Cows In Action 6

by Steve Cole

  Pat smiled weakly. “Hopefully the professor will hear we’re in trouble and come to our rescue.” Suddenly, he noticed Bettie Barmas, watching stony-faced from the window of one of the houses. With a thrill of fear, Pat thought he glimpsed a cow-like figure standing just behind her – and the flash of green eyes . . .

  “Bo,” he whispered. “I think I might have just seen a ter-moo-nator!”

  As the first flakes of snow began to drift through the moonlit sky, Professor McMoo paced up and down near the entrance to William’s camp. The fairy lights cast a soft glow over the wintry scene – but McMoo was far too worried to feel festive.

  Tostain poked his head out of a nearby tent. “All that stamping is keeping me awake, Angus! What’s the matter?”

  “My young friends should be back by now.” McMoo sighed. “I hope they’re all right.”

  “They seem hardy enough,” remarked Tostain. “They probably just got tied up somewhere . . .”

  Suddenly, an arrow shot past the professor’s head. Thunk! It struck a wooden post, slicing a rope of tinsel in two.

  “We’re under attack!” cried Tostain. “Everyone up!” Within moments, Renouf arrived on horseback, followed by hordes of soldiers and William himself in a grotty green nightshirt.

  “Hold your horse, Renouf!” cried McMoo. “And calm down, the rest of you. I don’t think it’s an attack.” He unwrapped a piece of parchment from the shaft of the arrow and held it up. “It’s a message.” But he gasped as he read the Saxon scrawl. “You were right, Tostain. Pat and Bo have been tied up – by Ethelbad the ’Orrible! He demands a Christmas feast of five hundred barrels of ale, sixty loaves of bread and two thousand Cornish pilchards be delivered to his domain on the other side of London, or else he will do something terrible to my friends!” McMoo turned to William with a hopeful smile. “You can spare that, right?”

  “I? Give food and drink to that rascal? Certainly not!” William shook his head. “Besides, pilchards are my absolute favourite and I only have seventeen left!”

  Tostain clapped the professor heartily on the back. “You know, Angus, this seems the perfect chance for you to scare that slimy Saxon right out of London.”

  “Oh, yes!” Renouf galloped up and gave McMoo an encouraging smile. “Go alone to Ethelbad and his band of savage, dangerously unhinged barbarian killers and show them that you won’t stand for any nonsense!”

  “Thanks for your support, fellas.” McMoo sighed, straightened his glasses, then stalked off through the settling snow towards the forest. “Well, I’d better be off.”

  William yelled after him, “No time like the present, eh?”

  “No time at all,” McMoo muttered, as he entered the dark forest. “And how I wish I was there now – not stuck in 1066!”

  Even in the dark, it didn’t take the professor long to find his way to Ethelbad’s camp. Bettie Barmas had trampled a clear path through the forest, and the London of 1066 was a lot smaller than in McMoo’s time – he crossed it in just twenty minutes. But the thrill of touring eleventh-century London was spoiled for him by the endless Christmas lights and decorations strewn about the city. They left the dingy, smelly, crooked streets neon-bright.

  An uneasy feeling filled McMoo’s stomach. Why was the Fed-up Bull Institute bringing modern Christmas decorations into the past? And with no plugs or electricity in 1066, what energy was making them work?

  “Speaking of energy,” McMoo murmured to himself, “I wonder how quickly the Time Shed’s banks are recharging?” He pulled out the time-power gadget, checked the levels and sighed. “It’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would . . .”

  Suddenly, four large, threatening Saxons stepped out from an alley to block his way.

  “Hello!” said McMoo brightly. “I’m looking for Ethelbad’s camp.”

  A bald, bloated Saxon stood aside to reveal a large hole in a broken old fence. “You’ve just found it, Norman scum – but you’ll soon wish you hadn’t!”

  The four men grabbed McMoo and bundled him away into the smelly, sweaty darkness of Ethelbad’s domain . . .

  Chapter Six

  MENACE BY MOO-NLIGHT

  McMoo found himself in a large yard that stank of wee and rotten meat despite the light carpeting of snow. Small shabby huts with patchy thatched roofs were arranged around a big, ramshackle hall. He could hear the splutter of Saxon snores and the squeal of rats gnawing on discarded bones – and then deep, rocking laughter from the main hall.

  “Your boss in there, is he?” McMoo enquired.

  The bald Saxon nodded. “Ethelbad is having a secret meeting.”

  “So, the special Christmas turkeys have been prepared!” The deep voice boomed from the hall like cannon-fire. “Excellent!”

  “Hmm.” McMoo raised his eyebrows at the bald Saxon. “At that volume it’s not terribly secret is it?”

  “Make sure these marvellous birds are handed out to all the noble families of London,” Ethelbad went on in bellowing tones. “Our lordly neighbours must believe they are a wondrous gift from William, not to be cooked till Christmas Day . . .”

  “Speaking of food, Ethelbad,” the professor yelled, “I’ve come from William’s camp in response to that sweet message you sent.”

  The hall fell silent for a moment. Then the ground shook with the sound of heavy footsteps, and a massive, misshapen figure in a metal war helmet appeared in the doorway. “Who dares interrupt the secret meeting of Ethelbad the ’Orrible?”

  “Some people in Wales, complaining about the noise?” McMoo suggested. “Oh, and me, of course. Hello!” He smiled cheerily as more glowering Saxons emerged from their huts. “The name’s McMoo. Who’s your secret meeting with then?”

  “Be silent.” Ethelbad’s eyes narrowed beneath his bushy brows. “You have brought the food and drink I demanded?”

  “First,” said McMoo firmly. “Show me my friends are all right.”

  Ethelbad nodded to three of his men, who vanished into a hut and came out soon after, dragging two familiar figures in a net behind them.

  “Pat! Bo!” McMoo beamed. “Are you all right?”

  “We are now you’re here!” Pat declared.

  “Apart from being trussed up in a tangle of fairy lights,” Bo complained. “Some of the bulbs are getting hot in very awkward places!”

  “Shut up!” roared Ethelbad. “Now, McMoo – where’s my food and ale?”

  “I’m surprised you need more food when you’ve got all those special Christmas turkeys prepared in your camp,” said McMoo. “Although turkey is a funny choice for Christmas dinner in 1066, isn’t it? You Saxons celebrate with roast lark or goose or wild boar. Turkey at Christmas doesn’t take off for another five hundred years. Henry the Eighth – he was the first to have it on Christmas Day. I’ve met him, you know . . .”

  “Stop this babbling!” Ethelbad stamped towards him. “I demanded five hundred barrels of ale, sixty loaves, and two thousand pilchards. Where are they?”

  “Sadly, William couldn’t quite stretch to the full amount,” McMoo admitted, turning out his pockets. “But I did find an acorn, a dead mackerel and a cooking apple on my way here.” He held out his smelly offering to the Saxon chief. “Will they do?”

  Bo groaned, and Pat held his hooves over his eyes.

  Ethelbad’s eye began to twitch. He opened his huge mouth to bellow in anger . . .

  And McMoo shoved the cooking apple into it!

  Gasping and spluttering, with a hard fruit jammed tightly between his teeth, Ethelbad staggered back – and the professor hurled his acorn at one of the three men guarding Pat and Bo. Like a mini-missile, the nut pinged off his head and struck the guard beside him! Both of them fell with a cry and crashed into the third.

  Bo quickly reached through the net and grabbed a sword from one of the fallen men. “Come on, Pat, we’re busting out!” she cried, and split the plastic net wide open.

  “Nice one!” cried McMoo, running towards his friends. But Ethelbad’
s men were hard on his heels – so he dropped the slimy fish over his shoulder.

  “Whoa!” The bald bruiser skidded in the rotten fish and fell backwards onto his butt. His friends couldn’t stop in time and tripped over him, landing in the gooey mess too.

  Bo smiled as she chucked the sword away and helped Pat to his feet. “At least they’ll all smell a bit better now!”

  “They’ll smell a lot better when we’re miles away,” said McMoo, grabbing hold of his friends’ hooves as he ran towards the camp’s high fence. “Come on!”

  But Ethelbad had finally spat out the giant apple and was sprinting after them with his axe. “You can’t escape me!”

  Pat lowered his head and charged the fence. The rotten wood splintered about him, and Bo and McMoo followed him through the hole and out into a slippery, snow-covered street.

  “This way,” said the professor, charging off again.

  “Professor, wait!” Pat panted. “I think I saw a ter-moo-nator before, with Bettie Barmas, in a house close to where we were caught.”

  McMoo skidded to a halt and grabbed hold of Pat urgently. “Do you remember where?”

  “Um . . .” Pat stared round, trying to get his bearings in the glow of the lights. “I’m not sure!”

  Suddenly, Ethelbad and his gang came into sight, pounding down the road towards them. “I think we came this way,” said Bo, leading the way down a crooked alley. But seconds later, she came up short against a huge pile of rubbish and the back of another house. “Pants! It’s a dead end!”

  “Now then, my three fine Norman ninnies . . .” With a stab of dread, Pat saw that Ethelbad and his men were blocking their way back out. The Saxon chief raised his axe. “I shall send you back to William – in pieces!”

  McMoo stood bravely in front of Pat and Bo as Ethelbad advanced towards them.

  But suddenly, the Christmas lights dangling above them flickered and grew brighter, brighter – until the bulbs exploded! Blue sparks began to flicker about the dirty wooden alleyway and Pat felt the hairs on his coat stand on end.

  Ethelbad stared round in alarm – then dropped his axe as a sizzle of power shot along the length of it. “What’s this?” he demanded, terrified. “Witchcraft?”

  “More like an electrostatic shock-beam,” said McMoo, peering at the light show through his glasses. “But in 1066? It’s unheard of!”

  The other Saxons cried out too as more crackles of power shot up their trouser legs like electric ferrets. They turned and ran, and Ethelbad soon fled from the alleyway after them.

  Then Pat gasped. The figure of a cow on two legs stepped into sight at the end of the alley. The shadowy shape walked towards them, green eyes agleam . . .

  “P-P-Professor, that’s the thing I saw before, in the window with Bettie,” he gabbled. “The ter-moo-nator – it’s found us!”

  Chapter Seven

  THE DAISY DILEMMA

  “Me? A ter-moo-nator?” The cow gave gales of high-pitched laughter. “Don’t be daft, chuck! I just saved you, didn’t I?”

  As clouds shifted from in front of the midnight moon, Pat saw the newcomer more clearly. He realized there was nothing robotic about this cow. Her pretty green eyes sparkled like the length of tinsel tied around her tail. She wore a deep-blue sash over her black-and-white coat, a rumpled party hat on her head and had a Christmas bauble dangling from each ear. “I saw those nasty fellas catch you in the street and thought you might need some help,” the cow went on. “Shame I had to overload that set of fairy lights with my electro-beam . . .” She held up the torch-like device she was carrying, then pulled out another string of flashing bulbs from under her sash. “But luckily I’ve got plenty spare!”

  “So you’re the one who’s been making these modern Christmas decorations?” McMoo scratched his head. “But you’re wearing a C.I.A. sash!”

  “Course I am! And you’re C.I.A. agents too. I saw through your ringblender disguises in a moment – Pat and Bo Vine, and dishy old Angus McMoo.” The cow grinned and shook her tinselly tail. “I’m Daisy Micklepud, the C.I.A.’s top electrical expert – and I just love Christmas, whatever the year!”

  “Hey, hang on . . .” Pat boggled at the newcomer. “You’re the one Yak told us went missing!”

  “After you’d been tinkering with an F.B.I. time machine,” McMoo agreed gravely. “What’s going on, Daisy? The C.I.A. was set up to stop people mucking around with time – but by putting up all these Christmas decorations that’s exactly what you’re doing!”

  “Don’t be cross with me, chuck!” Daisy’s tail drooped. “Come back to Bettie Barmas’s house and let me explain.”

  “You’re friends with Bettie, then?” asked Pat.

  Daisy nodded. “You could say we’re helping each other out. Come on, lovies! This way!”

  The four cows trotted quickly through the medieval maze of narrow streets. Daisy didn’t have a ringblender, so Pat pretended he was herding her through the city. But the Christmas-mad cow couldn’t stop singing carols, and Bo had to keep shushing her.

  Finally, they made it to Bettie’s home – though Bettie herself was not there. The wooden house was bare inside, save for a stool, a bench and a small log fire. The floor was packed earth and littered with straw – it reminded Pat of his bed back on the farm.

  “Let’s cheer the place up a bit,” said Daisy, crossing to a curtain at the back of the room. Beyond it stood a cramped Christmas grotto with fairy lights flashing, a decorated tree in the corner and a workbench littered with futuristic tools. “There! Much better!”

  McMoo sighed and sat down with Pat and Bo as Daisy began her strange story.

  “So – there I was in my workshop,” she explained, “trying to make that wretched broken F.B.I. time machine work . . . when suddenly, it switched itself on and whisked me back to 1066! There must have been a power surge, ’cos it dragged my workbench, my tools, even the workshop’s Christmas decorations along with me – and then stopped working again! I woke up to find it was December 1st, 1066, and I was marooned in a cold forest with no way of calling for help, no protection and nowhere to go . . .” She used her paper hat as a tissue and dabbed delicately at the tears in her eyes. “Anyway, Bettie Barmas found me first. I gave her quite a shock, me being a clever cow with all my tools and flashy Christmas stuff. And I knew that if she ran off and told people, then cow technology from the twenty-sixth century would fall into the hands of eleventh-century humans!”

  “That could change the whole course of history,” said McMoo. “If humans discovered electro-beam weapons in 1066 they might have wiped themselves out by 1100!”

  “Precisely,” Daisy agreed. “So, using sign language, I did a deal with Bettie – if she kept my stuff a secret and gave me a place to hide while I tried to get the F.B.I. time machine working again, then I would do something nice for her in return. And once she clocked my dazzling Christmas decorations, she realized she could use them to get in with William the Conqueror.”

  Bo frowned. “How come?”

  “William needed a lot of help to win over the people of England,” Daisy confided. “But my dazzling decs proved just the job! Because of them, William is really popular. He’ll be crowned king on Christmas Day, and he’ll probably make Bettie a princess or something. Everyone’s a winner!”

  “That’s a turn up,” Bo remarked. “For once it’s not the F.B.I. playing time tricks – it’s the C.I.A.!”

  “But where did so many decorations come from, Daisy?” asked Pat. “They can’t all have come from your workshop?”

  “Course they didn’t, love!” Daisy leaned closer. “When I took the time machine to bits, I found enough electronic bits and pieces to build a Short-Life Replicator.”

  Bo blinked. “A Shortbread Reptile Butler?”

  “A Short-Life Replicator. It makes a perfect copy of anything you stick inside it,” Daisy explained. “But the copy only lasts a short time. All these baubles, lights and decorations will vanish away to nothing just aft
er Christmas – so no naughty future technology can fall into anyone’s hands!” She beamed. “You know, it’s funny – I was trying to make a replicator back in 2550, it’s a big top-secret project . . .”

  “That’s a remarkable coincidence,” McMoo agreed, looking slightly awkward. “Well, I’m sorry I misjudged you, Daisy. You did what you had to do, and did it very cleverly. If the decorations won’t last, no real harm has been done.”

  “Right,” Daisy agreed. “Today is Christmas Eve, and tomorrow the conqueror will be crowned king!” She fluttered her eyelids at McMoo. “And now you’re here, dearie, you can whisk me back to my own time!”

  “I wish I could,” said McMoo. “But right now my Time Shed is up the spout.” He checked the long-range Time-Power Sensor. “The energy banks just aren’t charging up properly.”

  “I’ve not got much power myself,” Daisy confided. “My electro-beam sends energy through the air, but it isn’t very strong. And after that blast I gave Ethelbad and his men, there’s barely enough left to work the Christmas lights.”

  Bo smiled. “So that’s how the decorations work without being plugged in!”

  “The whole mystery is solved,” said Pat happily. “Result!”

  “I’m afraid not,” said McMoo. “Not quite. There’s still this business of Ethelbad’s ‘special’ turkeys.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” said Bo, “Ethelbad can make like his turkeys and get stuffed!”

  “You’re missing the point,” the professor told her. “Turkeys were first discovered in America. And America hasn’t been discovered yet. Turkeys won’t come to Europe for hundreds of years.”

  Bo scratched her head. “So the F.B.I. are playing about with time . . .”

  Pat nodded. “And working with Ethelbad.”

  Suddenly, the door slammed open – and Bettie Barmas appeared, her ugly face twisted in angry surprise. “Oi! What are you three troublemakers doing in my house? Get away from my cow. Get out!”