by Jodi Taylor
‘Aahhhh,’ I said, equally unenlightened.
‘You haven’t a clue, have you?’
‘Not even a little bit,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘Professor Penrose thinks – and he admits it’s a bit beyond him – that it’s the initial theory for a portable time-travelling device.’
I frowned. ‘Like a smaller pod?’
‘No – like a bracelet.’
I stared at the paper. ‘Oh . . . shit.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Leon, it was bad enough when Mikey and her brother designed a pod without any safety protocols. The last thing we need is them coming up with something like this.’ I rubbed his arm. He looked as tired as I did. ‘I should have asked – how’s your search going?’
‘I have one clear favourite and two acceptable alternatives so if you need us back here . . . We’d all be happy to pitch in.’
‘Not at the moment, although I might later on. Where are you off to next?’
‘I’m thinking of taking them to Skaxos for a while. Out of harm’s way. By which I mean the harm they can inflict upon the universe – not the other way around.’
Skaxos is a tiny island at the eastern end of the Med. You won’t find it on a map. Leon and I spend time there regularly.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘They’ll love it there.’
He grinned. ‘As will Matthew. In fact, under the command of Professor Penrose, the three of them will probably knock up an energy-neutral hot-water system out of a rock and two twigs, install indoor plumbing, design and build an indoors to have indoor plumbing in, fall off a cliff, be snatched by aliens and God knows what else. I’m an old man, Max. I’m not sure I can keep up. I need you there with me. And I miss you.’
I felt tears prick my eyes but only because I was exhausted and worried out of my mind. Just so everyone’s clear. ‘You do understand I can’t leave St Mary’s at the moment?’
‘I do understand why you have to stay for now but try and give some thought to the future. I don’t think you’re going to fare well under this new regime, but I’ll leave it up to you. Should I pay my respects to Treadwell before I leave?’
‘What have you told him?’
‘That I’m not done with my field test, that I’m still ironing out some problems and that I have to take it out again.’
‘And the Archive?’
‘Safe.’
I nodded. ‘Don’t tell me.’
‘I wasn’t going to. I’m sorry you haven’t got to see more of Matthew. And before you ask if he still remembers you – yes, he does. It’s Mum this and Mum that . . . on and on and on.’
‘Really?’ I said, quietly delighted.
‘Yes, apparently Mum doesn’t make him go to bed when he’s not tired or change his socks or clean his teeth. You are a paragon of mumness.’
I smiled at him. ‘Are you going now? Right at this moment?’
He smiled down at me. ‘Oh, I think I’ve got an hour or so yet . . .’
I put my arms around him. ‘I was wondering the other day – is there a square inch of our rooms where we haven’t actually . . . ?’
‘Don’t know,’ he said, grinning. ‘I usually just close my eyes and pray for it all to be over soon.’
‘Well, fortunately for you it usually is.’
He laughed. ‘Remember, you’re welcome to join us on Skaxos. In fact, I wish you would.’
‘I will, but not now. Not yet.’
‘Just bear in mind, Max – St Mary’s isn’t the centre of the universe. I know we have happy memories here, but we could easily go and make some more elsewhere. Even happier ones, perhaps. Yes, I know – not at this particular moment, but have a think about it.’
Three hours later they’d gone again and Treadwell came to see me in my office. Rosie Lee threw him one look and closed the door on her way out.
He looked down at me. ‘Third and last jump, Dr Maxwell.’
I stood up. ‘My people are paying the price for your people’s incompetence.’
‘Once again, Dr Maxwell – there are no my people and your people. We are all St Mary’s.’
‘Only some of us – the rest are dead or enslaved. And if, as I suspect, you intend to go ahead with your scheme to replace historians with Security personnel, you’d better get used to this. How long, do you think, before your employers query the massive number of employees you’re losing? This was your people’s first real jump and they made a complete dog’s breakfast of it. And they’re not the ones paying the price, are they?’
Treadwell ignored all that. Which is probably the best way of dealing with an enraged historian. I sighed. I seemed to be enraged all the time these days, and it was exhausting.
‘You’ve covered the city and its surroundings, Dr Maxwell. Twice at least and there’s still no sign of them anywhere.’
‘We have to find Clerk and Prentiss. We never leave our people behind.’
He said nothing.
‘I don’t think you quite understand the conditions under which they could be suffering,’ I said quietly.
Equally quietly, he said, ‘Have you considered that they could be dead and you’re actually putting more people at risk for no good reason at all?’
This time it was me who said nothing.
Treadwell pursued his advantage, informing me he was cutting back on the number of personnel available for the search. Apparently, other commitments and jumps were stacking up while we . . . He stopped.
I finished it for him. ‘Waste our time on this?’
‘Fall even further behind, I was going to say. I’m sorry, Dr Maxwell, but in situations like this, sooner or later the time comes to move on to other assignments. I understand your reluctance which is why I’m making the call on your behalf. If you like, you can tell everyone it was my decision and you resisted fiercely, but I’m sorry, the time has come to wind things down. Third and final jump. Two people only.’
‘What? What can I do with two people? Are you deliberately abandoning them?’
‘No, I’m perfectly happy for you and one other to continue the search as agreed, but I need to look at allocating resources elsewhere.’
‘I want to continue the search.’
‘We are decided then, Dr Maxwell. One final jump. You and one other. Are we agreed?’
I sighed. ‘Agreed.’
‘And then, on your return, I think you and I need to have a little talk.’
‘Looking forward to it already, Commander.’
I considered taking Evans with me but in the end, I decided to leave him at St Mary’s. He was quiet and competent and people trusted him. And I trusted him to do his best to rein in Hyssop. Without him – arguably the most important of the Security Section – there would be more Half-Wits than the original team. Yes, Evans should stay here. I mentioned this to Sands who immediately volunteered to come with me. An offer I accepted with relief and gratitude.
At least Treadwell hadn’t put any sort of limits on the length of our final jump. Sands went to get the maps out – they were in a hell of a state by now – but I stopped him.
‘I don’t think there’s any point in going over old procedures again. We’ve already covered every inch of this bloody city. Several times, in fact. I propose we dump it all on the god of historians. We’ll just walk around. No plan – no purpose. Random wandering. Let’s let chance play its part. We can’t be any more unsuccessful, can we? And if we have to call a halt after this jump then at least we’ll be able to say we’ve tried everything.’
He nodded. We had nothing else to try. By now, Clerk and Prentiss had been missing for months. The only positive was that summer had passed. And autumn, as well. We were beginning to creep into winter which made being on the streets a lot more pleasant. It was still hot, however, and would be until the rains came. They wou
ldn’t last long but they’d be heavy. The streets would turn to mud. The Euphrates would flood, despite the massive embankments. Searching would be difficult and unpleasant so we needed to get cracking as quickly as possible.
We assembled all our gear ready for an early start the next morning, ate a miserable meal and then sat outside and watched the setting sun send long purple shadows across the city. It was all so beautiful. Stunning. Magnificent. And fabulous. There was still so much to document and record but I never wanted to see any of it again. I’d never be able to come back here without memories of Clerk and Prentiss. When I thought about how much I’d wanted to see Babylon . . .
Sands turned to me, his face grave. ‘Max, I think we have to be prepared. We’re not going to find them. They’ve been taken away somewhere out of our range and we have no idea where. Nineveh, Uruk, Assur maybe . . . It’s the only explanation for us never finding a single trace of them.’
It was. Even if they were dead – if their bodies were in Babylon, then their tags should still have given us a reading.
‘They might still be here,’ I said, trying to hang on to hope. ‘They could be right under our noses but it might just be that, after all this time, their tags are failing.’
Sands said nothing, and heavy-hearted, we turned in for an early night.
I was so tired and depressed the next morning I could barely be bothered to climb out of my sleeping module. And we hadn’t even started yet. Nor likely to unless I got a move on.
‘Here,’ said Sands, handing me a mug of tea and taking himself off outside leaving me in peace. Obviously, Rosie Lee had him well trained.
I was only halfway down the mug when he crashed back in through the door, nearly trampling me in his excitement. ‘I think I might have something.’ He showed me his tag reader. I stared. Nothing.
‘Dammit,’ he said, giving it a good shake.
Nothing.
‘Come on, you swiving useless piece of swiving shit,’ he shouted, the traditional method of addressing tag readers.
Nothing. Our tag readers are shit.
I sighed. A last-moment flicker? Wishful thinking on his part, I suspected.
And then . . .
I stared in disbelief. There was a faint, a very faint spike. Then it was gone. Then a flicker. Then it was gone again.
I fell out of the sleeping module and scrambled into my shawls. Sands was waiting for me outside. ‘Over there, somewhere.’ He gestured towards the canal. ‘Close, anyway.’
I peered at the reader. ‘Has it come back?’
‘No – and it’s only by the greatest good luck that I happened to be looking at it at the time. I suspect that was its final gasp. I think it’s Clerk.’
I gabbled in my excitement. ‘Oh my God. Is he all right? Has he always been here? How did we miss him? What about Prentiss?’
‘I don’t know is the answer to any of that. Come on. The signal was so faint I don’t think he can be more than a couple of hundred yards away . . . in this direction. I think.’
He strode out – and just for Hyssop’s future info, bionic foot or not I had to trot to keep up with him. We rounded a corner. We were in the north-west part of the artisans’ quarter, trotting east into the rising sun, along the green banks of the wide canal separating the commercial areas. There were a lot of people on the banks already, washing, doing laundry, cutting back the reeds to make baskets. Keeping the canals clear was a continual battle. We carefully scanned every face.
There were slaves everywhere, drawing water for the three or four large brickmaking works quite close to each other. We walked past them all very slowly – the reader remained silent. And then, just as we turned to retrace our steps – a very faint bleep. We stopped dead and stared around. We were on the north bank of the canal, directly opposite the smallest brickyard. The one on the end. There was the usual workshop – a fairly haphazard building made of odds and ends loosely tacked together, with sagging canvas awnings on poles to extend the working area. Against one wall, ten or twenty wooden crates full of bricks packed in straw stood ready to go. Wagons would turn up for them later in the day to haul them off to one of the many building sites around the city.
On the other side of the compound stood the great piles of ash, sandstone conglomerate and pebbles. The cobalt that would give the bricks their distinctive blue tiled effect was locked away and would be added at the end, painted on to the bricks which would then be fired.
Great vats of some sort of liquid stood inside more wooden frames. I had no idea at what stage of the process they were, but close by, half a dozen slaves were turning clay tiles out of the moulds and another half dozen were carrying already dried bricks across the compound and stacking them neatly.
‘There – there. There’s Clerk,’ said Sands, careful not to point.
I stared across the canal, blinking in the low sun. ‘Where?’
‘There. By that pile of wooden slats.’
I would never have recognised him. Skinny. Emaciated. Filthy. Long bushy hair and beard. Burned brown by the sun. Bare feet. His sandals had either been stolen or just plain disintegrated. He was wearing a skimpy loincloth. In fact, he had more fabric twisted around his head than he had tied around his waist. I’m ashamed to say that had I encountered him in the street I would have just walked on past.
The brickyard wasn’t an enclosed compound. There was nothing to stop us entering but we didn’t make the mistake of galloping to the rescue. We wouldn’t make a move until we were absolutely certain we could get him out successfully. We sheltered in the shadow of a nearby wood-and-reed lean-to, owner unknown, and waited for him to notice us.
After ten minutes or so he straightened up from his brick stacking, wiped the sweat from his face with the trailing edge of his headdress and accepted a waterskin from the skeleton standing next to him. Sands stepped out from under the lean-to and raised his hand to shoulder height.
At first, I thought he hadn’t seen us. He stood very still for a very long time and then, abruptly, turned away, hiding his face. Sands made a slight sound.
I put my hand on his arm. ‘He’s OK. He just doesn’t want us to see . . .’ and found I couldn’t go on, either.
Clerk turned back again, nodded at us, passed back the waterskin as if nothing had happened and carried on working. There wasn’t much else he could do. Two very large men did nothing very much except stand around in the shade, watching everyone else work and finger their whippy canes.
I swallowed the lump in my throat and we stood in our tiny patch of shade as the sun inched its way across the blue sky. Winter might be approaching but it was still hot. I played with my shawl, running my fingers over the design on the material, tracing the patterns. I plaited the fringes over and over until one came off in my hand. So that was me in trouble with Mrs Enderby.
The day seemed endless to me. It must have felt ten times longer for Clerk. Even in the shade the temperatures were unpleasant. I had to resist the urge to pant. What must it be like for Clerk, toiling all day and every day under that blazing sun? Insects buzzed around my head, irritating the hell out of me. There were tons of mozzies here because of all the still water around – ponds, canals, ornamental pools, the river. You could hear the frogs croaking at night and the fluttering of insect wings everywhere.
We had ample opportunity to observe the brickmaking process. The rate of work was incredible. There must be an insatiable demand for bricks. Especially good bricks as these obviously were.
I sighed and broke the silence. ‘He doesn’t look that good, does he?’
‘No. I’m not sure he’ll be able to run very far or very fast. We’re going to have to plan this quite carefully.’
He was right. I suspected that initially, Clerk had been considered a fairly prime specimen. Well nourished, all his teeth and so on. He’d been worked hard, begun to flag, been sold on, been worked
again, deteriorated some more, been sold on again and so on. Every time he would have been worth less and less. This movement might be one of the reasons for us being unable to pick up his tag. No doubt he’d been outside the city at one of the big slave markets. By the time we got there he’d gone. Sold. He’d been out of the city when we’d been looking inside and vice versa. And all that time he’d been a slave. And where was Prentiss?
‘His signal’s very weak,’ said Sands, consulting his reader again, ‘and we’re practically on top of him. The power’s failing fast. I’m surprised it’s lasted this long. I imagine Prentiss’s packed up long ago.’
‘She could still be here somewhere, as well,’ I said, stubbornly, because we’d gone from no chance to every chance in just one day.
He nodded vigorously. ‘You’re right – she could. Listen, Max, I think our best opportunity is right here and now. Never mind going back to St Mary’s for help. If they move Clerk again then we’ll never find him. His tag’s on its last legs. They don’t seem to be heavily supervised and I suspect one of the overseers has gone off for a meal. I don’t know if Clerk will be locked up at night but we can’t risk it. Shall we create a St Mary’s diversion?’
‘Of course.’
To my non-brickmaking eyes, the compound was untidy with all sorts of materials stacked haphazardly all over the place. Which was good – lots of cover. I’d already identified a pile of mouldy-looking straw they used for packing around the tiles. And behind that, a pile of very dry-looking timber. Promisingly inflammatory, all of it. I could saunter between the piles of tiles, pause at the straw, stare about me, toss my lighted match and stroll casually away again. I’d need to be careful. There were other people around. The remaining overseer was talking to a small tunic-clad man who appeared to be making notes on a clay tablet. Something that would normally drive me into a frenzy of excitement. But not today. Today I had other priorities.
Sands stood up slowly and stretched. I did the same and straightened my many shawls.
‘All right?’ he said.
