Grailblazers Read online

  ‘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...’

  Toenail grinned and shook his head. ‘Sorry, old son,’ he said. ‘Guess he forgot to set the alarm. Anyway, you get the idea. That’s you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘You. Not,’ Toenail admitted, ‘that there’s much going on just at the moment. I mean, they say on the telly that unless someone does something about interest rates pretty soon it’s going to mean curtains for small businesses up and down the country, but that’s not really your line of work, I wouldn’t have thought. Maybe you’re going to do something about standards in primary school education. That it, you reckon?’

  ‘What’s a school?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Toenail. ‘What else could it be?’ He paused. ‘You’re not a fast left-arm bowler, by any chance?’

  ‘What’s a...?’

  ‘Pity, we could really do with one of those. Anyway, whatever it is we need, apparently you’re it. Try your feet.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  ‘Champion,’ Toenail said. ‘W
e’ll give it a minute, and then you can try getting up.’

  Boamund shifted slightly and discovered that he’d spent the last fifteen hundred years lying on a small but jagged stone. ‘Ow,’ he said.

  Toenail was packing tools away in a small canvas bag. ‘I’ll say this,’ he said, ‘they made stuff to last in those days. Fifteen-hundred-year-old steel, eh?’ He picked up a massive armguard and poked his finger through it. ‘Should be in a museum or something, by rights. There’s probably people who’d pay good money...’

  Boamund gave up the effort and lay back, wondering if you could die of pins and needles. Outside there was a noise; it had been there a while but he now perceived it for the first time. A low, ominous growling, like an animal - no, like a huge swarm of bees. Only these bees would have to be eight feet long to make a noise like that.

  Toenail grinned at him.

  ‘What you can hear,’ he said, ‘is the M62. Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  Toenail considered. ‘Depends,’ he said. ‘But as far as you’re concerned right now, yes. Try standing up.’

  He reached out a hand and Boamund grabbed it. A moment later he was putting his weight on his fifteen-hundred-year-old shoes. Oddly enough, they were fine. A spot of polish wouldn’t hurt, mind.

  ‘My clothes,’ said Boamund. ‘Why aren’t they...?’

  ‘Enchanted,’ Toenail replied. ‘Keeps them all nice and fresh. Come on, we’re running late as it is.’

  Boamund followed Toenail to the door of the cave, looked out, and screamed.

  A year or so back, a television producer, one Danny Bennett, made a documentary which implied that the poet T.S. Eliot was murdered by the CIA.

  According to Bennett’s hypothesis, Eliot was killed because he had, quite by accident, stumbled upon highly secret metaphysical data which the Pentagon was in the process of developing for military use. Not aware of what he had done, Eliot published his findings in the Four Quartets; twenty-nine years later, he was dead, yet another victim of the Men in Grey Suits.

  According to Bennett, the fatal lines were:Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future

  and Bennett’s argument was that this was taken by the nasty men to be an expose of the strange things that people seem to get up to in the parts of ancient monuments and historic houses which are never open to the public.

  Take, Bennett said, Hampton Court Palace, or Anne Hathaway’s cottage. More than half of the rooms in these jewels of England’s heritage are permanently shut. Why? Is it, as the Government would have us believe, simply because there isn’t the money to maintain them and pay attendants? Or is there a more sinister explanation? Could it be that top secret experimental research into the nature of time itself is being carried out behind the nail-studded doors - research that, the nasty men hope, will lead to the perfection of a super-weapon that will allow NATO forces to zap back across the centuries, assassinate Lenin, and so prevent the storming of the Winter Palace? And was it his unfortunately ambiguous statement in the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’ that signed Thomas Stearns Eliot’s death warrant?

  Shortly after completing the filming of the documentary, Bennett was promoted sideways and appointed to be the new head of BBC local radio on Martinmas Island, a small coral reef three thousand miles due east of Sydney. Interpretations of this outcome differ; Bennett, on his mid-morning phone-in Good Morning, Martinmas, has proposed the view that he has been muzzled, and this only goes to prove that he was absolutely right. The BBC, on the other hand, say that he was posted there because he had finally, irrevocably, fallen out of his tree, and although the next three years were likely to be tough going for the two marine biologists and six thousand penguins who inhabit Martinmas, short of having the wretched fellow put down there wasn’t much else they could do.

  Oddly enough, and by the purest coincidence, there is something extremely fishy about the back rooms of ancient monuments. These areas are used, as one would expect, for administration, storage and similar purposes; but nobody as yet has come up with a satisfactory (or at least comfortable) explanation for the fact that, when the staff come in every morning, they tend to find that someone’s been using the typewriters and the kettles are warm.

  ‘That’s it?’ Boamund said.

  ‘Basically, yes,’ the hermit replied. ‘I’ve left out Helmut von Moltke and the Peace of Nikolsburg, and maybe I skated over the Benelux customs union a bit, but I think you’ve got the essentials there. Anything you’re not sure about, you can look up in the book.’

  Boamund shrugged. He had learnt that, in the one and a half thousand years he’d been asleep, Albion had indeed changed its name and they’d invented a few labour-saving gadgets, but basically things were very much the same. In fact, to be absolutely honest, they were worse. He was disappointed.

  ‘My dad used to tell me,’ he said, ‘that by the time I was grown up, mankind would have grown a third arm it could use to scratch the small of its back.’

  The hermit smiled, a tight-lipped, well-there-it-is-and-it’s -too-late-now sort of smile, shrugged, and examined the crumpet on the end of his toasting fork. Outside in the street, small children rode up and down on bicycles and smacked the heads off flowers with plastic swords.

  ‘I know,’ agreed the hermit sadly. ‘We’ve tried, God only knows, but people just won’t listen. You try and guide them in the right direction, and what do you get? Apathy. You drop heavy hints to them about harnessing the power of the sun, the wind and the lightning and they go and invent the vacuum cleaner. Nobody’s the slightest bit interested in mainstream technology any more.’

  Boamund looked sympathetic. ‘It must be hard for you,’ he said.

  ‘Not really,’ said the hermit. ‘I get by more or less. It’s not like the old times, but as far as I’m concerned, the main thing is to try and blend into the landscape, as it were, and bide my time.’

  ‘Bide your time until when?’

  ‘I’m coming to that,’ said the hermit. The insubstantial red glow had burnt the crumpet, and the hermit impatiently dismissed them both and opened a packet of biscuits instead. ‘Have one?’ he asked. ‘You must be starving after all this time.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Boamund said, and took a mouthful of Rich Tea. A moment later, he made a face, spat out a mouthful of crumbs and coughed.

  The hermit apologised. ‘I should have warned you,’ he said. ‘It’s organic, I’m afraid. Made from ground-up grass seeds and processed sugar-beet, would you believe. The art of synthesising food was lost centuries ago. You get used to it after a while, but it still tastes like eating your way through somebody’s compost heap. Here, have a doughnut.’

  A doughnut appeared on the arm of Boamund’s chair and he ate it thankfully. With his mouth full, he asked, ‘So how do you manage it? Blending into the landscape, I mean?’

  ‘Simple,’ replied the hermit, ‘I pretend to repair televisions. You won’t credit it, but this country is full of little old men with their elbows showing through the sleeves of their cardigans who make a living mending televisions.’

  Boamund considered. ‘Those are the little box things with pictures in them?’

  The hermit nodded. ‘I’ve been here forty years now,’ said the hermit, ‘and nobody’s taken the slightest notice of what I do. If anyone hears strange noises or sees flashing green lights late at night, the neighbours say, ‘Oh him, he mends televisions,’ and that seems to satisfy them. I imagine that, since they expect you to work miracles, they aren’t too bothered if you do. In fact, I do it so well that some of them bring them back afterwards and complain that they still aren’t right, even when I’ve hexed the dratted things so hard they’d withstand a nuclear attack.’

  ‘That sounds like a really good cover,’ Boamund said. ‘Actually, while I’m here, I’ll get you just to have a quick look at my astrolabe. I think it’s the bearings.’

  The hermit ignored him. ‘I’m fortunate, of cour
se,’ he continued, ‘in still having a dwarf.’

  ‘You mean Toenail?’

  ‘That’s right. They’re getting a bit thin on the ground, dwarves, though it’s not as bad as it was. I think it was the free milk they used to give out to schoolchildren. Plays havoc with calcium deficiency, milk.’ The hermit frowned. ‘I’m drifting off the point a bit, aren’t I? You and your destiny, all that sort of thing. I expect you want to know what your destiny actually is. Well...’

  ‘Atishoo!’ Boamund said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Boamund explained that he’d just spent the last fifteen hundred years in a draught. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘you were saying...’

  ‘What you’ve got to do,’ said the hermit, ‘is go to Ventcaster-on-Ouse and discover the Holy Grail.’

  Boamund thought for a moment.

  The curriculum of chivalry is selective. It consists of, in modern terms, A-level heraldry, genealogy, religious instruction and falconry, horsemanship and weapon-handling to degree level, and the option of postgraduate studies in either mysticism or dalliance. Essential as all these disciplines are to the profession of arms, none of them tends to stimulate the rational faculties. If you can’t kill it, hit people with it or worship it, then as far as chivalry is concerned it clearly can’t be all that important. To set a knight thinking, therefore, a proposition has to be fairly startling.

  ‘If you know it’s in Ventcaster-on-Ouse,’ said Boamund carefully, ‘how come you need me to go and look for it? Couldn’t you just send a dwarf to fetch it or something?’

  The hermit smiled kindly. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘perhaps I could have put that better. I’m not saying the Grail is in Ventcaster. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s one place on earth that the Grail isn’t. But if you’re going to look for it, going to Ventcaster is an essential preliminary step, because that’s where the rest of the Grail Knights are. They need a new Grand Master. That’s you.’ He paused. ‘Better?’ he asked.

  Boamund nodded. He was still thinking. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that’s fine. But why me, what’s a Grail and why?’