by Jack Spain
When he turned back to look into the cavern he started to look a little lost. Some guards were coming up from the side to relieve Chopper and rather than stop to talk to them he began to walk forward again for a few yards before turning left and leading in the direction of his own stone hut.
When he got inside his hut he lit a candle and looked around. The only sound was from the celebrations in the distance. The tiny hut was bare and there was nothing to show for the adventure that he had just been through. His bed was still there but the fireplace was full of the charred remains of his belongings. Exhausted, he closed the door behind him and went to the bed and sat down. He pulled his sword sheath over his head and unhooked his comither magazine from his belt before untying his boot laces, kicking off his boots and swinging his legs up onto the bed and laying back. He pulled the sword from its sheath and with his sword laid across his chest and his comither magazine held tightly in his other hand he began to doze off and soon he was fast asleep.
A few moments later there was a knock on the door, and a few seconds later it opened slowly. Moriarty didn’t stir. He was completely out for the count. Betty Black stood at the door and looked in.
‘Moriarty,’ she said, ‘are you OK?’
There was no answer. She stepped inside and walked over to the bed and leaned over slightly to look. Moriarty was fast asleep and had turned onto his side, still clutching his sword and comither magazine. He twitched a little as if he was reliving a battle in his dreams. His clothes were very dirty and badly torn. His arms and face were scratched, grazed, muddied, and bruised. His brand new sword looked as if it had seen a lot of action. It was pitted and scratched and the threading on the handle was frayed. His hair had grown a little since she last noticed and it was matted with mud and debris. She looked around for a blanket but there was none, so she quietly took off her jacket and gently laid it over his shoulders. He didn’t move. She looked at him for a few more seconds before turning and walking to the door, and after one last look she went outside and quietly closed the door.
A Storm is Coming
It was the new summer and the sun was just below the eastern horizon. The sky was clear and you could still see the stars above. The birds had already begun to sing their morning song, and the world as Moriarty knew it had returned to normal. He looked around at the countryside from the top of the hill, down to Grogan’s new house, around by the road and back to the top of the hill before taking a deep breath and resuming his exercises. Holding a sword in each hand, he looked to the eleven sticks that he had stuck in the ground around him. Each stood nearly as tall as Moriarty himself, and each had a single branch, at the end of which was a single leaf. Moriarty turned his head slowly to regard each leaf before raising the swords into the same stance that Nemed had taken when they had surrounded him. In his own mind, he concentrated on the exact location of each leaf relative to his own position. He reversed his stance to bring the left sword behind his head and, when he was ready, he began, slicing each leaf off the branch at lightning speed, with alternate swords. In less than four seconds, it was over and he returned to the original stance. He quickly looked around to see if he had got them all, but he was interrupted by a clapping noise from behind him. It was Balor, strolling up the hill from the direction of Grogan’s new house.
‘You missed one,’ Balor said, pointing to a branch behind Moriarty. Moriarty looked and expelled a little sigh. He had been sure that he had hit it.
‘I’m nearly there, though,’ Moriarty replied. ‘Just a little more practice and I’ll be there.’
‘The spy’s swordsmanship obviously impressed you more than I had thought.’
‘He was very fast.’ replied Moriarty.
‘And very precise.’
‘He could have killed us all. But maybe he chose not to.’
‘Yes, I think he chose not to,’ replied Balor. ‘I don’t care why. Being alive is the most important thing in the end. Set up the leaves again. I’d like to try. Are they new swords?’
Moriarty nodded and smiled as he stuck the swords into the ground and picked up the leaves. He began inserting them in the little holes at the end of each branch.
‘Do you know what he was after in the end?’ Moriarty asked.
Balor pulled the swords out of the ground and began to examine them. ‘What was that?’ he asked.
‘Do you know what he was after?’
‘Hmmmm,’ Balor replied. ‘Secret weapons I suspect.’
‘Maybe but I don’t think that was all that he was after.’
‘You don’t? And why is that?’ Balor quizzed, interested to hear Moriarty’s theory.
‘Well, he blew it all up in the explosion. The Comither. That was our only secret weapon, and he must have found that pretty early on.’
‘You think?’
‘We were both there. I reckon he switched with Morphu that first night we went to the road to move the markers.’
‘I agree.’
‘Something else bothers me.’
‘What bothers you?’
‘How much of an explosion did you think a whole bag of Comither concentrate would create?’ Moriarty said. ‘It was about a Megaton, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right,’ said Balor. ‘A Megaton. Enough to blow a hole fifty yards deep and probably a blast radius of two or three hundred yards, and probably a hell of a lot more. Stand back. It’s my turn.’
Balor stretched his neck as he took a new stance, similar to but not quite the same as Nemed’s. On the count of three, Balor began, swinging the swords expertly and gracefully, but much faster than Moriarty, and by the time Moriarty had counted to two, he was finished. Moriarty stood in stunned silence as Balor lowered the swords, looked around and smiled knowingly to himself. Moriarty pointed two wagging fingers at Balor.
‘Don’t look so surprised!’ Balor said. ‘Any idiot can teach themselves to cut leaves off trees at high speed. Why, even a machine could do that. The trick is to cut down eleven armed warriors who are all moving in different directions, at different speeds, from different angles. That takes a lot of experience and skill. That’s what our spy had. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to train him up and send him here. He was expensive, not expendable.’
‘You don’t think he’s dead, do you?’
‘No I don’t. I reckon that there were two, three canisters at most, in that rucksack that he threw into the fire,’ said Balor. ‘I reckon that he deposited at least twenty five of them somewhere between where I gave them to him in the hill, and Grogan’s house.’
‘But we ran down the hill right after him. We didn’t see him drop them anywhere.’
‘I thought of that,’ said Balor as he handed the swords back to Moriarty. ‘That means that they are still here someplace, or that he used some Comither on us to make us forget that he took them.’
‘I don’t think he did. It sounds strange, but as we were together all night guarding the hill. I don’t think he would have been able to approach us. We were a bundle of nerves. We would have seen him coming. He wouldn’t have had a chance.’
‘I think you are right. I think they are still here someplace, and you know what that means if he survived the blast?’
‘He’ll be back for it?’
‘That’s a possibility. The other one is that he has taken our most potent weapon and put it in a place where he could use it against us. I’ve spent months searching the hill and cannot find them, but I’m sure that they are here, someplace, just waiting for the spy, or someone else to come and get them, or worse, use them against us.’
Moriarty shuddered at the thought that hidden somewhere in the hill was a bomb powerful enough to wipe the entire hill, and everyone that lives in it from the face of the Earth.
‘But one thing bothers me,’ Balor said to Moriarty. ‘If he did want to use the Comither against the hill he would have been better to kill us both. He probably thought that he was more than capable. I don’t think wiping us out was on his plan. Alt
hough I don’t think he was expecting you to be as fast or determined as you were either.’
‘So what do we do? We can’t just carry on without knowing what happened to them.’
‘That’s exactly what we will do. We don’t know who sent him and we cannot tell the Kings of the other hills about the Comither, or they will send someone to steal it.’
‘So, in the meantime we are sitting on a bomb. Does the King know?’
‘Yes he does.’
‘And what does he want to do about it?’
‘Nothing. We cannot find it so there is nothing we can do. If somebody wants to blow us up and we cannot find it then there is nothing we can do, other than to be more vigilant or move to another hill, and what is to stop them using it there. No. He thinks that whatever its purpose, so long as we don’t declare another war, it will be of little cause for concern. In any event he would have expected it to be raised during the non-proliferation treaty negotiations, and there was no mention at all. Not a whisper. And what I’m telling you is secret. It can go no further. The King can when the need genuinely arises keep a secret too you know?’
‘But there is always the chance he got away with it?’
‘True, and what is to stop them mass producing it and using it against us?’
Moriarty smiled. ‘Because it is a secret recipe?’
‘Yes,’ replied Balor. ‘It is a secret recipe. If they use it all in one go, there will be none left for anybody else to use, and what use will that be? If they really wanted it they should have taken me instead. I’m the only one who can make it.’
Moriarty began to feel a little more at ease, but struggled to shake the thought of living in a time-bomb from his mind. He stepped back and began to gather the sticks into a small bundle under his arm before walking over to Balor and looking out over the new road.
‘What about Morphu?’ he said to Balor. ‘He’s out there somewhere, maybe, if he’s not dead already.’
‘I really don’t know,’ replied Balor, quietly. ‘I think he’ll be alright. He’ll find his way home someday. Maybe he’s found a new home already. Did I tell you that I worked out who the ninja eco-warrior was?’
‘Betty Black.’
Balor was surprised. ‘Yes. How did you know?’
‘I knew the second the King mentioned it. Miss Ninja Eco-Warrior. I mean, really? What about you?’
‘The same time. Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Could you imagine having to spend another two thousand years in this hill with her if she knew that you dobbed her in to the King?’ replied Moriarty. ‘What about you?’
‘I had my suspicions but I said nothing because it was easier to let her do her own thing than interfere in ours. In retrospect, her timing in getting those environmentalists to turn up couldn’t have been worse. Of course the evidence came much later, after the road was diverted.’
‘The evidence? What was it?’
‘She used my credit card to book flights for twenty of those protestors to Brazil.’
Moriarty looked very surprised. ‘You have a credit card?’
‘Of course. Grogan keeps it for me. It’s in his name too. How else do you think we buy all this stuff we have? But to head off your next question, she didn’t ask my permission to use it.’
‘So why didn’t you say anything?’
‘We have lots of money,’ Balor told him. ‘I’ve been playing the stock market for over two hundred years. You learn a few tricks.’
Moriarty looked to the east as the sun warmed his face. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It was time to go back inside.
‘Do you think we will always be hiding in the hills?’ Moriarty asked. ‘The road may have gone around the hill, but the road still came here, and now we have to hide from German and Japanese tourists on bicycles during the day time. It doesn’t really feel like we won. It feels like we lost, just in an easier way. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know. I like to think we won, but I don’t know. Maybe there are never clear winners. That can be your lesson for the day. In real life there are no perfect plans, no clear winners, and there are no clean getaways. Maybe this is no country for little men anymore. Maybe it never was. Yes. That’s it. It never was.’
Moriarty put his hand on Balor’s shoulder and looked him directly in the eyes. ‘This is my country,’ Moriarty told him. ‘We were here long before the Celts and the Irishmen came. Maybe that road is the line in the sand that we need. Maybe there is nowhere left to run and hide.’
‘We are just a little people, Moriarty.’
‘That’s just a description, Balor, not an excuse. Maybe the King was right. Next time we might have to put our backs to the wall and fight. The Irishmen are killing us off and they don’t even know that they are doing it. Maybe that was the lesson for the day.’
Balor’s mood turned as sombre as the dark clouds on the western horizon. He pulled his cloak tight around him as the wind started to blow. ‘Anyway, we should get inside,’ he said. ‘The wind is picking up. I think that there’s a storm coming.’
With that, he had one last look around before he descended into the hill after Moriarty.
The wind rustled the leaves on the surrounding trees and swirled through the grass down the hill towards Grogan’s new house. Grogan emerged and went to the washing line to bring in his clothes before it rained. Some birds took to the air and darted off in the opposite direction of the clouds, A dog could be heard barking in the distance.
In a small hollow by the fence at the bottom of the hill, a shadowy figure, dressed in dark green camouflaged fatigues, lay face down looking up at the tree by the entrance to the hill. He rolled over and pulled himself sitting up against a back pack and looked at the four other little men that were laid down behind him, all heavily armed, and camouflaged. He opened it and pulled out a small mobile phone, and dialled a number whilst pulling a earbud, half the size of his head to his ear. The call was answered. The little man leaned close to the microphone.
‘This is Nemed. We are in position,’ he said.
‘Standby,’ said a voice on the other end of the line. There was a short pause and then the voice came back on. ‘The order is go.’
Moriarty will return in The Revenge
For more details go to:
http://moriartysaga.blogspot.com