The Eye of Zoltar

by Jasper Fforde

  ‘From here on in we’re in Mountain Silurian territory,’ said Addie.

  ‘Can you see the others?’ asked Wilson as we gazed out across the landscape.

  Perkins spelled himself a hand telescope by creating two ‘O’ shapes with his index fingers and thumbs and conjuring up a glass lens in each. Early versions of the spell required an operator to focus the telescope manually, but later releases had autofocus as standard, with a zoom feature and auto-stabilisation useful add-ons.

  ‘I can see the half-track. Looks like it’s a couple of miles from the base of the mountain. Think he’s still got your conch?’

  ‘He didn’t try and sell the Helping Hand™ in Llangurig,’ I said, for if he had he’d make several times the price of a handmaiden, ‘so I’m hoping.’

  Perkins scanned the parts of the road that were visible among the low hills and wooded areas. ‘The Skybus truck is not far behind him.’

  Because they were still moving, it seemed logical to presume that neither of them had encountered the Mountain Silurians, or if they had, goats had been successfully bartered.

  We moved off soon after and as we descended into the dense woodlands of the Mountain Silurians’ land, we noted how the increased rainfall had made everything lush and moist. Bottle-green moss grew in abundance on the rocks and trees, lichen clung doggedly to anything it could find, and we were constantly fording small streams and rivers.

  All this time, the overwhelming size of the bleak pinnacle of rock that was Cadair Idris loomed over us menacingly. A better place for a pirate hideout would be impossible to imagine.

  ‘Where are the Mountain Silurians?’ asked the Princess. ‘I thought you said they were fearless tribes-people who would kill us all for amusement unless we gave them goats?’

  ‘I was wondering that myself,’ said Addie. ‘To get this far into their territory without being threatened with dismemberment and asked to pay tribute is unusual – I hope nothing’s happened to them.’

  ‘I’m really hoping something has happened to them,’ said the Princess. ‘Any jeopardy we can avoid is one more step toward survival.’

  ‘I’ll just be glad to quietly sit down somewhere with my pipe and a pair of slippers,’ said Perkins, coming over a bit fiftyish, ‘and read the paper.’

  ‘You don’t have a pipe,’ I pointed out, ‘or slippers.’

  ‘Or a paper, yes, agreed – but there’s a first time for everything.’

  ‘Slow down,’ I said, pointing to where a light blue vehicle had stopped ahead of us in a clearing. Addie pulled the jeep off the road and parked behind an oak tree. It was the Skybus truck. The driver had climbed out and was stretching his legs, then he reached into his cab, took out a roll of loo paper and walked off into the forest.

  ‘Stay here,’ said Addie.

  She jumped out of the jeep and darted forward noiselessly, stopped for a moment, looked around and then moved forward again. Within a minute she was at the back of the truck, had opened the rear doors and looked inside. Just as quickly she shut the doors again, and slipped into the undergrowth. The driver duly returned, the truck restarted and then drove off towards the mountain. Half a minute later Addie rejoined us. She didn’t look too happy.

  ‘Everything okay?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, pointing behind us, ‘and we’ve got company.’

  I turned around to find that a dozen or so warriors riding Buzonjis had crept up on us completely silently, and were now less than twenty paces away. Each warrior was large, tanned and amply but not skilfully covered in blue warpaint. Every one of them was armed with a short sword and a lance, upon the point of which was a human skull, the steel tip of the lance piecing the top of the skullcap. These heads were traditionally harvested by lance in battle while in the charge, and remained there as a trophy. The warriors were all scowling at us in probably the most unpleasant and unwelcoming way I had ever witnessed. I heard Wilson swallow nervously. We didn’t need to guess who they might be. They were the feared Mountain Silurians.

  The Mountain Silurians

  ‘All hail Glorious Geraint the Great,’ said Addie, bowing low, ‘the gutsy, gallant and gracious gatekeeper of the great green grassy northern grounds.’

  It seemed, from Addie’s flowery and clearly overblown greetings, that the Silurian chief himself had graced us with his presence.

  We all bowed as Geraint the Great looked on imperiously, while the Buzonjis stamped their feet impatiently. After a pause that felt like ten minutes but was probably less then twenty seconds, Geraint the Great looked at one of his advisers, a giant of a woman dressed in the skin of a Welsh leopard, who nodded.

  ‘Your alliteration is acceptable albeit mildly simplistic,’ said Geraint. ‘What do you seek, Addie the Tour Guide, champion of the blade, younger daughter of Owen the Dead, holder of the Tourist Good Conduct medal?’

  ‘Our lives are in your hands,’ continued Addie, bowing again and continuing the long-winded formal greeting. ‘We wish only peace and goodwill, and are merely travellers seeking to pass through your sacred grounds.’

  ‘To where?’ asked Geraint.

  ‘To seek the legendary Leviathans’ Graveyard on Cadair Idris, Your Greatness, to venture there and return, safely and without hindrance.’

  ‘The Rock Goddess shall not be defiled,’ he intoned angrily, while the rest of the warriors muttered darkly to themselves. ‘You shall be sacrificed to the mountain, your blood splashed about the rocks and your rotting carcasses picked apart by the condor. The mountain shall be appeased. You will die. I, Geraint the Great, have spoken.’

  ‘We have brought gifts,’ said Addie.

  There was a pause.

  ‘The mountain may be appeased … in other ways,’ said Geraint the Great. ‘We accept your gifts … so long as they’re not more of those bloody goats. All we ever get given is goats, and let me tell you, we’re sick of them. Sick of the sight of them, sick of the smell of them, and sick of the taste of them. Isn’t that right, lads?’

  The warriors gave out a hearty ‘Uuh!’ sort of noise and waved their spears in the air.

  ‘We have so many goats,’ continued Geraint the Great in an exasperated tone, ‘that we even have to sell them at below market value to those milksops in Llangurig. If anyone were ever to try and offload those same goats back to us, our anger would be great, our violence most savage.’

  ‘O-kay,’ said Addie. ‘Please wait, Your Greatness, while I consult with my fellow travellers.’

  She turned to us.

  ‘Looks like I was misinformed over the whole goat thing,’ she said in a whisper.

  ‘It explains why cheap goats are flooding the Llangurig Commodities Market,’ said the Princess thoughtfully. ‘How fascinating.’

  ‘Not really important right now, ma’am,’ said Addie. ‘Has anyone got anything else we can barter?’

  ‘I have two thousand plotniks,’ said Wilson, opening his wallet. ‘It’s all I have in the world but you are welcome to it.’

  ‘Any good?’ I said to Addie.

  ‘They’re not fond of cash,’ she replied, ‘but I’ll try.’

  ‘Gorgeous Geraint the Great,’ said Addie, turning back to the warriors, ‘as weary travellers of limited means, we can offer only two thousand plotniks.’

  The warriors all laughed uproariously.

  ‘We despise your abstract monetary concepts. Value should lie in the commodity, and not be assigned arbitrarily to a device of no intrinsic value in itself.’

  ‘I like this bunch,’ whispered the Princess, ‘they totally talk my language.’

  ‘So we only barter,’ continued Geraint the Great, ‘but no more goats. We want washing machines, food mixers, toasters and other consumer durables. That nice man in the half-track gave us his iPod.’

  That explained how Curtis got past, at least. We told him we had none of these things, nor any reasonable chance of finding any at short notice.

  ‘Very well,’ replied Geraint, �
�you will return the way you came and we will take the novelty rubber Dragon in exchange for your lives.’

  As he said it he pointed at Rubber Colin, who was still sitting, very much made of rubber, in the back of the jeep.

  ‘The … novelty rubber Dragon is not for trade,’ I said.

  The chief rolled off his horse in a less-than-expert fashion and drew his sword.

  ‘Then you will die,’ said the warrior chief, ‘and painfully – except for Addie, who will do our washing and cleaning for the rest of her natural life.’

  Addie drew out her dagger and glared at the warriors.

  ‘I will die protecting my friends.’

  They were fine words and I knew she was good in a fight, but a dozen Mountain Silurians armed to the teeth against a twelve-year-old wasn’t a fight I’d be betting on any time soon.

  ‘Wait!’ said the Princess. ‘I can help you.’

  ‘You can iron?’ said the chief. ‘That would indeed be a game-changer.’

  ‘No,’ said the Princess. ‘I’ll help you change your financially crippling goat surplus into a valuable trading commodity.’

  Geraint looked at the Princess and narrowed his eyes.

  ‘It’s an attractive idea,’ he said. ‘We have thousands of the blasted things. How?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Princess, taking a deep breath, ‘we would first form a Goat Trading Corporation and use this to bring together all the other goat-producing tribes in order to control the number of goats moving on to the market. Instead of buyers dictating goat prices based on free supply, the goat-producing tribes can limit production and peg their value to an agreed minimum goat price so that all producers get a fair deal. We can couple this with an advertising strategy to increase goat use awareness among the public, and even develop a breeding programme to generate expensive limited-edition goats for collectors. I think we can increase the value of goats tenfold in as little as six months, so long as all the other goat-producing tribes agree to join us.’

  ‘What’s she talking about?’ whispered Addie.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ I whispered back.

  Geraint the Great stared at the Princess for a long time, then replaced his sword in its scabbard.

  ‘It shall be so,’ he said. ‘You will consult with our accountant, Pugh the Numbers.’

  One of the neater warriors climbed off his Buzonji as Geraint remounted his, and after Geraint had told us we were ‘the guests of the Siluri’, they were all gone, leaving the Princess to explain her complex marketing plans in detail to Pugh the Numbers.

  It was almost an hour before we were back on the road again.

  Cavi homini

  ‘That’s kind of weird,’ said the Princess once we had driven a mile or two down the road in silence. We had dumped the trailer and freed the goats, so although still cramped in the jeep, we were at least a little faster.

  ‘What’s weird?’ I asked. ‘There’s a wide choice out here.’

  ‘The quantity of goats involved. Pugh the accountant said that Skybus Aeronautics gave them two thousand goats a month as payment for mining rights at Cadair Idris.’

  ‘What were they mining?’

  The Princess shrugged.

  ‘He didn’t say. But because the contract was well drafted, they couldn’t convert the goats into something more usable. At least, not until now. I think the Goat Marketing Board will be a serious earner for the Mountain Silurians. It might even civilise them.’

  ‘You did say that peace would be brought about only through economic means,’ I observed.

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’

  We reached the farthest extent of the wooded area a half-hour later, and Addie pulled into the shade of a large lime tree. We climbed out to consider our next move.

  ‘There’s at least a mile of open country to the base of the mountain,’ said Addie, peering at the landscape through binoculars, ‘and we must be cautious – a lot of people have vanished travelling this way.’

  I looked up at the sheer grey mass of Cadair Idris, the top swathed in clouds, and saw, for the first time, that one side of the rocky pinnacle seemed to have the remnants of a stairway cut into the stone. The road upon which we were parked led to the mountain, then branched to where we could see that some buildings had been constructed beneath the almost vertical southern face. They seemed quite new, too. I nudged Perkins and pointed. He spelled himself a hand telescope again and stared for a moment at the distant buildings.

  ‘Several large buildings,’ he said, ‘and a barbed-wire perimeter with lots of people milling about. Looks like a manufacturing facility of some sort. The Skybus truck has just arrived and the gates are being opened to allow it to enter.’

  ‘Manufacturing?’ I said. ‘Out here?’

  ‘Looks like it. With a sizeable workforce, too, but they’re too far away to see details.’

  ‘Someone not subject to the hundred per cent fatality index, at any rate,’ I said.

  ‘Pugh the Numbers called them Cavi homini,’ said the Princess.

  Addie laughed and I asked her what was so funny.

  ‘It’s like Cloud Leviathan graveyards and Sky Pirate Wolff and the Eye of Zoltar – myths. The Cavi homini are spooks, bogles, mysterious men without morals, or form. They take what they want, and nothing can kill them. It is said they are only empty walking clothes, with nothing inside. The translation from Latin is—’

  ‘Hollow Men,’ I said with a shiver.

  ‘Yes,’ said Addie with a frown. ‘You have these fairy stories in the Kingdom of Snodd as well?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ve got them for real, as have you. We call them drones. They are used by …’

  I stopped talking as several pieces of a large and very unseen jigsaw puzzle that was hovering above me locked into place. The Mighty Shandar used drones, owned a large share of Skybus Aeronautics, and here in the empty land near Cadair Idris, Hollow Men were manufacturing something for Skybus and then shipping it out in the trucks we had just seen.

  ‘Addie,’ I said, ‘just what did you see in the back of the Skybus truck?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, ‘it was completely empty.’

  ‘It couldn’t have been,’ I said. ‘They come in heavy and go out light – you said so yourself.’

  ‘I did say that, yes. The empty lorry I saw was one of the heavy ones being driven in.’

  ‘Then there’s less than nothing in the light ones going out?’

  Addie shrugged.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said the Princess.

  ‘Sometimes when magic and the Mighty Shandar are involved,’ I said, ‘it’s better not to know the truth.’

  ‘Jenny, I’ve found the half-track,’ said Perkins, who had focused his fingerscope on the side of the mountain where I had seen the stone steps.

  ‘And?’

  ‘The vehicle’s empty, but halfway to the top I can see a small figure – Curtis. I’d recognise that bandana anywhere. What do we do?’

  ‘Do what we planned and climb Cadair Idris,’ I said, ‘by way of the steps, preferably.’

  ‘And the Skybus facility and the Hollow Men?’ asked Addie.

  I shrugged.

  ‘They’re what – two miles away? I say we worry about them if they start heading our way.’

  So that’s what we decided to do. We got back in the jeep and headed off over the open land towards the mountain. I say ‘open land’ but that was true only in that there were no trees. The road rose and fell with the contours, and then tipped into a shallow ravine where the river crossed our path.

  Addie slowed to a stop when we reached the river, and we looked around at the morbid sight that met our eyes. We didn’t speak for some moments.

  ‘Holy cow,’ said Perkins finally.

  Addie switched off the engine and we climbed out. It was a medium-sized river, stony and fast moving and no more than a couple of feet deep. But it wasn’t the river that we had stopped to see, it was the bones. There were, quite lite
rally, thousands of them. All human, and in places piled so thick that they had clogged the river and raised the water level. There were vehicles, too. Some overturned by winter floods, others corroded to nothing and a few that looked as though they had been there less than a year.

  ‘I’m thinking we’ve just discovered what happened to everyone who headed this way,’ said Addie, ‘ambushed and massacred.’

  ‘Do you think the Mountain Silurians aim to kill us anyway?’ asked Wilson. ‘That they aim to kill us anyway?’

  ‘After all my financial advice,’ said the Princess, ‘that would be a pretty dismal thing to do.’

  Addie had approached the river and knelt down to inspect the bones.

  ‘It won’t be the Siluri,’ said Addie, ‘they’re honourable people, if a little violent and not very sophisticated.’

  She held up a cleanly sliced ulna, then a lower jaw cleaved neatly sideways.

  ‘No, these are random wounds by a swiftly wielded long sword. These people were overcome not by skill, but by numbers.’

  ‘Drones,’ I said. ‘Hollow Men.’

  We looked around nervously, but there was nothing – just the babbling of the brook, the gurgle of water through rocks.