by Scott Baker
That was it. We were clear. In a moment of exultation Hamza ran to the stern and called out with his middle finger raised. ‘Fuck you!’ he screamed back at the pirate ship.
I shook my head and allowed a smile, knowing the insult was wasted on the sea raiders. Hamza cheered, but the elation was premature. In a moment his smile changed to a look of inquisition, and then concern, as he followed my wide-eyed glare skywards.
It flew straight. From the rear of the boat, twenty-five feet up, a long wooden spear flew from their vessel to ours. It would not hit anyone on deck, but then, it was not intended to. A mass of burning cloth was wrapped about its shaft, leaving a trail of black smoke. Its steel tip pierced the material of our main sail easily, and the eruption of flame engulfed the fabric.
The tongues of orange spread about the sail as the fire ate with feverish hunger. Buckets were immediately lowered over the side in an effort to collect precious water to douse the flames, but the damage was done: the main sail was useless, and within a minute the raiders’ vessel would pull up alongside our own. I tightened my grip around my sword. While the crew fought to control the flames, the raiders’ ship came within touching distance. The raiders had lined up along their port side in anticipation of boarding our now crippled vessel, and I knew they would slaughter us without exception.
I remembered Mishca downstairs, hiding in the cabin as the flames licked at the wood of the mast. I knew that if the crew were busy fighting pirates, they would lose in their plight to douse the fires before the ship became a blazing inferno. With that thought, I ran towards the stern. Malbool and Hamza called after me, but I didn’t stop.
The box that contained the support for the steering oar gave me just enough foothold to spring into the air. I hit it running and leaped off the back of the boat, hanging for an eternity out over the open ocean.
I hit the raiders’ deck and rolled as I landed. The sound caught the sea pirates off guard as I retook my feet and drove my sword forward. Two of the pirates fell before they realised what was happening. The last thing they had expected was for us to bring the fight to them. As I stood and spun, I counted nine on the deck but knew there would be more. Each was armed with a variety of weapons, obviously collected from their various bounties.
A tall, willowy man slashed downwards, but I cut in close to him and took his arms off at the wrists before he could deliver his blow. Shooting my heel out, I kicked the man off the deck and into the water, streams of blood pulsing from the stumps where his hands used to be.
Calls went up as the raiders tried to decide whether to leap to the flaming merchant vessel or deal with the attacker on their own ship. Their hesitation gave me enough of an advantage to spin and decapitate two raiders as they stood next to each other dumbfounded. Thrown rather than swung, a heavy wooden club caught me in the back, causing my fingers to open reflexively and drop my sword. I didn’t reach for the weapon but rather shot my foot out at the nearest raider’s knee. The tearing ligaments sounded like the branch of a tree breaking. The knee bent the wrong way. A full row of yellow rotted teeth greeted me as the man screamed in pain. His sword fell into my waiting hand and I smashed his teeth out with the hilt.
I had now lost the element of surprise. The next attacks came two at a time, one from the front and one from the rear. Having the sword gripped like an enormous dagger, I pushed the blade backwards, assisting the thrust with both my hands. Simultaneously I tucked my knee high and shot the sole of my foot out at the attacker rushing towards my chest. His jaw broke on both sides. I barely noticed the sound of the body behind me sliding off my new broadsword.
Three more of the raiders battled Malbool and Hamza in an attempt to board our ship as flames began to take hold. Mishca was still hiding in the cabin – between the flames and the raiders, he did not have long. I refocused on a new attacker in front of me.
He swung at my ankle as I leaped forward from a box in a twisting somersault above his head. I struck before I landed, my blade skewering the crown on his head. His brain blended as his body danced like a possessed marionette. By the time he fell to the deck I was moving back towards the Jewel.
Malbool fought with determination, and felled one of the attackers brutally, but he was unused to fighting at sea and found it difficult to balance on the burning, tilting ship. Hamza, on the other hand, was in his element. Trained at The Facility and living on trading vessels between Jerusalem and Rome, he punished any who dared to engage him.
As I jumped back to the Jewel, the main mast, weakened by the onslaught of flame, fell back onto the cargo netting at the rear of the deck, setting the ropes and boxes ablaze. The silks took to the flame, producing a pungent black smoke. I sprinted for the cabin, but before I could get there, a raider kicked the cabin door off its hinges with a crack. I heard Mishca’s terrified scream as the raider grabbed him by the shirt and dragged him onto the deck.
Without time to close the distance, I did the only thing I could. Underhand like a softball pitch I swung my sword and released it. The blade tip bit into Mishca’s shoulder, drawing both blood and a yell of pain from the boy, but not before it passed through the lung of the pirate who held him. Mishca kicked free as the man’s grasp went limp and his body fell back onto the cabin floor. I raced to Mishca, who reached up to his shoulder where blood had started to seep.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said as I knelt beside the boy to inspect his injury. Before I could get a good look at it, he threw his arms around my neck and began to sob. I hugged him back, but pulled away to look at his face.
‘You have to get off this ship, do you understand? It’s going to sink, the fire is too far gone.’ The boy nodded and looked about, for the first time seeing the flames and their destruction.
‘Mishca, listen,’ I said, refocusing the boy’s attention. ‘You need to make it home. Stay away from the fighting. Head for the bulkhead.’
The boy looked at me, confused.
‘The front of the boat. Like where you were playing earlier. Stay up there and hide if you can, there’re some boxes up there. Do you understand?’
Mishca nodded and ran for the front of the ship, steering clear of the spot where Malbool had opened the belly of another of his attackers.
Hamza had dispatched two of the pirates and boarded the larger vessel to engage the few remaining mercenaries. Two of the Jewel’s crew lay face down in pools of their own blood, beyond help.
It was useless. The flames had caused too much structural damage and we were taking on water quickly. I hustled the remaining crew along the length of the ship.
‘This is my ship! I’ll not leave her!’ It was the guttural voice of the Jewel’s captain. He stood alone with a single bucket, futility his only companion as he tried to douse the roaring flames. As he turned to protest my anticipated negotiation for him to leave, I thumped the side of his skull with the hilt of my sword, knocking him unconscious. With the old man in a shoulder carry, I drove along the ever-increasing slope of the deck and made for the raiders’ vessel. When I got to the border between our ships, I saw that the fight had spilled entirely onto our attackers’ boat. Mishca too had slipped from the bulkhead onto the attackers’ boat.
The Jewel was sinking fast, her deck now at least six feet lower than that of the raiders’ large vessel – and the gap increased every second. I dropped my sword and brought the old captain onto my chest, then used every bit of strength I had left to throw him up to the deck.
The boat tilted as it sank. The stern disappeared below the rolling ocean, forcing the pointed nose of the ship to rise, water streaming from its barnacled underbelly. It was to this last bastion of hope that I now ran, in a race against fire, gravity and friction as my legs pumped quickly just to stay in the same spot above the water. Slipping and sliding, I struggled upwards. When at last I scrambled on all fours to scale the ship’s figurehead, it was vertical.
With a final leap, even as the last of the wood fell away from beneath my feet, I launched myself at the rim o
f the raiders’ ship.
One arm.
Fully stretched. Fingers.
I hung. For the briefest of moments I caught my breath, then reached up with my other hand just as a blade came down on it. My fingers were sliced in two, severed at the second knuckle, and my hand fell away. Once again I hung by one arm.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t even realise what had happened, just wondered how I’d lost my grip. I looked up to see Malbool pounding his fist into the raider who had severed my fingers. He was punching him repeatedly in the face, his nostrils flared, rage in his eyes. He continued long after the raider’s face had caved in beyond repair. With a final shove, Malbool tossed the body over the lip of the railing and sent it splashing into the frothing water. I looked down and saw the trail of blood fanning out below me, and dark shapes moving curiously around the scene.
‘Saul!’ I heard a voice as my wrist was gripped from above. ‘Reach up!’
Malbool caught my other arm by the wrist and hauled me over the railing and onto the deck. Bodies were strewn around me, spilling their life force onto the rough wooden boards. His chest heaving, the African grinned.
‘Well, nice to see that you can break too, man from the future!’ With a thud he flopped onto the deck beside me and recovered his breathing. After a moment, he became serious. ‘Do you have any other magic to put those back on?’
I stared at the stumps on my left hand. The slice was diagonal, and ran just above my middle knuckles, leaving only a thumb and forefinger intact. Malbool took his blade and sliced into his tunic, tearing a strip. He wrapped it around the offending stumps as I winced at the contact.
Looking about, I saw that the captain was conscious and giving commands to the remainder of his crew. Hamza and one of the other men threw bodies over the side of the vessel, fuelling the feeding frenzy that had begun off the port bow. The time we had lost was precious, as were the men, but we were alive and Mishca still had a chance to get home.
Shaun flicked the page, and as he did so he noticed the intricacies of his hand. He looked at his fingers, and wondered what he would do without them.
CHAPTER 45
‘So, tell me again,’ Mishca said. Hamza stood behind the boy and stretched his arm out.
‘Now, hold up your thumb.’ Mishca did as he was told.
‘That’s two, right?’
‘Yes, good, that’s two. Now a fist. Good. Look beyond the fist at the stars. The width of your fist is ten arc minutes. That’s right. Good.’
‘And when I spread my hand it’s twenty?’
‘Very good. Yes, twenty. That’s how sailors for thousands of years will measure the distance of stars, but they won’t understand what they’re doing.’
‘And where did you learn it, Zachariah?’ Mishca asked the Jordanian who posed as a Jew.
‘Well, you know that friend of yours? The one you call Saul?’
‘Saul knows about the stars too? He taught you?’
‘He knows about the stars, but he didn’t teach me exactly. We learned at the same place. We sort of went to school together.’
‘You did?’ Mishca asked, then said, ‘What’s school?’ looking at the grey-and-gold-haired man. Hamza laughed.
‘It’s where you learn together with children your own age.’
‘But you’re old. He wouldn’t have been born when you went to school.’
My friend threw his head back and laughed at this, clasping the boy’s shoulder.
‘You’re right. But I was not so old once, and there was a time when we were about the same age, if you can believe that,’ Hamza said offhandedly.
‘Yeah, the time machine.’
Hamza stopped laughing. ‘What did you say?’
‘The time machine. The doctor who fixed us told me about it. He kept saying that they sent him back too far. He kept saying they were bas … bar-tards?’
‘Bastards?’ Hamza asked, and then roared again. ‘They are bastards! They are! They sent me back too far as well.’
Mishca started to laugh at seeing Hamza so jovial. Hamza came over to me and sat down. We looked at Malbool sleeping and the captain manning the steering oar. We had all settled to gather our strength before our arrival in Jerusalem. The captain wanted to dock a little south to avoid arriving at the port in a pirate vessel, but all being equal he was happy with his new acquisition. Underneath the silver full moon, the ship was like a ghost.
‘Who was it?’ Hamza asked me.
‘Who was who?’ I replied.
‘Who was it that fixed you up? The boy said that you were cut up pretty bad in the arena.’
I let my head fall back against the wood. ‘It was Miles, as an old man. It was a shock to the system to see him, but it was … nice.’
‘Miles? He wasn’t an agent …’ Hamza let it hang.
‘No, I know. He said that he had been given a special mission. He wouldn’t tell me how he knew where to be, but he saved my life.’
‘I knew that someone was going to shoot someone, but I didn’t know who. We haven’t really talked about this.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We haven’t talked properly for months.’
‘Over a decade,’ Hamza put in. I smiled. Although I had seen my friend recently, he had not seen me for years. It was still a little hard to comprehend.
‘Like I said, Delissio thought I was in Rome to kill him. But, Hamza, it’s all too convenient. I was exhausted and injured from the Royåle, and Delissio was about to kill me – then Miles conveniently popped one through his back. He said that he had been waiting for fifty years. Every year he went to the games and waited to see me fight. His whole mission was purely to put an arrow in Delissio’s back. Hamza, how could he have known?’
‘I don’t know,’ Hamza lied as he sat back.
I began to get a little suspicious.
‘So, how did you know I would be at the port in Italy?’
‘I knew you would be there the same way you know what your mission is. It was programmed into my mission log. I have no other assignment, Graeme. You are it. This journey is it. I have no camera implant like you do. I have to make sure you get your interview.’
‘Yeah. But that’s just it. I wasn’t supposed to go to Rome. I arrived a hundred miles from Jerusalem. Getting in that fight in the village was a mistake, it wasn’t part of my mission. At the time I didn’t remember anything. I didn’t even know who I was. I didn’t have your, ah, inscription.’ I motioned to the scar on Hamza’s forearm.
He nodded slowly. ‘Perhaps there is more going on here than we’re supposed to know.’
‘I don’t understand!’ I protested.
‘The Rule of Knowledge, Graeme. What do you really know about your mission? You have to interview Jesus, right? You were supposed to ask him all those questions so the guys would have the answers. Scientific questions, philosophical questions, the questions people would ask him if he’d have lived in our time.’ Hamza scoffed and looked around. ‘Our time. What does that even mean? I had myself convinced that I imagined the whole thing. I never expected to see you, although I always had this.’ He held out his arm where the word VOMIT was formed by thin scars. ‘The fact that I could read it, that it was in English, meant that I wasn’t insane. It was always with me, I couldn’t drop it or lose it. Graeme, what you’re doing, what you’ve got to do, well, you know what happens if you don’t, but imagine, just imagine what’s going to happen when they find that disc with all the answers! Brother, you know that I follow the way of the prophet, but I am here six hundred years before him. My whole religion hasn’t been invented yet. Does that mean it doesn’t apply? No, the teachings are in my red-time, my past … they still apply to me.’
‘But what if we’re too late? What if Delissio’s men have already got to Jesus? What if he’s dead already?’
‘Graeme, for ten years I wondered if you would ever show up. All I could go on was faith. I had inquired about you, searched, tried to find you, but no. I didn’t know when you would
appear; I certainly didn’t expect to have to wait that long! Faith. I have faith in Allah, and I have faith in what you’re doing. It all comes from the same place, this faith. You have to have faith that you will not be too late, that the professor knows what he’s doing. I have faith that we can get to Jerusalem and that Jesus will be alive,’ he said with reflection. ‘Ah, of course, if what you say is true, we must come up with a plan to discover these men who would rob you of your moment.’
‘Land!’ the captain called.
Scrambling to our feet, we turned to look out. There, burning not more than a mile away, were the lights of Jerusalem.
CHAPTER 46
‘Done!’ David Black announced as he slammed his pen down onto the airline tray table. Shaun looked up.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m happy for you.’
‘That’s what my mother used to say.’
‘Did she buy you first-class tickets too?’
David smiled. ‘You’re not going to rob me of this.’
‘Rob you of what?’
‘My moment of glory.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it. You want a drink? I’ve got a lot to tell you.’
‘I’ll get a drink, sure, but keep your story to yourself. I’ve got another hour on this flight, and I’m ready to catch up. You should get some sleep.’
Shaun hated to admit it, but he was exhausted, and although he wanted nothing more than to keep reading, he knew he needed to give his body a chance if they were going to make it to Afghanistan. He pressed the call button and slid the diary over to David. But before the flight attendant arrived to take his order, Shaun Strickland had fallen back and landed gently on a padded sofa in the middle of a field. The sun shone and birds chirped, and as he lifted the remote to change the channel on the small wooden television about ten feet in front of him, Lauren lay her head down in his lap and curled her knees up to her chest.
