A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  “Pick up a club, something, anything,” she yelled. “Kill anybody who even looks halfway wrong.”

  Cady wasted a few seconds casting about for a weapon until she patted at the zippered pockets of her leather jacket, searching for a memory. She found it in there: a can of mace.

  She shouted at Georgia holding up the artifact of a long lost future time. “Good enough?”

  “It'll do,” yelled Georgia. “Let's go. He'll be in there somewhere.”

  She pointed her sword at the dense, roiling mass of murder and anarchy at the far end of the stadium.

  That was the last place Cady wanted to go.

  They set off at a run.

  Calista, flanked by two gladiators, caught up with them just before they entered the depths of the ferment. Cady thought they might hack and slash their way in, but instead, they began pulling people apart. She realized then that they had passed through the worst of the violence. This was something more akin to a mosh pit.

  “Come!” Calista called back over her shoulder. “Come with us. Crixus says your man is up here. He safeguards il Scissore from the mob. Hurry now.”

  Georgia, shuddering, threw down the sword, as though discovering she was disgusted by it. Cady held onto her can of Mace, but kept it discreetly tucked away in one palm. They fell in behind Calista and her bodyguards, slowly forcing an advance through the crowd. The earthen floor of the stadium was muddy with blood. Once or twice Cady tripped on bodies or body pieces.

  The whole thing was totally gross.

  They emerged into a small clearing where Smith stood over a man, presumably this Carver asshole. Cady saw immediately that the marshal was not guarding him to prevent escape, but rather to stop the mob from tearing him apart. He looked badly cut up. Even with the benefit of the watch to translate for her, she had trouble understanding.

  Was this il Scissore?

  “Cady! Miss Georgia!” Smith whipped off his hat and mopped at his brow. He was a mess. “Ain't this a hog killin' time, and ain't you a sight for the sorriest eyes? You recognize our friend here?”

  Cady wasn't quite sure what he meant. Why would she …

  “Holy shit! That's Chumley!”

  “Who?” Georgia asked.

  “Chumley,” Cady said, unhelpfully. “Oh, sorry, he's … well, he's like us. He shouldn't be here.”

  “What? He's like a time traveler, too?”

  “My name is Apprentice,” Chumley croaked, barely audible over the noise. He was drenched in blood and one of his arms was grotesquely swollen. “You should not be here.”

  “Yeah, he will not let go of that particular bone,” Smith said.

  The marshal looked like he'd been tied to a horse and dragged backwards through the worst part of Texas. He was covered in blood, his clothes torn, one eye was swollen, and livid bruises stood out all over him. Chumley looked worse. Cady guessed that the mob had tried to tear him apart and had been about half way done with that before Smith put a halt to it.

  Cady ran forward and threw her arms around the cowboy.

  He staggered back under the impact, which told her how badly hurt he must be. Running into Titanic Smith would normally be like head-butting a tank.

  Calista and her sword-and-sandal twins loomed over Chumley looking like they couldn't understand why he was still drawing breath. The taller gladiator, standing protectively close to her, pointed his sword at Chumley and announced, “This one has no honor.”

  Smith eyed the new arrivals.

  “Cady, could you tell these folk that I’m right grateful for their help earlier’ in the tunnel, but I will not have this man lynched. Already had to see to a few folk decided to poke holes in him.”

  “You can tell him yourself,” she said and knelt down to Chumley.

  “Best be careful,” Smith warned.

  The apprentice tried to push her away, so Cady maced him. He cried out and raked at his eyes with one bloodied hand.

  “Hey,” Smith protested. “He's my prisoner.”

  “He had it coming,” said Cady. “For Gracie. Besides, I need him distracted.”

  She looked Chumley up and down.

  He was not the thin and unimpressive specimen they'd met in London. He looked musclebound and scarred. There was no way to affect that sort of transformation in two days.

  Another data point.

  Cady found what she was looking for at his hip; a small pouch, tied to his belt. He tried to stop her when she tugged at it, and Cady punched him on the nose, drawing another rebuke but no further action from Smith.

  Chumley was half blind and weak from blood loss and injury, and it made Cady feel good to hit him, even though it sort of hurt her knuckles.

  “I need a knife,” she announced, and Gannicus appeared beside her.

  “You know of il Scissore?” he asked, passing her a small, nasty-looking hooked blade. Like every other piece of edged metal she'd seen today, it was sticky with blood. She used it to cut away the pouch.

  “I know him from another place,” she said. “He killed two friends of mine.”

  Gannicus nodded.

  “Mine too,” he said. “Shall I kill him now?”

  She almost said, "Sure, why not," but Smith had obviously kept him alive for a reason. Hopefully not just because he was a better person than her.

  “Maybe later. Just, you know, keep an eye on him.”

  “Here,” she said, tossing Smith a gold pocket watch, just like the one in her jeans pocket. Cady had a moment of fleeting panic, then, thinking she may have dropped it, but a quick pat reassured her it was still there.

  Smith took the second timepiece, as Georgia attempted to get a good look at it.

  “Is this it? Is this how you do it?”

  “I reckon as much,” Smith confirmed, taking in the faces of the crowd. Cady could tell he was listening to them now, and he could understand what they were saying.

  “We must seize this day,” the man standing by Calista announced. “We cannot remain here. The legions will come from Capua. If we defeat them, more will come from Rome. We must be gone when they arrive.”

  “Us, too,” Cady said, climbing back to her feet.

  Calista took Cady in her arms.

  “You should come with us. The stars are not in their heavens for you now, but your arrival here set the constellations in place for us. Come with us. You have led us to freedom. My husband will lead us to a safe place, where that freedom can never be taken from us again.”

  “Thanks,” said Cady, “but, you know, we should probably be going.”

  The guy who had to be Calista's old man saluted Smith with his sword and bowed to Cady and Georgia.

  “Your names will forever be remembered, Smith John Smith, Cady of iOS, and Georgia of Bungie,” he said to each in turn.

  “You know what, you should probably just keep us out of it,” said Cady. “Good luck with your slave revolt and everything, though.”

  “We are no longer slaves; praise be to you.”

  “Awesome. You be you then… err… Gladiator Maximus. Sorry, I met Gannicus and Calista, but I didn't get your name.”

  The freed man stood a few inches taller.

  “I am Spartacus.”

  35

  Gannicus helped Smith carry the apprentice to a shaded tent where the same young woman who had tended to him after his beating now cleaned out Chumley's wounds.

  Chumley's watch was not an exact replica of Wu's. It had a minute and a second hand, for starters, and two crowns. But it afforded the same convenient translation of all that was said around him, and for now Smith was content with that.

  “If Chumley’s somehow been here for a couple of months, his watch will be live,” Cady warned. “You double-click that thing, and you're gone, Smith. We can still use this one to get out of here tomorrow,” she said, holding up the original chronometer, “but we'd be on our own, and the chances of finding you again would be zero. Probably less.”

  He took the warning to heart,
looping a thin leather strap around the crown in such a way that it could not be easily depressed. It meant Smith couldn't activate the watch quickly if he got himself into a tight corner, but he didn't want to leave here without them, so that was no consideration at all.

  He thanked his little nurse, whose name was Lyvia, for her earlier kindness, and was glad of the opportunity to do so. Smith did not care for being unable to offer his gratitude when he'd been the recipient of such benevolence. Had Lyvia not tended his wounds so well, he might have been unable to hold out Chumley's attacks.

  It were a dang close run thing, that fight.

  They sat with Chumley until he passed, a vigil of some three hours. Ms. Cady was inclined to offer him no comfort at all, until Smith reminded her that the apprentice was the only one of them with any knowledge of how to properly use the watch, or watches. She only grudgingly acknowledged that, but she did admit to it in the end.

  “I can't even look at him without thinking of what he did to Gracie,” she said. “You didn't read the stuff I did, Smith. You don't know.”

  “They were already dead,” Chumley coughed, spitting up a small gobbet of dark blood. It did not endear him to Cady. “Drowned,” he added, cryptically.

  “You can say hello when you meet them, douchebag.”

  Smith simply got on with the job of trying to interrogate the dying apprentice. Miss Georgia was a help, lacking her friend's investment in so much personal animus towards Chumley.

  Smith would have preferred that Cady swallowed her resentment and took part. After all, she was more familiar with their circumstances and had done some real professorial thinking on the matter of time travel. It did not reflect well on her that she could find no Christian charity within herself for a man who, as far as Smith could tell, had simply been going about his work.

  Granted, it seemed that he worked for the devil, but Chumley did not appear to hold any personal feelings about the “elusives” he pursued. Indeed, he didn't seem to hold personal feelings about anything, except maybe dying. And on that, he had one more surprise for them.

  “I was born near here, you know,” he said in a rare moment of lucidity, shortly before he passed. Most of the final hours they spent with him, he was unable to string together a coherent thought. Despite the best efforts of Miss Georgia to engage him, Chumley remained out of reach, mumbling and babbling and occasionally passing out as his life bled away.

  “That so?” Smith asked.

  “I was to return one day. At the end of my service. Such is our due and reward.”

  Georgia moved in closer too. It was a rare thing, hearing sense from Chumley by that point.

  Cady paid him some heed, but she mostly watched the last of the freed slaves and fighters as they looted the property of Lentulus Batiatus and prepared to flee. Many had already lit out on their own, striking out across the countryside singly or in twos and threes. Smith did not doubt that most of them would quickly be hunted down. More interesting was the caravan this Spartacus feller put together under a lowering sun. Seventy or eighty fighting men like him, and whomsoever cared to join up with their party.

  They reminded Smith of settlers in company heading west.

  “I was born in Pompeii,” Chumley said softly, “in the house of Julius Polybius.”

  “If you wanted to go there,” Georgia said almost as softly, “if you wanted to go home, we could take you, but you'd have to tell us how, Apprentice.”

  “I would have gone home. One day,” he said. “But now, I cannot return. I have failed.”

  Cady left her post, watching over the preparations for the wagon train, and joined them with Chumley. Her expression was still dark, but she'd heard enough to catch her interest.

  “How were you going to get back if you hadn't failed, Chumley?” she said.

  He closed his eyes and shook his head, going quiet for so long that Smith thought he may have slipped the mortal coil. The sounds of looting and departure reached them faintly.

  Georgia brought him back, stroking his hand.

  “Apprentice. You were telling us how you were going home,” she said. “Remember?”

  Chumley frowned and coughed. Another small spot of blood flew from his mouth and Georgia wiped it away.

  “I was born into the house of Julius Polybius,” he repeated.

  Cady kneeled down next to him, and Smith was surprised by the tenderness in her voice.

  “And you can return there, Apprentice. Tell us how.”

  He opened his eyes and smiled at her.

  His teeth were stained with blood.

  “We all go home. But I have failed,” he said. “You should not be here.”

  “I know,” Cady nodded. “Tell us how, and we'll make it right. You can go home. We can go home.”

  His eyelids fluttered closed.

  “…Can go … can go back … in one golden minute,” he whispered.

  Chumley did not open his eyes again.

  36

  Smith would have buried the man. It was the decent thing to do. But there were so many dead men that, in the end, they threw his body on a funeral pyre of slaves and masters alike. Cady insisted on searching the body in case he was carrying anything else which may have been of use to them, but they found nothing.

  “So what now?” said Georgia as dusk fell and the wagon train of freed slaves and fighting men departed.

  “I guess we could probably jump right now, using Chumley's watch,” Cady suggested. “But I don't think we should. It's a different model, different UI, probably a different UX as well.”

  Smith frowned.

  “Is it the case you think we shouldn't use Chumley's timepiece because we know even less about it than Mr. Wu's?”

  Cady nodded. “Got it in one, Marshal. We don't know where he came from, when he was last there, or how he managed to hang out here for months when we saw him only a day ago, give or take.”

  Georgia grinned as though the answer was obvious. “Cady, he's a time traveler.”

  “So are we, babe, and yeah, sure, Chumley had some mad Timelord skills, but I just don't understand why he inserted himself into this timeline to wait for us. If he knew we were coming here, why not just be standing on that hill ready for us with a net or a phaser or something?”

  They walked aimlessly around the grounds of the estate. There were only a few people left now. Fires burned here and there, and the occasional shout drifted to them on the early evening breeze. Smith did not mind admitting the whole thing gave him the shivers. Felt like the place was haunted before its time.

  “Sometimes,” he said, “I might get word a fugitive is going to be someplace at some time, but that word ain't gospel. Often times you would set up to surprise a feller and he'd already be gone long a’fore you even set the trap for him. Or he wasn't in this town, he was in that town, one over. Tracking a man is never simple. I don't know how he found us here. I don't know why circumstances were such that he had to burrow in for such a long while to wait us out. Can't even begin to contemplate how he did that. But it don't matter. He's dead and we're not, and if these apprentices are anything like marshals, another one will be along shortly. Chumley promised as much.”

  They climbed a set of steps leading up to a villa. The white marble looked pink in the sunset. Smith drew his Bowie knife, just in case. He missed the reassuring weight of a pistol on his hip.

  “Do you think we should bug out like Calista and the others?” Cady asked.

  Smith did not.

  “Batiatus was a slaver. His estate is gonna be surrounded by more slavers. Most of those what run are gonna be back in chains a’fore nightfall tomorrow. That big caravan with Gannicus and the others, they got a chance, but they'll have to fight their way through. It'll be just as bad as it was here today. You don't want to get mixed up in that do you?”

  “No,” both girls agreed at once.

  “Then I suggest we hole up here,” said Smith. “Find a hiding place if we need one, but otherwise lay low an
d get gone as soon as ol' Mr. Wu allows.”

  They reached the top of the steps into the villa and took a moment on the stone porch out front. It afforded them a fine view of the gladiator school and the lands beyond. Would’ve made a fine spot for a rocking chair.

  “You ladies best wait here while I scout this place out. Miss Georgia, you might profitably equip yourself with a weapon. Plenty to be picked up, just laying around.”

  “Hey,” Cady objected. “I'm not the damsel in distress here. I kicked some ass today, you know.”

  “In your own way, yes you did,” Smith allowed. “But I heard from Gannicus how Miss Georgia put down three fellers, all of them armed, and did so with her empty hands and true grit.”

  “Why sheriff, I'm blushing,” grinned Georgia, before teasing her friend. “You hear that, Cady? I have true grit.”

  Smith picked up a short sword that lay near a bloody sandal and gave it to Cady, who did not take to being teased. “Okay then, Jim Bowie, you take this. I don't doubt you got the sand to stick it in someone if the need should arise. Miss Georgia, you okay to look after yourself?”

  “You know what?” she said. “After today, I think I am.”

  Smith spied out the villa, which had been thoroughly ransacked. He took a few minutes to drag away the three bodies he found, dumping them in a small garden out back. There was no hiding the thick blood smears they left on the polished stone floors, but he was confident the ladies had seen enough of the red stuff spilled by now that they weren't like to come over all faint and a-flutter.

  The villa sat on top of a small hill, giving them a long view of the road down which he expected the authorities to arrive sometime on the morrow. Hopefully, long after they had decamped. He fetched Cady and Miss Georgia in when he was happy the place was secure.

  “It's like a museum,” Cady said, boggling at the surrounds.

  “That got looted,” Miss Georgia qualified.

  “There's a sitting parlor out back which weren't too badly messed up,” Smith said. “No blood, anyways. I vote we rest up there, post a guard, and head out to the little creek in the morning to make our departure.”