by Jack Spain
‘I’ll get over it,’ Balor remarked. ‘It was only a small shock and I have lots of pesto.’
‘I’m not concerned about you. Well, don’t take that the wrong way. You have always been a concern. I’m more concerned that the people building the road are getting hurt, by us. There have been over three hundred trips to accident and emergency on that site over the past few weeks, between superglue and bad doses of diarrhoea and industrial related accidents. It’s all minor stuff but I think it’s getting out of hand.’
Balor jumped up in a rage. His hair popped back out at the sides. ‘Of course they are getting hurt. They are trying to destroy our hill. We are defending our home. We should kill a few.’
‘You sit right back down, you poor excuse for a punk rocker,’ yelled the King. Balor drew in a deep breath and reluctantly sat down. After a few angry glances had been cast in all directions, the King continued.
‘In ancient times, before we were born, when a village was threatened by somebody, we went out into the battlefield and fought our opponents face to face.’
‘And look where it got us,’ Balor snapped back. ‘We live like animals as little people in hills.’
‘Like I said,’ continued the King, ‘we faced our enemies, eye to eye. They knew who we were and we knew who they were. These workmen don’t know that we are here. Every night, we send you out and, with escalating deception and skulduggery, you sabotage the roadworks. Every morning, there is an ambulance or a doctor called to the building site. Three ambulances this morning due to electrocution and no sight of this Health and Safety Executive that you told us about. According to the Captain of the Guard, one of the poor workers is being kept in hospital with suspected heart problems. My question to you, Balor, is how long before they need to call a hearse?’
The room went very quiet. Only now did Moriarty realise the consequences of his actions. Balor looked very unrepentant, but deep inside he understood what the King was saying.
‘The problem is that these workmen are not warriors from another village sent to destroy us. They are just workmen, innocent workmen with families and children. Yes, we are defending our home, but there is another word for how we are doing it. Do you know what that word is?’
‘Terrorism,’ said Moriarty. Balor turned to his apprentice and knew that he was right. He had often regretted the consequences of booby traps, but usually just for a few minutes.
‘We have no choice,’ Balor remarked. He seemed very calm but inside he was torn between saving the village and not hurting anybody. The King looked at them both.
‘Terrorists often claim that they have no choice but there is no excuse for harming innocent people. From now on, I want the roadworks to be sabotaged in such a way that people cannot start work in the first place and don’t get hurt. I don’t care how you do it, but my order is that nobody is hurt. Is that understood?’
‘I understand,’ replied Balor. ‘Is that all?’
‘That is all,’ replied the King and the two little men stood up and turned to leave. ‘Nothing drastic, alright, Balor?’
Balor nodded.
‘Good,’ said the King. ‘Now on another matter, have any of you two got any idea who this Miss Ninja Eco-Warrior is?’
‘Who?’ Moriarty asked, looking perplexed.
‘Miss Ninja Eco-Warrior. She’s getting a lot of press coverage. They seem to be blaming her for the sabotage.’
‘No idea,’ said Balor.
The king looked at them both. ‘So you are sure this isn’t something you two have concocted?’
‘Certain,’ said Balor.
‘She seems to be a big hit with the local school girls around here according to the press,’ said the King. ‘I think that they are even printing t-shirts, with a ninja woman holding a cucumber instead of a samurai sword.’
Balor and Moriarty looked at each other and tried to imagine what that looked like. The expressions they made clearly indicated that they thought it was ridiculous.
‘Probably some adolescent girl at home making it up,’ said Moriarty.
‘I suppose,’ said the King. ‘But she does seem to have the right idea. The publicity she is attracting to the sabotage may actually work our way.’
‘It’s a possibility,’ said Balor. ‘However, she, if indeed it is a she, is only getting the coverage because of the sabotage that we are doing. I don’t think anybody else is causing any. It’s probably just some lonely old crank with nothing better to do.’
‘Possible,’ said the King. ‘Well that’s all. Keep it clean out there and don’t go doing anything drastic, alright?’
‘Alright,’ said Balor and the two little men stood up and left the chamber and walked out into the cave.
Moriarty walked with Balor back to the Laboratory. Along the way, Balor was silent, ignoring most of what Moriarty was saying to him. When they got to the steps of the laboratory, he looked up at his apprentice.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’ll think of something.’
‘I know. You know he’s right?’
‘I know that he is right,’ replied Balor with a sigh as he began to descend the stone stairs.
The laboratory was warm and unusually tidy, but the druid thought it was more curious that Morphu wasn’t around. Moriarty was also very impressed at how tidy everything was, right down to the pencils by the map being dusted and perfectly lined up. He picked up the first pencil and started to mark the progress of the road on the wall.
Balor emptied his pockets onto his workbench and stood staring into the fire while he wondered what to do next. As he stared, his eye was drawn to his magazine of Comither vials. A seed of an idea began to form in his mind. Soon the seed had become a tree of thought, with mad ideas branching out everywhere until, finally, he saw it.
‘Eureka,’ Balor yelled at the top of his voice. Moriarty, who had never heard the word before immediately began to smell his own armpits.
‘No, I don’t,’ he told Balor. ‘I had a bath last month.’
‘What are you on about?’ said Balor, clutching the magazine.
‘You told me I reeked,’ Moriarty replied, a little hurt.
‘You always reek, but that’s not the point. I have an idea. This one will blow your mind,’ he told his bemused apprentice as he grappled with a vial of Comither and held it up to Moriarty to see. Moriarty looked at the tiny vial with a very perplexed expression on his face.
‘What good is that? I hope that you’re not thinking of using Comither on the entire county,’ he said to Balor.
‘Better than that,’ Balor told him excitedly. ‘I’m going to make them think that it is too dangerous to build the road.’
‘And how are you going to do that?’
Balor threw the vial of Comither into the fire and Moriarty watched it land on the hot embers. After a few seconds, the vial started to emit a bright white light. Moriarty turned back to ask Balor what he was planning to do, but Balor was gone. He had rushed upstairs and was standing outside his stone hut with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut.
Moriarty had no time to react before the explosion threw him all the way across the room and almost completely destroyed the laboratory, returning it to its normal untidy state.
Balor took his fingers out of his ears and turned to where he thought Moriarty should have been but he was shocked to find that he wasn’t there. He quickly rushed back inside and ran down the stairs. Through the smoke he was able to make out the blackened figure of Moriarty clambering over his upturned bed.
‘What are you doing down there?’ Balor yelled out. Moriarty didn’t answer. Seeing that Moriarty was still intact, he carried on: ‘Isn’t it brilliant?’
‘You could have killed me,’ Moriarty told him angrily.
‘You should have followed me outside,’ Balor exclaimed.
‘Why did you set that off in here?’
‘There are so many explosions coming from my laboratory that nobody even notices, although this one was
more powerful than I estimated.’
Moriarty put a finger in each ear to quell the ringing and then looked at Balor, annoyed at the old druid’s childish innocence about explosives.
‘I didn’t know Comither exploded,’ he told the druid.
‘I didn’t tell anyone,’ Balor replied. ‘It would stop them carrying it around. Besides, only the Comither concentrate is unstable. The ordinary vials are just like a little firecracker.’
‘A little firecracker, eh? So, what is your plan?’
Balor leaned in and spoke very quietly. Moriarty couldn’t hear him at first. His ears were still ringing.
‘What,’ yelled Moriarty.
Balor raised his voice. ‘I’m going to blow up the building site. I want it to look like there is gas underground and that it is too dangerous to dig there.’ Moriarty’s face turned red, especially as the King had just told them not to hurt anyone.
‘Before everyone turns up for work,’ Balor continued. ‘We’ll arrange a distraction to get rid of the security guards and then use Comither concentrate to blow up the site. They’ll think that there are dangerous gas pockets in the bog.’
‘But it’s a road,’ Moriarty yelled, still deafened by the blast. ‘What possible long term damage could that do? They’ll just fill in the crater and continue.’
‘If we drop it into one of those deep drainage holes, it will create a massive crater. But it’s not the crater that will stop the road. It’s everything else.’
‘Like what?’
‘Comither is completely untraceable after it is dispersed by an explosion,’ Balor said excitedly. ‘Nobody will know what caused the explosion. They’ll be forced to investigate, by the Health and Safety people. An explosion would be too big to ignore. It could take them months or years to declare the site safe. People will be afraid. Fear will stop the road.’
Moriarty thought about it for a moment. ‘And nobody would get hurt?’
‘Not a soul,’
‘Shall we tell the King?’
‘The King? Please King Bruan can we create a three hundred foot wide crater at the roadworks? No. I think not.’
‘And where will we get the Comither?’
‘We’ll take it from the reserves,’ Balor told him.
‘We’ll get in trouble,’ Moriarty warned him.
‘Only if the King finds out beforehand,’ Balor reassured him. ‘Afterwards, we’ll be heroes.’
A wry grin formed on Moriarty’s face. The prospect of making a very big explosion seemed to appeal to him. He looked about at the devastation caused by the vial and then looked at Balor who was perfectly able to interpret his answer. It was on.
‘But remember, we can’t tell the King,’ Balor reminded him. ‘He won’t want to spare so much Comither and he’ll think it too risky.’
‘Agreed. How will we set it off?’
‘Remote control.’
‘Do we have one?’
‘Not really. I’ll get you to light a fuse on my hand signal from where I’ll be standing, in a remote location. You can run faster than me.’
‘I’m not sure that I like that plan!’
‘It will be a long fuse.’
Moriarty and Balor quickly made plans to steal the reserves of Comither and then raced upstairs. Morphu was just coming in the front door with some firewood as they were leaving. Balor stopped him.
‘The laboratory needs a bit of a tidy, Morphu,’ he told him. ‘Can you see to it?’
The two little men raced out the front door and hurried off in the direction of Moriarty’s hut. Morphu dropped the firewood and just stared at the smoke rising from the stairwell to the laboratory.
Save the Rainforest
The next morning, to everyone’s surprise, the ‘Save the Bog Environmental Group’ arrived and met up in the middle of town. A meeting was called by the leaders of the protestors in the back of a van. They sat there waiting for the head of the group, updating their Facebook profiles and posting messages on Twitter. The door of the van opened and a thin old man in a Trilby hat stepped in and closed it behind him. Everyone put their phones away.
‘Are we all here?’ he asked as he looked around the group.
‘Yes we are,’ replied a woman dressed in particularly colourful clothes. ‘Why are we here? This isn’t a rainforest!’
‘Of course it’s not a rain forest,’ he replied.
‘So, why are we here?’ asked another.
‘Publicity,’ he replied. ‘Times are hard and the recession has bit deeply into our fundraising. We need to improve the quality of our public profile. Right now we haven’t enough money to fly to the Amazon to protest against the loggers so we are going to diversify a little.’
‘But this is a bog!’ the camouflaged woman protested. ‘No other environmental group is interested in it. The only thing we know about it is that there is this mad ninja eco-warrior woman who is suspected of sabotaging the site, but the police have no leads.’
‘She sounds a right piece of work,’ he responded. ‘But thanks to her this road has been in the papers and on the radio, what with all that has been going on. The publicity that we can leech from this road will be good for our street collections, which will mean more money, and then we’ll be able to get back to saving rainforests.’
‘But we could be implicated in the sabotage!’ she replied.
‘There isn’t one person in this van that has been anywhere near a tree, let alone this place for months. We all have alibis. We’ll just be here long enough to get a few shots in the paper and on TV and take off.’
‘How long will that be?’
The man in the Trilby pulled out a map from his pocket and opened it up. ‘There is a hill three miles from where the roadworks are currently. According to the plans we got from the council the road will cut right through it. It’s the only discernable feature worth any press coverage. As soon as the hill has been flattened we’ll declare it an environmental disaster and move on, preferably somewhere warm like Brazil.’
‘How long?’
‘From what I hear about this particular developer, it will only be a couple of months at the most. The plan is to occupy the road path, and continually get moved on, without looking too suspicious, until they flatten the hill. We’ll need to occupy it twenty four hours a day.’
‘Isn’t this all a bit deceptive?’ asked a young man with dreadlocks in the corner.
‘It is,’ replied the man. ‘However it is necessary for us to be a little deceptive in order to achieve the greater good, which is saving rainforests and not bogs. Are we all agreed?’
The man in the trilby looked at each individual in the van and when they had all nodded in agreement he clapped his hands together. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s get all these volunteers outside to camp on the building site. And remember, if anyone comes across this Betty Black send her straight to me!’
Outside the deluded volunteers had brought with them a collection of placards with the word ‘rainforest’ blanked out and replaced with the word ‘bog’. They were very proud of their work and had even taken the trouble of calling the local radio station, the national radio station, the television stations, the local newspapers, the national newspapers and a whole raft of international environmentalist groups, to let them know what they were up to. If that wasn’t enough they has created a website and were posting regular updates on their activities on Twitter and Facebook. In order to be sure of some good photographs showing them being manhandled off the building site by the Gardaí, they called the local Garda station and agreed to start the protest at 10.30 in the morning. This would give the local Gardaí enough time to finish their Thursday morning meetings.
With everything running to schedule, they bundled themselves into three four-wheel-drive trucks and set off in a convoy. To get to the end of the site, they had to cut across some fields, as they were sure that Michael McManus would not let them drive up the roadworks to protest at the end of it. Having driven across country for
almost a mile, singing tree songs while leaving deep tyre tracks in their wake, accidentally damaging a few fences and rabbit burrows, and driving a poor badger out of his home, they came to what they thought was the end of the roadworks, but they were unsure.
The end of the roadworks looked like a spaghetti junction. As a result of Balor’s sabotage, the road had gone off course five times and the protestors had a hard time deciding where the end of the road actually was. Thinking that this was actually a clever conspiracy by the government, the Garda Síochána, some bankers and Michael McManus, they decided to split up and protest at the end of all of them.
Balor, Moriarty and Chopper hid under a hedge while they watched the protestors erect tents, set campfires, litter the countryside and sing songs. Between them lay the bag of Comither concentrate.
‘Where the blue blazes did all these idiots come from?’ asked Balor.
‘No idea,’ claimed Moriarty. ‘How long do you think they’ll be here?’
‘They seem to be settling in for the long haul,’ said Balor as scratched his head. He looked back in the direction of the hill. ‘They won’t hold up a man like McManus for very long. I’ve never come across someone so determined to build a road before. We’ll have to place the explosives somewhere further up, where they cannot do any harm to them or the King will have our heads.’
‘How much further up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘How big of an explosion will it cause?’
‘I don’t know. Probably a couple of hundred feet.’
‘Based on what?’
‘A guess,’ Balor replied. ‘The vial only blew up the lab.’
‘How much of the concentrate is in a vial?’
‘One part Comither to five hundred parts water.’
Moriarty looked down at the bag and started to perform some calculations in his head, and then gave up.
‘How many vials can we make from once canister of Comither?’ he asked Balor.
‘About a thousand’
Moriarty looked into the bag and rummaged around. ‘Then there is the equivalent of thirty thousand vials of it in this,’ he said.