A fter breakfasting on barbecued rabbit and lager (from the wizard’s now perpetually refilling can) in the ruined broch just south of the Loch of Killimster, King Hrolf Earthstar and his heroes—and heroine—drove into Wick in search of thin copper wire, resistors, crocodile clips and other assorted bits and pieces needed by the wizard for connecting the two chthonic spirits up to the Luck of Caithness. Of course, it had not occurred to any of them to check that the two spirits were still in the small sandalwood box into which the wizard had sealed them with a powerful but imperfectly remembered spell; but even a wizard cannot be expected to think of everything.
The fog and low cloud, which had been hovering over the tops of the mountains for the last few days, had come down thickly during the night, and Hildy, who was not used to driving under such conditions, made slow progress along the road to Wick. The town itself seemed, as usual, deserted, and Hildy felt little trepidation about leading her unlikely-looking party through the streets. As it happened, such of the local people as were out and about did stop for a moment and speculate who these curious men in grey suits might be; but after a little subdued discussion they decided that they were a party of Norwegians off one of the rigs, which would account for their uniform dress and long shaggy beards.
There is an electrical-goods shop in Wick, and if you have the determination of a hero used to long and apparently impossible quests you can eventually find it, although it will of course be closed for lunch when you do.
“I remember there used to be a mead-hall just along from here,” said Angantyr Asmundarson. His shoes were hurting, and he liked the town even less than he had the last time he had visited it, about twelve hundred years previously. “They used to do those little round shellfish that look like large pink woodlice.”
“I thought you hated them,” said the King. “You always used to make a fuss when we had them back at the castle.”
“I never said I did like them,” Angantyr replied. “And, anyway, I don’t expect the mead-hall’s there any more.”
Oddly enough it was, or at least there was a building set aside for roughly the same purpose standing on the site of it. Hildy was most unwilling that the company should go in, but the King overruled her; if Angantyr didn’t get something to eat other than rabbit pretty soon, he suggested, he would start to whine, and that he could do without.
“All right, then,” Hildy said, “but be careful.”
“In what way?” asked the King.
Hildy could not for the moment think of anything that the heroes should or should not do. She tried to imagine a roughly similar situation, but all she could think of was Allied airmen evading the Germans in occupied Prance, and she had never been keen on war films. “Don’t draw attention to yourselves,” she said, “and keep your voices down.” As she said this, something that had been nagging away at the back of her mind resolved itself into a query.
“By the way,” she asked the King, as she brought back a tray laden with twelve pints of Tennants lager and twelve packets of scampi fries, “how is it that I can understand everything you say? It’s almost as if you were speaking modern English. You should be talking in Old Norse or something, shouldn’t you?”
“We are,” said the King, wiping froth from the edges of his moustache. “I thought you were, too. And what’s English?”
At this point, the wizard made a sound like a slate-saw. The King raised an eyebrow, then translated for Hildy’s benefit.
“He says it’s a language-spell he put on us all. He says it would save a great deal of trouble. Unfortunately,” the King went on, “he couldn’t put one on himself. He tried, using a mirror, but it didn’t work. He’s now got a mirror that can speak all living and dead languages, but even we can’t understand most of what he says because he’s got this speech impediment and he mumbles.”
Not for the first time, Hildy wondered whether the King was having a joke at her expense, or whether her new friends were just extremely different from anyone she had ever met before. However, the King’s explanation seemed to be as good as any, and so she let it go. The thirteen helpings of grilled salmon and chips she had ordered (and paid for; the money wasn’t going to last much longer at this rate) arrived and were soon disposed of, despite the heroes’ lack of familiarity with the concept of the fork. However, even though they did not know what to use them for, they displayed considerable unwillingness to give them back, and Hildy had to insist. All in all, she was glad to get them all out of the hotel before they made a scene.
“And who do you suppose they were?” asked the waitress as she cleared away the plates.
“English, probably,” said the barman.
“Ah,” replied the waitress, “that would account for it.” By now the keeper of the electrical shop had returned from lunch, and Hildy, the wizard and the King went in while the heroes waited outside. After a great deal of confusion, they got what they wanted, and Hildy led them back to where the van was parked. She considered stopping and buying some postcards to send to her family back in America, but decided not to; ‘Having a wonderful time saving the world from a twelve-hundred-year-old sorcerer’ would be both baffling and, just for the moment, untrue. She did, however, nip into a camping shop and buy herself a new anorak. Her paddock-jacket was getting decidedly grubby and it smelt rather too much of boiled rabbit for her liking.
“Where to now?” she asked, as they all climbed into the van.
“Home,” said the King.
Hildy frowned. “You mean Rolfsness?” she asked. “The ship? I don’t think—”
“No, no,” said the King, “I said Home.”
“Where’s that?”
The King, who had already grasped the principle of Ordnance Survey maps, pointed to a spot just to the north-east of Bettyhill. “There,” he said.
“Why?” Hildy asked.
“I live there,” replied the King simply. “I haven’t been home for a long time.”
Hildy looked again at the map. It was a long way away, and she was tired of driving. But the King insisted. They filled up with petrol (Hildy now had enough Esso tokens for a new flashlight, but she couldn’t be bothered) and set off. Their road lay first through Thurso and then past the now functioning nuclear power station, and the turning for Rolfsness; but the area seemed deserted. Hildy wondered why.
Eventually they crossed the Swordly Burn and took the turning the King had indicated. There were quite a few houses along the narrow road, but Hildy found a small knot of trees where the van could be hidden, and they packed all their goods into the rucksacks she had bought and the heroes wrapped blankets over their shields and weapons. The company looked, Hildy thought, like a cross between an attempt on Everest and a party of race goers with a picnic lunch.
They had walked about a mile from the road when they came to a small narrow-necked promontory overlooking the Bay of Swordly. Below them the cliffs fell away to the grey and unfriendly sea, and Hildy began to feel distinctly unwell since she suffered from attacks of vertigo. There was only a rudimentary track heading north, over a broad arch of rock, apparently leading nowhere. Hildy hoped that the King knew where he was going.
Suddenly the King scrambled off the path and seemed to disappear into the rock. The heroes and the wizard followed, leaving Hildy all alone on the top of the cliff. She was feeling thoroughly ill and not at all heroic. This was rather like going for walks with her father when she was a child.
“Are you coming, then?” she heard the King’s voice shouting, but could not tell where it came from.
“Where are you?” she shouted.
“Down here.” The sound seemed to be coming from directly below. She tried to look down, but her legs started to give way under her and she stopped. After what seemed a very long time, the King reappeared and beckoned to her.
“There’s a passage just here leading down to the castle,” he said. “Mind where you put your feet. I never did get around to having those steps cut.”
This time Hildy summoned all her courage and followed him. A door in the rock, like a small porthole, stood open before her, and she dived through it.
“That’s the back door,” said the King, pulling it shut. It closed with a soft click, and the tunnel was suddenly pitch-dark. The passage was not long, and it came out in a sort of rocky amphitheatre perched on the edge of the cliff. Just below them were the ruins of ancient masonry; but all of a much later period, medieval or perhaps sixteenth-century. The amphitheatre itself, with a deep natural cave behind, was little more than a slight modification of the original rock.
“I see they’ve mucked up the front door,” said the King with a sigh. “Still, that’s no great loss.” He looked out over the sea, and then turned back to Hildy. “Unless you know what to look for,” he said, “this place is invisible except from the sea, and now the front gate’s been taken out the only way down here is that door we came through, which is also impossible to find unless you know about it. Someone’s been building down there, but this part is exactly as it was. Let’s see if the hall’s been got at.”
He led the way into the cave. The heroes had evidently had the same idea, for another small door had been thrown open, and the sound of voices came out of it. Hildy followed the King into a wide natural chamber.
In the middle of the chamber was a long stone table, on which Starkad and Arvarodd were standing, poking at the ceiling with their spears. “Just getting the windows open,” Arvarodd grunted, “only the wretched thing seems to have got stuck,” and he pushed open a stone trapdoor, flooding the chamber with light. Hildy looked about her in amazement. The walls were covered in rich figured tapestries, looking as if they had just been made but recognisable as typical products of the ninth century. The table was laid with gold and silver plates and drinking-horns, with places for about a hundred. Beside the table was a hearth running the length of the chamber, and the rest of the floor was covered in dry heather that crackled under Hildy’s feet. Against the wall stood a dozen huge chests with massive iron locks, and in the corners of the room were stacks of spears and weapons. Everything appeared to be perfectly preserved, but the air in the chamber was decidedly musty.
“The doors and shutters on the windows are airtight,” explained the King. “We knew a thing or two about building in my day.”
“What is this place?” Hildy asked.
“This,” said the King with a hint of pride in his voice, “is the Castle of Borve, one of my two strongholds. The other is at Tongue, but I never did like it much. The Castle of Borve is totally impregnable, and the view is rather better, if you like seascapes. On a clear day you can see Orkney.”
The heroes had got the chests open, and were busily rummaging about in them for long-lost treasures; favourite cloaks and comfortable shoes. Someone came up with a cask of mead on which a preserving spell had been laid, while Arvarodd, who had lit a small fire at one end of the hearth, was roasting the last of the sausages Hildy had bought in Marks & Spencer at Inverness. The heroes had discovered that they liked sausages.
“The Castle of Borve,” said the King, “was built for my father, Ketil Trout, by Thorkel the Builder. My father was a bit of a miser, I’m afraid, and, since he was forever going to war with all and sundry, usually very hard up. So when he commissioned the castle from Thorkel, the finest builder of his day, he stipulated that if there was anything wrong with the castle on delivery Thorkel’s life should be forfeit and all his property should pass to the King. Actually, that was standard practice in the building industry then.”
Hildy, who had had bad experiences with builders in her time, nodded approvingly.
“The trouble was that there was nothing at all wrong with the castle,” the King continued, “and Ketil was faced with the horrible prospect of having to pay for the place, which he could not afford to do. So he persuaded the builder to go out into the bay with him by ship, on the pretext of inspecting the front gate. Meanwhile my mother hung a rope over the front ramparts, which, seen from the sea, looked like a crack in the masonry. Ketil pointed this out to Thorkel as a fault in the work, and poor old Thorkel was left with no alternative but to tie the anchor to his leg and jump in the sea. This was really rather fortuitous, since apart from my father he was the only other person to know the secret of the back door, which we came in by. Oddly enough, ever after my father had terrible trouble getting anyone to do any work on the place, which was a profound nuisance in winter when the guttering tended to get blocked.”
The heroes had drunk half of the enchanted mead and were beginning to sing. The King frowned. “Anyway,” he said briskly, “that’s the Castle of Borve for you. Back to business.”
He clapped his hands, and the heroes cleared a space on the table. The wizard laid out the various items he had obtained in Wick, and the King laid the dragon-brooch beside them. The wizard set to work with some tools he had retrieved from one of the chests, and soon the brooch was festooned with short lengths of wire, knitted into an intricate pattern. Then he made a sign with his hand, and Ohtar brought over the sandalwood box. The wizard picked it up, shook it and held it to his ear.
“Now what?” demanded the King impatiently. The wizard made a subdued noise, like a very small lathe.
“You haven’t!” shouted the King.
The wizard nodded, made a sound like a distant dentist’s drill, and hid his face in his hands.
“I don’t believe it,” said the King in fury. “You stupid Oh, get out of my sight.” The wizard promptly vanished, turning himself into a tiny spider hanging from the ceiling.
“What’s the matter?” Hildy asked.
“He’s only gone and lost them, that’s all,” growled the King. “Here, give me that box.”
He threw open the lid, but there was nothing inside except the chewed-up remains of a couple of torch-batteries Hildy had put in for the two spirits to eat. For a moment there was total silence in the chamber; then the King threw the box on the ground and jumped on it.
“Now look what you’ve made me do,” he roared at the spider swinging unhappily from the roof.
“But what’s happened?” Hildy wailed. She felt that she was in grave danger of being forgotten about.
“I’ll tell you what’s ruddy well happened,” said the King. “This idiotic wizard has let those two spirits escape, that’s what. He was supposed to have sealed them in his magic elf-box…” The King stepped out of the smashed fragments of the magic elf-box, which would henceforth be incapable of holding so much as a bad dream. “Now we’ve got nothing to work the brooch with. Without them it’s useless.”
The heroes all started to complain at once, and even the spider began cheeping sadly. The King banged his fist on the table and shouted for quiet.
“Let’s all stay calm, shall we?” he muttered. “Let’s all sit down, like reasonable human beings, and discuss this sensibly.” He followed his own suggestion, and the rest of the heroes, still murmuring restlessly like the sea below them, did likewise. The spider scuttled down his gossamer thread and perched on the lip of the King’s great drinking-horn.
“All right, Kotkel,” snapped the King to the spider, “you’ve made your point. You can come back now.”
The wizard reappeared, hanging his grizzled head in shame, and took his place at the King’s left hand. The company that had, a few moments ago, resembled nothing so much as a football team stranded in the middle of nowhere with no beer had become, as if by some subtler magic, the King’s Household, his council in peace and war. A shaft of sunlight broke through the stone-framed skylight into the chamber, highlighting the King’s face like a spotlight—Thorkel the Builder had planned the effect deliberately, calculating where the sun would be in relation to the surrounding mountains at the time when the Master of Borve would be likely to be seated in his high place. Hildy found herself sitting, by accident or design, in the Counsellor’s place at his right hand, so that such of the sunlight as the King could spare fell on her commonplace features. A feeling of profound awe and responsibility came over her, and she resolved, come what may, to acquit herself as well as she could in the King’s service.
Arvarodd of Permia, who carried the King’s harp, and Angantyr Asmundarson, who was his standard-bearer, rose to their feet and pronounced in unison that Hrolf Ketilsson Earthstar, absolute in Caithness and Sutherland, Lord of the Isles, held court for policy in the fastness of his House; let those who could speak wisely do so. There was total silence, as befitted such an august moment. Then there was more silence, and Hildy realised that this was because nobody could think of anything to say.
“Well, come on, then,” said the King. “You were all so damned chatty a moment ago. Let’s be having you.”
To his feet rose Bothvar Bjarki, and Hildy suddenly remembered that he had been the adviser of the great king Kraki, devising for him stratagems without number, which generations of skalds had kept evergreen in memory.
“We could go back and look for them,” suggested Bothvar Bjarki.
“Oh, sit down and shut up,” said the King impatiently. “Has anyone got any sensible suggestions?”
Bothvar sat down and started to mutter to himself. Angantyr was sniggering, and Bothvar gave him a look. Hildy, thoroughly bewildered, realised that she was on her feet and speaking.
“Perhaps,” she stammered, “the wizard can find them. Wasn’t there that bit in Arvarodd’s Saga where someone put a seer-stone to his eye…”
“Have you got a seer-stone, Kotkel?” demanded the King, turning to the wizard. Arvarodd, sitting opposite Hildy, seemed to be blushing slightly. He leant across the table and whispered: “Actually, I made that bit up. I wanted a sort of mystical scene to counterpoint all the starkly realistic bits. You see, the structure seemed to demand…” Hildy found herself nodding, as she so often had at Cambridge parties.
The wizard was turning out his pockets. From the resulting pile of unsightly junk, he picked out a small blue pebble, heart-shaped, with a hole through the middle. He breathed on it, grunted some obscure spell, and set it in his eye like a watchmaker’s lens.
“Well?” said the King impatiently.
There was a sound like a carborundum wheel from the wizard. “Interference,” whispered Arvarodd. “Ever since they privatised it—”
But the wizard shook his head and took out the stone. Then he leant across the King and offered it to Hildy.
“Go on,” the King said. “It doesn’t hurt.”
Hildy closed her mouth, which had fallen open, and took the stone from the wizard’s hand. It felt strangely warm, like a seat on a train that someone has just left, and Hildy felt very reluctant to touch it. But she held it up to her eye, squinting through the hole. To her amazement, and horror, she found that she could see a picture through it, as if it were a keyhole in a closed door.
She saw a tower of grey stone and glass, completely unfamiliar at first; then she recognised it as an office-block. Pressing the stone hard against her eye, she found that she could see in through one of the windows, and beyond that through the open door of an office. Inside the office was a glass case, like a fish-tank, and inside that were two pools of light. There were wires leading from the tank into the back of a large square box-like trunk, which she could not identify for a moment. Then, with a flash of insight, she realised that the box was a computer, and that whoever it was that had control of the two spirits was using them to cut down on his electricity bills.
She thought she could hear voices; but the voices were very far away—they were coming from the picture behind the stone.
“And two for his nob makes seven, redoubled,” said the voice. “Proceed to Valhalla, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred crowns.” The other voice sniggered.
It’s them, Hildy thought. She felt utterly exhausted, as if she had been lifting heavy weights with the muscles of her, eyes, and her head was splitting.
“I give up,” said the first voice. “I never did like this game.”
“Let’s play something else, then,” said the other voice equably.
“I don’t want to play anything,” retorted the first voice. “I want to get out of here, before they plug us in to something else. I don’t mind being kidnapped, but I do resent being used to heat water.”
“Impossible,” said the second voice. “We’re stuck. I suggest we make the most of it.” The first light flickered irritably, but the second light ignored it. “My throw. Oh, good, that’s an X and a Y. I can make ‘oxycephalous’, and it’s on a triple rune score—”
“There’s no such word as ‘oxycephalous’,” said the first voice, “not in Old Norse.”
“There is now,” replied the second voice cheerfully. “Up the tree, six, and I think I’ll see you.”
Hildy’s eyes were hurting, but she struggled to keep them open, as she had so often struggled at lectures and seminars. With a tremendous effort of will, she forced herself to zoom backwards, widening her angle of view. She saw the office-block again, standing in a familiar landscape, but one which she could not put a name to. Then she made out what could only be a Tube station, stunningly prosaic in the midst of all the magic. With a final spurt of effort she read the name, “St Paul’s”. Then the stone fell from her eye, and she slumped forward on to the table.
When she came round, she found the heroes gathered about her. She told them what she had seen, and what she deduced from it. The King sat down again, and put his face in his hands.
“We must take a great risk,” he said at last. “I shall have to go to this place and recover the two spirits. Otherwise, there is no hope.”
“You mustn’t,” Hildy protested. “They’ll catch you, and then there really won’t be any hope.” She dug her fingers into the material of her organiser bag until they started to ache. “Let me go instead.”
The King suddenly lifted his head and smiled at her. “We’ll both go,” he said cheerfully, almost light-heartedly. “And you, Kotkel. Only this time you’ll do it properly, understand? And you, Brynjolf,” he said to the shape-changer, who was trying unsuccessfully to hide behind the massive shoulders of Starkad Storvirksson, “we’ll need you as well. And two others. Any volunteers?”
Everyone froze, not daring to move. But after a moment Arvarodd stood up, looked around the table, and nodded. “I’ll come,” he said quietly. “After all, it can’t be worse than Permia.” He laughed weakly at his own joke, but all the others were silent. The King looked scornfully about him, and sighed. “Chicken,” he said, “the whole lot of you.”
Starkad Storvirksson rose to his feet. “Can I come?” he asked mildly. If no one else was prepared to go, he might at last get his chance to do something other than fighting. Fighting was all right in its way, but he was sure there was more to being a hero than just hitting people.
“No, Starkad,” said the King kindly. “I know you’re not afraid. But not this time. I’ll explain later.”
Starkad sat down, looking dejected, and Brynjolf patted him comfortingly on the shoulder. “It’s because you’re so stupid, Starkad,” he said gently. “You’d only be in the way.”
“Oh,” said Starkad happily. “If that’s the reason, I don’t mind.”
“I’ll go,” said Bothvar Bjarki suddenly, and all the heroes turned and stared at him. “What this job needs is brains, not muscle.” The King muttered something inaudible under his breath, and said that, on second thoughts, five would be plenty. Bothvar scowled, but the heroes cheered loudly, and raised the toast; first to Odin, giver of victory; then to the six adventurers; then to their Lord, King Hrolf Earthstar. Then Ohtar remembered that there had been another cask of enchanted mead in the back storeroom, and they all went to look for it.
“The others had better not stay here,” said the King to Hildy, while they were gone. “They’ll have to hunt for food and find water, and I saw too many houses on the road back there. I’ll send them up into the mountains.” From the back storeroom came sounds of cursing; someone, back in the ninth century, had left the top off the barrel. The King grinned. “It’ll give them something else to complain about until we get back.”
“Will they be all right?” Hildy asked doubtfully. “They don’t seem terribly practical to me.”
The King nodded. “I should think so,” he said. “Take Angantyr Asmundarson, for instance. To—join the muster at Melvich, he marched all night from Brough Head to Burwick—that’s right across the two main islands of Orkney—and since there was no boat available he swam over from Burwick to the mainland, in the middle of a storm. Then he ran all the way from Duncansby Head to Melvich, on the morning before the battle, and still fought in the front rank against the stone-trolls of Finnmark. Complaining bitterly about his wet clothes and how he was going to catch his death of pneumonia, of course, but that’s just his way.” He paused, and contemplated his fingernails for a moment. “Put like that, I suppose, it rather proves your point. Only a complete idiot would have gone to so much trouble to get involved in a baffle. Come on,” he said briskly, “it’s time we were going.”
Thorgeir Storm-Shepherd was feeling his age, and since he was nearing his thirteen-hundredth birthday this was no small problem. He could not, he reflected, take the long journeys like he used to, when a flight from Oslo to Thingvellir, perched uncomfortably between the shoulder-blades of the huge mutant seagull that his employer had bred specially for him, had just been part of a normal day’s work.
He had not been idle. What with dashing about by train, car and helicopter, interviewing Danny Bennett and capturing the two chthonic spirits, then hurrying back to Rolfsness to clear the area of Professor Wood and his archaeologists, he felt he had earned a rest. But now he was back in London, and the sorcerer-king was in the bad mood that usually attended the tricky part of any enterprise.
The two spirits were safely locked up in a spell proof perspex tank, and the Professor had been shunted off to the British Museum to ferret about among the Old Norse manuscripts one more time, just in case anything had been overlooked. Still, the Professor was a useful man.
Another practical benefit of commercial sponsorship of archaeology. It had, of course, been fortuitous that a freak and entirely localised storm had threatened to flood the site at Rolfsness, forcing the excavation team to close up the mound and go away, but Thorgeir was not called Storm-Shepherd for nothing. He was glad that he had kept his hand in at that particular field of Old Magic, useful over the past thousand years only for betting on draws in cricket matches and then washing them out. He leant back in his chair and ruffled the papers on his desk. As well as being a Dark Age sorcerer, he was also one of the key executives in the world’s largest multinational, and work had been piling up while he was away. As he flicked through a sheaf of ‘while-you-were-out’ notes, he reflected that it was a pity that he had never mastered the art of delegation.
The intercom buzzed, and his secretary told him that his boss was on the scrambler. Thorgeir disliked the machine, but it was better than telepathy, which had until recently been the main method of in-office communication between himself and the sorcerer-king, and which invariably gave him a headache.
“Now what?” said the sorcerer-king.
“That’s that,” replied Thorgeir, “at least for the moment.”
“Without those two whatsits, the brooch is useless.”
“Why can’t they just plug it into the mains?”
“Even if they could, they couldn’t get enough power from the ordinary mains,” Thorgeir explained patiently. “But they can’t. They need direct current, and you’d need a transformer the size of Liverpool to convert it. The only power source in the world big enough to power that brooch is sitting in a perspex tank in Vouchers. You have my word on it.”
“So now what?”
“With the brooch out of action, they’re up the fjord without a paddle.” Thorgeir grinned into the receiver. “Lucky, wasn’t I?”
“Yes,” said the sorcerer-king, “very.”
Thorgeir stopped grinning. “So we have all the time in the world to find them and dispose of them. They can’t do us any harm.”
“You said that the last time, before Melvich.”
“That was different.”
“So is this different. How do you know they can’t modify it?”
“Trust me. Let me rephrase that,” Thorgeir added hurriedly, for that was a sore point at all times. “Rely on it. They can’t. All they can do is try breaking in here and springing the two gnomes.”
“Just let them try.”
“Exactly. So relax, won’t you? Enjoy yourself. Set up a new newspaper or something. The situation is under control.”
“I hope so.” The sorcerer-king rang off.
Thorgeir shook his head and returned to his work. The papers from the Japanese deal were starting to come through, and he didn’t like the look of them at all. Come the glorious day, he said to himself, I’ll turn that whole poxy country into a golf-course, and we’ll see how they like that. But before he could settle to it the telephone went again. This time it was Professor Wood, ringing from the call-box outside the British Museum. Thorgeir sat up and reached for a pen and some paper.
After a few minutes, he put the phone down carefully and read back his notes. Things were starting to take shape. In a nineteenth-century collection of Gaelic folk-tales, the Professor had found a most interesting story, all about a chieftain called Rolf McKettle and his battle with the Fairies. Allowing for the distortions inevitably occurring over a millennium of the oral tradition and home-made whisky, it was a fair and accurate report of the battle of Melvich, and it went on to tell the rest of the story, including where the King had been buried and who was buried with him.
The Professor would be round in about half an hour. Thorgeir dumped a half-hundredweight of unread contracts in his out-tray and went to tell his boss. “Not,” he reflected as he got into the lift, “that he’ll take kindly to being called a fairy. But there we go.”
How long he had been there, or where exactly there was, Danny had no idea, but he was beginning to wonder whether the senior cameraman might not have been right after all. It had been the senior cameraman, armed with the map, who had insisted that the big cloudy thing over to their right was Ben Stumanadh, and that the road was just the other side of it. Danny had been a Boy Scout (although he had taken endless pains to make sure that no one in the Corporation knew about it) and he knew that the assertion was patently ridiculous, and that the cameraman was determined to lead the crew into the bleak and inhospitable interior, where death from exposure was a very real possibility. He had reasoned with him, ordered him, and finally shouted at him; but the fool had taken no notice, and neither had the rest of the crew. Finally, Danny had washed his hands of the lot of them and set out to walk the few miles to the road, which he knew was just over to the left.
Of course the mist hadn’t helped, but the further he had gone, the more Danny had become convinced that either the map had been wrong or that someone had moved the road. As exhaustion and hunger, and the loss of both his shoes in a bog had taken their toll, he had inclined more and more to the latter explanation, especially after his short but illuminating chat with the two brown sheep which had been the only living things he had seen since meeting the strange man who had pointed them all in the wrong direction. Shortly after he had arrived at that conclusion, his eyes started playing tricks on him, and he had spent the night in what appeared at the time to be a fully equipped editing suite, complete with facilities for transposing film on to video-tape. In the cold (very cold) light of morning it had turned out to be a ruined shieling, and he had somehow acquired a rather disconcertingly high fever. But at least it kept him warm, which was something.
Rather optimistically, he tried out his arms and his legs, but of course they wouldn’t work, just as his car never used to start when he had a particularly urgent meeting. He felt surprisingly calm, and reflected that that was probably one of the fringe benefits of going completely mad. If he wasn’t deeply into the final stage of hallucination that came just before death by exposure, he wouldn’t be imagining that the men in the grey suits were coming over the hill towards him.
“Just like old times,” one of them was saying. “Out on the fells with no shelter and nothing to eat but rabbit and perishing salmon. If I have to eat any more salmon, I’ll start looking like one.”
Since over his suit he was wearing a coat of silvery scale armour he already did; but of course, Danny reflected, since the man was not really there he was not to know that. He groaned softly, and slumped a little further behind the stones. If he had to see visions in his madness, he would have preferred something a little less eccentric.
“If you hadn’t been so damned fussy,” said another of the men, “we could have had one of those sheep.”
“He said not to get into any trouble,” said the salmon-man. “Stealing sheep counts as trouble. Always did.”
“There might be deer in that forest we passed,” said a third man.
“Then, again, there might not,” replied the salmon-man, who seemed a miserable sort of person. Danny decided he didn’t like him much and tried to replace him with a beautiful girl, but apparently the system didn’t work like that. “And if you think I’m going to go rushing about some wood in the hope that it’s full of deer you can think again,” the salmon-man said. The others didn’t bother to reply. Danny approved.
“That’ll do,” said one of them. He was pointing at the shieling, and Danny realised that they intended to make their camp there. That was a pity, since he had wanted to spend his last hours on earth in quiet meditation, not making conversation with a bunch of phantasms from the Milk Marketing Board. In fact, Danny said to himself, I won’t have it. An Englishman’s fallen-down old shed is his castle, even in Scotland. “Go away,” he shouted, and turned his face to the stone wall. The words just managed to clear his lips, but they fell away into the wind and were dispersed.
“There’s someone in there,” said Starkad Storvirksson. “So there is,” said Ohtar. “I wonder if he wants a fight.” “Better ask him first,” said Angantyr. “It’s very bad manners to fight people without asking.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to fight anyone,” Starkad said.
“We can if we have to defend ourselves,” said Ohtar, but his heart wasn’t in it. The man hardly looked worth fighting anyway. In fact he looked decidedly unwell. Ohtar turned him over gently with his foot.
“Ask him if he’s got anything to eat,” Angantyr whispered. “Tell him we’ll trade him two rabbits and a salmon for anything in the way of cheese.”
“Hold it, will you?” said Ohtar. “It’s that sorcerer from the van, the one who wouldn’t fight with Bothvar.” He turned to his companions and smiled. “Things are looking up,” he said. “We’ve got ourselves a prisoner.”