismay. ‘Oh drat,’ he said. ‘Yes, that does put rather a different complexion on it, I suppose. What do we do now?’
The Timekeeper leant over the rock and cleared her throat. ‘We could eat,’ she suggested.
‘Not peaches, please,’ Lamorak sighed. ‘Not right now, I couldn’t face it.’
The Timekeeper grinned. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘how doeth thcallop chowder, chicken with bathil and oregano and apricotth in brandy thtrike you?’ By way of explanation, she opened her shopping bag and produced three large tins. ‘I’ll just thet up the tholarpowered microwathe and we’re in buthineth.’
Lamorak smiled wryly. ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘And afterwards, could you give us a lift in this spaceship of yours? Otherwise it’s going to be a long walk.’
‘Thure thing.’ The Timekeeper took a small tin cube from her pocket, pressed a knob on the back, and held it at arm’s length. It grew into a microwave oven.
‘Only don’t tell anyone you’the theen one of thethe, becauthe they haven’t been invented yet,’ she added. ‘You could thet off a complete Dark Age with one of thethe thingth.’
‘No problem,’ Lamorak replied. ‘You keep stumm about the unicorn, we’ll forget about the technology.’
The Timekeeper laughed and set to work with a tin-opener. It was some time since she’d used it last, and she nearly burnt a hole the size of a large geological fault in the landscape before she got the atomiser beam properly adjusted, but there was no harm done.
‘That still doesn’t explain things, Lammo,’ Pertelope was saying, and his voice sounded remarkably like the buzzing of a fly against a windscreen.
Lamorak shook his head and said, ‘Not now, Per. Later, perhaps.’
Pertelope scowled at him. ‘But Lammo,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t matter about Lightning Darren O’Shea, because it says here his brother Norman is now playing for the Melbourne Werewolves, and that means the x-coefficient no longer reciprocates the reflected tangent of pi—’
‘Later, Per.’ Lamorak closed his eyes, settled his head against his rucksack and lay back. You know, he said to himself, I could get to like failure after a while. It’s so much more relaxing ...
And then he sat bolt upright again, and grabbed for the book.
‘Told you,’ Pertelope was saying. ‘And of course we’d have to recalculate the differential shift in the y-axis.’
Lamorak wasn’t listening. He was staring at the Timekeeper; who had opened the tins and emptied their contents into little plastic bowls, which she was loading into the machine.
‘Nearly ready,’ she said.
‘Great,’ Lamorak replied, trying to sound calm. ‘Tell me, when it was your turn to go shopping, why did you come here?’
‘It’th where my tholks came throm, originally,’ she replied. ‘Of courthe, I don’t thuppothe it‘th anything like it’ll be in their day, but ...’
‘I see,’ Lamorak said. ‘Um, that’s a nice pinny you’ve got on, if I may say so.’
The Timekeeper smiled. ‘You think tho? Actually, it’th been in my thamily for yearth. Nithe embroidery round the edgeth, look. Thlowerth and thingth.’
The two knights exchanged glances. Then Lamorak drew Pertelope to one side.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘you’re obviously thinking the same as me.’
‘It’d explain the distortion in the base coefficient, certainly,’ Pertelope replied. ‘It’s a very interesting effect, actually, because—’
‘Yes, all right, I believe you.’ Lamorak drew in a deep breath, then let it go. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘one of us is going to have to ask her, and I think it’s probably your turn. Okay?’
‘Ask her what, Lammo?’
‘Never mind,’ Lamorak replied. ‘Forget I spoke.’
The Timekeeper shut the oven door and twiddled the dial a couple of times. ‘It’ll be about three minuteth,’ she said. ‘Tho that’th a unicorn, ith it? I’ve alwayth wanted to thee a real unicorn.’
‘Bingo,’ muttered Lamorak under his breath. At her age, and with those braces on her teeth
, I don’t need to ask, I just know. ‘Can I just have a closer look at that apron thing for a moment?’ he asked.
There are two ways of landing a spaceship escape capsule on the surface.
The first way is to ease your way down through the upper atmosphere and sidle back into gravity with the aid of your stabiliser rockets. The alternative method is to keep on going until you hit the ground. This technique should on no account be confused with crashing, although the net result is more or less the same.
Fortunately, anything that happens to the landscape of the Great Victoria Desert is almost certain to improve it, and Trevor would no doubt have been only too pleased had he known that in years to come (long after he was born, in fact) the enormous crater brought into being by his textbook Method II landing would be flooded with water and turned into Australia’s first inland surfing park, with tides automatically stimulated by a huge solar-powered turbine.
As he dragged himself out of the remains of the cockpit, however, all he could think of was the rather depressing fact that his spacecraft had had its chips, which meant that unless he could find the foraging party, he was going to have to stay here for the rest of his life. Quite apart from the fact that he seemed to have landed in a distinctly unprepossessing spot, he faced the horrible prospect of reverting to the normal life-pattern of a surface-dweller, with all the morale-sapping repetition that would entail. It’s bad enough turning thirty once in one’s lifetime. Having to do it twice is enough to make anybody very depressed indeed.
And even that unattractive prospect, he realised, was going to be pretty remote unless he found something to eat. Quickly.
He had been trudging generally eastwards for about half an hour when the smell of something edible floated past him on the sluggish desert breeze. He stopped in his tracks and concentrated. About thirty seconds of intense inhaling satisfied him that it wasn’t some sort of olfactory mirage. If the smell was simply a product of his imagination, then his imagination wouldn’t have put so much garlic in it. He walked quickly in the direction he guessed the scent was coming from, later breaking into a run.
‘It’s not for me, you understand,’ Lamorak said hastily. ‘It’s for a friend of mine.’
The Timekeeper continued to stare at him. ‘A friend of yourth,’ she repeated. ‘A friend of yourth who liketh drething up in women’th clotheth.’ She shot a glance at Pertelope, and then added, ‘Another friend of yourth who liketh drething up in women‘th clotheth. I thee.’
‘Now hang on a minute,’ Pertelope started to say, but Lamorak ignored him. ‘It’s not like that,’ he said. ‘Look, we’re on this quest, right, and we’ve got to recover the Holy Grail, okay, which means that—’
The Timekeeper raised her ladle threateningly. ‘I’d thtay right there ith I wath you,’ she hissed. Or rather hithed.
‘Now look ...’ Lamorak began to say; then he broke off, bent double and clutched his jaw. ‘Now look what you’ve done,’ he mumbled.
‘He’s got toothache,’ Pertelope explained. He was like that, of course; he was also perfectly capable of explaining that you were getting wet because it was raining, and that you’d just broken your leg because you’d fallen off your ladder.
‘Nethertheleth,’ replied the Timekeeper grimly, and swung the ladle demonstratively. You don’t get to stay a maiden of unspotted virtue for long on a pitch dark spaceship without knowing how to handle heavy kitchen implements. She backed away, didn’t look where she was going, and tripped over the unicorn.
Startled out of its narcotic dreams (in which, behind a bush with a gang of other unicorns, it lay in wait for a maiden of tarnished virtue to be attracted by a tethered kangaroo), the unicorn started, kicked against the ropes restraining its legs, and succeeded in loosening them.
‘Right, you bunch of Pommy woofters,’ it started to say; and then the Timekeeper fell on it, knocking it out cold. It subsided into a heap, taking up its dream where it had left off.
‘Don’t just stand there, you pillock,’ Lamorak shouted. ‘Grab the bloody apron.’
Pertelope hesitated. On the one hand, he was a Knight of the Table Round, and he distinctly remembered the bit in the rule book about succouring damsels in distress. He mentioned this.
‘So?’
‘So I should be succouring, shouldn’t I?’
‘Right,’ Lamorak snarled. ‘And the thing to remember about succouring is never to give them an even break. Now move!’
‘Oh,’ Pertelope replied. ‘That’s what it means. I always thought it meant—’ He got no further than this, because the Timekeeper belted him across the head with her ladle.
Lamorak said something under his breath - it rhymed with pit - and made a half-hearted sort of lunge. He was hampered by the fact that he was trying to shield his jaw with his body, and only succeeded in putting his foot in the Timekeeper’s discarded armour. There was a crash, and he landed heavily.
‘Thcumbag,’ the Timekeeper yelled, and raised the ladle above her head. Then she froze.
‘If it’s any consolation,’ Lamorak said after a while, ‘I really don’t feel good about doing this.’ He waggled the Timekeeper’s revolver, which had somehow found its way into his hand when he landed. ‘One, it’s unchivalrous. Two, it’s an anachronism. Three, these things terrify the life out of me. On the other hand ...’
The Timekeeper wasn’t listening. She was looking at something over Lamorak’s left shoulder, while trying to do high-level semaphore with her eyebrows.
‘Don’t give me that,’ Lamorak sighed. ‘Oldest trick in the book, that is, pretending to see something so’s I turn round, and then you hit me with—’
Then he too fell silent, as Trevor thumped him hard on the side of the jaw with a rock.
The true origin of the Apron of Invincibility will probably never be known.
One school would have it that the apron was worn by the head chef at Belshazzar’s feast, and the distinctive red marks down the front are all the remains of the venison casserole, spilt there by the chef when he saw a huge hand materialise out of thin air and start writing graffiti on the walls of his newly decorated taverna.
Others claim that the red marks are the stains left by the particularly virulent Algerian beaujolais served to the guests at the wedding at Cana just before the wine finally ran out. This view is substantiated to a certain extent by the fact that generations of owners have done their best to bleach them out, but without success.
Still others say that the red marks are just red marks, and that the Apron is a seventh-century Byzantine forgery; although what it’s a forgery of, nobody even pretends to know.
Whatever the truth of the matter is, the fact remains that the Apron has curious properties which cannot be explained in rational terms. For example; the touch of its hem cures certain extremely rare varieties of scrofula (not a particularly useful property, this, since the bacteria in question are so rare that they count as protected species, and anyone harming them is liable to a substantial fine); it mucks up Aussie Rules football like nothing else on earth; and a sponge cake baked by a person wearing it will invariably turn out as hard as millstone.
After a while, Lamorak came round. He shook his head and gathered together the splinters of his memory.
He realised that he was feeling a lot better.
Something sharp was digging into his neck. He fished around inside his shirt, and found a dislodged tooth. He seemed to recognise it from somewhere.
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Good.’
He looked up, and saw the barrel of the revolver. Behind it stood the Timekeeper and another figure, similarly dressed, male, its jaw moving steadily.
‘Threethe,’ rasped the Timekeeper. ‘Or Trethor here’ll drill you full of holeth.’
It‘th okay,’ Lamorak replied, ‘don’t thoot. Oh thit,’ he added, rubbing his swollen jaw. ‘You’the got me at it now.’
‘What the hell’s going on here, anyway?’ Trevor enquired, with his mouth full. ‘The fight. The
unconscious guy in the frock. The horse with a flagpole up its nose. I mean, what is this?’
Lamorak grinned painfully. ‘Let me ecthplain,’ he said.
‘I’the got a better ...’ The Timekeeper growled impatiently, opened her mouth, and pulled out two little strips of shiny metal. ‘That’s better,’ she said, stuffing them in her pocket. ‘The hell with dental consistency. I’ve got a better idea, Trevor. Let’s tie these two idiots up and get back to the ship, okay?’
Trevor shrugged. ‘Please yourself,’ he said. ‘What’ll we tie them up with?’
Lamorak coughed politely. ‘Ith I may make a thuggethtion,’ he said.
The Apron of Invincibility, torn into thin strips, produced enough material to keep the knights securely bound for six hours; at the end of which they were released by a party of wandering Fruit Monks on their way to replenish the cache of tinned lychees at Ayers Rock.
On their return to Albion, the knights entrusted the job of restoring the Apron to the Sisters of Incongruity, an even smaller and more secretive order who devote themselves to prayer, meditation, needlework and spot-the-ball competitions (from which source is derived the fabulous wealth of the community). Three months of round-the-clock work resulted in an Apron that was almost, but not quite, as good as new. True, it no longer affected the outcome of football matches; on the other hand, it developed a quite staggering knack of turning anything left overnight in its pockets into small balls of disintegrating paper, discarded fruit-gum wrappings, delaminated metro tickets and demonetised fifty-lire coins.
4
‘Admit it, Turkey,’ said Bedevere, ‘we’re lost.’
You can tell of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the Colossus of Rhodes; if you’re looking for the world’s great wonders, try a knight of an ancient order of chivalry coping with a statement of the painfully obvious.
‘I know we’re lost,’ Turquine replied cheerfully, folding the road map and shoving it under the seat of the van. ‘We’re supposed to be lost. If we weren’t lost, we’d be going the wrong way.’