The Great Troll War

The Troll

I walked out the back of the hotel and to the car park. I wasn’t annoyed because of what they said, I was annoyed because it was very likely true. I had felt the power channel through me when I held up Exhorbitus back in the Dragonlands the day I slayed the last Dragon, and it had felt as though every cell in my body was being pulled apart. Pain I would never want to feel again. But there had been something else, too – I felt that my purpose, my destiny, was not yet fulfilled.

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 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 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.

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 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.

‘Is there any other?’

‘From personal experience,’ I said, ‘things can and do come out all right. What rank were you?’

‘A second lieutenant in the Queendom of Mercia’s land army.’

‘Have you seen combat?’

‘I was in the catering corps, but it was still traumatic. Have you ever thought just how stressful it is making spaghetti and meatballs for six thousand soldiers? I forgot the cheese one evening and had to demote myself. Look, don’t you think Sir Matt Grifflon would be better suited to lead us all? I think I saw him just now in the Co-Op.’

‘No, we need someone we can trust,’ I said, ‘and I speak for the Queen when I say this: I promote you to General Worrier, commander of the resistance army. These two will be your second- and third-in-command: Major Worrier, and Private Worrier.’

‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ said the general.

‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘Besides, I appointed you in full recognition of the facts – so any failure of yours is a greater failure of mine. I promoted you; the responsibility is all mine.’

‘Oh,’ said General Worrier, pondering this for a moment.

‘Right,’ I said, ‘so I want you to all put your heads together and figure out who conceivably might be useful in a scrap. Shandar gave us two days and since we’re not doing a deal, we need everyone we can muster with whatever weapons we can find along the Button Trench at sunrise on Monday morning. Questions?’

‘What if we fail?’

I shrugged.

‘Shandar triumphs and we all get eaten, I guess. But that’s not going to happen. Let me know when you have set up some sort of command structure. Discipline and focus will be everything.’

They looked at one another, saluted smartly, gave me the remainder of their chips and hurried off.

I dawdled back down the hill soon after, and took a short cut through the rather lovely Morrab Gardens, full of rare shrubs, trees and perfectly manicured grass. As I was walking out of the garden’s exit near the Queens Hotel, the Quarkbeast said: ‘Quark.’

‘What is it?’

He was pointing at a small car: an Austin Mini. I think it was a Mark 1 estate version from the sixties as Kazam’s cook, Unstable Mabel, had one just like it. The car seemed to be moving slightly and snoring, but as I looked closer I could see that inside the car was a young female Troll, curled up on the rear seats, mouth open, fast asleep. The car was sagging on its suspension, and I think the roof actually bulged outwards when she turned over in her sleep.

I stared at her intently, feeling quite safe as, firstly, I had Exhorbitus and the Quarkbeast with me, and secondly, the Trolls were notoriously slow and jam-headed for at least half an hour after waking. In fact, Jimmy Nuttjob’s father, Timmy Nuttjob, toured with one of the captured Trolls in the 1950s, performing his ever-popular ‘putting my head in a Troll’s mouth’ act, a feat he could only perform within twenty minutes of the Troll waking. Sadly, one day at a Royal Command Performance, the pantomime horse act preceding him overran while performing their trademark ‘Dobbin Quickstep’, which brought Timmy Nuttjob’s career to a very swift end – and with no chance of an encore.

Intrigued, I examined the Troll minutely. She was not as big as most, and because of the small size of the car, had somehow managed to fold herself up in a manner that looked staggeringly uncomfortable. One arm was behind her head, the other was under her body, and she’d draped her legs over the front seats so her feet were pressed against the inside of the windscreen.

I felt conflicted. Conventional wisdom should have had me dragging the creature from the car and striking her head clean off her shoulders before she woke. True, Trolls would show us no mercy and had already murdered over two hundred thousand people, with many of those not eaten currently bottled in aspic,34 but it seemed wrong to kill them as a routine, no matter how indifferently barbarous they were. Trolls had been captured only twice before, and neither of them divulged a single piece of intelligence, and without fail took every opportunity to savage their captors.

I was just wondering whether there wasn’t some other way of handling this when I noticed that the Troll had something written with a Sharpie on the back of her hand. Even viewed upside down it made me stop and take notice, for I recognised the unmistakable cadence of Zambini’s handwriting in the elegantly lettered script. I wiped some dirt off the Mini’s window to read it.

Contact Jennifer Strange in Penzance and tell her everything. She will not harm you.

I could feel my heart beat faster. The Great Zambini popped out of non-existence every now and again, and never more than for a few minutes. I had to assume that he had met with this Troll, found a friend, had a few words, and then sent her off to find me.

I had to know more.

Still keeping a wary hand on Exhorbitus I slid the window open, and poked the Troll to wake it up. She groaned, farted and rolled over, and I poked her again.

‘Jenny?’ came Tiger’s voice from just behind me. ‘What are you doing?’

‘There’s a Troll in this Mini.’

‘Crumbs,’ said Tiger when he saw what I’d found. ‘How did she get across the Button Trench? No, wait, scrub that – how did she even get herself inside that Mini?’

I told him I had no idea, showed him what was written on the back of her hand, then asked Tiger why he had come to find me.

‘Just that lunch is ready,’ he said, ‘and it’s macaroni cheese.’

‘My favourite,’ muttered the Troll, lifting its eyelids a fraction to stare at us both with a sleepy expression.

‘Fetch an armed guard,’ I said. ‘Actually, make that several. Tell them to blindfold her, lead her to one of the hotel basements, then say that I, Jennifer Strange, will be along to see her just as soon as I can.’

‘I need to stay in the car,’ said the Troll in a sleepy voice.

‘Why?’

‘Wide open spaces don’t agree with me. Or with you, come to think of it.’

‘I don’t understand.’

She opened an eye fully and regarded me minutely.

‘It’s a Troll thing.’

I took a deep breath.

‘Okay,’ I said to Tiger, ‘have a guard drive our guest to the hotel garage and tell them to watch her like a hawk until I come and see her.’

‘Shall I tell them to use lethal force if she doesn’t comply?’

‘You know what?’ I said, staring thoughtfully at the massive creature. ‘If her favourite meal is macaroni cheese and she likes Mini Travellers, I have a feeling she’ll be no trouble at all.’