HOW TO BLOW UP TOLLINS. Conn Iggulden

after that.

      Tollins had come into contact with humans before. They were too curious for their own good and humans always seemed to be doing something interesting. Small Tillets were still told the tale of the Tollin who wrestled an apple off a tree and dropped it on the head of a young man sleeping below. The young man’s name was Isaac Newton and, as a result, he discovered gravity.

      As a young Tillet, Sparkler had even spent time at a school, when he overslept in a satchel. He still cherished the memories of the little book he had brought home, full of big letters and pictures of apples and bees. The bees smiled from the page, which was surprising. In Sparkler’s experience, bees had no sense of humour.

      Just taking that book had been an enormous risk. After all, the first Tollin law was that no one spoke to humans. It always led to trouble, or sometimes gravity. It was better for Tollins if humans didn’t know they existed. After all, Tollins weren’t fast, or even particularly nimble. Over the years, they had been caught by propellers, run over by lawn mowers and one had become tangled in a kite string until he bit through it. They might not have been fast, but they were tough. One of them had even been swallowed by a cat and she survived too, but the less said about that the better.

      In the end, the High Tollin decided no lasting harm had been done. He couldn’t have known then that the men with beards were more excited about the new kind of firework than they were about big ships, good boots and proper penknives put together. Seeing young Roman whoosh above their heads had been the most interesting moment of their lives and they would not rest until they had managed to do it again. If the Tollins had known then about Catherine wheels, perhaps they might have flown to a different part of the country, joining the Dark Tollins of Dorset, or the Mountain Tollins of Wales. They could even have stowed away on a ferry to another country, where Tollins spoke in a strange accent and wore berets. If they had, it would have saved them from headaches, exhaustion, fallen arches and worst of all, slavery.

^* Some people have suggested that Chinese Tollins were used in fireworks more than a thousand years ago. This is NOT that story.

       CHAPTER TWO

       SERIOUS AND DETERMINED MEN WITH BEARDS

      It took almost two years for the bearded men to discover the secret of good fireworks. The Tollins sometimes watched through the windows of the factory as the men rolled the tubes and tried to recreate the magic moment when young Roman had almost blown himself to pieces.

      Sparkler had snorted with laughter as the men tried adding pieces of their beards, scraps of their jackets and even tiny snips from their boots, though that batch of fireworks just smelled awful. If he had thought about it, he might have realised that no matter how many times the firework men failed, they just shrugged their shoulders and tried again. You only have to wrestle a bee off a flower once or twice before he goes away, but the bearded men were serious and determined.

      The events of that summer started with two boys from a local house. They had spotted Sparkler’s parents sunbathing on a daffodil and instead of standing in amazement as children usually do, or even running back to the house for a shoebox and butterfly net, they yelled and whistled and raised such a commotion that Sparkler’s father fell into a rose bush.

      The boys’ parents didn’t believe the story at first, but their father had worked in the fireworks factory for a long time. He scratched his beard and tapped his boots on the ground, looking very thoughtful. He looked at the garden and he looked at the firework factory which was just next door. He considered lighting his pipe, which he couldn’t do in the factory in case he blew the roof off.

      “Well, I’ve tried everything else,” he said to himself. After all, something had made that Roman Candle better than all the others. Some special ingredient had made it soar upwards, like the dreams of bearded men.

      He knew his two sons weren’t handsome or clever. They were in fact the sort of boys who collect beetles and try to race them for money, but they didn’t tell lies, or at least, not very often. The bearded man didn’t think they would make up something as strange as a little winged creature sleeping on a daffodil, or even one who fell in a rose bush and used very bad language indeed.

      It wasn’t long before the bearded man was creeping about at the bottom of his garden, armed with a net. That didn’t work of course. He couldn’t see them and the Tollins just flitted about without a care in the world. Some of the young Tillets were trying to make fairy-powered roller skates, but the fairies kept getting squashed. Later, when Sparkler looked back on those innocent days, with the little piles of flat fairies, it made him sad. It had been a happy time.

      It was a simple blue glass filter that made the difference. The Tollins kept away from the two boys, but they didn’t try to hide from an adult – they had never needed to.

      They saw that the bearded man had made himself a pair of glasses and they saw the way he kept changing the lenses and peering into the bushes, but they fluttered on, drinking nectar and laughing at the way Sparkler’s dad couldn’t sit down. The first they knew of the blue glass filter was when three of them were scooped up in a jam jar and the lid screwed down. They were trapped! The bearded man shouted in excitement and even considered a little dance of his own, before he remembered his wife was watching from the house.

      That night, the Tollins gathered along the walls of the testing yard and watched three green rockets whoosh up to the stars before exploding with a noise that sounded a bit like thunder, but a lot more like the end of the world. Their friends had fluttered down with burnt wings, shouting ‘What?’ just as poor Roman had done.

      The next morning, the Tollins were woken by dozens of bearded men shouting and stamping around. All of them worked for the factory and all carried jam jars and wore glasses with blue lenses. As the sun rose, Tollins were snatched off petals, flowers and flowerpots. They’d be quietly snoring and suddenly whoosh, they were in a net, and pop, they were in a jam jar. The fairies didn’t seem to mind the sudden loss of their companions. The blue filters didn’t reveal fairies at all. Some of them sang a farewell song that they called ‘Goodbye to the summer (with burping frogs) in B-sharp’.

      The bearded men lined up the jam jars on the workbenches of the factory and the poor Tollins looked mournfully at each other. They all knew what was going to happen. They eyed the rows of cardboard tubes uneasily, but there was nothing they could do. One by one, they were plucked out by huge fingers and stuffed into fireworks.

      Some of them went legs first. The unluckiest ones went head first.

      Sparkler was one of the unlucky ones. He found himself upside down in something called a ‘Moon Rocket’. For a while, he comforted himself with the thought that Roman had survived the experience. Surely he too would live through the explosion to come.

      One of the men tapped Sparkler’s tube and the shivering Tollin heard the words, even through the layers of cardboard.

      “That’s enough for the demonstration,” said the man. The voice was very low and deep, so it seemed to go on for a long time. To humans, Tollin voices sounded a little bit like the whine of a fly. They tried to swat them when they crept up to an ear. Sparkler concentrated as the voice boomed somewhere close. He could not hear if the owner had a beard, but he imagined one anyway.