Earth, Air, Fire and Custard

by Tom Holt

  Vicky’s eyes flickered upwards, just for a second. ‘Of course, there’s no hurry,’ she said. ‘Time has no meaning here, blahdyblahdy. It’s just that if I’m around Ricky for more than three minutes, I tend to throw up. So, if we could get to the swordfighting—’

  With a frown, Ricky straightened up. Maybe it was a trick of the light or the terrain, but he’d never looked taller, broader, more intimidating or (as he did stylish little backflips with the living sword) more annoying. He had the languid grace of a panther, and his hair was perfect.

  Paul, on the other hand - ‘Just a moment,’ he said, and glanced round for his other self, who wasn’t there. Ricky, Vicky and Sophie, all present. Also, holding the swirly brown sword, himself but not in duplicate. Someone had blundered.

  ‘Just you and me,’ Ricky said. He sounded bored, as though he was playing himself in repertory, his hundredth Wednesday matinée. ‘Let’s finish this,’ he added inevitably.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  Three of them looked round and stared at the fourth: Sophie, who was scowling. ‘Excuse me,’ she repeated, ‘but nobody’s finishing anything till someone’s told me exactly what it is I’m supposed to do. Only, apparently I’m essential to all this crap, and I’ve got this sick feeling that this is the moment my whole life’s been leading up to, but nobody’s had the simple good manners to tell me—’

  ‘Nothing,’ Vicky snapped. ‘You don’t have to do anything - just shut your face, stay still and don’t interfere. Just being here’s enough, that’s all.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ Sophie seemed less than convinced. ‘And I should believe you, the enemy. Right.’

  ‘She’s telling the truth, actually,’ Ricky put in. ‘All that’s needed is for the two halves of the sword to be present at the same time, and that sets the magic going.’

  ‘That’s it?’ Sophie sounded almost disappointed. ‘So, I could be reading a book, doing the crossword—’

  Ricky nodded. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s totally straightforward. All it takes is for the guy to have the sword, and the girl to be there, in a direct line of sight. And she’s got to be in love with him, of course, but—’

  Sophie protested loudly; Vicky yelped and threw a piece of seaweed, but missed. Ricky, smirking, did a triple over-the-wrist backflip and rounded it off with a little flourish. The other Paul still wasn’t there.

  ‘Let’s start,’ Ricky said.

  ‘No, but—’ Paul got no further. The sword in his hand was tugging at his fingers, like a small child who’s just sighted chocolate. He wanted to stay exactly where he was, wait a bit, give his alter ego a bit more time to show up, but apparently he didn’t have that option. Unfortunate. He heard Sophie behind him insisting ‘I am not—’ and then his left foot plunged forward, his right foot slid across, and he was advancing, purposeful, menacing and for some obscure reason sideways, like Tyson reincarnated as a crab.

  Ricky was doing much the same sort of thing, though ever so much more convincingly. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. Then he darted forward and swung his sword from the shoulder, his arm shooting out like a hinged flail.

  Whatever happened next - Paul was rather foggy about it, partly because he had his eyes shut a lot of the time - seemed to go on for absolutely ages. As for Paul, dragged along behind the sword as it lunged, cut, parried, riposted, counterthrust, he felt a bit like a small, frail policeman trying to arrest a huge, drunk Marine in the middle of a fight. Luckily, nothing he did seemed to matter in the slightest. The sword knew exactly what it wanted to do and seemed to regard him as an annoying but trivial handicap. It was bewildering, humiliating, exhausting and scary, and the closest thing to it in his narrow range of experiences was using Windows for the first time.

  Not for one moment, however, did Paul have the slightest doubt as to how it was going to end, magic sword or no magic sword. Sooner or later - he tried to think back and remember, the last time, the time before that, whether dying had hurt very much. Part of him still hadn’t given up hope yet; Mr Dao’s voice in the back of his mind, death has no jurisdiction. The rest of him could point out to their shared heart’s content that that had obviously been a reference to the other Paul, the one he’d let in through the door in Benny Shumway’s office, the one he’d planned to bring along here so that Ricky could kill him, only that had gone wrong somehow. He tried consoling himself with the thought that at least one of him was probably going to make it, and that in that case it was all as broad as it was long, surely. The trouble was, though, that he knew himself too well to be able to lie to himself convincingly. But it didn’t matter, not now, and for all he knew he might turn out to be a born bridge player, or very good indeed at basket-weaving, assuming Mr Dao forgave him and let him join in after all.

  In the middle of all this, he heard someone talking to him. He was rather surprised to discover that it was Ricky Wurmtoter.

  ‘This isn’t working,’ Ricky was saying.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Paul panted, as his sword passed within a millimetre of Ricky’s jugular vein.

  ‘Not bloody working,’ Ricky gasped back. ‘Too evenly matched. Cancelling each other -’ Ricky lunged, Paul side-stepped and hacked at his collarbone as he sailed past; Ricky’s sword somehow got there in time to parry ‘- out. Completely screwed. We’ll be doing this for ever and ever. Really ever and ever. Don’t you understand?’

  ‘Why start now?’ Paul replied. But, wretchedly, he could see what Ricky was driving at. It was the swords’ fault; they seemed to have forgotten all about the poor miserable life forms dangling off their hilts, as they worked out thirteen hundred years of pent-up frustration. The fight had subtly changed in the last few seconds. The swords weren’t trying to cut flesh any more, they weren’t aiming themselves at Ricky’s head or Paul’s guts. Instead, they were slamming into each other, edge to edge, flat to flat, in a series of savage parries, each sword trying to batter the other one to death; only, Paul intuitively recognised, that was a mug’s game, because neither of them was capable of being broken or even scratched. An internal review board inside Paul’s head delivered its minority report: This is silly. But nobody who mattered wanted to know. Vicky had been right after all; a fight to the undeath. Give him Mr Dao and infinite nothingness any day.

  ‘Ricky,’ he muttered.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Think of something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re the fucking professional. Think of something.’

  Ricky shook his head. ‘Can’t,’ he said. ‘Mind’s a blank, sorry. How about you?’

  A shower of sparks fell across Paul’s cheek. They stung. ‘Nothing’ he replied. ‘I think we’re stuck like it, just like my mum used to warn me.’

  ‘Theo Van Spee,’ Ricky grunted, as the feedback from a particularly violent clash vibrated right down Paul’s arm into his elbow. ‘He might be able to do something. But he wouldn’t. He must be laughing like a drain right now.’

  ‘Why?’ Paul said, as his sword slammed itself against the other sword’s cutting edge and bounced off like a squash ball. ‘I thought—’

  ‘We’re here. Stuck. In the bloody past. He’s back home, in our time, and nobody’s ever coming back to sort him out, because we’ll be here for ever. He’s won.’ Ricky pulled a horrible face, his clean, sharp, aftershave-commercial features contorted into something both inhuman and surprisingly ordinary. ‘You have no idea how much I hate him, the bastard. It’s all been his fault, right from the—’

  Paul wasn’t listening; because he understood. It had all dropped into place, like the last bit of the jigsaw, which you thought all along was a bit of left-hand sky, but when you turn it over you realise it’s the last chunk of right-hand sea, or the sky tricksily reflected in the surface of the pond.

  Well, all was an exaggeration, but he understood a lot of it, even including Audumla the Great Cow of Heaven. Annoyingly, there simply wasn’t time to digest most of it - he could see it all, like the view from a tower, but he only had a m
icrosecond or so, the fragment of time while the sword was recoiling sideways after a savage but fruitless hack, so he concentrated on the most relevant bit.

  Of course the fight could end; Ricky was being dim, or deliberately not taking the point. It just needed—

  ‘Ricky,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you trust me?’

  - A great leap of faith, on the part of both of them. The swords belted each other, bounced. Sparks flew. Paul’s elbow hurt like buggery.

  ‘Yes,’ Ricky said. ‘Yes, actually I do. You and about two other people, and one of them’s dead.’

  ‘Great,’ Paul said. ‘Now listen. Next time the swords bash into each other—’

  Well, not the next time, because they were at it again, pounding into each other like two seas meeting. The time after that.

  ‘The next time,’ Paul repeated, ‘let go. All right?’

  ‘What?’

  Another opportunity missed. This time, Ricky’s sword tried to chop off the crosspiece from Paul’s hilt. No dice. Boing.

  ‘Just let go of the fucking sword, all right? And I’ll do the same. If we aren’t holding them, they can’t fight. Or if they can, we can leave them to it and go home. Looks like they don’t really need us, anyway.’

  Crash, bounce, sparks. ‘You sure that’ll work?’ Ricky, a thirteen-hundred-year-old professional dragonslayer (and lieutenant colonel of the Riders of Rohan) asking him if he thought it’d work. That was the funniest thing yet.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul said, and then he repeated, ‘Trust me. OK?’

  ‘OK. On three.’

  A glittering curve slicing through air, as the sword Skofnung and the sword Tyrving raced towards each other, edge to edge. ‘Three,’ Paul shrieked, and let go.

  In that moment, there was a great deal he wanted to say. He wanted to apologise: to Sophie, for leaving her, now that it was pretty well settled that she loved him too, without philtre, without outside interference, possibly because of the sword and thirteen centuries of carefully seeded destiny and Custardspace and related dogshit, but completely and for ever. And to Ricky, of course, because when he’d said, ‘Do you trust me?’ he’d been plotting Ricky’s death, cold-blooded and calculating as any accountant figuring out how to reduce a tax bill. And possibly to a wide selection of other people whom he’d generally let down, disappointed, not done the right thing by: his mother, Uncle Ken, possibly Mr Tanner’s mum though that was pushing it a bit. And to himself, of course, because he’d just thrown away his life in a quixotic gesture, only for the sake of fixing some fuck-up in the space-time continuum that he couldn’t even understand. Quixotic? Absolutely the right word for it. Quixotic as two short planks.

  Meanwhile, Ricky’s sword slipped through Ricky’s suddenly relaxed fingers and flew through the air towards Paul who watched it come at him. At the same time Paul watched his own sword hurtling straight at the little hollow where Ricky’s neck snuggled down onto the collarbone. For some reason (Newton or Einstein would know why; possibly also Galileo) Skofnung got there first, winning the race by a nanosecond, and Paul watched the needle-sharp steel disappear into Ricky’s throat, just south of his Adam’s apple. So; did that mean Skofnung had won the fight, and if so, what implications would that have for the Canadian banking industry? Fuck, Paul thought, I can’t remember which way round—

  Then he remembered, that thing he’d forgotten about whether dying hurts. Yes, but not for very long.

  ‘You,’ said Mr Dao, ‘have got a fucking nerve.’

  Paul grinned feebly into the darkness. ‘Not any more,’ he tried to say, but it came out in italics, without the quotation marks. Not that I was ever a great fan of the central nervous system. Pain, for one thing. Hell of a lot of grief just to tell you not to do something. A little flashing light’d do just as well, and no -

  Mr Dao wasn’t amused. Mr Dao also wasn’t there; Paul couldn’t see his broad, calm face, or hear his deep, refined voice. Instead, the words passed through Paul’s mind, out of nowhere, going nowhere. ‘I thought I told you,’ Mr Dao said, ‘don’t you ever come back. But here you are.’

  Yes.

  ‘Marvellous. And this time—’ A deep sigh; and because Paul couldn’t hear it, or see the accompanying facial expression, it was somehow even more poignant, pure grief and frustration and annoyance without the ice cubes and slice of lemon. ‘What did I tell you? I said, death has no jurisdiction over you.’

  Ah, well. Everybody makes mistakes.

  ‘Not me. That’s the whole point. Infallible. Me and taxes.’

  Actually, that’s inevitable, not infall—

  ‘Infallible.’ Mr Dao clicked his tongue. ‘Until now. So,’ he added grimly. ‘Here we are again. Only this time—’

  I know. And I’ll come quietly. You’d better show me where I’m supposed to sit, and what it is you actually do. Presumably you’ve got to sort of poke one bit of stick in and out of the other bits.

  ‘What?’

  Basket-weaving. And isn’t there some tool called a rapping-iron? Is that for patting down the bits of stick so they lie straight?

  ‘Basket-weaving?’

  That’s right. And contract bridge, and conversational Spanish. I’m all ready, and I promise I’ll join in and not stand about sulking like I used to do at the other kids’ birthday parties. I know it’s for keeps this time, because the only way we could end the duel was if we both died. There wasn’t any other choice. A nasty thought struck Paul; highly unlikely, but you never knew. Ricky is here, isn’t he? He did die?

  ‘Wurmtoter?’ Mr Dao laughed icily. ‘Oh, he’s here all right. Beat you down here by a fifty-thousandth of a second. I can only put it down to his instinctive competitive streak, always got to win at everything. But you—’

  Born loser, Paul said. Always have been. I remember one Sports Day, the teacher saying—

  ‘You aren’t dead.’

  Time had no meaning there, so it must’ve just felt like a very long, awkward silence. Excuse me?

  ‘You aren’t dead. No basket-weaving for you, sunshine. Like I keep telling you but will you bloody listen? Over you, death has no jurisdiction.’ Mr Dao sighed again, raw emotion, unbearably bitter and sad. ‘Either of you,’ he added.

  You what? Only this time Paul could hear himself saying it. ‘You what?’

  ‘I mean,’ Mr Dao replied, suddenly visible, ‘one of you’s not enough, oh no. Now I’ve got two of you cluttering up the place, unsettling the other guests, monopolising my time-which-has-no-meaning-here when there’s a million and one things I ought to be doing. Over there, look.’ Mr Dao nodded into the surrounding darkness. ‘Just sitting there, like an overgrown doorstop. Sulking.’

  Paul peered, but no dice. ‘Where? I can’t see him.’

  ‘What, are you blind as well as annoying? Over there. Talking to Theo Van Spee.’

  Oink? Paul thought. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Theo Van Spee,’ Mr Dao repeated. ‘He showed up a second or so after you two. You three,’ he added wretchedly, ‘though of course in real time, that was thirty-odd years earlier. But screw the details, death’s too short.’

  Not the time, Paul felt, to go wandering off the point. ‘Professor Van Spee is dead?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Mr Dao laughed grimly. ‘Quite definitively, after what that Frank Laertides did to him. Thunderbolt,’ he explained casually. ‘Right on the spot, too. Zap, aargh, and a bit of a burning smell. No, he won’t be going anywhere, ever again.’

  ‘Oh.’ Paul felt a shudder running up his spine. ‘Well, I suppose—’

  ‘He had it coming, too right. Custardspace won’t help him now. Not that Frank wasn’t doing him a favour, in a sense, because at least it was very, very quick. I’d have hated to have been in Van Spee’s shoes when the Canadians caught up with him.’

  Paul looked in the general direction where he thought Mr Dao had been pointing, but he couldn’t see anything. It took him a moment to realise that that, of course
, was the point. In the Land of the Dead, you can’t see the dead people, just as you can’t see individual raindrops in the ocean.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Anyway.’ Mr Dao was letting bygones go by, though it was clearly costing him an infinity of effort. ‘There you are, all sorted. I expect you’ll be wanting to go home now,’ he added, with the subtlety of a pink elephant.

  ‘Will I? I mean, yes. Yes, please.’ Paul struggled to find the question he knew he needed to ask, but it was like trying to tickle trout with numb fingers. ‘Um, how do I—?’

  ‘Oh, for pity’s sake,’ Mr Dao said -

  - And Paul opened his eyes, and saw the most beautiful thing he could possibly imagine. It was white, it was sort of rectangular, and it hummed very softly. He got up from the floor, crossed the lino and opened its door. Inside he found a pint of needled milk, a bit of translucent yellow cheese rind with green bits on it, two vintage yogurts and a very, very old carrot.

  ‘Hello, fridge,’ he said.

  The fridge didn’t say anything back, but it beamed clean white light at him, like a smile.

  Paul backed away and looked round. He was in his kitchen, back at the flat. Through the window he could see the street: the street lamps, parked cars, the sad, dead plane tree installed some time ago by the government with a view to turning Outer London into a green and pleasant land. Carefully, he opened a cupboard door; to his overwhelming joy, he found washing-up liquid, a packet of Daz, some cans of soup, but no short cut to the existential void.

  ‘Well,’ he quoted, ‘I’m back.’

  But -

  Temporal paradoxes or no temporal paradoxes, Paul hadn’t been born yesterday. He went back to the fridge and looked at it for a while, waiting for it to make the first move. Then he folded his arms and said, ‘I know you’re in there.’

  The fridge made a sort of clanking noise, and turned into Mr Laertides.

  ‘Hello yourself,’ he said. His left arm was stuck out at an angle, just as the fridge door had been. He lowered it. ‘Any chance of a cup of tea?’

  Paul shrugged. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that you drank tea.’