Grailblazers (13 page)

‘Oh thit,' mumbled the ironclad. ‘How did you know?'

Had Lamorak been truthful, he'd have replied that it was the logical conclusion when you came across someone who'd heard of kangaroos but didn't know what they looked like, and had the idea that in the Outback, the way to dress inconspicuously was to make up as Ned Kelly. Instead, he said, ‘Lucky guess.'

Pertelope, meanwhile, had been doing a very good impersonation of a man swallowing a live fish. ‘How do you mean, from the future?' he finally managed to say. Lamorak smiled.

‘Allow me to introduce you,' he said. ‘Sir Pertelope, this is the Timekeeper. Timekeeper, Sir Pertelope.'

For his part, Pertelope looked like someone who has just been told that the sun rises in the east because of horticulture. He furrowed his brows.

‘Excuse me,' he said, ‘but could somebody please explain what's going on?'

The Timekeeper shrugged - a gesture which would have been rather more elegant if it hadn't involved the movement of quite so much rusty sheet metal - and removed the iron drum to reveal a young, freckled and quite unmistakably female face; fourteen going on fifteen, at a guess, and with braces on her teeth.

‘It'th all right,' she said, ‘I'll ecthplain. I'm uthed to it,' she added. ‘But thirtht, can I get out of all thith bloody armour?'

There was a confusing interval while she peeled off the metalwork. It was like watching a destroyer getting undressed.

‘That'th better,' sighed the Timekeeper. She was now dressed in a scarlet boiler suit and silver trainers, and stood about five feet two in them. The revolver was still in her hand, but probably only because there wasn't anywhere to put it down that wasn't covered in sheet steel. ‘I'm throm a thpathethip,' she said.

‘I see,' commented Pertelope unconvincingly.

‘It'th very thimple,' the Timekeeper went on, standing on one foot and massaging the other vigorously. ‘There‘th ten of uth, and we were put into orbit in a time capthule travelling at just over the thpeed of light.'

‘The Relativity Marketing Board,' Lamorak interrupted. ‘It was the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Years ahead of its time,' he added.

‘Yeth,' said the Timekeeper, bitterly, ‘ecthept the thools went and thent uth off in the wrong direction. Inthtead of going into the Thuture, we went into the Patht.'

‘Sheer carelessness,' said Lamorak sadly. ‘Somebody forgot to read the instruction manual, apparently.'

‘And they thorgot to pack any thood,' the Timekeeper added, ‘which meanth every tho ofen one of uth hath to take the ethcape capthule down to thome detherted thpot on the Thurthathe and forage for provithionth. Gueth whothe turn it wath thith time.'

Pertelope gave Lamorak a bewildered look. ‘How do you know all that, Lammo?' he asked.

‘Simple,' the knight replied. ‘I met one of them - oh, two hundred and fifty years ago now, maybe more. Not you,' he added to the Timekeeper, ‘one of your, er, colleagues. He was about nine years old, with sort of carroty red hair.'

The Timekeeper nodded. ‘That thoundth like Thimon,' she said. ‘I'll warn him to ecthpect you.'

Pertelope was about to say ‘But—' again, but Lamorak forestalled him.

‘Our past is their future, you see,' he explained, ‘so although I've already met - Simon, was it? Yes, I remember now - he won't meet me for another two and a half centuries, or whatever it is in his timescale. And of course, where we get older as time passes, they get younger.'

The Timekeeper nodded. ‘I wath thorty-thicth onthe,' she said savagely, ‘and now look at me. And having thethe thodding thingth on my teeth doethn't help.'

‘It must be awful,' agreed Lamorak. ‘Why don't you take them off and the hell with it?'

‘Becauthe,' the Timekeeper replied sadly, ‘when I wath thorty-thicth I had really thraight even teeth and no thillingth. Which meanth I've got to wear thucking bratheth and bruth three timeth a day, otherwithe it'll cauthe a temporal paradocth. It'th a real bummer.' She paused for a moment, as something jammed in her mind. ‘Hold on,' she said. ‘How can you have met Thimon two hundred and thithty yearth ago? You'd be dead by now.'

It was Lamorak's turn to sigh.

‘Let me explain,' he said.

 

Not far away, a real kangaroo - one without golden hooves or a horn in the middle of its forehead - was bounding happily along, its mind occupied with the one great mystery which obsesses the consciousness of the species; to the extent that it has stopped them dead in their evolutionary tracks and prevented them from developing into the hyper-intelligent super-lifeforms they would otherwise have become.

Namely; how come, no matter how careful you are about what you put in your pockets, in the end you always find two paperclips, a fluff-covered boiled sweet and a small, worthless copper coin at the bottom of them?

It had just come to the conclusion that the Devil creeps up and puts them there while you're asleep, when a terrifying apparition shot up out of a hollow in the rocks, waved its arms and grinned fearfully The kangaroo stopped dead in mid-hop, landed awkwardly, and twisted its ankle. The force of the landing jerked a shirt button and a scrap of peppermint wrapper out of its pouch, and the wind bore them away.

The monster advanced, slowly and with infinite menace. Behind it, a man with a camera and another with a big tape-recorder put their heads up above the escarpment. The monster was talking, apparently to itself.

‘These spectacular creatures,' it was saying, ‘the world's largest true marsupials, hounded by mankind to the verge of extinction in some parts of the Outback...'

The kangaroo cowered back on to its hind paws and raised its forepaws feebly; whether to make a show of aggression or to hide behind them was far from clear. The monster continued to advance.

‘And now,' it was saying. ‘I'm going to try and get in close to the kangaroo, and if we're really lucky we might for the first time ever be able to show you ...'

The kangaroo tried to move; but completely without success. It fought the urge to grin feebly and wave into the camera with every fibre of its being. It failed.

‘The largest species - Barry, can you zoom in on the little bugger's head please - the largest species of kangaroo, the Red, can leap twenty-five feet at a single bound and clear objects six feet high,' said the monster. ‘I'm going to see if I can get close enough for you to see in detail ...'

The spell broke. With a shrill bark of terror, the kangaroo launched itself into the air, twisted frantically round and bounded away, pursued by strange and distinctly unfriendly cries from the monster. Only after half an hour's high-speed bounding did it stop, crouch down and drag breath into its heaving lungs.

And then stiffen in cold despair; for just behind its shoulder it could hear the sound of human breathing, and that terrible voice, saying:

‘And if we're extremely quiet, we might just be able - Kieron, if you scare the bugger this time I'll make you swallow your polariser - we might just be able to get a glimpse of its ...'

A single massive jump might just reach the edge of that rock over there, but why bother? There was clearly no point.

With a soft, despairing cough, the kangaroo turned, faced the camera and waggled its forepaws, hating itself almost to death.

 

 

‘Let'th get thith thtraight, thall we?' said the Timekeeper, after a long, long pause. ‘You're really ecthpecting me to believe that you're a pair of Arthurian knighth on a quetht to find an apron?'

‘Yes.'

‘Fine.' A sharper than usual pair of eyes would have seen her suspended disbelief bobbing for a moment above her head before drifting away on the breeze. ‘And that'th what you need the tied-up horthe for?'

‘The horthe?'

‘Horthe,
yeth.'

‘Oh I see, the horse.' Lamorak scratched his head. He was hot, tired, confused, overdosed to the eyebrows with tinned peaches and dying of toothache. He didn't really want to do any more explaining just at the moment. ‘It's not a horse,' he said, ‘not as such.'

Just then the unicorn woke up, struggled ineffectually in its bonds, and embarked on a stream of invective.

‘Hey,' said the Timekeeper, ‘the horthe jutht thaid thomething.'

‘Yes, only it isn't a—'

‘Listen, you bastards,' screamed the unicorn. ‘Tell that flamin' sheila that if she calls me a bloody horse just one more time, then so help me—'

Pertelope, showing more intelligence than anyone would have given him credit for, grabbed a sugar-lump and slapped it into the unicorn's mouth. The tirade broke off abruptly, and was replaced by a crunching sound.

‘If it'th not a horthe,' whispered the Timekeeper, ‘then what ith it?'

Lamorak sighed. ‘It's a unicorn,' he said. ‘Satisfied?'

‘Oh.'

‘And now, we've got to get on with what we were doing, and I'm sure your colleagues are getting very hungry up there in orbit, so ...'

‘What do you need a unicorn for?'

It took Lamorak just over six seconds to count to ten slowly under his breath. ‘If you must know,' he said, ‘we want it as bait to catch a maiden of unspotted virtue.'

The Timekeeper looked at him. ‘You'th got that the wrong way round, you know.'

Lamorak prised his lips apart into a smile. ‘Have we? Oh
damn.
That is a nuisance, isn't it, Per? Oh well, it's back to the drawing board for us, then. Thanks for the tip, anyway. And now we really must be getting along.'

‘And bethideth,' continued the Timekeeper, ‘you thaid you were questhting for an apron, not a maiden of unthpotted ...'

‘It's her apron,' said Sir Pertelope.

‘Ith it?'

‘Yes.'

 

 

After the unicorns came the convicts.

There were two waves of them. The second wave arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, seven hundred years after the first wave.

The aborigines, whose permission nobody bothered to ask, had a phrase for it. One damned thing after another, they said.

The first man in the first wave to set eyes on Australia had been the overseer. His first reaction was to shudder slightly. Then he jumped down from the observation platform and told the drummer to stop marking time.

‘Right,' he shouted, ‘everybody out.'

Nobody moved. Two thousand dragon-headed prows bobbed silently up and down in the still waters of Botany Bay.

The overseer blinked. ‘Did you lot hear what I said?' he yelled. ‘Everybody off the ships, now.'

‘We're not going.'

The voice came from behind an oar in the third row back. It was backed up by a mumbled chorus of That's Rights and You Tell Hims. The overseer started to perspire.

‘What did you just say?' he demanded. The faint blur of grey smoke behind the oar coruscated in the sunlight. If it had had shoulders, it might well have been shrugging them.

‘I said we're not bloody going,' it replied evenly. ‘We can see into the future. It sucks. We stay here.'

In the back of the overseer's mind, a little voice nervously started asking around to see if anyone had any ideas about what should be done next. The overseer's hands were more positive. They reached for the big knotted whip hanging from his belt.

‘We'll soon see about that,' he said, and he aimed a ferocious blow at the cloud of smoke.

‘Idiot.'

With aggravating slowness, the wisps of smoke coalesced into a cloud once more. There was an expectant silence.

‘There's no way you can force us to get off the ship, you know,' went on the voice, calmly. ‘So you might as well accept the situation, turn this thing round and head for home. Yes?'

‘No,' said the overseer.

He was sweating heavily now.

He hadn't wanted to come in the first place. When he'd joined the company, all those years ago, he'd seen his future career developing in an entirely different direction. After five years or so loading sides of bacon on to the ships and sailing them from Copenhagen to Dover, he reckoned, he'd have proved himself the sort of man they could use in marketing. There would follow an orderly progression, from sales representative to assistant sales manager, then regional sales manager, then sales director, and so on until he was given overall responsibility for the whole Danish operation in Albion. And here he was, ten years later, trying to cajole a boatful of deported supernatural entities into colonising New South Cambria. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong.

‘Please?' he said.

There was a swirling of mists and fogs the length of the ship that left him feeling dizzy. He could feel the roof of his mouth getting dry.

Two thousand longships; each one crammed to overflowing with minor divinities. There were river-gods, wood-nymphs, fire-spirits, elves, wills o' the wisp, pixies, chthonic deities, earth-mothers, thunder-demons, even a few metaphysical abstractions huddled wretchedly at the back and insisting on soft lavatory paper. As part of the dismantling of the magical culture of Albion, her entire population of supernatural bit-players had been rounded up and sent to Van Demon's Land.

The overseer dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and took a deep breath. ‘Come along now, people,' he wheedled, ‘you'll like it once you get there, promise.'

‘Nuts.'

‘But there's rivers,' whined the overseer. ‘Majestic, awe-inspiring torrents, crashing over dizzying water-falls, winding lugubriously through ancestral forests. There's deserts. There's rock formations any redquartzed troll'd give his right arm to live in. There's bush fires that make Hell look like a camping stove. What in God's name are you complaining about? It's a bloody spook's paradise out there.'