Who's Afraid of Beowulf

by Tom Holt

  She had a headache now, and tried to get some sleep, but when she dozed a dream came to her, and she thought she stood on the roof of a very high office-block somewhere in Manhattan or Chicago, from which she could see all the kingdoms of the earth below her. That was curious enough but what was odder still was that large areas of the world were apparently dyed or cross-hatched in a colour she had never been aware of before. Then something rolled out of her pocket, and she stopped to retrieve it. It was the third pebble that Arvarodd had lent her, the one whose use was unknown, and it was the same colour as the cross-hatching.

  Then the train went over some points, and she woke up. Once she had recovered her wits sufficiently, she took out the roll of cloth and extracted from it the third pebble. It felt warm in her hand, and something prompted her to put it in her mouth and suck it. It tasted rather bitter, but not unpleasantly so, and she picked up the magazine and started to read it a third time.

  By the time the train pulled in to Euston, she was sweating and feeling very frightened. She took the pebble out of her mouth and put it away, then walked briskly to a small and not too horrible hotel she had stayed in before. She did not sleep well that night.

  The next morning, promptly at nine-thirty, she walked down to Holborn, where the dealers in antiquities have their lairs. There she converted the golden brooch into seven thousand pounds cash money. It seemed strange to be walking about with so much money in her pocket, but she was in no mood to entrust it to a bank.

  Next she went to the London University bookshop, where she bought a number of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon texts, of such great popularity that the prices on the backs were still in shillings, and then to the British Museum, where she spent several hours in the Reading Room. After a cup of coffee and a hamburger, she caught a train for Inverness. It took even longer than the train down, but the journey passed quickly, for she was used to working on trains.

  She stayed the night in a hotel in Inverness, and spent the next morning among the secondhand-car dealers, trying to find a fourteen-seater van. Most of those that were within her price range had no engine or less than the conventional number of wheels, but eventually she found something suitable, which she christened Sleipnir, after the eight-legged warhorse of the god Odin. Then she went to Marks & Spencer and bought fourteen suits; she had to guess at the sizes, but she knew that you can always change things from Marks & Spencer if they don’t fit. The woman at the cash-desk gave her a suspicious look, and Hildy could not really blame her; but the worst she could be suspected of doing was organising a cell of Jehovah’s Witnesses, which was not a crime, even in Scotland. Shoes were more of a problem, but she decided on something large and simple in black; timeless, she thought to herself. They would need to be, after all.

  There were other things, notably food and blankets and camping-stoves, and by the time she had got everything there was not much money left and she was exhausted. She filled the van up with petrol - how do you explain petrol to Viking heroes? This wagon has no horses, it moves by burning dead leaves - and started off on the long drive to Caithness.

  ‘Don’t talk daft,’ said the horn-bearer, ‘that’s the Haystack.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s talking daft, Bothvar Bjarki,’ replied Arvarodd. ‘That’s Vinndalf ’s Crown. You find Vinndalf ’s Crown by going left from the Pole Star until you reach the Thistle, then straight down past the Great Goat.’

  ‘If that’s all you know about the stars,’ replied Bothvar Bjarki, ‘it’s no wonder you ended up in bloody Permia. Where were you trying to get to - Oslo?’

  Arvarodd gathered up his cloak and moved pointedly to the other side of the fire. There the huge man and another champion were sitting playing chess on a portable chess-set made out of walrus ivory.

  ‘Is that checkmate?’ asked the huge man.

  ‘Afraid so,’ replied his opponent.

  ‘I always lose,’ said the huge man.

  ‘You can’t help it if you’re stupid, Starkad,’ replied his opponent kindly. ‘A berserk isn’t meant to be clever. If he was clever, he wouldn’t be a berserk. And you’re a very good berserk, isn’t he, Arvarodd?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Arvarodd. The huge man beamed with pleasure, and his smile seemed to light up the camp.

  ‘Thank you, Brynjolf,’ said Starkad Storvirksson. ‘And you’re a very good shape-changer.’

  ‘Thank you, Starkad,’ said Brynjolf, trying to conceal the fact that he had had this conversation before. ‘How about another game, then?’

  ‘Don’t you want to play, Arvarodd?’ Starkad asked, looking at the hero of Permia. Starkad loved chess, even though he invariably lost, although how he managed to do so when everybody cheated to make sure he won was a complete mystery.

  ‘No, not now,’ Arvarodd said. ‘I’m going to get some sleep in a minute.’

  ‘Can I be black, then?’

  ‘But white always moves first, Starkad,’ said Brynjolf gently. ‘Don’t you want to move first?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said the berserk. ‘I’ve noticed that I always seem to lose when I play first.’

  If Brynjolf closed his eyes, it was only for a moment. They played a couple of moves, and Brynjolf advanced his king straight down the board into a nest of black pieces.

  ‘Tell me something, Brynjolf,’ said Starkad softly, marching his rook straight past the place Brynjolf had meant it to go, ‘why do Bothvar and the others call me Honey-Starkad?’

  Brynjolf stared at the board and scratched his head. Yet again, it was impossible for him to move without check-mating his opponent. ‘Because you’re sweet and thick, Starkad,’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ said the berserk, as if some great mystery had been revealed to him. ‘Oh, I see. It’s your move.’

  ‘Checkmate,’ said Brynjolf.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The job description had never said anything about this, thought the young man as he scooped up the armfuls of paper that had spilled out of the printers during the night. The Big Bang, yes. The New Technology, certainly. The waste paper, no.

  He paused, exhausted by the unaccustomed effort, and cast his eyes over a sheet at random. It said:

  And probably meant it, too. It might be BASIC, or it might be FORTRAN, or any other of those computer languages, except that he knew all of them and it wasn’t. If he was expected to do a reasoned efficiency breakdown on it and report intelligently in the morning, they were going to be disappointed.

  ‘What are you doing with those?’

  The young man jumped, and several yards of continuous stationery fell to the floor and wound themselves round his feet, almost affectionately, like a cat.

  ‘It’s last night’s printout, Mr . . .’ He never could remember the boss’s name. In fact he wasn’t sure anyone had ever told him what it was.

  ‘Leave that alone.’ The old sod was in a worse mood than usual. ‘Have you looked at it?’

  ‘Well, no, not in any great detail yet. I was hoping . . .’

  ‘Put it down and clear off.’

  ‘Yes, Mr . . .’

  No point in even trying to place it tidily on the desk. The young man let it slither from his arms, and fled.

  ‘And find me Mr Olafsen, now.’

  The young man stopped. One more stride and he would have been out of the door and clear.

  ‘I’m not positive he’s in the building, actually, Mr . . .’

  ‘I didn’t ask you if he was in the building. I asked you to find him.’

  This time the young man made it out of the door. There was something about his employer that he didn’t like, a sort of air of menace. It was not just the fear of the sack; more like an atmosphere of physical danger. He asked Mr Olafsen’s secretary if she knew where he was.

  Apparently he was in Tokyo. Where exactly in Tokyo, however, she refused to speculate. He had been sent there on some terribly urgent business with instructions not to fail. In the event of failure, he should carry the firm’s principle of conforming to local
business methods to its logical conclusion and commit hara-kiri.

  ‘He was in a foul mood that day - worse than usual,’ went on the secretary. ‘You might try phoning the Tokyo office. I don’t know what time it is over there, and they might all be out running round the roof or kicking sacks or whatever it is they do, but you might be lucky.’

  A series of calls located Mr Olafsen at a golf-course on the slopes of Mount Fuji, and he was put through to his employer.

  ‘Thorgeir, there’s trouble,’ said the boss. ‘Get back here as quick as you like.’

  ‘Won’t it wait? If I can get round in less than fifty-two, we’ll have more semiconductors than we know what to do with.’

  ‘No, it won’t. It’s dragon trouble.’

  ‘This is a terrible line. I thought you said—’

  ‘I said dragon trouble, Thorgeir.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’

  The boss put down the telephone. The knowledge that he would soon have Thorgeir Storm-Shepherd at his side did something to relieve the panic that had afflicted him all day. Thorgeir might not have courage, but he had brains, and his loyalty was beyond question. That at least was certain; any disloyalty, and he knew he would be turned back into the timber-wolf he had originally been, when the sorcerer-king had first found him in the forests of Permia. Timber-wolves cannot wear expensive suits or drive Lagondas with any real enjoyment, and Thorgeir had become rather attached to the good life.

  ‘Why now?’ the sorcerer-king asked himself, for the hundredth time that morning. With repetition, the question appeared to be resolving itself. There was the little matter of the Thirteenth Generation, the final coincidence of hardware and software that the sorcerer-king had vaguely dreamt of back at the start of his career under the shade of ancestral fir-trees, when artificial intelligence had been confined to stones with human voices and other party tricks. It had been a long road since then, and he had come a long way along it. No earthly power could prevent him, since no earthly power would for one instant take seriously any accurate description of the threat he posed to the world and its population. But the dragon and the King had never been far from his mind ever since he had abandoned his mortal body on the battlefield at Rolfsness and escaped, rather ignominiously disguised as a Bad Idea.

  The sorcerer-king leant his elbows on his desk and tried to picture the Luck of Caithness, that irritatingly elusive piece of Dark Age circuitry. As a work of art, it had never held much attraction for him. As a circuit diagram it had haunted his dreams, and he had racked his memory for the details of its involved twists and curves. For of course the garnets and stones that the unknown craftsman had set in the yellow gold were microchips of unparalleled ingenuity, and in the endless continuum of the interlocking design was vested a system of such strength that no successor could hope to rival or dominate it.

  The sorcerer-king shook his head, and struck one broad fist into the other. He had tried everything he knew to avoid this day, and made every possible preparation for it, but now that it had come he felt desperate and hopeless. Yet, if it were to come to the worst, he was still what he had always been, and old ways were probably the best. He rose from his desk and took from his pocket the keys to the heavy oak trunk that seemed so much out of place among the tubular steel of his office. The lock was stiff, but it turned with a little effort, and he pushed up the lid. From inside he lifted a bundle wrapped in purple velvet. He took a deep breath and gently undid the silk threads that held the bundle together, revealing a decorated golden scabbard containing a long beautiful sword. He drew it out and felt the blade with his thumb. Still sharp, after all these years. He made a few slow-motion passes with the blade, and the pull of its weight on the muscles of his forearm reminded him of dangers overcome. With a grunt, he swung the sword round his head and brought it down accurately and with tremendous force on a dark green filing-cabinet, cleaving it from A to J. At that moment, the door opened.

  The young man had not wanted to go back into the boss’s office. As he turned the handle of the door, he could hear a terrific crash, and he nearly abandoned the mission there and then. But the letters had to be signed.

  The sorcerer-king had just lifted his sword clear of the filing-cabinet, feeling rather foolish. He stared at the young man, who stared back. At last the young man, with all the fatuity of youth, found speech.

  ‘Jammed again, did it?’

  ‘Did it?’ The sorcerer-king was sweating, despite the air-conditioning.

  ‘The filing-cabinet. I think it’s dust getting in the locks.’

  The sorcerer-king glanced down at the filing-cabinet, and at the sword in his hands. ‘Come in and shut the door,’ he said pleasantly.

  The young man did as he was told. ‘If it’s about the luncheon vouchers,’ he said nervously, ‘I can explain.’

  ‘So can I,’ said the sorcerer-king. Of course, there was no need for him to do so, but suddenly he felt that he wanted to. He had kept this secret for more than a thousand years, and he felt like talking to someone. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘What can I get you to drink?’

  He laid the sword nonchalantly on his desk and produced a bottle from a drawer. ‘Try this,’ he suggested. ‘Mead. Of course, it’s nothing like the real thing . . .’ He poured out two glasses and drank one himself, to show his guest that the drink was not poisoned.

  The young man struggled to find something to say. ‘Nice sword,’ he ventured. Then he recollected what Mr Olafsen’s secretary had been saying about Japanese business methods.

  ‘“Nice” is rather an understatement,’ said the sorcerer-king, and added something about the cut and thrust of modern commerce. The young man smiled awkwardly. ‘Tell me, Mr Fortescue,’ he continued, ‘do you enjoy working for the company?’

  ‘Er,’ said Mr Fortescue.

  The boss seemed not to have heard him. ‘It’s an old-established company, of course. Very old-established.’ He leant forward suddenly. ‘Have you the faintest idea how old-established it is?’

  The young man said no, he hadn’t. The boss told him. He also told him about the fortress of Geirrodsgarth, the battle of Melvich, and the intervening thousand years. He told him about the dragon-brooch, the King of Caithness, and the wizard Kotkel. He told him about the New Magic and its relationship with the New Technology, and how the Thirteenth Generation would be the culmination of all that had gone before.

  ‘I realised quite early,’ said the sorcerer-king, ‘that magic in the sense that I understood it all those centuries ago had a relatively short future. It wasn’t the problem of credibility - that was never a major drawback. But it’s basically a question of the fundamental problem at the root of all industrial processes.’ The sorcerer-king poured himself another glass of mead and lit a cigar.

  ‘Look at it this way. In all other industries, the quantum leap from small-scale to large-scale, from workshop to factory, craftsman to mass-production, hand-loom to spining jenny, is the dividing-line between the ancient and the modern world. Do you follow me?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Magic, I felt, fell into the same category. In my day, you had a small, highly skilled workforce - your sorcerers and their apprentices - turning out high-quality low-volume products for a small, largely high-income-group market. Result: the ordinary bloke, the man on the Uppsala carrier’s cart, was excluded from participation in the field. Magic was not reaching the bulk of the population. Given my long-term objective - total world dominance - this was plainly unacceptable. What was the use of a lot of kings and heroes being able to zap each other to Kingdom Come when Bjorn Public could take it or leave it alone? Especially since, as my own experience will testify, a little well-applied brute force and ignorance can put an end to the whole enterprise? You appreciate the problem.’

  ‘Thank you for the drink. I really ought to be getting back . . .’

  ‘There had to be a breakthrough,’ continued the sorcerer-king, ‘a moment in the history of the world when magic finally had the poten
tial to get its fingers well and truly round the neck of the human race. There were several key steps along the way, of course. The Industrial Revolution, electricity, the motor-car, and of course television - all these were building-blocks. All my own work, incidentally. They may tell you different down at the Patents Office, but who needs all that? He who keeps a low profile keeps his nose clean, as the sagas say.

  ‘And then I came across an old idea of mine I’d jotted down on the back of a goat-skin hood in the old days - the computer. Originally it was just meant to be an alternative to notches in a stick to tell you how much cheese you needed to see you through the winter, and for all I cared it could stay that way. Except, I got to thinking, how’d it be if everyone had one? I mean everyone. A Home Computer. A little friend with a face like a telly, and its little wires leading into the telephone network. All things to all men, and everything put together. You do everything through it - bank through it, vote through it, work through it, be born, copulate and die through it. Good idea, eight out of ten. But the extra two out of ten is the incredible tolerance the profane masses have towards the evil little monsters. “Computer error,” they say, and shake their heads indulgently. Three hours programming the perishing thing, and then it goes bleep and swallows the lot.’ The sorcerer-king chuckled loudly over his drink and blew out a great cloud of cigar-smoke, for all the world like a story-book dragon. ‘Swallows is right. I saw that possibility a mile off. You don’t think, do you, that all those malfunctions are genuine? Ever since I got the first rudimentary network established, I’ve had everything most carefully monitored. Anything I fancy, anything that looks like it might be even remotely useful - gulp! and it hums along the fibre-optics to my own personal library.’