The Golden Minute

by John Birmingham

  Without a map or guide of any sort, the vast expanse of Potsdamer Platz and the roiling crowds within were a pure vexation. The Berliners were an odd lot, the men fustily dressed in heavy coats and woolen britches, often topped by dark Homburg hats; the ladies a swirl of bright colors in slender, high-waisted frocks, gathered narrow at the waist but often so fearsomely puffed or padded out at neck and shoulders that Smith found himself weaving through a constantly moving hazard of aggressively ruffled collars and dangerous shoulder boards. His own vesture drew some curious and even fascinated glances, but none seemed startled to encounter a frontier marshal in the heart of Europe, and as Smith adapted to his surroundings he noted the density of saloons and dance halls and theatrical establishments in the neighborhood. It might well explain the natives’ equanimity. He assumed this to be a party district. It had surely seemed so on his previous detour. The square reminded him of the Mission Dolores area in San Francisco, but on a vastly grander scale and possessed of immeasurably more refined amenities than that muddy and ramshackle barrio. The number of folks taking their leisure in this one bustling square seemed greater than the entire population of the West Coast, and where much of San Francisco was jerrybuilt and fated to early dilapidation, the architecture of Berlin looked to have been made from the foundation stones of empire. He was but a mote of dust floating through and not an especially interesting one at that.

  Smith eased off the power of his stride and really invested himself in scouting out the terrain. For every big-bellied clerk in a black or brown suit, he found he could locate a younger, thinner, hungrier-looking feller, often with shirt sleeves rolled up and his face to the sun, rather than bent stoically to the ground as he stomped onwards, mind fixed on his next business conference or contractual obligation. These young’uns often as not lounged around, nursing fancy drinks and mooning after pale-faced calico gals who themselves were like as not to have their pretty heads in a book as they were to be swooning at some feller’s mooning. They paid him no heed at all. Nor did the sleek lookin’ types who swept past him, hauling instruments for a music hall. He evinced just as little interest from a group of professorial tweedy owls, hooting loudly at each other over some hot political item, and he likewise excited not at all the keen curiosity of a tight clutch of Hasidic gentlemen, hurrying somewhere with suitcases and travel valises.

  This were a big city, of course, and every big city has its poor and unfortunate. Smith automatically tipped his hat to an elderly lady who caught his eye while she was gathering the scraps and offcuts tossed from a vegetable seller’s horse-drawn wagon, and he felt a twinge of guilt at not stopping to offer her some of the food from his possibles bag. But it simply would not do to lay out the impossible contents of that pack in the light of common day. He passed her by and immediately fixed his lamps on a thin, unshaven character in a too large suit holding up a sign that read, “Attention, Unemployed, Haircut 40 pfennigs, Shave 15 pfennigs.”

  Smith was in need of neither a haircut nor a shave, having seen to his grooming back in Seattle.

  But he was in need of a guide or at the very least some information, and this feller looked a promising candidate. That suit had been expensive once, before hardship shrunk its occupant. And Smith would wager that a man who had fallen on hard times but was willing to abase himself in the search for honest employment was a feller John Titanic Smith was willing to trust, and even to help out some.

  5

  They all saw it.

  The impossible.

  The profane.

  Cady and the dozens of angry villagers.

  They all saw a man simply disappear before their eyes. There was no mistaking what had just happened. No chance to refashion the impossible as improbable, or even remotely explicable. A man, an unusually large man of flesh and blood, who had just seconds before gutted one of their own with a knife as big as a Roman short sword, and had before that shot down an unknown number of men and maybe even women with furious pistol and rifle fire, had altogether vanished.

  Right in front of them.

  He was gone…

  There was, Cady realized all too late, not just one second, but a long interval of many broken moments, a slowly turning instant of discontinuity when she might’ve escaped. She might have simply shone her torch in their eyes, wielded the thing like a light saber, and bolted for the forest. The tree line was much closer than it had seemed in the panic of headlong flight. Smith’s vanishing had stopped the charging mob as completely as if the earth had yawned open before them. The collective gasp of men and women who had witnessed something inconceivable was still dying away in her ears. If she’d had a flare she could have set it off. If she’d thought to reach into a pocket and grab her can of mace she might’ve sketched a warding of concentrated pepper spray into the air between them. Something they would not understand, but might recognize as a dangerous transfigurement of the ether, not to be crossed.

  Instead she lay winded and numb and all but paralyzed by the shock of realization.

  Smith was gone and she was all alone.

  “The witch remains! Subdue the witch!”

  It seemed she heard the shout, in a man’s voice, but high and quavering with real fear, after the Indian brave had clamped both arms around her again, squeezing so hard she couldn’t breathe. The rank, sour stink of the guy was overpowering. Cady’s head swam and she struggled against her captor, but his arms tightened around her like iron bands, forcing the last breath from her lungs and causing dark black roses to bloom at the edge of her vision. Her last thought before passing out was that this must be some awful nightmare, and she would wake in the Marriott, Smith asleep in the room next door, or possibly sitting watch as he sometimes did, with a loaded rifle laid across his lap, and a single bourbon within easy sipping distance.

  She awoke on a flagstone floor, gritty and filthy with old straw, mud and…

  Oh god.

  … manure.

  Smith was gone.

  And Cady was alone. Her head started spinning again and her stomach turned over, whether from a deep and total body horror at the comprehension of just how terminally fucked she was, or because she woke up face down on a mat of rotten straw full of cooties, Black Death and horseshit.

  Or at least she hoped it was horseshit, because the alternative poop source was squatting on the cold stones in the shadows a few feet away. An old woman, taking a piss in a wooden bucket.

  Cady heaved up the dinner she’d eaten at the Marriott just a few hours earlier: a delightful truffled mushroom on a bed of wild rice, washed down with a glass of pinot noir from the Willamette Valley. It exploded out of her in a geyser of hot bile and chunkage. She heaved and heaved until there was nothing inside her but a weak, twitching gag reflex which only kept going because she’d heaved so much her body might have forgotten how to stop. Hot and cold flushes washed over her face, and her entire body was bathed in a sticky film of panic sweat.

  She was alone in the sixteenth fucking century. Or was it the seventeenth? She had to think about that and right now the only thought that had any traction was the memory of Smith blinking away to fuck knew where-or-when, his face a fright mask of shock and recognition.

  Recognition that he’d doomed her.

  “No,” she grunted, and shuddered as she realized how much of her regurgitated dinner remained wedged into the nooks and crannies of her mouth. “Ugh.”

  Cady pushed herself up off the damp, filthy flagstones and tried not to look at her… cellmate?

  The old woman was muttering something to herself and seemed not the least bothered by Cady’s coming to.

  Spitting out as much of the leftover puke as possible, Cady forced herself to chill the fuck out. She was alive. They hadn’t strung her up from a tree or thrown her onto a fire in the town square. Not yet anyway. And Smith, she deliberately told herself, had not doomed her. She had chosen to share his journey and the dangers that she knew, she totally knew, were part of it.

  She’d told h
im, and she might even try to tell herself, that it was a solid choice. The guardians of the watch, or the caretakers or whatever the hell the Apprentices actually were, had never tried to talk to them. They’d never attempted to negotiate the return of the watch the old Chinese man had given to Smith. The marshal would gladly hand it over if he thought doing so might get him home, and surely the assholes who invented the thing would be able to make that happen. They could probably just Uber up a TARDIS and drop him back to his kid.

  Instead they’d sent guys like Chumley to hunt Smith and Cady down and kill them.

  Figuring out a way to shake those guys off really was a solid choice, and Cady wouldn’t feel safe until it was done.

  More than that, though, the watch was an almost unbelievable piece of tech. In fact, for anybody who hadn’t used one, it literally would be unbelievable. But Cady had, and she knew how valuable it was. How powerful it could be. Not just the watch. But the freedom it offered to travel between realities.

  So Smith had not doomed her by dragging her into this.

  Cady had made her choice freely and now she had to deal with the consequences.

  She carefully, almost warily, took inventory of her aches and pains. It hurt to breathe, but not with the stabbing, searing pain she’d expect from a broken rib. All of her limbs seemed to be attached and functional. She patted down her pockets and was surprised to find she still had her wallet. Like, big fucking deal. She also had a bar of Swiss Army chocolate, which was better, even though she couldn’t face eating anything at the moment, and would probably catch the Bubonic Death Plague or some hideous fucking zombie fungus, just like in The Last of Us, if she did dare to eat without washing her hands.

  And her mace!

  She still had her trusty little chemical weapons platform, a compact tube of Sabre’s 3-in-1.

  Thirty-five concentrated shots of a nasty-ass cocktail of red pepper, CS gas and UV marking dye with a range of ten feet.

  Damn. She could’ve hosed down every rimjob in that crowd of baying assholes this afternoon.

  And she could totally pussy mace Grandma over there if she didn’t get off the piss bucket, pull up her bloomers and put that festy old fish taco of hers away real soon.

  Feeling her mood lift, even if only a little, at recovering some sense of agency, Cady scoped out her surrounds. She was in a small, dark room, a cell of some kind. But it felt less like a county jail than a secure storage area, possibly for a tavern or even a stable. There were similar spaces on either side of her cell. The bars were roughly hewn from hardwood, maybe oak or ash, and although one of the cells held two more prisoners, the barred gates to the other lockable areas stood open, and casks of wine or beer sat atop one another, climbing three high to the low ceiling. The lighting was poor. Two candles, one of them about to gutter out into a puddle of melted wax, threw a weak, shapeshifting glow over the enclosures. The shadows of the cell bars moved with every breath of wind, which was constant. A storm blew outside, with rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning, and the cellar space—Cady felt sure they were underground—was drafty and leaked badly. She felt as though they might soon lose what little illumination they had.

  “What cheer, goody? You are the latest to face the court of Oyer and Terminer then?”

  Cady jumped a little.

  Her cellmate had been so quiet that she’d forgotten about the old crone while she was lost in her Agent 47 fantasy. Scope out the scene. Mark the targets. Terminate some motherfuckers.

  “The what?” Cady asked, feeling dumb.

  The old woman, who had thankfully dropped her voluminous skirts again, shuffled across the dirty, uneven floor. Her clothes were smeared with filth and wet from sitting on the damp stones. Wild strands of gray hair crept out from under a gray cotton bonnet, although Cady was pretty sure it had once been white. Dark smudges bruised the sagging flesh beneath her eyes, and her knuckles stood out starkly on thin, bony hands.

  “The court, goodwife. Our accusers and executioners. Prithee do you face examination on the morrow?”

  Cady scrunched up her face in concentration. The woman spoke English, and if she listened carefully, each word was comprehensible. But she didn’t sound like any New Englander Cady had ever spoken to, or heard before. Her accent was more of a lilting brogue, a strange mix of cartoon Irish and Downton Abbey.

  “Er, I dunno,” Cady said. She realized the woman was having as much trouble understanding her, so she repeated herself, but tried to enunciate each word with greater clarity.

  “I do not know,” she said, and the weird, forced sound of her own voice in her ears was like hearing it recorded and played back for the first time. She suddenly understood just how much translation the watch had done for her in 1880s London. She’d probably have been able to make out each word there too, but deciphering a torrent of speech delivered without pause might have been harder than she’d imagined.

  A shiver of dread ran through her.

  What if she’d ended up alone in Dark Ages France or at the court of Genghis Khan? Smith had told her of passing through both.

  The notebook!

  She patted at her pockets, looking for the ziplock bag with the notebook in which she’d tried to lay out the sequence of Smith’s jumps, all the way back to the first time he’d triggered the watch without understanding what the hell he was doing.

  Her heart sank as she recalled herself back at the hotel, stowing it at the bottom of her backpack, where it would be safe.

  The backpack she’d last seen on a rainswept hillside, Christ only knew how many miles from here. The old woman was talking to her again.

  “Oh, they will make a fair brawling dance of it for our abodement, worry not.”

  “Okay,” Cady said, mostly to herself. “Worrying not on that score.”

  She saw the old woman frowning at her, mostly in confusion, and tried to get a little medieval on her ass, but in a nice way.

  “How art thou known, old… woman. What name have you? Or. You know…”

  The old girl regarded Cady as though she might be the village idiot.

  “My name is Mary Bradbury,” she said, in reasonably plain English. “Wife of Captain Thomas Bradbury. And you, goodwife?”

  Cady bristled at the presumption she was anybody’s wife, let alone good at it, but she tried to imagine herself as an undercover hottie in the Republic of Gilead, or maybe King’s Landing under the rod and rule of the High Sparrow. Basically, it looked like she’d fallen in with a bunch of mad fucking sister wives and crazy punishing fetish nuns whose not-so-secret kink was whipping hotties like her with bamboo switches and hissing “Repent! Repent!”

  In fact, she recalled hearing the word just before Smith had gone full Alamo.

  “And I am Cadence McCall,” she said, and immediately but silently cursed herself. She was supposed to be undercover. How the hell was she going to avoid the Apprentices if she told everybody her real name?

  Then again, the Gestapo from the fourth dimension hadn’t had much trouble tracking them before, had they? It was almost as though landing somewhere was like tossing a rock into a pool, allowing an observant watcher to intuit the splash point by working back from the spread of ripples.

  Cady liked that idea.

  If she didn’t die screaming in this episode of American Horror Story she might be able to do something with that insight. But what she needed to focus on right now was the potential ally she had in this Mary…

  What was her last name?

  Bradbury! That was it. Like the old science fiction writer.

  “So what are you in for, Mary?” she asked, before throwing her hands up in exasperation and trying again. “What… er… how do you stand accused? What er… what hast thou, you know, done?”

  Mary laughed, but it was not a happy sound.

  “What has thou done, Goody Cadence? Are you, like me, infamed for certain detestable arts called Witchcraft? Hath you maliciously and feloniously practiced and exercised sorceries? Dost t
hou stand appeached of torture and affliction to consume, waste and torment your neighbors?”

  “Er, no,” Cady said, butt-shuffling back a little to escape the woman’s intensity. “Some gamergate douchebros shitposted me on 4chan,” she muttered to herself, before speaking directly to Bradbury again. “No. Or I don’t know, for sure. Some guys, some varmints… some varlets, is that even a word? Anyway they shot at us, with muskets I guess, when we weren’t doing anything. Honest. They…”

  She stopped herself before she could say, ‘They fucking tea bagged us like bitches.’

  Instead she composed herself and said as slowly and as clearly as she could, “We were but honest journeymen, set upon by villains and ruffians. We did defend ourselves. But that is no crime from where we come.”

  “We?”

  Damn.

  “Uh, yeah. I mean, yes. Verily. Totes verily. We. I was traveling with my… husband. Yes. I am married. Goodwife Cadence McCall Smith, that’s me. And my husband John Smith—” In for a penny, in for a pound of this fantastic bullshit. “—my husband didst but defend me from violation.”

  Mary Bradbury appeared to weigh up the story as though it was a shaved puppy Cady was trying to sell off as a prize pig.

  “And where might your husband be now?” she asked.

  Cady’s display of grief and loss were entirely genuine. She had trouble speaking for a moment. When she finally swallowed the lump in her throat she managed to warble, “I do not know.”

  Smith approached the unemployed barber straight on. Trusting that the watch would translate his speech, he strode up and held out his hand.

  “Sir, I am not in need of being shorn in a barber’s chair, but if it’s honest work you’re lookin’ for, I may have some for you.”

  The man gave Smith a frank and searching inspection.