Grailblazers

by Tom Holt

  Radulf and the Graf go way back; right back to when he started out as a Finno-Ugrian storm-deity with responsibility for punishing perjury and collecting the souls of the dead. They have seen some high old times together, howling through the midwinter skies with the wind in their hair and the world splayed out below them like a spilt breakfast. It wasn’t Klaus and Radulf then, of course; it was Odin and Sleipnir - and there have been other names, too, which the race-memory has been only too glad to forget. All the stuff with the red dressing-gowns and the sleigh bells is comparatively recent, the result of one of the biggest balls-ups in theological history.

  Radulf is virtually retired now, and only rides the winds once a year. He hates the Americanised form of his name, and the song and the greetings cards make him sick. The slight discolouration of his nose (he prefers to think of it as a snout, anyway) is an honourable wound, the red nose of courage; a lasting memento of a desperate ten minutes with the Great Frost-Bear, back when the world was young, violent and not nearly so damn soppy.

  Retired from flying, anyway; there’s plenty of work for him to do on the ground, what with all the various jobs that need to be done under the terms of the Great Curse. There are toy catalogues to be pored over, order forms to make out, deliveries to supervise, and mountains and mountains of requisition chits to be sorted through as the requests from every family in the world come cascading through. And last, but definitely not least, there are the preparations for each year’s Ride; itineraries to plan, architects’ plans to study, ingenious methods of breaking into chimneyless houses, converted windmills and blocks of flats to be worked out.

  ‘Radulf!’

  A girl’s voice, echoing melodramatically in the vastness of the stables. The old reindeer lifted his snout, took off his reading glasses and mooed softly. He knew the Graf didn’t hold with the Grafin coming down to the stables. Not safe for a young girl, he said, and he was right. Some of the reindeer were special thoroughbreds, wild and savage, with antlers like pneumatic drills and tempers to match; and the Grafin was young and silly. She carried sugar-lumps in the pocket of her dress. Not sensible.

  ‘Radulf, the phone for you!’ she was saying. It sounded like she was down among the drag-racers. Radulf flicked his left ear apprehensively. Give a sugar-lump to one of those high-octane monstrosities, you could have an explosion.

  He mooed loudly to her to stay where she was and not feed anything, then sprang to his hooves and padded silently through the rows of stalls. He knew the layout of the stables as well as a taxi driver knows Bayswater. He should do, by now.

  ‘There you are, Radulf,’ said the Grafin, and handed over the portable phone. ‘It’s Father. He says it’s urgent.’

  Radulf nodded his head, and the dim light of the chandeliers high above under the rafters glinted on the tinsel wrapped round his horns. He put the receiver to his ear and mooed into it.

  ‘Moo. Moo. Moo. Moo? Moo? Mo ...’ The antlers nodded a couple of times, and Radulf hung up. ‘Moo,’ he explained.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said the Grafin. ‘I suppose we’d better get back to the house, then.’

  ‘M.’

  ‘I expect he’ll need plenty of hot water and bandages.’

  ‘M.’

  They left the stables, switching out the lights as they went. For a while, the enormous building was silent - except, of course, for the shuffling of innumerable hooves and the quiet whinnying of the reincalves.

  Then a voice spoke in the Number 2 hayloft.

  ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’ it said.

  There was a sharp intake of breath next to it, and a muffled click as a torch was switched on.

  ‘Be quiet, Gally, I’m trying to think.’

  ‘Please yourself.’

  In the hayloft, Boamund was turning the situation over in his mind; or at least he was trying to. Something - he hadn’t the faintest idea what - kept getting in the way. His companion, Galahaut the Haut Prince, had gladly abdicated any participation in the decision-making process at a very early stage, and was filing his fingernails. Toenail was cleaning the boots.

  ‘Who was that?’ Boamund asked suddenly. Galahaut shrugged, and so it was left to Toenail to reply.

  ‘Looked like a bloody great big deer, boss,’ he replied. ‘Domesticated, too, by the looks of it.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Boamund, with what he hoped was irony. ‘Actually, I meant—’

  ‘It’s amazing the things you can train animals to do,’ Toenail went on. ‘Cousin of mine, worked in a circus, used to tell me how they trained the lions—’

  ‘Toenail.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Boamund leant his chin on his cupped hands. ‘That girl,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember there being anything about a girl...’

  Toenail pointed out that they had heard her speak of somebody, presumably the Graf, as Father, and suggested that she might be his daughter.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Toenail,’ Boamund replied. ‘Whoever heard of the Graf von Weinacht having a daughter?’

  ‘Whoever heard of the Graf von Weinacht?’ Toenail answered.

  Boamund clicked his tongue. ‘Not under that name, maybe. But - well, surely you’ve twigged by now. It’s him. You know ...’ Boamund rubbed his stomach and said ‘Ho ho ho!’ with a sort of manic jollity. Toenail smiled tactfully.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I’d managed to get that far, sure. What I mean is, all this -’ he waved his arms in an encircling gesture ‘- doesn’t actually fit in with what you might call his public image. I mean,’ he went on ruefully, ‘the barbed wire. The dogs. The searchlights. The mines. The moat full of piranhas ...’

  He glanced down at his boots, which had nibble-marks where the toecaps had once been. Boamund nodded.

  ‘I think I see what you’re driving at,’ he said. ‘You mean, he isn’t really like how he seems to us.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Toenail replied, relieved. ‘The image and the man. It turns out that we don’t know anything about the real Santa ...’

  Boamund put his hand over the dwarfs mouth and hissed. ‘Not here, you clown. I don’t think you should say that name here.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Toenail through a gag of fingers.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Boamund replied. ‘I just have this feeling, all right?’

  ‘About the real Graf von Weinacht, then,’ Toenail said. ‘I mean, the person with the sack and the sleigh doesn’t have a daughter, admittedly, but then, I’ve never seen a Christmas card with claymore mines and attack dogs on it, have you?’

  Galahaut yawned. ‘You mean,’ he said suddenly, ‘we should abandon our preconceptions?’

  The other two looked at him.

  ‘Forget about stereotyped role-perceptions,’ he continued. ‘Look for the real persona behind the image. Fair enough.’

  For the seventy-third time since they’d set out, Toenail gave his master that Why-did-we-have-to-bring-him look. Boamund shrugged and grimaced back. Galahaut, for his part, was completely engrossed in dealing with a potential whitlow.

  ‘So,’ Boamund said, ‘you reckon that girl was his daughter, then?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Right.’

  Boamund lowered his chin back on to the palms of his hands and sat for a while, completely still. If this was a cartoon, Toenail said to himself, he’d have a big bubble with ‘Thinks’ in it coming out of his head.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Boamund at last, ‘I reckon it’s about time we got on with the job in hand. Right.’ He nodded his head purposefully and punched the palm of his hand to register decisiveness. Boamund, Toenail decided, would have been a great success in the silent movies.

  He waited.

  ‘So,’ Boamund said. ‘First things first, eh? Let’s ...’ He bit his lip thoughtfully. ‘How’d it be if ...?’

  The dwarf looked at him expectantly. An X-ray of his head, he said to himself, would show up completely blank at this particular moment.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Toenail
said, therefore, ‘but if I could just break in here ...’

  Boamund registered the democratic attitude to supreme command and nodded. Toenail thanked him.

  ‘What I was thinking was,’ he said, ‘we want to get inside the castle proper, don’t we?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Just off the top of my head, then,’ Toenail went on, ‘wouldn’t you say our biggest problem was getting past the gates?’

  The gates. They’d seen them already, of course. They made you feel vertiginous half a mile away. The two flanking towers were black needles of masonry soaring up into the sky, and the gates themselves were cliff faces in hobnailed black oak.

  ‘Tricky, certainly,’ Boamund replied. ‘I thought we might actually give the gates a miss and try the wall instead.’

  Toenail couldn’t help shuddering. Eighty metres high at least, and built of polished black marble. Probably best, he decided, to try and divert the boss’s mind away from that one.

  ‘Good idea,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, that’s much better than what I had in mind.’

  Boamund raised his eyebrows, registering his willingness to listen to any suggestion, however puerile. ‘What were you thinking, then?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, it was just ... No, it was silly.’

  ‘Out with it.’

  ‘I thought,’ Toenail said, ‘we could pretend to be postmen.’

  Boamund’s face clouded over. ‘Postmen,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Toenail. He waited for what he judged to be the right moment, psychologically speaking, and added, ‘Didn’t you notice the letterbox, then?’

  ‘Letterbox?’

  ‘In the gate,’ Toenail said artlessly. ‘Well, not in the big gate, of course. I meant the little side gate we passed when we were trying to find a place to cross the moat.’

  ‘Ah,’ Boamund said. ‘The side gate.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Toenail said brightly. ‘You remember. I kept trying to point it out to you and you kept telling me to shut up, so I guessed you must have noticed it for yourself. Well, it had a letterbox in it, so it stands to reason...’

  ‘Yes,’ Boamund said, ‘of course. I was wondering when you were going to ...’

  ‘Of course,’ Toenail continued, ‘to begin with, I was puzzled how the postman gets to the letterbox, what with the moat and the piranhas and everything. Had me thinking there, I can tell you.’

  ‘I bet!’

  ‘And then,’ Toenail went on, ‘I saw what you’d seen.’

  ‘Oh good.’

  ‘The little boat,’ said Toenail, kindly, ‘tied up under the weeping willow. Of course, you with your trained eye, you saw that like a shot.’

  Boamund managed to register smugness.

  ‘And then I wondered, Why did he make us paddle across the moat on that floating log when there was a perfectly good boat just sitting there? Pretty slow on the uptake, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Boamund feebly. ‘It takes a special sort of mind, I always think.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Toenail said, ‘it wasn’t till after we were across the moat and in the potting shed and I was putting TCP on where the piranhas—’

  ‘Um...’

  ‘Then,’ said the dwarf, ‘I realised. Of course, I said, we couldn’t have taken the boat, or else it wouldn’t have been there for the milkman, and he’d have raised the alarm, and ...’

  ‘Ah,’ said Boamund. ‘Just out of interest, what was it put you on to there being a milkman?’

  ‘Same as you, I expect,’ said Toenail, maliciously.

  ‘Good man.’

  ‘The empty milk bottles outside the little gate, I mean.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said Boamund, and he laughed. ‘Make a general of you yet, we will.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Toenail. ‘Must be marvellous to think of things the way you do.’

  ‘It’s a knack.’

  ‘So,’ Toenail said, ‘my idea was that we wait until the postman comes along in the morning - that’ll be after the milkman’s been and gone, of course - and then one of us knocks on the door, as if there was a parcel ...’

  ‘Or a registered letter,’ said Boamund, excitedly.

  ‘Yes, even better,’ said Toenail resignedly. ‘And then, when somebody comes to answer the door, we thump him and get in.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Pretty silly idea, really.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Boamund slowly. ‘I mean, put like that ...’

  ‘I thought you said something about the wall.’

  ‘Oh, just thinking aloud,’ Boamund replied. ‘Got to consider every possibility, you know. Actually, I was coming round to the postman scenario myself. Neat, I thought.’

  ‘One of your better ideas?’

  Boamund registered modesty. ‘Simple, anyway,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

  Toenail smiled. ‘I don’t know how you do it, boss,’ he replied.

  The sleigh howled through the night sky, the clanging of its bells drowned by the shrieking of the wind.

  Klaus von Weinacht, head down over the console to reduce the coefficient of drag, stared out through the driving snow for the first glimpse of his battlements. On the instrument panel, the compass stopped its crazed spinning and jammed dead.

  Nearly home. Good.

  He ran back through the timings in his mind. If they had all left the Grail Castle at the same time then, allowing for pack ice in the Nares Straight and contrary winds over Permia, then it would still be two or three days before they were due to arrive. Plenty of time. He laughed cruelly.

  The reindeer pounded the clouds with their hooves.

  ‘Ready?’

  Toenail, concealed behind a bush, nodded, while Galahaut yawned and picked bark off the branch they had found for a club. Boamund took a deep breath, and knocked on the gate.

  ‘Let’s just run through it once more,’ he hissed. ‘The porter opens the door, I distract his attention. Galahaut, you hit him. Toenail ...’

  There was the sound of heavy bolts being shot back, and the door opened.

  ‘Hello.’

  Galahaut gripped the club and started to move. Then he stopped.

  ‘Er ... hello,’ Boamund was saying. He had gone a very pretty shade of pink.

  ‘Was there something?’ said the girl, nicely.

  For four seconds, Boamund just stood there, irradiating pinkness. Then he smiled idiotically.

  ‘Postman,’ he said.

  ‘Oh good,’ said the girl. ‘Something nice, I hope. Not more horrid old bills. Daddy gets so bad-tempered when it’s bills.’

  Toenail had covered his face with his hands. The worst part was not being able to do anything.

  ‘Letter,’ Boamund gurgled. ‘Registered. Got to sign for—’

  ‘How exciting!’ said the girl. ‘I wonder who it’s from.’

  There was a moment of perfect equilibrium; and then it dawned on Boamund that he didn’t have about his person anything that looked like a registered letter.

  Toenail had to admit that he coped as well as could be expected in the circumstances. After he had made a right pantomime of patting all his pockets and rummaging about in his knapsack, he said, ‘Damn, I seem to have left it in the van.’ It could have been worse, said the dwarf to himself, just conceivably.

  ‘Never mind,’ said the girl. ‘I’ll wait for you here.’

  In retrospect, Toenail realised that there was a funny expression on her face, too. At the time, though, he put it down to a complete absence of brains.

  ‘Right,’ said Boamund, rooted to the spot. ‘I’ll just go back and, er, fetch it, then.’

  ‘Right.’

  They stood for a moment, gazing at each other. Then Boamund started to walk slowly backwards. Into the bush.

  ‘Be careful!’ the girl called out, too late. ‘Oh dear, I hope you haven’t hurt yourself.’

  Toenail, who had broken Boamund’s fall very neatly indeed, could certify that he hadn’t. But t
he fool just sprawled there. It was only natural that the girl should come and look ...

  ‘Oh,’ she said.

  Boamund grinned feebly. Galahaut tried to hide the club behind his back, and waved.

  ‘Actually,’ said Boamund, breaking a silence that was threatening to become a permanent fixture, ‘we aren’t postmen at all.’

  ‘Not... postmen?’

  My God, thought the dwarf, and I thought he was a pillock. He tried to wriggle the small of his back away from the sharpest roots of the bush.

  ‘No,’ Boamund said. ‘That was a ruse.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Actually, we’re—’

  ‘Knights,’ Galahaut interrupted. ‘Knights of the Holy Grail. At your service,’ he added.

  Boamund gave him a filthy look.

  ‘Knights!’ the girl squeaked. ‘Oh, how exciting!’

  The hell with this, said the dwarf to himself, things can’t get any worse, they just can’t. With a tremendous wriggle, he extricated himself from under Boamund, shook himself free of leaves and bits of twig, and tugged at his master’s sleeve.

  ‘Boss,’ he said.

  Boamund looked round. ‘What?’

  ‘The plan, boss. You know.’

  ‘Go away, Toenail.’

  Dwarves cannot, of course, disobey a direct order. He shrugged his shoulders and drifted away to the shelter of a wind-blasted thorn tree, crossed his legs, and sulked.

  The girl’s eyes were shining. ‘This is so thrilling,’ she said. ‘What are you doing here? Or is it a secret?’

  ‘We’re ...’ A tiny spark of common sense flared up in Boamund’s brain. ‘It’s a secret,’ he said. ‘A quest,’ he added.

  ‘Gosh!’

  ‘And you mustn’t tell a soul.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Promise.’

  A long silence followed, as the girl gazed at Boamund, Boamund and Galahaut gazed at the girl, and Toenail darned a sock. It could have gone on for ever if it hadn’t been broken by the sound of a door slamming.