Grailblazers. Part 29

Boamund looked at him. 'Such as?'

'Well,' Galahaut said, 'apparently, this b.u.t.ton here There was a whoos.h.i.+ng 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 giftwrapped 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, tally, 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 c.o.c.kpit. '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 b.u.t.ton 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 pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.ton 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 andTom Holt examined the punctured sack. There was just one pair of nicks left in it.

Then he lifted his head and looked up at the sky. Without the dwarf s weight, the knights' sleigh was moving faster, drawing rapidly away from its pursuers. He stood and watched a,, the chase screamed away over the skyline.

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

Hammerfest 1200 On, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!' he yelled. 'Next time!'

242.

Exit Ken Barlow, pursued by a bear.

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.

The Rovers Return. Alf Roberts and Percy Sugden are leaning against the bar.

Alfa ? he way 1 see it, Percy, there's a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, you understand, well - you could 6e on to a good thing there.

Percy: Im with you all the way there, Councillor. 1 was saying to Mrs Bishop just the other day, if you don't grab hold of your opportunities in this life, you're bound in shallows and in miseries, like.

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: The Rovers Return. Vera, Ivy and Gail sharing a table.

Vera: Well, here we all are again, like. Raining cats and dogs outside, an' all.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 t.i.tus Andronicus. But the pendulum was something he hadn't considered. If the pony 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 . . .

First Courtier: They say Jack Duckworth's been off his feed lately.

Second Courtier: Perhaps he hasn't heard that their Terry's in trouble with the police over that vanload of stolen eiderdowns that was found round the back of Rosamund Street . . .

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 sometime. 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 arid 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-fas.h.i.+oned writing, even by his standards. Pictures, too; naughty pictures. A piece fell into place in his mind, arid 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 p.o.r.n 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 s.h.i.+rts, empty pizza boxes and Lamorak's angling magazines, and had mounted a sort of trophy.

An ap.r.o.n, 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 embarra.s.sment.

'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?'

Sir pairs of eyes rested on the exhibits; an ap.r.o.n, 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 ap.r.o.n. 'I'm asking myself,' he said, 'what does an ap.r.o.n say to me?'

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

Bedevere ignored him. 'Ap.r.o.n,' 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 ap.r.o.ns, it's this ap.r.o.n in particular. Has anyone examined it? In detail, I mean?'

'Well, not as such,' Boamund said. 'I mean, an ap.r.o.n is an ap.r.o.n, surely.'

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

He took the ap.r.o.n in his hands and stared at it for a while. 'It's just an ap.r.o.n, 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.'

'What's it, Bedders?' Lamorak asked.

'It,' Bedevere replied. 'Thing. Finding the Grail. I mean,' he said, waving his hands about, 'that's the way it's always been done. You set forth, you meet a wise old crone by the wayside, she gives you a scrotry old tin lamp or a bit of carpet or a magic goldfish, and next thing you know you're in business. You've just got to have a bit of patience, that's all. Leave it to them.'

'Them,' Turquine muttered, 'we, they, it. You're nothing but a p.r.o.noun-fetis.h.i.+st, Bedders.'

'What's a p.r.o.noun?'

'And who are you calling stupid, anyway?'

Galahaut, frowning, banged the table with his fist.

'I vote we give it a shot,' he said. 'I mean, can't do any harm, can it? And if all that happens is that we wander around for a year and a day having a good time, then so what? We can start again from scratch, no skin off our noses.'

'He's right,' Bedevere said. 'Whoever heard of knights having to organise things? It's just a matter of getting on with it.'

Boamund nodded suddenly. 'Bedevere is right,' he said decisively. 'Put all that stuff' in a bag, somebody, we're going questing.'

Toenail, who had been curled up in a cardboard box under the table polis.h.i.+ng the sugar-tongs, jumped up, loaded the three treasures into a plastic carrier, and stowed them in his knapsack. He had come to this conclusion half an hour ago.

'Ready?' he asked.

'I'll just do my packing,' said Lamorak. Toenail pointed out that he'd done everyone's packing that morning, while they were all having breakfast. The cases were in the hall, he said.

'Right,' said Boamund happily, 'that's settled. Let's get on with it, shall we?'

Thus it was that three minibuses set off from three very different places at precisely the same moment.

The first - an ex-British Telecom Bedford, property of the Knights of the Holy Grail - headed off down the Birmingham ring road towards London, with Sir Pertelope driving and Sir Turquine doing the map-reading. Perhaps because of the human chemistry involved, it missed all the relevant turnings and ended up on the A45 to Cover-try.

The second - an Avis eight-sealer Renault nominally on hire to the Faculty of Experimental Mythology skittles team - left Glas...o...b..ry, joined the M5 northbound to Bristol and the Midlands, made good time and stopped at the Michael Wood service station for a cup of tea and a go on the s.p.a.ce Invader machines in the front lobby.