Who's Afraid of Beowulf

by Tom Holt

  ‘There’s no such word as “oxycephalous”,’ said the first voice, ‘not in Old Norse.’

  ‘There is now,’ replied the second voice cheerfully. ‘Up the tree, six, and I think I’ll see you.’

  Hildy’s eyes were hurting, but she struggled to keep them open, as she had so often struggled at lectures and seminars. With a tremendous effort of will, she forced herself to zoom backwards, widening her angle of view. She saw the office-block again, standing in a familiar landscape, but one which she could not put a name to. Then she made out what could only be a Tube station, stunningly prosaic in the midst of all the magic. With a final spurt of effort she read the name, ‘St Paul’s’. Then the stone fell from her eye, and she slumped forward on to the table.

  When she came round, she found the heroes gathered about her. She told them what she had seen, and what she deduced from it. The King sat down again, and put his face in his hands.

  ‘We must take a great risk,’ he said at last. ‘I shall have to go to this place and recover the two spirits. Otherwise, there is no hope.’

  ‘You mustn’t,’ Hildy protested. ‘They’ll catch you, and then there really won’t be any hope.’ She dug her fingers into the material of her organiser bag until they started to ache. ‘Let me go instead.’

  The King suddenly lifted his head and smiled at her. ‘We’ll both go,’ he said cheerfully, almost lightheartedly. ‘And you, Kotkel. Only this time you’ll do it properly, understand? And you, Brynjolf,’ he said to the shape-changer, who was trying unsuccessfully to hide behind the massive shoulders of Starkad Storvirksson, ‘we’ll need you as well. And two others. Any volunteers?’

  Everyone froze, not daring to move. But after a moment Arvarodd stood up, looked around the table, and nodded. ‘I’ll come,’ he said quietly. ‘After all, it can’t be worse than Permia.’ He laughed weakly at his own joke, but all the others were silent. The King looked scornfully about him, and sighed. ‘Chicken,’ he said, ‘the whole lot of you.’

  Starkad Storvirksson rose to his feet. ‘Can I come?’ he asked mildly. If no one else was prepared to go, he might at last get his chance to do something other than fighting. Fighting was all right in its way, but he was sure there was more to being a hero than just hitting people.

  ‘No, Starkad,’ said the King kindly. ‘I know you’re not afraid. But not this time. I’ll explain later.’

  Starkad sat down, looking dejected, and Brynjolf patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. ‘It’s because you’re so stupid, Starkad,’ he said gently. ‘You’d only be in the way.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Starkad happily. ‘If that’s the reason, I don’t mind.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ said Bothvar Bjarki suddenly, and all the heroes turned and stared at him. ‘What this job needs is brains, not muscle.’ The King muttered something inaudible under his breath, and said that, on second thoughts, five would be plenty. Bothvar scowled, but the heroes cheered loudly, and raised the toast; first to Odin, giver of victory; then to the six adventurers; then to their Lord, King Hrolf Earthstar. Then Ohtar remembered that there had been another cask of enchanted mead in the back storeroom, and they all went to look for it.

  ‘The others had better not stay here,’ said the King to Hildy, while they were gone. ‘They’ll have to hunt for food and find water, and I saw too many houses on the road back there. I’ll send them up into the mountains.’ From the back storeroom came sounds of cursing; someone, back in the ninth century, had left the top off the barrel. The King grinned. ‘It’ll give them something else to complain about until we get back.’

  ‘Will they be all right?’ Hildy asked doubtfully. ‘They don’t seem terribly practical to me.’

  The King nodded. ‘I should think so,’ he said. ‘Take Angantyr Asmundarson, for instance. To join the muster at Melvich, he marched all night from Brough Head to Burwick - that’s right across the two main islands of Orkney - and since there was no boat available he swam over from Burwick to the mainland, in the middle of a storm. Then he ran all the way from Duncansby Head to Melvich, on the morning before the battle, and still fought in the front rank against the stone-trolls of Finnmark. Complaining bitterly about his wet clothes and how he was going to catch his death of pneumonia, of course, but that’s just his way.’ He paused, and contemplated his fingernails for a moment. ‘Put like that, I suppose, it rather proves your point. Only a complete idiot would have gone to so much trouble to get involved in a battle. Come on,’ he said briskly, ‘it’s time we were going.’

  Thorgeir Storm-Shepherd was feeling his age, and since he was nearing his thirteen-hundredth birthday this was no small problem. He could not, he reflected, take the long journeys like he used to, when a flight from Oslo to Thingvellir, perched uncomfortably between the shoulder-blades of the huge mutant seagull that his employer had bred specially for him, had just been part of a normal day’s work.

  He had not been idle. What with dashing about by train, car and helicopter, interviewing Danny Bennett and capturing the two chthonic spirits, then hurrying back to Rolfsness to clear the area of Professor Wood and his archaeologists, he felt he had earned a rest. But now he was back in London, and the sorcerer-king was in the bad mood that usually attended the tricky part of any enterprise.

  The two spirits were safely locked up in a spellproof perspex tank, and the Professor had been shunted off to the British Museum to ferret about among the Old Norse manuscripts one more time, just in case anything had been overlooked. Still, the Professor was a useful man. Another practical benefit of commercial sponsorship of archaeology. It had, of course, been fortuitous that a freak and entirely localised storm had threatened to flood the site at Rolfsness, forcing the excavation team to close up the mound and go away, but Thorgeir was not called Storm-Shepherd for nothing. He was glad that he had kept his hand in at that particular field of Old Magic, useful over the past thousand years only for betting on draws in cricket matches and then washing them out. He leant back in his chair and ruffled the papers on his desk. As well as being a Dark Age sorcerer, he was also one of the key executives in the world’s largest multinational, and work had been piling up while he was away. As he flicked through a sheaf of ‘while-you-were-out’ notes, he reflected that it was a pity that he had never mastered the art of delegation.

  The intercom buzzed, and his secretary told him that his boss was on the scrambler. Thorgeir disliked the machine, but it was better than telepathy, which had until recently been the main method of in-office communication between himself and the sorcerer-king, and which invariably gave him a headache.

  ‘Now what?’ said the sorcerer-king.

  ‘That’s that,’ replied Thorgeir, ‘at least for the moment. Without those two whatsits, the brooch is useless.’

  ‘Why can’t they just plug it into the mains?’

  ‘Even if they could, they couldn’t get enough power from the ordinary mains,’ Thorgeir explained patiently. ‘But they can’t. They need direct current, and you’d need a transformer the size of Liverpool to convert it. The only power source in the world big enough to power that brooch is sitting in a perspex tank in Vouchers. You have my word on it.’

  ‘So now what?’

  ‘With the brooch out of action, they’re up the fjord without a paddle.’ Thorgeir grinned into the receiver. ‘Lucky, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the sorcerer-king, ‘very.’

  Thorgeir stopped grinning. ‘So we have all the time in the world to find them and dispose of them. They can’t do us any harm.’

  ‘You said that the last time, before Melvich.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘So is this different. How do you know they can’t modify it?’

  ‘Trust me. Let me rephrase that,’ Thorgeir added hurriedly, for that was a sore point at all times. ‘Rely on it. They can’t. All they can do is try breaking in here and springing the two gnomes.’

  ‘Just let them try.’

  ‘Exactly. So relax, won’t you? E
njoy yourself. Set up a new newspaper or something. The situation is under control.’

  ‘I hope so.’ The sorcerer-king rang off.

  Thorgeir shook his head and returned to his work. The papers from the Japanese deal were starting to come through, and he didn’t like the look of them at all. Come the glorious day, he said to himself, I’ll turn that whole poxy country into a golf-course, and we’ll see how they like that. But before he could settle to it the telephone went again. This time it was Professor Wood, ringing from the call-box outside the British Museum. Thorgeir sat up and reached for a pen and some paper.

  After a few minutes, he put the phone down carefully and read back his notes. Things were starting to take shape. In a nineteenth-century collection of Gaelic folk-tales, the Professor had found a most interesting story, all about a chieftain called Rolf McKettle and his battle with the Fairies. Allowing for the distortions inevitably occurring over a millennium of the oral tradition and home-made whisky, it was a fair and accurate report of the battle of Melvich, and it went on to tell the rest of the story, including where the King had been buried and who was buried with him.

  The Professor would be round in about half an hour. Thorgeir dumped a half-hundredweight of unread contracts in his out-tray and went to tell his boss. ‘Not,’ he reflected as he got into the lift, ‘that he’ll take kindly to being called a fairy. But there we go.’

  How long he had been there, or where exactly there was, Danny had no idea, but he was beginning to wonder whether the senior cameraman might not have been right after all. It had been the senior cameraman, armed with the map, who had insisted that the big cloudy thing over to their right was Ben Stumanadh, and that the road was just the other side of it. Danny had been a Boy Scout (although he had taken endless pains to make sure that no one in the Corporation knew about it) and he knew that the assertion was patently ridiculous, and that the cameraman was determined to lead the crew into the bleak and inhospitable interior, where death from exposure was a very real possibility. He had reasoned with him, ordered him, and finally shouted at him; but the fool had taken no notice, and neither had the rest of the crew. Finally, Danny had washed his hands of the lot of them and set out to walk the few miles to the road, which he knew was just over to the left.

  Of course the mist hadn’t helped, but the further he had gone, the more Danny had become convinced that either the map had been wrong or that someone had moved the road. As exhaustion and hunger, and the loss of both his shoes in a bog had taken their toll, he had inclined more and more to the latter explanation, especially after his short but illuminating chat with the two brown sheep which had been the only living things he had seen since meeting the strange man who had pointed them all in the wrong direction. Shortly after he had arrived at that conclusion, his eyes started playing tricks on him, and he had spent the night in what appeared at the time to be a fully equipped editing suite, complete with facilities for transposing film on to video-tape. In the cold (very cold) light of morning it had turned out to be a ruined shieling, and he had somehow acquired a rather disconcertingly high fever. But at least it kept him warm, which was something.

  Rather optimistically, he tried out his arms and his legs, but of course they wouldn’t work, just as his car never used to start when he had a particularly urgent meeting. He felt surprisingly calm, and reflected that that was probably one of the fringe benefits of going completely mad. If he wasn’t deeply into the final stage of hallucination that came just before death by exposure, he wouldn’t be imagining that the men in the grey suits were coming over the hill towards him.

  ‘Just like old times,’ one of them was saying. ‘Out on the fells with no shelter and nothing to eat but rabbit and perishing salmon. If I have to eat any more salmon, I’ll start looking like one.’

  Since over his suit he was wearing a coat of silvery scale armour he already did; but of course, Danny reflected, since the man was not really there he was not to know that. He groaned softly, and slumped a little further behind the stones. If he had to see visions in his madness, he would have preferred something a little less eccentric.

  ‘If you hadn’t been so damned fussy,’ said another of the men, ‘we could have had one of those sheep.’

  ‘He said not to get into any trouble,’ said the salmon-man. ‘Stealing sheep counts as trouble. Always did.’

  ‘There might be deer in that forest we passed,’ said a third man.

  ‘Then, again, there might not,’ replied the salmon-man, who seemed a miserable sort of person. Danny decided he didn’t like him much and tried to replace him with a beautiful girl, but apparently the system didn’t work like that. ‘And if you think I’m going to go rushing about some wood in the hope that it’s full of deer you can think again,’ the salmon-man said. The others didn’t bother to reply. Danny approved.

  ‘That’ll do,’ said one of them. He was pointing at the shieling, and Danny realised that they intended to make their camp there. That was a pity, since he had wanted to spend his last hours on earth in quiet meditation, not making conversation with a bunch of phantasms from the Milk Marketing Board. In fact, Danny said to himself, I won’t have it. An Englishman’s fallen-down old shed is his castle, even in Scotland. ‘Go away,’ he shouted, and turned his face to the stone wall. The words just managed to clear his lips, but they fell away into the wind and were dispersed.

  ‘There’s someone in there,’ said Starkad Storvirksson.

  ‘So there is,’ said Ohtar. ‘I wonder if he wants a fight.’

  ‘Better ask him first,’ said Angantyr. ‘It’s very bad manners to fight people without asking.’

  ‘I thought we weren’t supposed to fight anyone,’ Starkad said.

  ‘We can if we have to defend ourselves,’ said Ohtar, but his heart wasn’t in it. The man hardly looked worth fighting anyway. In fact he looked decidedly unwell. Ohtar turned him over gently with his foot.

  ‘Ask him if he’s got anything to eat,’ Angantyr whispered. ‘Tell him we’ll trade him two rabbits and a salmon for anything in the way of cheese.’

  ‘Hold it, will you?’ said Ohtar. ‘It’s that sorcerer from the van, the one who wouldn’t fight with Bothvar.’ He turned to his companions and smiled. ‘Things are looking up,’ he said. ‘We’ve got ourselves a prisoner.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘Have some more rabbit,’ said Ohtar kindly. Although Danny had done nothing but eat all night, he felt it would be rude to refuse. Obviously the strange men prided themselves on their hospitality.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll have enough for yourselves?’ he asked desperately, as Ohtar produced two more burnt drumsticks, still mottled with little flecks of singed fur. The man they called Angantyr made a curious snorting noise.

  ‘Don’t you mind him,’ said Ohtar. ‘Plenty more where that came from.’

  ‘Well, in that case . . .’ Danny sank his teeth into the carbonised flesh and tried not to remember that he had been very fond of his pet rabbit, Dimbleby, when he was a boy. ‘This is very good,’ he said, forcing his weary jaws to chew.

  ‘Really?’ Ohtar beamed. He had been field-cook to King Hrolf for most of his service, and this was the first time anyone had paid him a compliment. ‘You wait there,’ he said and, gathering up his sling and a handful of pebbles, walked away.

  ‘You’ve made his day,’ said Angantyr, sitting down beside Danny and absentmindedly picking up the second drumstick. ‘Personally,’ he said with his mouth full, ‘I hate rabbit, but it’s a sight better than seagull. You ever had seagull?’

  ‘No,’ Danny said.

  ‘Very wise,’ said Angantyr, and he spat out a number of small bones. ‘Not that you can’t make something of it with a white sauce and some fennel. Don’t get me wrong,’ he added, ‘I’m not obsessive about food, like some I could mention. Five square meals a day is all I ask, and a jug or so of something wet to see it on its way. But I draw the line at seaweed,’ he asserted firmly. ‘Except in a mousse, of course.’
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  ‘Of course,’ Danny agreed.

  Having looked to make sure that there was no more rabbit lying about, Angantyr lay back against the wall of the ruined bothy and pulled his helmet down over his eyes. ‘Ah, well,’ he said, ‘this is better than work. What do you do with yourself, by the way? I know you’re a sorcerer of sorts, but that could mean anything, couldn’t it?’

  ‘I’m a producer,’ Danny said.

  ‘Good for you,’ Angantyr said. ‘Me, I’m strictly a consumer.’ The early-morning sun was shining weakly through a window in the cloud, and the hero was in a good mood. ‘That was always the trouble with this country, ’ he went on. ‘Too few producers and too many consumers. I admire you people, honestly I do. Out behind the plough in all weathers, or driving the sheep home through the snow. Rotten job, always said so.’

  ‘No, no,’ Danny said, ‘I’m not a farmer, I’m a producer. A television producer.’

  Angantyr sat up, a caterpillar-like eyebrow raised. ‘What’s that, then?’

  ‘You know . . .’ Danny said weakly. ‘I work out the schedules, supervise the crews, that sort of thing.’

  ‘You mean a forecastle-man?’ Angantyr suspected that his leg was being pulled. ‘Get out, you’re not, are you?’

  ‘Not that sort of crew,’ Danny said, wishing he had never mentioned it. ‘Camera crews. Keys, grips, gaffers, that sort of thing. I make television programmes.’

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ said Angantyr after a long pause. ‘I’ve been asleep for a thousand-odd years.’

  ‘No, but really.’ Danny nerved himself to ask the question that was eating away at the lining of his mind. ‘Who are you people?’

  Angantyr looked at him sternly, remembering that he was a sorcerer. But he looked harmless enough, and they had smashed up all his magical instruments in the Battle of the Vans.