Faerie Tale by Nicola Rhodes Page B

Tamar, at least, would not have thought she had in her.  She was apparently right anyway. Stiles looked unaccountably relieved at this summation.
    ‘You won’t be there that long anyway,’ she added. 
    ‘That’s right,’ said Tamar.  ‘Just in – get the dwarfs – out again.’
    Denny slid out of the chair.  ‘Anyone not going to Valhalla stand back from the computer.’ he said.
    Tamar stepped forward with Stiles and pressed, “Enter”. ‘All aboard,’ she said, and they vanished.
    * * *
    ‘Are you sure this is the right place?’
    ‘Looks right,’ said Tamar.  ‘See, large mountain over there, large mountain over there, absolutely bloody enormous mountain over there.’
    ‘I see,’ said Stiles dryly. ‘But there are, as far as I can see, and not to put too fine a point on it, no Vikings – or Dwarfs either,’ he added.
    ‘They’re all inside getting drunk,’ said Tamar authoritatively.
    ‘Inside where?’
    ‘Um,’ said Tamar, scanning the skyline.
    ‘Anyway, I thought they battled all day and drank all night.’
    ‘Pure hearsay,’ said a voice from behind them.  A deep, booming voice that could only belong to a man with more testosterone in him than a football team locker room. 
    Tamar’s spine prickled.  She turned round cautiously.  ‘Hog?’ she gasped.
    ‘Djinn,’ said the Viking pleasantly.  If he was surprised to see her, he was hiding it well.
    ‘We don’t fight every day,’ he went on as if nothing at all surprising had happened at all.  ‘We aren’t barbarians you know.  At least, not anymore.’  He said this rather sadly.
    Stiles stares at him. Taking in the large hairy chest, the huge untamed beard, the goatskin jerkin and the horned helmet. 
    ‘Really?’ he said. 
    ‘Oh no, we’ve evolved, so they tell me.  I don’t know, fifteen hundred years dead, and suddenly we find out that we’ve been doing it all wrong.  It’s a sad day when a proud warrior meets his descendants and finds out that they make furniture.  I mean what kind of a job is that for a race of conquerors?’
    ‘So, you two know each other then?’ said Stiles in a frantic effort to change the subject.  It was embarrassing watching fifteen stone of hairy Viking with tears dripping down his nose.
    ‘Jack, this is Hogswill the Hairy Backed,’ said Tamar wearily.  ‘We used to hang out – well I was in a bottle most of the time but it was still quite an education.  ‘Hog, this is Jack – stop blubbering will you – he’s a po-lice-man. That means he asks difficult questions and always knows when you are lying.  Where are the dwarfs?’
    ‘In the tavern of course,’ said Hogswill, blinking rapidly in his nervousness.  In his experience, only the Norns knew when a man was lying, and they were women.  He eyed Stiles apprehensively as if expecting him to suddenly don a corset and start singing in a high falsetto voice.  (Something actual women never do, but Hogswill was getting confused)
    ‘Of course they are,’ said Tamar.  ‘Can you take us to them please?’
    ‘ Please ?’ thought Stiles.
    Hogswill also seemed a little thrown off by Tamar’s good manners.  Even as his slave, he remembered, she had tended to treat him with barely veiled contempt.
    ‘Well …’ began Hogswill nervously.  ‘There are no women allowed see. ’Cept serving wenches o’ course.’
    ‘I’m not a woman,’ snapped Tamar, ‘I’m a Djinn. That’s different.’
    ‘Oh, is it?’ said Hogswill the not overly bright.  ‘I suppose that’s all right then.’
    ‘What do you want with dwarfs then?’ he ventured as they trotted along.
    ‘We only want to borrow them for a while,’ said Tamar.  ‘We need some fighting done.’
    ‘Fighting,’ said Hogswill dreamily. ‘They’re good you know,’ he added.  ‘Fearsome little buggers, very handy with an axe.’
    ‘Yes, I know.’
    ‘Who are you fighting then?’ he asked.
    ‘Faeries,’ said Stiles, before he could stop