‘Oh dear,’ said Hawker. ‘Officers, arrest her.’
The policemen stepped forward but I raised a hand.
‘Wait!’
They stopped.
‘I thought you said I had ten minutes?’
Hawker gave a rare smile and checked his watch.
‘Think you can raise a hundred thousand in, let’s see... eight minutes?’
I thought quickly.
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘actually, I rather think I can.’
Maltcassion again
An hour later I was heading off to the Dragonlands again, the Rolls-Royce bedecked with Fizzi-Pop stickers. Painted on the door was a big sign saying:
Dragonslayer
Personally sponsored by
Fizzi-Pop, Inc.
The Drink of Champions
Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do for the greater good. After Mr Hawker’s warning I had dashed out and collared the Fizzi-Pop representative who had been camping outside the Dragonstation. He and his opposite number at Yummy-Flakes breakfast cereals had quickly called their bosses and bid over the phone for my endorsement of their product. Yummy-Flakes had pulled out at M95,000 but Fizzi-Pop had gone all the way to my asking price of M100,000. It was a simple deaclass="underline" I was to wear one of their hats and jackets whenever in public, and the Slayermobile had to be similarly adorned. I had to appear in five commercials and do nothing to impinge on the good name of the product. The alternative was debtor’s prison so I didn’t have much choice. Hawker, as you might expect, was furious. He had called his lawyers and tried to find a way round the problem, but this was something they had not expected. It wasn’t the end of it, I could see that, but at least it was the first round to me. And actually, I quite liked Fizzi-Pop.
I saw as I approached that even more people had gathered at the Dragonlands. Just behind the marker stones there was now a 500-yard-deep swathe of tents, mobile eateries, toilets, marquees, first-aid posts and parked cars. The word was spreading, and citizens were arriving from the farthest kingdoms of the land. It was rumoured that claimants were arriving from the Continent and masquerading as unUK citizens in order to be able to stake a claim. A coachload of Danes had been detained at Oxford, a boot-load of rollmop herrings having given them away.
Sunday at noon was a little over twenty-four hours away, and if the premonition came true there would be an unseemly rush to claim everything there was as soon as the force-field was down. It was estimated that a total of approximately 6.2 million people would claim the 350 square miles in under four hours, and the vast majority would be disappointed. The injury rate was pegged at about two hundred thousand, and the fight over land would, it was thought, lead to an estimated three thousand deaths.
I bumped on to the Dragonland and drove up the hill towards Maltcassion’s lair. It was a beautiful day and peace and tranquillity still reigned within the lands. Birds were busy building nests and wild bees buzzed among the wild flowers, which grew in cheerful profusion on the unspoilt land. I found Maltcassion scratching his back against an old oak that bent and creaked under his weight.
‘Hello, Miss Strange!’ he said in a cheerful tone. ‘What brings you here?’
‘To speak with you.’
‘Well, cheer up, old girl, your face looks long enough to reach your feet!’
‘You don’t know what’s going on out there!’ I replied miserably, waving my hand in the direction of the outside world.
‘Oh, but I do,’ replied Maltcassion. ‘You can see the visible spectrum of light, can’t you? Violet to red, yes?’
I nodded and sat down on a stone.
‘A pretty poor selection, I should think!’ said the Dragon, stopping his scratching, much to the relief of the oak tree. ‘I can see much farther; past visible light and into both ends of the electromagnetic spectrum.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, poking at the dry earth with a stick.
‘Put it this way,’ continued Maltcassion. ‘Only seeing the visible part of the spectrum is like listening to a symphony and hearing only the kettle drums. Let me describe what I can see: at the slow end of the spectrum lie the languorous long radio waves that move like cold serpents. Next are the bright blasts of medium and short radio waves that occasionally burst from the sun. I can see the pulse of radar that appears over the hills like the beam of a lighthouse and I can see the strange point-sources of your mobile phones, like raindrops striking a pond. I can see the buzz of microwaves and the strange thermal images of the low infrared. Beyond this is the visible spectrum that we share; then we are off again, past blue and out beyond violet to the ultraviolet. We go past google rays and manta rays and then shorter still to the curious world of the X-ray, where everything bar the most dense materials are transparent. I had a cousin once who claimed he could see beyond X-rays and into the realm of the gamma, but to be frank I have my doubts. I can see all this, a beautiful and radiant world quite outside your understanding. But it’s not all just for fun. You see this?’
He showed me one of his ears. It folded into a flap behind his eye and was of a delicate mesh-like construction, a bit like the ribs on a leaf. He unfurled it for my benefit, rotated it and then slotted it away again.
‘A Dragon’s senses are far more keen than yours. In the radio part of the spectrum I can see your television and radio signals. But more than that, I can read them. I can pick up sixty-seven TV channels and forty-seven radio stations. I thought you were great on the Yogi Baird show.’
‘How about cable?’
‘Luckily, no.’
‘Then you know what’s going on outside?’
‘Pretty much. Ever since Marconi started crackling away with his radio sets the planet has been getting progressively noisier. I can block it out the same way you can shut your eyes against light, but even on a sunny day you can still see the sun through your eyelids. It’s the same with me. It’s very like a bad case of visual ringing in the ears.’
‘Then you heard about the incident this morning? The truck the police thought was taken by you?’
‘I heard something about that, yes. Quite what I would be doing stealing eighteen-wheelers is anyone’s guess; I don’t even have a driver’s licence. Have you had lunch?’
‘And you’re not bothered!’ I jumped up, my voice rising. ‘There are crowds of people outside waiting for you to die and take over this haven! Doesn’t that worry you?’
Maltcassion stared at me and blinked the lids above his jewel-like eyes.
‘It bothered me once. I am old now, and have been waiting for you for a number of years. But there is another place we can see. Not radio waves or gamma waves but another realm entirely—the cloudy sub-ether of potential outcome.’
‘The future?’
‘Ah, yes!’ said Maltcassion, raising a claw in the air. ‘The future. The undiscovered country. We all journey there, sooner or later. Don’t let anyone tell you the future is already written. The best any prophet can do is to give you the most likely version of future events. It is up to us to accept the future for what it is, or change it. It is easy to go with the flow; it takes a person of singular courage to go against it. It was long foreseen that the Dragonslayer who oversaw the last of our kind would be a young woman of singular mind, remarkable talents and generosity of spirit. She would set us free.’
‘Are you sure you’ve got the right Jennifer Strange?’ I asked, not recognising myself in Maltcassion’s description.