A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  Georgia's eyes fluttered open, she groaned, leaned to one side and vomited into the grass.

  The pizza Cady had sent with an iPhone.

  Because Cady McCall was such a 007 bad-ass bitch and, like, totally three moves ahead of those idiots from Homeland. The idiots who'd chased them here.

  She felt her head begin to spin and she stumbled down to the stream where she fell to her knees, leaned down and splashed shockingly cold water over her face.

  She stayed there, kneeling by the brook, shame burning her cheeks, despite the icy kiss of the fresh water. She didn't move, because when she did, she was going to have to go back to her friend and explain what she'd done. And why she had done it.

  Even though Smith had been the one who …

  “No.”

  “What?” Smith said from behind her.

  “Nothing,” Cady said, forcing herself to stand up and return to them. She carried a little water cupped in her hands, and sprinkled it on Georgia's brow. None of this was Smith's fault. He’d defended her from those muggers or apprentices, or whatever they’d been, back at the start of all this. He’d just saved them being fed into a Trump-brand gulag. At best, they'd have ended up with Matt on the Wall. Even more likely, they'd have been dropped into a black cell and spent the next fifteen years explaining to a bunch of agencies and acronyms that didn't officially exist what the hell they'd been doing the previous twenty-four hours.

  No. This wasn't Smith's fault. It was hers.

  Cady walked back to where her friend lay on the grass. Georgia watched her through slow blinking eyes. She was still having trouble coming to terms with everything.

  “I'm sorry, Georgia. I'm so sorry. I just didn't know what to do. I thought we'd screwed things up for you. I'd screwed things up for you. And I just wanted to help. I just wanted my friend back.”

  Smith kept fanning Georgia with the hat. He said nothing. His face was unreadable.

  “Is this where you were?” she asked. “All that time? We thought you were dead, Cady.”

  She shook her head.

  “Not here, no. We were in London. Late 19th century London. Sherlock Holmes, Queen Victoria, Jack the Ripper. That London.”

  Georgia started to deny it, but the evidence of her own eyes told her Cady was not lying. Or at least that they had passed out of the world of real things and into a Twilight Zone of possibilities.

  “But you were gone more than two years. Your parents … God, Cady. I mean … they never gave up on you, but—”

  Cady waved her hand at Georgia, wordlessly begging her to stop talking. That'd be why she could still access her bank accounts. Her dad probably. He'd have fought every day to keep the idea of her alive. He’d have made sure she could get to that money if she needed it.

  And she hadn't even called him.

  She fell silent.

  Nobody spoke. Light breeze whispered through the leaves, dappling them with shade. The stream water gurgled and birds sang unfamiliar songs in the branches above.

  “How? How did this happen?”

  Smith and Cady swapped a look.

  “Some guys attacked me, after the dinner with you and Matt. The marshal stepped in. He saved me, but we ended up …” she waved her hands helplessly. “In London. In the 1880s.”

  “I believe the men who attacked your friend were looking for me, ma’am,” said Smith. “But for their own reasons they turned their attentions on her. Can’t say as to why.”

  “Two years, Cady.”

  Georgia said it quietly, like a whispered accusation.

  “It were only twenty-four hours to us, ma'am,” Smith said, making Cady wince. He was trying to help, but he was making it worse. He didn't know her friend.

  Georgia fixed her with a chilling stare. Colder than the icy water she had just splashed on her face.

  “One day? You were gone one day?” Her voice grew louder. “You took a fucking daytrip? Watched a little History Channel, picked up a cowboy, and wandered back two years later to fuck everyone up all over again? Because it wasn't enough that you were lost, you were dead to everyone who loved you for all that time? Oh no! Cady McCall had to have it her way.”

  The last few words she shouted, her voice so piercing and shrill that Smith reached over and gently but firmly clamped his giant hand over her mouth. Georgia's eyes flew wide open at that and she tried to tear herself out of his grip. But she was a tiny sparrow in the paws of a grizzly.

  He shushed her again and shook his head mournfully.

  “Best you don't go a-hollerin' like that, ma'am,” Smith warned. “We don't know nothing about this place. Could be we rolled a natural seven. Could be we got snake eyes. I would just as soon not bet the farm until we see how the bones come out.”

  Georgia's eyes darted back to Cady, who shrugged.

  “He says things like that.”

  Smith carefully took away his hand. Georgia was breathing heavily, but she did not cry out again. Instead she took a series of deep breaths, composing herself. “How bad is it?” she said at last.

  Cady and Smith exchanged a whole conversation in a single glance. She answered for both of them.

  “Like the marshal said, we don't know yet … Oh!”

  She pulled out her phone. Her new phone.

  “No signal. So, I'd guess not just out of range. We've probably jumped back in time. Smith?”

  He looked very uncomfortable. She set a timer. Twenty-three hours and fifty minutes. Enough to give them a little wiggle room. Then she turned the phone off again. This didn't look like the sort of place she could recharge, and the timer would run anyway, even with the phone off.

  “I did give the little crown thing a good tweak as I grabbed y'all up,” Smith explained. “I'm afraid we did not get to try your experiment, Miss Cady.”

  “Smith, please.”

  He went from uncomfortable to abashed. “Sorry, I mean Cady. I think I might have nudged us a good deal further back than the one minute you was intending to try.”

  She tried to sound conciliatory. “Well, it's not like we jumped under controlled conditions.”

  “Nope.”

  Georgia spoke up again, but kept her volume in check this time. “What are you talking about?”

  “We're trying to work out the control scheme for the watch.”

  “You don't know how it works?”

  Her voice was climbing again and Cady had to make hasty a placating gesture.

  “I've got some ideas,” she said.

  “Ideas?”

  Georgia was losing her temper for real now. Cady, who never did like to be second-guessed, was drawn into her spiral.

  “Look, I've only done this once or twice, and never under ideal circumstances.”

  “Omigod!”

  “Look. Just shut up would you. It's…”

  “Ladies,” warned Smith.

  “No, you shut up.”

  “Ladies.”

  “I'll work this out, Georgia. I can get us home. And not to that bunk-ass alterna-fucked timeline you were locked up in.”

  “Ladies!” Smith shouted.

  He got to his feet with surprising speed for a man of his size.

  He drew his gun even quicker.

  28

  Smith shot down the man who rode at them with a spear raised. He killed another wielding some sort of axe. Three more riders veered away from the report of his pistol, but they did not flee. More men appeared over the next ridge, arrayed on foot. They were armed with a motley collection of edged metal and blunt clubs, and dressed in short smocks which showed off their bare legs.

  They were shouting, but too far away for him to be able to make anything out. It was undoubtedly the same old thing as always. Throw down your weapons, put up your hands, we got you surrounded. Smith tried to reload his gun, which was empty now, but more riders appeared, this time they came over the hill down which he'd just carried Miss Georgia.

  She was struck dumb, perhaps even shocked into catatonia. Cady, he n
oted was casting about for a weapon, which he supposed was admirable, but as like to get her run through as not. The marshal faced the hard truth of it and holstered his gun, raising his hands in surrender and stepping to put himself between the nearest of the riders and the two young women. No sense their getting speared because he'd just plugged some fellers.

  “Smith? What’s happening?” said Cady, her voice frightened and unsteady.

  “Dunno,” he admitted. “But I'd say we're goin' in the bag. Ain't got the bullets or the time to pick off so many targets.”

  A first rider drew up in a shower of pebbles and mud from the banks of the little stream.

  “Who are you to trespass on the estates of Lentulus Batiatus?” he demanded to know.

  Smith could tell from the blank incomprehension of Cady and Georgia that they did not understand a word of it. To Smith's ear the man's voice sounded harsh, but devoid of any accent.

  More riders made the bank of the stream, and behind them came the men on foot, all brandishing their spears and swords and clubs.

  “Well, I do beg pardon,” Smith said, “But we're travelers. Merchants,” he improvised. In his experience, merchants tended to go wherever there was a dollar to be had. That were as true in times when men wore dresses and sandals as it were when they covered their heads with fish bowls and flew off to the stars.

  “He is dead!” a new voice called out.

  Merchants did not tend to go ventilating fellers with .45 pistols, though.

  He was saved the inconvenience of explaining away the corpses he had just made of their comrades by the blow to his head which sent him down into darkness.

  He awoke in chains, lying on the cold flagstone floor of a prison cell.

  It was mighty surprising to be alive.

  Smith's head throbbed pitifully from the knockout blow, and his stomach heaved and flipped over with the sickness of it. He held down his gorge with great effort.

  “Smith?”

  It took him a moment to recognize Cady's voice.

  “Smith are you okay?”

  He blinked away his blurred double vision and pushed himself up off the floor.

  “Still breathing,” he grunted.

  As his eyesight came back into focus, he took inventory. Apart from the lump on his head and his roiling guts, he was unhurt. He'd taken worse falls from horses over the years, been hit harder from behind in more'n one bar fight. He had suffered no broken bones, and had been spared the inconvenience of waking up to find pieces of himself missing.

  His scalp remained firmly attached to his head.

  All in all, not much to complain about, then. The headache was ferocious, but unless they'd knocked his brains loose, it would pass.

  “Marshal, your jacket,” said another voice. He blinked and squinted and found Miss Georgia pushing his coat through the gaps between the iron bars separating his cell from theirs. They were imprisoned. Widening his attention from his own woes to the larger question of what the devil had just happened, he found himself secured in a small cell, flanked on both sides by identical lock-ups. He could see bright sunlight, so at least they were not confined in some dungeon.

  Smith rubbed his eyes, and at last his vision cleared completely. He could see now that their penitentiary took an unusual form. It was constructed in a circle, with the cells all looking out through shaded cloisters onto a large grassed area. The sun shone fiercely out there, where half naked men engaged in physical training. Some wrestled. Others fought each other with sticks. He could hear the dull crack of wood on wood. The sun looked as though he might've been out for hours, occasioning a moment of free-falling terror when Smith reached for the watch and realized he was not wearing his jacket.

  “Marshal,” Miss Georgia said again. “Here, take your jacket and use it as a pillow. You're hurt.”

  He remembered, then, the watch was in his waistcoat, not his jacket. He found it and checked the local time. The watch always knew that.

  Late morning. Just after eleven.

  “Thank you, ma'am,” he said, shuffling over to the bars separating him from his companions. Georgia still wore the Homeland collar. She and Cady looked scared but unmolested, for which he was profoundly relieved. It was his experience that there were few places and times that women, let alone captive women, could be assured of their safety and honor without the strong hand of a male protector to safeguard them. That, or ready access to a loaded shotgun.

  Cady and Georgia had had neither while he was down for the count.

  “Any idea where we ended up?” he asked. “They said something about us trespassing on some feller's land, but whoever knocked me out done knocked that memory right out of my head, too.”

  “I think we're in ancient Greece or Rome,” said Cady. “All the dudes are wearing dresses and sandals and swords and shit.”

  “We're definitely somewhere around the Mediterranean,” said Georgia. “The landscape looks right to me.” Her voice was tight with anxiety, but the shock and confusion which had undone her upon their arrival had passed. She'd probably had time to talk with Cady. “I can't understand a word they're saying, but every now and then it sounds familiar,” she added.

  “I got the watch,” Smith said. “So I could understand. They said we were on somebody's land, and then, bang, they put out my lights.”

  “You are on the estate of Lentulus Batiatus, friend.”

  Smith turned towards this new voice, a man's. He found the feller standing on the far side of his cell, behind the same sort of iron bars that separated him from the ladies. This man was of medium height, but broad and powerful through the shoulders. His skin had the deep brown tan of someone who worked out of doors, rather than the naturally dark pigment of a Mexican or a mulatto.

  Smith raised his eyebrows at Cady and Georgia, as if they might have some information about their fellow prisoner, but they just shrugged and shook their heads, reminding him that they did not have the advantage of holding the watch. They couldn't converse with anyone here.

  “My name is Smith,” he said turning to face the man. “John Smith.”

  He walked across the breadth of his cell, covering the distance in three careful strides, holding his hand out in greeting. It was a gesture he found to be nearly universal.

  “And I am Gannicus of Salluvi.”

  This Gannicus took his hand through the bars and shook it. Smith remained alive to the possibility of a ploy, and was ready to turn and snap the man's arm at the elbow, but his gesture of greeting was returned without trickery.

  “I hear tell of your prowess in combat, Smith John Smith,” he said. “I hear that you slayed a mounted retainer of Lentulus at bow shot distance, and brought down another, but neither with a bow.”

  Smith remained guarded with him. It was possible, more than probable even, that this Gannicus was no friend, but rather a jailhouse snitch.

  “We're merchants,” he said, falling back on the first lie he had chosen.

  “What's he saying, Smith?” Cady called across the cell.

  “Just getting acquainted,” he replied without turning around.

  “Do you sell these women?” Gannicus asked.

  “Oh, hell no,” Smith said, insulted at the very thought. “The buying and selling of people ain't my line of business, sir. They're my partners, I suppose you would say.”

  The man seemed to consider this, eventually nodding as if he approved.

  “And how did you end up here, friend?” Smith asked pointedly.

  “The Romans overran my village when I was fourteen years old,” he said. “I killed two of their legionnaires and would have been killed myself save for Batiatus, who bought me as a slave for his school.”

  “A slave? His school?” Smith was not certain he understood. Perhaps the watch had not translated well. His skin prickled uncomfortably.

  “You are here,” Gannicus said, as though it should be obvious. “Lentulus Batiatus runs the largest gladiator school in Capua.”

  T
he dozen or so men training in mock combat out under the high sun suddenly made sense. Of a sort.

  “Excuse me, Gannicus,” he said. “I'll be right back.”

  He returned to Cady and Georgia.

  “This feller says we're being held by some slaver called Lentulus. Reckons he runs a school for gladiators. That's like professional fighters in olden days Rome, right? He also reckons the Romans took his village. Made slaves of everyone.”

  “I guess that tells us where we are,” said Cady.

  “But not when,” said Georgia. “Could be the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, could be East or West. Did he say anything else?”

  They all looked back over Smith's shoulder at their fellow captive. He did not look like a prisoner. He seemed well fed and strong. Fit. He watched them curiously, but without obvious enmity.

  “Said this slave owner was based in … Capua, I think.”

  Cady looked to Georgia, who shrugged. “Never been there, but I know the name. I think it's near Rome, but north or south I couldn't say. And near for us doesn't mean the same thing for these guys, remember. They don't have Uber or hyperloop.”

  “Okay,” said Smith. “I'm gonna talk to this Gannicus feller a bit more. See if I can spy out the land.”

  He shucked on his jacket, feeling a little more settled in the old familiar coat, despite the heat of the day outside.

  “This Lentulus, he gonna be reasonable? For a big bug?” Smith asked Gannicus.

  The man laughed, but not with any pleasure. “He is no bug. He is a pig.”

  “Oh. Well I meant boss, not a bug in the exact meaning of the word. An overseer. Is he reasonable as an overseer?”

  He could not bring himself to say ‘owner’.

  “Do not imagine you can reason with him Smith John Smith.”

  “Just Smith will do.”

  “Smith.” The gladiator considered the word as if it were a gift. “Good,” he pronounced at last. “You cannot reason with him, Smith. Even before you killed his man, you were on his estate. For Lentulus, you became his property the moment you set foot upon his land.”