Who's Afraid of Beowulf

by Tom Holt

  But Prexz wasn’t listening. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘only one way to find out.’

  The two spirits sat in silence for a while, as if preparing themselves for a great adventure.

  ‘Right,’ sighed Zxerp. ‘If we’re going, we’re going. Where are we going, by the way?’

  ‘Dunno. The world is our oyster, really.’

  ‘Terrific. Oh, hang on.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Shall I bring the game, then?’

  Prexz scratched his head. On the one hand, the world was full of new, exciting things for a chthonic spirit to do: elements to explore, currents of power coursing through the magma layer to revel in, static to drink and ultrasound to eat. On the other hand, he was winning.

  ‘Go on, then,’ he said. ‘Might as well.’

  ‘If anybody asks,’ Hildy whispered, ‘you’re the chorus of the Scottish National Opera off to a rehearsal of Tannhäuser in Inverness. I’m going to get some food.’

  She had parked the van in a backstreet in Thurso, just round the corner from a fish and chip shop. She hated leaving them like this, but the clamour of the King’s champions for food was becoming intolerable, and nothing else was open at this time of night, except the off-licence. ‘Cod and chips for fourteen and fourteen cans of lager,’ she muttered to herself as she trudged up the darkling street. She only hoped she had enough money to pay for all that. And how long was all this going to last, at three meals a day, not to mention finding them all somewhere to sleep?

  Back in the van, the standard-bearer was being difficult, as usual.

  ‘But how do we know we can trust her?’ he said. ‘I mean, you don’t know her from Freyja. She’s obviously some sort of a witch, or how come this thing moves about without oars?’

  The King shook his head. ‘We can trust her,’ he said. ‘But she doesn’t seem to know very much. Whether that’s good or bad, I don’t know.’

  ‘So you think there’s still danger?’ said the huge man, who was bent nearly double at the back of the van.

  ‘There’s danger all right, Starkad Storvirksson,’ replied the King thoughtfully. ‘That much we can be sure of. I can feel it all around me. And I think the woman Hildy Frederik’s-daughter is right that we should not reveal ourselves until we have found out exactly what is going on. I do not doubt that the power of the enemy has grown while we have slept.’

  When Hildy returned, exhausted and laden down with two carrier-bags, the King ordered his men to be quiet. ‘We had better not stay in this town,’ he said. ‘Can you take us back into open country?’

  Hildy nodded, too tired to speak, and they drove out of Thurso for about half an hour to a bleak and deserted fell under a grey mountain. There the company got out and lit a fire in a small hollow hidden from the road. Hildy handed out paper packages of cod and chips and cans of lager, which the champions eyed with the greatest suspicion.

  ‘I’m afraid it may have got cold,’ Hildy said, ‘but it’s better than nothing.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked the horn-bearer. ‘I mean, what do you do with it?’

  ‘Try taking the paper off,’ said Hildy. The huge man looked up in surprise; he had already eaten the wrapping of his.

  ‘The brown stuff on the outside is called batter,’ Hildy said. ‘It’s made from eggs and flour and things. Inside there’s fish.’

  ‘I don’t like fish,’ said a champion with a silver helmet.

  ‘The small brown things are chips,’ Hildy continued. ‘They weren’t invented in your time. There’s beer in the metal tubes.’

  The champion in the silver helmet started to ask if there was any mead instead, but the King frowned at him. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘We owe you a great debt already, Hildy Frederik’s-daughter.’

  Hildy nodded; they owed her twenty-two pounds and seventy-five pence, and she could see little chance of her ever getting it back. The authors of all the sagas she had read had been notably reticent about the cost of mass catering.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ she said wearily. ‘My pleasure.’

  ‘In return,’ said the King through a mouthful of cod, ‘I must explain to you who we are and why we were sleeping in the mound in the first place. But I must ask you to remember that this is a serious business. Wise is he who knows when to speak; wiser still, he who knows when to stay silent.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said Hildy, who recognised that as a quotation from the Elder Edda. ‘Go on, please.’

  The King bent his can of lager into the shape of a drinking-horn and pulled off the ring-pull. ‘My father was Ketil Trout,’ he said, ‘and he ruled over the Orkneys and Caithness. He was a wise and strong king, not loved overmuch by his people but feared by his enemies, and when he fell in battle he was buried in his ship.’

  ‘Where?’ Hildy asked, for she still had the instincts of an archaeologist. But the King ignored her.

  ‘I succeeded him as king,’ he said. ‘I was only fourteen at the time, and my uncle Hakon Claw ruled as regent until I reached the age of sixteen. When I came to the throne, I led my people out to war. I was strong then, tall for my age and burning with the desire to win glory. The people worshipped me, and I foresaw a succession of marvellous victories; my sword never sheathed, my banner never furled, my kingdom growing day by day in size and power.’

  The King stopped speaking, and Hildy could see by the light of the fire that there were tears in his bright quick eyes. She waited patiently, and he continued.

  ‘As you can see, Hildy Frederick’s-daughter, I was a wicked fool in my youth, blinded with tales and the long names of heroes. That’s what comes of paying attention to the stories of long ago; you wish to emulate them, to bring the Elder Days back into the present. But there never was an age of heroes; when Sigurd Fafnir’s Bane was digging dragon-traps in the Teutoberger Wald, they were already singing songs about the great heroes and days that would never come again. But I wasted many lives of farmers’ sons who could not wait for the barley to ripen, leading armies into unnecessary battles, killing enemies who did not merit killing. What are these songs that they promised me they would make, and sing when I was cold in the howe? You say you have read all the sagas of our people, and studied the glorious deeds of heroes. Is there still a song about the battle of Melvich, or the fight at Tongue, when I struck down Jarl Bjorn in front of his own mainmast?’

  Hildy turned away and said nothing.

  ‘They promised me a song,’ said the King. ‘Perhaps they made one; if they did not, it does not matter very much. I found all those songs very dreary; warflame whistled and wolves feasted when Hrolf the Ring-Giver reddened the whale-road. The arrows always blotted out the sun, I remember, and the poet didn’t get paid unless blade battered hard on helmet at least once in the first stanza.’

  The King smiled bitterly, and threw more wood on the fire. It crackled and grew brighter, and he continued.

  ‘Then one day I was wounded, quite seriously. Strangely enough, it wasn’t a great hero or an earl who did it; it was just a miserable little infantryman whose ship we had boarded. I expected him to hold still and be killed, because I was a hero and he was only a peasant, but I suppose he didn’t know the rules, or was too scared to obey them. Anyway, he hit me across the forehead with an axe - not a battle-axe with runes all over the blade, something run up by the local blacksmith. I think it knocked some sense into my thick head, because that was the end of my career as a sea-raider, even though I made a complete recovery. I went back home and tried to take a serious interest in more mundane matters, such as whether the people had enough to eat and were the roads passable in winter. I’m afraid I was a great disappointment to my loyal subjects; they liked their kings blood-thirsty.

  ‘Just when the world was beginning to make a little sense, and nobody bothered to invade us any more because we refused to fight, something started to happen away up north in Finnmark, in the kingdom of Geirrodsgarth, where the sorcerers lived. I think they stopped fighting among themselves and made an alliance. W
hatever it was, there was suddenly an army of invulnerable berserks loose in the northern seas; all the fighting men who were too vicious even to be heroes had apparently been making their way there for years, and the sorcerer-king organised them into an army. And that wasn’t all. He had trolls, and creatures made out of the bodies of dead men, which he brought back to life, and the spirits of wolves and bears put into human shape. Suddenly the game became rather serious, and the kings and earls settled their differences very quickly, and started to offer high wages to any competent wizard who specialised in military magic. But most of those had joined up with the enemy, and quite soon there were battles about which nobody made up any songs, as the ships from Geirrodsgarth appeared off the coasts of every kingdom in the north.

  ‘There seemed little point in fighting, because the ordinary hacking and slashing techniques didn’t seem to work on the sorcerer’s army. But I was lucky, I suppose, or my ancestor Odin came to my aid. In a stone hut in Orkney lived a wizard called Kotkel, and he knew a few tricks that the enemy did not. He came to me and told me that I could withstand the enemy, perhaps even overthrow him, if I found a brooch, called the Luck of Caithness; with that in my possession, I could at least fight on equal terms. At that time, all the fugitives from the great kings’ armies were pouring into my kingdom, and so I had the pick of the fighters of the age. I chose the very best: Ohtar and Hring, Brynjolf the Shape-Changer and Starkad Storvirksson, Angantyr and Bothvar Bjarki, Helgi and Hroar and Hjort, Arvarodd, who had been to Permia and killed giants, and Egil Kjartansson, called the Dancer. I sent them to find the brooch, and within a month they had found it. Then we went to fight the sorcerer. And we won, at Rolfsness, after a battle that lasted two days and two nights.

  ‘But something went wrong at the last moment. One of us - I can’t remember who, and it doesn’t matter - had the sorcerer-king on the point of his spear but let him get away, and he escaped, although all his army, berserks and trolls and ghost-warriors, were utterly destroyed. We had failed, in spite of all our efforts, and we knew it. Of course, we did our best to make up. We raised forces in every kingdom in the north and went to Geirrodsgarth, where we razed the sorcerer-king’s stronghold to the ground and killed all his creatures in their nests. We searched for him under every rock and in every barn and hay-loft; but he had escaped. Some said he had ridden away on the wind, leaving his body behind, and others assured me that he had sunk into the sea.

  ‘Then the wizard Kotkel came to me and gave me more advice, and I realised that I would have to take it. I ordered my longship Naglfar to be brought up on to the battlefield at Rolfsness and sunk into a mound.While the wizard cast his spells and cut runes into the joists and beams of the chamber, I gathered together my champions and led them into the ship. Then the wizard sang a sleeping spell, and we all fell asleep, and they closed up the mound. That last spell was a strong one; we should not wake until the day had come when the sorcerer-king was once again at the summit of his power and threatening the world. Then we should do battle with him once more, for the last time. And there we have been ever since, Hildy Frederik’s-daughter. Quite a story, isn’t it? Or aren’t there any songs about it? No? I’m not surprised. I think people rather lost interest in stories about heroes after the sorcerer-king appeared; most of them seemed to be in rather bad taste.’

  For a while, Hildy sat and stared into the heart of the fire, wondering whether or not she could believe this story, even out on the fells, by night beside a fire. It was not that she suspected the King of lying; and she believed in his existence, and that he had just woken up after twelve hundred years of sleep. But something struggling to stay alive inside her told her that some token show of disbelief was necessary if she was to retain her identity, or at least her sanity. Then it occurred to her, like the obvious solution to some tiresome puzzle, that her belief was not needed, just as the meat need not necessarily consent to being cooked. She had entered the service of a great lord; part of the bargain between lord and subject is that the subject does not have to understand the lord’s design; so long as the subject obeys the lord’s orders, her part is discharged, and no blame can attach to her.

  ‘So what are you going to do?’ she asked.

  The King smiled. ‘I shall find the sorcerer-king and I shall destroy him, if I can,’ he said. ‘That sounds simple enough, don’t you think? If you keep things simple, and look to the end, not the problems in the way, most things turn out to be possible. That is not in any Edda, but I think it will pass for wisdom.’

  The King rose slowly to his feet and beckoned to the wizard, who had been sitting outside the circle of the fire-light, apparently trying to find a spell that would make a beer-can magically refill itself. They walked a little way into the night, and spoke together softly for a while.

  Hildy began to feel cold, and one of the champions noticed her shivering slightly and took off his cloak and offered it to her.

  ‘My name is Angantyr,’ he said, ‘son of Asmund son of Geir. My father was earl of—’

  ‘Not you as well,’ moaned the horn-bearer. ‘Can’t we have a song or something instead?’

  Hildy wrapped the cloak round her shoulders. It was heavy and seemed to envelop her, like a fall of warm snow.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said Angantyr Asmundarson. ‘The lady and I—’

  ‘Don’t you take any notice of him,’ said the standard-bearer. ‘He’s not called Angantyr the Creep for nothing.’

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ replied Angantyr.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Hildy said. The heroes looked at her. ‘Which one of you is Arvarodd?’

  ‘I am,’ said a gaunt-looking hero in a black cloak.

  Hildy was blushing. ‘Are you the Arvarodd who went to Permia?’ she asked shyly. For some reason the heroes burst out laughing, and Arvarodd scowled.

  ‘I read your saga,’ she said, ‘all about the giants and the magic shirt of invulnerability. Was it like that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arvarodd.

  ‘Oh.’ Hildy bit her lip nervously. ‘Could I have your autograph, please? It’s not for me, it’s for the Department of Scandinavian Studies at St Andrews University,’ she added quickly. Then she hid her face in the cloak.

  ‘What’s an autograph?’ asked Arvarodd.

  ‘Could you write your name on - well, on that beer-can? ’

  Arvarodd raised a shaggy eyebrow, then scratched a rune on the empty Skol can with the point of his dagger and handed it to her.

  ‘Everyone’s always kidding him about his trip to Permia,’ Angantyr whispered in her ear. ‘All his great deeds, and the battles and the dragons and so forth - well, you heard the saga, didn’t you? - and all anyone ever asks him is “Are you the Arvarodd who went to Permia?” And it was only a trading-voyage, and all he brought back was a few mouldy old furs.’

  The King and the wizard came back to the fire and sat down.

  ‘The drinks are on the wizard,’ announced the King, and at once the heroes crowded round the wizened old man, who started to pour beer out of his can into theirs.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said the King to Hildy, ‘the wizard and I have thought of something. But we’re going to need a little help.’

  There are many tall office-blocks in the City of London, but the tallest of them all is Gerrards Garth House, the home of the Gerrards Garth group of companies. Someone - perhaps it was the architect - thought it would be a good idea to have a black office-block instead of the usual white, and so the City people in their wine bars refer to it as the Dark Tower.

  The very top floor is one enormous office, and few people have ever been there. It is full of screens and desktop terminals, and the telephones are arrayed in battalions, like the tanks at a march-past. On the wall is a large electronic map of the world, with flashing lights marking the Gerrards Garth operations in every country. On a busy day it almost seems as if the entire world is burning.

  The building was entirely dark, except for one light in this top office, and in that offi
ce there was only one man: a big burly man with red cheeks and large forearms. He was staring into a bank of screens on which there were many columns of figures, and from time to time he would tap in a few symbols. Then the screens would clear and new figures would come up before him. He did not seem to be tired or impatient, or particularly concerned with what he saw; it looked very much as if everything was nicely under control. Thanks, no doubt, to the new technology.

  And then the screens all over the office went out, and came on again. All over them, little green figures raced up and down, like snowflakes in a blizzard, while every light that could possibly flash began to flash at once. Unfamiliar symbols which were to be found in no manual moved back and forth with great rapidity, forming themselves into intricate spirals and interweaving curves of flickering light, and all the telephones began to ring at once. The man gripped the arms of his chair and stared. Suddenly all the screens stopped flickering, and one picture appeared on all of them, glowing very brightly, while the overhead lights went out, and the terminals began to spit out miles of printout paper covered in words from a hundred forgotten languages.

  The man leant forward and looked at the screen closest to him. The picture was of a golden brooch, in the shape of a flying dragon.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘Admit it, Zxerp,’ said a voice, ‘you’ve never had it so good.’ The postman, who had just been about to get on his bicycle for the long ride back to Bettyhill, stopped dead in his tracks and stared at the telegraph wires over his head. He could have sworn that one of them had just spoken. He looked around suspiciously, but nothing stirred in the grey dawn.

  ‘I mean,’ said the voice, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what this stuff is, but it beats geothermal energy into a cocked hat.’

  The postman jumped on his bicycle and pedalled away, very fast.

  ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ replied Zxerp. ‘A bit on the sweet side for my taste, but it has a certain something.’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.