by Nick Earls
‘It’s not even the bit we’re doing.’ Every time Shakespeare spoke, his impatience seemed to crank up a notch. ‘When we do lines, we talk about the bit we’re doing.’
He said it slowly and forcefully, as if Robert’s capacity to grasp it was likely to be limited. He turned to the table behind him and set down the scene they were working on. He had the rest of the play there, laid out scene by scene.
‘Yes, but I thought we weren’t doing lines. That’s when I said I had the small point.’ Robert held his thumb and finger close together, as if Shakespeare’s back might see it.
‘Actors—’ Shakespeare didn’t turn around. ‘It would be easier to teach kittens how to morris dance. But, please, your small point—’ He picked up the scene.
Robert shuffled through a few pages, then shuffled back again. ‘Actually, it’s act I, scene 2, the line “Till he disbursed at Saint Colme’s Inch ten thousand sovereigns to our general use”.’
Shakespeare flicked through act I, slipped scene 3 in and pulled scene 2 out. ‘Yes?’ He turned and shrugged.
‘It’s the King of Norway, William,’ Robert said, ‘so would it be better with foreign money? Marks, maybe?’
‘Well done, Robert. You were right to identify that as a small point. I’d be interested to see what you would call a very small point.’ He searched through the pages until he could see the line himself. ‘“Marks” doesn’t scan. Do you have no sense of rhythm at all? Can’t you feel that it needs two syllables?’ He read the line again. ‘Dollars? That’s foreign. I think it’s even Norwegian. Daler. Does “dollar” work for you?’
For the past few minutes the word hunters hadn’t thought about their mission, but the mention of dollars and the glow from the page as Shakespeare made the alteration with his quill changed that.
‘There it is,’ Al whispered, though the others had seen it too. ‘Can we get it and then look for Grandad Al?’
‘Don’t see why not.’ Will stood up. ‘As soon as he puts the page down. The others have all got copies, so it’s not as if “Macbeth” will end up a page short. Just follow my lead. I worked out how to get on stage quickly a couple of visits ago.’ As the word hunters moved forward, Will called out to the men on stage, ‘Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve been sent to make repairs.’
‘Repairs to what?’ Richard Burbage didn’t seem to like the idea. ‘And sent by whom? You do realise we own this theatre?’
‘We’re Mr Street’s men.’ Will strode towards the steps to the stage as if he’d been on them dozens of times. ‘There’s a problem with one of the beams. We need to get it sorted out before there’s an audience in here.’
‘All right, then.’ Richard folded his pages. ‘If Street thinks there’s a problem, then there’s a problem. Do you need us to move?’
‘We should be able to work around you,’ Will told him. ‘We’re just measuring for now. You can leave things where they are and keep ignoring us.’
Shakespeare checked the new wording of the line, tucked the scene back into act I and set it down on the table. The actors had started reading again before the word hunters reached the steps.
As they crossed the back of the stage, it all seemed easy. There were no horses this time, or pockets to pick, or battles to fight. Now they were this close it was impossible not to watch the actors and Shakespeare, and ‘Macbeth’ taking shape. Al wanted to stop and tell them how famous it would be 400 years later, and that it looked set to be famous forever, this thing they were making here and now. He’d never seen the play, but he knew that.
As Will reached for act I, scene 2, a hand grabbed his wrist. There had been no one there seconds before.
‘My friend,’ the man who had grabbed him said. He had a cape, a tall dark hat and strange dark glasses, a black moustache and goatee. ‘John Johnson. A moment—’
‘Mr Street wants us to—’ Will had barely got the words out when the man’s other hand drew a knife from inside his cape.
Will jumped back, but John Johnson held on. Four men in grey robes ran from behind pillars and across the stage towards them. Will smashed John Johnson’s arm onto the edge of the table and broke his grip. As the men in grey closed in, they pulled knives from their robes. One of them moved behind Will.
‘Lexi, the table!’ Al shouted.
They grabbed it by the legs and lifted it, scattering the carefully ordered scenes. They swung it hard and hit the man in the back, knocking him to the ground. His dagger clattered to the floor, almost at Will’s feet. As the man lunged forward to pick it up, Will kicked at it. It skidded across the stage and dropped off the edge into the straw.
Al felt someone pull at his sack and heard the clank of pegs and then a scream. He swung around and saw that the top had been pulled open. Doug’s head was poking out and his teeth were bared. The man’s hand was bleeding. He lunged at Al with his knife, but Al lifted his sack and the blade slashed it before hitting something hard inside.
‘What’s this?’ one of the actors shouted. ‘Intruders? Not in our theatre! Armourer?’
As the word hunters ran, Richard Burbage opened a chest at the side of the stage and started throwing wooden swords to the actors. They pounced and rolled and pulled off one mystifying stage-fighting move after another, fearlessly whacking into the men in grey robes, whose knives were suddenly nowhere near long enough.
With the attackers taking a pounding and John Johnson having quietly disappeared, the word hunters ran back to the table and the fallen script. The glowing page was face down, but the light came through. Al took the peg from his backpack. There was no time to look for their grandfather here. The men in grey robes had steadied and were taking the fight to the actors.
Lexi opened the portal, Al stuck the peg in, locked it in place and turned the key. A mist rolled across the straw and onto the stage.
In the second that the floor fell away, Al saw them – two men in grey robes diving after him. He kicked. He hit nothing. Then he was falling.
They veered sideways, then struck the turbulence of the Renaissance. Al looked back, but the fog was thick and dark and he couldn’t see anything. Then he, Lexi and Will broke free and found themselves in bright daylight. They were falling towards a forest, with a castle on a hill and a town at the foot of it.
‘That was them!’ Will shouted. ‘The men in grey. They know what we’re doing. I think they’re trying to stop us.’
Al rolled to look back up to the cloud as it started to shrink. Just before it vanished, he noticed two bodies in grey robes drop from it and fall awkwardly.
‘Look!’ he shouted to the others. ‘Fly!’
The word hunters were dropping towards the town, but shaped their arms to swing them away and over the woods, straining to change their course as much as they could. Al glanced behind. The men in grey were tumbling straight down, struggling to work out how to control their fall.
The word hunters crashed through the upper tree branches and dropped to the forest floor. For a moment they said nothing, all three of them turning around and around, checking every tree.
‘No one here,’ Will said once he was certain of it. ‘That’s why we need weapons – for dealing with those men most of all.’
‘They tried to get into my bag.’ Al now had a neatly stitched satchel. They all did. He checked for a slash from
the knife, but there wasn’t one. Doug was okay, apart from the fresh wee smell.
‘They cut mine.’ Lexi looked at her satchel. ‘It’s okay now, but I lost a lot of stuff. My torch broke on the stage and the batteries fell out.’
‘They were after the pegs.’ Will pointed to Al’s satchel. ‘This is changing. It’s one thing to be on the edge of someone else’s battle, but they know exactly who we are and they’re coming for us.’
Lexi wanted it not to be true, but the attack seemed planned, as
if the men in grey had been waiting for them. ‘Well, we know they’re here this time. Whatever we’re looking for is in the town. We were going to land there. And the town is where they are.’
‘Weapons.’ Will found a fallen branch and snapped it. ‘This is better than nothing until we can find swords or – Where are we? When are we?’
They checked the peg.
‘Romans?’ Lexi took the peg to have a closer look. ‘Don’t tell me—’
‘No.’ Al knew what she was thinking. ‘It’s a thousand years after the Romans. The Holy Roman Empire’s a different thing. I know it looks like Teutoburg Forest, but the Romans aren’t about to lose three legions here today. We’re not here to fight that battle.’
It wasn’t just Lexi he wanted to convince. There were still some nights when he dreamt about that battle and trees a lot like these. And mud and a man in grey robes on the end of his borrowed sword.
‘We’ve got money,’ Lexi said. Each of them had a cloak with a hood and an embroidered waistcoat with slashes that had bright fabric showing through. Their puffy breeches ended at the knees in yellow leggings. ‘And we’re not soldiers. But we all look the same. We look as though we’re dressed for the same thing.’
Never having lived in Bohemia in the early 16th century, they were not sure what that thing was.
‘I hope everyone’s dressed like this.’ Al looked down at his legs. ‘We’ll stand out a bit otherwise. We’re in real trouble if everyone here’s in a grey robe.’
They moved off through the trees and stayed well above the town. The men would be expecting them to go straight there. The word hunters would find another way in. This was the last step in ‘dollar’. If they could avoid them here, they’d be home. Lexi still had her picture of Grandad Al in her bag, though a lot of other things had fallen out. She’d thought she’d adjusted to being a word hunter. She’d got used to the job being safer than it first seemed and now it wasn’t again. ‘Dollar’ had been easy and now they were in a forest 500 years from home, with men nearby who seemed to want to kill them. The stick in her hand wasn’t much of an answer to that.
There were noises ahead – human voices, animals, the creaking and clanking of wagons on the move. They moved forward tree by tree, always looking out for the men who had fallen through the portal behind them.
There was a road cut through the forest and they stayed back in the shadows to watch the traffic on it. A heavy wooden cart was being pulled down the mountain by oxen. It had a cover fitted over its heaped cargo and two soldiers on board guarding it. They wore dull steel helmets and olive tunics and had swords on their belts.
‘Let’s try going away from the town,’ Will said. ‘Let’s see where they’re coming from.’
They made their way uphill, keeping to the trees and staying out of sight. They passed two empty carts heading in the same direction. The road ended at a tunnel that had been cut into the hillside, with soldiers surrounding its entrance and checking carts on the way in and out.
As the word hunters watched, a man rode up on a horse.
‘He’s dressed exactly like us.’ Lexi noticed it first. ‘That’s got to mean something.’
The only difference was the sword they could see beneath his cape.
He spoke to two of the soldiers, dismounted and opened one of the saddlebags on his horse. He took out a piece of parchment with a seal on it and waited while they read it. The soldiers pointed to the mine and back down the road. They were checking something. The man put the document back in his saddlebag. Other guards were called over. They saluted him and escorted him into the tunnel.
One of the two soldiers who had stayed outside led the man’s horse from the entrance and tied its reins to a nearby tree.
‘Whatever he was flashing around, it could be good to see it,’ Al said. ‘Do you think we can get it without them noticing?’
‘From above.’ Will pointed to a ledge. The hill above the horse was almost a sheer drop. ‘We’ll use the ropes.’
‘And we’ll just—’ As Lexi started to disagree, she realised she could see some hand or footholds already. There were tree roots, tussocks of grass and places where the rock jutted out. Her father had sent her down tougher slopes when they’d been bushwalking – not that she’d liked it at the time. ‘Okay.’
They made their way through the forest and further up the hill before crossing back, until they were directly above the horse. They had a good view of the road and when a cart drew up for inspection, they made their move. They fixed their ropes in place and dropped step-by-step down the slope. Al told himself to treat it like any other steep hillside. Forget the guards, watch his footing, stand out from the rock. And stay quiet.
They made it to the ground safely. Lexi could feel her heart racing. She wondered what she’d say – what Will would say – if a guard stepped out from the tunnel entrance and saw them.
But it didn’t happen. No one noticed Will moving to calm the horse or Lexi lifting the document from the saddlebag.
‘Take it,’ Will whispered. He pointed back up the hill.
Lexi stuck the document in her waistcoat and retraced her footholds, powering back up the slope. She’d always been a good climber – at least as fast as Al – even if climbing was something none of her friends at school rated.
They untied and coiled their ropes and slipped back into the trees.
‘I’m impressed,’ Will said once they were safe. ‘I didn’t know you two had been training.’
Lexi felt her cheeks go red as she pulled the document out of her waistcoat. ‘Finally I get something out of all those boring trips to national parks with Dad over the years.’
‘And there was practically no whingeing this time, which was a nice change.’ Al laughed. ‘“What if my pants get dirty?” “What if I break a nail?” “I don’t have a signal.”’
‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t expecting a signal. Just like I wasn’t expecting you to beat me to the top. Oh, wait – you didn’t.’
The document was a letter signed by a Count Stefan von Schlick appointing Johan Kruger as an inspector of his mines and mint, and requiring all of the count’s people to ensure unlimited access.
‘So that’s the mine,’ Al said. ‘And it’s mining whatever metal they’re using to make the coins in the mint. The mint has to be the place and it’s got to be in the town. Someone’s got to say something about dollars there.’
He looked for the town through the trees, but couldn’t see it. He could make out the next ridge line, which was also covered in forest. He had one peg left, so ‘dollar’ had to begin here, in this valley, at this time.
‘So,’ Lexi said to Will, ‘how do you feel about being Johan Kruger and getting us into the mint?’
‘What if he’s already been there?’ Al took a closer look at the letter. ‘They might even know him.’
Will thought about it. ‘Lexi’s right. I think you’re right to say the mint’s going to be it, but they don’t make mints easy to get into. If we’re lucky this gets us in the front door. The seal should get us through. We look like the real deal and a lot of these people can’t read.’
Al didn’t want to think about what would happen if they could read and if they’d known Johan Kruger for years. He had no better plan. And he figured he’d lose a vote if the three of them were a democracy. Which he wasn’t at all sure they were. There hadn’t been a boss before Will came along. Before they saved him in 1839. They’d saved him at the Globe, too. Much as Al told himself there was no point in keeping that kind of tally, he seemed to be keeping one anyway. But Will would be good to have around in any fight that came up, and without him the attack at the Globe might have ended very differently.
The town was even smaller than they had first thought. As they left the trees, they watched for the men in grey robes. It might be easy to lo
se them in a city, but not here. They dropped the sticks at the edge of the forest, since Johan Kruger and his clerks wouldn’t carry them.
‘We’ve got nothing,’ Lexi said. ‘Just bare hands to take on those guys. And Johan Kruger’s going to come out of that mine sometime and he’ll probably have to show his letter to someone.’
‘So we move fast.’ Will was already leading the way between two houses. ‘That’s all we can do.’
From the street the layout of the town was clearer. At its centre it had a church, a timber yard and a large building next to it that was heavily guarded and had to be the mint. It had a solid wooden door with metal bands across it and, along one side, an equally solid gate. There were only a few small windows and they were far above street level. Further back there were chimneys, putting out white smoke.
A cart arrived. Its covers were lifted, its load inspected and the gate was opened for it to go in. But the only way for Johan Kruger was through the front door.
They checked the doorways and shutters of the houses as they passed, always ready for the men in grey robes. They watched the forest’s edge, but it was too easy to believe there might be anything in there, hidden in the dark and moving with them.
When they came to the small town square, they crossed it the way the count’s men would – confidently, as if they were one step removed from the guy who owned the place. The soldiers at the door held poles in their hands that ended in broad silver blades and each of them wore a sword.
As they looked at the letter, something made Lexi turn around. Across the square, between two houses, she saw the grey-robed men ducking back into the shadows.
‘They’re here,’ she said quietly to Al. ‘Don’t look.’
There was no safer place for the word hunters to be than surrounded by soldiers, but they had been seen. The men knew where they were.
