A ten-and-a-half year-old boy is set up to do battle with the most evil creature he is ever likely to meet. The outcome of the fight will decide whether Humanity will live in the light of freedom or the darkness of evil for a thousand years.
A tall order for a small boy but he does have certain special qualities to help him get the job done. Very brave, he thinks quickly and clearly under pressure, has a practically limitless imagination - he actually believes he’s a super hero and he comes from the twenty-first century. Through an accident of time he is also the grandson of King Arthur, great-nephew of Merlin, the greatest arch-druid of all time and great-grandson of Cadwellon, king of the faerie peoples of ancient South Wales.
A small, very oddly assorted, army of helpers joins him on a series of dangerous adventures before he can finally meet his Nemesis, the Gwr Drwg or the Bad Man - the Devil incarnate and he must face that battle alone except for a magical axe given to him by Merlin and named by the boy hero the mighty FRED!
This excerpt is taken from chapter six when our hero Axe is making his way through a forest with Merlin’s apprentice, a six-foot three inch tall, thirteen year-old escaped African slave called Shadow. The boys have been met by their guide, a bad tempered ten-inch tall fairy named Dirkle Spinweed, and Axe asks Dirkle how long before they get to where they are going.
“A couple of hours at most, then we hole up for the night with friends. It doesn’t do to wander about in this place after dark.”
Axe, being a genuine hero in the bud but still with the littlest touch of stupidity that comes with the realisation that he was ever so brave but lacking the experience of actually, really being a hero, said with a barely contained snigger, “Not afraid of the dark are we?.. If we can’t see whatever we’re afraid of, it can’t see us either.” He thought back to what Merlin had told him when he started his course at the castle.
“Oh yeah big boy”, sneered the little man, “except that what’s abroad in these woods can see in the dark! Catch my drift?” “Um...yes...sorry.” He thought it might be a good idea if he shut up as the fairy had instructed in the first place.
(The three walked on in silence for a while)
The fairy, surprisingly, was the first to break the silence.
“Cousin Merlin tells me that you come from the twenty-first century to help out. Been there meself you know, the twenty-first century that is and a few other centuries as well.”
“Ah, so you’re a time-traveller too,” said Axe, determined this time to let the fairy lead the conversation.
“Got it in one sunny Jim. I particularly like the nineteenth.”
“Nineteenth what?” asked Axe, once more feeling that he’d missed something along the line.
“Century, fathead, I like the nineteenth century. Marvellous big wooden sailing ships right at the peak of development. I love big sailing ships, then they had to go and put steam engines and paddles and propellers in them! Absolutely disgusting, totally ruined sailing. Those beautiful wooden giants replaced by great smelly, oily, steel objects. No soul in steel, no soul at all.”
The fairy shook his head in disgust. “Sailing ships were made from the timbers of the forests, we’re all part of the forest you know, in fact,” he looked wistful, “some of my best friends sailed the seven seas as part of some handsome sailing ship or other.” He turned and flitted on in silence again for a little while. “You can keep your twentieth and twenty-first centuries as far as I’m concerned,” he couldn’t keep quiet for long. “Enjoyed the literature and theatre of the nineteenth too y’know. Especially liked musical theatre, particularly the light operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan… you know much G&S?”
“’Fraid I don’t know any er… G&S,” apologised Axe. “Good was it?”
“I’ll say it was,” there seemed no stopping the little fellow talking now that he was in full flow and he spoke very quickly. “My favourite’s Iolanthe. Brilliant storyline about this guy whose half a fairy cos his mum was a fairy but his dad was mortal. His mum was banished for marrying a mortal and her son grew up as a shepherd to be close to his mother cos she’d been banished to the bottom of an old pond by the fairy queen. He fell in love with this girl he knew, but she was the ward, that’s sort of in the protection of, the Lord Chancellor. Practically all of the House of Lords was in love with this girl, including the old Lord Chancellor chappie but what Strephon, that’s the shepherd chap, didn’t know was that the old Lord was actually his real father who’d thought his fairy wife, who he’d married yonks before, had died and didn’t even know that he had a son.” The fairy hardly took a breath, he was obviously onto a favourite subject.
“Now Phyllis, that was her name, was being practically forced to choose between one or t’other of these crumbly old Peers from the house of Lords but she only had eyes for Strephon, until she saw him talking to his mother one night. His mum by the way, being a fairy, never looked any older than seventeen, so Phyllis thought he was two-timing her and agreed to marry the Lord Chancellor to spite Strephon for dallying with this other girl… only it wasn’t another girl… it was his mother...d’you see… d’you see?”
He paused briefly for breath and Axe nodded, he hoped he was expected to nod because by this time he’d shut his brain down almost completely to avoid the risk of further damage.
“Anyway, when he found out about the Chancellor and his girlfriend he went positively ape and ran off to tell his mum. He was a bit childish I guess, as well as stupid… Anyway, she decides the only way to secure her son’s happiness is to tell the old guy, that’s the Lord Chancellor bloke, that she hasn’t really snuffed it but she’d been lying low all these years and dopey Strephon is really his own son! Now this is the really dramatic bit…”
Axe felt himself drifting off to sleep whilst he was walking…
“If she tells her husband she’s not really dead… then the penalty is death. Good eh? What a twist!... But she tells the old geezer anyway to make her stupid son happy and when the fairy queen tries to impose the death penalty all the other fairies rebel and admit that they’ve all fallen in love with the House of Lords, or rather the crusty old codgers who are in the Lords and the queen is going to have to kill them all if she s going to top Iolanthe, just for being in love with a mortal!” The fairy took a deep breath and continued—”At this point the old queen realises that she’s fallen in love with a mortal too, a soldier, so they all get married and live happily ever after.”
“Oops-a-daisy...you alright?”
Axe had walked into a tree and he was sitting on the ground wondering what had hit him and hoping that someone had got the presence of mind to take the licence number of the car, or whatever it was.
“We might as well take a short rest here then, seeing as you’re already sitting down,” said the fairy matter-of-factly, apparently completely unaware that Axe was in some considerable discomfort, pain even, “but not for long mind, we’ve still got quite a ways to go before dark.”
- Some time later -
“I do not understand,” said Shadow, “why we have not been attacked yet when there have been so many chances to ambush us.”
“We are being watched,” said Axe, “to see what we’re up to because the dark ones, the Evils as Dirkle calls them, don’t know what to make of us yet. They expect uncle Merlin to be going for the precious thing, whatever it is but they don’t know where we fit in.” He scratched his head in puzzlement then had an idea. “I expect they think that we’re just a decoy, which we are but I’d hoped we would have got a bit further along our journey before they got wise to us… unless,” he paused again, “unless perhaps that’s just what uncle Merlin wanted to happen. The sly old dog knew they’d follow us right from the off! I wonder why he set us up to think we could fool the forces of evil?”
“Merlin knows what he’s up to,” said Dirkle, “and if he set you two up it was for a very good reason and tell me, you keep referring to Merlin as uncle Merlin, how come he lets you be so familiar that he allows you to call him uncle?”
“That’s because he is my uncle, well my great-uncle anyway,” replied Axe. “He’s my grand-dad’s twin brother.”
“You don’t mean Arthur’s your grand-dad!” Dirkle held his little hand up to his mouth in surprise. “Well scrollop me dollops with a wet nettle, that means you’re a bit of a cousin of mine then, you’re right, Merlin is devious, he never told me we were related.”
