Aurelius and I (18 page)

“I’ve got it!”

***

“This had better work,” I whispered from my precarious position in the lower branches of the old oak.

“You’re telling me it had better work! You’re not the flipping bait!” Grahndel replied, barely able to keep his voice low through fear and anger. “How come I ended up with the most dangerous job anyway? It was my flipping idea!”

“Because, as it turns out, dragnors climb like girls,” I replied.

“Hey!” snapped Ophelia. “That’s an insult to girls everywhere. And probably dragnors for that matter. He’s the worst climber I’ve ever seen – they can’t all be that bad. Can they?”

“Shut up will you,” Grahndel snarled. “I think they’re coming.”

He was right. The footsteps were definitely louder now, indeed the ground actually seemed to be shaking with them. The trolls would be upon us at any second. There was no time left to run. All three of our lives depended on the sole, rapidly-conceived, ill-considered plan of one dragnor. We were as good as dead.

I could feel my heart thumping in my chest as the lumbering beasts came into view. If they noticed Ophelia and I hiding in the tree and went for us instead of running directly at the suspiciously-unhidden dragnor, we would unquestionably be smashed to a bloody-pulp.

Fortunately, our earlier instinctive suppositions regarding the low IQs of our pursuers had been correct; the first troll came tearing around the corner with the smell of prey pungently fresh in his immense nostrils and was so eager to reach the small, demon-shaped snack that was his reward for the chase that he failed to notice the large patch of quicksand that stood hidden in the long grass between he and his target until it was too late.

Unfortunately, our all-too-quickly conceived plan had failed to take account of one seemingly easily observable, plainly undeniable fact; trolls are not joined together at the hip. As a result, the second troll, on seeing his comrade slide helplessly into the quicksand, skidded to a halt several yards short of it.

“Oh, turdburgers!”

The words of panic spewed from my lips before I had a chance to stop them, or even to control their volume. The troll turned slowly around, instantly forgetting about Grahndel, who had been his primary focus, and switching all of his attention to the much easier target Ophelia and I provided. He seemed to smile as he edged towards us, happy at how easy it was going to be to finally reach his prey -for the branch on which we sat, though high above the ground to a child and a fairy, remained well within the enormous reach of a troll.

Faced with the choice between being snatched from the branches of a tree and having my bones crushed one-by-one, or leaping from a great height, breaking my ankle as I landed and being picked up from the floor and having my bones crushed one-by-one, I took the only one course of action left open to me – I began throwing acorns.

Now, please understand, dear reader, that there was no part of me that believed that such a course of action would do anything more than marginally postpone my inevitable painful death, but, when faced with the prospect of being brutally murdered by an mythical beast, the possibility of just a few more moments of blessed life becomes the most alluring thing in the world. And so I threw the acorns. I threw them for all I was worth. I threw as many acorns as I could lay my hands on. And, to begin with at least, it actually seemed to be working.

The troll, flustered, confused, and partially blinded by a succession of acorns hitting his eyes, was unable to compose himself for long enough to see where he was grabbing. Instead he simply swung his arms about wildly, trying and failing to find my dangling legs whilst simultaneously protecting his eyes from the shower of missiles.

“It’s working,” I cheered gleefully, turning to Ophelia. But, to my surprise, rather than joining in with the acorn throwing, she was fiddling around in the depths of her bag. “What are you doing?” I demanded. “This is no time to do your make-up, I could do with some help here.”

“That’s what I’m trying to give you!” she snapped back without ever looking away from the inside of her tiny satchel.

I was angered and confused by Ophelia’s inaction in the face of grave danger, but I had no time with which to remonstrate with her about it now; I had a troll to fight.

Whilst the acorn-hurling had proved surprisingly successful to begin with, it quickly became less so. After only a minute or two’s throwing I had (thanks largely to the earlier efforts of The Professor’s pesky squirrels) severely depleted the supply of acorns provided by the branch on which I sat. I began reaching for the acorns which grew on adjacent branches, but this quickly proved to be far too dangerous an activity, since I not only risked falling to my death with each and every lunge, but it also meant leaving much longer gaps between throws, allowing the troll to get dangerously closer to my dangling legs with every swipe.

Realising my tactic of an acorn-based air assault was about to bring about my demise, I decided that the time had come to take extreme measures and so I pulled from my rucksack the small bag of wine gums and began hurling these instead. To begin with these proved far less effective as a source of ammunition, given that wine gums are considerably softer than acorns (a fact that, in almost every conceivable scenario could only be considered positive, but which became a negative when assessing the merits of each substance as a potential troll repellent).

Down to my final three winegums, the end of our mission, and indeed our lives, seemed imminent, but then a minor miracle occurred. In the panic to drag my legs away from the gnashing yellow teeth of the troll, my aim became understandably skewed, and I ended up landing a port flavoured sweet directly into the mouth of the troll, rather than its eye. Caught off guard by the tactical change, the troll stopped trying to eat me for a moment whilst he coughed as a result of the sweet’s inadvertent targeting of his tonsils. In doing so, he accidentally swallowed the gelatine-based delight, and was evidently pleased with the results of his mistake for he instantly forgot his murderous desire and instead began gathering the other wine gums from the forest floor.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief and turned to my fairy companion expecting to see her do the same, only to find that she still had her head in her bag searching for something that, if not discovered by now, could surely never have been in there.

“What are you doing?”

“Trying to save our skins,” she replied from inside the cloth sack.

“Well you had better do it quickly because the first troll is going to manage to drag himself out of that quicksand pretty soon, and the second will have finished off those sweets even sooner.”

Indeed, no sooner had I spoken the words when the second troll, having abandoned his search, satisfied that all the missing wine gums had now been accounted for, looked hungrily in my direction. In response I threw my penultimate sweet into the long grass to his left, desperately trying to buy Ophelia some more time with which to discover whatever magical saviour lay hidden in the depths of her bag.

“Whatever you’re doing, do it quickly!”

“I’m trying, I’m trying!’” she yelled.

Within seconds the troll was once again upon us, having located the missing wine gum disappointingly quickly. In desperation I threw the final sweet over the beast’s head hoping to gain Ophelia the maximum possible amount of time. Unfortunately for both of us, I and the troll watched despairingly as the round jelly rolled agonisingly into the quicksand in which the first troll was still trapped and sank rapidly. The second troll turned to face us once again, a look of pure rage across his face.

“
Ophelia!
” I wailed as if I could somehow will her to find whatever it was she was looking for. It was the useless, desperate action of a frightened child. Miraculously though, it worked.

“Got it!” she smiled, triumphantly holding an even smaller cloth bag above her head.

“Whatever you’re going to do,
just do it
!” I demanded, unable to believe her failure to grasp the urgency of the situation. She appeared to be completely immersed in her own little world (no doubt a peaceful, calm world in which there was not a troll shredding the ends of my trouser legs with his grimy, yellow fingernails), and then, suddenly, a realisation of the true horror of the situation swept across her face and she hurled the tiny bundle directly into the face of the troll.

“AAAARRRGGH!!!”

The troll let out a blood-curdling cry which the preceding mass of repeated letters can go no way toward justifying. It was extremely loud, so loud in fact that I instinctively moved to cover my ears with my hands, almost falling from my position on the branch as I did so.

The evil blue beast bent over with his head between his knees, his hands covering his face as he wailed. When he finally took them away, his face was no longer blue at all, but a strange shade of purple that lay somewhere between lavender and pink. His cheeks puffed, his ears twitched and his eyes bulged.

“He looks as though he’s about to explode,” I said to Ophelia.

“He is,” she replied with a satisfied smile.

“I beg you’re pardon!”

“I said he’s going to explode,” she repeated calmly. “I just hit him with an entire bag Karupa Dust, the most powerful weapon in a fairy’s arsenal, once inhaled the subject’s nasal passageways are filled with a potent and painful gas which builds and builds until it eventually causes their head to explode.”

I stared at her in shock, unable to believe the calmness with which she had ended the gruesome troll’s life. I knew that it was a horrible, disgusting, and evil creature and I knew the action was taken in self defence, but it still felt deeply wrong that I had played such a major part in killing a living, thinking(ish) thing. In spite of the fact that it had attempted to batter me to death just moments before, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the troll as it writhed around in pain in front of me.

After what seemed like hours, but was in reality probably only seconds, the changes in the troll began to accelerate. His head became larger and pinker, his nostrils flared to the size of lemons and his eyes bulged so wide that they looked as though they would tip from their sockets and roll down its cheeks at any moment.

“He’s gonna blow!” yelled Ophelia.

We both covered our faces and waited for the sound of the explosion.

“AAAA-CHOO!”

The horrible, strange noise was followed immediately by the sensation of what I could only assume to be trolls brains spraying across my face and torso. Then there was silence.

I gingerly took my hands from my eyes, forcing myself to open them and see for myself the exploded troll head that I knew lay in wait for me. When I did so however, I was surprised and confused to be faced with a very intact, very angry-looking troll head staring right back at me.

“I thought you said his head would explode” I said, too frightened to take my eyes off the still pink-faced beast.

“I thought it would,” she replied. “It works on stag beetles.”

I couldn’t believe my ears, we were facing certain death at the hands (and teeth) of an angry troll because my fairy sidekick was unable to comprehend that a troll is quite considerably bigger than a stag beetle and so the two may require different dosages of ingredients if magic potions were to be successful.

“AAAA-CHOO!”

Just as the troll went to resume its attempts to pull me from the tree it was overcome by a second sneeze and I was once again covered in what I now knew to be troll bogeys, which is possibly the only thing in the world more disgusting than being covered in troll brains.

I realise this may seem hard to believe, but you must understand that troll bogeys are quite the most disgusting bogeys of any creature on earth (and no doubt beyond). To start with, they are the brightest, most fluorescent pink you have ever seen - it resembles the colour of radioactive Turkish delight. They are slimy and sludgy, but not at all watery. They have a texture which is somewhere between oysters and phlegm and which feels much more disgusting than either, particularly when it is hanging from your face. And, as if this were not disgusting enough, they are frequently punctuated by thick green hairs ripped from inside the troll’s nostrils. No, dear reader, being covered in troll bogeys could not be claimed by anybody to be a pleasant experience, and it is one which I recommend you do your best to avoid.

“AAAA-CHOO! AAAA-CHOO! AAAA-CHOO!”

“Come on,” I said to Ophelia after watching the second troll writhe around on the floor sneezing, while the first still clung desperately to the roots of a tree next to the quicksand in which he was stuck, not daring to move for fear of being dragged further under. “This is our chance, let’s get out of here!”

We made our way down from the oak as quickly as possible, before tentatively skirting around the still sneezing troll when we reached the ground.

“Don’t forget about me!” cried Grahndel from across the quicksand.

“I wish we could,” said Ophelia.

“Wait there,” I said. “We’ll come around and find you.”

***

Once the three of us had been reunited, I restored my companions to their previous positions in my rucksack and shirt pocket and ran as fast as I could in the opposite direction to the trolls, the caves, and any trace of Blackheart and his cronies. When I was sure we had escaped their clutches, and I had run until I could run no further, we stopped and rested against a large sycamore on the edge of a clearing.