Grailblazers.

"Stay right there," he said, and the window slammed. Boamund turned round.

"What are you doing down there?" he asked.

"Hiding," said a voice from behind the bike"s rear wheel. "What does it look like I"m-?"

"You don"t want to take any notice of old Bedders - that"s Sir Bedevere to you," Boamund replied. "Soft as porridge, old Bedders. Here, quick, where"s that sword?"

He rummaged around in the luggage, and when the door opened (to reveal a huge-looking figure completely covered in steel, Toenail couldn"t help noticing) he had found the sword and the shield and had put his crash helmet back on. For his part, Toenail, having a.s.sessed the various options available to him, jumped into the bike"s left-hand pannier and pulled the lid down over his head. There are times when it feels good to be small.

"Ha," he heard someone saying. "Abide, false knight, for I will have ado with you." Toenail shuddered and closed his eyes.

"I will well," said the other idiot. "Keep thee then from me."

Then there was a noise like a multiple pile-up, followed by the inevitable sound of something metal, as if it might be a hub-cap, wheeling along the ground, spinning and then falling over with a clang. And then shouts of boisterous laughter.

And then someone pulled open the lid of the pannier and extracted Toenail by the collar of his jacket.

"Toenail," Boamund was saying, "meet Sir Bedevere. Bedders, this is my dwarf, Toenail."

"Pleased to meet you, Toenail," said the armoured lunatic. By the looks of it, the thing that had come off and rolled about on the floor must have been his helmet, since he was bareheaded and bleeding from a cut over his left eye. "Well, then," said Sir Bedevere, "you"d better come in. The others," he added, "are all out, and it"s muggins" turn to do the kitchen floor again." A thought occurred to him. "Hang on," he said, brightening, "your dwarf can do it, can"t he?"

Toenail was just about to protest violently when Boamund said, "Good idea," and clapped Toenail heartily on the back. Much more of this, the dwarf muttered to himself, and I"m going to be sick. However, as it transpired, things could have been worse. Bedevere did show him where the mop and the Flash were kept, and it was a smaller kitchen than, say, the one at Versailles.

"Anyway," said Bedevere, showing his guest to the comfortable chair, "sit down, make yourself at home, tell me all about it."

"About what?" Boamund replied, helping himself to peanuts. "That reminds me," he added. "I"m starving. I haven"t had any food - proper food, that is - in ages."

"Help yourself," said Bedevere politely, and Boamund, having recited the necessary formula, set about eating his way through a side of venison which obligingly materialised in front of him. In fact, thought Toenail to himself as he crouched on his hands and knees trying to shift a particularly stubborn stain, if all knights can do this, what do they need a kitchen for, let alone a kitchen floor?

"You were saying," said Bedevere.

"Was I?"

"Yes," Bedevere replied. "About what you"ve been doing and, er . . ."

"Yes?"

"How come you"re still alive. I mean," Bedevere a.s.sured his friend, "wonderful that you are. Spiffing. But it"s rather a turn-up, don"t you think?"

Boamund put down a pheasant"s wing and looked at him. For all that they"d been through basic training, Knight School and the Benwick campaign together, that still didn"t ent.i.tle young Fatty to go asking him personal questions. "What about you, then?" he demanded. "You"re the one who was always stuffing himself with honey-cakes and second helpings of frumenty? If anyone should have pegged out . . ." Bedevere winced. "It"s a long story," he said.

Boamund gazed at him defiantly over a roast quail. "Go on, then," he said, "I"m in no hurry."

"All right, then."

The gist of what Bedevere said was this: Boamund no doubt remembered how sticky things were getting towards the end of Arthur"s reign, what with the Saxons and everything . . .

Well, no. Boamund was asleep at the time, but he"ll take your word for it. Do go on, please .

. . . what with the Saxons and everything, and the last thing the King wanted was for his knights to offer any resistance to the vastly superior Saxon forces. This could only make things worse, and was fundamentally a bad idea. On the other hand, chivalry would undoubtedly forbid the knights to do nothing while a lot of Danish bacon entrepreneurs took over the country and drove small shopkeepers out of business.

Arthur therefore decided on a diversion; and since chivalry was about to end, he felt it only right and proper that it should go out with a bang. He therefore summoned his knights to Camelot, told them a little white lie about the Saxons all having gone home, leaving money to pay for all the broken doors and windows, and suggested that they might all like to go and look for the Holy Grail.

The knights accepted the challenge with enthusiasm, for all that none of them had the faintest idea what a Grail looked like, and agreed to rea.s.semble at Camelot a year and a day later and bring the Grail with them.

The idea succeeded beyond Arthur"s wildest dreams. When the court rea.s.sembled it turned out that of the hundred knights who had set out on the quest, fifty were dead, fourteen had been arrested, twenty-two had defected to the court of the king of Benwick, and eight had given up chivalry and gone into personnel management. The remaining six, King Arthur reckoned, were unlikely to bother anyone. He therefore provided them with a chapter house and a pension scheme, named them the Order of Chevaliers of the Sangrail, and left by the fire escape while they were all in the bar.

The Chevaliers of the Sangrail continued with the quest for a while; but it should be obvious from the fact that they alone had survived out of the original hundred that they were all knights who held quite firmly to the rule that discretion - or, even better, naked fear - is the better part of valour, and besides, none of them knew what a Grail was. For three years they toured Albion on the off chance that the Grail was to be found either in an inn or a greyhound track, and then decided by a majority of five to one to abandon the quest. Their reasoning was that Albion was a small place and in their travels the chances were that they"d probably come across it; find it, His Majesty had told them, there was nothing in the fine print about recognising it once found. They then put the chapter house on the market and went to draw their pensions. All would probably have been well, had not the chairman of the trustees of the pension fund been a diehard magician and reactionary Albionese nationalist by the name of Merlin. He insisted that the Grail had to be brought to Camelot in order that the quest be fulfilled; and until it was they could whistle for their pensions.

The Chavaliers decided to make the best of a bad job. Instead of actively searching for the Grail, they resolved in future to look for it pa.s.sively; that is to say, to do something else, hopefully something more interesting and profitable, while waiting for the thing to turn up. After investing all their spare capital in a scheme to dig a tunnel connecting Albion with Benwick, which was frustrated by the fact that Benwick disappeared into the sea when they were five miles short of it, they moved into the chapter house, let the ground-floor premises to a man who arranged bucket-shop pilgrimages, and got jobs in the local woad factory.

The woad factory is, of course, long gone. The knights are still there.

"Except," Bedevere said sadly, "for Nentres, of course."

Boamund surrept.i.tiously wiped a tear from his eye and murmured, "Dead?"

"Not quite," replied Bedevere. "About six months ago he announced that he"d had enough and was going south. Apparently he"d met this chap who was starting up a video shop somewhere. The blighter," said Bedevere savagely, "he b.u.g.g.e.red off with our outings fund. Seventy-four pounds, thirty-five pence. We were planning to go to Weymouth this year."

"Where"s Weymouth?"

Bedevere explained. "So," he went on, "here we all are, and here you are too. It"s a small . . ."

Then the penny dropped. Bedevere had been in the process of raising a gla.s.s containing gin and tonic to his lips. He spilt it.

"I see," Boamund was saying. "That would account for it, I suppose."

Bedevere picked a slice of lemon out of his collar. "Always delighted to see you," he gabbled, "and it would have been nice if you could have stayed for a while, but if you"re really busy and in a hurry to get on with whatever it is you"re here to do, which must be really important, then please don"t let us..."

"Actually," Boamund said.

". . . stop you. After all," he wittered frantically, "we"re just here, minding our own business, or rather businesses Turquine delivers pizzas, you know, and Pertelope"s got a really nice little window-cleaning round, shops and offices as well as houses, and Galahaut"s an actor, though he"s resting just now, and Lamorak buys things and sells them in street markets and I . . ." He broke off and, unexpectedly, blushed.

"Go on," said Boamund, intrigued. "What do you do?"

"I . . . I"m an insurance salesman," Bedevere muttered into his beard. "It"s a really interesting job," he said hurriedly. "You"ve no idea what a wide cross-section of society..."

"An insurance salesman," said Boamund.

"Um," Bedevere mumbled. "You wouldn"t by any chance be interested in a . . .?"

"I see." Boamund was frowning. On his broad, plain, straightforward, honest and, well yes, stupid face a cold look of displeasure was settling, like ice on the points of a busy commuter line. "You know what we used to call you back at the old Coll, Bedders?"

"Er, no," said Bedevere. Actually he had had a fair idea and he"d always resented it. The way he saw it, a chap can"t help it if he"s born with big ears.

"Li chevalier li plus prest a succeder,"* replied Boamund, severely. "Double first in tilting, I seem to remember. Honours in falconry. Dalliance blue. Captain of courtesy three years running. And now," he sighed, "you"re an insurance salesman. I see."

"It"s not like that," Bedevere growled unhappily. "Times change, and-"

"I remember," Boamund went on obliviously, "I remember when your father, rest his soul, came to Sports Day one year, and you were jousting for the Deschamps-Mornay Memorial Salver. He was so proud of you."

Bedevere snuffled. "Look," he said, "they don"t have jousts any more. It"s all your televised snooker, your American football-"

"And when he heard you"d been selected for the Old Boys match," Boamund continued cruelly, "well, I"ve never told you this before, Bedders, but-"

"Look!" Bedevere was close to tears. "It"s not as simple as that. We tried our best, honest we did. We looked all over for the wretched thing. We even went to," and the knight winced, *Since Bedevere"s father was the Duke of Achaia and ninety-seven years old, the term "most likely to succeed" might be interpreted rather more literally than Boamund thought.

"Wales. But we just didn"t have the faintest idea of what it was we were looking for. Chivalry doesn"t prepare you for things like that, Bo. Chivalry is all about finding someone who"s big and strong and mean sitting on a ruddy great black horse and clouting him around the head till he pa.s.ses out. In chivalry, you leave all the planning and the thinking to someone else. You"re just there to do the important bit, the bashing people up side of things. We couldn"t manage it on our own, Bo, with n.o.body to tell us what to do. There"s no place for knights in the modern world, you see. We"re..." He searched for the exact term. "I suppose you could say we"re over-qualified. Too highly trained. Over-specialised. You know what I mean."

"Useless, you mean."

"Yes," Bedevere agreed. "It"s just that there aren"t any dragons left any more. And no damosels to rescue, either. Young Turquine tried to rescue a damosel the other day. It was some sort of a party, and he was delivering pizzas. He walks in through the door and there"s this terrible barbaric music and all these men pulling girls about by the arms and . . . Well, he jumped right in, like a true knight, sorted a few of them out, I can tell you. And then this damosel kneed him in the-"

"I see, yes."

"Then they called the police," Bedevere said. "Luckily, Galahaut and I happened to be pa.s.sing, so we were able to pull him off before he did any of them a serious injury, but..."

"Nevertheless," said Boamund. His face looked like something rejected by Mount Rushmore for excessive gravity. "I think it"s probably just as well I"ve come to take charge here, don"t you? Delivering pizzas! Selling insurance! Old Sagramor would turn in his grave if he knew."

Bedevere, remembering their old venery tutor, secretly agreed, and hoped that this would involve his brushing up against something sharp. "But . . ." he said.

"What I was about to say," Boamund went on, "is that I"ve been woken up from a fifteen-hundred-year sleep to take charge of this Order, and by G.o.d, take charge of it I jolly well will!"

Just then, the door of the Common Room flew open and a large, round man with a red face bustled in, holding a portable telephone in one hand and a huge stack of thin styrofoam boxes in the other.

"Bedders," he called out, "there"s a dwarf in our kitchen. I went in there to heat up the pizzas and the nasty little thing was making the floor all wet. I chucked him in the bin, naturally, but the damage was done. How many times have I told you about leaving the back door open in the . . ."

He froze, and stared. The pizzas fell from his hand and started to roll around the room like slow, anchovy-garnished hoops.

"b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l," he said at last. "It"s Snotty Boamund!"

"h.e.l.lo, Turkey," replied Boamund coldly.

Sir Turquine went, if anything, redder than before. "h.e.l.l fire, Bedders, a joke"s a joke, but what the h.e.l.l do you think you"re playing at? I was only saying the other day, things may be a bit smelly these days, but at least we don"t have to put up with that sanctimonious little toad and his incessant wittering on about ideals any more. And you agreed with me, I remember. You said-"

"Er, Turkey," said Sir Bedevere. "I-"

"And now," Sir Turquine protested, "you get someone all dressed up with a mask on or something, just to give me the fright of my life! Look at my pizzas, you stupid idiot, they"ve got fluff all over them..."

"It"s me, Turkey," Boamund whispered, in a tone of voice that would have frozen helium. "How are you keeping?"

Turquine now dropped the portable telephone as well. "My G.o.d," he said, "it is you! What in the name of . . .?"

Bedevere swallowed hard, stood up and, as briefly as he could, explained. The other two knights exchanged looks that would have had a sabre-tooth tiger yelping for joy and growing an extra thick winter coat.

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," said Sir Turquine at last. "He"s got no authority. If he"d got any authority, he"d have a commission or something, sealed by that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Merlin. He"s just having us on."

Without speaking, Boamund reached inside his jacket and produced a thick, folded parchment, from which hung a seal. The odd thing about the seal was the way it glowed with a strong blue light.

Sir Turquine, whose mouth had suddenly become extremely dry, took the parchment and opened it. He stared at it for a moment and then said, in a kind of quavering roar, "Nuts. It"s in gibberish. He"s just written it himself."

"Tell Sir Turquine," said Boamund quietly, "that he"s holding it the wrong way up."

Sir Turquine glowered at him helplessly and turned the parchment round, so that the seal hung from the bottom. Boamund sniffed; Turquine could remember that d.a.m.ned supercilious sniff as though it were yesterday. He glanced down at the writing.

"Although," Boamund went on, "as I seem to remember, Sir Turquine was never exactly adept at reading. One seems to recall that when the rest of the cla.s.s were halfway through the Roman de la Rose, Sir Turquine was still sitting at the back of the room saying "Pierre has a cat. The cat is fat. The fat cat sits on the-""

"All right," shouted Sir Turquine, "commission or no commission, I"m going to kill him."

Sir Bedevere hastily placed a hand on Turquine"s chest while Boamund said "mat", very deliberately, sat down and ate an olive. Turquine gave a last infuriated snarl, threw the commission on the ground and jumped on it. Since it was, of course, enchanted parchment, all that happened was that his shoelaces broke.

Boamund smiled, that same smug, teeth-grindingly infuriating smile he"d had when he was Helm Monitor back in the sixth form, and made a little gesture with his left hand. Turquine, bright red in the face, snorted like a horse, knelt down, and extended his hands, their palms pressed together. Boamund, looking down his nose like an archbishop, stepped forward and pressed his palms to the backs of Turquine"s hands, as lightly as possible; thus signifying that he had accepted Turquine"s fealty. It didn"t help to soothe Turquine"s feelings to find that he"d knelt in one of his own pizzas.

"Arise, Sir Turquine, good and faithful knight," said Boamund, obviously enjoying every moment of it. Turquine gave him a look you could have roasted a chicken on, made an obscure noise in the back of his throat, stood up and made a great show of brushing mozzarella off his right knee. Boamund turned to Sir Bedevere and made the same gesture.

Sir Bedevere hesitated, muttered, "Oh, all right then," and performed the same simple ceremony.

"And now, Sir Turquine," said Boamund, "you will kindly oblige me by retrieving my dwarf from wherever it was you put him."

"I might have guessed it was your dwarf," Turquine grumbled as he plodded to the kitchen. "Funny the way that even when we were at school, some of us always seemed to have dwarves when the rest of us had to polish their own armour. "Course, that came of some of us having great softhearted sissy mothers who wouldn"t have their dear little boys hurting their hands with nasty rough . . ."

The kitchen door slammed behind him, and Boamund sighed. "He always was inclined to whine a bit," he observed, and Bedevere, never a man given to nostalgia, found himself harking back to the happy days of boyhood, when he"d gladly have given a whole week"s pocket money for the chance of doing something unpleasant to young Snotty.

And then it occurred to him that, although young Snotty was exactly the sort of pompous little swot that Authority invariably made a prefect, nevertheless there was a sort of malign justice that had always ended up by landing him in the smelly, right up to the vambrace, even when (as was generally the case) it wasn"t actually his fault.

Bedevere, having checked that Boamund wasn"t looking, smirked. The way he saw it, the mills of the G.o.ds may grind slow, but they don"t half make a mess of you when the time comes.

Dwarfish society is well ordered and stable to the point of inflexibility, and the average dwarf generally knows his place* to within 0.06 of a micron. As a result, sudden promotion is something that dwarves are ill-equipped to deal with. Toenail was no exception. From being a lowly hermit"s gopher, he had, at a stroke, risen to being Chief Factotum to a whole order of chivalry. The only other dwarf in the oral tradition of the race who"d ever achieved that distinction was Lord Whitlow King of Arms, who superintended the household of King Lot of Orkney in King Uther"s time. It was an honour.

On the other hand, Toenail couldn"t help feeling, Lord Whitlow probably had a few lesser dwarves to help him out, or at the very least a vacuum cleaner. And he couldn"t be positive about this, because oral tradition can be a right little tease when it comes to matters of detail, but he had a feeling that Lord Whitlow probably got paid.

Boamund was all right, of course, as knights go - and Toenail was rapidly becoming an authority on knights. Not only had the new Grand Master paid him back for the petrol and the damage to the rear mudguard of the bike as soon as Toenail had found him the old teapot which served the Order as its exchequer, but he"d expressly forbidden Sir Turquine and Sir Pertelope (who was nearly as bad) to put him in *Which is either in the kitchen or the armoury, depending on status, and, in either case, set behind a very big jar of metal polish the dustbin without authority, on pain of dishonour. Toenail wasn"t sure what dishonour now meant in the context of the Order, but he guessed it was something to do with not being allowed to use the van at weekends. Given the trades which Turquine and Pertelope now followed, this was clearly a sanction of the utmost weight.

Of course, it was now Toenail"s job to clean out the van every morning (which meant scrubbing caked-on tomato puree off the back seat and occasionally unloading cartons of Hungarian training shoes which Lamorak had bought cheap and somehow forgotten to disembark himself), but that in itself was an honour, if one translated it into the terms of the Old Days. You"d had to be a pretty high-ranking dwarf to be Chief Groom and Lord High Equerry.

On balance, the first fortnight of the new state of affairs had gone off all right, so far as Toenail could judge. There had been a few tricky moments; Turquine, Lamorak and Galahaut the Haut Prince had mutinied and tried to ambush Boamund on his way back from the newsagent"s, with a view to loading him with chains and casting him in the toolshed, but Bedevere (rather, Toenail had felt, against his better judgement) had betrayed the conspiracy, with the result that Boamund had foiled the plot by getting the number 6 bus instead of the number 15a. He had given them all a very stern talking-to in the Common Room after tea, following which Turquine had stalked out of the room and been very ostentatiously sick in the kitchen sink. Apart from that, however, a routine was developing. Basically, it consisted of the other five going out to work as usual, while Boamund sat in the Common Room with his feet up on the sofa and watched the snooker on the television. Boamund had taken to snooker very quickly, Toenail had noticed, and was talking freely of having a table installed in the garage, which would mean Lamorak finding a home for seven hundred pairs of flood-damaged Far Eastern jeans, fifty one-handed alarm clocks and all the rest of his stock-in-trade.

Toenail sighed and dipped his cloth in the metal polish. So far, Boamund"s main effort in the direction of starting the quest up again had been ordering him to get all the armour and weapons from the cellar and polished up to tiltyard standard. That seemed to suit the other five, who he knew had no intention of giving up their settled if unprofitable lives just to go looking for that d.a.m.ned Grail thing; but Toenail, with a degree of perception that is not uncommon among dwarves, had a shrewd suspicion that things might change once the Emba.s.sy World Snooker Championship was over. Call it, Toenail said to himself, astrology.

He breathed a fine mist on to the surface of a shining gauntlet, polished it off on his trouser-leg, and added it to the pile. There was enough armour there to equip an army, and he hadn"t even started on the horse-furniture yet. Mind you, he couldn"t really see how there was going to be much call for that. A couple of sheets of corrugated iron welded on to the sides of the van was probably all that would be needed.

From the direction of the Common Room he could hear raised voices, and his genes told him that the Lords were holding a High Council.

Racial memory is very powerful among dwarves. Putting down his cloth, he tiptoed to the linen basket, raised the lid and jumped in.

"No," said Turquine.

Boamund glowered at him and struck the table with his mace of office. Lamorak, who had forty-two others just like it in the lock-up, sighed. As he"d suspected at the time, they weren"t solid teak at all.