by Tom Holt
Mahaud thought for a moment. ‘It’s never too late to - well, give him a helping hand, you know.’
Simon Magus looked at her. ‘But that’s unethical,’ he said. ‘Once they’ve started and everything. Most improper.’
‘Nobody would ever know.’
‘I would.’
‘Oh.’ She stood for a moment, playing with the binoculars. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘Fancy a quick game of Scrabble?’
Simon Magus studied his wife for a moment.
‘Mahaud,’ he said, ‘you’re up to something.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Come on, I know that expression. You’re not to interfere.’
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ replied his wife innocently. ‘You know that.’
‘Well, then.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Blast,’ he said, ‘I must dash. I said I’d give Merlin a game of dominoes.’
‘You run along then,’ Mahaud said. ‘See you later.’
It was an awkward moment.
‘Hello again,’ Galahaut said. ‘We were just going to come and look for you.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘We were just,’ Galahaut went on, ‘helping your father have a really good sort-out of his sock drawer.’
‘Really.’
‘And then,’ Galahaut persevered, ‘he said he felt a bit tired and went to sleep, and so we thought we’d come and find you. But here you are anyway.’
The girl gave him a look. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.
‘You don’t?’
‘No, I don’t’.
‘Oh.’
‘I think,’ the girl said, ‘that you’re trying to steal Daddy’s special Socks. I think you’re burglars.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘You are, aren’t you?’ the girl said. ‘I think you tricked your way in here pretending to be knights, but really you’re just sock-thieves. Probably,’ she added, remembering a phrase from a book she’d been reading, ‘an international gang.’
‘Oh, we’re knights all right,’ Boamund interrupted. ‘There’s no question of that.’
The girl sniffed. ‘Knights fight fair,’ she said. ‘Knights don’t tie people up and go emptying drawers out on the floor. Burglars do that.’
‘Knights do too, sometimes. It’s all a matter of what’s right in the particular circumstances.’
The girl shook her head. ‘Daddy told me to be specially on the look-out for burglars,’ she said. ‘And he told me that if ever I saw any, I was to get this gun from his study and shoot them.’
‘Gosh,’ Boamund said. Galahaut smiled.
‘And you always do what Daddy says?’ he enquired.
‘Always.’
‘What a terribly dreary life you must lead.’
The girl frowned. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
Galahaut raised an eyebrow. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘I don’t suppose you get out much, do you? No going to parties or anything like that.’
‘Certainly not.’ The girl looked pensive as she fidgeted with the safety catch of the rifle. Pensive but extremely dangerous.
‘Can’t be many people of your own age around here,’ Galahaut went on. The girl nodded.
‘None,’ she said. ‘Except for some of the pages, of course. Some of them are quite nice, or at least one of them...’ She hesitated for a moment. ‘But Daddy says I’m not to talk to the pages. He says...’
Galahaut raised his eyebrow a little bit more. It was very eloquent. But the girl suddenly shook her head.
‘What’s that got to do with burglars?’ she said.
‘Um...’
‘You’re just trying to confuse me,’ the girl went on. ‘That’s a typical burglar trick, trying to confuse people.
Knights wouldn’t do that. They’d think it wasn’t chivalrous.’
Slowly, she raised the rifle towards her shoulder, and Boamund shut his eyes. This didn’t fit in with his preconceptions about damsels in distress at all.
A moment later he heard a hissing noise and a thump. At first he guessed the thump must be his own dead body collapsing to the floor; but after a few seconds he revised this opinion and opened his eyes again.
The girl was lying on the floor, snoring gently, and Toenail was putting an aerosol can back in his satchel.
‘Knew it’d come in handy,’ said the dwarf. ‘Marvellous stuff, Mace. Works wonders with large dogs, too. I couldn’t find a sack, by the way, but I thought a couple of pillow cases might do instead. Is that all right?’
Galahaut, who had gone a very funny colour, extricated himself from the corner of the room, into which he had backed, and grinned.
‘Jolly good timing, that,’ he said shakily. ‘Nice work.’
‘Thank you,’ Toenail replied, rather taken aback. He tried to remember if anyone had ever thanked him before; good question. ‘I met this woman out in the laundry room who said I was needed back here, so I came in.’
‘What woman?’ Boamund asked.
‘Dunno,’ Toenail replied. ‘Just a woman. Appeared out of nowhere holding a pair of binoculars, gave me a message about you two being in the ... you two wanting me for something, and vanished again. Might have been a hologram, even.’ He opened a pillow case and began filling it with socks.
‘We still don’t know which pair is which, though,’ Boamund observed. ‘You know, I do think it’d be a good idea if we found out. Otherwise...’
The other two looked at him.
‘Bo,’ Galahaut said, ‘I don’t want to seem slapdash or anything, but if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather we escaped with our lives first and saved the underwear-sorting part of it till later. If that’s all right with you, I mean.’
‘I wonder who that woman was. She might have known.’
‘Who?’ Toenail asked, looking up from the pillow case. ‘The hologram, you mean?’
‘That’s if it really was a hologram,’ Boamund said. ‘What is a hologram, anyway?’
Toenail was about to explain when a sound outside the door checked him. The sound, if he wasn’t very much mistaken, of hooves. Feet, too. Lots of them.
‘Oh God,’ he said, ‘more of them.’ He reached for the aerosol, shook it and made a face. ‘Not much left in there,’ he muttered. ‘May I suggest that you hide?’
‘Where?’
Toenail nodded towards the fireplace. ‘You could try the chimney,’ he said.
‘Good Lord,’ Simon Magus said. ‘How on earth did they manage that?’
Mahaud looked up from her Scrabble pieces. ‘Manage what, dear?’ she said.
‘That young Snotty and the other one,’ said the magician, putting the binoculars down. ‘They’ve got away from that lunatic girl after all. There’s more to Boamund than I thought, apparently.’
Mahaud smiled. ‘That’s nice, dear,’ she said. ‘Now, what can I make with this lot?’
She studied her hand carefully. There was a C, an H, an E, an A and a T.
‘Is there such a word as theac?’ she asked.
It was windy up on the roof.
‘Hand me up that other pillow case,’ Boamund called down the chimney. ‘Careful now, don’t drop it. That’s the way.’
A moment later Galahaut emerged. He was very sooty, and he’d broken a fingernail.
‘Pity we had to leave the dwarf,’ he said. ‘Still, never mind.’
‘We’ll just have to wait till we get home,’ Boamund said. ‘Still, it is a shame. I hate polishing shoes and sewing on buttons. It’s so fiddly.’
A sleigh was floating in the air a few feet from their heads, tethered to a ring on the side of the chimney-stack. There was a full team of reindeer in the shafts.
‘That’s handy,’ Boamund said. ‘I was wondering how we were going to escape.’
‘Something always turns up,’ Galahaut replied. ‘Do you know how you drive one of these things?’
‘Not really,’ said Boamund. ‘Still, I expect it’s not too difficult once you’ve g
ot the hang of it. Probably an ordinary flying spell will do.’
‘I forgot,’ Galahaut said, ‘you know all that magic stuff for getting about and things. I could never be doing with it, personally.’
Boamund hauled himself up into the sleigh, took the pillow cases from Galahaut and gave him a hand up into the cockpit. ‘Now then,’ he said, ‘we just say the magic words, and then we’re away.’
He said them. Nothing.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘It isn’t working, that’s what.’
Galahaut, the actor, sniffed. ‘Try putting a bit more feeling into it. Motivation, that’s what you need. Come on, let me try. What’s the spell again?’
Boamund told him, and he sat for a moment, thinking himself into the part. Then he said the spell.
‘Gosh,’ Boamund said. ‘That was very good.’
‘Thanks.’
‘We still aren’t moving, though, are we?’
‘Probably a bit too melodramatic,’ Galahaut admitted. ‘A bit too Olivier, maybe. I’ll make it a bit more Marlon Brando this time, shall I?’
‘Who’s Marlon Brando?’
Galahaut said the words again. The sleigh continued to bob gently in the breeze.
‘That’s a bit tiresome,’ he said. ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right words?’
‘I think so.’ Boamund muttered them over to himself under his breath. They sounded all right.
‘Perhaps magic doesn’t work here,’ he suggested. ‘I’ve heard that there are places like that.’
Just then, Galahaut noticed that an arm had appeared over the edge of the chimney-pot. He drew his sword, and then stopped.
‘It’s all right,’ he said, ‘it’s only the dwarf.’
Sure enough, Toenail’s head appeared a moment later. They helped him up on to the sleigh.
‘Sorry you got left behind,’ Galahaut said, ‘only, well, it was you or the socks. Couldn’t carry both, you understand.’
Toenail understood all too well. Still, it had been all right, just about. He had a nasty antler-gouge in his leg, and his neck ached where a page had thrown a teapot at him, but otherwise he was all right. All the Mace had gone, though.
‘Would it be a good idea if we left now, please?’ he suggested. ‘Only, they were saying something about following us, and...’
‘Easier said than done,’ Boamund replied. ‘We can’t get this thing to budge. We’ve tried the magic spell, and it won’t work.’
Toenail looked down at the console.
‘It might help,’ he said, ‘if you took the handbrake off.’
‘Running away,’ Boamund said, ‘is just not done.’
‘I’ve done it,’ Toenail interrupted, ‘lots of times. It’s quite easy once you get the hang of it.’
‘But it’s not right,’ Boamund protested. ‘Sir Lance-lot never ran away from people.’
‘Maybe not,’ Galahaut retorted, as they skittered over a patch of turbulence. ‘Maybe the fact that everyone was shit-scared of him had something to do with it. I don’t think that lot are terribly frightened of us, do you?’
He waved an arm behind them. Boamund looked over his shoulder. In the distance he could just make out the figure of von Weinacht in the leading pursuit sleigh - there were ten of them - standing up in the box and wielding his big Danish axe. He certainly didn’t look frightened.
‘That’s beside the point,’ Boamund objected, ducking to avoid a passing skua. ‘I mean,’ he added, ‘they’ll never be scared of us if we keep running away, will they?’
‘I don’t think they’ll be all that scared if we suddenly decide to keep still,’ Galahaut replied. ‘Just rather surprised and very pleased.’
The sleigh rocked as a thermal hit it, and Boamund grabbed the rail. ‘I still don’t think ...’ he started to say, and then caught sight of the world, a very long way below. ‘Gosh,’ he said.
The pursuers were gaining on them. In the shafts of von Weinacht’s sleigh, there was a very big reindeer with a red nose and grey hairs round its muzzle, the tinsel on its antlers cracking in the wind. It looked rather unfriendly.
Toenail, who had been exploring the glove compartment, tugged Galahaut’s sleeve. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I think it’s some sort of instruction manual.’
Galahaut took the booklet and glanced at it. ‘Hey,’ he said, ‘that’s not bad, is it? Here, Bo, how about a compromise? How’d it be if we ran away and fought them at the same time?’
‘Talk sense, Gally,’ Boamund replied, resolutely not looking down. ‘How can we do that?’
‘Look,’ Galahaut said. ‘Apparently this sleigh’s got, like, built-in optional extras. I wondered what it was doing tethered up there. It must be the old Graf’s escape sleigh. According to this, it can do some pretty antisocial things if you want it to.’
Boamund looked at him. ‘Such as?’
‘Well,’ Galahaut said, ‘apparently, this button here...’
There was a whooshing noise directly under them, and two vapour trails appeared behind the sleigh. A moment later there was a loud explosion in the sky to their rear.
‘Heat-seeking rockets,’ Galahaut said, ‘disguised as gift-wrapped golf umbrellas. And this...’
He got no further with his sentence; the air was filled with thick, rolling black clouds which billowed away into their slipstream. Toenail finished the sentence for him.
‘Smoke screen,’ he said. ‘Now, which of these is the machine-guns, and which is the rear wash-wipe?’ He shrugged and pressed both.
When the smoke cleared, there were only seven sleighs following them. Boamund grabbed the instruction manual and started flicking through it.
‘Jet boost,’ he said. ‘Hey, Gally, what does that...?’
Before Galahaut could answer, the sleigh was hurled across the sky like a fast leg-break. Boamund only managed to stay in it by clinging on to the strap of a sleigh-bell.
‘Nice one,’ Galahaut said, as he hauled him back into the cockpit. ‘Won’t be long before they’ve closed in, though. They’re pretty nippy, those sleighs.’ He looked at the dwarf thoughtfully. ‘We’re carrying too much weight,’ he said. ‘We could do with lightening this thing up a bit, really.’
Toenail didn’t speak; he put his arms round one of the bags of socks and set his face into a grim expression. Galahaut shrugged, said that it was just a suggestion, and looked over Boamund’s shoulder at the manual.
‘Anti-aircraft mines,’ he read. ‘Don’t see that myself, do you?’
‘Does no harm to try.’
‘All right.’
They pressed the button together, and at once the rear cargo-door of the sleigh flew open, scattering hundreds of little brightly wrapped parcels which hung in the air on tiny individual parachutes. A few minutes later, as the lead pursuit sleigh passed through the floating cloud, they found out how that one worked.
‘That’s about it,’ Galahaut said wistfully. ‘And there’s still five of them following us.’
‘There’s still this button here.’
‘I’d leave that alone if I were you.’
‘Ejector seat,’ Boamund read aloud. ‘I wonder what that does?’
Toenail hit the surface of the ice, and bounced.
The sackful of socks burst under him, scattering its contents, and he slid for a while on his stomach until he came to rest in a snowdrift. He picked himself up slowly and examined the punctured sack. There was just one pair of socks left in it.
Then he lifted his head and looked up at the sky.
Without the dwarfs weight, the knights’ sleigh was moving faster, drawing rapidly away from its pursuers. He stood and watched as the chase screamed away over the skyline.
Oddly enough, in the middle of the ice floe there was a signpost.
Hammerfest 1200 km, it said, and pointed.
The dwarf put his hand down into the pillow case and drew out the remaining pair of socks. Slowly he unravelled them, found the label and read it. The lette
ring was faint, worn away by incessant laundry, but after a while he was able to make out the words.
MADE IN SYRIA. 100% COTTON. HAND-WASH ONLY.
He grinned, stuffed the socks into his satchel, and began to walk.
Von Weinacht reined in his sleigh, leant forward and shook his fist at the tiny speck on the horizon.
‘Next time, you bastards!’ he yelled. ‘Next time!’
8
Exit Ken Barlow, pursued by a bear.
The ghost looked at the page in front of him, wrinkled his broad, insubstantial forehead, and crossed out what he’d just written. No good; start again.
The Rovers Return. Alf Roberts and Percy Sugden are leaning against the bar.
Alf: The way I see it, Percy, there’s a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, you understand, well - you could be on to a good thing there.
Percy: I’m with you all the way there, Councillor. I was saying to Mrs Bishop just the other day, if you don’t grab hold of your opportunities in this life, you’re bound in shallows and in miseries, like.
No. Something lacking there. Not punchy enough.
The ghost drew a line through it and noticed that the sheet of paper was completely full. He scowled irritably; a perfectly good sheet of A4 down the plughole, and nothing to show for it.
In the hall, the old clock whirred, hesitated for a moment and struck thirteen times.
Funny, the ghost reflected, how it did that. It always had, ever since he could remember, and it had always aggravated him beyond measure. Ironic, really, that the only piece of original furniture in the whole place should be that knackered old clock. Why they couldn’t get one of those smart new digital affairs was beyond him.
He wrenched his mind back to work, bit the end of his pen, spat out a fragment of quill, and wrote:
The Rovers Return. Vera, Ivy and Gail sharing a table.
Vera: Well, here we all are again, like. Raining cats and dogs outside, an’ all.
Another thing which had always annoyed him was the way his concentration tended to waver when he came to a sticky bit. Instead of pulling himself together and getting down to it, he had this tendency to let his mind wander away from the job in hand to quite irrelevant and unimportant things, like why that bloody clock had never worked, not since the day...