The Great Troll War

‘It’s not a worry I share,’ said the Princess, ‘but if you’re going to eat us, why haven’t you done so?’

It was a pointlessly dangerous remark to make to a Troll, but the Princess was always forthright, even for a princess. She was the same age as me but we could not have been more different. While she grew up in a palace wanting for nothing and with forty rooms of her own, I was in an orphanage with nothing but my dignity and forty other girls in the same room. She had joined us on the quest3 for the Eye of Zoltar because her parents, the King and Queen of Snodd, felt she was too horribly obnoxious to successfully lead the Kingdom if the need arose, and a slice of real-life experience would be good for her. Her mind was switched into the body of a lowly royal dog-mess clearer-upper to further her lesson in humility, and after several high-jeopardy adventures and a few interesting digressions into the knotty question of supply-side economics, the Princess had transformed from a hideously spoiled princess into a confident young woman of considerable courage. She was also, following the death of her parents at the hands of the invading Trolls, the rightful heir to the wealthy and influential Kingdom of Snodd on the Welsh Borders.

She was also now permanently residing within the royal dog-mess clearer-upper’s body, her own lost during the invasion – ringlets and dimples and royal birthmark and everything.

‘Once we find a way to cross that trench,’ said the Troll Husband, eyeing the glittering collection of buttons nervously, ‘we will definitely eat you.’

‘Without the badger’s paws,’ added the Troll Wife, who must have felt the issue had not yet been resolved.

‘Right,’ said the Troll Husband.

The trench ran for nearly four and a half miles along the route of the railway line from Penzance in the south of Cornwall to Lelant Saltings in the north, just to the east of St Ives. The ditch was barely ten feet wide and only a foot deep – humans could wade across it with ease. But the Troll, whose cunning, appetite and violent ruthlessness made the worst despot of the Kingdoms look like little more than an enraged infant,4 had several unaccountable fears: swimming, a certain shade of cerulean blue, and buttons. And that’s precisely what was protecting us now – millions and millions of buttons. They had been pulled from coats, shirts and blouses, or liberated from haberdasher’s shops throughout the Kingdoms, then carried in bags, buckets or wheelbarrows by those fleeing the Trolls and dumped in the trench dug wizidrically by Wizard Moobin, who had given everything to his last and greatest spell, the years piling on to his weary body as he sacrificed his remaining life-force to create a final line of defence against the invaders.

‘Where would you place a human on the tasty scale?’ the Troll Wife asked her Troll Husband.

‘Somewhere between stoat and seal pup,’ replied the husband thoughtfully, ‘but they’ve never been my snack of choice, to be honest. Too stringy past the age of twenty-six. Some say their tendency to escape can offer up good sport, but I just think it’s plain tiresome, myself.’

‘A good sauce is key,’ added the Troll Wife, ‘and we’d best get used to them – it’s about all we’ll be eating for the next ten years.’

And they both laughed, a soft, galumphing, you’re-so-trashed-as-a-species kind of laugh.

Magically digging the four-and-a-half-mile trench that now cut off Land’s End, St Ives and Penzance from the invading Trolls had been the easy part. Spreading the ‘bring every single button you can find to Cornwall’ message on the low-alpha-suggestive telepathic bandwidth was actually what drained Wizard Moobin’s power and ultimately took his life-force from him. The telepathic message was powerful enough to be heard by almost everyone in the Kingdoms, but only as a ‘a vague idea that should be put into action’, and only a small proportion responded. Luckily, the message was also picked up by magpies, who, as natural thieves, may have contributed at least a million buttons to the defences before falling, exhausted, from the skies.

It was a bold yet timely construction. The Button Trench kept the Trolls from crossing over into the last bastion of the UnUnited Kingdoms where lay encamped the free. The ones who had been the quickest to react to the threat, the ones who could run the fastest, the ones with a death-by-devouring promise on their heads, and those with specialist skills who had also been drawn here by a call on the same telepathic wavelength – specifically: expert fencers, keen-eyed marksmen and warriors.