Leif Frond and Quickfingers

by Joan Lennon

  JOAN LENNON

  Illustrated by

  BRENDAN KEARNEY

  Chapter One Woad Rage

  Chapter Two Queue and the Book of the Artificer

  Chapter Three The Arrival

  Chapter Four Testing Times

  Chapter Five The Artificer’s Tale

  Chapter Six The Tracks of the Pilfering Pedlar

  Chapter Seven The Flight of the Skite

  Chapter Eight The Pedlar’s Story

  Chapter Nine Leif’s Cunning Plan

  Copyright

  My name is Frond. Leif Frond. I’m ten years old and I’m a hero. I’m six foot tall, strong as a bear, with a big blond beard down to my waist...

  All right, maybe not. Maybe not even five foot tall, and about as strong as a ferret. But just wait. It’s going to happen. Any day now... any day...

  My granny says things like, “You don’t have to be as tall as a troll to make people sit up and take notice – look at your great-great-uncle, the one they called Gory Weaselbeard! Everybody knows about him and he was shorter than me!” I think she mustn’t be telling the whole truth there, because my granny is so bent over she can look a sheep in the eye. And it’s no secret that my great-greatuncle was the sneakiest trickster anyone has ever heard of and who wants to be known for that? Not me.

  For me, it’s hero or nothing.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Woad Rage

  “Leif! Hurry up – come and help me!” “Hey Twig – get over here. Hold this.” (Yes, my family call me Twig. Very funny.)

  “Leif – hey! Where is that boy?”

  “Leif!”

  It’s like that all day long. I never get a moment’s peace.

  If I go into the Hall, one of my sisters will want me to move the trestle tables. If I go down to the beach, one of my brothers will want me to help scrape barnacles off the bottom of the longship or mend the fishing nets. If I go near the fields I get roped into weeding. If I get caught walking past the animal enclosures then I obviously have nothing else to do and would be happy to help catch a cow and hold its head while my father has a look at its lame foot.

  It’s the price you pay for being the youngest in a very big family.

  So (even though it isn’t the most heroic thing in the world) I do my best to disappear. I hide in the latrine, or nip up the Weirdly Crag behind Frondfell, or swim out into the fjord and lie on my back until I get all pruney. But those are places you can only really hide in the summertime.

  Which is why I was dreading the winter.

  Winter closes us right in on ourselves. There is no escape. Frondfell is surrounded by mountains, which are only passable in the summer (and even then there’s snow on the high tops). When the ice on the fjord freezes solid, no ships can get through.

  It’s just us – my family, and the other people who work with us and live in the settlement – all crammed into the Hall for warmth, day in, day out, getting on each other’s nerves. And every one of the many members of my family giving me jobs to do that I have no chance of avoiding. Meanwhile who, you might ask, do I get to give jobs to? Nobody.

  It’s not fair.

  But, without doubt, the worst of my family is my sister Thorhalla. No hero in all the Viking sagas ever told by all the bards ever had to deal with a monster as horrifying as her. You probably think I’m exaggerating, but I can see through her disguise. All I have to do is squint my eyes and I can see the troll within. She’s probably on the prowl right this minute, gnashing her teeth and drooling, looking for someone to sacrifice to her biggest obsession. That’s right, laundry.

  She may be my least favourite sister, but one of my most favourite daydreams is about her. It always cheers me up. I can imagine just the way the bards would tell it, if only they could get their hands on such a fabulous tale…

  …down by the stream, Thorhalla the Merciless belabours laundry, steely-hearted, striking hapless clothing with a stick. She hasn’t bothered to disguise herself as a human being, but instead is in her natural state – a terrible troll woman with a twitching tail.

  Suddenly the stream begins to flood, grabbing clothes and stick and whisking them all away. Troll Thorhalla is in dire danger of being swept out to sea! Turning, she tries to run but stumbles on the shore and shrieking falls backwards into the torrent.

  “Oh save me, brave brother, save me!” she cries.

  For one deeply satisfying moment, Leif the hero stands, stroking his big beard and thinking of all the awful things she’s done to him over the years. Then, with a sigh, he steels himself to rescue her, for heroes have no choice in situations such as these. As he drags her to safety she has become a changed woman. From then on in, she is always so gentle, so considerate, so grateful, so…

  “So there you are, you lazy good-for-nothing!”

  The voice sliced through my daydream like a Viking knife through an unsuspecting turnip. I’d been too busy imagining, and I’d forgotten to pay attention to where I was. Thorhalla – the real Thorhalla, not the drenched, rescued one of my daydream – had found me.

  “Oh no!” I moaned. “Not laundry! Anything but laundry!”

  “Oh no, dear little brother, not laundry.” Thorhalla purred. “I couldn’t ask a hero-in-the-making like you to do anything so lowly.” She was enjoying this. (She also had a good hold on my sleeve by now, so I couldn’t run away. She has an unfairly enormous set of fists. When Thorhalla grips something, it stays gripped.) I was just wondering how on earth she knew about me wanting to be a hero, when she went on to say, “Not exactly laundry, anyway. More like… dyeing!” and my heart sank.

  I should have realised. There’d been a pretty horrible smell hanging over the settlement for a couple of days now, which should have alerted me to the fact that my granny was making dye. The recipe involved stewing up crushed plants in the big vat behind the stable and making a horrible smell. Come to think of it, this was probably her blue lot, because we’d all been out harvesting wild woad leaves not that long ago.

  As Thorhalla dragged me round the corner of the stables, the stink really hit. The other poor souls she’d recruited were all holding their noses and making faces. Except for my granny, whose nose barely works any more.

  “Run!” I cried to them all, gesturing wildly towards the mountains with my free hand. “Save yourselves! I will do battle with the Oppressor!”

  You’d think they’d take advantage of my heroic offer, but all they did was giggle. Thorhalla glared at me, just like the troll woman I knew her to be. I crossed my eyes, and dug in my heels. She turned, took hold of both my sleeves and started to drag me towards the vat of dye.

  Slick as an eel, I ducked my head, straightened my arms and slithered out of my sister’s grasp. The effect on my sister was, well, dramatic. Flapping and flailing, she staggered backwards, desperately trying to regain her balance, every second getting closer and closer to that great big vat of smelly blue dye.

  For a moment, time slowed down, just the way it did in my daydream. Then it speeded up again – my sister, shrieking, fell backwards. As her bottom landed in the vat, a lovely stinky fountain of blueness sploshed, up and up, and then down again, all over her head – and, well, I had to admit it. It was even better than my daydream.

  “Leif!” shrieked Thorhalla. “I am going to kill you!” Followed by, “Get me out of here!”

  No one was particularly keen to get close to her at that moment. She was sat in a vat, dripping blue and smelling really strongly of plants that had been rotting for just that bit too long. Her hair hung down around her face like weird evil seaweed and the expression in her eyes would have frightened even our ancestor Headbasher Smorgasbord – and he fought ogres for fun.

  Nobody w
as heroic enough to go near that.

  Fortunately, my granny took charge.

  “Right, girl – get out of my vat and off with you to the bathhouse. The rest of you, what are you gawking at? The show’s over. Go and find yourself some other work to do before I find some for you.”

  My granny can put a lot of oomph behind her voice when she wants to, and pretty soon everyone had scattered, including a furious Thorhalla, and there was only the two of us left surveying the mess.

  “I… I’m sorry about all that,” I said cautiously.

  My granny shrugged. “Never mind. We’ll just have to dye another day.”

  “But all the work of making another batch – I really am sorry,” I said. “I know it took you ages, Granny.”

  At which point, she grabbed my sleeve, dragged my ear down to her level and pointed to my sister. As we both watched her squelching her way to the bathhouse, dripping blue goo and looking like a monster’s nightmare, my granny whispered gleefully, “It was worth it, boy! By Odin’s toenails, it was absolutely worth it!”

  And in the days that followed, I decided that even though a stinky, streaky-blue-coloured Thorhalla was even more unpleasant than an ordinary one, still my granny was right.

  It was worth it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Queue and the Book of the Artificer

  If only someone would come – if only someone would come. That’s what I was saying to myself, over and over, about a week later.

  I was remembering the time two years ago, when we had a travelling bard – Stori was his name – wintering with us at Frondfell. Now that was great. Partly because of the sagas and stories of battle and heroes and adventure that he told us round the fire in the long dark evenings. Partly because of the hilariously rude riddle games we all played. But mostly because my father gave me the job of looking after our guest. Every time one of my sisters or brothers would try to rope me into some job, all I had to say was, “So sorry – Stori needs me.” The fact that Stori actually needed very little made it even better.

  What a great winter that had been.

  I knew it was too much to hope that Stori might find his way back to Frondfell again so soon, but any stranger would do, preferably one with simple requirements who would ask specifically for me to look after him. I was walking along the side of the stables, thinking about it, when a horribly familiar voice froze my spine and stopped me in my tracks.

  “Leif! Where is that boy? Just wait till I get my hands on him.”

  Thorhalla!

  I raced away at top speed, heading for my favourite hideout, the workshop of Queue the Artificer. If I could just get there before she spotted me…

  Queue is without doubt the best Artificer in the whole world. He can build anything. And it doesn’t matter what it’s made out of either – metal, wood, amber, stone, bone – if he can think of it, he can make it. And he thinks of the most amazing things.

  Best of all, sometimes he needs a willing volunteer to test his inventions. For some reason I’ve never understood, nobody else around here is all that keen, which means I’m Queue’s first (and only) choice. Official Frondfell Tester, that’s what he calls me.

  Even when there’s nothing to test I love being in his workshop. There are always strange hot smells, and weird clanging and thumping noises, and flashes of coloured light, and you never know what might come flying out of the shadows at you as you step through the door. And it was also the place that held The Book.

  Mostly, Vikings don’t have books. Bards like Stori have all the words of all the stories and sagas and songs in their heads. They don’t write any of it down. There probably isn’t another settlement within twenty leagues of us that can say it owns a book – but Frondfell can. And it’s not just any book. It’s old and wonderful and full of drawings, measurements and beautiful curly Arabic writing. The paper pages are sewn with silk and bound with leather-covered board. It is The Book of the Artificer.

  The story of how The Book came to be in Queue’s hands would, I think, be one a bard would love to tell, but Queue doesn’t talk much about his life before he came to Frondfell. The only bits of the tale I’d been able to tease out of him go like this: The Book came from faraway Constantinople, where Queue had been apprentice to a famous Arabic Artificer. In it were written all of the great man’s inventions and theories and, after a time, Queue’s own discoveries and devices were considered good enough to be included. When his master died, The Book passed to Queue, and he brought it all the way from Constantinople to Frondfell. That’s all I know. Tantalizing, but I’ve never managed to get more out of him. Maybe someday.

  Today, however, in far less time than it’s taken me to explain all that, I raced to Queue’s workshop and, without pausing to knock, shoved open the door and flung myself inside.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Queue muttered without looking up.

  I was just drawing breath to ask him if there were any inventions he’d like me to test for him, when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder, an unpleasant smell wafted past my nose, and the voice of a troll-woman sounded in my ears.

  “Got you, you lazy pup!” it cried triumphantly.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Arrival

  Thorhalla the troll-sister had found me.

  “Do you have any idea how long I’ve been looking for you?” she scolded, giving me a shake with every other word. “I needed you to run about and tell everybody that a Pedlar has arrived but instead I’ve had to do it myself. This is the last place I had to come. You are the most absolutely, unmitigatedly, utterly useless…”

  “A Pedlar?” I squeaked between shakes. “Here?”

  “Oh… what’s the point?” Thorhalla grunted and let me go. “Consider yourselves told,” she said to Queue and me and stalked off.

  I rushed out the door, and the Artificer followed me with more speed than you’d think somebody his age could produce. From all over Frondfell you could see people hurrying towards the Hall. A Pedlar was good news. These travelling packmen covered vast distances, moving from one community to the next, their goods in heavy packs on their backs. There’d be exotic things like amber and silk and silverwork to buy and gossip from other settlements to be heard and wonderful (probably tall) tales of the Pedlar’s adventures to be heard –

  –and no work to be done! Any visitor meant an automatic holiday. My wish had come true.

  As we all piled into the Hall I launched myself towards my father, up at the far end, sitting on his big chair. It wasn’t easy – I had to pinch a few people, and crawl through a few sets of legs, which I realise doesn’t sound very heroic, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to see anything from the back, because of the whole height thing. Me not having much of it, I mean. When I did make it through the crowd, I saw that the Pedlar was similarly lacking in tallness. He was also lacking in youthfulness.

  I don’t know exactly what I’d been expecting to see, but it certainly wasn’t anyone quite as ancient-looking as the figure before me now. This Pedlar was small and skinny with a wrinkly old face and a head of white hair. He also had a croaky old man’s voice – and yet when it came to lifting his pack up off the floor and tossing it onto a table before opening it, he was not even a little bit rickety.

  You get that sometimes – old men and women who look slight and frail, but who can outcarry, outwork and outlast people half their age. My granny’s like that. She’s all bent and little, but she has a back of oak, a tongue like a whip and elbows like knives, and she’s not afraid of using any of them.

  Nobody messes with my granny. I wondered if this old Pedlar was built of the same stern stuff.

  “Roll up! Roll up!” he was saying. “I can’t stay long, but let me tell you, this is your lucky day! They call me Quickfingers the Pedlar. And why do they call me that, I hear you cry? Because, quick as a flick, I can look into your heart and pull out of the air just exactly what you’ve been yearning for. Take you, young lady.” He gave my sister Gerd a big cheesy smile.
“I can see right into your heart and I see an empty place in it. An empty place just about the size of this – ”and, just as quick as he’d said, he unfurled a blue silk scarf with a flourish and draped it across her shoulder.

  Gerd’s face lit up. “Oooo – it’s just like the one the Widow Brunnhilde wore at the Midsummer Festival – I was so jealous! How did you know?”

  “Because it is just the very colour of your eyes, of course.”

  I leaned over to Queue and whispered, “He should sell it to Thorhalla – it’s just the very colour of her hair!”

  How was I to know Thorhalla had pushed her way through the crowd too and was standing right behind me? The expression on Queue’s face was my first clue – so like a flash, I ducked, managing to just miss getting walloped, and scuttled over to stand, looking innocent, beside my father’s chair. I got a clear view from there of Thorhalla and the way her angry red face clashed with her streaky blue hair. It was pretty scary.

  “Who else has a dream in their hearts that needs to come true today?” the Pedlar was saying meanwhile. “Who longs for a brooch or a blade, a cloak or a – my good gods!”

  He’d seen Thorhalla.

  But the old man rallied magnificently. As others swarmed forward to look over his wares, he rummaged out a small package and beckoned to Thorhalla. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, but it was clear from the way he kept pointing, first at the package and then at her head, that it was some sort of hair colouring he was offering her. He actually managed to make her smile – and part with her money!

  This old Pedlar was evidently a genius.

  He darted back and forth, demonstrating to some, sweet-talking others, bartering and bargaining. There was a knife I quite fancied, but I had no money of my own – I wondered what I could use to buy it with. While I was still puzzling over that, I noticed something else. Queue had come to the front of the crowd, and was idly turning things over when suddenly his hand darted forward and he pulled out an object from where it had lain, half-hidden behind the Pedlar’s pack.