by Tom Holt
Up till then, the young man had been profoundly unconvinced by all this. He had never believed in God or any other sort of conspiracy theory, and he could never summon up enough credulity to be entertained by spy thrillers. But even he had sometimes wondered about the telelogy of his own particular field of interest. All computer programmers have at some stage come face to face with the one and only metaphysical question of what happens to all the stuff that gets swallowed by the computer. Here at last was the only possible explanation. He sat open-mouthed and stared.
‘Now do you see?’ said the sorcerer-king.
‘Yes,’ said the young man. ‘That’s clever. That’s really clever.’
The sorcerer-king smirked. ‘Thank you. Of course,’ he continued, ‘another fundamental cornerstone of modern commerce is diversification of interests. We may not be the world’s biggest multinational, but we hold the most key positions. With an unrivalled position in the Media - don’t you like that word, by the way? It gives exactly the right impression. I suppose it’s because it sounds so like the Mafia. Anyway, with that and a manufacturing base like ours, we have the establishment to support a truly global concern. So it would be pretty nearly perfect. If it wasn’t for the setback.’
‘What setback?’
‘The dragon. But never mind about all that.’ The sorcerer-king was feeling relaxed again. His own narration of his past achievements gave him confidence, for how could such an enterprise, so brilliant in its conception and so long in the preparation, possibly fail? He smiled and offered the young man a cigar. ‘Fortescue,’ he said, ‘I think your face fits around here. I’ve had my eye on you for some time now, and I think that you could have a future with us after the expansion programme goes through. How would you like to be the Governor of China?’
‘What is the point,’ said Angantyr Asmundarson, ‘of having the coat and the trousers the same colour?’
There was no answer to that, Hildy reflected. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but I thought . . .’
‘I think they’re fine,’ said Arvarodd firmly, as if to say that Hildy was not to be blamed for the follies of her generation. ‘What are these holes in the side?’
‘They’re called pockets,’ Hildy replied. ‘You can keep things in them.’
‘That’s brilliant,’ said the hero Ohtar, who had been familiar to generations of saga audiences as an inveterate loser of penknives and bits of string. ‘Why did we never think of that?’
‘Gimmicky, I call it,’ grumbled Angantyr, but no one paid him any attention. By and large, the heroes seemed pleased with their new clothes - except of course for Brynjolf the Shape-Changer. He had taken one look at his suit and changed himself into an exact facsimile of himself wearing a similar suit, only with slightly narrower lapels and an extra button at the cuffs. The King’s suit, of course, fitted perfectly. Even so, like all the others he looked exactly like a Scandinavian hero in a St Michael suit, or a convict who has just been released.
‘While you were away,’ said the King, taking her aside, ‘Kotkel found two old friends.’
‘Old friends?’ Hildy said with a frown. ‘Don’t you mean . . . ?’
‘Kotkel!’
The wizard came out from behind a tree. He had apparently found no difficulty in coming to terms with the concept of pockets; his were already bulging with small bones and bits of rag. He signalled to the King and Hildy to follow him, and led them out of sight behind a small rise in the ground.
‘Meet Zxerp and Prexz,’ said the King.
At first, Hildy could see nothing. Then she made out two faint pools of light hovering above the grass, like the reflection of one’s watch-glass, only rather bigger. ‘His familiar spirits,’ explained the King. ‘It seems they got shut in the mound with us. Probably just as well. They are the servants of the Luck of Caithness.’
‘Do you mind?’ said one of the pools of light.
‘Kotkel has been telling me how the thing actually works,’ the King went on, ignoring the interruption, ‘and these two have a lot to do with it. The brooch itself is a . . . a what was it?’ The wizard made a noise like poultry-shears cutting through a carcass. ‘A jamming device, that’s right. It interferes with the other side’s magic. But in order to do this it requires a tremendous supply of positive energy, which is what these two represent.’
‘Glad to know someone appreciates us,’ said the pool of light.
‘Quarrelsome and unco-operative energy,’ continued the King sternly, ‘but energy nevertheless. When Kotkel has put together all the right bits and pieces, he can link these two up to the brooch, and all the enemy’s magic will be useless. Once that has been achieved, we can get on with the job. He won’t be able to use any of his powers to stop us, or even know we’re coming, just like the first time. Then it’ll just be the straightforward business of knocking him on the head - always supposing that that will be straightforward, of course. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
‘That sounds perfectly marvellous,’ said Hildy a little nervously. There was, she suspected, something to follow.
‘The problem, apparently,’ continued the King, ‘lies in getting the right bits and pieces. Kotkel isn’t absolutely sure what he’ll need. He says he won’t know what he wants until he sees it.’ The King shook his head.
‘What sort of things does he need?’
‘That,’ said the King, ‘is a very good question.’
Hildy had been to enough academic seminars to know that a very good question is one to which no one knows the answer - counter-intuitive, to her way of thinking; surely that was the definition of a truly awful question - and her face fell. ‘So what now?’
‘I think the best plan would be for us to go somewhere where the wizard would be likely to see the sort of thing he might want, don’t you? And that would probably have to be some sort of town or city.’
‘But wouldn’t that be rather dangerous?’
The King smiled. ‘I hope so,’ he said mischievously. ‘I wouldn’t like to think that the greatest heroes in the world had been kept hanging around all this time just to do something perfectly safe.’
‘What I like least about this country,’ Danny Bennett started to say; and then he realised that he had said the same about virtually everything worthy of mention that he had encountered since the aircraft which had brought him there had landed. ‘One of the things about this country which really gets up my nose is the way you can rely on all their schedules, timetables and promises.’
‘Talk a lot, don’t you?’ said his senior cameraman. It was raining at Lairg, and the van which was supposed to be meeting them to take them up to Rolfsness had entirely failed to appear. All the shops and the hotel were mysteriously but firmly shut; and the only public building still open, the public lavatory, was filled up with camera and sound equipment, placed there to keep it dry. As a result, the entire crew had been compelled to take what shelter it could, which was not much. There was, of course, a fine view of the loch to keep them entertained; but the presence of ground-level as well as air-to-surface water was no real consolation.
‘It’s a process of elimination, really,’ Danny continued. He believed in making the most of whatever entertainment was available, and since the only entertainment in all this wretchedness was his own coruscating wit he was determined to enjoy it to the full. ‘If they say there’s rooms booked at such and such or that the van will be there at whenever, you can rely on that. You can be sure that that hotel is definitely closed for renovation, and that that particular time is when all the vans in Scotland are in for their MoT test. Yes,’ Danny continued remorselessly, ‘I like certainty. It gives a sort of shape to the world.’
The cameraman felt obliged to make some sort of reply. ‘I was in Uganda, you know, when they had that coup.’
‘Oh, yes?’
‘We were stuck waiting for a bus then, an’ all.’
‘Really.’
‘Bloody hot it was. Came eventually, of cou
rse.’
That, it seemed, was that. Danny opened his briefcase and, shielding its contents against the weather with his sleeve, began to read through his notes one last time. Not that there was much point. Without any material from the archaeologists, who were up at Rolfsness in nice dry tents, he couldn’t hope to start planning anything. The one thing that might make this into television was an interview with this missing female who had been the first into the mound. There was probably a perfectly good reason why she had gone missing, of course, and he felt that if he was now to be reduced to a curse-of-the-pharaohs angle it was probably not going to work in any event; still, there is such a thing as the Nose for a Story. He reminded himself, for about the hundredth time that afternoon, that a routine break-in at a Washington hotel had led to the full glory of Watergate. As usual when he was totally desperate, he tried to think in children’s-story terms, and as he isolated each element he made a note of it in his soggy notebook. Buried treasure. Mysterious disappearance. Remote Scottish hillside. Vikings. A curse on the buried treasure. The fast-breeder reactor twenty miles or so down the coast. Did anyone happen to have a note of the half-life of radioactive gold?
Through the swirling rain, a small man in a cap was approaching. He asked one of the cameramen if Mr Bennett was anywhere.
‘I’m Danny Bennett.’
‘It’s about your van, Mr Bennett. The one you were wanting to go up to Rolfsness,’ the small man said. ‘I’m afraid there’s been a wee mistake.’
‘Really?’
‘Afraid so, yes.’
That seemed to be all the man was prepared to say. So far as he was concerned, it seemed, that would do.
‘What sort of a mistake?’
‘Well,’ said the man, ‘I hired my van out on Tuesday, just for the day, and it hasn’t been brought back yet. So it isn’t here for you.’
‘Oh, that’s bloody marvellous, that is. Look, can’t you get another one? It’ll take forever to get one sent up from the nearest town.’
‘There is only the one van.’
Danny wiped the rain out of his eyes. ‘Is there any chance of its being returned within the next couple of hours? Who hired it? Is it anyone you know?’
‘Not at all,’ said the man. ‘It was a young woman who hired it. The one who came to look at the diggings up at Rolfsness, the same as yourself.’
Danny looked at him sharply. ‘You mean Miss Frederiksen? The American girl?’
‘That’s right,’ said the man. ‘And now I’ll be getting back indoors. It’s raining out here,’ he explained. ‘Sorry not to be able to help.’
‘Hold it,’ Danny shouted, but the man had disappeared.
‘What was that about our van?’ asked the chief sound-recordist.
‘It’s not coming,’ Danny answered shortly.
‘Thought so,’ said the sound-recordist. The news seemed almost to please him. ‘Just like Zaire.’
‘What happened in Zaire, then?’
‘Bleeding van didn’t come, that’s what.’ The sound-recordist wandered away and joined his assistant under the questionable cover of a sodden copy of the Observer. Danny walked swiftly across to the telephone-box, with which he had dealt before. When you admitted that the thing did actually take English money and not groats or cowrie shells, you had said pretty much everything there was to say in its favour. However, after a while he managed to get through to a van-hire firm in Wick and arranged for substitute transport. Then he reversed the charges to London.
So cheerful was he when he came out of the phone-box that he almost failed to notice that the rain had got heavier and perceptibly colder. He had - at last - the bones of a story. Of course, none of the researchers had come up with anything new about the Frederiksen woman. But they had called up her supervisor, a certain Professor Wood. Apparently, when she telephoned him from Lairg (God help her, Danny thought, if she was using this phone-box), her manner had been rather strange. Incoherent? No, not quite. Excited, of course, about the discovery. But not as excited as you would expect a career archaeologist to sound after having just made the most remarkable discovery ever on the British mainland. How, then? Preoccupied, Professor Wood had thought. As if something was up. Something nice or something nasty? Both. Something strange. Strange as in mysterious? Yes. And she had started to say something about a dragon, but then apparently thought better of it.
Danny Bennett sat down and wrote in ‘Dragon?’ in his list of potential ingredients. Then he stared at it for a while, put down ‘Query Loch N. Monster double-query?’ and crossed it out again. He then started to draw out the complicated wheel-diagrams and flow-diagrams from which his best work had originated. He felt suddenly relaxed and happy, and soon he was using the red biro that meant ‘theme’ and the green felt-tip that signified ‘potential concept’. A television programme was about to be born.
‘That’s settled, then,’ said the King. ‘And if we can’t find the bits we want in Wick we’ll try somewhere else. And so on, until we do find it.’
The heroes had taken their briefing in virtual silence, since no one could think of any viable alternative, Angantyr’s suggestion of declaring war on England having been dismissed unanimously at the outset. After a formal toast and prayer to Odin, the heroes sat down to polish their weapons and pack for the journey.
Hjort and Arvarodd, who had already packed, and Brynjolf the Shape-Changer (who didn’t need to pack) lingered beside the fire, playing fivestones.
‘I don’t know about all this,’ grumbled Hjort. ‘Complicated. All this stealth and subtlety. I mean, we aren’t any good at that sort of thing, are we? What we’re good at is belting people about.’
‘True,’ said Brynjolf wistfully. ‘But it doesn’t look as if there’s much to be gained from belting people about these days.’
‘Isn’t there, though?’ replied Hjort emphatically. ‘I reckon there’ll be some belting-about to be done before we’re finished here. Don’t you agree, Hildy Frederik’s-daughter? ’
Hildy, who was carrying an armful of blankets over to the van, nodded without thinking.
‘You see?’ said Hjort. ‘She’s clever, she is.’
‘That’s right enough,’ said Arvarodd briskly. ‘There’s more to that woman than meets the eye.’
‘Just as well,’ said Hjort. ‘I like them a little thinner myself.’
Arvarodd scowled at him. ‘Well, I do,’ protested Hjort. ‘I remember one time in Trondheim - before they pulled down the old market to make way for that new potters’ quarter—’
‘That girl has brains,’ said Brynjolf hurriedly. ‘Brains are what count these days, it seems.’
‘Dunno what we’ll do, then,’ said Hjort. ‘Never had much use for brains, personally. Messy. Hard to clean off the axe-blade.’
‘I reckon she’s an asset to the team,’ went on Brynjolf. ‘As it is, we’re strong on muscle and valour, but a bit short on intellect. There’s Himself, of course, and that miserable wizard, but another counsellor on the staff is no bad thing. I reckon we should adopt her.’
‘What, give her a name and everything?’ Hjort looked doubtful.
‘Why not?’ said Arvarodd enthusiastically. ‘Except that I can’t think of one offhand.’
‘I can.’
‘Shut up, Hjort. Yes, we must think about that.’
Just then, there was a shout from the lookout.
‘Hello,’ said Hjort, suddenly hopeful. ‘Do you think that might be trouble?’
‘Who knows?’ said Arvarodd, buckling on his sword-belt over his jacket and reaching for his bow. ‘Anything’s possible, I suppose. Who’s moved my helmet?’
The heroes had enthusiastically formed a shield-ring, looking rather curious perhaps in shields, helmets and two-piece grey polyester suits. The King stalked hurriedly past them. ‘Not now,’ he said shortly.
‘But, Chief . . .’
‘I said not now. Get out of sight, all of you.’ He crouched down behind a boulder and looked out over the road.
Two vans had stopped there. A moment later Hildy and Starkad (who was the lookout) joined him.
‘Just drew up, Chief,’ whispered Starkad. ‘You said to call you if—’
‘Quite right,’ replied the King. ‘Who are they, Hildy Frederik’s-daughter?’
Hildy peered hard but could make nothing out. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Probably nobody.’
Out of the first van climbed a man in a blue anorak with a map in his hand. He walked up to the top of a bank, looked around him, and made a despairing gesture.
‘What’s he looking for, do you think?’ muttered the King. ‘You stay here. I’m going to have a look.’
Before Hildy could say anything, the King slipped over the boulder and crept down towards the road to where he could hear what the people in the vans were saying. The man in the blue anorak had gone back and was shouting at the driver.
‘How was I to know?’ replied the driver. ‘One godforsaken hillside looks pretty much like another to me.’
‘We’ll have to go back to that last crossroads, that’s all,’ said the man in the blue anorak. ‘Rolfsness is definitely due north of here.’
‘Why don’t we just go back to Lairg and see if the pub’s open?’ growled the driver. ‘It’s too dark to film anyhow. We’re not going to do any good tonight.’
‘Because I want to get there as soon as possible and talk to those archaeologists. We’ve wasted enough time as it is. We’ve got a schedule to meet, remember.’
‘Please yourself, Danny boy. Since we’ve stopped, though, I’m just going to take a leak.’
‘Hurry up, then, will you?’
To the King’s horror, the driver jumped out and walked briskly over the rise. The heroes were just over there, hiding. He closed his eyes and waited. A few moments later, he heard a horrified shout, followed by the war-cries of his guard. The driver came scampering back over the rise, pursued by Hjort, Angantyr and Bothvar Bjarki, with the other heroes at their heels and Hildy trotting behind shouting like a small pony following the hunt.
