The Mammoth Book of Awesome Comic Fantasy Read online

  The Magician, talking excitedly, waved his wand over the Animal, which reverted to human shape.

  “This is my animal, Your Majesty! Merely one of Your Majesty’s pages masquerading as a – er – just masquerading. I was suspicious and so took the liberty of temporarily changing him.” He observed that the page, though otherwise normal and still scratching the back of his neck, had four pairs of ears, said “Tut, tut!” and waved the wand again, abolishing the three superfluous sets. “I guessed he was an impostor. So I told the page something definite to say to see if this rogue could really translate.”

  “And didn’t he?” asked the King.

  “He did not.”

  “It seemed all right to me,” said the King carelessly, stroking the back of his head again. “Quite natural. I mean, it was what one might expect a rabbit of perception to say.”

  “Aha! Your Majesty. But it was not my test sentence. He has deceived you.”

  “Sir,” began Crispin. “I . . .”

  But here the Vizier interrupted. He leant forward and fixed the Magician with his eye.

  “And what did you tell the page to say?” he asked slowly.

  “I . . .” began Magus and then stopped. He perceived that, in his anxiety to ensure Crispin’s not translating accurately, he had overlooked one contingency. “Er – something quite different,” he explained, crestfallen. “Er – that is, just a trifle different,” he added hastily.

  The Vizier sat back with the air of a defending counsel who has caught out a witness. “Is the boy to be penalized because he makes a trifling mistake in translation?” he asked, with a reassuring wink at Crispin.

  “Of course not,” said the King. “Have some Marsala?”

  “Shall we ask the page what he was told?” continued the Vizier, but the now frightened Court Magician, with a sudden wave of the wand, had caused the page to vanish. In his place there was only a tortoise – a tortoise still trying to scratch the back of its neck but without success, since, wonderful though Nature is, tortoises are not built that way.

  “Ah!” said the Vizier.

  “What on earth . . .?” began the King.

  “A slight slip,” said Magus, who had removed the incriminating evidence; for tortoises do not talk.

  “Well, when you’ve quite finished with my page, I’d like him to refill this decanter,” said the King in sarcastic tones.

  “A slip, I assure you,” stammered Magus.

  “You’re not quite yourself tonight,” said the King sternly, who might have made this remark with more truth to his page. “You’d better go to bed. And,” he added, producing his little book and writing in it, “don’t make any more slips. You’ll find them expensive.”

  The Court Magician went, casting a look at Crispin which made that youth think furiously. The erstwhile page obediently followed after, but the door was banged in his face, a bare twenty minutes before he reached it.

  “Now,” said the King kindly. “Would you like to be Assistant Court Magician?”

  Crispin, with memories of Magus’ last glance, said hurriedly he didn’t think he would, as his health wouldn’t stand it.

  “Well, what would you like? Come closer, my boy. . . . How strong that smell of bacon is! I really must speak to the butler . . . Well, what would you like? I promise you shall have it.”

  “Please, Sir,” said Crispin in a tremble, “a house for my mother in the forest and money and some new treatment for the Spazzums but not too good a one, because she’ll have nothing to talk about, and a lady companion if possible with Spazzums too! Oh, and a coach to take me back at once.”

  “Gobbless my soul!” gasped the King, and added a little later: “Why do you want to leave?”

  “Perhaps,” explained the Vizier with a meaning glance at the door by which Magus had so balefully left, “he thinks that if he stays he won’t be – er – feeling quite himself by tomorrow.”

  “Ah!” said the King, seeing it at last. “Reasons of health!” he added and laughed as loudly as though he had made the joke himself. “Not feeling quite himself! Ha! Ha!”

  “Ha! Ha!” said the Vizier very, very swiftly, and with a look of regret the King put away his little book which he was hopefully taking out.

  “Well, it shall be granted,” said the King. “But it seems a pity to waste your gift.”

  “It need not be wasted,” said the Vizier.

  “How?” asked the King.

  “Appoint him to Your Majesty’s Secret Service and let him send reports weekly from the forest of what the birds and animals say, so that Your Majesty may know what is going on all over the Kingdom.”

  “A good idea!” said the King.

  “There are one or two people, even at Your Majesty’s Court, who are of a jealous disposition and may be inclined to plot. Well, the birds will hear of it and thus this young man, and so it will come to Your Majesty.”

  “A very good idea!” repeated the King. “I’m glad I thought of it.” He looked sternly at the Vizier who had indignantly opened his mouth to speak. “A good idea of mine!” he repeated aggressively. The Vizier shut his mouth without speaking. He had great power of self-control – which was why he had become Vizier.

  And so it was arranged. Crispin got for his mother all that she wanted, and lived in the forest and sent his weekly reports to the King. The King’s omniscience became a marvel to everyone, though when people respectfully asked him how he did it, he used to reply: “Ah, a little bird told me!” which, as very few people know nowadays, is the real origin of that old saying.

  A Halo of Angels

  TOUCHED BY A SALESMAN

  Tom Holt

  I can’t imagine Tom Holt needs much introduction. Since he hit the comic-fantasy shelves with Expecting Someone Taller (1987), he has produced a stream of ingenious and wickedly funny novels including Who’s Afraid of Beowulf? (1988). Flying Dutch (1991), Faust Among Equals (1994), Paint Your Dragon (1996), Snow White and the Seven Samurai (1999) and Valhalla (2000). His work is remarkably diverse, as shown by the following story, totally different to either of the previous stories in this series.

  There are days that convince you that God is a game-show host, and that His hidden cameras are filming you while a studio audience laughs itself sick at your carefully staged misfortunes. At any moment you expect Him to walk out from behind a parked car or a burning bush and confirm that yes, you’ve been set up, none of it’s really happening, and you’re entitled to a free combination cafetiere/alarm clock as a reward for being such a good sport.

  Yes, God, You definitely had me going there for a minute or two, Paul thought, as he walked out of the Swindalls building into the night. Still, it’s all in fun, and you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you? He paused for a moment and waited, but for some unaccountable reason God missed His cue and didn’t appear, so Paul shrugged his shoulders and walked toward the bus stop.

  And there are days that convince you that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Or, to be more precise, told by an idiot who earns his living writing storylines for an Australian soap, which would account for the lack of a decent interval between earth-shattering disasters. And there are days that lead you to believe that the soap God writes for is locked in a desperate à l’outrance ratings battle with a rival show, which has forced Him to pour a whole season’s worth of unspeakable disasters into one half-hour episode. On such days it isn’t even safe to stay in bed with the covers pulled up over your head; that’s just inviting a freak tornado, flash floods or abduction by aliens. All you can do is spend the day in the company of those you like least, in the hope that some of your truly rotten luck will rub off on them.

  A moderately large slice of his life limped by like an hourly paid glacier. No bus. Nothing unusual in that. The locals had long since come to terms with the fact that the 47 route passed through a pocket of non-relativistic space somewhere between Sainsbury’s car park and Debenhams, with the result that what seemed l
ike two minutes inside the bus actually lasted at least half an hour in real time, with the interesting concomitant effect that whereas (according to the schedules) the bus stopped outside Higson’s Shoe Repairs at 19.37, if you arrived there at 19.35.15 precisely, you’d be just in time to watch its tail-lights disappearing round the back of Burger King. You could set your watch by the Number 47, the locals reckoned, provided your watch had been designed by Salvador Dali.

  Paul sighed and glanced up at the sky, just in time to see something bright and quick whizz through a gap in the clouds: a shooting star, he assumed, or a bit of derelict TV satellite findings its way home. He followed the line and picked it up again on the other side of the cloud. To his amazement, it shot down to rooftop level and vanished with an audible thump. After a moment’s thought, he realized that it had passed in front of the council offices tower, which could only mean that it had pitched somewhere in the hoarded-off wasteland where C&W were clearing the site for a new DIY megastore.

  If it hadn’t been such a rotten day, he probably wouldn’t have bothered. But . . . For some reason he’d always rather wanted to find a meteorite (and besides, he seemed to remember reading somewhere that they were worth good money). He hesitated for about ninety seconds, and crossed the street, heading for the gap in the hoarding where the kids had broken into the site two days ago.

  As Paul slid aside the loosened rails and squeezed through the gap, he couldn’t help feeling rather foolish. For one thing, how was he going to find a meteorite in a large building site in the dark without a torch? For another thing, what was he proposing to do with it even if he did find it? Sell it maybe, but who to? Putting a classified in Exchange & Mart wouldn’t cut it, and he didn’t know any geologists. Besides, didn’t all meteorites found on British soil belong to the Queen, or was that sturgeons?

  In the event, finding it wasn’t a problem. Properly speaking, it found him; one moment he was walking cautiously past a parked cement mixer, the next his foot snagged on something and the ground came rushing up to meet him like a big, friendly puppy with its lead in its mouth.

  “Oomph,” said a voice in the dark.

  Seen purely as a piece of hardware, the human brain is still way ahead of the competition. It’s versatile. It’s reliable. Its response times are excellent and it can multi-task effortlessly, as every schoolkid yelled at for daydreaming will confirm for you. Just as soon as someone comes up with a decent operating system to run it, in place of the weird lash-up of bugs and patches that comes installed as standard, we’ll finally get to see its true potential. For example: even during the split second that elapsed between his foot getting caught and his nose pecking into the mud, Paul had already formed several hypotheses to explain what was going on. The most promising of these was that the person he’d just cannoned into must be a fellow treasure-hunter who’d managed to get there first. This thought was, of course, extremely annoying.

  “You were quick,” he huffed. “How long have you been here?”

  There was a sound like a computer mulling over the strangeness of life and then a voice said: “Not sure. Not very long. Sorry if that sounds a bit vague, but I think I may have hit my head, because I’m feeling a little bit dizzy.”

  Maybe that was it, then; there was something about the voice that wasn’t quite right. The accent, for example; it was a bit like a Scandinavian carefully imitating an American newsreader through a mouth full of sponge cake. The timing was odd, too – the words came out in bunches, two or three at a time, with the tiniest little pause between each batch. For some reason it reminded Paul of the synthetic voice you get when you call Directory Enquiries, or its even more irritating cousin who tells you to press One if you want the main menu. But, he supposed, a bang on the head might do that to somebody.

  “Ah,” he said. “You all right?”

  “Give me a hand up, will you?”

  “Sure,” Paul said. He kneeled down and reached out. Something like a bad-tempered mole wrench fastened onto his wrist and dragged him sharply forward.

  “Thanks,” the voice said, as the grip relaxed. “This probably sounds like a dumb question, but where is this?”

  “The building site, round the back of Tesco’s,” Paul replied. “How are you feeling now?”

  Short pause. “My fault,” said the voice, “didn’t set the query parameters precisely enough. Let’s start with the planet. Mercury?”

  “Huh?”

  “Which planet are we on? I’m guessing Mercury, but geography was never my strong suit.”

  Paul took a step backwards, just in case. “Sounds to me like you’ve definitely had a bump on the head. We’d better get you to a hospital.”

  “Hospital,” the voice replied. “Right, that’s helpful. Definitely a humanoid concept” (longer pause than usual before the word humanoid; definitely something odd about that voice), “so we’re talking Earth or Proxima Centauri 7; and either I’ve got a bad cold or this isn’t a nitrogen-based atmosphere, so I’m guessing Earth. Am I right?”

  It took Paul a moment to get his voice back. “I really think you ought to see a doctor,” he suggested.

  “I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you,” the voice replied. “If this is Earth, my guess is we’re in the late twentieth century, possibly early twenty-first; and if our long-range scans are right about the state of your medical technology – well, no offence, but I think I’d rather take my chances with a fatal injury, if it’s all the same to you. Actually, I think it’s just a little bump on the head; can’t have been all that bad, or the translator chip wouldn’t still be working. Temperamental, you’ve only got to breathe on the damn’ things – Hold on,” the voice continued, “I hate talking to someone I can’t see. Let’s have some light, shall we?”

  A sudden glare, brighter than arc welding or burning magnesium. Paul instinctively looked away. “What the bloody hell do you think you’re . . .?”

  “Sorry.” The voice sounded hurt and bewildered; disappointed. “You don’t like it?”

  “No,” Paul replied, trying to blink burning purple spots off his retina.

  “Oh. Oh well. Maybe it’s a bit dated. Went down a treat last time I was here, but that was, what, two thousand years ago? I guess fashions change.”

  A nutcase, Paul decided; worse, a nutcase with some industrial-grade pyrotechnics. That horrible blinding light wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, he figured, as he remembered that he was trespassing on a building site. Security guards, big dogs (he was terrified of dogs), culminating in a ride to the police station. Strange to think that, a mere quarter of an hour ago, he was telling himself that the day couldn’t really get worse.

  “It’s all right,” the voice was saying. “I’ve turned it down.”

  Sure enough, the light was tolerable now, a mere ivory glimmer no brighter than the stairwell in a block of flats. He could see the man behind the voice.

  “Anyway,” the voice’s owner went on, “this is all very well, but I suppose I’d better be making tracks. Which way is the spaceport?”

  He’d seen pictures of them, back when he was a kid; in story books and My First Scripture Reader (in the latter, preceding generations of scholars had embellished the drawings with biroed-in beards, moustaches and other, more improbable physical attributes) and Christmas cards, of course. He knew exactly what he was looking at. Everything was just like it had been in the artwork (wings, halo, flowing nightgown; no harp, but harps were known to be optional). The only problem was that they didn’t exist.

  “You’re an angel,” he said accusingly.

  A slight frown creased the angel’s face. “Yes,” it said. “The spaceport. Is it far?”

  “But you can’t be,” Paul objected. “No such thing as angels.”

  The angel shrugged, giving Paul the impression that it had had this conversation before. “You’re entitled to your opinion,” it said. “Faith is an entirely personal matter, and freedom of belief is guaranteed by the Declaration of Sentient Rights.
So; how about telling this figment of your imagination the quickest way to the spaceport?”

  Paul started to back away.

  “Oh, for . . .” The angel vanished. Paul was still trying to cope with that when it reappeared; only it wasn’t an angel any more. It was a carbon copy of himself.

  “Better?” asked the faux Paul.

  “No.”

  “Oh. May I ask why?”

  Paul did try to answer, but his voice didn’t seem to want to work.

  “No offence,” said his double, “but I think you’re being a little bit unreasonable. All right, you don’t like the bright light, it’s probably something technical and species-specific that wasn’t in the manual. You don’t like the winged-messenger outfit; matter of taste, I guess, and like I said a moment ago, you’re entitled to your opinion. But you can’t seriously expect me to believe there’s anything offensive about this; dammit, it’s your own species.”

  Paul shook his head for quite some time. Eventually he managed to say, “Yes. It’s me.”

  “What? Ah, I take your point. Well, I haven’t met anyone else from your species in a long, long time.” The doppelgänger sighed. “Clearly we’ve got off on the wrong foot here, and I have an awful feeling that whatever I do is going to make things worse, so why don’t you just tell me how to get to the spaceport and you can forget the whole distasteful incident?”

  “No spaceport,” Paul stammered. “Not here.”

  “Drat.” His mirror image clicked his (their?) tongue. “Now you’re going to tell me it’s on the other side of the island or something.”

  “No spaceport,” Paul repeated. “No such thing.”

  Paul had the dubious privilege of seeing exactly what he looked like when he was forcing himself to be calm and patient when dealing with an idiot. “I must say, this belief system you’ve got going here is a new one on me. Some sort of hyperexistentialism, presumably. Let’s see: you don’t believe in the spaceport because right now you can’t see it or smell it or touch it. All right, let’s see what we can do. Supposing there was a spaceport—”