The Great Troll War

The Worriers

I had a room on the second floor facing the sea, and slept through five storms, woke for the sixth, then was asleep for the next two. I had balanced a bottle on the doorknob to alert me in case anyone attempted to get in, but no one did.

And I dreamed.

I was back on the control deck of the Mighty Shandar’s Tower of Knowledge. The Hollow string quartet were playing a piece by Pachelbel, and from the duct that would funnel the energy from the conjoining Quarkbeasts I could hear the distant murmur of the other Hollow Men and Women working far below, packing the treasures and necessities for Shandar’s journey across an eternity of time and space. Shandar was sitting in a leather armchair and thumbing through a book of spells. Dreams were often a method of communication from sorcerers, so I assumed this was one of those, and waited to see what he had to say.

‘Ah,’ he said, lowering the book, ‘Jennifer. The Quarkbeast is captured, my friends tell me. You shall be granted safe conduct to bring the little beast to me. It is important you are here to witness the conjoinment.’

‘Delivering the Quarkbeast was never part of the deal.’

‘The deal has changed.’

‘We know of your plan,’ I said. ‘You would destroy the Earth and everything on it to pursue your self-serving megalomaniacal ambitions?’

He wagged a slender index finger at me.

‘Total knowledge is a noble pursuit, and nobility always exacts a price. So what if I suck the life out of a few suns and lay waste to a star system or two? There are billions upon billions of stars out there, and I’m sure the universe can spare a dozen or so. No one will miss the Earth. You know what? I don’t think anyone even knows about the Earth.’

‘I know about the Earth,’ I said. ‘Agreed, it may have a few unresolved issues, but it is also full of beauty, and kindness, and love.’

‘And hate,’ he said, ‘and cruelty, and hunger.’

‘It’s a work in progress,’ I replied, ‘and with optimism, diligence and wise guidance we may get to improve ourselves.’

‘Wise guidance? From whom?’

‘From people like the Princess.’

‘Pah!’ he said. ‘Six months of absolute power and even your little well-meaning chum will start building bronze statues to herself and have her underlings avert their eyes in her presence. Humans are horribly flawed, and prone to morbid self-aggrandisement with even a sniff of power. You will miss nothing when you join me on this journey.’

‘I shall not join you.’

‘It is my wish,’ he said evenly. ‘You will not defy me.’

‘I would sooner die.’

I stood up to yell, but in doing so I woke myself up, and I was back in my room, the day outside new and grey and drizzly with patches of sleet, sun, hail and snow. Someone was tapping on my door. It was Tiger.

‘I heard some shouting,’ he said as soon as I opened the door. ‘Bad dream?’

‘Nope – a mental leap to Shandar’s Tower. He’s going to ask me to deliver the Quarkbeast personally, and wants me to accompany him on his journey to the stars.’

‘What is it with you and him?’

‘I don’t know. Were you sleeping outside my door?’

‘I always sleep outside your door. I’ve got General Worrier here. He wants to talk to you about the Princess.’

The time was 6 a.m. General Worrier had his second-in-command, Major Worrier, with him, plus a half-dozen of his trusted fretteratti,46 but they waited outside once they’d apologised profusely for getting in the way and hoped ‘I was not inconvenienced’, and told me how they ‘could never forgive themselves if I was’.

‘Because we were so terrified of disappointing you,’ said the general, perching on the dressing table and looking at his notes, ‘we set about organising ourselves into a tiered command structure so orders could be spread quickly and fast. With the thousand worriers divided into two cohorts commanded by five highly strung centurions each in charge of one hundred overwrought neurotics to recheck each others’ work, we had enough worriers to make a huge number of inquiries, filter them for relevance, then pass all pertinent information on to a centralised committee to be flustered and fretted over minutely before being passed on to me.’

‘It sounds super-geeky,’ I said. ‘I love it. Then what?’

‘No one knows when the Princess was switched, but since the impostor couldn’t have made it across the Button Trench due to the number of Trolls in attendance, she must either have flown here or arrived by boat.’

‘Makes sense.’

‘Right. So we sent our field agents off to knock on the doors of freight managers, shipping agents and immigration officials at the docks and Penzance International Airport, to see what we could find out.’

‘Surely no one’s keeping records in a time of war?’

‘These are bureaucropaths,’ said General Worrier. ‘Bureaucrats who get all obsessive about procedure. Like us, they worry about everything. Whether the records are in triplicate, whether a form hasn’t been filled in, whether there is a box which hasn’t been ticked. Who arrived, are they here, and if they left, then when, and how. No, the records are one hundred per cent complete. Better still, they think Matt Grifflon is a total idiot, and are much bigger fans of you and the Princess. And this is what we came up with.’

He placed a photocopied passenger manifest on the table.

‘She flew in yesterday morning, part of a refugee flight set up for people on the Eat List – they run mercy dashes from Bodmin, a place not yet overrun with Trolls. She came in under her own name: Betty Scrubb, aged sixteen. Nationality: Snoddian.’

He placed another photocopy on the table, this time of her identity card. The likeness to the Princess was uncanny.

‘So what happened then?’

‘Nothing. She got the bus into St Ives, and the trail goes cold.’

‘I really hope there’s more.’

General Worrier grinned broadly.

‘And how. Checking the passenger manifests again, someone named Betty Scrubb flew out of Penzance International Airport just before the nuptials yesterday afternoon. We had a word with the immigration officer and he said she appeared to be “in a bit of daze”.’

‘Drugged?’

‘Most likely. But get this: her travelling partners were four of Sir Matt Grifflon’s personal bodyguards. I ran their IDs and they must have been hand-picked to defend the Princess against rescue: all of them were convicted for extreme violence and murder, and each time pardoned by Sir Matt or his father, Lord Grifflon of Bedwyn.47’

‘What was their onward destination?’

‘The Isles of Scilly,’ he said, ‘about twenty miles west of here. As soon as the aircraft departed, “King” Mathew annexed the entire Isles of Scilly as a no-fly zone, and requisitioned all the castles there for his own use.’

He flicked over the pages of a notebook.

‘After analysing all the potential castles for princess-imprisoning and grading them on suitability, isolation, lofty towers and dampness, we came up with this as the most likely.’

He showed me a postcard of Cromwell Castle on the island of Tresco, a tall, cylindrical stone tower with one entrance, six storeys and a single window high up under the eaves of a pointed roof. It was perfect for imprisoning a princess, which was not surprising, as imprisoning princesses at the top of tall towers was a mini-industry in itself, and there were several purpose-made towers dotted around the country which could be had at a very reasonable weekly rate.

I opened the window and called up to Colin, who was sitting on the roof above my bedroom. He stepped off into a near-silent hover, and came down to see me.

‘Hello,’ he said, scratching himself, ‘this bat survey stuff is actually quite fun. I’ve seen fifty-eight pipistrelles, twelve lesser horseshoe, seventeen long-eared and a Daubenton’s. How did the meeting go last night?’

I told him about Shandar’s plans.

‘Dear oh dear,’ he said, ‘humans are so tedious with their overinflated mission statements and unbridled ambition. It would be better for all concerned to have more modest goals: like watching a sunset with friends, or making nourishing cabbage soup. They’re much less harmful – and actually attainable. What can I do?’

I explained where we thought the Princess might be imprisoned.

‘Ooooh,’ he said excitedly, ‘my first Princess-rescuing gig. If her guards try to stop me, can I vaporise them all with a scorching lungful of fire that leaves only a pile of carbonised bones, heat-distorted armour and the faint smell of a hog roast? I’ve always wanted to do that.’

‘You … must use whatever force you feel is necessary to restore the true monarchy.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’ll be off as soon as I’ve eaten seven cans of curried beans, nine cabbages, a dozen assorted fish-heads, four pints of soured cream and six dozen slightly-off eggs.’

I didn’t need to ask why. A Dragon’s fiery breath is basically methane,48 which is generated in a separate stomach, then lit by a pilot light in the gullet before being expelled out of a nostril or the mouth. I shut the bedroom window and hugged General Worrier warmly.

‘Thank you,’ I whispered in his ear. ‘You and your team have done the Crown, the Kingdoms and the planet a great service and it shall not be forgotten.’

‘Not if she isn’t rescued, we’re all vanquished or we got it wrong,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll all go from hero to zero faster than you can whistle the Catalina Magdalena Hoopensteiner song.’

‘Not in my eyes.’

I looked at my watch. I had full confidence in Colin’s princess-rescuing abilities, but I needed to find out why Zambini left me in the orphanage as a baby and what made Shandar so fearful of me. I had to visit Mother Zenobia, but the orphanage was back in Herefordshire and a drive would be too long and perilous, so I removed from around my neck the Cloud Leviathan’s tooth that had been fashioned into a whistle, and blew on it. I’d not done this before, and knew only that Ralph would hear and help me if I asked. That’s the thing about Australopithecines who are the result of an Evolutionary Master Reset49 – they can be trusted on a favour if things really get out of hand.

The Cloud Leviathan’s whistle made no noise, but I knew it had been effective as I heard dogs whine and bark outside. Ralph could be anywhere, but a Leviathan was swift.

Once everyone had gone I had a quick bath, dressed and came downstairs for breakfast. The new Queen was lording it over everyone in the ballroom, which was now a VIP breakfast area. I heard later that she’d had the Rice Krispies checked to ensure they were all the same size, and the porridge rejected nine times until the consistency was just right. The King was also present with most of his retinue, including those who would have killed me the night before if Kevin’s strategic fibbing hadn’t won the day.

The royals all had a separate, screened-off area in which to eat, but I also noticed the Quarkbeast had not yet moved from the spot he had adopted the night before. I winked at him as I walked past, and he winked back. He hadn’t been captured at all by the King’s men. The most they could hope to boast was that they knew where he was.

I sat down at a table with Boo, Monty Vanguard and Tiger. Colin had left soon after his methane-inducing feast, and although the Isles of Scilly would only be twenty minutes’ flight time away, he had not yet sent word of progress. It would be safe to assume he would observe the tower first in order to confirm she was there, numbers in the garrison, the Btu50 value of a human, that sort of thing. He knew the importance of the mission, and I trusted he would be cautious, yet victorious.

‘Where are Full Price and Lady Mawgon imprisoned?’ I asked.

‘In the Cornwall Department of Corrections in St Ives,’ said Boo.

‘They’ll be free as soon as we get the Princess back,’ said Tiger.

‘How do we prove she’s the Princess?’ asked Boo.

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What about the Trolls, Monty? William of Anorak told me the way to defeat Trolls might have been forgotten down the years and scrubbed from the archives by Shandar, eager to make their defeat impossible.’

‘I’ve been doing a bit of reading,’ replied Monty, ‘and trying to work the problem backwards to figure out a solution. We know that fighting the Troll was a big deal during the Roman invasion of Britain, and Emperor Hadrian defeated the Troll by banishing them beyond the wall that bears his name. Later on, Emperor Antonine established a new wall sixty miles to the north. As far as we know that was the last time the Trolls invaded – each subsequent war was the result of humans attacking them.’

‘The Roman Troll Wars are well documented,’ said Boo. ‘Battle re-enactors seem to do little else. Where are you going with this?’

‘This: that defeating Trolls seems to revolve around having not one Troll wall, but two. The Modern Troll Walls were built three hundred years ago, and only ten miles apart, far closer than the Roman walls.’

‘Is this significant?’ I asked.

‘I think so. But there are rumours of another Troll War, this time in the eighth century when they were defeated by King Offa, who, and I quote, “Builded a great wall of the purpose of which to Troll numbers greatly reduced”.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I’m not sure. Records are scarce or missing. But there is another dyke or wall behind Offa’s Dyke known as Wat’s dyke, and, well, here we have the double wall thing again.’

We remained silent. There didn’t really seem much to go on, but Monty wasn’t finished. He showed me a map of the UnUnited Kingdoms with all the ditches and walls built in antiquity marked on them. There were a lot in number: some running east and west, others running north–south – even a canal network built in part by the Romans that was fed by seawater.

‘I think these defences were built to get rid of the Trolls,’ said Monty. ‘All of them have been found to contain buttons in great quantities. It also says that Offa’s Troll War was “faced with many hundreds of thousands of the sinful beast, but we did by way of clever enclosure, two days from start of attack to the last Troll banished”.’

‘That’s seriously quick in terms of defeating Trolls,’ said Tiger. ‘You would have thought mopping up the stragglers would have taken a month on its own.’

‘Excuse me,’ said one of the waiters politely, ‘there’s an Australopithecine outside wanting to speak to a Miss Strange.’

‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that will be my ride. Anything else, Monty?’

‘I’ll know more when you return.’

‘Good. Tiger? You up for a trip to Mother Zenobia’s?’

‘Do I get to ride on a Cloud Leviathan?’

‘You do.’

‘Then yes,’ he said, ‘I’m totally up for this.’