Jasper Fforde - The Great Troll War

Today’s post-breakfast visit to the Button Trench was to ensure that it was holding firm – and to welcome any human stragglers who had crossed under cover of darkness.

‘Badger’s paws are hideously out of fashion,’ said the Troll, whose ears, although only small holes in his head, made for surprisingly good hearing. ‘We prefer a garnish of week-old goat entrails.’

‘Two weeks,’ said his wife, who was also on guard duty at the Button Trench. ‘Goat entrails aren’t nearly putrid enough in a week.’

They stared at each other angrily and both went the colour of a radish, the veins in their temples standing out like tree-roots. A Troll’s temper is short and explosive and usually accompanied by extreme violence.

‘It’s warmer this far south,’ said the Princess, who always spoke her mind, even to Trolls. ‘You’re probably both right regarding goat putrefaction rates when seen as combination factors of temperature against time.’

This was likely, as all Trolls lived until recently in the far North of the Kingdoms where the weather is disposed towards the inclement. 2 2 Translation: very cold.

‘I can put it in a spreadsheet if you like,’ she added.

‘I like spreadsheets,’ said the Troll Wife thoughtfully; like her husband, she was quick to temper yet quick to lose it. ‘I have one that calculates the correct cooking rates for humans based on their Body Mass Index.’

‘Undercooked humans present numerous health hazards,’ explained the Troll Husband helpfully. ‘It’s a bit of a worry. Spending a day in bed after eating a dodgy human is rarely agreeable.’

‘It’s not a worry I share,’ said the Princess, ‘but if you’re going to eat us, why haven’t you done so?’

It was a pointlessly dangerous remark to make to a Troll, but the Princess was always forthright, even for a princess. She was the same age as me but we could not have been more different. While she grew up in a palace wanting for nothing and with forty rooms of her own, I was in an orphanage with nothing but my dignity and forty other girls in the same room. She had joined us on the quest 3 3 Technically speaking it wasn’t a quest at all but you’ll have to read The Eye of Zoltar to find out why. for the Eye of Zoltar because her parents, the King and Queen of Snodd, felt she was too horribly obnoxious to successfully lead the Kingdom if the need arose, and a slice of real-life experience would be good for her. Her mind was switched into the body of a lowly royal dog-mess clearer-upper to further her lesson in humility, and after several high-jeopardy adventures and a few interesting digressions into the knotty question of supply-side economics, the Princess had transformed from a hideously spoiled princess into a confident young woman of considerable courage. She was also, following the death of her parents at the hands of the invading Trolls, the rightful heir to the wealthy and influential Kingdom of Snodd on the Welsh Borders.

She was also now permanently residing within the royal dog-mess clearer-upper’s body, her own lost during the invasion – ringlets and dimples and royal birthmark and everything.

‘Once we find a way to cross that trench,’ said the Troll Husband, eyeing the glittering collection of buttons nervously, ‘we will definitely eat you.’

‘ Without the badger’s paws,’ added the Troll Wife, who must have felt the issue had not yet been resolved.

‘Right,’ said the Troll Husband.

The trench ran for nearly four and a half miles along the route of the railway line from Penzance in the south of Cornwall to Lelant Saltings in the north, just to the east of St Ives. The ditch was barely ten feet wide and only a foot deep – humans could wade across it with ease. But the Troll, whose cunning, appetite and violent ruthlessness made the worst despot of the Kingdoms look like little more than an enraged infant, 4 4 Coincidentally enough, the worst despot in the Kingdoms actually was an enraged infant. had several unaccountable fears: swimming, a certain shade of cerulean blue, and buttons. And that’s precisely what was protecting us now – millions and millions of buttons. They had been pulled from coats, shirts and blouses, or liberated from haberdasher’s shops throughout the Kingdoms, then carried in bags, buckets or wheelbarrows by those fleeing the Trolls and dumped in the trench dug wizidrically by Wizard Moobin, who had given everything to his last and greatest spell, the years piling on to his weary body as he sacrificed his remaining life-force to create a final line of defence against the invaders.

‘Where would you place a human on the tasty scale?’ the Troll Wife asked her Troll Husband.

‘Somewhere between stoat and seal pup,’ replied the husband thoughtfully, ‘but they’ve never been my snack of choice, to be honest. Too stringy past the age of twenty-six. Some say their tendency to escape can offer up good sport, but I just think it’s plain tiresome, myself.’

‘A good sauce is key,’ added the Troll Wife, ‘and we’d best get used to them – it’s about all we’ll be eating for the next ten years.’

And they both laughed, a soft, galumphing, you’re-so-trashed-as-a-species kind of laugh.

Magically digging the four-and-a-half-mile trench that now cut off Land’s End, St Ives and Penzance from the invading Trolls had been the easy part. Spreading the ‘bring every single button you can find to Cornwall’ message on the low-alpha-suggestive telepathic bandwidth was actually what drained Wizard Moobin’s power and ultimately took his life-force from him. The telepathic message was powerful enough to be heard by almost everyone in the Kingdoms, but only as a ‘a vague idea that should be put into action’, and only a small proportion responded. Luckily, the message was also picked up by magpies, who, as natural thieves, may have contributed at least a million buttons to the defences before falling, exhausted, from the skies.

It was a bold yet timely construction. The Button Trench kept the Trolls from crossing over into the last bastion of the UnUnited Kingdoms where lay encamped the free. The ones who had been the quickest to react to the threat, the ones who could run the fastest, the ones with a death-by-devouring promise on their heads, and those with specialist skills who had also been drawn here by a call on the same telepathic wavelength – specifically: expert fencers, keen-eyed marksmen and warriors.

‘Tell you what,’ said the Troll Husband, who had been staring at the Princess for some time and drooling in a truly unpleasant manner – great gobs of sticky saliva that fell from his upswept tusks like melted mozzarella, ‘hand over the scrawny one and we’ll guarantee that once we find a way across this trench, you’ – he was pointing at me – ‘will not be killed and eaten. You shall be spared . It is a promise.’

Oddly, the Troll would be as good as its word. Although murderous in nature and utterly dismissive of a human’s right to life, they could still barter effectively with the ultimate bargaining chip: they would promise to spare your life. It was a gesture that was particularly effective for negotiating the surrender of the UnUnited Kingdoms as they swept through the island.

Offer resistance? Be killed and eaten.

Bow to your new overlords and follow their every demand? Be spared.

Guaranteed .

‘How could they promise such a thing?’ asked the Princess, whose schoolwork had centred more around deportment, strategic tantrums and estimating a prince’s net worth and marriageability at a glance, rather than learning about the other inhabitants of our island.

‘They have several active strands of Hive Memory,’ said Tiger, knowing quite a bit about Trolls, as not learning which fork was which at a state banquet really freed up some time. ‘It’s thought that memories are shared by the same familial affiliation – and once shared, they effectively have the same memories. If you want all Trolls to have the same memory, you’d only have to share it with all the tribal affiliations, so it never takes long.’