The Boy Who Was Wanted Dead Or Alive - Or Both

by Dominic Barker

  Agnes shook a little when she heard the word ‘dung’.

  ‘Let us assure you,’ said Princess Lois, moving closer to Agnes and placing a comforting hand on her arm, ‘that we will tell nobody of our visit. Nobody will ever know that we have met you.’

  Princess Lois looked so sweet all of a sudden that Agnes was tempted. She remembered the fun she’d had talking to animals and the way everyone was so impressed by what she could do.

  But then she remembered the dung.

  ‘No,’ she repeated.

  Princess Lois’s eyes shrank back to their normal size and her comforting hand dropped from Agnes’s arm.

  Beo watched Princess Lois’s failure.

  ‘When you want a job done I’m the man to do it for you,’ he announced and he pulled his giant sword from his scabbard.

  ‘Now,’ he said, approaching Agnes, ‘we’ve tried to be nice and we’ve tried to be reasonable. And you, being a nasty crone living in a hovel, couldn’t appreciate nice and reasonable – which makes me sad. And when I get sad I get angry. And when I get angry I tend to pick up my sword and cleave into pieces the person who made me sad and angry, unless they change their mind and talk to that horse straight away.’

  Beo’s approach lacked subtlety, but as he approached Agnes, brandishing his sword, none of the questors doubted that it would be effective.

  But Agnes was not cowed.

  ‘There are worse things than being cleaved in two.’

  ‘Don’t be too sure,’ said Beo, raising his sword higher and preparing to slash.

  ‘I will face death before I face dung.’

  Agnes raised her head and fearlessly faced Beo’s blade.

  ‘Beowulf!’ said Capablanca. ‘We cannot come into a woman’s clearing, knock down her shelter and then kill her simply because she won’t help us.’

  ‘Can’t we?’ said Beo.

  ‘We are not savages,’ the wizard reminded him.

  The warrior looked dubious.

  ‘I thought you said my shelter blew down in a freak wind,’ said Agnes.

  ‘Did we?’ said Capablanca, realising his mistake.

  ‘Yes,’ said Agnes. ‘And I was considering helping you.’

  ‘No, you weren’t,’ insisted Beo.

  ‘I was,’ said Agnes.

  ‘You didn’t sound like you were to me,’ said Beo.

  ‘Beowulf!’ said Capablanca.

  The questors looked at each other helplessly. If even death could not persuade Agnes to help them, then nothing could. It was at that moment that Blart produced a freak wind of his own.

  Chapter 42

  ‘Is something wrong with your lard?’ Blart demanded of Uther.

  ‘Blart!’ snapped Capablanca. ‘We are trying to save the world. The quality of Uther’s lard is entirely unimportant.’

  ‘My lard is fine,’ insisted Uther.

  ‘It’s doing strange things to my insides,’ said Blart.

  ‘There’s probably something wrong with your insides, then,’ said Uther, who never acknowledged anything he sold was defective.

  ‘I think my insides are about to become outsides,’ said Blart.

  ‘What’s the boy talking about?’ demanded Beo. ‘If he wants his insides to become outsides then I’ve got an unsheathed sword in my hand that will do a fine job of it. One swift cut is all I need.’

  ‘No,’ explained Blart. ‘I need to –’

  ‘I know what you need to do,’ said Capablanca, feeling that even though the quest was not going well it had not yet descended to the level where public discussion of Blart’s less attractive physical requirements was necessary. Beo was bound to find it unchivalrous and offensive to the modesty of Princess Lois and soon there’d be blood everywhere.

  ‘Just go into the trees,’ said Capablanca.

  Blart walked delicately but swiftly towards the trees, which was the point at which Agnes finally understood what was going on.

  ‘No!’ she shouted, a terrible desperation in her voice. ‘I can’t have that horrible boy’s dung near my clearing. You must stop him. I’ll do anything.’

  ‘Including talk to Pig the Horse for us?’ said Uther quickly.

  ‘Anything,’ repeated Agnes.

  ‘Blart,’ commanded Capablanca. ‘Stop.’

  Blart paused at the edge of the clearing.

  ‘I’m not sure I can,’ he said.

  ‘You can and you will,’ ordered Beo. ‘All you need is will power.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Blart.

  ‘Your body wants to do something but you use the power of your mind to stop it.’

  Blart looked confused. When his body wanted to do something his mind usually went along with it.

  ‘Concentrate, boy,’ urged Capablanca. ‘The success of the quest may hinge on your movements.’

  ‘Or lack of movements,’ added Uther unnecessarily.

  Rarely can the world have been so at risk.

  Blart screwed up his face and concentrated.

  ‘We must hurry,’ said Capablanca to Agnes. ‘I don’t know how long we can keep your clearing dung free.’

  Agnes needed no more encouragement and she rushed across the clearing towards Pig the Horse.

  ‘Beo and the Princess!’ said Capablanca. ‘You are Blart’s oldest friends. Distract him. Keep his mind on higher things.’

  Capablanca and Uther followed Agnes to where Pig the Horse was waiting patiently. Reluctantly, Beo and the Princess obeyed the wizard.

  ‘Hello, Blart,’ said the Princess.

  ‘Hello, Blart,’ said Beo.

  ‘Hello,’ answered Blart.

  There was an awkward silence. It appeared that despite having spent long periods of time in each other’s company, having saved the world once and being in the process of trying to save it again, the three questors had nothing to say to each other.

  ‘Would it help if I threatened to kill you?’ said Beo.

  Blart shook his head. Down below his insides made strange and ominous noises.

  Strange noises were also coming from the other side of the clearing.

  Agnes stood in front of Pig the Horse and cleared her throat impressively.

  ‘May I ask respectfully,’ said Uther, ‘why you are a horse shouter? I have heard of horse whisperers.’

  ‘I was a horse whisperer when I was young,’ replied Agnes. ‘But then I became hard of hearing.’

  ‘How does your shouting help your hearing?’

  ‘If you shout at them they shout back,’ said Agnes. ‘Now let me get on.’

  Agnes reached up to Pig’s ear and suddenly produced a loud noise that hovered between a bray and a whinny.

  Pig did nothing.

  Agnes nodded her head vigorously and repeated the noise, only louder this time with a bit more whinny and a little less bray.

  Nothing.

  ‘Is there a problem?’ said Capablanca.

  ‘Of course there isn’t a problem,’ said Agnes testily. ‘Horses are just like people. They speak a broadly similar language but they have different dialects. I just have to hit upon the one your horse speaks.’

  ‘How many horse dialects are there?’ asked Uther.

  ‘Seventy-eight.’

  Capablanca looked across the clearing. Blart was sweating with effort. In the battle of mind over matter, the wizard was sure matter was on the verge of winning.

  Agnes nodded and brayed, shook her head, whinnied, blew out some air and then brayed.

  Pig the Horse did exactly the same.

  ‘Got it,’ said Agnes.

  ‘What did the horse say?’ said Uther.

  ‘He said, “Hello.”’

  ‘You had to do all that to say hello?’

  Agnes nodded.

  ‘Horse language is very primitive, so it takes a long time to say anything,’ she explained. ‘But they do have twenty-seven different words for hay.’

  ‘This is no time for a lesson in horse language,’ said Capablanca. ‘Ask Pig if he
can remember where we took Zoltab the Dark Lord after we captured him.’

  Agnes looked shocked.

  ‘Can’t I ask him whether he likes his oats?’ said Agnes. ‘It’s what people normally wanted me to ask their horses.’

  Capablanca ground his teeth with frustration.

  ‘We have not travelled vast distances at considerable risk to ourselves to find out whether the horse likes its feed. Now ask what I have told you to.’

  ‘It’s not that easy,’ protested Agnes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever learnt how to say “Zoltab the Dark Lord” in horse language.’

  ‘You must try,’ Capablanca told him. ‘Can you not sense how important this is?’

  ‘All right,’ agreed Agnes. ‘But I can’t guarantee that it will work.’

  And so Agnes embarked upon a long series of whinnies and brays and loud blows through her mouth and shakes of her head and snorts.

  After a while she stopped and the Pig the Horse whinnied, brayed and snorted back.

  This went on for a long time. All the questors watched in silence, awed by the communication between woman and beast, which none of them had ever witnessed before.

  That is, they were awed for a bit and then it got boring. After all, one whinny sounds much like another. And once you’ve heard one snort you’ve heard them all.

  Still, Agnes persisted and with occasional prompts from Capablanca it looked like progress was being made when Agnes was finally able to report …

  ‘The horse remembers.’

  ‘Hurrah!’ shouted Capablanca uncharacteristically. ‘What does he remember?’

  Many more snorts and whinnies later Agnes turned to the questors once again.

  ‘It is a little confusing,’ she announced, ‘but the horse remembers going to some big white hills where there wasn’t any hay.’

  ‘Big white hills,’ said Capablanca thoughtfully.

  ‘The tallest and steepest white hill was so tall and steep that Pig the Horse couldn’t land on its top,’ continued Agnes. ‘So he and you and Zoltab landed lower down and you climbed up it. It was very cold and the white stuff was hard for the horse to climb through, but eventually, tired and exhausted, you reached the summit, where there wasn’t any hay.’

  ‘You can edit the hay bits,’ said Capablanca irritably.

  ‘Here, you imprisoned Zoltab the Dark Lord and left him no hay.’

  ‘I said edit the hay bits,’ said Capablanca.

  ‘You asked me to tell you what the horse said and I’m telling you,’ said Agnes. ‘He’d like more oats if it could be arranged and he doesn’t ever want to go back to the circus. That’s everything.’

  But Capablanca had stopped listening and was already deep in thought.

  ‘Big white hills and the white was hard to walk through,’ the wizard pondered. ‘They must be snow-covered mountains.’

  Uther nodded.

  ‘And the tallest and steepest mountain is,’ the wizard began muttering the names of mountains to himself and shaking his head as he ruled them out one by one. And then suddenly his head stopped shaking.

  ‘I have it,’ he declared. ‘Zoltab is imprisoned at the summit of Mount Xag.’

  Chapter 43

  ‘Mount Xag the Unclimbable,’ said Uther.

  ‘My insides feel better now,’ announced Blart, but nobody seemed to be listening. Now that Agnes had spoken to Pig the Horse, Blart’s insides had become irrelevant. He followed Princess Lois and Beo across the clearing to join the others.

  ‘It cannot be unclimbable if I climbed it,’ Capablanca said to Uther.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ added Agnes. ‘The horse said something I didn’t quite understand about a stick and lots of blue light when you were climbing the mountain.’

  ‘I thought you said you’d told me everything,’ said Capablanca.

  ‘You got very tetchy about the hay,’ said Agnes indignantly. ‘So I thought you’d get really angry if I started talking about sticks.’

  ‘The stick must have been your wand,’ exclaimed Princess Lois. ‘You must have used magic to help you climb.’

  ‘Surely that’s cheating,’ observed Beo, who was very aware, as a possible knight, that if one was to do a deed of derring-do, such as climbing an unclimbable mountain, then it had to be done properly.

  ‘I had more important concerns than whether I was cheating or not,’ said Capablanca. ‘I was imprisoning Zoltab the Dark Lord, who, if discovered by his Ministers and minions and rejuvenated to full power, could cast a pall over the entire world.’

  ‘I’m just saying that there are right ways of doing things and wrong ways.’

  ‘I will dispute this no longer,’ said Capablanca. ‘We must get out of this forest and make our way to Mount Xag, where we will be able to take evidence from Zoltab to prove he has been imprisoned. This will be sufficient to prevent the war between the Grand Alliance and Illyria.’

  ‘Can you have a war when only one side’s got an army?’ asked Princess Lois.

  ‘Not really,’ conceded Capablanca. ‘What you usually get is a massacre, but massacre doesn’t sound as good, so the winners usually call it a war anyway and the losers tend not to complain because they’re dead. We must head north to Mount Xag immediately.’

  ‘Except we can’t,’ pointed out Uther, ‘because the Princess let the tree imps go.’

  ‘Because you didn’t drop a path of pebbles,’ countered the Princess.

  ‘Let us leave that matter in the past,’ said Capablanca. ‘I’m sure Agnes can lead us out of the forest.’

  Agnes shook her head vigorously.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Nobody mentioned anything about leading you out of the forest. I swore a solemn oath to stay deep in this forest for ever. I cannot help you.’

  ‘But you’ve already broken one solemn oath today,’ said Uther. ‘So, when you think about it, your oaths can’t really be that solemn.’

  ‘My oaths are as solemn as the next woman’s,’ protested Agnes. ‘I will not break this one.’

  Uther was completely unruffled by this refusal. He knew Agnes’s weak point and as an experienced merchant he knew that once he found a weak point he could make a deal.

  ‘If you don’t help us we will be forced to stay here with nothing but rancid lard to eat. You would be faced with mountains of dung,’ he threatened. ‘But if you do help you will never see us or a horse ever again.’

  Uther offered his hand to shake on the agreement.

  Agnes stared at the merchant, horrified by his threat. But she knew she was beaten. She shook his hand. The deal was done.

  Chapter 44

  ‘There is no time to waste,’ urged Capablanca as they watched Agnes disappear back into the forest. ‘We must fly to Mount Xag and find Zoltab’s prison. We have only two days before the Grand Alliance invades Illyria and war must be averted.’

  ‘I’m tired,’ said Blart. ‘Could we have a rest first?’

  The temptation to rest was great for the wizard. He was exhausted and his body ached. He looked at the other questors. They too seemed to want a rest. It would be so easy just to collapse into the soft grass and sleep.

  But no! Capablanca shook his head angrily at his own weakness. There was no time to waste. The future of Illyria and possibly the future of the world depended on the questors not stopping for a moment. The wizard drew himself up and embarked upon a more rousing call to arms.

  ‘Fellow questors. We are called upon to go once more into the breach. We are tired and yet we must go on. We must stiffen our sinews, summon up our blood, set our teeth and stretch our nostrils wide. We must …’

  A repulsive sight abruptly halted Capablanca’s speech.

  ‘What is the matter with you, boy?’ demanded the wizard.

  ‘I’m doing what you said,’ answered Blart. ‘I’m stretching my nostrils wide. I was wondering how far they would go.’

  Capablanca gave up on his morale-building speech.

  ‘Just get on the horse,’ he told the questors
. ‘We’ve got a war to stop.’

  Once more the questors climbed on to Pig the Horse. Once more Pig the Horse unfurled his great wings from under his belly. Once more they rose into the air. Capablanca directed Pig north and the steady beats of his great wings took them towards Mount Xag and Zoltab and the answers to so many questions. Would they be able to climb Mount Xag? Would they be able to find Zoltab’s eternal dungeon? Would Zoltab still be inside it? Would they return in time to prevent the conquest of Illyria? And just how far could Blart’s nostrils stretch?

  ‘Faster,’ Capablanca urged Pig the Horse. ‘Every second saved is crucial.’

  ‘I think I’ve got a nose bleed,’ said Blart.

  Nobody paid any attention.

  Instead they watched the world pass beneath them. The verdant forests became scrub grass became desert became beach became sea. Bright day dimmed to cold night. Moonlight beamed down on the ocean below, shooting stars flashed across the sky and Pig the Horse’s wings beat on, regular and strong. The first warm rays of morning shone from the east as the sun rose, dismissing the puny light provided by the moon and the stars. Below them the sea became land. But no longer a land of yellow sand or green vegetation. Instead there were fierce crags and jagged rocks, trees without leaves and barren plains with no cover. And in the distance there was the white glare of snow. Though the sun was at its height the temperature fell as Pig the Horse continued north. Blart blew steam from his mouth, the Princess pinched her cheeks to bring them warmth, and drops of water in the warrior’s beard froze to form shards of ice.

  And then they saw them.

  White and majestic, the great mountains shot up into the immaculate blue of the sky. Beowulf the Warrior shielded his eyes and shivered at the same time. Never had he seen such terrible beauty.

  ‘Where are we?’ he asked Capablanca in a hushed tone.

  ‘Behold,’ said the wizard, ‘the Xanthean Mountains. The most inhospitable place on earth.’

  ‘Aren’t there any quests to nice places?’ asked Blart.

  Capablanca ignored him.

  ‘We must find the highest peak,’ said Capablanca. ‘Mount Xag the Unclimbable. We must journey to the top, where Zoltab is imprisoned.’

  ‘Why is it called “the Unclimbable”?’ asked Blart.