A Secret Weapon, Or, Oh For One Night With Those Knights
by John M. Joyce (Dec. 2008)
There was a murmur of polite, but sincere, agreement in which he detected an undertow of excitement.
He trailed off, unable to compleat the thought.
The only female member of that group of farmers, Sarah MacKay, took a step forward. She was as black as the ace of spades and her honest and comely face was serious and sincere. Her Trinidadian origins were writ large across her lineaments and her farming antecedents were obvious in her well-muscled form and in her large and competent farmer hands.
And that last was a promise, nay, almost a threat!
***
Nothing, however, could stop him from walking through the copse, as he realised as he stood at its eastern edge that late autumn afternoon. No, nothing at all could stop him from doing that. He could walk through it, quarter it and cast his expert eye, an eye made expert in its ability to observe by years of walking important, but denied, territory, over it. In an instant he scrambled over the banked up earth and stood, almost triumphantly, upon the threshold of the copse. The trees waving gently in the light fall breeze seemed to beckon him on into the green shade.
Confidently, assured in his own knowledge, he strode forward into the gloom. It was but a scant few steps, perhaps no more than a hundred yards or so, just about where the city wall should have been, that he felt the ground give way under his feet and he fell, tumbled, down a deep and sloping well. On and on went his fall. Head over heels he plummeted into the earth until, at last, he came to rest upon a mound of stale mould. He lay there upon that damp earth regretting his foolishness for some few minutes. The flashlight which he always carried with him in his jacket pocket seemed to have broken, or, at the very least, severely bruised, his ribs in the fall. Winded, he was disinclined to move.
A huge fear, a massive sense of shock, overcame him at that point. All that he wanted to do was run away. He scrambled desperately towards the foot of that sloping well down which he had fallen just a few minutes earlier. He scrabbled, earth and root filling his mouth and nose, upwards toward the light, along and up that steep slope until he found himself gasping for breath in the pale golden green evening in the copse above, his usually immaculate tweeds muddied, dirtied and despoiled.
***
He glanced at his watch. Drat! It was time to feed the Unicorns.
He stood up, put back his shoulders and went to feed the Unicorns.
He got back to his office just in time to meet the delegation from the Council of Cornish Pixies which was demanding that the Government increase their common mischief allowance by eight percent to make up for their sub-prime lending losses.
It was a long night but he beat them down to two and a half percent – for just two years and then a review!
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