My Hero

by Tom Holt

  There was a screech at his right elbow, and he found himself confronted by a beautiful, scantily clad, silver-skinned female holding a very sharp-looking knife. He reassessed his priorities.

  ‘You,’ he snapped at the female. ‘Back off or the donkey gets it.’

  The female backed off, snarling. ‘Peaseblossom, Moth, Mustardseed,’ she growled, ‘stomp the bastard!’

  This complicated matters. He was covering Skinner with the rifle and the female with his revolver, and he only had one pair of hands, for Chrissakes. He resolved the problem by booting Moth savagely in whatever fairies have due south of their navels, and stepping back towards the presumed safety of the trees.

  A mistake. As the immortal Kurt Lundqvist says in Chapter Nineteen of Bounty Hunting For Pleasure And Profit, never presume. Just as he was within arm’s length of the edge of the glade, he felt a depressingly familiar cold, metallic something pressing in his ear, and heard the sound of a hammer being cocked.

  ‘All of you,’ said a voice behind him, ‘freeze or the bounty hunter gets it.’

  There was a moment of puzzled silence.

  ‘So?’ demanded a fairy. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You’re quite right,’ Regalian said apologetically. ‘What I meant to say was, freeze and nobody’s going to get hurt.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘Now then, the knives. Drop them slowly, where I can see them.’

  There was a clatter of falling cutlery. ‘It’s confusing enough as it is,’ the fairy continued, ‘without you fluffing your lines.’

  ‘Look, I said I’m sorry. And you, the one with the big log. Thank you.’

  ‘Yes,’ complained the fairy, ‘but who’s he meant to be threatening? The other one’s in the way, I can’t see what’s going—’

  ‘Hoy!’ It was Skinner, waving his arms. ‘Just what in hell is going on?’

  ‘Don’t you start,’ Regalian snapped. ‘Now, get yourself over here and we can be on our way.’

  ‘Not damn well likely,’ Skinner replied. ‘I like it here.’

  ‘Get over here or I’ll blow your stupid head off!’

  ‘Hey, he’s threatening him,’ wailed a fairy. ‘I thought he was on their side.’

  ‘No, he’s on our side, that’s why he’s threatening the other one, and—’

  ‘No, you’re wrong there, because otherwise they’d both be threatening us.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘HEY!’ Regalian shouted, and there was silence. ‘Get this straight, will you? I’m threatening all of you, so if you’ll just . . .’

  He tailed off in mid sentence. Titania had stepped in front of Skinner, who was now trying to step in front of her. She was holding him back with one slim but obviously very strong arm. Meanwhile Mustardseed was trying to step in front of both of them, and Peaseblossom was trying to barge him out of the way. It was, Regalian said to himself, all so utterly depressing . . .

  ‘Please yourselves,’ he said, and, for want of anything better to do, he belted the bounty hunter across the back of the head with the barrel of the Scholfield, dropping him to the ground. That, at least, simplified matters to some extent.

  ‘NOW!’ yelled a voice from the bushes, and suddenly the glade was full of fairies in black pullovers and balaclava helmets. Regalian recognised the leader as the chap who’d ambushed them in the forest and fitted out Skinner with the big ears. That, presumably, was Oberon, whose practical joke all this had been.

  The arrival of Oberon’s people didn’t do much to simplify the position. There were now so many fairies trying to stand in front of each other that the far end of the glade looked like the queue for night-of-performance tickets for The Phantom of the Opera. The bounty hunter, having recovered from his nasty knock in excellent time, had lunged forward towards Skinner, tripped over his own feet, and was being fought over by two separate contingents of Oberon’s lot. Titania, meanwhile, had grabbed hold of Oberon himself and was giving him a fearful shellacking with an empty champagne bottle. Regalian stepped back into the vegetation at the edge of the glade, picked up a stray apple from the picnic, and holstered his gun. Let someone else do the running around for a change, he thought.

  When he’d finished his apple he put the core tidily in the hollow of a dead tree and strolled forwards through the heaving tumult of fighting elves, muttering the occasional, ‘Excuse me, please,’ and, ‘Mind your backs, please, coming through.’ Pleasingly enough, the fight seemed to eddy round him, and he got the distinct impression that the participants had other issues to resolve besides the detention/rescue of Skinner. They had even stopped kicking the bounty hunter, except occasionally in passing.

  When he reached him, Skinner was kneeling over a rather battered-looking Oberon, brandishing a small fork in his face and yelling something about ears. With a sigh, Regalian grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him to his feet and said, ‘That’ll do. Time we were leaving. ’

  ‘Not,’ panted Skinner, ‘without my ears, I want my goddamn ears back, and I’m not . . .’

  Enough, Regalian said to himself, is enough. Pausing only to knock Skinner silly with a large veal and ham pie, also left over from the picnic, and fireman’s-lift him on to his shoulders, he turned and started to walk away; only to find the dratted woman blocking his path.

  ‘Can I come too, please?’ she said.

  ‘No. Bugger off.’

  ‘I can fix your friend’s ears for him if you’ll let me come too.’

  Regalian scowled. ‘Miss,’ he said, ‘my job is to deliver this idiot to the real world, preferably alive. Nothing was said about ears. Now get out of my way before I thump you with this pie.’

  Titania didn’t move. ‘You want to get out of here?’ she said. ‘Back to real life?’

  ‘Yes. Now I warned you . . .’

  The pie twitched in his hand, and turned into a white rabbit. With a shudder of distaste, Regalian opened his fingers and let it go. ‘Was that you?’ he asked.

  Titania nodded. ‘I’m good at that sort of thing,’ she said. ‘I could be a lot of help getting you out of here.’

  Regalian was about to try pushing past when an unpleasant thought occurred to him. Letting Skinner slide gently off his shoulder on to the ground, he turned to Titania and folded his arms. ‘Why exactly are you so damn keen to tag along?’ he asked.

  Titania prodded the recumbent Skinner with her toe. ‘Him,’ she replied. ‘I think he’s cute.’

  ‘You’re the love interest, aren’t you?’

  The Fairy Queen nodded. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘It’s a lousy job, but someone’s got to do it.’

  They stood for a moment; two professionals, each with a job to do. They understood each other.

  ‘All right, then,’ Regalian sighed, ‘if you must. But I’m warning you, the moment you sprain your ankle or get kidnapped by the bad guys, you’re on your own, got it?’

  ‘You don’t mean that.’

  No, Regalian sighed to himself, I probably don’t.Who’d be a hero, anyway?

  ‘All right,’ he said grumpily. ‘But you get to carry him until he comes round.’

  ‘But he weighs a ton!’

  ‘True. But I’m a strictly equal opportunities hero, and I refuse to conform to outmoded stereotypes. Come on, we haven’t got all day.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Hamlet sat and stared into the darkness. Had he been feeling his usual self - the self who saw ghosts, went mad, stabbed government officials through curtains and eventually got killed - he would undoubtedly have thought of something pretty pungent, not to say quotable, to say about all this; although since it would have had to be a soliloquy, nobody would have been any the wiser for it. As it was, he merely sat with his elbows on his knees, occasionally muttering, ‘Bugger!’

  It was, he decided, a sorry state of affairs, slice it how you like. On the positive side, admittedly, instead of having a body like a clapped-out Skoda, he had the corporeal
equivalent of an armoured car. On the negative side, according to Dr Rossfleisch, he had a number of fairly major side effects to look forward to, at some unspecified but probably not too distant point in the future.

  Among the more palatable of these were sudden uncontrollable fits of violent rage, a dual personality oscillating between diabolical malevolence and whimpering remorse, murderous headaches, adrenalin rushes, catatonic trances and extra-special heartburn. There was also the prospect of a stray snatch of music from a car radio, a supermarket muzak tannoy or a whistling postman blasting his intestines out through his ears at half a second’s notice. To make matters even worse, it seemed that he no longer had the choice of to be or not to be. He was, and that was that.

  To help pass the time, he got to his feet, groped his way to the door and tried battering it down with his head; but it didn’t get him very far. The good Doctor had evidently had that in mind when he’d designed the room, and all he did was make his headache slightly worse.

  It would be nice, he said to himself, to get my hands on whoever’s responsible for this, and pull his head off. No, dammit, he corrected himself, that’s what the bastard wants you to think, he’s planning to use you as a sort of para-human Dobermann, don’t give him the satisfaction. Think nice thoughts. Peace. Love. Spring flowers. Wee lambkins.

  It didn’t work. After about four seconds, all he could see in his mind’s eye was himself, chasing wee lambkins across flowery dells with a bloody great cleaver.

  All right, then, he urged himself, harness that aggression and hostility, make it work for you. Try giving the door another damn good hiding.

  It was a palliative, nothing more; and as soon as he stopped, the bad thoughts started again. World leaders, he found himself thinking, heads of state, I bet a lot of this is their fault. If I could just get my boot behind some of those suckers . . . Dear God, he said to himself, this is bad, I’m definitely going round the bend here. Put a hawk and a handsaw in front of me right now, and I’d be lucky to get it right four times out of ten.

  Well now, he ventured, what would Hamlet do in this situation? Well, he’d agonise. He’d speak lots of blank verse, prance around a bit scoring verbal points off anyone who didn’t get out of his way fast enough, and end up dragging everybody around him down into a cock-up of monolithic proportions. Not exactly ideal, admittedly, but better than running around the place scragging people.

  He left the door alone, sat down in the middle of the floor and tried very hard to remember who he was. It didn’t come easy. He no longer felt the slightest inclination to think of himself as a rogue and peasant slave, and the thought of his too, too solid flesh melting and resolving itself into a dew just made him want to find the guy who looked after the air conditioning and bash him into a pulp. With an effort, he throttled back on the adrenalin and made a conscious effort to face up to the moral dilemmas his situation posed.

  Moral dilemmas, as is well known, are like policemen; there’s never one about when you need one. He was just turning over in his mind the moral ambivalence of ripping the guts out of total strangers when the door started to open. At this point instinct took over, and he sprang at the doorway like a tiger.

  ‘Only me,’ said Rossfleisch’s voice, and Hamlet froze in his tracks. All the Doctor had to do, he knew, was whistle. He subsided into a growling heap.

  ‘I thought you might be feeling a bit peckish by now,’ the Doctor said, ‘so I’ve brought you some nice raw meat and a cup of hot blood.’

  Hamlet snarled. He’d wanted to say thank you, politely, but somehow he couldn’t manage it. He had the unpleasant feeling that the nicest thing he’d currently be capable of saying would be, ‘GrrroARRRR!’

  ‘And when you’ve had that,’ the Doctor went on, ‘we must have a little chat about what I want you to do next. I think,’ he added cheerfully, ‘it’s something you’ll enjoy very much. Very much indeed.’

  Jane looked up from the screen, lit a cigarette, and thought hard.

  Plots, she was always ready to confess, really weren’t her thing. The broad outlines (‘Well, there’s this prince sort of person and he finds this magic ring, and he’s got to take it to this sort of temple place before the bad guys catch him, and that’s sort of it, really’) she could just about manage, given time and encouragement; but when it came to what actually happened, the running around and toing and froing that one needs to fill in the awkward gap between the opening paragraph and the last page, she tended to find herself going with the flow; or, to be more accurate, the trickle.

  That approach, however, wasn’t going to cut much ice in this case. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and tried to think . . .

  So, we’re in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we want to get out of that and into Alice in Wonderland. This is, essentially, a continuity problem, and we need a link of some sort.

  She breathed in, inhaled a mouthful of smoke the wrong way, choked and stubbed out the dog-end. A link, between the two. Shouldn’t be too hard, surely.

  Twenty minutes later, she came to the conclusion that it was probably a bit harder than she’d anticipated, but not completely insoluble. She got up, made a cup of tea, and sat down again.

  Fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she hadn’t drunk her tea.

  Eight minutes later, she reviewed her progress so far. It consisted of the one word, Wonderland.

  In Wonderland, there is no here or there, only wherever and another part of the forest. In the kingdom of the imagination, the cock-eyed man is king.

  Let there, then, be a rabbit hole.

  ‘If she thinks I’m going down there,’ Regalian observed angrily, ‘she’s got another think coming.’

  Titania looked at him quizzically. ‘I think we’re meant to,’ she replied. ‘Otherwise, it wouldn’t be there, would it?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Regalian said. ‘More to the point, did you see the size of that thing?’

  ‘Oh come on,’ Titania objected. ‘It was a big fluffy white rabbit with a comical hat and a big pocket-watch. You aren’t going to tell me you’re afraid of fluffy white rabbits, are you?’

  ‘I am when they’re five feet ten inches tall,’ said Regalian unhappily. ‘Must have teeth like large chisels. If you think I’m scrabbling about down a long dark tunnel with those buggers roaming about . . .’

  Titania shook her head. ‘It’s only a character,’ she said, ‘like you and me. I’m sure it means us no harm. It’s from a children’s book, after all.’

  ‘You read any children’s books lately?Your average child is about as bloodthirsty an animal as you can find this side of a piranha colony. They have dragons in children’s books, for God’s sake, and wolves that eat grandmothers. No, I think I’ll go the long way round, if it’s all the same to you.’

  Titania was about to reply when there was a scuffling sound and the rabbit reappeared. Its big top hat was rather muddier than you see in the illustrations, and it had torn the sleeve of its frock coat on an underground root.

  ‘Are you two clowns going to stand around gossiping all day?’ it demanded. ‘Because if so, you can damn well find your own way. Oh my ears and whiskers,’ it added dutifully, and vanished back down the hole.

  ‘All right,’ Regalian conceded, ‘maybe it’s not exactly a wild rabbit. That doesn’t alter the fact that we’ve got him to lug about with us.’ He jerked a thumb at the recumbent Skinner. ‘Sheer dead weight, he is.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have hit him so hard, the poor lamb.’

  ‘That’s beside the point. I say we wait till he wakes up, at the very least. Or else we find some rope to lower him down with.’

  Titania nodded. ‘Rope,’ she said, and there was rope. Regalian scowled.

  ‘Smartarse,’ he said.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men, muttered Hamlet to himself as he balanced the chamber pot on the lintel, that, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

  Stepping back gingerly so as not to disturb the delica
te equipoise of the chamber pot, he reflected bitterly that that was about the only quote from Shakespeare that wasn’t in Hamlet, and it was the only one he had ever had the slightest use for. Would he, he mused, nevertheless be entitled to his staff discount?

  As befitted a graduate of the University of Wittenberg, he had calculated the physics of the thing to a nicety. He backed against the far wall, took a deep breath and started to bellow.

  Thanks to Dr Rossfleisch’s unquestionable design flair (lung capacity increased by 27%) it wasn’t long before somebody came. The inspection hatch in the door shot back, leaking light into the cell like a breach in the Dutch sea wall, and then slammed shut. There was a rattle of keys in the door. The door opened.

  Poetry in motion. The chamber pot, supported on a stiff piece of leather ripped out of Hamlet’s left boot and jammed into the door frame, tottered and fell from its perch just exactly at the moment when Dr Rossfleisch’s assistant walked under it, holding a portable cassette player and a torch. A thud and a crash and it was all over.

  Pausing only to tread heavily on the cassette player, Hamlet scooped up the keys, bundled the assistant into the cell, locked the door and stood for a moment, the temporary victim of his own success. Since he hadn’t imagined for one moment that such a hare-brained scheme would succeed, he hadn’t wasted any mental energy on thinking what he would do after he’d broken out. He scratched his head, snagging a fingernail on a slightly proud rivet.

  Up the corridor, he asked himself, or down the corridor. That is the question.

  Oh for crying out loud, don’t let’s start all that again. He turned left and started to run.

  As he turned a corner, he could hear running footsteps coming up behind him. Bad déjà vu here; this was about the point in the proceedings when he generally got caught and sent to England. Ha, he said to himself, fooled you, I’m already in England. Talk your way out of that one if you’re so damned clever.