Abbot Dagger's Academy and the Quest for the Holy Grail

by Sam Llewellyn

  Next day at lunch, Owen and Rosetti were sitting together as usual. Owen had just handed in the Hard Sums part of the Greyte Cup work, and was tucking in with the sense of a good job well done. A shadow fell over Rosetti’s sausage and mash. He looked up and saw Dr Cosm, looming. ‘Gnah,’ said Cosm, surveying the boys with what Rosetti thought was a look of smug satisfaction. ‘Do you know, insects, I think you are not getting enough sss exercise.’

  ‘He’s running twenty-five miles a day,’ said Owen.

  ‘So,’ said Cosm, ignoring him, ‘I shall expect you both on Big Side at half past two in full Footer gear. We are two short in the Victims.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘Otherwise,’ said Cosm, ‘I shall assume that you are ill, and you will be put to bed in the Sanatorium for the next two weeks. The Maximum Security wing,’ he said. ‘Founder’s Day in mere days. You won’t want to miss Founder’s Day or the Greyte Cup run, nyhaha. Well?’

  ‘Footer it is,’ said Rosetti. Cosm crunched off. ‘It can’t be that bad,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘Oh yes it can,’ said Slee, cracking his huge red knuckles at the next table.

  ‘Worse,’ said Damage.

  ‘Hur, hur,’ said Slee and Damage together.

  The Rules of Footbrawl, Footer for short, are pretty straightforward. Basically there are two Goals and a Brawl, which is a heavy-duty sack loosely filled with gravel. The object of the game is to get the sack into your opponent’s goal. Each team should be roughly the size of a Standard Class, which for the purposes of Skool Footer is reckoned to be thirty.

  Abbot Dagger’s Academy had a proud Footer record. Its Footerers were hand-picked from the roughest, toughest and thickest pupils. The problem, of course, was training: the Footerers could scarcely ever find anyone to compete against, because the Skolars were too clever for them and the Skoolies just ran away. Mostly, Footer trainers fixed this by dividing the classes in half, and playing the game known as Half Footer, roughly fifteen a side. But in the run-up to a big game like the Old Boys’ Bloodbath on Founder’s Day, the whole Footer side needed to practise as one. So, during the run-ups, Footer trainers picked scratch sides to oppose the Footer Skoolies. The scratch sides were known as Victims. Trial Games were reckoned to be good training for Teams and San staff, who got valuable experience of caring for trample injuries. The Victims… well, nobody worried much about the Victims.

  Rosetti and Owen stood in a field of mud heavily marked with boot studs. They were shivering. Partly this was because the usual fine rain was falling on their heads. And partly it was because they and the twenty-three smallish, thinnish, fattish or just weakish people on the Victim side were gazing drop-jawed at a thing like a cliff. Except that it was not a cliff. It was seven years’ worth of Footer Skoolies, four per year, stretching from one side of the field to the other.

  The ref took a deep bref.

  PHEEP, went the whistle.

  ‘CHAARGE,’ cried the Footer Skoolies.

  ‘EEK,’ wailed the Victims, except Rosetti and Owen, who watched narrow-eyed, selecting their target…

  And finding him.

  He was a huge red mass of legs and face, lumbering towards them with a hungry grin. But Rosetti and Owen had travelled together through a total of thousands of years, so their teamwork was excellent.

  Rosetti said to the giant, ‘You have a face like a squished tomato and you smell like a hyena’s bottom,’ and made a childish but rude gesture.

  The giant accelerated, now half-blind with rage. So he did not see Owen, on his hands and knees in his path.

  ‘Oof!’ cried the giant, tripping and falling flat on his face.

  ‘Freedooom!’ cried Rosetti, streaking through the gap in the line left by the fallen foe.

  ‘Freedooom!’ cried Owen, leaping and streaking after him.

  They ran, and did not stop running. Behind them the Footer Field was a bedlam of thuds and crashes and the shrieks of the trampled. They burst into the Skolary, to find Miss Davies at the desk and Onyx beside her, pogoing with excitement.

  ‘Boys!’ cried Miss Davies. ‘How lovely to – Yes? Can I help you?’

  For Dr Cosm’s assistant, Otto, stood framed in the doorway. ‘They fled the Field of Play,’ he said. ‘They must return.’

  ‘As Victims?’ said Miss Davies, in a voice with a bad smell under its nose.

  ‘Footer needs Victims,’ said Otto. ‘It is the Law of Nature.’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake go away,’ said Miss Davies. ‘Go on, run.’ Otto left. Miss Davies put her palms together. ‘Now. Onyx has found the Cup again! And as soon as the doves are ready, off we go!’

  ‘When?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Which is exactly a week till Founder’s Day,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘Well, we will do our best,’ said Miss Davies. ‘And now, Onyx will tell us where we are going, and when. Onyx?’

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said Onyx, vibrating with excitement, ‘do you remember that Keeper in Rome? How he spoke jolly interestingly of lost Atlantis, birthplace of our Cup? Well, I have analysed the style of its making, and I have decided he was right! So we know for certain it was there and we’ll get it for sure because nobody Dr Cosm knows is a really brilliant researcher like me!’

  ‘If we don’t, we’re in trouble,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘And so is the Universe,’ said Owen.

  ‘And so is the Headmaster!’ said Onyx. ‘Selfish! Anyway! They’ll never find it! Unless they follow us! And how would they do that?’

  Elsewhere in the Skool, Dr Cosm thumbed the Transmit button on his personal communicator. ‘Otto!’ he barked.

  ‘Master?’

  ‘Commence charging.’

  Machinery whined. All over the Academy the lights dimmed. ‘Charging.’

  ‘Hours to full potential?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘Wilco.’

  And Dr Cosm strode off down the passage. The way ahead lay clear. Forward, to Universal Domination!

  Eight days till Founder’s Day!

  Two days later the Skool was in a ferment. Cookery II was producing great volumes of evil brown smoke. Welding III was sticking anything it could find made of metal to anything else it could find made of metal. Year 6 Gym was bounding to and fro like kangaroos in tight white jumpsuits. Ballet XIV was staring at itself in great mirrors until it could no longer tell what was real and what was not. The Footerers demolished several granite walls with their heads out of sheer high spirits.

  The staff were also affected. Dr Cosm strode to and fro in his white coat, quivering with ambition. The Headmaster made encouraging remarks in many languages, few of which anyone understood. Mato cheered the fracture clinic on in the San. And Wrekin Sartorius the Art Master murmured advice to the Art Crew as it painted a mural of Beauty triumphing over the Brute Creation, in which Beauty looked very like Miss Davies and the Brute Creation closely resembled Slee and Damage. (Onyx had had an eye on Mr Sartorius. It struck her that he was rather keen on Miss Davies, in a worshipping sort of way.)

  It was twilight when Miss Davies led the Skolars towards the farmyard. Nobody noticed them go.

  ‘Everyone in?’ said Miss Davies once the dovecote door had closed behind them.

  ‘In,’ said everyone. The air was heavy with tension.

  ‘Hold tight,’ said Miss Davies, and leaned on the Dove Pole.

  Squawk. Flap. Nests in head.

  The world was heaving up and down and from side to side, trying to buck them off. There was a noise, a great hollow booming. ‘Let’s have a look,’ said Miss Davies in a voice perhaps a little tighter than usual. She opened the door. ‘Well,’ she said, stepping outside.

  The air was cold, and smelled of salt. The dovecote stood on the upper slopes of a low green hill. On top of the hill was a long mound covered in grass. The hill seemed to be the highest of a range of hills. On all sides, lower crests rolled away into the distance –

  The not very
far distance. Two hills away, the crests turned into islands, separated from each other by valleys through which grey torrents of sea surged and eddied.

  ‘The water’s rising!’ squeaked Onyx.

  ‘Or possibly,’ said Owen, ‘the land is sinking.’

  ‘In which case,’ said Rosetti, ‘we should perhaps start looking for the Cup.’

  ‘But where?’ cried Onyx.

  Rosetti’s eyes narrowed. He appeared to be listening. ‘It’s calling,’ he said. ‘From the top of the hill.’

  ‘I’ll get it,’ said Owen.

  The Skolars walked swiftly up the hill. At the top was a level patch of turf. From the level patch rose a long, grassy mound.

  ‘A barrow,’ said Onyx.

  ‘It’s in there,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘Dangerous things, barrows,’ said Miss Davies. ‘Hey! Owen!’

  But Owen was already walking between two rows of white stones to a door in the green side of the mound.

  ‘How will it open?’ said Onyx.

  ‘Automatically,’ said Miss Davies grimly.

  Owen came to the stone doors and stood for a moment. There was a roar. The doors burst inwards. Owen trotted in.

  He ran down a dark tunnel that turned left, then right, and got absolutely pitch-black. He ran with his arms out so he could feel the walls on either side of him, dry and lined with stone. Ahead of him was a faint glow. Towards the glow he went, one hand on each wall. There were things that felt like spiders’ webs in his head, and little voices in his ears that said things like Go Back and Get From Here and What Do You Think You Are Doing. But Owen knew there were no spiders in his head and no earphones in his ears and that these things were therefore not real and therefore not worth bothering about. So he pressed on round the corner from which the light was glowing.

  And came into a place that even he realized was pretty peculiar.

  In front of him was a long stone box with a lid. At the far end of the box was a cube of granite. On the cube of granite stood the Greyte Cup for Achievement, glowing with a soft golden lustre.

  Owen stepped on to the lid of the stone box and walked across it. He put his hand near the Cup to check if the reason for its glow was that it was hot. It seemed coolish. So he picked it up and walked back over the box.

  The lid of the box moved under his feet – not a rocking movement, but a definite forward slide. Owen took two steps and jumped down. He heard the lid clonk on the stone floor behind him. He looked round. The box was open, and a figure was sitting up in it, a creature of bones without eyes dressed in armour that glowed pale blue.

  ‘Forth!’ cried the figure, pointing. ‘Take the Cup from this Drowning World to its Destiny!’

  Owen naturally wished to enquire what on earth this creature was, what had happened to its eyes and how it got its armour to glow in a place that had no electricity. He took a breath to do this. Unfortunately at that moment the roof fell in.

  For a moment, he felt the usual sort of crushing and smothering feelings that roof-collapse victims probably feel but do not get round to talking about for sad but obvious reasons. Then he was surprised to feel himself being shot along a tunnel in the same way that a pea is shot along a peashooter. And since Owen was not actually capable of being surprised, his brain shut down.

  ‘Nooo!’ cried Rosetti, horrorstruck as the barrow dimpled and collapsed.

  ‘Yess!’ cried Onyx, clapping her hands.

  For the doorway of the barrow bulged like a pair of lips and said PTOOOOARR, halfway between a spit and a roar. And out of the door shot Owen like a bullet from a gun. He hit the ground, turned two somersaults and landed on his feet.

  He shook his head. Soil flew out of his hair. His face wore its first ever dazed expression.

  ‘Look!’ cried Onyx. ‘Look!’

  Rosetti looked. Miss Davies looked. A mammoth on the next hill paused in its trumpeting and looked.

  In Owen’s hands, glowing golden in the sun, was the Greyte Cup.

  ‘Right!’ cried Miss Davies. ‘Everyone back to the dovecote, quick!’

  Everyone started to run towards the dovecote. The ground was shaking, the sound of the rising sea a sluicing roar. Then above the roar of the sea came a new noise – a clanking and a bellowing that sounded like a Footer cheer, though of course that could not be right, because this was the sinking of Atlantis and Footer would not be invented for thousands of –

  Over the horizon there galloped two very large people. They paused, looking around.

  ‘Slee,’ said Rosetti. ‘Damage. Run, Owen!’

  Owen turned to run. His feet got mixed up with each other. The Footbrawlers charged him down. Slee stooped and plucked the Cup out of his hands. The two of them ran on towards the dovecote.

  Rosetti ran to head them off. The Footerers knocked him down. Then they piled into the dovecote and slammed the door.

  ‘No!’ said Miss Davies.

  The dovecote door opened again. A figure sailed out and landed face first in the grass. The door closed.

  The dovecote vanished like a blown-out flame.

  The Polymathic Skolars stood open-mouthed, abandoned on a hillside in drowning Atlantis.

  The face-down figure got up and groaned. It was wearing the remains of a beautiful tweed suit.

  Flicking an artistic forelock out of its eye, it said, ‘What place is this?’

  ‘Wrekin!’ cried Miss Davies, her eyes lighting up.

  Wrekin Sartorius looked around him. Then he said, ‘The tide seems to be coming in. Top of the hill?’

  To the top of the hill they went, slowly, the way people would walk if they had recently been struck by lightning.

  ‘Well,’ said Miss Davies, when they reached the ruins of the burial mound. ‘Here we are.’

  All around them, great waves were crashing in on the sinking land.

  ‘Wild and splendid calamity,’ murmured Wrekin Sartorius. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Dr Cosm came back here in his Time Machine,’ said Owen. ‘He brought Slee and Damage. They stole the Greyte Cup and now they have stolen our Time Machine. So they have won the Grail and we’re stuck.’

  ‘And it’s getting a bit crowded up here,’ said Onyx. There were indeed animals everywhere on the remaining bump of dry land. Rosetti had the faraway look in his eye that meant he was speaking to non-human creatures with his mind. Onyx found she was holding Miss Davies’s hand.

  ‘Shoo,’ said Owen, batting away a sabre-toothed cat that was trying to climb on to his head.

  ‘And if I might ask,’ said Miss Davies, ‘what exactly are you doing here, Wrekin?’

  ‘I stowed away,’ said Sartorius.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I have been watching you. I had an inkling of Cosm’s plotting, and I think he is dangerous. I wanted… to protect… you,’ said Sartorius, going scarlet and avoiding Miss Davies’s eye.

  ‘Some hope,’ said Miss Davies, blushing herself.

  ‘And I must say,’ said Wrekin, ‘that although the protecting part has not worked out very well, I am happy, nay honoured, to be –’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Rosetti, ‘this is all very interesting but by my reckoning in ten minutes Atlantis will be one hundred per cent sunk.’ He moved to avoid being trodden on by a woolly rhinoceros. ‘And these animals are hostile when frightened and I am having trouble keeping them calm.’

  ‘True,’ said Miss Davies.

  ‘So what shall we do?’

  Miss Davies closed her eyes. ‘Father,’ she said.

  A huge wave reared a vast grey head, hung over the land and burst white upon the grassy slope. The ground shook. A blast of salt spray rolled over the people and animals, who squealed and roared with terror, according to species. And remarkable species they were.

  ‘Look!’ said Owen, fascinated. ‘A direwolf, ancestor of both the domestic dog and the woewolf.’

  ‘Behind you, Onyx,’ hissed Rosetti.

  Onyx turned. A direwolf was crouching, ready to spring. I
t measured two metres to the shoulder

  ‘Help!’ cried Onyx.

  ‘I can’t get through to its mind,’ said Rosetti. ‘Too primitive.’

  ‘Ye anymall bee quyte anciente alsoe,’ said a creaking voice behind him. ‘Ha ha. Begone, creature.’

  The direwolf’s eyes crossed, and it leaped into the sea. Abbott Dagger (for it was he) bowed deeply, sweeping the ground with his hat feather. ‘You called, deare Daughter,’ he said. ‘I begge ye, enter my Cabine of Voyagyng.’ He led them over the horizon and indicated the odd contrivance resting on the ground there. It looked like a flat-bottomed ship, with windows all round it. ‘Yn ye Clymbe.’

  ‘Father!’ said Miss Davies.

  ‘I knowe, ye Cupp, disaster, but Layterr. For lo, ye waters ryse –’

  ‘Father! Oh dear, too late,’ sighed Miss Davies.

  ‘Too layte? Saye, rather, too earlye,’ said Abbott Dagger, chortling at his great wit.

  ‘Thou haste trod in ye accident of ye direwolfe,’ said his daughter.

  ‘Blaste, blaste, blaste!’ cried the Abbot, wiping his shoe on one of the few tufts of grass remaining above water in Atlantis.

  ‘Ahem,’ said Rosetti. ‘I think perhaps we ought to be, er…’

  ‘Zooks!’ cried the Abbot, for the Time Ship was now floating on water, and beating against the hilltop with every wave that arrived. ‘Yn!’

  In they all leaped. The smell of direwolf accident was strong, but the desire to escape was stronger. The last thing Onyx saw as the door closed was the sea full of animals swimming towards the distant line of what must have been the mainland…

  Squawk, flap, nests in head. The door opened again.

  ‘Home Time,’ said the Abbot. ‘Out with ye! Begone!’

  The children found themselves standing in the dark and ruined farmyard. Miss Davies waved. The Time Ship went out like a candle flame.

  ‘Ah,’ said Miss Davies, walking across the yard. ‘I see they brought back the dovecote.’ She stuck her head in at the door. ‘Looks all right. But how did they get there?’

  ‘The Time Table,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘The wha?’

  ‘I realized when you were talking the other day. We saw it when we were in the Duggan Cube that night. I thought it was furniture but it was a machine. It looks like a grey metal table with chairs round it.’