Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

Behind me, the Quarkbeast yawned and scratched his ear with a hind leg. His effortless nonchalance in the face of their threat spoke volumes. He could have killed them all without even breaking a sweat, but sometimes wielding awesome levels of power is all about not wielding it at all.

‘So,’ I said, deftly returning Exhorbitus to the scabbard on my back. ‘How are you doing with the task the Princess set you?’

Sir Matt looked at me coldly.

‘You will beg my forgiveness before the weekend is out, Dragon-Girl. Mark my words: I will marry the Princess, and I will be king.’

‘The Princess will never marry you,’ I said, ‘no matter how many buildings you jump off.’

‘We’ll see.’

And he took the telephone back off the valet, and carried on talking.

‘I’m now very interested,’ I heard him say as I walked away. ‘How soon can you find your way down here?’

I carried on up the road, unworried about Grifflon’s threats or intimidation. I’d weathered them before.

I took a right into Market Street with its imposing domed-roof bank building and the bronze statue of John Nettles, Cornwall’s most famous son. I knew the statue was here, but I’d not wanted to view it merely with a disrespectful glance so had avoided the main street while driving around town over the past week. No, I wanted to gaze upon it at my leisure, as I could now. The thing is, it wasn’t just his performance as Jim Bergerac in Bergerac that so impressed us at the orphanage, but that he had been adopted at birth, and that sort of made him one of us. Elsie Hopkins at the orphanage once claimed to have seen Mr Nettles in the Aldi in Hereford, but she often told tall stories, so we didn’t think it was true. Tiger thought it might actually have been Christopher Timothy, 33 33 Another TV star that you might not have heard of. which was more likely as he had been performing his one-man show in the Courtyard Theatre; it was based on the life of Jeb Malick, the adventurer who not only successfully navigated the River Wye in a barrel, but also invented the trampoline.

I sat on a handy bench in front of the Nettles statue and pulled from my pocket the photograph of my parents I always kept with me. Mum and Dad were smiling brightly in front of a shiny new landship. They were wearing overalls with the shoulder chevrons of engine room technicians first and second class of the third division of the Fourth Armoured Brigade. They fought in the third Troll War – that’s two before the current one – and had been in the first wave of the attack.

Actually, it wasn’t their picture at all – just a random one pulled from the pages of Picture Post . Aside from the note left for me in the Volkswagen which said I was a Troll War war orphan, there was no concrete evidence that I was anything of the sort.

I dug a Pollyanna Stone out of my pocket, a simple device which caused the holder to see what they wanted to see. It was lick-to-activate, spelled by Bartelby the Mildly Creepy in the fifteenth century. I licked the stone and the saliva bubbled and fizzed as the enzymes from my mouth reacted with the five-hundred-year-old spell. In an instant Mum and Dad were standing there in front of me.

‘Hello, sweetie,’ said the person I imagined might be my father. He was dressed exactly the same as he was in the photograph, but because of the HENRY in black and white and a little flickery. My similarly imagined mother was standing behind him, holding a spanner. Both had streaks of oil on their faces, and I could sense a faint odour of hot oil and diesel exhaust.

‘Look at you!’ beamed my mother, sitting down next to me. ‘All sort of warrior-like. Did you find the Eye of Zoltar?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but the Trolls invaded in our absence and now I’m not only responsible for a ramshackle army of resistance, but am chief adviser to the Queen, a position that might unite the Kingdoms once and for all – supposing we live that long.’

‘You’ve always delivered before,’ said my father kindly. He was always kind, but this was how I wanted him to be, so it was how the magic made him appear. I looked down at the Pollyanna Stone, where my saliva was bubbling on the surface. They’d only be here for another ten seconds or so.

‘I often wonder,’ I said, ‘how different my life would have turned out had I been indentured to a hotel or fast-food outlet instead of a House of Enchantment.’

My mother put her translucent hand on mine.

‘Where you are now is where you were always going to be,’ she said. ‘You were always going to be the Last Dragonslayer and nothing would have altered it. This is your destiny, Jenny, and for better or worse, you will fulfil it.’

‘The Mighty Shandar is the most powerful wizard yet known,’ I said, ‘and planned much of this in advance. It seems likely he removed the Dragons for precisely the same reason he removed Zambini – so nothing could ever stand in his way.’

‘ You stand in his way,’ said Dad, ‘so he’s not that powerful. He can’t kill you, vanish you, turn you to stone or even teleport you to the Antarctic. You control your own destiny, but you also control his. Where you go, so must he.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Jenny,’ said my mother, ‘all that you have ever done is leading to a single decision point where everything hangs in the balance and nothing will ever be the same again. A moment where only you can make things right, where only you can make the difference that matters.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. You’re different and you’ve always known that.’

She was right. I’d always felt it. At the orphanage I’d been respected rather than popular. Bullies never troubled me. Strange by name, strange by nature, I’d heard them say.

‘Tell me what will happen,’ I said, ‘tell me what I should do.’

They smiled at me.

‘We’re not real,’ said my mother, ‘we’re only saying what you want to hear. Our knowledge outside of this is limited.’

I looked again at the Pollyanna Stone as the last of my saliva boiled away, and by the time I looked up, they had gone and I was left staring at the empty space.

‘Quark,’ said the Quarkbeast, who was sitting on my foot, something he often did, I think because he found it comforting.

‘What do you think, boy?’ I asked, folding up the photo of my parents and returning it to my pocket with the Pollyanna Stone.

‘Quark,’ he said again.

‘I know,’ I replied, tickling him behind the ear, ‘uncertain times.’

‘Miss Strange?’

I turned. It was the representatives of the fencers, marksmen and worriers. They had elected to come out and have some fish and chips instead of eating in the hotel.

‘Fancy a chip?’ asked the worrier. ‘I hope I haven’t overdone it on the salt.’

‘Thank you. Perfect,’ I said, not telling him that, yes, they did indeed have too much salt on them. I budged up on the bench so they could sit down.

‘What’s Christopher Timothy doing as a statue all the way down here?’ asked the Chief Fencer.

I decided not to correct her.

‘How many people do you have under your control?’ I asked instead. ‘All of you, like, in total?’

The number, it turned out, was eighteen hundred, more if the haberdashers wanted to help out.

‘That’s good,’ I said, as at least there was a command structure of sorts in place. ‘Were any of you in the military?’

‘I was,’ said the worrier, ‘but I’ve a bad feeling you’re going to give me something important to do and I would then fail utterly and bring dishonour on my family to the end of recorded history.’

‘That’s a worst-case scenario, right?’ I asked.