Grailblazers (2 page)

Something sinks into Boamund's slowly grinding brain. ‘Oh,' he says. ‘So you're going to, er...'

‘Yes.'

‘And you're, um, not going to...'

‘No.' Kriemhild takes off her cardy, rolls it into a ball and puts her head on it. ‘Please replace my veil before you go,' she says firmly. ‘Good night.'

‘Oh,' says Boamund. ‘Right you are, then.' He stoops awkwardly down and picks up the veil, not noticing that he's standing on one corner of it. There is a tearing sound. ‘Sorry,' he says, and drapes it as best he can over the face of the princess, who is now fast asleep once more. She grunts.

‘Damn,' says Boamund, faintly; then, with a shrug which makes his vamplates crunch rustily, he sets off slowly down the mountain.

He's about a third of the way down when it starts raining again.

Fortunately there is a small cave nearby, its entrance half hidden by a wind-twisted thorn tree, and he squelches heavily towards it. Just inside he sees a dwarf, sitting cross-legged and munching a drumstick.

Promising.

‘Hello, dwarf,' says Boamund.

‘Wotcher, tosh,' replies the dwarf, not looking up.

‘Still pissing down out there, is it?'

‘Um,' says Boamund. ‘Yes.'

‘Rotten bloody climate, isn't it?' says the dwarf. ‘I suppose you're coming in.'

‘If you don't mind.'

‘Suit yourself,' says the dwarf. ‘I suppose you want a drink, an' all.'

Boamund's face lights up under his sodden fringe. ‘Have you got any milk?' he asks.

The dwarf favours him with a look of distilled scorn and indicates a big leather bottle. ‘Help yourself,' he says, with his mouth full.

It's a strange drink. Boamund thinks there are probably herbs in it; cold herbal tea or something. Then he suddenly feels terribly, terribly sleepy.

When he's fast asleep the dwarf jettisons his chicken leg, grins unpleasantly, makes a cabalistic sign and gets up to leave. A thought crosses his mind and he turns back. Having stolen Boamund's purse, penknife with corkscrew attachment and handkerchief, he leaves, and soon he has vanished completely.

Boamund sleeps.

 

Quite some time later he woke up.

Localised heavy rain, perhaps; or else someone had just emptied a bucket of water over him. He tried to move, but couldn't. Something creaked.

‘It's all right,' said a voice somewhere overhead. That was probably God, Boamund thought; in which case, what he'd always suspected was true. God did indeed come from the West Riding of Yorkshire.

‘You're not paralysed or anything like that,' the voice went on, ‘it's just that your armour's rusted solid.
Really
solid,' the voice added, with just a touch of awe. ‘We're going to need more than just tinsnips to get you out of there.'

Boamund tried to see who was talking - probably not God after all - but the best he could do was crane his eyes. Result, a close-up of the bottom edge of his visor. ‘Where am I?' he asked.

‘In a cave,' replied the voice, and then continued, ‘You've been here for some time, actually, sorry about that.'

Boamund cast his mind back. A fiery mountain. A maiden. A dwarf. Milk that tasted funny. Something his mother had told him, many, many years ago, about not accepting milk from strange dwarves.

‘What's going on?' he asked.

‘Ah,' replied the voice. ‘You're the perceptive type, I can see that. Maybe all it needs is a dab of penetrating oil. Hold still.'

This injunction was, of course, somewhat redundant, but at least Boamund caught a very brief glimpse of someone small, in a purple hood, darting across his restricted line of vision. ‘Here,' he said, ‘you're the dwarf, aren't you? The one who...'

‘Close,' said the dwarf, ‘but not quite.'

‘Hang on,' Boamund remonstrated. ‘Either you are or you...'

‘I'm not the dwarf you're thinking of,' replied the dwarf, ‘but I'm a relative of his.'

‘A relative...'

‘Yes.' A small, ugly, wide grin floated across Boamund's sight-plane for an instant and then vanished again. ‘A relative. In fact...'

‘Yes?'

‘Um.' A scuttling noise. ‘A direct relative.' There was a curious swooshing sound near Boamund's left knee. ‘Try that.'

Boamund made an attempt to flex his leg, without results.

‘Give it another go,' said the dwarf. ‘Brilliant stuff, this WD-40, but you've got to let it have time to seep through.'

Something began to tick inside Boamund's head. ‘How long
have
I been here, exactly?' he asked. ‘If my armour's really rusted solid, I must have been here...' He considered. ‘Weeks,' he said.

‘Try that.'

‘Nothing.'

‘Sure?'

‘Of course I'm...'

Sound of intake of dwarfish breath. As well as being notorious for their alliance with enchanters, sorcerers and other malign agencies, dwarves are celebrated blacksmiths and metalworkers. This means that they have that profoundly irritating knack, familiar to anyone who's ever taken a car to a garage to have an inexplicable squeak sorted out, of drawing their breath in through a gap in their teeth instead of answering questions. The gap in the teeth, so current research would indicate, is usually the result of getting a smack in the mouth from telling a short-tempered customer that you can't get the parts.

‘You're stuck solid there, chum,' said the dwarf. ‘Absolutely solid. Never seen anything like it.'

Boamund felt a tiny twinge of panic, deep down inside his digestive apparatus. ‘What do you mean,' he said, ‘solid?'

The dwarf seemed not to have heard him. ‘Not really surprising, though, amount of time you've been here. Suppose we could give it a try with the old cold chisel, but I'm not promising anything.'

‘Hey!' said Boamund; and the next moment the entire universe began to vibrate loudly.

‘Thought not,' said the dwarf, after a while. ‘Helmet's rusted solid on to your vambrace. Looks like a hacksaw job to me. Stay there a minute, will you?'

In an ideal world Boamund would have pointed out, very wittily, that he didn't have much choice in the matter; however, since the world he was in fact inhabiting was still badly polluted with the after-effects of the dwarf attacking his helmet with hammer and chisel, Boamund didn't bother. What he in fact said was, ‘Aaaagh.'

‘Right then,' said the dwarf at his side. ‘I've got the hacksaw, the big hammer, crowbar and the oxy-acetylene cutter. Hold still a minute while I just...'

‘What's an oxy-whatever you said?'

‘Oh yes.' The dwarf was silent for a moment. ‘You know I said I was a relative of that other dwarf?'

‘Yes?'

‘Well,' the dwarf replied, ‘the fact is, I'm his ... Just a tick.' The dwarf muttered under his breath. He was counting.

‘You're his what?'

‘I'm his great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great-grandson,' said the dwarf, ‘approximately. I'm basing that on, say, fifteen hundred years, thirty-five-odd years per generation. You get the idea.'

There was, for the space of several minutes, a very profound silence in the cave, broken only by the sound of the dwarf having a go at the hinge-bolt of Boamund's visor with a triangular-section rasp.

‘What did you just say?' Boamund asked.

‘I'm the great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great-great-grandson of the other dwarf,' said the dwarf, ‘the one you mentioned just now. And my name is Toenail. Ah, that's better, I think we're getting somewhere.'

Boamund made a gurgling noise, like a blocked hotel drain. ‘What was that you said,' he asked, ‘about fifteen hundred years?'

Toenail looked up from his raspwork. ‘Say fifteen hundred years,' he replied, ‘give or take a year or so. That's your actual oral tradition for you, you see, handed down by word of mouth across forty generations. Approximately forty generations, anyway. Hold on a second.'

There was a crash, and something gave. A moment later, Toenail proudly displayed a corroded brown lump. ‘Your visor,' he explained. ‘Now for the tricky bit.'

‘I've been here for fifteen hundred years?'

‘We'll call it that,' said the dwarf, ‘for ready money, so to speak. You got enchanted.'

‘I'd guessed that.'

‘It was the milk,' Toenail continued. ‘Big tradition in our family, how Toenail the First put the Foolish Knight to sleep with a drugged posset. About the only exciting thing that's ever happened to us, in fact. Fifteen hundred years of unbroken linear descent we've got - there's just the three of us, actually, now that Mum's passed on, rest her soul, that's me, our Chilblain and our Hangnail - fifteen hundred years and what've we got to show for it? One drugged knight, and a couple of hundred thousand kettles mended and lawnmower blades sharpened. Continuity, they call it.'

‘I...'

‘Hold still.'

There was a terrific creak, and then something hit Boamund very hard on the point of his chin. When he next came to, his head was mobile again and there was something looking like a big brown coal-scuttle lying beside him.

‘Your helmet,' said Toenail, proudly. ‘Welcome to the twentieth century, by the way.'

‘The what?'

‘Oh yes,' Toenail replied, ‘I forgot, back in your day they hadn't started counting them yet. I wouldn't worry,' he added, ‘you haven't missed anything much.'

‘Haven't I?'

Toenail considered. ‘Nah,' he said. ‘Right, it's the torch for that breastplate, I reckon.'

In spite of what Toenail had said, Boamund felt he'd definitely missed out on the development of the oxy-acetylene cutter.

‘What the hell,' he said, when his voice was functional once more, ‘was that?'

‘I'll explain it all later,' Toenail replied. ‘Just think of it as a portable dragon, okay?' He lifted off a section of breastplate and tossed it aside. It clanged and disintegrated in a cloud of brown snowflakes.

‘Basically,' Toenail went on, ‘you've had your Dark Ages, your Middle Ages, your Renaissance, your Age of Enlightenment, your Industrial Revolution and your World Wars. Apart from that, it's been business pretty much as usual. Only,' he added, ‘they don't call it Albion any more, they call it Great Britain.'

Boamund gurgled again. ‘Great...?'

‘Britain. Or the United Kingdom. Or UK. You know, like in Kawaguchi Industries (UK) plc. But it's basically the same thing; they've changed the names a bit, that's all. We'll sort it all out later. Hold tight.'

Boamund would have enquired further, but Toenail turned the oxy-acetylene back on and so he was rather too tied up with blind fear to pursue the matter. At one stage he felt sure that the terrible white-blue flame had gone clean through his arm.

‘Try that,' Toenail said.

‘Grr.'

‘Sorry?'

Boamund made a further noise, rather harder to reproduce in syllabic form but indicative of terror. ‘Don't worry about it,' said the dwarf. ‘Just count yourself lucky I didn't think to bring the laser.'

‘What's a...?'

‘Forget it. You can move your arms now, if you like.'

For a moment, Boamund felt that this was a black lie; and then he found he could. Then one and a half millenniums' worth of pins and needles began to catch up with him, and he screamed.

‘Good sign, that,' Toenail shouted above the noise, ‘shows the old blood's beginning to circulate again. You'll be up and about in no time, mark my words.'

‘And the first thing I'll do,' Boamund yelled at him, ‘I'll take that oxy thing and ...'

Toenail grinned and went to work with the torch on Boamund's leg-armour. Wisely, Boamund decided not to watch.

‘Anyway,' Toenail said as he guided the terrible flame, ‘I bet that what you're dying to ask me is,
Why
was I put to sleep for fifteen hundred years in a cave with all my armour on? I'm right, aren't I?'

‘Aagh.'

‘Well,' said the dwarf, ‘oops, sorry, lost my concentration there for a minute. The armour was a mistake, I reckon, personally. Bit slapdash by old Toenail the First, if you ask me.' The dwarf grinned pleasantly. ‘The actual going-to-sleep bit, though, that was your destiny.'

‘AAGH!'

‘Butterfingers,' muttered the dwarf. ‘Sorry. The way I heard it, anyway, you're destined to be this, like, great hero or something. Like the old legends, you know, Alfred the Great, Sir Francis Drake—'

‘Who?'

‘After your time, I suppose. Like the great national hero who is not dead but only sleeping and will come again when his country needs him, that sort of thing.'

‘Like Anbilant de Ganes?' Boamund suggested. ‘Or Sir Persiflant the—'

‘Who?'

‘Sir Persiflant the Grey,' said Boamund wretchedly.

‘You must have heard of him, he was supposed to be asleep under Suilven Crag, and if ever the King of Benwick sets foot on Albion soil, he'll come again and...'