Grailblazers (26 page)

‘Ah.'

‘Especially after he fell off the wall.'

‘Right.' Bedevere scratched his ear thoughtfully. ‘I'm game,' he said. ‘What about you, Turkey?'

Turquine looked up. He was having difficulties. Beyond the basic principle that the leg bone conneckato the thigh bone, he was no anatomist.

‘You know me,' he said, ‘I'll try anything once. Er, Bedders, do you know anything about knees?'

 

‘This isn't going to work,' said Turquine. ‘Don't ask me how I know, I just do.'

‘Shut up, Turkey,' Bedevere grunted.

‘All right, I'm just saying, that's all. Don't blame me if—'

‘Boys!' said the skull sharply. ‘No getting fractious, please.'

‘Sorry,' said Turquine. ‘It's just—'

‘That'll do, Master Turquine,' the skull said. ‘Oh, by the way, did you have a cousin called Breunis?'

Turquine raised an eyebrow. ‘That's right,' he said. ‘Breunis Saunce Pitie. Come to think of it, he was at the Coll, too.'

‘I knew you reminded me of someone,' said the skull. ‘He was a horrid little boy.'

Many years ago, Lyonesse Market Research discovered that market penetration for Lyonesse financial services among the Giants of South Permia was less than 18½ per cent, and a major marketing drive was launched. It was quite successful, and, as a result, the Giants (who were basically personifications of glaciers and could trace their ancestry back to the Second Ice Age) were soon extinct. One such Giant, Germadoc the Violent, had taken out an offshore roll-up sterling assets bond which went yellow on him about ten minutes after the ink was dry on the policy document, and he had come straight across to Atlantis City to complain. The customer service people had had to fire catapults at him just to stop him moving about. Then they tied him up and put him in the dungeon. In sections.

Being a Giant, his femurs were a touch over twelve feet long. The trapdoor was very slightly more than eighteen feet above floor level.

‘I saw someone at a circus do this once,' Turquine was saying. ‘Garcio the Magnificent, they called him, he was very good. Mind you,' he added, ‘he had proper stilts, with little ledges you put your feet in and hand-grips and everything.'

Bedevere, clinging on to an enormous bone for dear life, nodded impatiently. ‘Are you there yet?' he demanded.

‘Not sure,' Turquine replied. ‘It's so dark, you see ... Ah, what's this?'

The stilts swayed alarmingly, and Bedevere was nearly swept off his feet. He braced himself against the wall and hugged the bone to his chest. This had jolly well better work, he was saying to himself, otherwise...

‘Gotcha!'

And then a loud cry and an oath, and suddenly there wasn't any weight at the top of the stilts any more. Bedevere yelled ‘Turkey!' and tried to peer upwards, but it was pointless. There were some grunting noises.

‘Turkey!'

‘It's all right,' came a strained voice from above. ‘There's a handle or something, I'm hanging on to it. If I could just loosen this catch ...'

And then there was a flood of light.

And then things in the dungeon got a bit fraught.

 

Germadoc the Violent was very good about it all, considering. Once Bedevere and Matron had explained, and he'd understood that he was alive again and it really wasn't their fault at all, he'd helped them all up out of the cellar - Bedevere was amazed how many of them there had been - and then led his fellow-complainants away to find somebody to complain to. They could hear them doing it, far away in the distance.

‘Well,' said Turquine, ‘that's that. Piece of duff, really.'

Matron smiled. Once she got the flesh back on her bones, Bedevere saw that she hadn't changed a bit.

‘Thank you, both,' she said graciously. ‘Very much obliged, I'm sure. It was very perceptive of you, young Bedevere, to realise that we weren't dead at all, and it was just the magic in the dungeon all along.'

Under normal circumstances, Bedevere would have explained that Sir Giraut at the dear old Coll had explained to him that since death is final, anything that permits the patient to carry on talking must be something else. But he remembered the apple-cores behind the radiators and contented himself with a bashful smile. ‘That's all right,' he said.

‘And you, Master Turquine,' Matron continued, ‘that was very brave of you. Well done.'

Turquine, unused to compliments, blushed. Usually when he was brave, the only witnesses were the people he was being brave against, and they tended to be hyper-critical.

In the distance there was a crash which made the floor shake, followed by a lot of cheering. That was probably Germadoc, complaining. By the sound of it, he had decided against putting it in writing.

‘Well,' Bedevere said, ‘we've got the Personal Organiser, the Atlanteans don't seem to be about, I think it's time we were on our way. Can we drop you off anywhere, Matron?'

Mahaud de Villehardouin smiled. ‘Thank you,' she said, ‘that would be most kind. Would Glastonbury be out of your way?'

Glastonbury ... Bedevere knew the name from somewhere, but although the bell rang in his mind, nobody came to answer it. He assured her that that would be fine, and together they went in search of the fax machine.

It was hard to find. Although under normal circumstances Atlantis City is crawling with faxes, just then none of them seemed to be working. In fact, most of the office equipment was out of order, one way or another, which only goes to show that a good concerted complaint can make itself felt.

Eventually they tracked one down in a snug little room with comfortable chairs and a calendar with pictures of kittens on it. Something told Bedevere that this was probably the Queen's office.

‘Here we are,' Turquine said, thumbing through the directory. ‘Any number of places in Glastonbury are on the fax. Any preference?'

Mahaud shook her head. ‘I expect it's changed rather a lot since my day,' she said. ‘And besides, I won't be stopping.'

Glastonbury. The town of the Glass Mountain.

Bedevere did his best not to stare; he managed to get by with just glancing out of the corner of his eye as he dialled in the number. If she was going into the Glass Mountain, that meant that she was ...

She was smiling again. ‘You are a sharp one, Master Bedevere,' she said. ‘You're quite right. Not in my own right, though; just by marriage, so to speak.'

The last piece dropped into place in the jigsaw of Bedevere's memory. Dr Magus and Matron had, of course, both left in the same term. All those long walks.

‘How is Dr Magus, by the way?' he asked, as nonchalantly as he could.

‘Simon?' Matron beamed. ‘Very well indeed, thank you, or at least he was when I last saw him. That was some time ago now, of course, but I don't imagine he'll have noticed. A brilliant man, of course, but something of a dreamer. I expect I'll find fifteen hundred years' worth of washing-up waiting for me in the sink when I get home. I'll tell him you were asking after him; he always said you were rather brighter than you looked.'

Bedevere was going to say something, but then it occurred to him that from what he had heard, time in the Glass Mountain is rather different, somehow. Rather like life, he remembered someone telling him once; you only get out of it what you're prepared to put into it. Something like that, anyway.

‘Here goes,' he said. ‘Hold tight ...'

Transmitting.

In the stables of the Schloss Weinachts, the reindeer were restless.

Because the Graf has distinctly idiosyncratic requirements in transport, the stables are twice the size of the rest of the castle; and the rest of the castle is rather larger than, say, Tuscany.

There are sports reindeer, touring reindeer, four-leg-drive reindeer, turbo-charged reindeer with six stomachs and extremely antisocial digestive systems, reindeer with red go-faster stripes down their flanks; even a few with ‘My other reindeer's a Lappland Red' stickers on their rumps. And then there is Radulf.

Radulf and the Graf go way back; right back to when he started out as a Finno-Ugrian storm-deity with responsibility for punishing perjury and collecting the souls of the dead. They have seen some high old times together, howling through the midwinter skies with the wind in their hair and the world splayed out below them like a spilt breakfast. It wasn't Klaus and Radulf then, of course; it was Odin and Sleipnir - and there have been other names, too, which the race-memory has been only too glad to forget. All the stuff with the red dressing-gowns and the sleigh bells is comparatively recent, the result of one of the biggest balls-ups in theological history.

Radulf is virtually retired now, and only rides the winds once a year. He hates the Americanised form of his name, and the song and the greetings cards make him sick. The slight discolouration of his nose (he prefers to think of it as a snout, anyway) is an honourable wound, the red nose of courage; a lasting memento of a desperate ten minutes with the Great Frost-Bear, back when the world was young, violent and not nearly so damn soppy.

Retired from flying, anyway; there's plenty of work for him to do on the ground, what with all the various jobs that need to be done under the terms of the Great Curse. There are toy catalogues to be pored over, order forms to make out, deliveries to supervise, and mountains and mountains of requisition chits to be sorted through as the requests from every family in the world come cascading through. And last, but definitely not least, there are the preparations for each year's Ride; itineraries to plan, architects' plans to study, ingenious methods of breaking into chimneyless houses, converted windmills and blocks of flats to be worked out.

‘Radulf!'

A girl's voice, echoing melodramatically in the vastness of the stables. The old reindeer lifted his snout, took off his reading glasses and mooed softly. He knew the Graf didn't hold with the Grafin coming down to the stables. Not safe for a young girl, he said, and he was right. Some of the reindeer were special thoroughbreds, wild and savage, with antlers like pneumatic drills and tempers to match; and the Grafin was young and silly. She carried sugar-lumps in the pocket of her dress. Not sensible.

‘Radulf, the phone for you!' she was saying. It sounded like she was down among the drag-racers. Radulf flicked his left ear apprehensively. Give a sugar-lump to one of those high-octane monstrosities, you could have an explosion.

He mooed loudly to her to stay where she was and not feed anything, then sprang to his hooves and padded silently through the rows of stalls. He knew the layout of the stables as well as a taxi driver knows Bayswater. He should do, by now.

‘There you are, Radulf,' said the Grafin, and handed over the portable phone. ‘It's Father. He says it's urgent.'

Radulf nodded his head, and the dim light of the chandeliers high above under the rafters glinted on the tinsel wrapped round his horns. He put the receiver to his ear and mooed into it.

‘Moo. Moo. Moo. Moo?
Moo
? Mo ...' The antlers nodded a couple of times, and Radulf hung up. ‘Moo,' he explained.

‘Oh dear,' said the Grafin. ‘I suppose we'd better get back to the house, then.'

‘M.'

‘I expect he'll need plenty of hot water and bandages.'

‘M.'

They left the stables, switching out the lights as they went. For a while, the enormous building was silent - except, of course, for the shuffling of innumerable hooves and the quiet whinnying of the reincalves.

Then a voice spoke in the Number 2 hayloft.

‘Are you sure this is the right place?' it said.

There was a sharp intake of breath next to it, and a muffled click as a torch was switched on.

‘Be quiet, Gally, I'm trying to think.'

‘Please yourself.'

In the hayloft, Boamund was turning the situation over in his mind; or at least he was trying to. Something - he hadn't the faintest idea what - kept getting in the way. His companion, Galahaut the Haut Prince, had gladly abdicated any participation in the decision-making process at a very early stage, and was filing his fingernails. Toenail was cleaning the boots.

‘Who was that?' Boamund asked suddenly. Galahaut shrugged, and so it was left to Toenail to reply.

‘Looked like a bloody great big deer, boss,' he replied. ‘Domesticated, too, by the looks of it.'

‘Thank you,' said Boamund, with what he hoped was irony. ‘Actually, I meant—'

‘It's amazing the things you can train animals to do,' Toenail went on. ‘Cousin of mine, worked in a circus, used to tell me how they trained the lions—'