The small hours of the morning always get a rough deal. They are actually the same length as other hours. They don’t really mind “small,” but they seriously object to the “wee, small hours,” which just sounds insulting.
During those hours after midnight, a bedraggled, soaked figure buzzed wearily through the rain. Dawlish had flown all night and he was exhausted. He had lost track of the hours, large or indeed wee. He couldn’t see the stars or the moon under all the clouds and he had lost his way. For a Tollin, it was a physical struggle to fly through the raindrops and wind. He was flung up and down, backwards then forwards. He was battered and bruised and weary, but he struggled on anyway.
A particularly vicious gust blew him into a wooden sign, making him dizzy for a while. He lay in the long grass and looked up at it. He couldn’t read human letters. If he had been able to, he’d have known it said “Chorleywood.”
Wearily, he forced himself to keep going. The rain died down before dawn and he found the train track and knew he was close. The station wasn’t far and though he hadn’t been there before, he was Tollin enough to find the tiny, hidden entrances that led to the tunnels deep below. He had made it and he was safe. He collapsed in a dry spot and went to sleep, just a few minutes before the High Tollin tripped over him and began yelling for his guards.
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN SLIPPERS ARE NOT THE RIGHT CHOICE
HE HIGH TOLLIN’S GUARDS had a firm grip on their prisoner as he was dragged into the Great Hall. The High Tollin was still flustered. He was not used to coming out of his bathroom and stumbling over a stranger. In fact, he was not used to strangers. The Tollins of Chorleywood all knew each other. Seeing a Tollin he did not know brought back terrible memories of the struggle with the Dark Tollins from Dorset. The High Tollin suspected his voice had gone a little high with the shock of it, so soon after brushing his teeth. He was covering his embarrassment with dignity and sheer indignation, though the effect was slightly spoiled by his bathrobe and slippers.
“Will the prisoner identify himself?” he demanded. Dawlish opened his mouth to reply and one of the guards cuffed him on the back of his head.
“Answer the High Tollin!” the guard bellowed. Dawlish could not rub his head, as his hands were bound in iron chains, which clanked nicely and were much more impressive than the old wooden ones. Instead, he glared at the guard.
“I’ll remember you, mate,” he said. The guard grinned evilly and then checked that Dawlish’s chains were secure, just in case.
“Name’s Dawlish, sir,” Dawlish said after a pause. “From Dorset.”
“A Dark Tollin?” one of the advisors exclaimed in horror. The other advisors shuddered as they recalled the plot to overthrow their beloved High Tollin.
“I flew night and day, sir, to get to Chorleywood. To warn you all, sir.”
“He could be a spy, sir,” one of the advisors murmured.
“A what?” the High Tollin replied.
“A spy, sir?”
“Ah! And a ‘spy’ is…?”
The advisor sighed.
“I’m sure we’ve been over this, sir. A spy is someone who creeps about and reports on us for our enemies, a wicked creature.”
The High Tollin glared at Dawlish.
“Is he? I see,” he said.
“I’m not a spy!” Dawlish said curtly. “I’ve come here to warn you.”
“He might not even be from Dorset, sir,” said the advisor. “Quick, prisoner, how long did it take you to get here?”
Dawlish shrugged.
“Aboat a mumf,” he said in his Dorset accent. Silence fell in the Great Hall.
“Some sort of code, was it?” the High Tollin whispered.
“I think he meant to say ‘about a month,’ sir.”
“Oh, I see. He should try that old rhyme. How now…brown…what was that thing with horns?”
“Was it a Viking, sir?”
“Don’t be silly, man. A cow, that was it. ‘How now, brown cow?’ It helps you speak properly, as I understand it.”
Dawlish watched all this in fascination. He had been told the Chorleywood Tollins were intelligent and dangerous folk, with more ideas than they knew what to do with. He was beginning to believe he had been misled.
At that moment, two young Tollins entered the Great Hall in a rush.
“Sparkler! And my dear Wing,” said the High Tollin. “Thank you for coming. Wing, would you mind fetching my work shoes?”
“In a minute, Father,” Wing replied. “Who is the prisoner?”
“He is a Dark Tollin spy, apparently. We’ve been interrogating him.”
Sparkler was watching Dawlish with some interest. He saw a young and grubby Tollin who was very close to losing his temper completely. Sparkler sympathized. He’d once been in the same position. Dawlish felt his steady gaze and turned his head until they were staring at each other.
“You told them you were a spy?” Sparkler said. Dawlish shook his head and sighed.
“No. I told them I’d come to warn you all.” He waited, but with Sparkler present, no one else seemed to want to interrupt.
“Well?” Sparkler said. “What was the warning then?”
Dawlish considered. He’d come a long way to help these people and instead of being grateful, they’d chained him up, thrown him on the floor and accused him of being a wicked creature. He was almost ready to forget about helping them, but this new one did seem a little brighter than the wrinkled old one.
“You’re about to be invaded,” he said at last. “There’s an army on the way.”
“What?” the High Tollin demanded. “You didn’t think to mention this before?”
“While your guards were chaining me up, perhaps?” Dawlish said. “Or dragging me through the tunnels to this place?”
“You could’ve walked,” the fat guard mumbled. “You only had to say.”
“I didn’t want to go with you!” Dawlish snapped.
“Draggin’s the only option then,” the guard murmured, staring at the floor.
“Get those chains off him,” Sparkler said. The guards looked to the High Tollin and he nodded, struck dumb with terror. It was Wing who took the keys from his belt and unlocked the chains. Dawlish rubbed his wrists and glared around him. The thin guard, Herbert, tried to hide behind the fat one and was surprisingly successful.
“You will need to summon your war council, High Tollin,” Dawlish said, taking a deep breath.
“War council?” the High Tollin said, his voice going squeaky again. He cleared his throat. “I don’t have one of those. My advisors are all…um…here.”
“Oh dear,” Dawlish said. “In that case, I think you could be in serious trouble.”
CHAPTER THREE
MAKING WAVES
N HIS WORKSHOP, Sparkler was testing the science fair project. Dawlish and Grunion were both watching him and for once, there was a grudging respect on the face of the Dorset Tollin.
“It picks up radio waves. They’re in the air, you see. The amazing thing is that it doesn’t even seem to need a power source.”*
Sparkler’s workshop was somewhere in the tunnels under the station. He’d insisted on blindfolding Dawlish before taking him there. He didn’t bother blindfolding Grunion. Grunion always had to be led out anyway. He could get lost in his own living room. The workshop contained very little, except a long bench and racks of tools. Most of them were made of wood or shell, but there were one or two made of metal and Dawlish had been amazed to find a spool of wire. Admittedly, Sparkler had found it practically abandoned on a shop shelf, with a price tag, but that wasn’t stealing, that was finding and it wasn’t as if the humans ever missed that sort of thing.
The contraption on the bench looked strange, even by Sparkler’s standards. It involved metal wire wound round and round a tube, with little loops sticking out. The most surprising bit was the telephone handset attached to it. That was the heavy part that had almost ruptured Grunion as he tried to carry it the
night before.
As Sparkler moved little metal clips up and down the wire, a strange unearthly voice came out of the telephone. It was slower than Tollin speech and it rumbled on and on, like distant thunder.
“…and in Rockall, the wind is mainly east, five to seven; the sea is moderate to rough, with occasional rain…and that is the end of the shipping forecast…”
“Human voices!” Dawlish said, with a gasp. “That’s incredible.”
“It’s just science,” Sparkler muttered. “The radio waves are there all the time, going through us. All the receiver does—”
“Hang on,” Grunion said suddenly. “Going through us? Right now, as I’m speaking, they’re going through me?” He covered his stomach protectively.
“They don’t do you any harm, Grun. At least, I can’t see how they could,” Sparkler replied absently. He was deep in thought. A radio could hear voices over a long distance, that much was obvious. What he needed was to be able to send his own voice back. Before it had just been a project, an exciting new idea. With the threat from the south, though, it could be a vital part of the defense when the Dark Tollins arrived. If he could just get it to work. He was wary of taking the human boy’s radio apart until he understood it, but he couldn’t understand it without taking it apart. Life was like that sometimes.
He hadn’t told Grunion about the torch he’d removed from the library cupboard in the Memorial Hall. It had a battery inside and he didn’t want to explain the whole “borrowing” thing again. He’d make it all right somehow, but he needed a battery if he was ever going to send his own voice back.
He propped his notebook up on the bench, vaguely aware of Dawlish staring at it in fascination. Sparkler didn’t show him the human book of 101 Things to Do where he’d found the original diagrams. He wasn’t yet sure if he trusted Dawlish, not completely anyway.
It was an odd thought. He wasn’t used to distrusting any Tollin. Yet there was Dawlish, peering at his private notebook and making Sparkler uncomfortable.
“Why don’t you go and show Dawlish the pond, Grunion?” Sparkler said, closing the book with a snap. “You could show him Blue Thunder, doing that turn thing.”
Grunion looked coldly at his friend. It was a bone of contention between them that Sparkler didn’t take dragonfly racing seriously enough.
“It’s called a wing stall turn, Spark, as you very well know. He has mastered it, as it happens. Come on, Dawlish. You’re going to love this.”
Dawlish seemed reluctant, but Sparkler waved him off with his friend and then when he was alone, he really set to work. He needed more batteries for what he had in mind. If it came off, it would teach the Dark Tollins an important lesson.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE PROBLEM WITH HEDGES
ORSET IS ABOUT NINETY MILES to the south and west of Chorleywood. It is an area on the south coast of England which is extremely pretty. The humans there enjoy the sea breezes and frequently tell each other how invigorating it all is. They make a point of doing things more slowly than Londoners, because, well, just because they can. Doing things slowly is sometimes a good thing. Building a house of cards is better if done slowly, while running for a bus should be quick. Eating a steak-and-kidney pie should definitely be slow, while drinking medicine should definitely be quick. Leading an army to war should also be quick, as any great general will tell you. You do not mess around during the frontal assault, stopping to buy postcards, then chewing on your pen as you consider what to write home.
And so on. That is not the right way to launch a major offensive.
Wangle was one Dark Tollin who understood little rules like that. He was not a pleasant Dark Tollin. It was thanks to Tollins like Wangle that the Dorset clan were still called Dark Tollins by everyone else, instead of something more to do with the countryside, like Sheep-dip Tollins, say, or Wurzels. No one in London knows what a Wurzel is, but it does sound a bit country and quite nice.
Wangle had tried once before to take over the Chorleywood tunnels. That had been a sneak attack and ended with him being flooded out and washed away, when Sparkler had invented a pump. Wangle had learned a few lessons from that experience. He had learned to swim, for a start. More importantly, he had learned that not everything the humans did was wrong. If human books had been such a help to Chorleywood Tollins, he reasoned, perhaps they might be useful to Dark ones as well.
It is perhaps unfortunate that one of the first books he found was The Ladybird Book of Battles. He couldn’t read it then, of course, though he’d enjoyed the pictures of explosions. It had taken him less than two years to learn to read, which isn’t bad, start to finish. He learned so quickly because Wangle was driven. Not in the sense of being taken around in a car, obviously. “Driven” in the sense of having a mission. His mission was simple. His mission was revenge.
The chapter on Hannibal had been the one that really caught his attention. Hannibal had used elephants in battle to terrify the ancient Romans. Wangle had never seen an elephant, but he had seen cats.
The one he was riding towards Chorleywood was a mature tomcat named Stripes by his previous owners. Stripes was frankly furious in the way that only cats can manage. Wangle had tied a harness on him, with steering reins and everything. Stripes had then gone completely berserk. It is very hard to train a cat to do anything. Only a will like Wangle’s could have managed it and even then, he had picked up extraordinary scratches and lost a finger in the process. The other Dark Tollins treated Stripes with terrified respect whenever Wangle rode by.
Even Wangle had given up on the idea of a herd of cats, like Hannibal and his elephants, but it was no great loss. Stripes on his own would terrify the Tollins of Chorleywood, Wangle was absolutely certain. Stripes would terrify anyone.
After two weeks of living in hedges and eating whatever they could find, Wangle’s horde of invading Tollins had reached the town of Henley and the banks of an enormous river. Stripes could not be forced into the water and none of the Dark Tollins liked the idea anyway. Over the years, a few Tollins had been badly gummed by trout as they crossed rivers. That wasn’t a pleasant experience by anyone’s standards.
There was a bridge, but it seemed a bit exposed. Tollins are used to being invisible to humans, but no one could fail to notice a cat wearing a saddle with little stirrups.
From his high seat, Wangle looked down on the horde and saw they were fired up with enthusiasm. They always looked like that when he stared at them. It was safer that way. The way Stripes looked at them wasn’t pleasant, either. It was a look that said, “One day, I won’t be wearing a harness and I’ll find you. When I do, you will regret it.”
When Wangle turned back to watching the river, they all slumped, looking cold and miserable.
“We’ll wait for night to use the bridge,” Wangle said.
“Yes, sir,” the horde replied in unison. There were thirty-two of them, which actually doesn’t seem that many for a horde, but Tollins are not very numerous. For the Dorset tribe, it was quite a commitment. They’d rubbed soot on their faces. They even had a flag with a picture of a snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me” as a motto. It was probably an adder, on the flag. No one minds treading on a grass snake. All they can do is look offended.
Wangle had persuaded the Dark Tollin Magnus to let him form a horde, but the volunteers weren’t quite as keen as he was. No one could be, really. Wangle had not forgiven the Tollins of Chorleywood for his defeat. His hatred burned with a pure flame and he would not be turned back. It was strange, but only Stripes understood that sort of rage—all cats do.
Wangle suspected the Tollin Magnus had only agreed to the invasion because he was too nice to say no to anything.
He leaned down and tapped his second-in command on the shoulder.
“Kerton,” he said. “Take two Tollins and scout the area. We’ll make camp here until nightfall. Search the nearest hedges for something to eat. A mouse for Stripes, if you can catch one.”
Kerton was
a solid, mature Tollin, with ears that stuck out. He was used to following orders, though he raised his eyes at the thought of digging through hedges yet again. There was never anything good in a hedge. It wasn’t like you’d come across a sandwich growing wild or something.
“Right, sir. Humble and Carter, you’re with me.” The three Tollins buzzed into the air, determined not to let Wangle down.
Wangle stared across the gray water. If he remembered it right, there were only around fifteen miles to go. On Stripes, he could do it much faster, but only by leaving the others behind. Even so, he thought they could be on the outskirts of Chorleywood by the following evening. He’d show them the price of humiliating a Dark Tollin then. When he left the Chorleywood tunnels this time, he’d leave them in flames.
“In flames!” he said suddenly. The horde shrank back.
“Sir?” one of them ventured after a bit of elbowing from the others.
“Never mind. Get some sleep, lads. Busy day tomorrow.”
Wangle dismounted at last, remembering not to let go of the reins until he had them firmly fastened to a tree branch. He also had to remember not to walk close to the teeth, or the claws. Stripes was fast and Wangle knew the cat watched him all the time. He doubted Hannibal had ever had this kind of trouble with an elephant.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PROBLEM WITH A HAIR TRIGGER
OOK, GRUNION. I don’t have time to mess around, all right? Yes, it’s deadly. That is the whole point of a crossbow, really. If I wanted you to merely irritate a Dark Tollin, I’d get you to throw your foot at him.”
Grunion looked hurt. He felt it was bad taste to mention his wooden foot. It was far too valuable to be used as a weapon anyway. There was literally only one of it.
Tollins 2: Dynamite Tales Page 3