by Tom Holt
The senior cameraman, who had been about to open a can of lager, dived for his Aaten and started to film through the side-window. The assistant cameraman also kept his head and groped for a light meter, but Danny Bennett was flinging open the van door. ‘Not now, for Christ’s sake; they’re gaining on him,’ shouted the senior cameraman, but Danny jumped out and ran to meet the driver. As he did so, one of the maniacs in the grey suits stopped and fitted an arrow to his bowstring.
‘f 8,’ hissed the assistant cameraman to his colleague. ‘If only there was time to fit the polariser . . .’
The King jumped up and shouted, and the archer stayed his hand. The heroes stood their ground while the driver leapt into the van, which pulled away with a screech of tyres, closely followed by the second van. A moment later, they were both out of sight. The heroes sheathed their swords and started to trudge back up the rise.
‘Who were they?’ the King asked Hildy. ‘Any idea?’
Hildy had seen the cameras. ‘Yes,’ she said nervously. ‘And I think we’re in trouble.’
When they had made sure they were not being followed, the camera crew pulled in to the side of the road and all started to talk at once. Only Danny Bennett was silent, and on his face was the look of a man who has just seen a vision of the risen Christ. At last, he was saying to himself, I have been attacked while making a documentary. There must be a story in it; and not just a story but the story. Who the men in grey suits had been - CIA, MI5, Special Branch, maybe even the Milk Marketing Board - he could not say, but of one thing he was sure. He was standing on the brink of the greatest documentary ever made. Sweat was running down his face, and in front of his eyes danced the tantalising image of a BAFTA award.
CHAPTER FIVE
Kevin Fortescue, Governor of China elect, met Thorgeir Storm-Shepherd at the Docklands stolport and drove him back to Gerrards Garth House. On the way, he made it known that he had been let into the secret of the company’s history. Thorgeir seemed surprised at this.
‘Why?’ he said.
‘Mr . . . the boss said he thought I had a lot of potential. In fact, he’s offered me China.’
‘China?’
‘I told him I’d give him my decision in the morning, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to take it. I think it would be a good move for me, career-wise. I’ve got the impression I’m stagnating rather in Accounts.’
Thorgeir made a mental note to water down the sorcerer-king’s mead with cold tea before leaving the country next time. He had the feeling that the sorcerer-king was due for a change of direction, career-wise. But it would not be prudent to let the feeling develop into an idea.
The sorcerer-king had come down to the lobby to meet him. ‘How was Japan?’ he asked.
‘Susceptible,’ replied Thorgeir, ‘highly susceptible. And I did get the semiconductors after all. Just time before the helicopter arrived for a birdie on the last hole.’
‘Good,’ grunted the sorcerer-king. ‘No point in letting things slide just because there’s a crisis. You’ve met our new colleague?’
‘Yes,’ said Thorgeir. ‘What possessed you to do that?’
‘Seemed like a good idea at the time.’
‘You said that about Copernicus, and look where that got us.’
‘Anyway,’ the sorcerer-king said, ‘he’ll come in handy. I’ve had an idea.’
Thorgeir knew that tone of voice. Sometimes it led to good things, sometimes not. ‘Tell me about it.’
‘It’s like this.’ The sorcerer-king reached for the mead-bottle, and poured out two large glasses. ‘Our problem is quite simple, when you look at it calmly. Our enemy has reappeared.’
‘How do you know that, by the way?’
The sorcerer-king explained about the late-night messages. Thorgeir nodded gravely. ‘So King Hrolf is back, and that dratted brooch. We could do one of two things. We could go and look for him, or we could wait for him to come to us.’
‘This is meant to be a choice?’
‘We could wait for him to come to us.’ The sorcerer-king leant back in his chair and put the tips of his fingers together. ‘If he tries that, he will be at a certain disadvantage. ’
‘Namely?’
The sorcerer-king grinned. ‘One, he’s been asleep for over a thousand years, and things have changed. Two, there’s no way he can hope to understand the modern world well enough to endanger us without at the very least a three-year course in business studies and a postgraduate diploma in computers. We are talking about a man who had difficulty adding up on his fingers. Three, he has just crawled out of a mound, in clothes that were the height of fashion a thousand years ago but which would now be a trifle conspicuous. He is likely to be arrested, especially if he strolls into the market-square at Inverness and tries to reclaim his ancient throne. Four, just supposing he makes it and turns up in Reception brandishing a sword, his chances of making it as far as the lift are slim. Very slim. I don’t know if you’ve dropped into Vouchers lately, but I didn’t hire them for their mathematical ability.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Thorgeir patiently. ‘So?’
‘So, since he’s not a complete moron, he’s not likely to come to us. So we have to go to him. But on whose terms?’
The sorcerer-king leant forward suddenly and fixed Thorgeir with his bright eyes. This had been a disconcerting conversational gambit a thousand years ago, but Thorgeir was used to it by now. After over a millennium of working with the sorcerer-king, he was getting rather tired of some of his more obvious mannerisms.
‘Ours, preferably,’ Thorgeir said calmly. ‘Explain.’
‘His best chance,’ said the sorcerer-king, ‘is to use the brooch again. He jams up our systems, blacks out our networks, and fuses all the lights across the entire world. Then he sends us a message - probably, knowing him, by carrier-pigeon - to meet him, alone, on the beach at Melvich for a rematch. Personally, I am out of condition for a trial by combat.’
Thorgeir nodded. He, too, had grown soft since his timber-wolf days. Apart from retaining a taste for uncooked mutton and having to shave at least three times a day, he had become entirely anthropomorphous. ‘We can rule that out, then,’ he said. ‘I never did like all that running about and shouting.’
‘Me neither. So we have one course of action left to us. We find him before he’s ready, and we kill him. That ought not to be difficult.’
‘Agreed.’
The sorcerer-king poured out more mead. ‘In that case, where is he likely to be? He’s just risen from the grave, right? And he’s on foot. All we need to know is where he was buried, and we’ve got him. Simple.’
Thorgeir smiled, and drank some of his mead. Now it was his turn.
‘Over the last thousand years,’ he said, in a slow measured voice, ‘I, too, have been turning this problem over in my mind, and the big question is this. Given that King Hrolf was the greatest of the Vikings, and his companions the most glorious heroes of the northern world, how come there is no King Hrolf Earthstar’s Saga?’
He paused, for greater dramatic effect, and took a cigar from the box on the desk. Having lit it, he resumed.
‘And, for that matter, why are the sagas of all the other heroes of northern Europe so reticent about the greatest event of the heroic age, namely our defeat and overthrow? You’d have thought one of them might have seen fit to mention it.’
The sorcerer-king frowned. With the exception of the latest Dick Francis or Jeffrey Archer, he rarely opened a book these days, and he had never been a great reader at the best of times.
‘There is no record of the final resting-place of King Hrolf Earthstar,’ said Thorgeir. ‘If there had been, I’d have bought the place up and built something heavy and substantial over it five hundred years ago. There is no trace or scrap of folk tradition in Caithness about King Hrolf or the Great Battle or anything else; just a lot of drivel about Bonnie Prince Charlie. The only clue is a single place-name, Rolfsness, which happens to be the site of a certain battle.
’
‘There you are, then,’ said the sorcerer-king.
‘There you aren’t. I’ve been back hundreds of times. If there had been anything there, I’d have felt it. And there is no record whatsoever of what became of Hrolf Earthstar while we were floating around as disembodied spirits. He just vanished off the face of the earth. For all I know, he could have sailed west and discovered America.’
‘You think he’s in America?’
Thorgeir closed his eyes and counted up to ten. ‘No, I think he’s probably somewhere in Europe. But where in Europe I couldn’t begin to say.’
The sorcerer-king smiled. ‘You’d better start looking, then, hadn’t you?’ he said, and poured himself another drink.
‘Those people,’ said Hildy, ‘were from television.’
‘What’s that?’ asked one of the heroes.
Hildy racked her brains for a concise reply. ‘Like a saga, only with lights and pictures. By this time tomorrow, everyone in the country will know we’re here.’
The King frowned. ‘That could be serious,’ he said. ‘We can’t have that.’
‘But how can we stop it?’
‘That’s easy.’ The King stood up suddenly. ‘Where do you think they’ve gone?’
‘Back the way they came, probably to Lairg. They’ll want to get the film off to London as quickly as possible. But—’
‘We can’t make any mistake about this. Kotkel!’
From a small pouch in his pocket, the wizard took a couple of small bones and threw them in the air. As they landed, he stooped down and peered at them intently. Then he pointed towards the south and made a noise like a buzz-saw.
‘They went that way,’ the King translated.
Hildy had never been fond of driving, and at speeds over thirty miles an hour her skill matched her enthusiasm. But somehow the van stayed on or at least close to the road as they pursued the camera crew along the narrow road to Lairg, and caught up with them in a deserted valley beside a river.
‘What do we do now?’ Hildy asked as the van bumped alarmingly over a cattle-grid.
‘Board them,’ suggested Angantyr. ‘Or ram them. Who cares?’
‘Certainly not,’ Hildy shouted.
‘Stop here,’ the King said. ‘Brynjolf!’
‘Not again,’ pleaded the shape-changer. ‘Last time I sprained my ankle.’
No sooner had Danny Bennett realised that the second van had suddenly stopped for no reason than he became aware of a huge eagle, apparently trying to smash the windscreen. The driver swore, and braked fiercely, but the bird merely attacked again, this time cracking the glass. The senior sound-recordist, who had done countless nature programmes in his time, was thoroughly frightened and tried to hide under his seat. The eagle attacked a third time, and the windscreen shattered. The driver put up both his hands to protect his eyes, and the van veered off the road into a ditch.
When Danny had recovered from the shock of impact, he tried to open his door, but a man in a grey suit with a helmet covering his face opened it for him and showed him the blade of a large axe. If this was the Milk Marketing Board, they were probably exceeding their statutory authority.
‘Who are you?’ Danny said.
‘Bothvar Bjarki,’ said the man with the axe. ‘Are you going to surrender, or shall we fight for a bit?’
‘I’d rather surrender, if it’s all the same to you.’
‘Be like that,’ said Bothvar Bjarki.
The camera crew were rounded up, while Starkad, apparently without effort, pushed the two vans into a small clump of trees and covered them with branches. The King had found a hollow in the hillside which was out of sight of the road, and the prisoners were led there and tied up securely. Meanwhile, at Hildy’s direction, Starkad and Hjort found the cans of film and smashed them to pieces. When Hildy was satisfied that all the film was destroyed, the heroes got back into their vans and drove away.
As the sound of the engine receded in the distance, the assistant cameraman broke the silence in the hollow.
‘Reminds me of the time I was in Afghanistan,’ he said.
Danny Bennett asked what had happened that time in Afghanistan.
‘We got tied up,’ said the assistant cameraman.
‘And what happened?’
‘Someone came and untied us,’ replied the assistant cameraman. ‘Mind you, that time we were doing a report for “Newsnight”.’
Danny had never worked for ‘Newsnight’, and people had been known to die of exposure on Scottish hillsides. He pulled on the rope around his wrists, but there was no slack in it. A posthumous BAFTA award, he reflected, was probably better than no BAFTA award at all, but awards are not everything.
‘If I can raise my wrists,’ he said to the assistant cameraman, ‘you could chew through the ropes and I could untie you.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ said the cameraman. ‘You could shut your bloody row and we could get some sleep while we’re waiting to be untied.’
‘But perhaps,’ Danny hissed, ‘nobody’s going to come and untie us.’
‘Listen,’ said the assistant cameraman fiercely, ‘I dunno what union you belong to, but my union is going to get me a great deal of money from the Beeb for being tied up like this, and the longer I’m tied up, the more I’ll get. So just shut your noise and let’s get on with it, all right?’
Danny’s head was beginning to hurt. He closed his eyes, leant back against the assistant cameraman (who was starting to snore) and tried to make some sense of what was happening to him.
The men had been partially disguised as Vikings, with helmets and shields and swords; but they had been wearing grey suits, which tended to spoil the illusion. They had, as he had expected, destroyed the film; but that was all. Not even an attempt to warn him off. Only the barest minimum of physical violence. And then there was that girl - Hildy Frederiksen, beyond doubt. Who was she working for, and what lay behind it all? And where in God’s name had they got that incredible bird from?
The obvious clues pointed at the CIA. Whatever they do in whichever part of the world, they always wear grey suits. They buy them by the hundred from J. C. Penney or Man at CIA. That would tie in with the Kennedy connection - at last, after all these years, they were trying to silence him - but the Viking motif was beyond him, unless it was something to do with that tiresome ship. Or perhaps they were in fact wearing protective clothing (the nuclear power station angle) made to look like Viking helmets. In which case, why? Unless they were all going on to a fancy-dress party afterwards. The more he thought about it, the more inexplicable it seemed; and the more baffled he became, the more convinced he was that something major was going on. All the great conspiracies of history have been bizarre, usually because of the incompetence of the leading conspirators. As the long hours passed, he traced each convoluted possibility to its illogical conclusion, but for once no pattern emerged in his mind. At last he fell asleep and began to dream. He seemed to hear voices coming from a small pool of light hovering overhead.
‘Seventy-five to me, then,’ said one voice, ‘plus the repique on your declaration, doubled. Your throw.’
Danny sat up. He wasn’t dreaming.
‘Six and a four. I take your dragon, and that’s forty-five to me. Four, five, six, - oh, sod it, go to gaol.’
The rest of the crew were asleep. Danny sat absolutely still. The hair on the back of his neck was beginning to curl, and he found it hard to breathe.
‘Trade you Hlidarend for Oslo Fjord and seventy points,’ said the first voice. ‘That way you’ll have the set.’
‘No chance,’ said the second voice. ‘Up three, down the serpent four five six, and that’s check.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘Yes, it is.’
The voices were silent for a while, and Danny swallowed hard. Perhaps it was just the bump he had suffered when the van crashed.
‘Good idea, that,’ said the first voice.
‘Brilliant,’ replied t
he second voice sarcastically. ‘You don’t imagine we’re going to get away with it, do you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’ll notice we’re not there, that’s why. And he’s not going to be pleased.’
The first voice sniggered. ‘He’ll be miles away by now. And the rest of them. They’re going to Inverness. He won’t be able to reach us from there.’
‘Where’s Inverness?’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But it sounds a very long way away to me.’
The second voice sighed audibly. ‘You and your ideas,’ it said.
‘Well, what choice did we have?’ replied the first voice irritably. ‘I don’t know about you, but I didn’t fancy having copper wire twisted round my neck and being linked up to that perishing brooch. Last time, my ears buzzed for a week.’
‘He’ll be back. Just you wait and see.’
Another silence, during which Danny thought he could hear a rattling sound, like dice being thrown.
‘Well,’ said the second voice, ‘we’d better make ourselves scarce anyhow. No good sitting about here.’
‘Just because I’m winning . . .’
‘Who says you’re winning?’
The voices subsided into a muted squabbling, so that Danny could not make out the words. He longed for the voices to stop, and suddenly they did.
The reason for this was that Prexz had just caught the vibrations from an underground cable a mile or so away to the south. He had no idea what it might be, but he was hungry, and it seemed irresistible.
‘Put the game away, Zxerp,’ he said suddenly. ‘I can feel food.’
But Zxerp didn’t answer. ‘I said I can feel food,’ Prexz repeated, but Zxerp glowed warningly at him.
‘There’s a man over there listening to us,’ he whispered.