Langue[dot]doc 1305

by Gillian Polack

  This is why Ben leaned against that oversized stalactite with its pale purple face and listened to Artemisia, regardless of the fact that Artemisia had just nearly defaced future French Government property. Also regardless of the fact that Artemisia had been nominated as the Evil Historian Who Did Not Do her Job in a Timely Fashion.

  First Sylvia, now Ben. This was life underground. She sighed. Ben laughed. Her mood turned from schoolgirl to confessional. She sat on the nearest rock ledge (more a lump than a ledge, she reflected, hard and cold and almost comfortable) and talked at him.

  “Who in particular would you upset by drawing on this stalagmite?” Ben asked.

  “The cave people. The rock people. The people who hate us for cleaning out the wildlife and the rubble.”

  “So we’re studying everything except what we destroy?”

  “Oh, the set-up party took notes and pictures before they built us this little home-away-from-home. Mac said. He couldn’t make up his mind if it was fine, or a pain because they had so few amenities until it was done.”

  “Still.”

  “What?” His voice was offended, but there was something in his face that suggested a willingness to be persuaded.

  “It’s so very nineteenth century.”

  “I don’t get it.” Ben had a very nice voice, Artemisia realised again. Almost baritone. She let herself be persuaded to explain further.

  “We’re the Great Explorers. We’re the people who know so much that we’re allowed to destroy things.”

  “We have our rules,” his defence was mild. In fact, his tone was not at all defensive. Almost as if he was agreeing with her.

  “And for the things they cover, those rules are good. Except…”

  “What?” This was a softer, milder, more curious question. Artemisia had suddenly become a whole person in Ben’s eyes. Why was this happening with the men her age, and why now? Artemisia decided to reserve her opinion as to whether this was a good thing.

  “They’re like the rules of anthropology in the early days. Just being here changes and contaminates.”

  “We’re careful. No grandfather paradox for us. Not a single local has seen us. Except Sylvia, that once. And you, as soon as you deliver that book.”

  “And yet we’ve changed this whole section of the cave system, just by living here. Maybe it was dull stuff when it was explored back when”

  “Future when.”

  “Back in the future, then,” Artemisia grimaced. The jokes got old very quickly. “Maybe it was dull because we killed it. Caves are living.”

  “We know that,” Ben’s voice was softer and gentler still. “We ignore it, but we know it.”

  “Then why all the talk about being clever at avoiding paradoxes? Why take any risks at all?”

  “Because most of us are very good at compartmentalising,” finally the real Ben Konig emerged. These words came out with the slight hurry of words that have been waiting to be said, waiting for a very long time. And yet, thought Artemisia, he’s not saying much. What is it with Konig? “The damage is done with our habitat. Not with anything else.”

  “Compartmentalising.”

  “You do it with your history,” Ben said. “You keep saying ‘I only know about saints.’”

  “I was so the wrong person to bring on this trip.”

  “Maybe. But maybe it’s because you weren’t vetted and your mind rejects all the hype and self-justification that we need you.”

  “So you agree that we’re nineteenth-century explorers, changing everything we touch.”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Data

  Berta was smug. The abbot had sent one of his men to order a special piece. That would show those idiot weavers in Aniane just who made the best cloth.

  * * *

  It was the ninth of May and Sylvia had commandeered the observation area. She had forgotten to book it, but she didn’t care. It was the perfect night for watching. Uranus, Mars and Saturn created a gentle curve pointing downwards, towards the rising moon. Neptune was there, too, invisible to the naked eye, but completing the curve and making it whole. When it aligned with their curve, the lunar eclipse would be over.

  Sylvia’s angel-bow lips pursed lightly in concentration as she pondered recording secular acceleration. If she could refine delta T then she could expand the time travel envelope back two thousand more years. It wouldn’t be safe, but safety wasn’t her task. She was here to observe a lunar eclipse. And she loved lunar eclipses. She was using old-fashioned observation — extra-galactic radio sources weren’t available to the time team.

  Geoff emerged in the dark and started to set up his equipment.

  “Not tonight.” Sylvia’s voice was obdurate.

  “I booked with Ben — I’m sharing my space with you, and you have half my equipment.”

  “Tough,” said Dr Smith, “this eclipse is mine. All mine. Go watch it from downstairs.”

  “With that light contamination? With the sky half-obscured by cliff?”

  “Not my problem.”

  * * *

  Sylvia and Luke were putting together the second datastream. The first datastream had been basic. This one was more ambitious. Everything the future needed to know about the past, to be blipped forward in the shortest possible time and taking the least possible space. Sylvia was designing forms and methods and Luke was working on the physics.

  Luke was challenging his changing universe. This datastream was the first test of the first part of his theories. The data would go through twice, once under the old system and once using his new one. He was quiet about it, but everyone knew it was big stuff.

  “It’s a symbiotic relationship,” Artemisia said to Pauline, as she went for much-needed cuppa. Luke had stopped in the middle of walking from place to place, his steps doing his thinking. He was writing down a thought. Sylvia would come along shortly and fit it into his main material.

  “It is,” agreed Pauline, almost conversationally. “They work well together.”

  This made her a little sad. Luke had already determined that the universe was black and white and he wanted to know how much black there was and how much white. But what if it were purple? Luke’s big ideas still rested within current scientific constructs. Scientists weren’t superhuman.

  * * *

  The village was divided, mostly along the usual lines. Saint-Laurent versus Saint-Barthelmy.

  Too many possessions left outside the walls had vanished. It had become a common pastime for a half dozen parishioners from Saint-Barthelmy (plus Berta and Sibilla) to lurk behind bushes and watch the gleaners. This group kept their silence, however. Guilhem-the-smith made sure of that. He thought that things could get very ugly very quickly if blame fell on these outsiders, however much they stole.

  * * *

  “Grapes,” said Ben. “The leaf shape. With fine dentata. I think we have a new variety.”

  “An old variety,” Luke corrected. “With teeth.” He showed his own bright white teeth a bit wolfishly as he smiled at his own mild pun.

  “Something that will make our future employers very happy,” Ben promised. “Not just one that was lost with the phylloxera - one that went a long time before then.” He was lying again. If he gathered enough samples, however, one would be a genuine unknown.

  “Will it make good wine?”

  Ben was impatient. “That’s something you can’t tell from a bloody leaf shape, Luke, you know that. The big thing is it’s a variety that these people make wine from, and that we don’t know it.”

  “You want space when we exchange for supplies.”

  “For a living plant - preferably several.”

  “Cut the slips now, then. Be careful that no-one sees you. Ask Tony to grow them. I’m not going to be responsible for magic disappearances in someone’s vineyard when we’re short of time.”

  Ben nodded once and almost ran out the door.

  Luke smiled at Ben’s back. No ma
tter what else he thought of the man, Konig was a damned good scientist and loved his work. More than anything else, this was what mattered.

  * * *

  “We can hear the bells inside,” said Sylvia.

  “My handyman’s secret,” Cormac grinned. “It only works at this spot in the workroom.”

  “Like that little passage. Where you sneak in and out.” Sylvia’s voice held faint condemnation.

  “I like it when you’re rumpled.” Cormac’s grin grew, and Sylvia turned round and went back to her desk.

  There she worked assiduously until dinnertime.

  * * *

  Both town and hill collected clutter. On this day, the clutter included: a coffee mug, half full of weak instant coffee, diluted with powdered milk, a clump of yellow powder floating near one edge; a pair of fluffy green slippers, with eyes; one small computer, chugging away in near silence; a blue biro, heavily chewed; a chocolate wrapper; a frayed towel, woven in 1296; one portable brazier, containing charcoal; one cooking fork; the relic of a miscellaneous saint, wrapped in soft leather and label illegible on a scrap of parchment, waiting for its reliquary to be cleaned; a staff; a pilgrim’s scrip; a cockleshell, once from Santiago de Compostella, now broken where someone misstepped; a pruning hook.

  * * *

  The air was dense and moist in the non-colonised parts of the cave system.

  “We’re people of the light,” joked Luke, “and so we live near the light where the air is dry.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Look of Things

  Guilhem couldn’t rid himself of the memory. He recalled seeing a woman, indecorous, entirely unknown, reaching down and picking up his book. He saw the look of glee on her face and the defiance she flung at him when he called out. He remembered how very fast she moved. How she disappeared. How he had not seen his book since. Every time he walked near this spot, he remembered, and his bitterness grew.

  Now here he was, back in the same spot, looking in vain for the woman with hair like gold thread with her pretty face and her greedy hands. There was a new woman waiting for him, taller, with big eyes and dark hair. Dressed decorously. Of his own rank. And in her hands was his book. She was holding it out to him. It was all he could do not to snatch it and run home, where he could put it in its leather book bag, out of harm’s way.

  He reached out and took it. Guilhem took a deep breath.

  The lady said nothing. The lady was too busy thinking, Thank God, he has the book. Thank God. And he’s young. Early twenties. Mid twenties at most. And he’s so bloody young! And he has his book and he’s been missing it. Look at how his fingers and his eyes run over it, how nothing else matters.

  When Guilhem had assured himself that his great treasure was in good condition, and that there was his private joke in the main illumination for March to prove it was his, that he and no other had commissioned this book from one of the best workshops in Paris. When he had finished, he looked at this second woman and thought From good stock comes good fruit - but from what stock does this woman descend? She is strange to me.

  “Permit me. Please. Excuse me,” Artemisia stumbled. “I must speak with you. I am Artemisia. I am called Artemisia.”

  “Guilhem,” the knight said, briefly, and discourteously. He regretted his brevity and said, reluctantly, “My name is Guilhem.”

  “Guilhem is a good name,” said Artemisia cautiously. ‘Bon nom’ was pretty safe, in old, new or any other French.

  “I don’t speak that language,” Guilhem replied, understanding Artemisia perfectly well. Why should he speak that Northern tongue? What had the North done for him? It had given him his uncle. And his cousins. And a lifetime of guilt. He would not speak that tongue.

  The woman excused herself slowly and haltingly. She had not understood his denial. He looked at her braided hair and small veil, not quite demure, nor yet immodest. He looked at her dress. Imported cloth, from its fineness, but with none of the decoration that would show him her class, her taste, her wealth. He didn’t want to talk to her.

  Eventually her apologies overcame his temper and he finally spoke in the French of France, slowly and with many allowances for her little brain. Renart has stolen my mind, he thought, for all I am doing is full of mischief and this lady is in distress.

  Artemisia didn’t let her face show that she realised that he spoke the French of France perfectly well. She also tried not to let herself show how very afraid she was. She wanted to pick up her long skirts and run away. This was too impossible. Her talking to someone educated from 1305. Her talking to anyone from 1305.

  All his words were careful, as if he listened for their intent before he could speak them aloud. They emerged in short phrases; one word, five words, never more. A micropause after each phrase, or maybe before the next. It wasn’t lack of self-confidence, Artemisia decided, but it might be awareness of consequences. Either way, the delays gave her time to deduce what he was saying, most of the time.

  She apologised again and explained that she had been looking for him, to return the book, that it had been a mistake.

  He thanked her with real gratitude. This book is his, she realised. Important to him.

  The young man then said, “Ill-gained goods never lead to profit.”

  “A saying?” she ventured. She thought she recognised it. She hoped her pronunciation was not too improbable - did one say the ‘c’ in ‘dict’ aloud? Was ‘dict’ an earlier word? A later one?

  It didn’t matter: Guilhem understood her. “Yes, and a good one.”

  “I am happy I could return it to you.” She explained that they were a group living in the hill until after Christmas. “We will try to be…” She looked in her mind and found only English.

  “You wish to be secret.”

  “No. Yes. To not…”

  “I think I understand. You wish to be little seen. This is why it has taken you a long time to find me.”

  “Yes, that is it. My people are not clever in this. They know this. They have asked...”

  “For help?”

  “For forgiveness. But we need help. We know so little.” Her language was halting and it was hard to find words. That will improve, she thought. It’s hard to move from reading a language to speaking it. It took a long time, but in the end Artemisia thought they understood each other.

  They had a place, and a signal. If she tied a ribbon to a bush he would look for her there the next day, and if he tied a different coloured ribbon to that same bush, then she would do likewise. If they couldn’t come, then they would leave more ribbons.

  “Fairies have ribbons?” asked Guilhem, half-seriously.

  “We are not fairies, although we do live under the hill, but we have ribbons. The very best ribbons.” Artemisia smiled. She had no idea why there were ribbons in Cormac’s stash, but she would sequester the colours, and hope the signal system would work. She remembered looking through the box of long soft silk in many shades, wondering if she could plait her hair in a better way, more in accordance with twelfth century fashion perhaps, ribbons winding through, glamorously.

  She and Luke had spoken for a long time about the need for a contact in the town. This young knight looked as if he had goodwill and enthusiasm, despite the initial contretemps. It was especially important since Luke still refused to allow language lessons. Her halting Middle French was the only Middle French they had.

  Mind you, she thought it was Old French still. Her brain analysed the use of cases and his syntax and his pronunciation, even as she struggled to make herself understood. Hardly Middle French at all. Thank goodness he spoke some northern dialect. That was the big thing. Not that she wasn’t sure about declensions or conjugations, but that he spoke the language she could read and for which she had Godefroy’s huge and unreliable nineteenth century dictionary.

  She asked Guilhem about the local language and said she didn’t know it, and she thought he had offered to be a kind of go-between. Which meant he lived here but wasn’t a loc
al? Or was staying here? Or lived in the castle? He had a sword and dagger and his clothes were nice and he had no tonsure and he owned a bloody expensive book - that meant that he was no peasant and no priest. At least, she didn’t think so. A knight, she decided again. I already thought that. Except what’s an ordinary knight doing with a Book of Hours? It’s an expensive calendar to be carrying around in 1305. Maybe he’s a time traveller from the 1450s? Or maybe he’s dirt-rich and in love with art and calendars, like the duc de Berry?

  Too much knowledge and not enough understanding; that was her trouble. This was going to be slow and difficult. She only hoped she got it right. There really wasn’t any margin for error.

  * * *

  Templar time again. Guilhem almost looked forward to his visit. As he followed the broad path to Pézenas (smooth, like the road to hell) he contemplated the money Master Bernat would hand over and calculated his finances over and again. That was the reason for this visit. No avuncular oversighting and no examination of the state of his soul. Some of his income had arrived from his aunt’s careful stewardship, in the north where lay the French of France and civilisation. Also far too many relatives, all full of opinions about him and his doings. Still, the money was a good thing.

  Guilhem calculated. He had already allowed himself 10 sous for the year. Maybe he could stretch that to 12 if he really needed it. The original figure reflected his new lifestyle, and didn’t reflect his actual income. It didn’t permit him to show his worth and to give the way a noble should, to his dependants and others around him. It was money for his personal use. A bit more would permit him to show his quality.

  Guilhem measured each of his estates in his mind and wondered how much his aunt would send him. She would no doubt keep a significant portion, but she would also keep aside money for taxes and to put back into his land. He hated her, but she was a good steward.