Leif Frond and Quickfingers (4 page)

KABAM! Cart, kite and boy slammed into Nell's big broad side and exploded into a hundred pieces. Well, the cart and the kite did anyway. I just landed hard and had the breath knocked out of me for a moment. And ripped my tunic. And scraped the skin off my elbows. And got a mouthful of grass and dirt. But what had I done to poor Nell?

“Are you all right?” I cried as I spat out the dirt, scrambled to my feet and started to pat her all over, checking for injuries. The look she gave me was deeply expressive, and spoke volumes about her hurt dignity and how she'd thought we were friends and how cannoning into the side of someone
wasn't nice or
necessary… But she seemed physically unharmed, to my great relief. Nell had been built to last.

“Are you all right?” said Quickfingers as he raced down the slope after me. (He outstripped Queue by a long way, I noticed.) Then, without waiting for an answer, he added, “Thor's thunderbolt, that looked like fun!”

“Act your age, you old fool,” panted Queue as he caught up, but his eyes were all shiny as if he wouldn't mind having a go himself. “Besides, I'll need to rebuild the kite a bit first. And the cart. Help me pick up the pieces and we'll take them back to the workshop.”

After
, that is, we'd taken Wandering Nell back to the herd. The words sound simple, but the reality was anything but. Back in the enclosure, she was greeted without fuss by the other cows – they were quite used to her disappearing and then reappearing again – and, after looking a bit surprised at where she'd ended up, she got down to the serious business of grazing as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Queue dusted his hands and turned to the two of us.

“Well,” he said cheerfully. “What next? Shall we get started reworking the Kite or would you like to test something else first?”

“The Fire-breathing Mechanism?” suggested Quickfingers. “Could we test that?”

“We certainly could,” said Queue with a gleam in his eyes. “Fire-breathing it is.”

“Great!” I said, and tried not to gulp.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Artificer's Tale

“Y
ou dunder-headed, dim-witted, beef-brained, fish-faced, idiotic no-hope know-nothings!” shrieked Thorhalla, and for a moment there I really thought she was going to start hitting us with her laundry stick.

Well, you could see why she might be a bit upset. Queue's fire-breathing mechanism
had
exploded (luckily just after I'd climbed out of it) and it
had
dumped a lot of soot and hot fish-oil all over her freshly washed sheets, which had been laid out to dry in the sun. (There would certainly need to be some fine-tuning done before the invention could be considered a complete success – half of all ‘trial and error' is likely to be ‘error', after all – but my sister has never understood the ways of artificing.) The Pedlar made the mistake of trying to make things better by complimenting her on how very glossy and un-blue her hair was looking, thanks to the potion he'd sold her. Even though this was perfectly true, it just made her even madder, and it focussed her fury rather unfortunately in his direction. (Well, I could have told him that! Keep your mouth shut and your head down – those are the only things to do when my sister hits her stride.) By the end of Thorhalla's rant his eyes had gone very wide, so that the whites showed right the way round, and he was quivering all over. Queue took one look at him and called a halt to testing for the day.

We took the Pedlar back to the workshop – and then something happened that had never happened before. Maybe it was to help take Quickfingers' mind off the trauma of Thorhalla and her troll tirade. Maybe something else prompted it. Whatever the reason, Queue brought out The Book, laid it on the table in front of us, opened it, and – amazingly – began to talk.

“This was my master's Book,” he said, gently turning the pages, smoothing them each in turn. “He was the one who taught me how to read and write in the Arab way.”

“You had a master?” The idea seemed a surprise to Quickfingers.

“Of course I had a master,” said Queue. “How else would I have learned so much? I wasn't born this brilliant, you know.”

“Tell us about him,” I said. I've never been
anywhere
and I've longed to know about Queue's life before he came to Frondfell.

“My master's name was Salim al-Basir, and he was without doubt the wisest man in Constantinople, and Constantinople is without doubt the greatest city in the world.”

“You've been to Constantinople?” exclaimed Quickfingers. “Why? When?”

I held my breath, in case Queue clammed up, but today he seemed willing to answer questions.

“It was my first trading trip,” he said. “I went with my two older brothers. I was very young, hardly more than a boy – but I thought I was man enough to find my own way about, so I gave them the slip on our first morning in the city. And, of course, I got myself hopelessly lost.” He shook his head at the memory of his young self. “I wandered for most of the day, half terrified, half-bewitched, until I found my way by some lucky chance into the Street of the Artificers and into the workshop of Salim al-Basir. He was kind to me, offering me food and drink, but I barely noticed. I was so enchanted by the sights and sounds and smells of his workshop I almost forgot to breathe.”

There was a dreamy, far-away look on his face, but then he shrugged and looked normal again.

“I knew immediately that there was nothing I wanted more than to be that man's apprentice. My brothers were appalled, of course, and argued with me for days, but in the end they had to give in and leave me behind. I never saw them again. From then on until the day he died, Salim al-Basir was my master, and my family too.”

“And when he died? What did you do then?” asked the Pedlar in a strange voice.

“I came away. I had no reason to stay. I joined your father's boat, Leif, for the journey back, and I've been here ever since.”

The old Artificer started to close The Book, and it looked to me as if that was all we'd be getting out of him today. But Quickfingers had more questions.

“Why didn't you go back to your own family? Back to your own settlement?” he asked.

He'll
never answer that!
I thought to myself, but I was wrong again.

“I tried to,” said Queue in a low voice. “Your father, Leif, made a detour specially to my home fjord, but things hadn't gone well in the years I'd been away. Both my brothers had died in the fever and the settlement had passed on to my cousins.” He shrugged. “They would have taken me in, but it was only a duty, I could tell plainly enough. Your father, on the other hand, was – and is – a far-seeing man. He offered me a place of honour at Frondfell. I said yes. My cousins were free of me, I was grateful and he was lucky to get me. Satisfactory outcome for all.”

“And The Book?” persisted the Pedlar. I saw how he reached out a finger longingly towards the leather cover but stopped short of touching it. “How did you come by that?”

For a moment Queue was silent. Then he said, “When he knew he was going to die, my master gave it to me. He said I was worthy of it.” He paused for a moment. “A long time ago,” he said softly. “And yet it seems only yesterday.”

Then he gave himself a shake and stood up. “That's enough wittering on – now, let's see what we can build here today that will be worthy of going in it as well, hmm?”

He gathered The Book up and put it carefully away. Quickfingers sighed, as if he'd been holding his breath.

I just stared into space, my head filled with pictures of hot white cities and mysterious robed men murmuring secrets and concocting marvels and, pretty soon, Leif the hero was there as well.

The next morning, I went into the workshop with some breakfast for them both. I was greeted by two voices calling automatically and in chorus, “Don't touch anything!”

Then, “Oh, it's you, Leif,” said Queue, looking up in an abstracted way. “Why has your hair turned white?”

For some reason Queue's question seemed to particularly startle Quickfingers, who jumped like a spooked rabbit, and put his hand up to his own white hair. Again, I felt as if there was something odd, but I still couldn't think what it was. I turned back to Queue.

“My hair hasn't turned anything,” I said. “It's snowing outside. The first snow of the year. Just a sprinkle for now, but Granny says there'll be a proper fall tonight.”

“Oh?” said Queue. “Well, don't drip on the table. Is that breakfast you've got there?”

Quickfingers didn't say anything. He didn't look well, all of a sudden. He didn't seem very hungry for once, so I ate his breakfast for him. (I've always felt that two is a good number of breakfasts to have. One never seems quite enough, and three is just greedy.) Then Queue shooed me away since there was nothing to test.

It was barely dawn the next day when the Artificer burst into the Hall where we were still asleep. (Queue always slept in the workshop, no matter what the time of year.) We were all so blurry and groggy that it took us ages to understand what it was he was trying to tell us. But once the news got through, it was as effective as a bucket of cold water. Suddenly, we were all wide awake.

“The Pedlar's gone!” Queue wailed for what must have been the umpteenth time. “And The Book's gone with him!”

CHAPTER SIX

The Tracks of the Pilfering Pedlar

A
ll those odd, uncomfortable feelings I'd had about the Pedlar came rushing back. I'd been right to be suspicious. Being right is usually pretty satisfying but I just felt sick. I wanted it not to have happened. I wanted the betrayed look on Queue's face not to be there.

“Right,” said my father, putting a hand on Queue's shoulder. “We'll go after him. We'll get it back.”

My father can sometimes say just the right thing.

Everyone scrambled into their clothes and out of the Hall – and almost immediately, there was good news.