Then he heard the distinctive sound of pounding hooves, a warhorse, undoubtedly a knight. He saw the boy fling himself to the ground and then the huge horse come hurtling over the crest of a small hill. He saw the rider, who was a knight as One Tooth had suspected, being thrown clear out of the saddle when the horse shied and reared up. One Tooth thought that was extremely funny and he watched the rest of the scene play out with interest. He shifted along the branch to get a better view of events and to try and hear what was being said between the two.
One Tooth was careful to be as quiet as possible and to not expose himself to the knight. After all, he was an outlaw and the knight would recognise him as such immediately. It would be the knight’s duty to take him captive. His capture would lead to a trial, and then inevitably to the hangman’s noose and that would not do at all. What he did see that intrigued him, and which stirred his robber’s black heart, was the heavy
looking purse that hung at the knight’s belt and he guessed that it would be stuffed full of gold pennies. One Tooth stroked the ugly purple scar that ran across his face, from ear to ear, as he considered his next move. The purse would make a pretty prize and that was no mistake; it would probably allow him to buy a passage to Normandy where he could lay low for a while. England was not a big country and his face was becoming widely known. He could no longer travel with the anonymity he would like. He would love to be able to steal that knight’s purse and have those golden pennies for himself.
In the part of the conversation that he could hear he heard the knight clearly say that he was bound for Sherebrook castle and One Tooth knew the road well. He knew of a good place to stage an ambush and he also knew that he could finish the job in an instant if he could get one good clean arrow into the knight’s neck. The knight looked quite old and, although surprisingly agile, he would not be able to dodge an unexpected arrow. He would cut the small boy in half with a single stroke of his sword and then the money would be his. He resolved to attack in a small glade that the road to Sherebrook wound through, just two miles south of the castle.
One Tooth was a wiry and tough individual who had spent his entire life living rough, stealing and murdering. He relished the idea of surprising this old knight and the boy and making a good prize for himself. All he had to do was wait until they were out of sight, drop from the tree, and then cut across country, ignoring the road so that he could get ahead of the pair and be at the ambush site in time for them to pass by. One arrow and one sword stroke would do it and he would be rich.
One Tooth waited until the knight trotted off with the boy running behind and then gathered up his bow; his quiver of arrows and a rust flecked sword in a battered scabbard hung at his side. He sprung right out of the tree and landed on the ground in a squatting position. He resembled an incredibly ugly toad. He slung the bow and quiver of arrows over his shoulder and held the sword loosely at his side and then immediately broke into a steady paced run, following the direction that Sir Geoffrey and Charlie had taken. After about five hundred metres, One Tooth veered away from the dusty road and struck out across a field of heather, taking the shortcut to get ahead of the knight. Now he had blood lust in his heart and the greed for gold in his head. The slaughter of an old
knight and a small boy would be an insignificant price to pay for such a prize.
EIGHT
Gramps pulled into the drive, the gravel crackling beneath the tyres of the elderly Ford Prefect. He brought the car to a halt and cut the engine. He looked at the house and was instantly filled with a sense of unease. Something seemed wrong-very wrong, but he was not sure what. He got out of the car and walked to the front door; he selected the front door key on his key ring and entered the house. When he opened the door and saw the dresser moved away from the wall Gramps heart missed a beat and knew immediately what was wrong. He cursed himself for not taking more care to secure the cellar and the time portal. He ran straight to the door and took the wooden stairs to the cellar two at a time. He went directly to the room in which Charlie had disappeared and let out a moan of frustration and anger. Where or, more to the point, when was Charlie.
Gramps had been keeping the time portal secret from Charlie until he was old enough to understand the implications of it and how to use it properly. Now Charlie had discovered it by accident and had used the portal without any instructions or training. Heaven only knew what he was experiencing and how long he had been gone.
Gramps made some quick and rough calculations in his head and then arrived at some conclusions. During any twenty-four hour period the time portal would deliver the user to a place in human history, relative to a specific scale, which Gramps could mostly keep in his head. Given the time Gramps had been out he could roughly calculate which period in history Charlie had ended up in. Also, time passed more quickly for the traveller on the “past” side of the portal than it did on the “present” side. Gramps knew that one week in a state of time travel was equal to a little over thirty seconds on the present side of the portal.
Charlie had also, somehow, had to discover the portal. Subtracting the amount of time that must have taken would narrow down the effective time of entry to twenty or perhaps thirty minutes ago, Gramps guessed. He realised, to his horror, that Charlie could have been gone for up to two years by his time clock. Gramps knew immediately that Charlie would have to be rescued as he would have no idea how to get back to his own time and the boy was ill equipped to deal with what he might find on the past side.
Gramps dashed up from the cellar, once again taking two stairs at a time, and ran into his study. He took off his watch and threw it onto his leather topped desk, opened a drawer and fished out a small notepad and a pen and then selected a book from his bookshelves. The book was bound in battered red leather and had faded gold lettering on its cover. He sat at his desk and began to quickly work out some equations on the notepad by way of the watch and a table of dates in the book. He could work out a rough time line based on two relative, but variable time flows. There was “real time”, on the present side of the portal, and “past time”, on the past side of the portal, but he would still have to apply a specific formula to try pinpointing a date range. Another concern was that the time portal could be geographically random within a radius of approximately twenty miles. He was not only going to have to work out when Charlie went to but he would also, probably, have to search a great deal when he went through.
Again he admonished himself, fuming at his inability to tightly secure things and his abject failure to prevent an accident of this nature happening. He never once considered Charlie to be at fault. He knew that a boy is boy and that curiosity is a part of being at that age. It would make no more sense to blame Charlie for being intrigued by a hidden cellar than it would to blame a compass needle for pointing north. When he was Charlie’s age he had been the same and in Charlie he saw himself. Gramps had long ago decided that Charlie would be his successor and would one day take his place as the Guardian of the Fourth Northern Portal.
He had decided to instruct Charlie when he reached the age of twenty-five, which was the traditional age of majority for a Time Guardian. Then he would apprentice Charlie until he was of an age and level of understanding to enable Gramps to give up his guardianship; when he reached one hundred years old. He would then be able to retire to his
Chosen Time and Charlie would, he hoped, become the official guardian of the Fourth Northern Portal.
Of course, none of that was important now-all that mattered was that Charlie was stuck somewhere in the past and it was up to Gramps to rescue him and bring him back safely to the present. Gramps finished his calculations and looked at the dates he had written down: between March 5th and August 4th in the year 1140. Gramps reasoned that he should arrive at the earliest possible date and time and then begin his search. He would have to ask people if they had seen Charlie and describe his grandson to them: what was Charlie wearing this morni
ng? Yes, that was it, white tee shirt and jeans. Would Charlie have the sense to find some way of disguising those clothes so as not to draw attention to himself? He assumed that he would. He toyed with the idea of bringing a photograph through to show people but he dismissed the idea immediately. It would be against the rules and he was a stickler for the rules; they were there for a reason. The time line can only be disturbed by a person fully instructed in the temporal sciences, in other words, a Guardian. The consequences of disrupting the timeline could be grave for the entire world, whole streams of events could be altered that would impact our modern world. This could not be allowed to happen. That was why the Time Portals had Guardians in the first place; to prevent unauthorised use, a task at which Gramps had spectacularly failed.
So there it was. Gramps would enter the portal in such a way that he would arrive at the earliest date Charlie could have travelled to. Of course he would have to wait a full twenty-four hours before he had the chance. This meant, in one possible timeline at least, that Charlie would have spent the rest of his life, grown into a man, and finally died, somewhere in medieval England. The very thought sent a shudder through Gramps body.
NINE
H e felt like he had been alternately walking and running for days, up and down hills, along side sparkling clear streams, over sun baked roads that ran through small crops of wheat, barley and corn. Twice they had crossed a river by way of a wooden bridge and both times Charlie had been astonished by the noise that Rufus’ heavy pounding hooves had made. Both bridges had shaken as though they were caught in the grip of an earthquake and Charlie had covered his ears as he ran because the noise was deafening.
He did not know exactly how far they had traveled but his best guess was that they were about ten miles from where he had first encountered Sir Geoffrey. He had just fixed his gaze on the back of the animal, becoming mesmerised by the rhythmic movement of the horse he followed almost blindly. If he refused he thought it likely that he would end up on the wrong side of the knight’s anger and Charlie was not sure he would survive another episode of that.
Sir Geoffrey glanced back at irregular but frequent intervals to make sure that Charlie was still following. This put paid to any chance he had of simply running in another direction. If he tried running away the knight would be upon him in no time at all and then heaven only knew what would happen.
Charlie was extremely fit and knew that he could run all day if he needed to and Rufus was not traveling that fast. Charlie guessed they were moving at about three or four miles per-hour, the pace of a really fast walk. He had been considering what had happened that day: the simple act of having dropped a biscuit, the discovery of the door, the cellar and then the room. He tried to understand how he had then come to be in the field, and just who Sir Geoffrey was. Charlie had discounted
most of his previous theories and now believed that the man on the horse in front of him was either a real knight or absolutely barking mad. If the latter was true then Charlie realised that he needed to find a way to get away from him as soon as possible. On the other hand, if the former were true, Charlie was really stumped. There was an explanation for the entire scenario that had not escaped him but he was struggling to accept it as a viable theory; he kept pushing it from his thoughts but it kept coming back and nagging at him. What if he had actually traveled back in time? This would answer all his questions in a heartbeat but no matter how he looked at it, the concept was impossible. Actually, Charlie knew full well that “impossible” was not strictly the right word, he had read enough theories and books on science, and specifically physics, to understand that time travel was at least theoretically possible.
The average person understands time to be constant and continuous, no beginning and no end. The seconds become minutes, the minutes become hours, the hours become days, the days become years and so on-forever. Time cannot be slowed or speeded up, it just is. But in fact, the reverse is true: time is as pliable and flexible as anything else; you just have to know how it works. For instance, the faster you travel the slower time runs for you. For speed to make a significant difference to time, however, one would have to travel extremely fast, nearly as fast as light. This is the fastest speed known to man. At the speed of light time stops altogether. The physics become complicated at this point but what is important is that time is not a constant force and can vary in relation to the state of the observer. Charlie thought of time as a river that flows past you whilst you are standing waist deep in it-but then, what if you could wade up or down stream?
Charlie was so deep in thought that he had been maintaining a fast paced walk without paying attention to anything else. His head was bowed to the ground and he failed to realise that Sir Geoffrey had brought Rufus to a halt. Charlie’s brisk walking pace came to an abrupt halt as he buried his face in the horse’s buttocks. He bounced backwards, stumbling to the ground, and landing on his backside with his glasses hanging from one ear and the musty aroma of Rufus’ rump filling his nose.
Sir Geoffrey turned in his saddle and, for a second, looked at Charlie with a quizzical stare of incomprehension, which turned to bemusement and then finally to a bellowing, roaring laugh of amusement. Such was
the knight’s delight at Charlie’s situation that he rocked back and forth and took a while to recover his composure. He did so at length and was wiping small tears from his eyes as he watched Charlie pick himself off the floor and start to dust himself down.
Charlie was not, in any way, amused by this and felt both awkward and angry. He was sweaty, dusty, starting to get really tired, hungry and…well, he now realised that he smelt of horse manure. His demeanour, which was usually cheerful, had changed to one of frustration and anger. He settled his glasses back onto his nose and looked up at the knight with a face like thunder, or as similar to such a face as he could muster. He let loose with the loudest voice he could manage.
“Oh right, go on, have a good laugh. I’m really glad that I have provided some amusement for you and that you find all this so bloody funny; I have no idea where I am, which, wherever it is, is clearly far from my home. I’m lost and I’m tired, I’m hungry and you seem to be leading me further from where I need to be. I’ve run and walked and done everything that you’ve told me to do and now I just want to sit down and take a rest and have something to eat. I can’t walk another step.”
Up to this point Charlie had been his tolerant of the man on the horse and had been content to occupy his thoughts with the question of what had happened to him. Now, in the face of exhaustion and hunger, he felt he was about ready to break down. Whatever had happened he was most definitely lost and under the control of a man about whom he knew nothing; he was feeling both sorry for himself and angry at the same time. His tirade at Sir Geoffrey had exploded out of him like a jet of Coke from a shaken can; his emotions had streamed out uncontrollably.
Then something happened that he did not expect for he did not receive the partonising mirth he had expected. The man on the horse seemed to change, for when he spoke to Charlie the gruff tone had softened significantly and he seemed to have genuine concern in his voice.
“Hmm…” he murmured, looking directly into Charlie’s eyes, “I think that you have run and walked enough today.” He then held out one of his huge gauntlet covered hands and offered it to Charlie. “Here Charlie Watts, catch hold of my hand and I will allow you to ride with me on the back of Rufus for the remainder of the journey to the castle.”
Charlie was at first a little wary of this offer and, although the idea of a ride on Rufus was appealing,-anything but more walking-he was
a little apprehensive of approaching Sir Geoffrey. He expected another head splitting cuff against his skull or something equally unpleasant.
“Come along!” said the knight, sensing Charlie’s unease but misjudging the reason for it. “I know that you must feel unworthy to be offered a ride with a knight like me but I a
m not completely without heart. We can let decorum slip every so often, just as long as just you and I know about it eh? It is still a league to the castle and to reach it before dusk we must quicken our pace. Come now and take my hand.””
Charlie gave in and accepted the offer from the knight. He really didn’t want to walk anymore. He moved toward Sir Geoffrey and grasped his bear like hand. He was yanked up as if he weighed no more than a rag doll and was slung behind the rider, all in one movement.
“Are you comfortable there, boy?” enquired Sir Geoffrey.
“Yes… yes, thank you,” answered Charlie.
“Good. If you look in the larger of my two pouches you will find some food that will cure that empty stomach of yours. It may also bring some better humour to you.”
As Sir Geoffrey spurred Rufus on to a quick walking pace, Charlie looked down at the two pouches slung across the horse’s rump and as instructed, selected the bigger of the two. He unbuckled the strap holding it closed and rummaged around inside. He pulled out a bundle of rough cloth that looked like a piece of old sacking and unwrapped it. Inside was half a loaf of hard bread and a greasy pale yellow substance that Charlie guessed was cheese. He broke off a piece of the bread and took a small bite. It tasted a bit dry and floury but he was extremely hungry and had soon eaten several huge mouthfuls with lumps of the cheese-like substance. The cheese was similar to cheddar but had a more powerful taste that almost irritated the roof his mouth. He discovered that the bag also contained several red and green apples and he selected the largest and juiciest looking one. The food had dried the saliva in his mouth and the juice from the apple re-hydrated him. With the food inside him, and the rhythmic movement of Rufus’s hindquarters, Charlie started to relax and regain some the composure that he had lost during his outburst. He decided to give Sir Geoffrey the benefit of the doubt and realised that if he meant to do him harm he would have done so by now.
Charlie Watts and the Rip in Time Page 6
