Grailblazers. Part 7

Silence. Bowed heads. Bedevere cleared his mouth of crumbs and continued.

'Precisely,' he said. 'So, just when we're all getting a bit slack and not really with it any more, what with Nentres going off like that and taking the . . . Anyway, who should turn up but young Bo, with this really quite exciting clue thing, and actually knowing what a Grail is, for Heaven's sake. You've got to admit, it gets you wondering. Well, it does me, anyway. Can't be coincidence.'

From the unwonted silence, Sir Bedevere deduced that his colleagues conceded he had a point. He continued briskly.

'What I'm trying to get at, chaps, is that, all right, Bo's as potty as they come, but so what? We've got the clue, we know what a Grail is, let's all jolly well go out and look for the blessed thing. And,' he added forcefully, 'I for one think the best way to go about it is the way Bo says, splitting up and getting all these socks and things. Must be right,' he said. 'That clue thing said so. Well?'

The knights looked at him shame-faced.

'But Bedders,' said Pertelope, almost pleading, 'he's barmy.'

'So was Napoleon,' Bedevere replied.

'No he wasn't.'

'Well, then,' Bedevere answered, 'Alexander the Great, then. Lots of great leaders are a bit funny in the head, wellknown fact. That's what makes them great. Not,' he added, 'that I'm saying Bo's great. All I'm saying is, we don't want to make a.s.ses of ourselves just because he's an a.s.s. That'd be silly, don't you think?'

Turquine growled. 'So he's let you have the van, has he?' he snarled contemptuously. 'Typical.'

Bedevere ignored him. 'Come on, chaps,' he said, 'let's vote on it. All those in favour.' Four hands, including his own. 'Against.' One hand. 'That's settled, then. Go on, Turkey, be a sport.'

'All right, then,' Turquine grumbled. 'Just don't blame me, that's all.'

Bedevere grinned. 'Certainly not,' he said, 'we can blame Bo. That,' he said, sagely, 'is what leaders are for.'

It was a ship.

Oh good, said Danny Bennett to himself, now I won't have to die after all. What a relief that is.

For the last six days, ever since the pirate-radio ship Imelda Marcos. .h.i.t an iceberg and sank, Danny had been wondering whether, career-wise, his sideways move from BBC television into commercial radio had been entirely sensible. On the one hand, he told himself, as he lay on his back in the inflatable dinghy and stared at the sun, I had my own show, complete editorial freedom, unlimited expense account and the chance to develop a whole new approach to radio drama; on the other hand, Bush House didn't start shipping water the moment anything hit it.

In the last few panic-stricken minutes of the ship's life, Danny had been so busy choosing his eight gramophone records that the rest of the crew got fed up waiting for him and shoved off with the lifeboat. To make things worse, there was no portable record player. They don't make them any more, apparently.

And now, just as he was reproaching himself for neglecting to pack any food and water, here was a ship sailing directly towards him. How rea.s.suring, Danny muttered to himself, as he propped his emaciated body up on one elbow and waved feebly. Somebody up there must like me.

The ship drew closer, and a head appeared over the side. 'Ahoy!' it shouted. 'Excuse me, but am I all right for the International Date Line? There hasn't been a signpost or anything for simply ages.'

'Help,' Danny replied.

'Sorry?'

'I said help.'

The head was female, thirtyish, blonde, nice eyes. 'Fair enough,' it said. 'Would you like to buy some unit trusts?'

Danny made a peculiar noise at the back of his throat; imagine the sound of a bathful of mercury emptying away down the plughole, and you might get some idea.

'Unit trusts,' the head repeated. 'It's a very simple idea, really. You pay a capital sum to the fund managers, and they invest your money in a wide range of quoted equities, which . . .'

'Yes,' Danny croaked, 'I do know what unit trusts are, thank you very much. Have you got any water?'

The head looked round at the infinite vastness of the sea. 'I think there's plenty for everyone,' it said. 'Why?'

'Freshwater,' Danny said. 'Drinking water.'

'Oh, that sort. Perrier, stuff like that?'

'It'd do.'

'Sorry, we're right out, all we have is gin. If you're not interested in unit trusts, how about a personal equity plan? There are several really excellent products available at the moment which I would unhesitatingly recommend. For instance . . .'

'All right,' Danny said, dragging breath into his lungs, 'food. I haven't eaten for three days.'

'Oh.' The head frowned. 'Does that mean you haven't got any money? Because if you don't, I can't see that there's a great deal of point in continuing with this discussion, do you?'

Danny cackled wildly. 'I've got plenty of money,' he said. 'I've got two years' back pay from Radio Imelda, for a start. What I haven't got is-'

'A flexible pension scheme tailored to your needs and aspirations, I'll be bound,' interrupted the head, nodding. 'Now I think I can help you there, because it so happens that I'm an agent for Lyonesse Equitable Life, and there's one particular package . . .'

'Can you eat it?'

The head emitted a silvery laugh. 'Alternatively,' it went on, 'I could do you a very nice index-linked Lyonesse Provident Flexible Annuity Bond, which would provide access to capital as well as a guaranteed rate of income, paid monthly, with a very compet.i.tive tax position. Interested?'

Danny shook his head. 'Maybe you're missing the point here,' he said. 'Here I am, cast adrift in an open boat, dying of hunger and thirst..

'Ah,' said the head, 'got you. What you're really concerned about here is some really constructive inheritance tax planning, possibly involving the creation of an offsh.o.r.e trust. Silly of me not to have realised that before.'

'But I don't want to die,' Danny screamed. I-'

'Well,' said the head patiently, 'in that case we can adapt the package to allow maximum flexibility by making the fullest possible use of the annual exempt giftable sum. I wish you'd said, by the way. I hate to rush you, but time is money, you know. Now...'

Danny sank back into the dinghy and groaned. The head peered back over the rail at him.

'h.e.l.lo?' it said. 'Is that a deal, then?'

'Go away.'

'Pardon?'

'I said go away. Bog off. Sink.'

'I don't think I quite heard you. You do want the pension policy, don't you?'

'No.'

The head looked shocked. 'You don't?'

'No.'

'Really?'

'Really.'

'Well!' The head wrinkled its brows. 'Suit yourself, then. Look, if you change your mind, you can always fax us on 0553 . . .'

Danny rolled over on his face and started to scream; he was still screaming nine hours later, when he was picked up by the captain of an oil tanker. When he told the captain of the tanker about his experiences with the strange ship, the captain nodded grimly.

'I know,' he said, and shuddered. 'I've seen it myself. The Flying Channel-Islander, we call it.'

Danny was half-dead from dehydration and exposure, but he was still a journalist, and a story is a story. 'Tell me about it,' he said.

'It's horrible,' the captain replied, crossing himself. 'Really terrible things happen to people who sight her.' He paused, his eyes closed. 'Terrible things,' he repeated.

'Such as?'

'Well,' the captain replied, 'some of them die, some of them go mad, some of them live perfectly normally for five or six years and then run amok with machetes. Some simply vanish. Some of them...'

'Yes?'

'Some of them,' said the captain grimly, 'even go and buy the insurance.'

Chapter 3.

Between the town of Giles, to the north of the Tomkinson Range, and Forrest in the Nullarbor Plain, lies the Great Victoria Desert. It is hot, arid, desolate and merciless; and whatever the Creator had in mind when He made it that way, it most certainly wasn't t human beings.

It's a really awful place to be if you've got toothache.

'I've got some oil of cloves in my rucksack,' said Sir Pertelope. 'Supposed to be very good, oil of cloves. Never seemed to do me any good, mind you, but maybe I'm just over-sensitive to pain.'

'Mmmm,' replied his companion.

'There's some aspirin in the first-aid kit, of course,' Pertelope went on, 'but I wouldn't recommend that, because it's water-soluble, and since we've run out of water. . .'

'Mmmm.'

'Needless to say,' Pertelope continued helpfully, 'if we found some water it'd be a different matter altogether. But somehow...' He looked up briefly into the steel-blue sky and then turned his head quickly away. 'Now my aunt Beatrice used to say that sucking a pebble-'

'Shut up,' said Sir Lamorak.

Offended, Pertelope shifted his rucksack on his shoulders and pointedly walked a few yards to the east. Then he stopped.

'If that's north,' he said, pointing due south, 'then England is seventeen thousand miles away over that big jutting rock over there. Fancy that,' he added. He stood for a moment in contemplation; then he shrugged and started to walk; for the record, due west.

They were trying to get to Sydney.

For two men who had alighted from an airliner in Brisbane several months before, this shouldn't have been too great a problem. True, neither of them had been to Australia before, but they had taken the precaution of buying railway tickets, advance-booking their hotels and securing copies of What's On In Sydney before leaving England. Their problems had started at Brisbane Airport, when Pertelope had left the little bag containing all the paperwork behind on the airport bus.

No problem, Pertelope had explained. All we have to do is. .h.i.tch a lift. The Australians are a notoriously friendly, hospitable people who take pleasure in helping travellers in distress.

Sixteen hours along the road, they had indeed managed to hitch a ride on a truckful of newly slaughtered carcases as far as St George, where the lorry driver had finally thrown them forcibly from the cab after Pertelope had insisted on singing Vos QuidAdmiramini in his usual nasal drone. After a short pause to regroup and eat the last of the bag of mint imperials that Lamorak had bought at Heathrow, they had set out to walk as far as Dirranbandi. It's hard to explain concisely how they came to be thirteen hundred miles off course; the best that can be done without embarking on a whole new book is to explain that in the back of Sir Pertelope's National Trust Diary was a map of the world; and that although Pertelope had heard about Columbus and the curvature of the earth, he had never been entirely convinced. The central premise of his navigational theory, therefore, was that the centre of the world lay at Jerusalem, and that maps had to be interpreted accordingly.

Pertelope looked at his watch. 'What do you say to stopping here for lunch?' he asked. 'We could sit under that rock over there. It's got a lovely view out over the, er, desert.'

Although Death had been trailing them pretty closely every step of the way, in the manner of a large fat pigeon outside a pavement cafe, the nearest he had come to cutting two more notches in his scythe handle had been fifty miles west of the Macgregor Range, where Pertelope had inadvertently knocked over the rusty beer-can containing the last of their water while doing his morning exercises. They had wandered round in circles for two days and collapsed; but they were found by a parry of wandering aborigines, whom Lamorak was able to persuade that his library ticket was in fact an American Express card, and who had sold them a gallon of water and six dried lizards in return, as it turned out, for the right to borrow three fiction and three non-fiction t.i.tles every week from the Stirchley Public Library in perpetuity. From then on, it had simply been a matter of lurching from one lastminute borehole to another, and sneaking up very quietly indeed on unsuspecting snakes.

Pertelope had, however, refused to harm the Paramatta horned python they'd finally caught after a six-hour scramble among the rocks of Mount Woodroffe, pointing out that it was an endangered species. It was shortly afterwards that Lamorak's upper left molar started to hurt.

'Now then, let's see,' said Pertelope. 'There's ...' He unslung his rucksack and started to go through its contents (three clean shirts, three changes of underwear, a copy of What's On In Sydney with a bookmark stuck in to mark the details of the New Orleans Jazz Festival, a Swiss Army knife with six broken blades, an electric razor, a pair of trousers, a tennis racket, a mouth organ, two flannels, a towel, Germolene, oil of cloves, a packet of plasters, a bottle of dandruff shampoo, entero-vioform tablets, nail scissors, a quant.i.ty of ladies clothing . . . .

'What have you got in your pack, Lammo?' Pertelope enquired. 'I seem to be fresh out.'

Lamorak unshipped his head from his hands, said, 'Nothing,' and put it back.

'Oh.' Pertelope frowned and scratched his head. 'That's awkward,' he added. 'I suppose we'll have to look for roots and berries and things.' He looked round at the baked, sterile earth. The last time anything had grown in it had been approximately two million years before the first warmblooded mammals evolved. The experiment had failed and had not been repeated.

'Pertelope.'

Sir Pertelope looked up. 'Yes?' he asked.

'There's always cannibalism, you know.'

Pertelope blinked. 'Cannibalism?' he repeated.

'That's right,' said his companion calmly. 'You know, eating human flesh. It used to be quite popular at one time.'

Pertelope thought for a moment, and then shook his head.

'I wouldn't dream of it,' he replied firmly. 'Not after all we've been through together. You'd stick in my throat, so to speak.'

Lamorak stood up. 'That's all right,' he said quietly. 'I quite understand. Now then, if you keep absolutely still it won't hurt a bit.'

A small cog dropped into place in Pertelope's brain. 'Hold on,' he said. 'A joke's a joke, but let's not get silly. I mean, people can get hurt larking about, and . . .'

Lamorak smiled, and lunged at him with a small stone. Hunger, thirst and toothache had taken quite a lot out of him, but he only missed by inches. He landed in the dust, swore and raised himself painfully from the ground.

'Lizards,' Pertelope was saying. 'I'm sure there're plenty of lizards about, if only we knew what we were supposed to be looking for. Trouble is, the little so-and-sos are masters of camouflage. Would you believe it, there's one species of lizard in the New Hebrides...'

He leant sideways, and the haymaking blow Lamorak had aimed at him wasted its force in the dry air.