Word Hunters

by Nick Earls

  ‘Something like it,’ Lexi said. ‘Wait till you see.’

  ‘The deck’s called an aftercastle. That’s where we need to be. The one at the front’s a forecastle.’ Will could picture the illustrations in the encyclopedia, a portrait of Hudson next to an engraving of the Half Moon – Halve Maen in Dutch – with Mohican canoes approaching from the shore. Hudson hardly looked like the portrait at all, but the Half Moon was close enough.

  ‘So why exactly are we up here and not down there?’ Al was feeling queasy and could have done without the lesson in ship parts. He already knew all that.

  ‘Another fair question. Take a look at the top of the cliffs.’ Will searched until he could find the exact spot, and then pointed. There were children crouched in the long grass and staring down at the deck of the ship. ‘We wouldn’t have the “k” in “okay” if it wasn’t for them. Let’s go to the aftercastle and watch it happen.’

  He led the way down the rope ladder, and when they reached the deck he said, ‘Pick up a rope or something and look like you know how to use it.’

  Lexi found a mallet lying next to some wooden pins. It was only once it was in her hand that she realised she could use it as a weapon if she needed to. ‘Okay’ had been a relief from that point of view – no battles, no threats to their lives so far. She checked the crew. There were no weapons in sight. She should have made sure of that earlier from the crow’s nest, but Will seemed so confident she’d stopped thinking that way.

  As they reached the rear deck, they saw Henry Hudson wave to the cliff-top and the children ducked down out of sight. One by one, they cautiously stood up again.

  ‘We’ll call this bend Children’s Corner,’ Hudson announced.

  The navigator picked up a quill, dipped it in ink and wrote on the chart in front of him. He was mapping the river as they travelled.

  ‘Kinderhoek,’ he said. A glow rose from the page, at the tip of his quill.

  Will walked straight up to him and said, ‘Sir, I’ve been sent by the second lieutenant. Your sextant has fallen and broken below decks. He thinks it can be repaired, but he’d like you to give instructions.’

  ‘What? How?’ The navigator wasn’t happy. ‘No one should be touching my sextant. It was in my quarters. How—’ He was already walking off. He stopped and turned. ‘Captain, permission to leave the aftercastle—’

  Hudson nodded.

  With the navigator gone, Will, Lexi and Al stepped forward to the chart. The ‘h’, ‘o’ and ‘e’ in ‘Kinderhoek’ were pulsing brightly, with an ‘m’ fitting among them to make the word ‘home’.

  ‘I wonder,’ Will said. For a moment, he dared to hope it would mean home for him too.

  He picked up the quill and wrote ‘x2’ next to the initials ‘WH’ near the corner of the chart. ‘TH’ had been written just below. He set the quill down, touched the glowing letters in ‘Kinderhoek’ and the portal opened. Al already had the peg in his hand.

  From nowhere, fog rolled up the river and across the deck, and the Half Moon shuddered in a wind that wasn’t there.

  Lexi, Al and Will blew clear of the deck and into the sky. Will laughed. It was his first flight to the future for four years and there had been many days and nights when he had doubted whether he would ever make another.

  The pictures of passing time rushed by – railways and revolutions, factories and fishing fleets. As they fell towards Fig Tree Pocket in the 21st century, it was clear there were still three of them. Will wasn’t going back to 1918 yet.

  They dropped towards the roof of their house and Lexi shouted, ‘This way!’ and steered past it. They landed in the ferns at the side.

  In the dark inside Al’s bag, Doug tried to work out which way was up. He smelt creek mud, cut grass and sausages. He was home.

  ‘Not exactly London in the early 20th century,’ Will said, looking around. ‘That was probably a bit much to hope for. But it’s good to be moving again. Great, actually. I can come with you next time, can’t I?’

  ‘Every time.’ Lexi stood up and brushed dirt off her pants. ‘It’ll be good to have you there. You look more ready for a fight than we are. Except right now maybe, when you look like some hot skater dude.’ She laughed.

  ‘A hot skater dude? We didn’t have a lot of those in 1918. As far as I know. Whatever they are.’ Will checked what he was wearing, but it didn’t help. ‘Skater dude’ remained a mystery. He had a black Von Dutch cap on, an orange T-shirt with skulls on it and baggy three-quarter pants. ‘I’m going to assume it’s legal to be one, unless you tell me otherwise.’

  Al felt his phone vibrate in his bag and then it started to ring. It was Mursili.

  ‘You’re back,’ Mursili said. ‘Good. I didn’t know what I was going to tell people if it went through to the message area. What happened? Was it 19th century? Did you find your grandfather?’

  Al watched Will stand up and straighten his cap. Lexi picked a leaf off his shoulder and blushed.

  ‘Pretty much 19th century and no. But we found the guy from Nantucket in the 1830s. We’ve brought him back with us.’

  ‘What? Another one?’ Mursili sounded excited. ‘You’re bringing everyone from the past to the present, one by one? Put me on wide speaker. I want to talk to him. What’s his name?’

  Al pressed the loudspeaker icon on screen and the phone beeped. ‘Will, there’s someone who wants to—’

  ‘Ahoy! Ahoy!’ Mursili shouted, making Will recoil. ‘Will? Is that right? Mursili here. Did you ever do “water”? I was the librarian in Hattusa.’

  Will still looked wary. ‘Is that – Do I—’

  Lexi stepped in. ‘It’s a phone. That’s a phone in the 21st century. A telephone.’

  ‘Seriously? This isn’t some—’ Will reached for the phone and took it from Al. He turned it over to check for wires and then took a close look at the screen. ‘It’s nothing like a telephone. Not one of the standard bits of the telephone’s there.’

  ‘You should try coming from 3,000 years ago,’ Mursili’s voice said. ‘You must be from some time much closer if you have a phone.’

  ‘1918. Do I just—’ Will pointed to the phone. Al nodded.

  ‘1918. So easy.’ Al turned the volume down, but Mursili’s voice was still pretty loud. ‘If you meet oncoming oxen at a crossroads in 1918, do you have to sacrifice? No. If you build a new house, do you have to bury a goat’s placenta beneath the corner posts or risk the wrath of the god Naamek? No. And Naamek’s no pushover. Always wanting more placenta.’

  Lexi tried to explain it. ‘We brought Mursili here—’

  Mursili cut in again. ‘And now I’m on the team, Will. I’ll help you adjust. I’m team librarian. When “okay” went off, Al and Lexi called me and I looked it up for them. You had movies in 1918? I’m like that guy in the control room with all the screens who goes in and shoots all his scenes in one day.’

  ‘Mursili, we’ll—’

  ‘We’ll have to meet.’ Mursili was already onto his next idea. ‘You might have knowledge that’ll let us fine-tune what we do.’

  ‘Good. Tomorrow, Mursili,’ Al said clearly. ‘Tomorrow. We’ll sort out a time in the morning.’

  ‘Good. Very good. Tomorrow. Ahoy, then.’ With that he was gone.

  ‘The guy in the control room with the screens—’ Will looked baffled.

  ‘Sorry,’ Lexi said. ‘That was a bit too much 21st century at once, wasn’t it? Mursili still hasn’t worked the phone out. He’s from 1180BC. He doesn’t realise you have to leave spaces, take turns, things like that. And he and Al are trying to bring back “ahoy” for answering the phone, which is a bit embarrassing.’

  ‘Ah, Alexander Graham Bell.’ Finally something sort of made sense. ‘Really?’

  ‘Just for “hello”,’ Al said, as if that made it all right. ‘I don’
t do it for “goodbye” or anything. That was all him.’ Lexi and Will were both laughing. ‘It didn’t feel so nerdy till right now.’

  They took leftover sausages to Will once dinner had finished. It wouldn’t have worked to turn up with a 19-year-old guy as their new friend and expect their parents to feed him.

  He slept in the ferns that night. It was summer and no one ever went down that side of the house. He said he’d done far worse over the past four years.

  The following day was Sunday, and Lexi and Al insisted to their parents that they’d been planning all week to meet friends for a movie at the El Dorado. Lexi even showed where it was on the calendar in the kitchen. She had written it there the night before. Their mother offered to drive them, but they said that’d be embarrassing, since everyone else was catching the bus.

  Al hated catching the bus. He knew his mother would bring up the conversation any time he wanted a lift in future. ‘But wouldn’t it embarrass you?’ she’d say. ‘Wouldn’t you be much happier on the bus?’ It would work for now, though.

  They met Will at the bus stop, as planned. They caught the bus to somewhere near the cinema, since that would look right if they were seen, but when they got there they went to an ATM instead and got him some cash. It was odd watching their world through his eyes – all the traffic moving so quickly, and people wearing so little and carrying tiny machines that played music, sent messages, took photos and sometimes also happened to be phones. He couldn’t tell the devices apart.

  ‘The iPod Shuffle’s much smaller.’ Lexi pointed one out on a woman who was walking past. ‘Too small to be a phone. You need a keyboard, or at least keys on a screen.’

  ‘What about the guy with the piece of black plastic hooked on his ear?’ Will could see a man in a suit standing at a cab rank by himself and talking.

  ‘That’s a phone, too, or part of one.’

  ‘No, seriously. I know I’m new here, but I’m not going to believe everything’s a phone.’ He leant in close to the badge on her top. ‘Hello, hello. Is this a phone?’

  Lexi laughed and pushed him away. ‘It’s got Bluetooth, the phone that guy’s using.’

  ‘Bluetooth? Harald Gormsson?’

  Now it was Lexi’s turn not to get it. ‘How do you know his name? You only got here yesterday.’

  ‘Not him. Not the guy on the phone. Harald the king of Norway and Denmark in the 10th century. Son of Gorm the Old. The word “hustings” takes you there. Something does. They called him Bluetooth.’

  Al took his phone from his pocket and jumped online. ‘Watch this.’ He went to Wikipedia and entered ‘Bluetooth’. He scrolled down to the section headed ‘Name and logo’. ‘It’s him.’ He turned the screen towards Will. ‘The phone company named it after him.’

  He wondered if the word would last. Maybe it would. And maybe one day it’d go off and a word hunter from the future would find themselves in the meeting at Ericsson in 1994 when names were debated and Bluetooth came out on top. Al pictured it like the newspaper boardroom in Chicago in “okay”, but with Ikea furniture and no smoking. Then the peg would lock into the portal, a thousand years would be gone in seconds, King Harald would appear. There would be a war on, more than likely.

  Will read the Wikipedia entry and then took the phone and checked it front and back. ‘How was that in there? How did you know to have it on the screen?’

  What he needed was an explanation of the past century, and Lexi and Al made a start on it. Al tried to imagine stepping into a movie about the future. That was what Will was doing right now.

  But he talked like them. Will looked and mostly sounded 21st century. At school in the lead-up to Anzac Day they had read letters from World War I soldiers, and the way they put things was different. There were hints of that when Will spoke, but not many.

  ‘It’s like you’re still carrying a peg,’ Al said, though he knew Will’s pegs had gone in the 19th century.

  Will reached down the neck of his T-shirt and pulled out a string. On the end of it he had peg keys – dozens of them. He had threaded them on and kept them with him.

  ‘The keys break off in the lock sometimes.’ He slipped them back into his shirt. ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. It’s good to have a few spares. Maybe enough keys together work a bit like a peg, as far as speaking and understanding goes.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s a lot of this word-hunter lark that’s not easy to work out. I am only from last century, though – not 3,000 years ago.’

  Mursili called out to them from across the street. He stepped right into the traffic and a car braked hard and hit its horn. He waved to the driver and patted the bonnet as he walked in front of it, as if it was the head of a horse. Then, before making it to the kerb, he nearly collided with a cyclist coming the other way.

  ‘Goodness, I’m amazed so many of you live to be adults,’ he said.

  ‘We cross at the lights.’ Lexi pointed towards the intersection. ‘And there’s this whole stopping and looking right and left thing that we’ll have to teach you.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear you still do that.’ Will stood up and held out his hand to Mursili. ‘An early 20th-century invention that’s still useful – how to cross the road. I’m Will.’

  ‘“Where there’s a Will there’s a way” – I just learnt that one. It’s a saying these people have.’ Mursili shook Will’s hand as if he was pumping water. ‘Mursili. Formerly supreme librarian to the royal court of Suppiluliuma II and the Empire of Hatti. Currently deputy librarian, Cubberla Creek State School. But we have the internet now. It’s not a come-down. Not at all.’

  Mursili had already been thinking about what Will would need, and said he thought he could get him a tax file number. The more they all talked about life in the 21st century – drivers’ licences and ID points for bank accounts and PINs and passwords – the more unnecessarily complicated Will thought the world had become.

  He decided he would be a gardener for now, until the tax file number came through. That way he could work for cash. Al was pretty sure that wasn’t legal, but since Will technically didn’t exist in the 21st century, it was probably safe enough.

  ‘I’ll design flyers for you,’ Lexi said. ‘I can make them look great. But you’ll need a point of contact.’

  ‘Easy.’ Lexi had jumped in with the offer of flyers and Al didn’t want to be left behind. ‘Mum and Dad have a fleet plan, and they never use it all. We could probably get you one of their old phones.’

  ‘Your parents have a fleet?’ Yet again, the new century was keeping Will off-balance. ‘A fleet of what?’

  ‘We all have phones on the one plan.’ As soon as he said it, Al realised it made no sense in 1918. ‘The family’s got a bunch of phones, but they’re all covered by one monthly bill. I’m sure it’ll be okay.’

  ‘Do people say “okay” much?’ It had been on Will’s mind for a while. ‘We didn’t in England in 1918, but you did just then. I didn’t know if it was going to last. Through disuse, I mean, not through it having four steps.’

  ‘Five steps,’ Lexi said. ‘If you mean the different time periods we had to go to when we hunted it. You wouldn’t have seen 1929, with the “O-K-A-Y” spelling. Just “O” and “K” still works, though.’ She couldn’t imagine life without ‘OK’. It was everywhere. She was forever pressing ‘OK’ or clicking on it.

  ‘It’s even more brittle with that extra step. You don’t get many words with five.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Al was thinking it too, but Lexi asked it. ‘What do you mean “brittle”?’

  ‘Well, the more steps, the more at risk it is.’ Will shrugged, as if it was obvious. But Lexi and Al were looking at him blankly. ‘Have you noticed how, in a language with thousands of words, some of them get triggered a lot more often than others? No one knows all the reasons for that, but one factor is how many steps a word
has to go through to exist in the present. The more steps, the more often it’ll break down. Plenty of words have one or two steps, so they’re more stable.’

  ‘But “okay”?’ Lexi couldn’t imagine losing it, or it unexisting. ‘If you think about it, it’s probably the most widely used word in the world. It could be the first word to go into practically every language. Dad said when he was in China with work, credit card machines still had an “OK” button on them and he heard people on the phone speaking Chinese and saying “okay”.’

  Will groaned and Mursili stepped in. ‘Not making sense? Credit card machines? A credit card is a plastic rectangle with a magnetised strip to store information about your money. It lets you spend money when you don’t have cash. Sometimes your own money from your bank account, but often it’s money that you don’t have and that you’re borrowing.’

  ‘Oh, like “broke”?’ Will looked at Lexi and Al. ‘Have you done “broke”? Borrowers’ tiles?’ They hadn’t. ‘Eighteenth-century Italy, banks handing out borrowers’ tiles with the customer’s name and credit limit on them. If the customer went over the limit, the bank broke the tile.’

  They compared words they’d hunted. Will had done more than 40 during his nine months with the dictionary. He could practically recite them all. He’d had four lost years to think about them, in case any one of them offered a way out of the 1830s.

  ‘What about the Battle of Hastings?’ Lexi wanted their four missions to count for something too, even if he’d been on far more. ‘If you haven’t done “water”, did anything else take you to the Battle of Hastings?’

  ‘Hastings was just one day, wasn’t it?’ He said it as if it couldn’t have been a big deal. ‘My toughest battle was against the Aztecs. They mightn’t have had guns, but there were thousands of them and they never stopped coming at you. That was “cocoa”. First I thought it wasn’t up to much, since it mainly seemed to be about Doctor Johnson making a mistake in his dictionary, but suddenly you’re waging war outside Tenochtitlan. It’s hot and everyone’s got diarrhoea and 50,000 men want to sacrifice you alive in the hope that it’ll change their luck. Now that’s a battle.’