"Yes," said Miss Cartwright, breathing through her nose. "Do you wish to claim Income Support, Mr . . .?"
Boamund"s eyes showed that he was sorely tempted, but that his mother or someone like that had warned him about accepting money from strange woman. He shook his head. "It"s this paper we"ve got," he said. "We"d like someone to-"
"A summons, maybe? A writ?"
Boamund nodded. He knew all about summonses and writs. Summonses and writs were the only way things got done in Albion. If, for example, King Arthur wanted the windows cleaned, he issued a summons by the Herald of Arms challenging all the window-cleaners of Albion to meet under the town cross at Caerleon on midsummer day and elect a champion. Or if he wanted an extra pint of gold top instead of silver top, he"d leave a writ for the milk-knight.
"Probably," he said. "Have a look and see what you think."
From the inside pocket of his jacket he produced a thick parchment with what looked like a seal hanging off it. Miss Cartwright stared at it as if it were alive.
"Um," she said, and opened it.
Some time later, she put it down and looked Boamund in the eye. She hated to admit it, even to herself, but there was something about this lunatic that gave her the horrible, creeping feeling that he was for real. You couldn"t pretend to be as weird as that and still be convincing; it would be like trying to pretend you were dead.
In circ.u.mstances like these, there is a well-established procedure. One finds the most junior member of staff and leaves him to get on with it. Miss Cartwright rose, smiled, asked Boamund if he"d mind waiting, and walked hurriedly into the inner office.
"George," she said, "be a love and see to that man in the leather jacket for me."
Oddly enough, George was grinning from ear to ear. "Sure," he said. "Thanks."
As he jumped down from his chair and scampered across to the door, Miss Cartwright scratched her head and wondered. It was all very well, she said to herself, making a conscious effort to recruit handicapped and disabled people, but she still couldn"t get used to working with someone who was only three foot four. You were always worried about, well, treading on him.
Boamund was just starting to wonder what was going on when he caught sight of a dwarf coming out of the back office. He smiled. It had been the right place to come to after all.
"h.e.l.lo," said the dwarf, "You"re a knight, aren"t you?"
"Yes," said Boamund.
"It"s not hard to tell," replied the dwarf, "if you know what to look for. My name is Harelip, but you"d better call me George while there are people about. People can be very funny about names, Mr..."
"Boamund," said Boamund. "Look, we"ve got this doc.u.ment thing and we can"t understand it."
"By we," said George, "you mean . . .?I "Me and my Order," Boamund said, "Knights of the Holy Grail."
George raised an eyebrow. "You don"t say?" he said. "My great-uncle-to-the-power-of-thirty-seven was dwarf to a Sir Pertelope who was a Grail Knight."
"Still going strong," Boamund a.s.sured him. "Fancy that."
"It"s a small world," George agreed. "Well," he added, looking down at the gap between himself and the floor, "not as far as I"m concerned, obviously, but you know what I"m driving at. Can I see the doc.u.ment?"
Boamund nodded and handed it over. George read it carefully, occasionally making notes on his scratch-pad. Finally he handed it back and smiled.
"Fine," he said. "Congratulations. So what"s the problem?"
Boamund blinked a couple of times. "Well, what does it mean, for a start?" he said.
"Oh, I see," said George, "I was forgetting, yes. I can see that to a knight it might present problems."
"So?"
"So," said George, "basically, it"s a list of three things which you and your knights have got to find before you can hope to recover the Grail. They are an ap.r.o.n, a personal organiser like a sort of notebook - and a pair of socks. They"re hidden in remote and inaccessible places. Okay so far?"
Boamund nodded. He had the glorious feeling that at last things were getting back to normal.
"There are cryptic clues as to where these things are to be found," George went on, wiping his nose with the back of his wrist. "Now I"m not really allowed to help you too much . . ."
"Why not?"
"King"s Regulations," explained the dwarf. "However, I can drop hints."
"Such as?"
"Such as..." replied the dwarf, and he went on to drop several very large hints. In fact, compared to the dwarf *Dwarves are, of course, naturally gifted at solving riddles, explaining conundrums, cracking codes and doing crossword puzzles. Partly, this is because they are, by their very nature, fey and uncanny creatures, much more at home inside the Gla.s.s Mountain than outside. The other reason is that, being too short to reach the pool table and too weak to be able to throw a dart, there"s nothing else for them to do in the pub on their night off.
Harelip"s hints, the Speaking Clock is a paragon of obscurity.
"I see," said Boamund. "Right. Thanks."
"Don"t mention it," said the dwarf. "A pleasure. Remember me to Sir Pertelope. Tell him he owes my great-uncle-to-thepower-of-thirty-seven three farthings."
"How is your great-uncle-to-the-power-of-thirty-seven?"
"Dead."
"I"m sorry to hear that."
"These things happen," replied the dwarf. "Anyway, never mind. Could you just sign here?"
From his inside pocket he produced an official-looking form.
"What"s that?" Boamund asked.
"My discharge," the dwarf replied happily. "You see, my family"s been indentured to the Grail Knights for generations. We"re obliged to do so many hours of service before the indenture is up. My great-uncle-to-the-power-of-thirty-seven had done all his time except for ten minutes when King Arthur abdicated and the Orders of Chivalry came to an end. We"ve been . . ." The dwarf shuddered slightly. ". . . hanging about ever since, waiting for an opportunity to get all square. And now, thanks to you, we can call it a day and retire. Lucky you came along, really."
"Very," Boamund agreed, signing the form with a big X.
"Or rather," George said, "Destiny. Yours and mine. Ciao. Good hunting."
He folded the form, reclaimed his pen (which Boamund had absent-mindedly put in his pocket), bowed thrice to the Four Quarters and jumped off his chair. In the middle of the room, where just a moment ago there had been a display of Family Credit leaflets, the Gla.s.s Mountain appeared, blue and sparkling. A door slid open and the dwarf stepped in, waving.
"Fancy that," Boamund said, and smiled. The way he saw it, the world he was in now was a huge, muddled heap of inexplicable things with just the occasional glimpse of normality showing through. Still, it was nice to know it was still there really; important things, like Destiny and the Unseen. He was, deep down, a rational man and it would take a d.a.m.n sight more than the odd microwave oven and radio alarm clock to get him really worried.
He picked up the Instructions, smiled at a bucket-mouthed, gibbering Miss Cartwright, and left.
"Right," said Boamund.
Leadership is a volatile, almost chimerical quality. The same aspects of a man"s character that tend to make him a natural leader of men usually also conspire to make him an unmitigated pain. Comes, for example, who overthrew the fabulously powerful empire of Mexico with four hundred and fifty men, fifteen horses and four cannons, was an inspirational general, but that didn"t prevent his devoted followers from wincing in antic.i.p.ation every time he rubbed his hands together, smiled broadly, and said, "All right, lads, this is going to be easier than it looks." In Boamund"s case, all his undoubted drive and energy couldn"t make up for the fact that he prefaced virtually every statement he made by hitting the palm of one hand with the knuckles of the other and saying, "Right." That, in the eyes of many of his men, was calculated to raise their morale to lynching-point.
"The plan," Boamund went on, "is this. We split up into three parties of two, we find these three bits of tackle, we bring them back, we find the Grail. Easy as that. Any questions?"
"Yes," said Lamorak. "Who"s having the van?"
"Which van?" interrupted Pertelope. "We"ve got two now, remember?"
"No we haven"t, you clown," shouted Turquine. "I keep telling you-"
"Shut up, you, you"re dishonoured."
"Don"t you tell me..."
Boamund frowned. "Quiet!" he shouted, and banged the top of the orange box which had been brought in to replace the table. "If you"d been listening," he went on, "it"d have sunk in that it"s really academic who gets the van, since we"re all of us going thousands of miles beyond the sh.o.r.es of Albion. The van is neither here nor-"
"All right," Lamorak replied, "except it"s my turn, 1 haven"t been dishonoured, so I think it"s only fair..."
Boamund sighed. "n.o.body"s getting the van," he said. "All right?"
There was a ripple of murmuring, the general sense of which was that so long as n.o.body had it, that would have to do. Boamund banged the orange box again.
"Now then," he said, "the next thing to do," and he turned up the radiance of his smile to full volume, masking the disquiet in his heart, "is to decide who"s going to go with who. Shut up!" he added, pre-emptively.
The knights stared at him.
"The pairings I"ve got in mind," he said, "are: Lamorak and Pertelope; Turquine and Bedevere; me and Galahaut. Any objections?"
He braced himself for the inevitable squall of discontent. It would, he reckoned, be school all over again. I"m not playing with him. We don"t want him on our team. Wait for it . . .
n.o.body said anything. Boamund blinked, and went on.
"Deployment as follows: Lammo and Perty, the ap.r.o.n; Turkey and Bedders, the personal organiser thing; tally and me, the socks. Any objections?"
They"re up to something, Boamund thought. They"ve never agreed to anything without a fight in their lives. They must be up to something.
His mind wandered back to the Old Boys Joust of "6, when he"d been Vice-Captain of tilting, and the Captain, old Soppy Agravaine, had twisted his ankle in a friendly poleaxe fight with the Escole des Chevaliers seconds, leaving him, for the first and only time, to pick the teams. As his memory swooped back on that day like a homing pigeon, he could almost feel the hot tears of shame and humiliation on his cheeks once more as he"d watched them going out, in deliberate defiance of his Team Orders, wearing their summer haubergeons with rebated zweyhanders and Second XI surcoats. They"d pretended to agree with him, he remembered, and then when the moment came, they"d just gone and done as they jolly well chose. Well, not this time. He was ready for them.
"Well," he said, "that"s fine. Now, here are your sealed orders," he went on, handing out the envelopes, "and you"re all to promise on your words of honour not to open them until after you"ve left the chapter house. And," he added, "the three parties will leave at fifteen-minute intervals, just to make sure."
"Make sure of what, Snotty?" asked Turquine innocently. Boamund let his lip curl just a millimetre or so, and smiled.
"Just to make sure, that"s all," he said. "Any questions?"
No questions.
"Splendid," he said. "All right, dismiss." He sat down and started to go over the packing list one last time.
The other knights filed out, leaving him alone. He was halfway through his list when Toenail came in. He looked furtive.
"Psst," he whispered.
There are people who simply can"t resist conspiratorial noises, and Boamund was one of them. "What?" he whispered back.
Toenail looked round to see if any of the knights were listening, and then hissed, "You know those envelopes you gave them?"
Boamund nodded.
"You know," the dwarf went on, "they weren"t supposed to open them until after they"d left here?"
Boamund nodded again.
"Well," said Toenail, "they"re all out there now, reading them. I, er, thought you ought to know."
Boamund smiled. "I thought they"d do that," he said. "That"s why I didn"t give them the real envelopes."
"Oh." Toenail raised an eyebrow. "They looked like real envelopes to. . ."
Boamund frowned. "Yes, of course they"re real envelopes," he said impatiently. "Only the message in them isn"t the real message."
"It isn"t?"
Boamund allowed himself a sly chuckle. "Oh no," he said. "All it says is, Shame on you, you"re dishonoured. That"ll teach them."
Oh G.o.d, thought Toenail to himself, and I"ve got to go on a quest with these lunatics. "Then why," he asked, as nicely as he could, "did you give them the envelopes now?"
"Because I knew they"d open them."
"But," replied the dwarf cautiously, "if you knew that . . ."
"And," Boamund went on, "this way, they"ll know that I knew they"d open them, and that way, they"ll know they"re all rotters, and then we"ll all know where we are, do you see?" And Boamund grinned triumphantly. "I think they call that man management," he added.
Not where I come from they don"t, sunshine, Toenail said to himself. "Ah," he replied. "Man management. Right, sorry to have bothered you."
He bowed slightly and went back into the kitchen, where the other knights were sitting on the worktops waiting for him.
"You"re right," he said. "He has gone stark raving honkers."
"Told you so," said Turquine. "Right, the way I see it, there"s nothing in the book of rules says that you"ve got to obey a Grand Master who"s gone round the twist. I vote we tie him up, chuck him in the cellar and get back to normal."
Bedevere held up his hand.
"Okay," he said, "point taken, he"s acting a bit funny. But-"
"A bit funny!" Turquine snorted. "Come on, Bedders, face facts. Young Snotty"s finally broken his spring. Had to happen, sooner or later. Trouble with Snotty is, his head"s too small for his brain. Leads to an intolerable build-up of pressure, that does, and you end up going potty. I"ll just go and get some rope, and..."
Bedevere remained firm. "Hold on, Turkey," he said quietly. "Just because Bo"s behaving a bit oddly, that doesn"t mean we should abandon the quest, does it, chaps?"
Four pairs of eyebrows lifted as one. Having got their attention, Bedevere slid down off the worktop, helped himself to a biscuit from the jar, and went on.
"What I"m getting at," he said, "is, sooner or later we"ve got to find the ruddy thing, or we"re all going to be here for ever and ever. Right?"