Langue[dot]doc 1305

by Gillian Polack

  “We knew there was a risk,” Ben said. “We signed our waivers.”

  “What waivers?” asked Artemisia.

  Every single person looked at her. Ben raced to his computer and checked his HR material. The whole team was excluded from the lounge area the rest of the afternoon while Ben shouted at Luke and Luke shouted at Ben and Sylvia spoke in a small self-justificatory voice.

  “What happened?” Geoff asked Ben, when he finally emerged.

  “Luke won. The bastard.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The Noise of the Middle Ages

  There were two special processions in Saint-Guilhem. There were two where everyone brought out their veils and best sleeves and visitors appeared with their devices and their banners and the whole village shone with solemnity and joy. The first of them had been on 3 May, for the Invention of the Cross, and the local people still talked about it, now, during Ascension, weeks later. The day the True Cross made its journey around the village, protecting it, letting its people know that the abbey wasn’t a stranger in their midst, but their protector. It was a noisy procession, and a happy one.

  The time travellers heard it from their vantage point.

  “This is the noise of the Middle Ages,” Geoff said.

  “Or just the noise of Catholicism,” suggested Artemisia. “I wish I could be there.” She was taking assiduous notes and recording when she had access to equipment, but it still felt like doing a tenth of what she should.

  “Don’t even think it,” snapped Sylvia. Artemisia was willing to bet that the tone of voice meant that Sylvia possessed that same precise thought.

  The procession took the Cross past the two churches, and each congregation clustered with their own. They were full of hospitality, for this was the day when everyone talked to each other and when friends and relatives took the walk from Aniane and worshipped with their smaller counterpart across the river. Aniane’s folk forgot their greater prosperity and their assumption of immense knowledge and the fact that they were founded first and that William had followed his friend in creating an abbey. It was when all the residents of the outlying hamlets came in and admired the bigger town. The piece of the True Cross unified the region.

  Just for a short time, Saint-Guilhem felt smug and superior and, after the Cross had been returned to its niche in the wall of the abbey church, all the residents of the region gossiped and played games and ate good food together. The children kicked balls around the streets and, in the evening, everyone shared fables and stories. Inevitably the ghosts came into the tales.

  Or the demons. Or the fairies. In different parts of the village, different tales were told.

  * * *

  Geoff was reading. His problem was that he had only brought a very few books. He was a slow reader and he had little space and he had thought that he would be fine. Like sailors and their months at sea. He had assumed that the time somehow filled. He hadn’t thought to requisition more until it was too late. So he read and reread the same three paperbacks. He wasn’t at all fine with just three volumes. He realised this as he started The Golem, Dancing for the fifth time.

  “Is it a good book?” Artemisia’s voice was wistful.

  “It was - the first two times through. Now I’m sick of it. You didn’t bring an e-reader, did you?”

  “I use the computer,” Artemisia admitted. “I wasn’t that organised. I’m not short of books, though, if you know how to transfer them.”

  “How can you not be short of books?”

  Artemisia’s golden laughter filled the common room. Geoffrey Murray liked that laugh and realised he hadn’t heard it much. He resolved to provoke it frequently.

  Unaware of Geoff’s thoughts, Artemisia carefully explained, “Whoever put together my database didn’t know fiction from non-fiction. They lumped a great deal of fiction in with my history. I can sort it if you like. Put it in a new file?”

  “That’s fine - I’ll access it as it is. Reading! Do you want to borrow my book?”

  “I’d love to. I love the feel of turning pages.”

  * * *

  Guilhem would not go to Pézenas as Bernat had demanded. This was because he didn’t want to. Peremptory orders from someone not his equal did not match his mood. He sent Bernat’s messenger home with polite words explaining that he was particularly busy. The business that consumed his time so much that he was unable to travel was pique. He would not let Bernat think, even for a moment, that he, Guilhem, was the Templars’ to command.

  * * *

  8 June, full moon

  Artemisia had the hilltop observation to herself. It was a bad viewing night and it was one of those periods when everyone avoided her. She spent a pleasant hour watching the moon rise in the east and bring a soft glow to the barren hillside. Fragments of thoughts drifted. Where did the scientific inquiries originate? What assumptions preceded the scientists’ questions? Did her colleagues ever push back the veil that hid their initial impulses? Did they ever question their direction?

  Inside, the others chatted in the kitchen.

  “Why do we get these damned emails about saints all the time?” Dr Sylvia Smith was exquisitely annoyed.

  “You forget. Artemisia is an expert in the lives of saints,” said Pauline.

  “Artemisia has explained it at least three times,” Luke intervened. “I wish you would pay attention. We need to understand the religious calendar because of the abbey. Processions. Events. Avoidance thereof. What’s the use in bringing a damned specialist back hundreds of years if everyone treats her as a lightweight?”

  “You’re a Catholic, just like Artemisia,” said Sylvia, suspiciously.

  “Guilty as charged. Also lapsed, just like Artemisia,” Luke’s tone was mocking. He didn’t have the time for Sylvia that he once had. “That doesn’t make her work any less essential to our well-being.”

  Sylvia picked up on Luke’s sarcasm. It would have been hard not to. Artemisia noticed this (it would have been hard not to, given she had just walked in for a hot drink) and also wrote in her journal that Sylvia was Dr Sylvia Smith again.

  ‘Dr Sylvia Smith’ was Artemisia’s shorthand for a woman who demanded that her own results be processed first, that her pain was higher than everyone else’s, and that she was a special petal. These words were not what Artemisia typed. Not ever. ‘Dr Sylvia Smith’ was the best she could do. She knew what she meant.

  Artemisia could tolerate Sylvia if she had to, but when Dr Sylvia Smith walked into a room, the historian became a mouse and hid, mostly at a computer terminal. Sylvia’s manner of demanding respect for her own work was not conducive to Artemisia’s contentment.

  * * *

  One morning, about an hour after the saint of the day had been posted on the intranet, Ben found that someone had replied to the post. He read it and chuckled and set up an alert. Cormac had written an entirely false biography for the saint in question over the top of Artemisia’s work. Cormac was the first. He was by no means the only. Artemisia did her best to ignore the others. She was upset, however.

  No-one mocks Sylvia’s rocks or Ben’s plants or Cormac’s fixes or Pauline’s cooking. Only my work is the subject of deletion. Or ignored.

  I want to go home.

  Except she couldn’t. Not until 31 December. Less than six months. Artemisia kept telling herself. Less than six months.

  * * *

  Guilhem was disaffected. Guilhem’s valet was even more disaffected. The boy was impossible, but Guilhem observed the niceties in his vicinity. Everyone else knew that this was mere show, but Sibilla thought of his youth and his attractiveness and his wealth. She exploited his mood by getting him into bed with her. Guilhem wasn’t upset by this. Guilhem’s page was however, and expressed his personal dissatisfaction by taking a knife to Sibilla’s second best dress, which Sibilla had left carelessly on the page’s personal chest, and by shredding to the sounds of their lovemaking. It was not his best moment.

  * * *

&nb
sp; “Ah, Raindrops on the Computer,” Luke observed as he walked past Geoff’s desk. “Nice music.”

  “I’m sorry?” Geoff had been in a dream world, half listening to his jazz track and half thinking through the weather patterns. They fitted with Artemisia’s data that suggested it wasn’t a good year, and he was comparing them with modern data. Artemisia’s information had been minimal, after all, just a notation of poor years in Western Europe.

  “Lucky to have that data,” Konig had commented as he passed it on. “This came from her thumbdrive. She downloaded it from the net before she left England. Our library doesn’t have a thing worth looking at.”

  “You checked.”

  “Damn right I checked. Every tedious document. I don’t know how she lives with that library.”

  So Luke’s comment about raindrops half-fitted with what he was thinking, but really didn’t make sense.

  “What the guys call that track,” Luke gestured with his thumb at Geoff’s speakers. “Your music. As I said.” He let it be seen that he was being patient with Geoff’s slowness.

  Suddenly, light dawned. Luke was in a social mood. Geoff gave up puzzling the weather patterns and grabbed the nearest chair. Luke could be very good company when he chose. It was incumbent upon Geoff to take advantage of it while he could.

  * * *

  The rain fell gently, in big drops. It ran over the countryside and down the streets in rushes and torrents. It swelled the river for a very brief time and it left the people of Saint-Guilhem wet to their ankles. Then it stopped.

  * * *

  Most of the team was in the storeroom, sorting their samples and finds from the last fortnight. Artemisia looked at the ‘historical’ samples she had been given and wondered just how far team members wandered to find these things. It looked suspiciously as if someone had ventured near a building site or a workshop. There was worked iron, and there was a piece of glass and something that rather looked like a cotton rag. She picked it up and examined it closely.

  “Mac,” she called out looking towards his workroom.

  “Yup!” he replied from behind her, making her jump. She had no idea how he had got there. His workroom didn’t have any exits to outside, so going out and coming back in using the main entrance wasn’t a possibility. Or was it?

  “Did this used to be a piece of clothing? Has it been used for polishing something and then washed? Look at that seam and the way this section is all shiny.”

  “I think you’re right.” Cormac’s pronouncement caused the others to gather around the collections bin. Now Cormac had an audience. “I found it, you know.” He sounded pleased.

  “Then label it,” Artemisia snapped. “Provenance, too. We need to know where you found it. Even time of day.” She was going to use Mac’s audience to make a point. “It’s essential data for analysis when we get home.”

  Cormac was entirely unperturbed by Artemisia’s tone. “I nearly got cat hair today,” he volunteered.

  “Fur,” corrected Sylvia.

  “If the damned cat hadn’t escaped I could have given you the whole skin and you could call it what you like. I’m sure someone will want to study cat DNA, sometime.”

  “It’s probably not a priority,” Geoff’s mouth betrayed his amusement. “But let me give you the list of parts of animal that we could collect, just in case.” For a moment, Artemisia and Mac both believed him.

  “There once were two cats of Kilkenny” Mac began, as he started to label the rest of his finds.

  “We’re going to run out of space.” Sylvia’s face was dour.

  “You’re just worried because we’re re-doing your rocks.”

  “I’m worried for the good of the expedition,” she snapped.

  “Children,” Luke appeared from nowhere, “Behave. Cormac, I need you to fix my bed.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “It fell apart.”

  “It’s napping during the day,” Geoff confided once Luke was out of earshot. “Does it to everyone. I never had to nap when I was in my twenties. Although it’s distantly possible that the collapse of Luke’s bed might be related to the fact that person or persons unknown were using said bed to explain how our beds are made.”

  “You didn’t?” Sylvia looked up on horror.

  “No,” and Geoff was truly regretful. “Tony wanted to know, and he doesn’t stop when he has a question. Not ever. I found him with Mac when they were putting the bed back together.”

  “Why Luke’s?”

  “I don’t think Tony asked whose bed it was. Artemisia found the pattern for them in one of her books, said they were used by the British army in India and that they fitted into a calico bag, so Tony had to see. Mac was happy to help him. He even produced the bag it came in. It was quite a small bag.”

  Sylvia played with her samples for a moment. “Are you really in your thirties?”

  “Yep,” said Geoff, more interested in the notion of collapsing beds than his advanced age. He himself had checked everyone’s age on the staff profiles, back in the twenty-first century. He had known since the beginning, for instance, that Sylvia not only lied about her age but had changed the records on their 1305 system.

  “You look younger.”

  Geoff shrugged and took his completed and labelled specimens over to Konig for official deposit in the current official sample-holding unit for samples that needed cold conservation. It had recently been full of meat.

  “Watch out,” Konig said. “You’re now officially a target. No longer too young.”

  Sylvia heard him. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and left her specimens half sorted.

  “Like a pouting teen,” Konig said, admiringly.

  “Just your type,” commented Geoff, and took himself back to his desk. There he typed on the Bulletin Board, anonymously:

  There was a young person from Wight

  Who travelled much faster than light.

  She departed one day

  In a relative way

  And arrived on the previous night.

  If this time travel is going to drive us all crazy, he thought, we might as well enjoy it. Artemisia’s got the right idea. Mac too.

  Sylvia was obviously not enjoying things. She called a planning meeting the moment she was back at her desk. When Artemisia turned up, she was sent summarily away. “You’re not needed for planning,” she told Artemisia. “You’re support staff.”

  Sylvia didn’t see Geoff Murray’s open and pleasant face turn into a mirror of Tony’s inward and shuttered visage. He watched her, absorbing every nuance of those words. At that moment, Geoff and Tony might have been cousins.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  A Dialogue of Silence

  Sibilla finally admitted that she had taken dye from Berta’s workshop and given it to Fiz. Fiz was faced with the accusation of having polluted the font at Saint-Barthelmy. He was entirely unperturbed. When Guilhem-the-Smith asked him, very puzzled, why Sibilla had not told anyone before this, Fiz explained, still unworried, that, “I threatened to tell all her secrets.”

  “We all know her secrets anyway. We’ve all had goods in pawn to her, too,” someone said. Fiz was happily unrepentant, but said, “I didn’t turn all that other water blue. That wasn’t me. I wish I knew how. We just changed the holy water.”

  * * *

  Back in the caves, by a happy coincidence, the team suffered a briefing session about the local water systems. The chart of the blue dye and its reaches was shown. Artemisia found the chart to be beyond her simple brain, but no-one stopped to explain. Underground water was a puzzle to her.

  “Cormac’s an idiot,” said Geoff conversationally. “Ben should have known better. All those chemicals will be in cave sediments for us to discover in the twenty-first century.”

  “We change things anyway,” said Artemisia mildly. She had been silenced too often on technicalities and found herself unable to ask the questions she ought to ask. She didn’t want to say We change things; she wante
d to ask how the water worked, what changes the dye made, what changes the cavedwellers made and why the hell they had all stopped caring. Maybe they hadn’t all stopped caring. Maybe they’d developed a dialogue of silence.

  “I don’t like to think about that too much,” admitted Geoff, his eyes softening ruefully.

  * * *

  22 June (St Alban)

  Harvest would start soon. Sometime. No-one knew when. Without harvest, the town was poor, so everyone watched the earliest fields, anxiously. Grapes and olives were the lifeblood of the region. They kept everyone alive when the pilgrims could not. The quality was the pride of Saint-Guilhem. Even Bona and her brother watched the grapes and olives anxiously.

  * * *

  Ben Konig’s past was never what he claimed. It was more exotic. More undependable. More worrying. He told lies to hide it. The more someone pushed, the more dramatic those lies became. Sylvia pushed the hardest of anyone, so he told her many different stories. His personal favourite was that he was descended from an exotic dancer who had once performed before the Czar of all the Russias. He hadn’t even needed to suggest that he had a genuine claim to the Russian Empire. Sylvia wanted him to be born to glory. Ben just wished that his past was different, any way different. That his grandfather had been almost anyone other than who he was. A war hero. Of the wrong religion. On the wrong side. The lies helped, a bit. It didn’t delete three generations of guilt, but it applied a mild salve.

  Ben’s extravagant words were in exact contrast to his modest personal habits. Unlike Geoff, he never paraded half -naked. Unlike Geoff, he never, ever complained about the cold. Also unlike Geoff, he didn’t push himself past Artemisia’s boundaries until she snapped. Konig played things safe, exactly as his grandfather had. This was his single biggest problem, exactly as it had been for his grandfather.

  While he was contemplating his own sad history and half-dreaming about the next tale he would spin to the very attractive Dr Smith, he half-listened to Artemisia Wormwood read Geoff Murray the riot act.