The Great Troll War

Kevin Zip looked at us all, and we all stared back. When a pre-cog with a proven track record says something important is about to happen, you take note, although uncertainties over the precise time, nature and location of the event often make the prediction either useless or irrelevant – or it comes too late to do any good at all.

‘The tea lady will arrive,’ he said slowly, ‘and she’ll be short on Hobnobs and will instead offer us digestives.’

‘That’s the important thing that’s going to happen?’ said Colin. ‘Like … big wow.’

‘Two weeks ago I could see a month into the future,’ said Kevin Zip, ‘but when the HENRY fired up my Predict Event Horizon reduced to a maximum of eighteen minutes. This morning it had diminished to only twelve. If it carries on reducing at this rate I’ll only be able to predict things after they happen. I think there’s a word for it.’

‘Memory?’ said Tiger.

‘That’s the one. It’s all a little annoying. But,’ he added, scribbling on a piece of paper, ‘immediate things I can often see with great accuracy.’

‘Is that useful?’ asked Colin, and Kevin showed him the piece of paper with ‘it could be, not sure’ written on it.

I took a deep breath and looked at Tiger, who shrugged. Usually a conclave is a well-ordered meeting offering a clear idea of where we are going with many sober, well-thought out and considered suggestions about the right course of action. With the Trolls quite literally an hour from this very spot – more if they chose to dawdle and admire the view – we needed to dispense with protocol and start dealing with practicalities.

‘I’m going to throw the meeting open,’ I said. ‘If anyone has any good ideas on how to vanquish the Trolls, I want to hear all about it right now.’

‘How about if we throw stones at them?’ said a young man at the far end of the table. ‘Just pelt them endlessly.’

‘And you are?’

‘Grover Ruckstell,’ he said, ‘representing the Guild of Haberdashers.’

‘And what would throwing rocks achieve?’ I asked, ‘Since it would probably take a stone too big to lift and thrown at a speed impossible to accomplish to have any sort of effect.’

‘It would make us feel better,’ said Grover with a shrug.

‘I think some sort of a stunt would be a good idea,’ said Jimmy Nuttjob, noted daredevil and stunt performer. He had been wowing the audiences up and down the UnUnited Kingdoms for decades, and by royal decree had a bed reserved in every hospital, as most of his outlandish stunts went spectacularly wrong – such as the time he tried to fire himself from an air cannon through a brick wall, and set the cannon pressure a little too high and went through two walls, a parked car and embedded himself in a telephone box. Rumours persist that he has the image of a telephone dial permanently embossed on his left buttock.

‘Okay,’ I said, well used to Nuttjob’s unique brand of showmanship/death wish, ‘so what’s your plan?’

‘A skydive from thirty thousand feet trailing a huge banner reading Ugg dugh lurgh hurg,19’ he said excitedly. ‘That should make them see we’re not a species to be trifled with.’

‘A parachute drop doesn’t sound that risky,’ said Full Price, who was a huge fan of Jimmy Nuttjob but had also, in leaner times, enjoyed a bit of parachuting himself.

‘Whoever said anything about a parachute?’ asked Nuttjob with an excited gleam in his eye.

‘Teatime!’ announced the tea lady as she walked in. ‘I know you could all do with a cuppa but the Trolls have disrupted the biscuit supply chain, so it will be digestives only today.’

Zip’s skill as a pre-cog was impressive but in this particular instance of little use – unless you were looking forward to Hobnobs, in which case it might have softened the disappointment.

‘Actually,’ said Kevin Zip, ‘the Hobnob issue wasn’t the important thing that was about to happen.’

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Colin.

‘I think it’s fairly clear,’ said Once Magnificent Boo, ‘that the Troll didn’t do all this on its own, and we must—’

She had stopped talking because the doors had been flung open in a dramatic fashion and a tall and impossibly handsome man walked in. He was dressed in expensive embroidered silk clothes, had a long flowing mane of blond hair, an impressive lantern jaw and large blue eyes. It was Sir Matt Grifflon, and while I and most people who knew him groaned audibly, Princess Jocaminca strategically swooned at his striking, manly presence while Princess Tabathini fanned herself with a copy of What Prince? magazine.

Sir Matt Grifflon

He wasn’t alone, as any knight worth their spurs always had a retinue of hangers-on which generally included a couple of lute-playing minstrels who would sing songs about the knight’s achievements, several squires, an accountant, a make-up and hair stylist combined, a gun bearer, his agent, two valets, a dozen or so armed guards and, at the front, an ornamental hermit whose function was to spout meaningless aphorisms on demand. The latter bowed and took a deep breath.