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say?’ Boamund enquired.
    â€˜You haven’t paid for that.’
    â€˜But I didn’t get it from you,’ Boamund was saying, very patiently, very reasonably. ‘Your people didn’t have anything I wanted so I got something for myself.’
    Toenail betted himself that he knew what was coming next. ‘You’re not allowed,’ said the voice, ‘to eat your own food in here.’ Oh good, said Toenail to his feet, I won.
    â€˜Look.’
    â€˜No,’ said the voice, ‘you look.’
    Honour, its cultivation and preservation, are at the very root of chivalry. It is thus highly unwise to say something like, ‘No, you look,’ to a knight, especially if he’s hungry and confused. Although Toenail had deliberately averted his head, on the slightly irrational grounds that anything he didn’t see he couldn’t be blamed for, he didn’t need eyes to work out what happened next. The sound of an assistant cafeteria manager being hit with a trayful of roast swan is eloquently self-explanatory.
    From under his table, Toenail had a very good view of one section of the fight - roughly from the feet of the participants as far as their knees - and as far as he was concerned that was quite enough for him, thank you very much. You had to say this for the lad, fifteen hundred years asleep on a mountain, you’d think he’d be out of practice, but not a bit of it.
    After a while, Toenail could only see one pair of feet, and they were wearing the pair of motorcycle boots he’d bought specially, after measuring the sleeping knight’s feet about a week ago. How long ago that seemed!
    â€˜Toenail!’
    â€˜Yes?’ said the dwarf.
    â€˜You’re not particularly hungry, are you?’
    Toenail put his head out. ‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Let’s have something when we get there, shall we?’
    â€˜Good idea,’ Boamund replied. He wiped gravy off his face and grinned sheepishly.
    They got to the bike and got it started about four seconds before the police arrived. Fortunately, the police had omitted to bring helicopters with them, so when the bike suddenly lifted off the ground and roared away in the direction of Birmingham there wasn’t very much they could do about it, except take its number and arrest a couple of students on a Honda 125 for having a defective brake light.

2

    â€˜Yes,’ Toenail replied.
    â€˜Are you sure?’ Boamund said. ‘Give me that street map a second.’
    Toenail did so, and Boamund studied it for a while. ‘Looks like you’re right,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t look like any castle I’ve ever seen before, that’s all.’
    Toenail was with him there a hundred per cent. It looked far more like a small, rather unsavoury travel agent’s office. Closed, too.
    â€˜Maybe it’s round the back,’ he suggested.
    Boamund looked at him, ‘I think you’re missing the point rather,’ he said. ‘The thing about castles is ...’ He paused, trying to choose the right words. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you just don’t get castles round the backs of things. It’s not the way things are.’
    â€˜Maybe it is in Brownhills,’ replied the dwarf. ‘Have you ever been here before?’
    â€˜I don’t know,’ Boamund confessed. ‘Things have changed a bit since my day.’
    â€˜Well,’ said the dwarf, ‘there you are, then. Maybe the fashions in castle architecture have changed too. The unobtrusive look, you know?’
    Boamund frowned and got off the bike. It occurred to Toenail that this was probably one of the best opportunities he was going to get for quite some time to jump on the bike, gun the engine and get the hell out of here before something really horrible happened to him; but he didn’t, somehow. What he told himself was that the bike wouldn’t start, and that knights took