‘A man is to be Tested tonight,’ the Don said in a carrying voice. ‘Zachary Owens, a foreigner guilty of two hanging offences…’
‘Only two?’ yelled a scarred old veteran, and there was general laughter among the Trolls.
‘…has taken the option of Testing,’ the Don continued. ‘Ulf has agreed to be his examiner.’
There was more laughter and some of the Trolls thumped their pint pots on the tables. Zoe’s stomach tightened into a knot as the door at the back of the hall opened and two Troll men-at-arms dragged a very unwilling Zachary into view. Get here now, Harold, thought Zoe, do something.
At the moment Zoe was thinking this, Harold was watching Meg work on the engine of the bus. It had stalled and she was trying to find out why. Harold was offering good advice but each new suggestion he made seemed to make Meg angrier. The Wyzen’s playing with the horn was not helping her mood much either.
Back at the castle, Zoe watched through the fretwork screen as Zachary’s guards dragged him into a clear space in the middle of the hall. The Trolls stayed at their trestle tables eating and drinking, cleaning their plates with thick slices of bread, draining their pint pots, and yelling comments. Meanwhile, Ulf was coming down from the high table, stripping off his shirt as he came.
Ulf was big, and none of it was fat. Zoe noticed the white scars on his chest and arms, and deduced from them that Ulf had done this kind of thing before. He did not look like an amateur having his first bout. On the other hand, Zachary was very fit. Perhaps, Zoe thought, he could stay away from Ulf long enough for the big man to collapse from exhaustion, but it did not seem to be much of a hope.
A Troll man-at-arms holding up a sword in each hand walked into the centre of the cleared space and threw them down, first one, then the other, so that the point of each sword stuck in the floorboards. Ulf backed off to one side of the cleared space, and Zachary was dragged by his guards to the other side. They then ripped his shirt off him, and threw the remnants of it to one side.
The Don rose to his feet. ‘The Testing is very simple,’ he said, speaking to Zachary. ‘When I drop my hand, you both go for the swords. Are you ready?’
‘Hang on,’ said Zachary, ‘When you drop your hand, we both go for the swords … and then what?’
‘And then,’ said the Don with an elegant wave of his hand, ‘whatever.’
‘That’s … that’s very open-ended,’ said Zachary.
‘Yes it is,’ said the Don.
‘There don’t seem to be too many rules,’ said Zachary.
‘That’s true,’ said the Don and dropped his hand.
At the drop of the Don’s hand, both Zachary and Ulf moved fast, but in opposite directions. Ulf dived toward the swords, his intention: mayhem. Zachary dived towards the nearest window his intention: to get the hell out of there.
As a result of these two tactical efforts, Ulf ended up with a sword in each hand, and Zachary ended up being caught in mid-air by some laughing Troll men-at-arms, who simply carried him back and tossed him into the cleared space to face a grinning Ulf.
Zoe winced, put her face in her hands, and peered through her fingers.
‘Can we try that one more time?’ said Zachary.
Marlowe was watching with grim amusement as Ulf began to stalk Zachary, who backed off, using the space he had, trying to stay away from the two swords Ulf was holding. Ulf lunged with his left hand, Zachary jumped away, and almost too late realized from a flicker in Ulf’s eyes that Ulf had been feinting and the real attack was coming from his right hand. Zachary dropped beneath Ulf’s right-hand blade, and rolled, and came back onto his feet. He was watching Ulf’s eyes now, not the blades.
Zachary moved to Ulf’s left again, figuring that the odds favored Ulf’s being a natural right-hander. If the odds were wrong, he might be moving into trouble. He was desperately trying to remember if he had seen Ulf handle something. Anything which would give him a clue. Then he remembered. Ulf’s sword hilt had projected above his right shoulder. He was right-handed, probably weaker and more awkward with his left hand.
But while this may have been so in theory, it was not noticeably so. When the attack came from Ulf’s left-hand blade, it was strong and swift and almost took Zachary by surprise. Up on a bench he leapt, then higher still, onto the table, and the slash of the blade passed beneath his feet. He was down again, running, staying away from the giant’s attack. As Zachary turned, he heard the scrape of steel behind him, and he looked back for a moment, expecting an attack from that quarter.
It was the priest, Father John, who had drawn a sword from the scabbard of one of the Troll men-at-arms and was handing Zachary the sword hilt-first. Zachary grabbed it with gratitude. He had reconsidered his opening tactics and now, on sober reflection, had been wishing he had taken a sword. Not, he knew, that he in any way felt confident of his ability to use one, but at least it gave him something with which to try and block Ulf’s attacks, and also add to any dumb luck factor he might have going for him.
‘Thanks Father,’ he said, and dodged Ulf’s next attack.
‘Whose side are you on?’ roared Ulf to the priest.
‘We’re not butchers,’ the priest answered, distaste written clearly on his narrow face.
‘Speak for yourself,’ roared Ulf and moved after Zachary like a semi-trailer made of meat.
Zachary now had a plan. He would allow himself to be driven back toward a window, or a door, or any way out of there. It was not, he realized, a great plan, but it was better than no plan at all. He began parrying Ulf’s two swords, even pushing his own sword out occasionally in the vague hope that Ulf might be deterred by it, or even impale himself by mistake. Ulf, he found to his horror, seemed to be encouraged by this. It seemed that the giant enjoyed a bit of competition. It added interest, perhaps.
As Ulf drove Zachary back, the Trolls pushed back the trestle table and benches and as a result there was now a trestle table directly under the open windows. It could not have been better for Zachary’s plan. He stepped up onto a bench, then up onto the trestle table. Ulf slashed, with the obvious intent of taking Zachary off at the ankles. He leapt in the air, and again the sword passed beneath him, but this time the left-hand sword was sweeping in from the other side.
Zachary realized what salami must feel like, and managed to get his own sword down to parry the blow. Ulf stepped onto the bench, then onto the table. He was forcing Zachary back along the table. Zachary was just managing to block the two swords which kept coming at him as if under the direction of some malign machine. He was almost level with an open window. He half-turned, and was about to leap out the window when his foot went down hard on a plate, the plate skidded from under him and he found himself not flying through the window as he had expected, but instead skidding along the table toward Ulf.
Zachary had planted his full weight on the plate in order to power his spring to freedom and this meant that the effect of the plate’s flying out from beneath him was to send him sliding along the table at full speed. His feet connected with Ulf’s and drove them from beneath the giant, and in a tangle of arms and legs and weapons they slid along the trestle table and fell off the end in a heap with Zachary, the lighter of the two men, on top.
In the combat so far he had developed a deep hatred of bladed weapons, and the first thing he did as he got to his feet was to gather up their three swords and to hurl them as far away from himself and Ulf as he could. Ulf meanwhile was shaking his head and preparing to get up. Zachary smiled a beautiful smile and put out his left hand to take Ulf’s left hand. This was a situation Zachary understood. He had practised this kind of thing in bar rooms and bachelor barracks in mining settlements and on the deck of the occasional merchant ship. ‘Allow me,’ Zachary said, and gripped Ulf’s left hand, and pulled him to his feet. At the same time he turned back, dropped his right hand, and unreeled a haymaker which started at the floor and described a beautifully timed arc to land flush on Ulf’s jaw.
Zacha
ry honestly thought that he had broken his hand. It was agony. He moved away from Ulf, nursing his right hand, not noticing that Ulf was getting a sway up. ‘He broke my hand,’ Zachary complained to anyone who would listen to him, ‘he’s a dirty fighter and he broke my hand.’
But no one was listening to Zachary: they were watching Ulf. Zachary turned and saw Ulf, unconscious on his feet, swaying to and fro like a giant tree in a wind, gathering momentum. Zachary decided that it was time to step out of the way, and as he did so Ulf, all two hundred plus pounds of bone and muscle of him, dropped to the wooden floor with a terrible thud and lay very still.
The Trolls looked up at the Don. Father John was whispering in the Don’s ear. The Don nodded and rose. ‘The Testing appears to be over,’ he said, and beckoned Zachary. ‘Come here, Zachary of the Ironcastle.’
As Zachary walked forward, Ulf was coming around. Trolls were pouring beer over his head, and he was shaking it everywhere like a huge dog coming out of a bath. Still nursing his hand, Zachary mounted the steps and dropped to one knee before the Don.
‘I like to have lucky men about me,’ said the Don. ‘Luck?’ said Zachary. ‘You think that was luck? I was toying with him.’ For a moment there, he could have sworn he heard Zoe’s laughter, but decided that it must have been a trick of the acoustics.
44: RESCUE PARTY
Zoe was laughing more in relief than in amusement, and the Trollwife alongside her, who turned out to be Ulf’s wife, was also relieved when she saw that her man was not badly injured, but was on his feet again, and demanding a return match as soon as possible. They could not hear everything Zachary was saying, but he seemed to be begging off from the return match on the grounds of previous urgent commitments.
Zoe now found herself being drawn away from the fretwork screen. Apparently it was the custom for the Trollwives to join their men after dinner, and they were assuming that Zoe would accompany them. What disturbed Zoe was not their assumption that she should accompany them, but their equally strongly-held assumption that she would want to be dressed in the same way they were. The idea of getting into a long dress and veil did not appeal to Zoe. The idea appealed to her so little, that the Trollwives ended up having to hold her down and put her Trollwife dress on over her tracksuit in order to get her dressed at all. Finally, Zoe looked at herself in a mirror, and even though the tracksuit made her look plumper than normal, she decided that it might after all be fun to go in fancy dress.
As this was happening, the guard on the roof was peering down toward the trail from the forest. Emerging from the forest were things that looked like two giant eyes, throwing beams of light up the hill toward the castle. The guard went to the speaking tube and picked it up. ‘Autobile coming!’ he shouted. ‘Could be a raid!’
Beneath the guard, in the hall of Trollcastle, Zachary was rapidly becoming the life of the party. He had borrowed a guitar from the Don’s minstrel, and had just finished singing Old Shep. His rendition had reduced Ulf to tears. Ulf, as he often said himself, was a sucker for the classics. Zachary had just started in on that other classic Heartbreak Hotel when a bell began to clang somewhere in the building. From its sonorous tone, Zachary suspected that this particular bell had once hung either in a schoolyard or a church.
‘Just take a walk down Lonely Street to Heartbreak Hotel,’ Zachary was singing to his own guitar accompaniment, when he noticed that he was losing his previously very appreciative audience. They were running, not walking, from the room and drawing their swords as they went.
As Zachary’s song trailed to a rather uncertain end only moments after it had begun, the Don moved to a speaking tube situated behind the high table. He listened, and then shouted ‘Autobile coming up the road! Raid maybe!’ and dashed out after his men.
Zachary found that he and Father John were the only ones left in the hall. Even the minstrel boy had drawn a sword and to the wars had gone. ‘You don’t help out with the fighting?’ Zachary asked the priest.
‘Only in self-defence,’ said the priest, and hefted his wooden staff, which Zachary now noticed had been drilled out at one end and filled with a grey metal, probably lead. The other end of the staff was shod with steel. ‘I’m not actually supposed to spill blood,’ Father John added.
Zachary made a mental resolution not to come within range of the staff when the priest was practising self-defence. ‘You get a lot of this? Autobiles coming through?’
‘People still occasionally find stores of gasoline and get engines running for a while. Mostly any gasoline we find, we save for sieges.’
‘Sieges,’ said Zachary, ‘right. I can see how buckets of burning gasoline might discourage people from climbing walls and things.’
‘I’m not entirely sure it’s a just weapon,’ said the priest, ‘but perhaps when used against infidels…’
‘Me personally, I’ve never cared much for infidels.’
Father John looked at Zachary curiously. ‘But you said in the dungeon that you were one.’ Zachary thought about burning gasoline. ‘I was distraught,’ he said, ‘and didn’t know what I was saying.’
In the women’s room, when the bell began to ring, the women became very excited. Some thought it might be barbarians from the coast, and others thought it might be Sullivans. Zoe could not get a clear picture of what Sullivans were. Apart from the fact that they rode horses and were led by the Sullivan Himself, there was a diversity of opinion among the women about them. Some said that they were Protestants and others said they worshipped the Sun God, and still others felt that this was very much the same thing. Some said that Sullivans always respected the women of the family, and others had theories about what Sullivans did to the women of the family, theories that Zoe felt, really, she could have done without hearing discussed. Horror movies were one thing but real live Sullivans (whoever they were) pouring through the doorway and improvising the script for one were different things entirely.
Whatever was going on, the bell had meant that it was an emergency, and to the Trollwives this had meant that Zoe had to have a veil on. No decent woman, it appeared, could face an emergency unveiled. After a certain amount of persuasion and struggle, Zoe now wore the veil, and the Trollwives were encouraging her by telling her that with a veil covering most of her face she was actually quite good looking.
This reminded Zoe of nothing quite so much as the “compliments” she had suffered from boys at school, but she decided that if the veil helped protect you from Sullivans she had, for the moment, better wear one.
Meanwhile, up the road toward the castle came the school bus, headlights blazing, horn blaring, parking lights on, indicator lights flashing and beeping..
Inside, Harold was delighted with what he thought the effect must be. ‘They’ll be terrified!’ he crowed, ‘they’ll think it’s a dragon!’ he exulted. ‘They’re going to have to change their iron underwear…’ he was saying when his eyes bulged with terror and he yelled in panic.
For with a massive thud, something very large had landed on the roof of the bus, and as Harold looked out the window to see what this might be, Ulf’s face appeared only inches from his, upside down, distorted with rage and screaming in berserker battle frenzy. Then Ulf’s right arm appeared and in his right hand was a battle axe with which he started to chop away the window.
Simultaneously, another Troll began chopping at the door of the bus, and others were standing in the light of the headlights, waving swords and axes.
The Wyzen uttered a long drawn out cry of ‘Wyyyyzen’ and ran to the back of the bus and Meg, finding she lacked the will to accelerate and run over 20 or 30 other human beings even if they did look like crazed Vikings, said: ‘I think I’ll just stop now,’ and brought the bus to a halt. She looked at the door of the bus. The dreadful armored man who had been chopping at it now stepped to one side, and jerked the remains of it out of the doorway, leaving the way clear for Meg knew not what.
Then a man dressed in black leather, a man from whose belt hung a
sword and dagger, a compact, muscular man, not over-tall, but certainly tall enough, Meg thought before catching herself and thinking tall enough for what, Meg Henderson?, a man with crisp dark curling hair above a face on which were drawn lines of decision and leadership but whose eyes were those of a wounded poet, a man who walked with the simple grace of an athlete or dancer, a man about whom Meg found herself thinking and just where have you been all my life then? stepped up to the doorway of the bus and said: ‘May I be of some assistance?’
The Don found himself looking into the eyes of the woman behind the wheel. For him it was the thunderbolt, the experience which cannot be translated into words, the sudden realization that this was she, the woman he had been born to spend the rest of his life with. The woman stood and moved down the steps of the bus and he took her arm. ‘I apologize for any damage to your school bus. My men thought the Sullivan clan might have been raiding.’
He only half-heard the boy’s question, ‘you know it’s a school bus then?’
His eyes were on the woman’s eyes as he replied, ‘It says so on the front.’
‘You can read?’ the boy’s voice seemed to come from far away.
‘Can’t you?’ the Don said, still looking at the lady. ‘Will you be my guest?’ he said to her.
She gazed at him, and found she was, for once in her life, lost for words, and so she nodded. Harold was looking at Meg and wondering if she had suffered concussion. She seemed drugged. She was walking off toward the castle on the Don’s arm. ‘Meg?’ Harold called, ‘I think he’s the one you said was a fascist gorilla?’
‘Shut up, Harold,’ Meg reasoned, and continued to smile as if in a daze at the Don as he escorted her into Trollcastle.
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