Little People by Tom Holt Page B

in zoology or folklore, or even gardening. I could only conclude that it was a cat thing – you know, like that amazing ability cats have of choosing the one person in the room who doesn’t like them, and then jumping on his or her lap with all claws locked outwards, curling up and going to sleep.
    Still, what did my feelings matter? It was only me, after all, not anybody important . . .
    While I was thinking all this stuff, I was on automatic pilot: putting books away, clipping the day’s notes into ring-binders, general admin and clutter control. By the time I reached the industrial-grade self-pity stage, I was getting ready to make a start on the rather daunting raft of maths problems I was due to hand in before noon the next day. I guess you could say maths was my best subject, though only in the sense that his attention to grooming and personal hygiene was Darth Vader’s most attractive quality. Maths was what I was least hopeless at, on a good day. But the impenetrable briar-patch of wiggly brackets and equals signs confronting me was so far over my head I could’ve wished on it; another reason, perhaps, why I wasn’t in the most cheerful of moods.
    Nevertheless, the sooner I made a start, the sooner I could legitimately give up in despair. I opened the stapled-up wodge of photocopied sheets, and looked at the first page.
    At first I assumed it was simply a hardware problem, my eyes playing tricks on me or my stressed-out little brain overheating. So I looked away, eyes tight shut, counted slowly to twenty plus two for luck, and looked again. It was still there: a neat but minuscule paragraph of mathematical calculations carefully inscribed in the margin, apparently answering the question. Oh please , I whined inwardly, not now, can’t you see I’m busy? I picked up the booklet and went through it page by page; next to each problem, an elegantly elfwritten answer, no letter or number more than two millimetres high but nevertheless surprisingly legible. There wasn’t a pen made that wrote that small.
    After I’d been sitting there for an indeterminate length of time, it occurred to me that it might just be helpful to run through one of these answers and see if it made sense; so I did. It did, too. Furthermore, the answer was so well presented and set out that, for the very first time, I got just the faintest sliver of a clue as to what all this guff was supposed to be about.
    What to do?
    Well. There’s an old folk tale about a man who was walking down a country lane and came to a long single-storey shed, out of the front of which protruded an unmistakable dragon’s head, while a similarly unmistakable dragon’s tail stuck out the back window. Next to the shed was a magnificent crop of brussels sprouts, being weeded by a little old man in a bobble-hat.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ the passer-by said to the old man, ‘but is that a dragon in your barn?’
    The old man looked at him for a while, then shrugged. ‘Ain’t no such thing as dragons,’ the old man said, ‘but their dung’s mighty good for brassicas.’
    Well, anyway, you get the general idea. Maybe the existence or non-existence of elves was making my life a metaphysical nightmare; but if they were prepared to do my maths homework for me, I wasn’t going to complain. True, squinting at that tiny handwriting as I made a fair copy gave me a splitting headache, but nothing in life is ever entirely perfect, not even chocolate profiteroles.
    The copying-out took me a quarter of an hour. As soon as I’d finished, I put my answer paper carefully away, picked up the question booklet and prowled around in the corridors to nab the first person I met. This turned out to be a guy called Paul Schenk, who was virtually a friend of mine.
    â€˜Paul,’ I said.
    He stopped and turned to face me. ‘What’s up with you?’ he said. ‘You look awful.’
    â€˜Do me a