Who's Afraid of Beowulf

by Tom Holt

  ‘Why didn’t you say?’

  ‘I’ve only just noticed him, haven’t I?’

  Prexz cleared his throat and turned his glow up a little. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

  ‘Yes?’ replied Danny.

  ‘Would you happen to know anything about a cable running under the ground about a mile from here and going due north?’

  ‘I would imagine,’ Danny replied, his heart pounding, ‘that it has something to do with the nuclear power station on the coast.’

  ‘Nuclear Power?’ Prexz said. ‘Stone me. Did you hear that, Zxerp? Nouvelle cuisine.’

  The two pools of light rose up into the air and seemed to dance there for a moment.

  ‘By the way,’ said Prexz, ‘if the wizard comes looking for us . . .’

  ‘The wizard?’

  ‘That’s right, the wizard. If he comes looking for us, you haven’t seen us.’

  ‘Before you go,’ whispered Danny faintly, ‘do you think you might possibly untie these ropes?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Prexz. As he did so, Danny was aware of a terrible burning sensation in his hands and arms. ‘Is that all right?’

  ‘That’s fine, thank you,’ Danny gasped. Then he fainted.

  ‘What a strange man,’ Prexz said. ‘Right, off we go.’

  The Dow up three - that won’t last - early coffee down, tin’s still a shambles, and soon they’ll be giving copper away with breakfast cereal. Who needs to buy a newspaper to learn that?

  Thorgeir had adapted splendidly to most things in the course of his extremely long life, but the knack of reading the Financial Times on a train still eluded him. How one was supposed to control the huge unruly pages was a complete mystery. He was sorely tempted to get the boss to buy up the damned paper, just to make them print it in a smaller format. With a grunt, he retrieved the news headlines. Earthquake in Senegal, elections in New Zealand, massive archaeological find in Scotland . . .

  Massive archaeological find in Scotland. Like a rain-drop trickling down a window, his gaze slid down the pink surface and locked on to the small paragraph. At Rolfsness, in Caithness; archaeologists claim to have unearthed a ninth-century Viking royal ship-burial. Unprecedented quantities of artefacts including treasure, armour and weapons. Gold prices, however, are unlikely to be affected.

  His fellow-passengers saw the small thin-faced man go suddenly white as he read his FT, and assumed that he had failed to get out of cocoa before the automatic doors closed. Thorgeir tossed the paper down on the seat beside him, and fumbled in his briefcase for his radiophone.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ he said. ‘In the paper?’

  ‘What are you going on about, Thorgeir?’ said the sorcerer-king, his voice faint and crackly at the other end.

  ‘Front page of the FT.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ve got that here.’ Thorgeir could picture the sorcerer-king retrieving the paper from the early-morning mess on his desk.

  ‘The news section, about a third of the way down.’

  ‘You’ve called me up to tell me about the Chancellor?’

  ‘Stick the Chancellor; it’s the bit below that.’

  When the sorcerer-king panicked, he tended to do so in Old Norse, which is a language admirably suited to the purpose, if you are not in any hurry. Thorgeir listened impatiently for a while, then interrupted.

  ‘Who have we got in archaeology?’

  There was silence at the other end of the line. Twelve hundred years he’s managed without a Filofax, reflected Thorgeir. The moment he gets one, nobody knows where they are any more. Marvellous.

  ‘In Scotland?’

  ‘Preferably.’

  ‘There’s a Professor Wood at St Andrews. What do you want an archaeologist for, anyway? I’m going over to Vouchers.’

  Thorgeir frowned. ‘No, don’t do that,’ he said quietly. ‘Get Professor Wood. It says in the paper he’s in charge of this dig at Rolfsness. Tell him I’ll meet him there.’

  ‘I’m still going over to Vouchers.’

  ‘You do whatever you like. By the way, where’s this train I’m on going to? I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Manchester.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Thorgeir switched off the phone and consulted his train timetable. He was feeling excited now that the enemy had been contacted, although he still could not imagine how he had overlooked something as obvious as a ship-burial on his many visits to that dreary place. Then it occurred to him that any wizard with Grade III or above would have been able to conceal the traces of life in such a mountainous and isolated spot from any but the most perceptive observer, and King Hrolf ’s wizard had been a top man. Pity they hadn’t headhunted him back in the 870s.What was that wizard’s name? Something about the pot and the kettle.

  In the age of the supersonic airliner, a man can have breakfast in London and lunch in New York (if his digestion can stand it); but to get from Manchester to the north coast of Scotland between the waxing and the waning of the moon still requires not only dedication and cunning but also a modicum of good luck, just as it did in the Dark Ages. By the time Thorgeir had worked out an itinerary, the view from the train window had that tell-tale hint of First World War battlefield about it that informs the experienced traveller that he’s passing through Stockport.Thorgeir closed his briefcase and leant his head back against the cushions. Kotkel. Hrolf ’s wizard was called Kotkel, and he had had quite a reputation around Orkney in the seventies. Winner for three years in succession of the Osca (Orkney Sorcerers’ Craft Association) for Best Hallucination. No slouch with a rune, either.

  ‘That’s all I needed,’ groaned Thorgeir.

  Telephone wires were humming all over Britain, for they had just had to shut down the nuclear reactor on the north coast of Scotland. There was, it had been decided, no need to evacuate the area; there was no danger. It was just that someone had contrived to mislay the entire output of electricity from the plant for just over half an hour. Even the lights had gone out all over the building.

  ‘Has anyone,’ the controller kept asking, ‘got a fifty pence for the meter?’ The senior engineers led him away and got him an aspirin, while his deputy made another attempt to get through to Downing Street.

  No one had yet got around to checking the underground cable that ran due south from the plant, which was where the fault actually lay. It lay on its back, its eyes closed, and it was singing softly to itself.

  ‘For ye defeated,’ it sang,

  ‘King Hrothgar’s army,

  And sent them home,

  To think again.’

  The fault’s companion was scarcely in a better state He had never even claimed to be able to hold his electricity, and he had very nearly been sick. It was just as well that he had not, or the entire National Grid would have been thrown into confusion. He gurgled, and went to sleep.

  ‘Prexz,’ said the fault, ‘I just thought of something.’

  Prexz moaned, and rolled on to his face, vowing never to touch another volt so long as he lived.

  ‘How would it be,’ Zxerp said, ‘how would it be if . . .’

  ‘Don’t want any more,’ mumbled Prexz. ‘Had too much already. Drunk. Totally drunk. Going to join Electronics Anonymous soon as I feel a little better.’

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ whined Zxerp.

  ‘Think they put something in it at the generator,’ continued Prexz. ‘Going to sleep it off. Shut up. Go away.’

  ‘Wimp,’ snarled Zxerp. ‘You’re no fun, Prexz. Don’t like you any more.’

  Prexz had started to snore, sending clouds of undecipherable radio signals to jam up the airwaves of Europe.

  ‘I don’t like it here,’ said Zxerp. ‘I want to go home.’

  No reply. Zxerp shook his head, which made him feel worse, and he fell heavily against the cable. There was nothing in it, and he was feeling terribly thirsty. He was also feeling guilty.

  ‘Poor old wizard,’ he said. ‘Always been good to us. Never a cross word in twelve hundred years. Prexz, sh
ouldn’t we go and find the wizard? Shouldn’t have run away from the wizard like that. Not right.’

  Zxerp started to cry, and negative ions trickled down the side of his nose, electrolysing it. At the government listening post in Cheltenham, a codes expert picked up his tears on the short-wave band and rushed off to tell his chief that the Russians had developed a new cipher.

  Thorgeir heard about the closedown of the power station over the radio as he drove his hired car past Loch Loyal. The shock made him swerve, and he nearly ended up in the water.

  He pulled over and examined an Ordnance Survey map, but that told him nothing he did not already know, and his own personal map, which was traced in blood on soft goat skin and was somewhat out of date. But a call to London on his radiophone told him all he needed to know, and he asked that a helicopter should be laid on to meet him at Tongue. He also enquired whether there was an equivalent to the Vouchers department at the company’s Glasgow office.

  ‘Yes? Then, send a couple of them up. Tell them to bring plenty of vouchers.’

  He pushed down the aerial so violently that he nearly snapped it off, and drove on towards the coast. As he turned a bend in the road beside a small clump of trees, he noticed and just managed to avoid a patch of broken glass in the middle of the carriageway. In doing so he stalled the engine, and while he was persuading it to start again his eye fell on the windscreen of a van among the trees. Someone had apparently been to the trouble of covering this van up with tree-branches. For some reason this seemed terribly significant, and Thorgeir went to investigate.

  What he found was two vans with broken windscreens and a good deal of smashed camera gear. As he stood scratching his hed, the wind carried back to him what sounded like an argument from the hill on the other side of the road. Something about due north having been over those hills there ten minutes ago, and it reminded someone of that time in Iraq.

  Thorgeir looked at his watch. He had plenty of time before he was due to meet the helicopter, and he was starting to get a tingling sensation all down the side of his nose, where his whiskers had once been.

  ‘Told you someone would come and find us,’ croaked the assistant cameraman. ‘Just like that time in Cambodia.’

  ‘That wasn’t Cambodia,’ said the assistant sound-recordist, ‘that was Kurdestan.’

  ‘We started in Iraq,’ replied the senior cameraman. ‘That’s the bloody point.’

  ‘Thank you,’ gasped Danny Bennett to the stranger. He was hoarse from arguing. For a long time, he had thought that he had imagined the sound of a car engine. ‘We’ve been wandering round in circles all day. That fool of a cameraman’s got one of those compasses you buy at filling stations, and we’d been walking for hours before we realised that it was being attracted by his solar calculator. ’

  ‘Are those your vans up there?’ said the stranger.

  ‘Yes.’ Suddenly, Danny seemed to notice something about his rescuer and recoiled violently.

  ‘What’s up?’ said the stranger.

  ‘Sorry,’ Danny said. ‘It’s just that suit you’re wearing.’

  ‘My suit?’ The stranger looked affronted.

  ‘It’s a very nice suit,’ Danny said. ‘It’s just that it’s grey. But it’s not from Marks and Spencer.’

  ‘I should think not,’ said the stranger irritably. ‘Brooks Brothers, this is. OK, the lapels are a bit on the narrow side, but—’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Danny said. ‘And you’d probably think I was mad.’

  ‘I already think you’re mad,’ said the stranger, smoothing out the creases on his sleeve, ‘so what have you got to lose?’

  So Danny told him. He explained about the ship-burial, the first attack, the second attack, the eagle and the men in the grey suits. The stranger seemed entirely unsurprised and utterly convinced by it all; in fact he seemed so interested that Danny was on the point of telling him about his President Kennedy theory when the stranger interrupted him.

  ‘Was there an old man with them, by any chance? Very old indeed, with a horrible squeaky voice?’

  ‘Yes,’ Danny said, ‘I think so.’

  ‘And what about the others?’ The stranger described the men in grey suits. Danny nodded feebly.

  ‘Do you know them, then?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. They and I go way back.’

  Danny dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands. ‘Who are they, then?’

  The stranger grinned in a way that reminded Danny of an Alsatian he had been particularly afraid of as a boy. ‘I don’t really think you want to know,’ he said. ‘Not in your present state of mind.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Danny said urgently. ‘And what has Hildy Frederiksen got to do with it?’

  The stranger raised an eyebrow. ‘Who’s Hildy Frederiksen?’

  ‘The archaeologist.The one who found the burial. She’s with them.’

  ‘You don’t say.’ The stranger had stopped grinning. ‘Listen,’ he said, taking hold of Danny’s sleeve.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Who do you think those men are?’

  Danny blinked twice. ‘Are they from the CIA?’

  ‘In a sense. You’re a TV producer, Mr . . .’

  ‘Bennett, Danny Bennett.’

  ‘I envy you, Mr Bennett. You’ve stumbled on to something big here. Really big.’

  ‘Have I?’

  The stranger nodded. ‘This is once-in-a-career stuff. If I were you, I’d forget all about that ship-burial and get after the men in the grey suits.’

  ‘Really?’ The roof of Danny’s mouth felt like sandpaper.

  ‘Just don’t quote me, that’s all. The road’s over there. It was good meeting you.’ The stranger started to walk away.

  ‘So you don’t think I’ve gone crazy, then?’ Danny called after him.

  ‘No,’ replied the stranger.

  ‘I didn’t tell you about the little blue lights, did I?’

  The stranger stopped and turned round. Strange-shaped ears that man has, Danny thought. Almost pointed.

  ‘Tell me about the little blue lights,’ said the stranger.

  ‘If you must hum,’ said Prexz, ‘hum quietly.’

  ‘I’m not humming,’ Zxerp replied, ‘you are.’

  ‘No, I’m not. And do you mind not shouting? I feel like I’ve got a short just above my left eye.’

  ‘It must be that cable, then,’ replied his companion. ‘Humming.’

  ‘Will you shut up about that cable?’

  Prexz closed his eyes and resolved to keep perfectly still for at least half an hour. If that didn’t work, he could try a brief electric storm.

  ‘Prexz.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘It’s not the cable. It’s coming from up there.’

  Prexz opened his eyes. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And it isn’t a humming. More like a buzzing, really.’

  ‘I don’t like it, Prexz. Shouldn’t we take a look?’

  ‘Please yourself,’ grunted Prexz. He lay back against the cable and dozed off. Zxerp tried to follow his example, but the buzzing grew louder. Then it stopped. After a moment, another sound took its place. Prexz sat upright with a jerk.

  ‘It’s that perishing wizard,’ he groaned.

  ‘It’s not, you know,’ whispered Zxerp. ‘Do you know who I think that is?’

  The two chthonic spirits stared at each other in horror as the summons grew louder and louder, until they could resist it no longer. Something seemed to be dragging them up to the surface. As they emerged into the violent light of the sun, they were seized by strong hands and copper wire was twisted around their necks. They were trapped.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After breakfasting on barbecued rabbit and lager (from the wizard’s now perpetually refilling can) in the ruined broch just south of the Loch of Killimster, King Hrolf Earthstar and his heroes - and heroine - drove into Wick in search of thin copper wire, resistors, crocodile clips and other assorted bits and pieces needed by the wiz
ard for connecting the two chthonic spirits up to the Luck of Caithness. Of course, it had not occurred to any of them to check that the two spirits were still in the small sandalwood box into which the wizard had sealed them with a powerful but imperfectly remembered spell; but even a wizard cannot be expected to think of everything.

  The fog and low cloud, which had been hovering over the tops of the mountains for the last few days, had come down thickly during the night, and Hildy, who was not used to driving under such conditions, made slow progress along the road to Wick. The town itself seemed, as usual, deserted, and Hildy felt little trepidation about leading her unlikely-looking party through the streets. As it happened, such of the local people as were out and about did stop for a moment and speculate who these curious men in grey suits might be; but after a little subdued discussion they decided that they were a party of Norwegians off one of the rigs, which would account for their uniform dress and long shaggy beards.

  There is an electrical-goods shop in Wick, and if you have the determination of a hero used to long and apparently impossible quests you can eventually find it, although it will of course be closed for lunch when you do.

  ‘I remember there used to be a mead-hall just along from here,’ said Angantyr Asmundarson. His shoes were hurting, and he liked the town even less than he had the last time he had visited it, about twelve hundred years previously. ‘They used to do those little round shellfish that look like large pink woodlice.’

  ‘I thought you hated them,’ said the King. ‘You always used to make a fuss when we had them back at the castle.’

  ‘I never said I did like them,’ Angantyr replied. ‘And, anyway, I don’t expect the mead-hall’s there any more.’

  Oddly enough it was, or at least there was a building set aside for roughly the same purpose standing on the site of it. Hildy was most unwilling that the company should go in, but the King overruled her; if Angantyr didn’t get something to eat other than rabbit pretty soon, he suggested, he would start to whine, and that he could do without.

  ‘All right, then,’ Hildy said, ‘but be careful.’