Grailblazers. Part 3

'Now what is it?' said Boamund testily.

Toenail turned slowly round in the saddle and leant towards Boamund until their visors touched.

'Look,' he said, 'I know you're a knight and I'm only a dwarf, and you've got a Destiny and know all about the old technology and your uncle had some sort of drag-racer that could do the ton in four seconds flat, but if you pull a stunt like that ever again, I'm going to take that sword of yours and shove it right up where the sun never shines, all right?'

Three foot seven of shattered dreams and injured pride can be very persuasive sometimes, and Boamund shrugged. 'Please yourself,' he said. 'I was just trying to help.'

'Then don't.' Toenail jumped on the kickstart, swore, tried again and eased the bike out into the slow lane.

In the course of the next fifty miles he was overtaken by three lorries, two T -registration Mini Clubmen, a moped and a Long Vehicle with a police escort transporting what looked like a pre-fab bridge; but he didn't mind.

'If,' as he explained to Boamund when the latter implored him to try going a bit faster, 'G.o.d had intended us to travel quickly and effortlessly from one place to another, He wouldn't have given us the internal combustion engine.'

As far as Boamund could see, there was no answer to that.

'Where are we going?' Boamund asked.

Toenail took his left hand off the bars and pointed.

'Yes,' Boamund said, 'I can read. But what does it mean?'

This puzzled Toenail; to him, the words 'Service Station' were self-explanatory. He made no effort to explain, and drove into the car park.

'I mean,' Boamund said, taking off his helmet and shaking his head, 'service is what you owe to your liege lord, and a station is a military outpost. Is this where knights come to bow down before their lords and beg favours of them?'

Toenail thought of the palaver he'd been through the last time he tried to order sausage, fried bread, baked beans and toast without the fried egg, and replied, 'Yes, sort of. You hungry?'

'Now you mention it,' Boamund replied, 'yes. All I've had in the last fifteen hundred-odd years is a cup of poisoned milk and a biscuit.'

'Not poisoned,' Toenail pointed out, 'drugged. If it'd been poisoned you wouldn't be here.'

'Must just have been wishful thinking, then.'

Toenail took great pains to explain the system. 'You get your tray,' he said, 'and you stand in line while they serve the people in front of you, and then you ask the girl behind the counter for what you want. Food-wise,' he added. 'And then she puts it on your tray and you take it up to the cash desk. Got that?'

Boamund nodded. 'And then what?' he asked.

'Then we sit down and eat,' Toenail said.

'Where?'

Toenail looked up at him. 'You what?'

'Where do we sit?' Boamund repeated. 'I mean, I don't want to make a fool of myself by sitting in a dishonourable seat.'

Jesus flaming Christ, thought Toenail to himself, why didn't I just bring sandwiches? 'You sit wherever you like,' he said. 'It's a service station, not the Lord Mayor's Banquet.'

'What's a-?'

'Shut up.'

To do him credit, Boamund waited very patiently in the queue. He didn't push or shove or challenge any of the lorry drivers to a duel if they trod on his foot. Toenail's stomach began to unclench slightly.

'Next,' said the woman on the Hot Specials counter. Toenail asked for steak and kidney pudding and was about to move on when he heard Boamund's voice saying: 'I'll have roast swan stuffed with quails, boar's chine in honey, venison black pudding, three partridges done rare and a quart of Rhenish. Please,' he added.

The girl looked at him.

'I said,' Boamund repeated, 'I'll have roast swan stuffed with . . .'

One of the few advantages of being a dwarf is that you can walk away from situations like these without anybody noticing, if necessary by ducking down between people's legs. Very carefully, so as not to spill his gravy, Toenail started to walk...

'Toenail!'

He stopped and sighed. Behind Boamund, quite a few people were beginning to get impatient.

'Toenail,' Boamund was saying, 'you told me to ask the girl behind the counter for what I wanted to eat, and she's saying all I can have is something called la.s.sania.'

'You'll like it,' Toenail croaked. 'They do a very good lasagna here.'

Boamund shook his head. 'Listen,' he said to the girl, whose face was doing what concrete does, only quicker, 'I don't want this yellow muck, right, I want roast swan stuffed with quails...'

The girl said something to Boamund, and the dwarf, whose genes were full of useful information about the habits of insulted knights, instinctively dropped his tray and curled up into a ball on the floor.

But Boamund just said, 'Suit yourself then, I'll get it myself,' muttered something or other under his breath, and started to walk away. Against his better judgement, Toenail opened an eye and looked up.

Boamund was still holding his tray. It contained a roast swan, a boar's chine in honey, some peculiar-looking slices of black pudding, three small roast fowl and a large pewter jug.

'Here,' said the girl, 'that's not allowed.'

Boamund stood very still for a moment. 'Sorry?' he said.

'Eating your own food's not allowed,' said the girl.

Toenail felt a boot digging into his ribs. He tried ignoring it.

'Toenail, I don't understand this at all. First they don't have any proper food, only la.s.sania, and now she says I'm not allowed to eat my food. Does that mean we all have to swap trays or something?'

Toenail stood up. 'Come on,' he said, 'we're leaving. Quick.'

'But . . .'

'Come on!'

Toenail grabbed Boamund by the sleeve and started to drag him doorwards. Behind them somebody shouted, 'Hey! Those two haven't paid!'

Boamund stopped dead, and try as he might Toenail couldn't induce him to move. 'What did you say?' Boamund enquired.

'You haven't paid for that.'

'But I didn't get it from you,' Boamund was saying, very patiently, very reasonably. 'Your people didn't have anything I wanted so I got something for myself.'

Toenail betted himself that he knew what was coming next. 'You're not allowed,' said the voice, 'to eat your own food in here.' Oh good, said Toenail to his feet, I won.

'Look.'

'No,' said the voice, 'you look.'

Honour, its cultivation and preservation, are at the very root of chivalry. It is thus highly unwise to say something like, 'No, you look,' to a knight, especially if he's hungry and confused. Although Toenail had deliberately averted his head, on the slightly irrational grounds that anything he didn't see he couldn't be blamed for, he didn't need eyes to work out what happened next. The sound of an a.s.sistant cafeteria manager being hit with a trayful of roast swan is eloquently self-explanatory.

From under his table, Toenail had a very good view of one section of the fight - roughly from the feet of the partic.i.p.ants as far as their knees - and as far as he was concerned that was quite enough for him, thank you very much. You had to say this for the lad, fifteen hundred years asleep on a mountain, you'd think he'd be out of practice, but not a bit of it.

After a while, Toenail could only see one pair of feet, and they were wearing the pair of motorcycle boots he'd bought specially, after measuring the sleeping knight's feet about a week ago. How long ago that seemed!

'Toenail!'

'Yes?' said the dwarf.

'You're not particularly hungry, are you?'

Toenail put his head out. 'Not really,' he said. 'Let's have something when we get there, shall we?'

'Good idea,' Boamund replied. He wiped gravy off his face and grinned sheepishly.

They got to the bike and got it started about four seconds before the police arrived. Fortunately, the police had omitted to bring helicopters with them, so when the bike suddenly lifted off the ground and roared away in the direction of Birmingham there wasn't very much they could do about it, except take its number and arrest a couple of students on a Honda 125 for having a defective brake light.

Chapter 2.

'Yes,' Toenail replied.

'Are you sure?' Boamund said. 'Give me that street map a second.'

Toenail did so, and Boamund studied it for a while. 'Looks like you're right,' he said. 'It just doesn't look like any castle I've ever seen before, that's all.'

Toenail was with him there a hundred per cent. It looked far more like a small, rather unsavoury travel agent's office. Closed, too.

'Maybe it's round the back,' he suggested.

Boamund looked at him, 'I think you're missing the point rather,' he said. 'The thing about castles is . . .' He paused, trying to choose the right words. 'Well,' he said, 'you just don't get castles round the backs of things. It's not the way things are.'

'Maybe it is in Brownhills,' replied the dwarf. 'Have you ever been here before?'

'I don't know,' Boamund confessed. 'Things have changed a bit since my day.'

'Well,' said the dwarf, 'there you are, then. Maybe the fashions in castle architecture have changed too. The un.o.btrusive look, you know?'

Boamund frowned and got off the bike. It occurred to Toenail that this was probably one of the best opportunities he was going to get for quite some time to jump on the bike, gun the engine and get the h.e.l.l out of here before something really horrible happened to him; but he didn't, somehow. What he told himself was that the bike wouldn't start, and that knights took a dim view of attempted desertion. The truth of the matter was that his dwarfish genes wouldn't let him. Stand By Your Knight, the old dwarf song goes.

Boamund was knocking on the door. 'Anybody home?' he called.

Silence. Boamund tried again, with the air of a man who knows that the proper way to do this would be to sound a slug-horn, if only he had such a thing about his person. Still nothing.

'It must be the wrong place,' Toenail said. 'Look, let's just go away somewhere and think it over, shall we?'

Boamund shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'I think this is the right place after all. Look.'

He pointed at something, and Toenail stood on tiptoe and looked. He could see nothing. He said so.

'There,' Boamund said, 'can't you see, on the doorframe, very faint but it's there, definitely.'

Toenail squinted. There was, he had to admit, the faintest possible pattern or design, crudely scratched on the paintwork. He stared at it for a while, until his imagination got him thinking that it could be mistaken for a bunch of roses, their petals intertwined. 'Oh yes,' he said. 'What's that, then?'

'It's a waymark,' Boamund replied. 'Part of the Old High Symbolism. Must mean that there are knights here.'

'Is that what it means, then?' Toenail demanded.

'Strictly speaking, no,' Boamund replied. 'What it actually means is, "No insurance salesmen or Jehovah's Witnesses; beware of the dog." But reading between the lines . . . Here, what's this?'

'Another one?'

'Maybe,' Boamund muttered. 'Let's have a look.' He rubbed away a dried-on pigeon dropping, scrutinised the doorpost carefully and then chuckled to himself. 'It's definitely a waymark,' he said. 'Look.'

'This time,' Toenail said, 'I'm going to have to take your word for it.'

'It's the ancient character designed to let bailiffs know that you've moved,' Boamund observed. 'We call it the Great SelfDefeating Pentagram. This is the right place, I reckon.' He thumped on the door so hard that Toenail reckoned he could feel it wince, and then called out very loudly in what Toenail would ordinarily have guessed was Bulgarian.

Several seconds of complete silence; and then a window above their heads ground open.

'We're closed,' said the voice. 'Go away.'

Boamund was staring, open-mouthed. 'Bedders!' he yelled out joyfully, and waved. 'Bedders, it's me.'

Toenail looked up at the man in the window; a roundfaced, bald head with a big red nose. 'Bo?' it replied, and its tone of voice implied that this was better than pink elephants or spiders climbing the wallpaper, but still uncalled for. 'It can't be.'

'Bedders!' Boamund repeated rapturously. 'Come and open this door before I kick it in!'

This, Toenail surmised, was entirely consistent with what he knew of the way knights talked to each other. Apparently, under the laws of chivalry, the way you expressed warm sentiments of friendship and goodwill to another knight was to challenge him to put on all his armour, be knocked off his horse, and get his head bashed in with a fifteen-pound mace.

'You touch that door,' the head replied, 'and I'll break both your legs.' An expert on courtly repartee would immediately have recognised this as being roughly equivalent to our, 'George, you old b.a.s.t.a.r.d, how the devil are you!', but Toenail decided to hide behind the bike, just in case.

'You and whose army, you drunken ponce?' Boamund replied tenderly. The head grinned.