Leif Frond and Quickfingers Read online

  It was a little model of a dragon, about two hands long, curiously jointed and with an opening in its side. Queue immediately opened the door and I could see that there were wood and metal workings inside.

  It looked wonderful and intriguing to me, and I knew it would be irresistible to Queue.

  “Ah, no, that’s not for sale,” said Quickfingers, reaching out for it. “It’s just a toy. A work in progress, you might say.”

  “I like work in progress,” said Queue. The Pedlar tried again to take the toy out of Queue’s hands, but the Artificer wasn’t letting go. “What’s it supposed to do?” he asked.

  “Well, I don’t know if it’s supposed to do anything,” said Quickfingers, who was clearly not comfortable with a stranger handling his belongings like this. “What I’d like it to do is scuttle across the floor belching flames and entertaining children, but you don’t always get what you’d like, now do you?” Again he held out his hand for the little dragon, but Queue acted as if he didn’t even notice.

  “Well?” he said. “Do you know why it won’t do what you’d like?”

  The Pedlar sighed. “I haven’t yet found a way to get the spinal cogs to connect with the limb latchets there and there, and so, obviously, they don’t mesh with the head.” He paused here, as if expecting the Artificer to lose interest, not realising that technical talk was meat and drink to Queue.

  The Artificer said, “Hmmph.” And then he thought for a moment. And then he said, “You want to add a slide block. There. You’ll bypass the whole fulcrum question and then you can attach the differential mechanism direct to the leg levers. That’s what I’d do.”

  I have to admit – when Queue starts talking technical, I get left behind at practically the first word. As I glanced around I could tell that nobody else understood what he was saying either.

  “Of course,” Queue continued, “what would be really good, is if you could get it to fly.”

  And he handed the dragon back.

  You have never seen a more gob-smacked Pedlar in your whole life. Quickfingers’ mouth was hanging so far open he was likely to trip over it if he tried to walk.

  “You… the… what… fly?” was all he managed to say, but the Artificer wasn’t listening any more.

  “Bring it along to my workshop when you’re done peddling your frippery here, and I’ll show you what I mean,” he said. “There’s a diagram of something similar to what you’d need in The Book.” And he turned on his heel and walked away.

  There was a stunned pause. (Queue tends to have that effect on people.)

  Then Quickfingers began to stuff his remaining goods back into the pack any which way. “That’s it for today, friends,” he babbled. There was a surge of protest from his customers. “Don’t worry, don’t worry,” he continued. “I’ve changed my mind about a short stay. I ask myself – how could I leave such lovely people in a hurry? And I answer myself, I couldn’t. See me again, same time tomorrow, same place, same fabulous selection of delights, same – please! Wait!” he called after Queue in a strangled voice. “Where…? Wait! What book?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said before anyone else could volunteer for the job. “I can look after you. The workshop’s this way.”

  And the Pedlar gave me a big, excited grin that suddenly made his whole face look young.

  For a moment I thought, What’s odd about that face? But then I was too busy clearing a way through the crowd.

  “He’ll show you tomorrow,” I reassured them all as we passed. “I know you didn’t get a turn. Don’t worry – he won’t leave you empty-handed.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Testing Times

  Ishowed the Pedlar where Queue’s workshop was, but I soon wished I hadn’t. That stupid dragon toy formed a bond between those two old men that made me crazy. They were obsessed. The Pedlar should have been on his way – he kept saying he was going to leave, he absolutely must, he was heading off the very next day – but the next day would come and there would be no sign of him leaving. And now that Queue had somebody to talk cogs and levers to, he just wouldn’t shut up.

  “There’s a drawing in The Book on mechanical flight and I’ve a few ideas of my own,” the Artificer burbled. “First we’ll build a full-scale version of my flier and then consider modifications… miniaturization… mumbo-jumbo…”

  Well, that’s what it sounded like to me. Over the next week, you could barely get Queue or the old Pedlar to leave the workshop, even to eat or sleep. And you couldn’t get either of them to pay any attention to anyone else.

  Like me, for example.

  All right, so I was jealous. How heroic is that? Not very.

  Now, did all this jealousy and uncomfortableness mean I decided to stay away from Quickfingers and, oh I don’t know, go and help my dear troll-sister Thorhalla with her laundry?

  Not likely.

  Besides, there was something that I knew I could do better than anybody else. Don’t forget, I was the Official Frondfell Tester. The two old men might be inventing up a storm without me, but I still stuck to them like a burr. When the ideas were all out there, they’d need me to check they worked. All I had to do was wait patiently for my moment of glory – and stay out of my family’s way in the meantime.

  My heart sank, though, when I overheard Queue and the Pedlar talking about the flying machine. It was the day it was ready to be tested.

  Quickfingers was grumbling, “But I could do it. You should let me have a go.”

  Oh no – NO! I yelled inside my head. Now he wants to take over my job as the Willing Volunteer and Official Frondfell Tester? Queue, don’t let him!

  Fortunately Queue was having none of it.

  “No, no,” he said. “You know how it is in the stories – the clever old dwarves create the magic sword, but it takes some young hero to try it out.”

  I let out a big sigh of relief and then breathed in again fast, expanding my practically heroic chest in pride. Some young hero. That was me. I didn’t care what death-defying contraption those old men had invented – just bring it on.

  There are, of course, dangers involved in being an Artificer’s tester. Danger of broken limbs, multiple bruising, having your shirt set on fire, being shaken and stirred until you can barely remember who you are or where you live. I was aware of all these, but I hadn’t anticipated that another, far greater danger would be added to the list that day.

  And that was… danger of cow.

  Every settlement has one eccentric animal – a sheep that thinks it’s a duck, or a horse who thinks the main Hall should be its stable. Ours is a cow, and her name is Wandering Nell. I was something of an expert on Nell, because I’d been landed with the job of watching her for a number of summers past. One advantage of this was that it gave me plenty of time to lie around in the grass thinking about how unfair life can be. Whenever I mentioned these thoughts out loud, Nell always had a look in her lovely brown eyes that suggested she absolutely understood. In fact, we had a great deal in common. Like me, Nell longed for adventure, excitement and the far horizon. If cows could sail, I swear she would have stolen a longship years ago and gone off to discover brave new worlds. If cows could fly, she probably would have escaped over the highest mountains and tried to colonise the clouds. Since cows can neither sail nor fly, her great escapes were always on foot, but she didn’t let that discourage her.

  So Frondfell had a cow who kept escaping and a boy – me – who had to keep bringing her back. What did that have to do with the dangers of being an Artificer’s tester?

  I was about to find out.

  Quickfingers was all fired up about the idea of making his toy dragon fly. Queue’s plan was to start with a large, Leif-sized version of a flying machine and only make it smaller – the size of Quickfingers’ toy dragon – when all the glitches and wrinkles had been fixed. (There always seemed to be a lot of those.) So we three went out to the top of a long, steep, grassy slope outside the settlement that the Artificer had chosen as his l
aunch site. He explained his new Kite-Cart-Flight machine to the Pedlar as he strapped me in to it. (Quickfingers was still looking distinctly grumpy about not getting to be the Tester.)

  “The boy, see, stands in the cart wearing the kite on his back like this.” He tugged the straps tight across my back. “We tie the cart to this big boulder at the top of the hill by this long coil of rope that pays out as the cart rolls, faster and faster, down the slope. Then, when the cart is going as fast as possible, it reaches the bottom of the hill and the end of the rope at exactly the same time. Sproing! The cart jerks to a halt. Whee! The boy keeps going, launched into the air. Whoosh! The wind catches the kite and off he flies. Simple,” said Queue.

  “Foolproof,” said Quickfingers.

  I tried to agree but there was a strange knot in my throat that was stopping me from talking. I nodded instead.

  Queue tightened the last kite strap and he and the Pedlar took hold of the back of the cart.

  “Ready. Steady. Heave!”

  With a lurch, the cart – with me in it – started down the slope, slowly at first, but rapidly picking up speed. Very rapidly. Too rapidly!

  As my ears began to be pinned back by the rushing wind, I suddenly wondered, Maybe I should have been more generous about letting Quickfingers have the first go? The cart was hitting every hummock and bump on the hill and my teeth were rattling like a scared skeleton.

  “Go! Go!” yelled Queue and Quickfingers from the safety of the hilltop. “Go! Oh – no!”

  They weren’t the only ones yelling “Oh no!” I was too. For there, clomping gently along the bottom of the hill, was Wandering Nell. She’d chosen today of all days to escape from the cattle enclosure. She’d chosen this moment of all moments to arrive at our launch site. And then she made one more unfortunate choice. She chose to stop, directly in the path of the thundering cart and me, to have a leisurely mouthful of grass.

  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

  “You 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.