The Great Troll War
- Автор: Ффорде Джаспер
- Серия: The Last Dragonslayer #4
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: Hodder & Stoughton
- ISBN: 9781444799958
- Жанр: Фэнтези
Электронная книга - «The Great Troll War». Краткое содержание книги:
‘Where are Full Price and Lady Mawgon imprisoned?’ I asked.
‘In the Cornwall Department of Corrections in St Ives,’ said Boo.
‘They’ll be free as soon as we get the Princess back,’ said Tiger.
‘How do we prove she’s the Princess?’ asked Boo.
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. What about the Trolls, Monty? William of Anorak told me the way to defeat Trolls might have been forgotten down the years and scrubbed from the archives by Shandar, eager to make their defeat impossible.’
‘I’ve been doing a bit of reading,’ replied Monty, ‘and trying to work the problem backwards to figure out a solution. We know that fighting the Troll was a big deal during the Roman invasion of Britain, and Emperor Hadrian defeated the Troll by banishing them beyond the wall that bears his name. Later on, Emperor Antonine established a new wall sixty miles to the north. As far as we know that was the last time the Trolls invaded – each subsequent war was the result of humans attacking them.’
‘The Roman Troll Wars are well documented,’ said Boo. ‘Battle re-enactors seem to do little else. Where are you going with this?’
‘This: that defeating Trolls seems to revolve around having not one Troll wall, but two. The Modern Troll Walls were built three hundred years ago, and only ten miles apart, far closer than the Roman walls.’
‘Is this significant?’ I asked.
‘I think so. But there are rumours of another Troll War, this time in the eighth century when they were defeated by King Offa, who, and I quote, “Builded a great wall of the purpose of which to Troll numbers greatly reduced”.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’m not sure. Records are scarce or missing. But there is another dyke or wall behind Offa’s Dyke known as Wat’s dyke, and, well, here we have the double wall thing again.’
We remained silent. There didn’t really seem much to go on, but Monty wasn’t finished. He showed me a map of the UnUnited Kingdoms with all the ditches and walls built in antiquity marked on them. There were a lot in number: some running east and west, others running north–south – even a canal network built in part by the Romans that was fed by seawater.
‘I think these defences were built to get rid of the Trolls,’ said Monty. ‘All of them have been found to contain buttons in great quantities. It also says that Offa’s Troll War was “faced with many hundreds of thousands of the sinful beast, but we did by way of clever enclosure, two days from start of attack to the last Troll banished”.’
‘That’s seriously quick in terms of defeating Trolls,’ said Tiger. ‘You would have thought mopping up the stragglers would have taken a month on its own.’
‘Excuse me,’ said one of the waiters politely, ‘there’s an Australopithecine outside wanting to speak to a Miss Strange.’
‘Ah,’ I said, ‘that will be my ride. Anything else, Monty?’
‘I’ll know more when you return.’
‘Good. Tiger? You up for a trip to Mother Zenobia’s?’
‘Do I get to ride on a Cloud Leviathan?’
‘You do.’
‘Then yes,’ he said, ‘I’m totally up for this.’
Cloud Leviathan
The Australopithecine had a flattish face, a protruding lower jaw, deep-set eyes that were a bright blue and was covered all over in short coarse hair. He wore no clothes at all except a set of very worn Converse All-Stars and his only possessions were carried in a large handbag that always sat in the crook of his arm. Handbag and shoes aside, he looked like the sort of hominid that is often featured on the cover of National Geographic, along with weddings in Azerbaijan and men on rickety ladders collecting honey.
Ralph had originally been Homo sapiens like us but when he suffered a potentially fatal self-induced overdose of magic, Perkins had to subject him to a Genetic Master Reset – that is, he had taken him back to the time when he wasn’t really quite human – a sort of hominid on the cusp, just between ape and man. It had saved Ralph’s life, but left him 1.6 million years behind in human development. And while Ralph had trouble remembering where he left stuff or following even the simplest episode of Bergerac, he knew a whole bunch about friendship and loyalty – and could ride a Cloud Leviathan like a master.
‘Hello, Ralph,’ I said, and he grunted in reply.
Swapping gifts is usual when you meet an Australopithecine. He gave me a Hot Wheels VW Baja – one I did not yet have in my collection – and in return I gave him a pretty marble, six marshmallows and a box of matches, while Tiger offered up a half-used scented candle and a pack of Zetor Tractor Top Trumps, and received, in return, a mousetrap and a used Q-tip. Ralph examined his gifts very carefully and, when satisfied, popped them into his handbag.
‘How are you?’ I asked.
‘Good I am me better never,’ he said cheerfully, his sense of word order not yet fully evolved. He had trouble with grammar and making plans more than a week in advance, and would often steal stuff that he liked, not really understanding the concept of ownership. But all things considered, he did pretty well on a third of a modern human’s brain capacity. To be honest, he fared a lot better than many humans I knew with a full brain capacity.
‘What do, Jen?’ said Ralph, and I outlined as best as I could where I needed to go. A modern map was useless as his more primitive visual cortex could not interpret the writing, so I handed him a picture map I’d drawn that gave him landmarks to follow all the way to Hereford, then a picture of the River Wye and the castle at Clifford, a stone’s throw from the orphanage.
The small hominid nodded, then started to look around, calling the Leviathan by name – it seems he had dubbed it ‘Basil’.
‘How can he lose a Leviathan?’ asked Tiger as Ralph ran around the place, covering the ground urgently like a demented spaniel trying to find a lost stick.
‘A Leviathan has chameleonic skin,’ I explained, ‘to merge into the background. They can’t be counted, studied or even hunted because … well, you can’t see them.’
The Cloud Leviathan was also known as an ‘AltiHippo’ or ‘Skywhale’, the latter giving the origin of the name of their native country, Wales. The creature was a coach-sized flying mammal that had so far escaped scientific scrutiny. Kept aloft by a diet of gravity-defying Angel’s Feathers and propelled by four massive flipper-like paddles on the side of its body, it had a large blunt head with a horizontal mouth that could swallow a thousand starlings at one go, or strip a single tree of apples during a high-speed swoop. The tail was long and ended in a small triple fluke which was used for directional purposes, as well as fanning itself in hot weather, and arranging things in its nest.
‘What’s that?’ asked Molly, who was driving past in her Mini, the window open a crack so she could talk, the car’s suspension sagging under her weight.
‘An Australopithecine friend of mine named Ralph.’
‘A what?’
‘I’ll explain later—’
‘That’s it!’ said Molly, pointing at the hominid. ‘That colour. Yukky yukky yukky. I’m off.’
And she drove rapidly off down the promenade in the direction of Newlyn without a backward glance. I looked at Ralph, who had painted his body with blue warpaint, presumably the shade of cerulean that Trolls don’t like. I made a mental note to ask him for the recipe.