The Great Troll War

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.