Grailblazers. Part 10

It took Lamorak just over six seconds to count to ten slowly under his breath. 'If you must know,' he said, 'we want it as bait to catch a maiden of unspotted virtue.'

The Timekeeper looked at him. 'You'th got that the wrong way round, you know.'

Lamorak prised his lips apart into a smile. 'Have we? Oh d.a.m.n. That is a nuisance, isn't it, Per? Oh well, it's back to the drawing board for us, then. Thanks for the tip, anyway. And now we really must be getting along.'

'And bethideth,' continued the Timekeeper, 'you thaid you were questhting for an ap.r.o.n, not a maiden of unthpotted . . .'

'It's her ap.r.o.n,' said Sir Pertelope.

'Ith it?'

'Yes.'

After the unicorns came the convicts.

There were two waves of them. The second wave arrived with the First Fleet in 1788, seven hundred years after the first wave.

The aborigines, whose permission n.o.body bothered to ask, had a phrase for it. One d.a.m.ned thing after another, they said.

The first man in the first wave to set eyes on Australia had been the overseer. His first reaction was to shudder slightly. Then he jumped down from the observation platform and told the drummer to stop marking time.

'Right,' he shouted, 'everybody out.'

n.o.body moved. Two thousand dragon-headed prows bobbed silently up and down in the still waters of Botany Bay.

The overseer blinked. 'Did you lot hear what I said'?' he yelled. 'Everybody off the ships, now.'

'We're not going.'

The voice came from behind an oar in the third row back. It was backed up by a mumbled chorus of That's Rights and You Tell Hims. The overseer started to perspire.

'What did you just say?' he demanded. The faint blur of grey smoke behind the oar coruscated in the sunlight. If it had had shoulders, it might well have been shrugging them.

'I said we're not b.l.o.o.d.y going,' it replied evenly. 'We can see into the future. It sucks. We stay here.'

In the back of the overseer's mind, a little voice nervously started asking around to see if anyone had any ideas about what should be done next. The overseer's hands were mare positive. They reached for the big knotted whip hanging from his belt.

'We'll soon see about that,' he said, and he aimed a ferocious blow at the cloud of smoke.

'Idiot.'

With aggravating slowness, the wisps of smoke coalesced into a cloud once more. There was an expectant silence.

'There's no way you can force us to get off the ship, you know,' went on the voice, calmly. 'So you might as well accept the situation, turn this thing round and head for home. Yes?'

'No,' said the overseer.

He was sweating heavily now.

He hadn't wanted to come in the first place. When he'd joined the company, all those years ago, he'd seen his future career developing in an entirely different direction. After five years or so loading sides of bacon on to the ships and sailing them from Copenhagen to Dover, he reckoned, he'd have proved himself the sort of man they could use in marketing. There would follow an orderly progression, from sales representative to a.s.sistant sales manager, then regional sales manager, then sales director, and so on until he was given overall responsibility for the whole Danish operation in Albion. And here he was, ten years later, trying to cajole a boatful of deported supernatural ent.i.ties into colonising New South Cambria. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong.

'Please?' he said.

There was a swirling of mists and fogs the length of the ship that left him feeling dizzy. He could feel the roof of his mouth getting dry.

Two thousand longships; each one crammed to overflowing with minor divinities. There were river-G.o.ds, woodnymphs, fire-spirits, elves, wills o' the wisp, pixies, chthonic deities, earth-mothers, thunder-demons, even a few metaphysical abstractions huddled wretchedly at the back and insisting on soft lavatory paper. As part of the dismantling of the magical culture of Albion, her entire population of supernatural bit-players had been rounded up and sent to Van Demon's Land.

The overseer dug his fingernails into the palms of his hands and took a deep breath. 'Come along now, people,' he wheedled, 'you'll like it once you get there, promise.'

'Nuts.'

'But there's rivers,' whined the overseer. 'Majestic, aweinspiring torrents, crashing over dizzying waterfalls, winding lugubriously through ancestral forests. There's deserts. There's rock formations any red-quartzed troll'd give his right arm to live in. There's bush fires that make h.e.l.l look like a camping stove. What in G.o.d's name are you complaining about? It's a b.l.o.o.d.y spook's paradise out there.'

'There are also,' said the spokeswraith, 'spiders.'

There was a soft thunk as the overseer's jaw dropped on to the studded collar round his neck. 'What was that?' he gasped.

'And snakes.'

'And mosquitoes.'

'And,' added the spokeswraith meaningfully, 'it's not as if it's exactly got vacant possession, you know. The whole place is absolutely crawling with . . .'

With a ma.s.sive effort, the overseer hoisted his jaw back into place. 'Yes?'

'You know,' replied the smoke-cloud diffidently. 'Things. It's really creepy out there, you know?'

'They go around singing all the time,' ventured a voice from the last bench but one. 'It's enough to give you the w.i.l.l.i.e.s.'

'b.l.o.o.d.y unsocial hours, too,' added a scratching, grinding sound from somewhere near the middle of the ship. 'Dreamtime-and-a-half, that sort of thing.'

'Let's get this straight,' said the overseer, with an ever so slightly unbalanced lilt in his voice. 'All you ghouls and ghosts and things that go b.u.mp in the night are refusing to get off the ship because you think the place is haunted?'

'Yes.'

'Be reasonable,' added the scratching sound - a feverwraith from the Plumstead Marshes - 'they're natives" they're used to living here, we're not. They'd have us for breakfast. If you turn us off the ship, it'd be ma.s.s murder. Exorcism. Whatever.'

The overseer lowered his head, stuck his hands in his pockets - where, inevitably, he found a small piece of string, a halfeaten apple and two small bronze coins of purely nominal value - and thought about it for a while; then he retired into the helmsman's cabin and banged his head against the ship's wheel for a while. Oddly enough, it helped, because when he emerged he knew exactly what he was going to do.

And it worked. It was, of course, bitterly unfair on the indigenous paranormals; and it has to go down as one of the biggest stains on the superhuman rights record of the English nation. Now, however, it's far too late to do anything about it, because within five years of the arrival of the deported spirits from Albion, the native deities had been completely wiped out, leaving the entire continent empty to receive the newcomers. In due course, they settled in, adapted themselves to their new environment and evolved an entirely original lifestyle of their own which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the culture they had left behind them, and which survived for seven hundred years before being completely destroyed by the coming of the First Fleet.

Which, so the aborigines say, served the b.u.g.g.e.rs b.l.o.o.d.y well right.

'Tho what did they actually do to the native thpiritth?' the Timekeeper demanded. Lamorak winced. He hated this part of the story. It was, he had always felt, enough to make one ashamed of being Albionese.

'They methylated them,' he replied quietly. 'Well, it's been really nice meeting you,' he said. 'and I look forward very much to having met you before, but unless we make a start immediately we're going to be very, very late. Ciao.' He picked up his rucksack, slung it on his back and advanced purposefully towards the unicorn.

'That'th horrible,' said the Timekeeper, and shuddered. 'But it thrill doethn't ecthplain about the ap.r.o.n and the unicorn.'

'Very true,' replied Lamorak over his shoulder. 'Right then, Per, you grab hold of the rope while I push.'

'The ap.r.o.n,' said Pertelope, 'was a talisman belonging to one of the deported spirits. It has magical powers of its own. We managed to track it down, through newspaper reports of unexplained happenings which could only have been caused by the ap.r.o.n, and it turns out to be owned by a maiden of unspotted virtue living in Sydney. Hence the unicorn.'

'I thee,' murmured the Timekeeper. 'At leatht I think I thee. What thort of unecthplained happeningth?'

Lamorak smiled unpleasantly. 'It's kind of hard to explain,' he said.

The Timekeeper was not amused. 'Try me,' she said.

'Football results,' said Pertelope. 'The ap.r.o.n plays merry h.e.l.l with the results of Australian Rules football matches. All we had to do once we knew that was to plot all the results on a big graph and wait until a significant mutation in the sine curve became apparent.'

yd?'

'Paramatta Under-Twelves 22, Sydney 0,' Lamorak growled. 'Which was as good as putting up a big neon sign saying OVER HERE.' He paused and scowled. 'I can explain the mathematics of it in very great detail if you want me to,' he added.

'No thankth,' said the Timekeeper, and Lamorak noticed that her eyes looked as if someone had accidentally slapped three coats of weatherproof varnish over them. 'Actually,' she went on, 'it'th time I wath getting along, tho . . .'

'Of course. We quite understand. Right, Per, when I say heave . . . Per? What the h.e.l.l are you staring at?'

Pertelope was standing bolt upright, his face contorted into an expression of terminal sheepishness. He swallowed once or twice, raised his left arm and waggled his fingers.

'Smile, Lammo,' he hissed out of the side of his mouth. think we're on television.'

Faster than the speed of light is very fast. And, it goes without saying, dark.

'Ouch.'

'Sorry.'

'That was my foot.'

'Yes, all right, I said I'm sorry.'

'Well, mind where you're going next time.'

Sleek, streamlined, virtually frictionless and as devoid of light as six feet up a drainpipe, the mighty starcruiser pounced like a giant cat across the vastness of s.p.a.ce. Far below - so far that distance became just another deceptive illusion - the earth spun on its languorous axis, while Time found itself dragged inexorably up the down escalator.

'For crying out loud, George, watch what you're doing with that b.l.o.o.d.y kettle.'

'Sorry.'

'You'd have thought the dozy cow would've been back by now. I'm starving.'

'So are the rest of us, Simon. The difference is, we don't make such a great big performance out of it.'

'Oh yes? And who asked for your opinion, Priscilla?'

'I'm not Priscilla, I'm Annabel.'

'And I'm Priscilla. You just put your teacup down on my head.'

'G.o.d, sorry, Priscilla.'

'I'm not Priscilla, I'm George.'

Aboard the starship Timekeeper, there are three levels of Time: earth time; relative time; and the time they'd all been cooped up on this small, cramped and above all dark s.p.a.ceship. The third variety had the weirdest properties of all. It seemed to last for ever.

'Look, this is hopeless. I'm going out for a pizza. Anybody else fancy coming?'

'Listen, George...'

'Trevor. I'm George.'

'Listen, Trevor, you just can't do that. This is a scientific experiment, right? We're playing sillyb.u.g.g.e.rs with the fabric of causality as it is; I mean, G.o.d only knows what damage we're doing just by being here. If you suddenly touch down in the middle of the twentieth century and start stuffing yourself with a deep-pan quattro stagione, there's no limit to what could happen. So just sit down and shut up, okay?'

There was complete silence.

'I said okay, Trevor?'

'I'm not Trevor, I'm Nick.'

'Where's Trevor, then?'

'How the h.e.l.l am I supposed to know that, Louise? There's no light in here.'

'Actually, I'm not Louise, I'm Angela. Who the h.e.l.l is Louise, anyway?'

Meanwhile, the second escape capsule roared away across the indescribable magnitude of Nothing, piloted by a ninetyseven-year-old child, straight as an arrow towards where he remembered the best pizza restaurant in the world used to be. The problem was that it wasn't open yet; it wouldn't be open for seventy years.

There was complete silence, except for the unicorn. It raised its head, saw the maiden of unspotted virtue, blushed, and said 'G'day' awkwardly, and started chewing the cud ferociously.

Then, very slowly, Lamorak reached out for Pertelope's pack, took out the sponge bag and found the oil of cloves; then he drank it, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and smiled.

'h.e.l.lo there,' he said.

'Actually, Lammo,' Pertelope hissed, 'you're not supposed to drink it, you're supposed to-'

'Shut up, Per, I know what I'm doing.' Lamorak snood up, brushed dust off his trouser-knees and walked up to the maiden of unspotted virtue.

'Swap,' he said. 'My unicorn for your ap.r.o.n. How about The maiden of unspotted virtue stared at him. 'Have you gone out of your tiny mind?' she said.

Lamorak raised an eyebrow. 'I'm sorry,' he said, 'I don't quite follow. Straight swap. You get your award for best nature programme, I get the ap.r.o.n, everybody's happy. Where's the problem in that?'

There are many cold places on earth, but few of them are as cold as two feet away from the maiden's eyes. 'Listen, whoever you are,' she said. 'I'm trying to make a serious film here. If I go home and tell my producer I've got ten minutes' footage of live unicorns in the can, I'm going to spend the rest of my career filming the weather forecast. Now will you please both go away? You're frightening the kangaroos.'

For perhaps the first time ever, Lamorak was at a slight loss for words. After considerable effort, he managed to say, 'But it's a unicorn.' The maiden of unspotted virtue sighed.

'Buster,' she said. 'I don't care if it's a performing woolly mammoth. I have my credibility as a serious wildlife presenter to think of. Understood?'