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Harold looked at his stopwatch. Zachary had been in there a full hour and Zoe had been inside half an hour. Harold really wished people would be more reliable. ‘I’d better go and check,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Maze.

‘I mean this is where we sort out the men from the boys,’ Harold said, and lay there in cover looking up the hill at the castle.

‘You are a man, Topclass,’ Maze said. ‘You must be 15 at least.’

‘Thirteen,’ Harold said.

‘That’s a man,’ Maze said.

‘Here we go all right,’ said Harold, but his muscles seemed reluctant to get him on his feet and running.

‘As long as you don’t go inside,’ Meg said.

Harold was disappointed in her. He really thought that someone responsible to the Education Department for his safety might have tried a little harder to stop him from doing this, then ‘Go!’ shouted Maze in his ear, and simultaneously slapped him on the shoulder. Harold’s body started working before his mind could come up with good reasons why it should not do such a manifestly stupid thing. His body was running up the hill before he could stop it.

Maze watched him go. ‘Was afraid and still went. That’s brave,’ she said. ‘I think I like Topclass. Quite clever, too.’ Here she paused. ‘For a male.’

Harold was running up the hill toward Trollcastle. He was taking the most direct route. He did not know any better, because no one had ever let Harold play stalking games. His mother and father had always refused to buy him toy weapons and by the time he had had the pocket money to buy them for himself he had been into computers and war games and role-playing games all of which used more aggression in the space of a year than several lifetimes spent stalking his friends and zapping them with toy guns would have. Harold, who had never owned a toy gun, was, sad to relate, the most aggressive boy in his class at school. Owning a toy gun would not have changed him; he was simply like that, but most of the time his aggression came out in ways that his teachers approved of.

The guard on the roof saw a figure running straight for the castle. He took his binoculars and looked at the figure and saw it was a thin unarmed boy, possibly the one who was made prisoner the day before. He moved to a corner of the roof, picked up a speaking tube and bellowed down it, alerting the guard on the gate. People who ran toward the castle were not necessarily enemies requiring the attentions of a bowman or an executioner. Sometimes they were messengers. The guard on the roof hated having to make decisions. The guard on the gate could decide Harold’s fate.

Harold ran directly to the window which Zoe had climbed through. He decided that, if all was clear, he would climb through it. It was all very well for Meg to tell him not to go inside, but Zoe was a girl and she had gone inside, and if he did not follow her he would never hear the end of it. Harold was intelligent enough to know that there were things he was afraid to do, but Maze had been correct in thinking that he was also brave enough to do them if he had to.

Climbing through the castle window was going to be one of those things, he decided. He ran to it, and looked inside. He found himself looking into the face of a Troll man-at-arms. They were so close he could smell the garlic on the man’s breath. Harold changed his mind. He would not, after all, climb through the window because that would mean simply climbing into the arms of the Troll. He expressed the logic of this position with a startled shout. He took off, running along the side of the wall. As he came around the corner, he saw a Troll man-at-arms running toward him. He turned back the way he came, and found that the Troll he had come face to face with in the window had now climbed out and was pursuing him too. He spun around and took off away from the castle toward the part of the forest where he had left Meg and Maze. As he ran, he heard a satisfying metallic clang as the two Trolls who had been chasing him collided with one another at the corner of the building.

The guard on the roof watched Harold running away from the castle. The boy seemed to have a very good turn of pace. He picked up the speaking tube and bellowed the news that the intruder had now gone.

Harold dived into cover alongside Meg and Maze. ‘Didn’t see her,’ he panted. ‘Place is alive with Trolls. Let’s get back to the ship, I’ve got an idea.’

Beneath Trollcastle was what had once been a basement level, housing an auxiliary power supply and rooms for the storage of files and computer records, but the first Don had cleared all that rubbish out and converted the space into a useful set of dungeons. Zachary now sat in the dark in one of the dungeons, thinking about Testing being defined as single combat with swords, and wondering why he had never bothered to learn a useful skill like fencing or kendo. Why had they not taught him these things at school, he wondered. Had his teachers wanted him dead? Thinking about that, he recalled that several had in fact expressed exactly that wish.

Just as he was putting that depressing thought to one side, he heard a rattling at the door, and then he could see lamplight as the door opened, and the Don’s priest came in, a lamp in one hand and a little leather-covered box in the other.

‘I’m Father John,’ said the priest.

‘How do, Father?’ Zachary said.

Whoever had opened the door was now locking it from the outside.

‘I thought you might wish to make confession and receive last rites,’ said Father John.

‘Isn’t that for people who are dying?’ Zachary said, wanting to get the situation perfectly clear.

‘That’s so,’ said the priest.

Zachary thought about this. ‘You people haven’t had a doctor look at me, so why do you think I’m dying?’ Zachary thought he already knew the answer to that, but was hoping that Father John would come up with different answer which might pleasantly surprise him.

He was doomed to be disappointed in that hope. ‘Tonight you undergo the Testing. That’s like being on your deathbed,’ Father John replied. He sat down and lifted the leather-covered box. ‘You want, ah…?’

Zachary had a fair idea of what was in the box, having seen boxes like that in hospitals. He had spent some time in hospitals during his late teens when he had been having a series of love affairs with motor cycles and for a while had been averaging a major broken bone a year. Some of the priests when they came around the wards had carried boxes like that to give communion to the patients.

‘I’m really not very religious, Father,’ he said.

‘Neither am I,’ said the priest. ‘Just a Christian.’

‘Well as I say … not very religious.’

‘I’ve met a lot of people like that,’ said the priest. ‘But just before they die they seem to want to discuss it anyway.’

‘Why do you think I’m going to die?’

‘Because most people who have single combat with Sir Ulf do die.’

‘You approve of this?’

‘No.’

‘You think it’s fair?’

The priest hesitated. ‘I think it’s the law.’

‘But not fair.’ Zachary felt he was making some headway.

‘If I were making the law, this may not be the way I’d do it,’ Father John allowed.

‘So why don’t you try to change it? Sometime soon? Before tonight maybe?’

‘You’ve met the Don?’ Zachary nodded. ‘Do you have a suggestion about how I could change his mind?’ Father John said this in the way you might ask someone how they thought they might go about changing the color of the sky. Zachary thought about the question, and then shook his head. ‘Zachary, my son, the Don may seem to you to be a little high-handed when it comes to trying people for crimes and handing out appropriate punishments.’

‘A little high-handed? He’s like a … like a Mafia chieftain!’

‘Exactly right. That’s where the first Don got his ideas on law and order.’

‘Great,’ said Zachary. ‘That’s wonderful. It makes me feel a whole lot better about this.’

‘It’s workable. In a fairly chaotic situation, it means that justice gets done quickly. All monarchies got started this way.’

‘Excuse me?’” said Zachary. ‘Monarchies? I don’t want to be rude, Father, but all the evidence suggests that this outfit started out as an outlaw biker gang.’

‘Club. Motor cycle club. The club records say that they were on the road when the Great Exit occurred. The next town they rode into … there was no one there. So the first Don … Don Spider Costello …’

Zachary could not help grinning. ‘You serious? Your first Don was a biker called Spider Costello?’

‘You find this amusing perhaps?”

The look in Father John’s eyes told Zachary that this was not a subject to be joking about. ‘Certainly not!’ he exclaimed. “Nothing amusing about that at all.’

‘I’m pleased to hear that,’ said Father John, and went on, “Don Spider the First was a great man. He re-invented feudalism. He’d seen picturemovies. Stories about heroes, knights, kings, Mafia Dons, and he adapted their political system. Later he found books which called it “feudalism”. When the gas ran out and the bikes became useless, his successors brought in horses, armor … swords.’

‘I really don’t want to know about swords, Father.’

‘That’s a pity. Because after dinner, you’re going to need to.’

‘You have to harp on that? After dinner, I’m going to be fighting a giant homicidal maniac, using weapons that he knows how to use and I don’t.’

‘That’s why I came to see you,’ said Father John. ‘I find that being in this kind of situation very often turns people’s minds to eternal matters.’

Meanwhile, in the women’s room, Zoe was hearing about the gentler side of the Don. ‘He needs a wife,’ one of the women was saying, looking at Zoe as if mentally measuring her for a bridal dress, ‘he was widowed when the fluenza came through last year.’

‘His young wife and their son,’ said another, brushing aside a tear. ‘She had lost their first two by the baby fever, but their son had survived the first three years. Then the fluenza took them both.’

Zoe felt moved to tears herself. The old illnesses, the child mortality, the minor and major plagues which, in a few privileged parts of the world, for a few decades of the 20th and 21
^st
centuries, had temporarily been held at bay by hygiene, vaccination and antibiotics, had all returned to haunt humankind.

‘Of course. You don’t have antibiotics any longer.’

‘Biotix?’ the oldest of the women said, ‘they’re a legend. A legend of the golden age.’

Zoe thought of her own time and wondered how anyone could have thought of it as a golden age, but knew that parts of it, in those times and places where sufficient food and good hygiene and modern medical technology had combined to save life, that those parts must now seem like utopia, like a golden age indeed.

‘The Don is very lonely without a wife,’ said one of the women, and they all looked at each other and then at Zoe.

‘I’m not looking for a husband just yet,’ she said hastily.

‘Fifteen,’ one of the women said, ‘in a year or two you’ll be in your best child-bearing years, and time isn’t standing still, you know.’

‘Look, about my friend,’ Zoe said, hoping to divert the conversation. These women were like her yaya, her father’s mother back in Greece. Yaya thought Zoe was getting a bit old, and was always trying to arrange marriages for her. ‘About Zachary…’

‘Of course!’ one of the wives said to the other wives, ‘She wants to marry Zachary!’

‘Forget him,’ said another. ‘Forget him till the Testing’s over.’

‘Poor girl,’ said yet another, weeping, ‘to lose a sweetheart like this.’

‘If Zachary’s life is in danger, help me get him out of here!’

They looked at her with a sad amusement.

‘He’d never let you help him escape.’

‘Oh yes he would!’

‘So young,’ one said to the others, ‘knows so little of men.’

‘You don’t know Zachary!’ Zoe said. ‘He’ll be delighted if I help him escape. He won’t want to do this Testing thing, he’s not crazy…’

‘All men want to do the Testing,’ the oldest of the women patiently explained to her. ‘All men. They want to be Tested, to go to the brink of death and return. That’s what men live for.’

‘Not Zachary.’

‘All men. Zachary included.’

Zoe knew she was getting nowhere. She stood and ran for the door she came in by. When she got there she reached for the handle and found there was no handle! She turned and looked at the Trollwives. ‘Is there another way out?’ They shook their heads. ‘You’re really locked in here?’ They nodded. ‘You’re prisoners?’

‘In our own best interests,’ the oldest of the Trollwives explained.

In the dungeon, Zachary was losing patience. ‘You can’t test me. I’ll tell you why you can’t test me. Because your law doesn’t apply to me!’

‘How can our law not apply to you, Zachary?’ Father John seemed puzzled.

‘Because I’m not from here. I’m from the past. Me and my friends are from the time before the Slarn came and took everyone away.’

Father John looked at him gravely. You really don’t want to die with all these lies on your conscience.’

‘You don’t believe me? I’ll prove it.’ Zachary dug around in his pockets, and pulled out a cigarette lighter, flicked the wheel and made a flame. ‘You got one of those?’ Then he brought out a ballpoint pen and wrote on his hand with it. ‘Ever seen something like this?’ He proceeded to produce more and more stuff from his pockets. ‘Dry-cleaning receipt? Movie ticket stub? Parking ticket? Credit cards? Look at the jeans! Look at the joggers? You ever see a shoe like that? I’m from the past!’

John took in all the evidence and remained unconvinced. ‘From over the seas, perhaps.’

Zachary groaned. ‘“Over the seas?” I’m defeated.’ He patted his pockets and found the ultimate proof. Bringing it out, he showed it to Father John. ‘Mobile phone,’ he said. Father John looked at the mobile phone, then back at Zachary. ‘One of these couldn’t have been made in this time,’ Zachary said, ‘therefore it’s from the past.’

‘Possibly,’ said the priest, ‘and you found it. For something 90 years old it’s in remarkably good condition. Whatever it is.’

‘It’s a mobile phone. For talking to other people.’

‘Then talk to someone.’

‘They … don’t seem to work in the future. The transmission tower’s all covered with vines. But,’ Zachary said, ‘they do other things. They have music, you can play games on them …’ The mobile beeped. He looked at its screen, then showed it to the priest and said, in despairing tones, ‘they have pictures of batteries?’