Leif Frond and Quickfingers (2 page)

“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
was 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

I
f 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

T
horhalla 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.