Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

There was more for me to do. D’Argento had been right: my destiny, like hers, was inextricably linked with Shandar’s.

I opened the bootlid of my Beetle, pulled out the dipstick, cleaned it, put it back in, then looked at it again. The oil was clean and perfect and filled exactly to the line. It had been the same since I’d started work at Zambini Towers, soon after leaving the orphanage. The tyres had always remained the same pressures, too, and never wore out. Tiger said it was because I was still running cross-plys over radial tyres, 31 31 It’s not important. This is just Jenny distracting herself with the minutiae of driving fifty-year-old cars. but I had a better idea: secretly, the sorcerers at Zambini Towers had been helping me out with a few simple car maintenance spells as they knew I earned almost nothing. Although I did still have to put fuel in the car, it never returned less than a hundred miles to the gallon – an impossible feat.

I busied myself thus, attempting to hide from the serious by undertaking the banal. I kept a dustpan in the boot and swept up the small bits of twisted metal left by the Quarkbeast in the footwells. He would insist on chewing metal when riding in the car, no matter how many times I asked him not to. I think he was a nervous passenger.

Tiger walked up.

‘Any news from Feldspar?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. The Princess wanted me to come and check on you.’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, which is what people who aren’t fine always say. ‘I’m going to wander up into town. If you need me, come up and find me.’

He left and I wandered out of the car park and up towards the main part of the town, absently staring into store windows as I went. There was a shop selling spares for the many steam engines that still pumped water out of the mine workings in the area, and another which sold tourist trinkets made out of tin and fossilised scones. There was even a museum dedicated to Richard Trevithick, 32 32 An early pioneer of steam engineering, both of pit pumps and locomotives. and a pasty shop that boasted proudly that it held the record for the largest pasty in the world, a monster that tipped the scales at almost six tons, and looked like a beached whale that had overindulged in a tanning booth.

I reached Chapel Street, then spotted a familiar figure making a call from a telephone box outside the Co-Op. It was Sir Matt Grifflon, and close by were his small group of hangers-on, which included the shabby curate in the oversized bishop’s hat. The minstrels were singing what sounded like the Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner Song, but had changed the words to something about how Sir Matt ‘married the frumpy Princess and made the Kingdoms a better place by his wise and not-at-all corrupt leadership’, but they soon stopped when they saw me.

‘Everything okay?’ I asked them.

They all looked shifty, then pushed the ornamental hermit out in front to quote some more of his meaningless aphorisms, presumably to confuse/impress me.

‘Complexity,’ he said in a grand tone, ‘is the second cousin of needfulness.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what that means,’ I told him, ‘and I strongly suspect that you don’t either.’

‘Oh,’ he said, then, in an equally grand and expansive manner: ‘Why dig a hole in the garden, when potatoes grow wild in Finland?’

‘Nope,’ I said, ‘that’s actually even more pointless and unintelligible.’

‘Damn,’ said the ornamental hermit, ‘how about: “Every journey starts with the first step”?’

‘Better,’ I said, ‘but still so hopelessly open ended as to be utterly meaningless.’

‘Hello, Jessica,’ said Sir Matt, suddenly noticing me and stepping out of the phone box, while indicating for one of his valets to take the receiver. ‘Come to apologise, have you?’

‘Not even close,’ I said, ‘and it’s Jennifer .’

‘Same thing. Look, you and I should come to an agreement of some sort. I will be King of the Greater Kingdoms soon, and it makes sense for you to back me up on this, what with having the ear of the Dragons and Head Mystician and stuff. Just advise the little princess that I’m the one for her, get her to cancel the whole silly jumping off a building lark, and there could be a little something in it for you.’

‘That’s very generous,’ I said sarcastically. ‘What were you thinking of? A lounge suite? A set of steak knives?’

‘No,’ he said, blinking twice, ‘I was thinking more along the lines of giving you … Wales.’

‘Wales?’

Yes, it’s a small country to the west of here about the size of … Wales. How about it?’

‘Wales is about the size of Wales?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it exactly the size of Wales?’

Sir Matt Grifflon looked at his retinue for guidance; they all nodded their heads vigorously.

‘As you said,’ he agreed. ‘Do we have a deal?’

‘No.’

‘Think carefully, Juliet, these are uncertain and volatile times, when pointlessly stubborn servants of the Crown might be found severed in two lengthwise. That sort of thing happens in Penzance all the time – no one would ever ask any questions.’

‘I’m not so sure that it does. And it’s Jennifer.’

I grasped the hilt of Exhorbitus as I saw Sir Matt’s hand move towards his own sword. I felt the power of the sword feed into me. I only had to think the sword in front of me, and there it was. Exhorbitus had the power to change thought instantaneously to action.

‘That was really … quite fast,’ said Sir Matt, who had only been able to grasp the hilt of his own sword in the time I had drawn my own, ‘but I am fifteen people and you are one.’

‘Fourteen,’ said a voice at the back. ‘Jerry’s gone shopping.’

‘Yes, okay, fourteen. But still enough to defeat you, given that you are small and girly and weak looking to boot.’

His bodyguards, I noticed, as they took a step towards me, were not just shiftless hangers-on, but armed with swords and daggers and eager to back their leader up. There was a wiry one at the front with wide-spaced eyes who looked specifically like trouble – he didn’t seem to blink much and had a dangerously indifferent look about him.

‘I am not a violent person,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘but I will kill anyone who tries to kill me, or harms anyone I am sworn to protect.’

‘Quark,’ said the Quarkbeast in agreement; he was sitting just behind me and licking his own bottom nonchalantly – it was clearly intentional: he wanted to demonstrate his contempt for them all. He knew I had this, and would only intervene if he thought I was in danger.

And I wasn’t. Not even the slightest bit.

‘So who’s first?’ I asked.

The indifferent-looking one with the wide-spaced eyes didn’t move, but one of the minstrels did. Exhorbitus and I moved again in a harmonious flash of light and steel. The minstrel stopped, shocked at my speed. He then nervously checked his own body to see whether there was a part of himself no longer attached. I could have sliced off his belt buckle and seen his trousers fall to the floor, but I wanted a more arresting demonstration of my power. After a two-second pause, the top of the iron post box next to me gently slid off and fell to the ground with an angry clang. Exhorbitus could cut through cast iron as though it were tissue paper. If I had chosen, I could have done the same to them, and they knew it. Their swords were cautiously replaced, and Sir Matt took his hand off the hilt of his. The one with wide-spaced eyes was the last to relax his grip, and I made a mental note: this one would fight not caring if he won or lost – the most dangerous of them all.