Grailblazers by Tom Holt

recommend that, because it’s water-soluble, and since we’ve run out of water ...’
    â€˜Mmmm.’
    â€˜Needless to say,’ Pertelope continued helpfully, ‘if we found some water it’d be a different matter altogether. But somehow...’ He looked up briefly into the steel-blue sky and then turned his head quickly away. ‘Now my aunt Beatrice used to say that sucking a pebble—’
    â€˜Shut up,’ said Sir Lamorak.
    Offended, Pertelope shifted his rucksack on his shoulders and pointedly walked a few yards to the east. Then he stopped.
    â€˜If that’s north,’ he said, pointing due south, ‘then England is seventeen thousand miles away over that big jutting rock over there. Fancy that,’ he added. He stood for a moment in contemplation; then he shrugged and started to walk; for the record, due west.
    They were trying to get to Sydney.
    For two men who had alighted from an airliner in Brisbane several months before, this shouldn’t have been too great a problem. True, neither of them had been to Australia before, but they had taken the precaution of buying railway tickets, advance-booking their hotels and securing copies of What’s On In Sydney before leaving England. Their problems had started at Brisbane Airport, when Pertelope had left the little bag containing all the paperwork behind on the airport bus.
    No problem, Pertelope had explained. All we have to do is hitch a lift. The Australians are a notoriously friendly, hospitable people who take pleasure in helping travellers in distress.
    Sixteen hours along the road, they had indeed managed to hitch a ride on a truckful of newly slaughtered carcases as far as St George, where the lorry driver had finally thrown them forcibly from the cab after Pertelope had insisted on singing Vos Quid Admiramini in his usual nasal drone. After a short pause to regroup and eat the last of the bag of mint imperials that Lamorak had bought at Heathrow, they had set out to walk as far as Dirranbandi. It’s hard to explain concisely how they came to be thirteen hundred miles off course; the best that can be done without embarking on a whole new book is to explain that in the back of Sir Pertelope’s National Trust Diary was a map of the world; and that although Pertelope had heard about Columbus and the curvature of the earth, he had never been entirely convinced. The central premise of his navigational theory, therefore, was that the centre of the world lay at Jerusalem, and that maps had to be interpreted accordingly.
    Pertelope looked at his watch. ‘What do you say to stopping here for lunch?’ he asked. ‘We could sit under that rock over there. It’s got a lovely view out over the, er, desert.’
    Although Death had been trailing them pretty closely every step of the way, in the manner of a large fat pigeon outside a pavement cafe, the nearest he had come to cutting two more notches in his scythe handle had been fifty miles west of the Macgregor Range, where Pertelope had inadvertently knocked over the rusty beer-can containing the last of their water while doing his morning exercises. They had wandered round in circles for two days and collapsed; but they were found by a party of wandering aborigines, whom Lamorak was able to persuade that his library ticket was in fact an American Express card, and who had sold them a gallon of water and six dried lizards in return, as it turned out, for the right to borrow three fiction and three non-fiction titles every week from the Stirchley Public Library in perpetuity. From then on, it had simply been a matter of lurching from one last-minute borehole to another, and sneaking up very quietly indeed on unsuspecting snakes.
    Pertelope had, however, refused to harm the Paramatta horned python they’d finally caught after a six-hour scramble among the rocks of Mount Woodroffe, pointing out that it was an endangered species. It was shortly