Grailblazers (33 page)

‘Talk sense, Gally,' Boamund replied, resolutely not looking down. ‘How can we do that?'

‘Look,' Galahaut said. ‘Apparently this sleigh's got, like, built-in optional extras. I wondered what it was doing tethered up there. It must be the old Graf's escape sleigh. According to this, it can do some pretty antisocial things if you want it to.'

Boamund looked at him. ‘Such as?'

‘Well,' Galahaut said, ‘apparently, this button here...'

There was a whooshing noise directly under them, and two vapour trails appeared behind the sleigh. A moment later there was a loud explosion in the sky to their rear.

‘Heat-seeking rockets,' Galahaut said, ‘disguised as gift-wrapped golf umbrellas. And this...'

He got no further with his sentence; the air was filled with thick, rolling black clouds which billowed away into their slipstream. Toenail finished the sentence for him.

‘Smoke screen,' he said. ‘Now, which of these is the machine-guns, and which is the rear wash-wipe?' He shrugged and pressed both.

When the smoke cleared, there were only seven sleighs following them. Boamund grabbed the instruction manual and started flicking through it.

‘Jet boost,' he said. ‘Hey, Gally, what does that...?'

Before Galahaut could answer, the sleigh was hurled across the sky like a fast leg-break. Boamund only managed to stay in it by clinging on to the strap of a sleigh-bell.

‘Nice one,' Galahaut said, as he hauled him back into the cockpit. ‘Won't be long before they've closed in, though. They're pretty nippy, those sleighs.' He looked at the dwarf thoughtfully. ‘We're carrying too much weight,' he said. ‘We could do with lightening this thing up a bit, really.'

Toenail didn't speak; he put his arms round one of the bags of socks and set his face into a grim expression. Galahaut shrugged, said that it was just a suggestion, and looked over Boamund's shoulder at the manual.

‘Anti-aircraft mines,' he read. ‘Don't see that myself, do you?'

‘Does no harm to try.'

‘All right.'

They pressed the button together, and at once the rear cargo-door of the sleigh flew open, scattering hundreds of little brightly wrapped parcels which hung in the air on tiny individual parachutes. A few minutes later, as the lead pursuit sleigh passed through the floating cloud, they found out how that one worked.

‘That's about it,' Galahaut said wistfully. ‘And there's still five of them following us.'

‘There's still this button here.'

‘I'd leave that alone if I were you.'

‘Ejector seat,' Boamund read aloud. ‘I wonder what that does?'

 

 

Toenail hit the surface of the ice, and bounced.

The sackful of socks burst under him, scattering its contents, and he slid for a while on his stomach until he came to rest in a snowdrift. He picked himself up slowly and examined the punctured sack. There was just one pair of socks left in it.

Then he lifted his head and looked up at the sky.

Without the dwarfs weight, the knights' sleigh was moving faster, drawing rapidly away from its pursuers. He stood and watched as the chase screamed away over the skyline.

Oddly enough, in the middle of the ice floe there was a signpost.

Hammerfest 1200 km,
it said, and pointed.

The dwarf put his hand down into the pillow case and drew out the remaining pair of socks. Slowly he unravelled them, found the label and read it. The lettering was faint, worn away by incessant laundry, but after a while he was able to make out the words.

MADE IN SYRIA. 100% COTTON. HAND-WASH ONLY.

He grinned, stuffed the socks into his satchel, and began to walk.

 

Von Weinacht reined in his sleigh, leant forward and shook his fist at the tiny speck on the horizon.

‘Next time, you bastards!' he yelled. ‘Next time!'

The ghost looked at the page in front of him, wrinkled his broad, insubstantial forehead, and crossed out what he'd just written. No good; start again.

No. Something lacking there. Not punchy enough.

The ghost drew a line through it and noticed that the sheet of paper was completely full. He scowled irritably; a perfectly good sheet of A4 down the plughole, and nothing to show for it.

In the hall, the old clock whirred, hesitated for a moment and struck thirteen times.

Funny, the ghost reflected, how it did that. It always had, ever since he could remember, and it had always aggravated him beyond measure. Ironic, really, that the only piece of original furniture in the whole place should be that knackered old clock. Why they couldn't get one of those smart new digital affairs was beyond him.

He wrenched his mind back to work, bit the end of his pen, spat out a fragment of quill, and wrote:

Another thing which had always annoyed him was the way his concentration tended to waver when he came to a sticky bit. Instead of pulling himself together and getting down to it, he had this tendency to let his mind wander away from the job in hand to quite irrelevant and unimportant things, like why that bloody clock had never worked, not since the day...

He strolled into the hall, trying to hear Vera's voice in his head. What would the confounded woman be likely to say? She's come home after a hard day, gone down the pub, run into her best friend and her best friend's daughter-in-law...

Maybe it was the pendulum. It wasn't the escapement; he'd had that out and in pieces all over the kitchen table that time he'd had a block with Titus Andronicus. But the pendulum was something he hadn't considered. If the poxy thing was out of true - the weight not balanced right, or whatever - that might well account for it.

Maybe he shouldn't start the scene with Vera at all. Maybe two courtiers...

Nah.

He opened the door of the clock and looked inside.

There were his initials, where he'd scratched them on the case when he was twelve. There was the stain where he'd hidden the rabbits he'd had off the Squire's back orchard, the night Sir John Falstaff's men had got a warrant to raid the place. Happy days.

He reached in and located the pendulum. Seemed all right, not loose or anything. Maybe it's the ...

The ghost raised an immaterial eyebrow. There was something wrapped very tightly round the pendulum and tied on with a bit of binder cord. It had plainly been there some time. Maybe Dad had tried to adjust the timing by packing the pendulum. That could account for it; a good sort, Dad, but not mechanically minded. Didn't hold with machines of any sort, which was why he'd refused to fork out when there was that chance of being prenticed to the instrument-maker. The ghost shook his head sadly; still, it didn't do to dwell too much on lost opportunities. Things hadn't worked out too badly in the end.

The something tied round the pendulum turned out to be a sheet of old-fashioned parchment. Swept away by nostalgia, the ghost removed it carefully, smoothed it out, and studied it. Marvellous stuff, parchment; miles better than this squashed-tree rubbish you got these days. Once you'd finished with it, all you had to do was get a pumice-stone and you could wipe off all the old writing and there you were.

He closed the door of the clock and wandered slowly back to his desk, squinting at the writing on the parchment. Pretty old-fashioned writing, even by his standards. Pictures, too;
naughty
pictures. A piece fell into place in his mind, and he remembered Dad coming home from the Fair one night, when he was quite young... saying something about - that was right, about fixing the clock. But it didn't need fixing, Mum had said. I'll be the judge of that. Soon have it right. And the blessed thing had been up the pictures ever since. Hardly surprising, really.

Fancy that, the ghost muttered to himself. After all these years, and it was a bit of porn round the pendulum all the time.

The words, he realised, were in Latin, which was a closed book as far as he was concerned; and the pictures weren't as naughty as all that. Good piece of parchment, though, keep you going for weeks if you were careful and didn't rub too hard. He smiled and nodded his head, then put the parchment down and went off to the bathroom to look for a piece of pumice.

 

‘Great,' said Sir Turquine. ‘Now what do we do?'

They had cleared the table in the Common Room of shirts, empty pizza boxes and Lamorak's angling magazines, and had mounted a sort of trophy.

An apron, a small leather-covered book and a pair of socks. The silence in the Common Room was tainted with just the tiniest degree - one part in a hundred thousand - of embarrassment.

‘Maybe I'm just being more than usually obtuse here,' Turquine went on, ‘but speaking purely for myself, I don't see that we're
that
much closer to finding the Grail. Do you?'

Pertelope had taken a biro from his top pocket and used it to poke the socks experimentally.

‘They don't
look
old,' he said. ‘You sure that ruddy dwarf got the right pair?'

‘Positive,' Boamund replied.

‘Why?'

‘Because.' The other knights looked at him, and in a disused compartment of his mind Boamund began to speculate as to why ‘Because' wasn't as convincing a reason as it had been when he was a boy.

‘Maybe it's an acrostic or something,' Lamorak suggested.

There was a brief moment of silence, as six knights tried to make sense out of the initial letters of the items before them.

‘No,' said Bedevere, ‘I think there's more to it than that. I mean, if it was that we wouldn't actually need the things themselves. I think there must be, well, clues in there somewhere.'

‘Clues,' Turquine repeated.

‘Like,' Galahaut suggested, ‘some common factor, maybe?'

Six pairs of eyes rested on the exhibits; an apron, a leather book and a pair of socks.

‘Animal, vegetable or mineral?'

‘Shut up, Turkey, I'm thinking.' Bedevere rubbed his nose with the heel of his hand and picked up the apron. ‘I'm asking myself,' he said, ‘what does an apron say to me?'

‘Not a lot,' Turquine replied. ‘Not unless you've been out in the sun again.'

Bedevere ignored him. ‘Apron,' he said. ‘That suggests housework, cleanliness, tidiness, cookery...'

‘Kitchen floors,' said Lamorak, whose turn it was to clean it. ‘Fruit cake. Rubber gloves. Persil. I don't think we can be on the right lines here, somehow.'

‘Maybe we're missing the point,' Galahaut interrupted. ‘It's not just aprons, it's this apron in particular. Has anyone examined it? In detail, I mean?'

‘Well, not as such,' Boamund said. ‘I mean, an apron is an apron, surely.'

‘Not necessarily,' Galahaut replied. ‘Give it here, someone, and let's take a closer look.'

He took the apron in his hands and stared at it for a while. ‘It's just an apron, that's all,' he said.

‘Brill,' Turquine said. ‘The fundamental things apply, and so on. If you ask me, someone with a very odd sense of humour's had us for a bunch of mugs.'

‘We're approaching this from the wrong angle,' Pertelope interrupted. ‘There you all go, trying to understand things. That's not what we're for; if they wanted things understood, they'd have given the job to a bunch of professors instead of us. As it is, we're doing it; and what are we good at? Being brave and socking people. Therefore...'

Bedevere held up his hand for silence. ‘Per's right,' he said. ‘That's got to be it, hasn't it? I mean, the thing about knights is, they're fundamentally - well, stupid, aren't they? I mean we. Obviously, what we're meant to do is take these things, ride forth for a year and a day and have adventures, and then it'll just happen. Stands to reason, really.'