Time's Chariot

by Ben Jeapes

  'Mr Carradine,' she gushed, 'I'm delighted to say . . .'

  'Show me,' Carradine said. Holliss let a brief flash of irritation show around the edges of her polished smile but she nodded slightly and her picture moved to the left of the display. A group shot appeared on the other side. Four people, and a pile of boxes stacked behind them. 'It was quite eerie, sir,' she said. 'We were expecting them and we'd kept the area clear, as instructed, but even so, they just . . . appeared. No noise, no flash, no special effects – it just seemed so natural that suddenly they were there.'

  Carradine remembered his own dealings with the Home Timer. There hadn't even been any air displacement, which would surely be expected if a substantial body were to appear and disappear at will. 'I know.' He zoomed in on the picture. A young woman and three men covering a range of ages. None of them was the man he had dealt with. He peered more closely, with interest. Their clothes were strange – nothing to distinguish gender, and impossible to tell if they were wearing separate tops and bottoms or strangely designed one-pieces, though there was plenty of variation within that theme – but otherwise they could be the people next door. 'Any indication of how long they plan to stay?'

  'None at all, sir. The booking's open-ended, as instructed.'

  'Well, their rent's good for it,' Carradine said.

  Holliss looked puzzled. 'Well, of course, sir, BioCarr is footing the bill . . .'

  'That wasn't what I meant,' Carradine snapped, thinking that though Holliss was technically a Grade 7 BioCarr employee, at heart she would always be a hotel manager. A very good hotel manager, whose establishment was frequented by senior BioCarr officials and therefore had the best staff and the tightest security BioCarr could buy . . . but still a hotel manager.

  She looked offended and he was immediately angry with himself. She couldn't be expected to know about the information the go-between had offered. 'Please tell me the surveillance is in place?' he said.

  Holliss hadn't been well pleased to have bugs planted all over her establishment and she dared to look slightly put out. 'It is, sir, only they have some device which we haven't been able to locate, and it jams our local bugs.'

  'Naturally,' Carradine said. 'What are you doing about it?'

  'The surveillance people,' Holliss said, emphasizing that it wasn't her problem, 'say they're going to have to make do with lasers on the windows, lip reading via telescope, that sort of thing. What you've just seen was the last good shot we had of the guests before the cameras were affected.'

  'Very interesting. What did they bring with them?'

  'A lot of boxes, sir. I can't tell what they're made of, and it's difficult to say what's in them. As for personal luggage – nothing but the clothes they're wearing.'

  'Give them whatever they want.'

  'Of course, sir.'

  'And now, introduce us.'

  The image of two youngsters – Carradine would have said sixteen or so, maybe older but certainly not by much – filled the display. The boy's skin and features looked vaguely Hispanic with sallow skin and dark hair. The girl too was basically white but otherwise impossible to classify straight off. Carradine had no idea what racial intermixings might be the norm in the Home Time.

  Holliss was going from left to right. 'These two seem to be dogsbodies, sir. The boy is . . . it's difficult to say since of course they haven't filled in registration cards or anything. As far as I can tell his name is something like Bayzhay. The girl is something like Killin. They don't seem to speak our language at all.'

  The display changed to one of the other men, bearded and in his late thirties or early forties. 'This one appears to be in charge, sir. His name is Phenuel Scott. The two young ones jump when he says.

  'And last of all, this one.' The image was of an oriental man of indefinable age. His hair was greying but his face wasn't particularly wrinkled, yet he looked old. Perhaps it was his expression, or his eyes, or both. 'He speaks our language but doesn't say much. I said Scott was in charge but it seems to be because this one lets him be. Scott treats him with honour and respect – that is, his tone changes when they talk together.'

  'I see,' Carradine said. 'Name?'

  'Again, difficult to tell, sir. It sounds Chinese or Japanese . . .'

  'There is a difference, Ms Holliss, as any Chinese or Japanese will tell you.'

  Holliss flushed. 'Yes, sir. His name sounds like Daiho. Scott called him "the Commissioner", but I don't know what he's a Commissioner of.'

  Ten

  London, 1620

  The Correspondent lifted his head gingerly and winced as pain stabbed through it. He quickly turned his pain receptors off and cast his senses down into the rest of his body, where his healing powers were working flat out. The bruises had almost cleared up, the cuts had mended and the most serious injury – the broken rib that had pierced a lung – was all but whole again. As was the lung.

  He tried to open his eyes. The swelling had gone down but the lid of his right eye was glued shut by encrusted blood. He spat on a finger and rubbed it on the blood to dissolve it. The eye opened slowly and he looked around, carefully so as not to set off another explosion inside his skull.

  It was a cell; something he had always tried to avoid, usually with success, in his 600 years as a correspondent. He lay on a plank bed set into the wall. Straw covered the floor, the only light was moonlight shining through a grill high in the wall, and the whole place stank to high heaven of unwashed humans and the stuff that came out of them.

  Luxury, he thought with only a slight sense of irony. Planks, cells, straw; these things all cost money in the England of 1620. It was not unusual to see prisoners who couldn't afford the cost of their imprisonment begging on the streets of London, under guard. No doubt there would be an accounting for this, too; his captors would have seen he was clearly a man of means, so they must have thrown his unconscious form in here first and intended to settle the bill later.

  Later. His internal clock told him it was shortly after one in the morning. The sun would rise at about 4:00: he had three hours of darkness. He hoped that being hanged at dawn wasn't literally dawn but he didn't intend to find out.

  He sat up and only then realized that his hands and feet were manacled – with iron, of course, allegedly proof against witchcraft. Another incidental expense. He looked at his bonds with irritation. They didn't present a problem in the long run, but he had better get started now.

  He sat on the plank, feet on the floor, hands motionless on his lap, and began to channel energy into the muscles concerned. And while he was doing that he began to sort the facts out in his mind, prior to preparing a report.

  The trial was in a large, gloomy room lined with oak panelling, and was crowded. People nowadays tended not to wash as much as the Correspondent would have liked and the finery of their clothes couldn't hide the stench.

  The main witness for the prosecution was a terrified individual named Mr Marks, steward for the household of Francis Bacon – Lord Chancellor of England, Baron Verulam and soon to be created Viscount Saint Albans. Marks' story bore no resemblance to facts as the Correspondent remembered them. A lot of things weren't making sense, but the Correspondent put the matter on hold while he gave the testimony his full attention.

  'Tell us,' said the prosecuting council, a tall and balding man named Whitrow, 'in your own words, the events of that evening.'

  The witness spoke, with constant fearful glances at the prisoner in the dock. 'Well, sir, on that evening – that is, the sixth of June, sir – I was bringing food for my lord and his, um, visitor.'

  'Is this visitor present here?'

  Marks was struck dumb, and the look of sheer terror he gave the Correspondent was unfeigned. Whitrow followed the man's gaze and smiled without humour. 'He is bound with iron and surrounded by good, God-fearing men. He can do you no harm. Answer the question.'

  'The visitor was the man in the dock, sir,' Marks said, almost in a whisper.

  'The man who calls hi
mself Sir Stephen Hawking?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Carry on.'

  Yes, carry on, the Correspondent thought. This was interesting.

  At first, the steward's testimony bore out his own recollection perfectly. The familiar inner promptings had led him to seek an interview with Bacon, using as an excuse a desire to discuss the recently published Novum Organum. In the book, Bacon exhorted for the abandonment of prejudice and preconception, and for observation and experimentation in science. The principles of the book influenced the whole direction that science was to take in subsequent centuries. Naturally, the Correspondent had to interview him.

  And then came that baffling point where the recollections of the Correspondent and Marks diverged. The Correspondent remembered that they had discussed empiricism, politics and the transition of the monarchy from the Tudors to the Stuarts – Bacon had served the last Tudor monarch and the first Stuart, and was a rich fund of anecdotes about court life under the two regimes. It had been a pleasant time, with food and drink duly brought by Marks to Bacon's panelled and book-lined study. Then the Correspondent had retired to his own lodgings.

  To be woken by the sheriff's men. He could have fought, yes, but they had come for him by surprise, and in large quantities, and they were armed. There were some things even he couldn't do – not all at once. Swords, spears, arrows he could handle, preferably if he was facing them. Bullets, from any direction, were quite another matter; the bygoners' discovery of gunpowder, in his estimation, had been a major step backwards and had made his life significantly harder.

  He frowned as Marks gave his damning evidence.

  'My lord and that man were talking and laughing, sir. I could hear them through the door. I put the tray down on the floor so that I could open the door, and then I heard a third voice.'

  'Go on,' said Whitrow. The room was silent.

  ' 'Twas a man's voice, sir, and it spoke . . . I don't know what it spoke, sir. It was not English. It was a babble.'

  'Who spoke?'

  'Sir, it was neither my lord nor this man here who spoke. I looked through the crack in the door and I saw it was a third man, and I heard the man in the dock shout something, then speak in kind . . .'

  Debate ensued between the counsels as to the significance of this: Marks argued that there was only one way into his lord's room, and that was through the door, and he swore no other man had entered the house – yet alone that room – that evening. This the Correspondent was prepared to agree with. But, a third man? And he himself had apparently spoken with the stranger, in this strange tongue . . .

  Something was nagging at the back of his mind, like the sudden reminder in the day time of a dream some nights back. A strange sense of familiarity . . .

  'And why did you look through the crack?' Whitrow asked.

  'I feared for my lord, sir. I heard such anger in the visitor's shout.'

  'Hawking shouted?'

  'Yes, sir. The, um, third man spoke, and this man shouted, and . . .'

  'Very well. And what else did you see?'

  'My lord was as if frozen, sir. He seemed to see without seeing, like this.' The steward gave an impression of a glassy eyed stare. 'This man had his back to me – I could not see what he was doing. It was blue, sir.'

  'What was blue?' Whitrow didn't sound surprised at the sudden change of tack; he had no doubt gone through this thoroughly with Marks beforehand.

  'The thing he—'

  'The stranger . . .' Whitrow prompted.

  '—the stranger held in his hand, sir. He held it to my lord's head. And then . . . then . . .' Marks was on the verge of collapsing in tears.

  'Go on,' said Whitrow, with surprising gentleness.

  The Correspondent heard the eagerness that lay beneath the words – the anticipation of the trap.

  'The newcomer vanished, sir. Just . . . vanished. And I fled, sir. I was that scared. I fled.'

  He had done a lot for his Home Time masters in six hundred years, but letting himself be captured, beaten to a near pulp and sentenced to death on a charge of witchery was surely the most devoted.

  After meeting Avicenna in Isfahan, he had found he had no desire to stay there any longer. At first he had wandered here and there with no real sense of purpose, reporting on what he saw, helped by the scraps of foreknowledge that would suddenly pop into his mind. He had soon learned to rely on their guidance. For instance, he had known that Isfahan and the whole area were about to be overrun by Turks, and at the same time he had suddenly found within himself the urge to head for Constantinople and, hence, Europe. He had spent some years wandering in France, then suddenly received the knowledge that the Normans were about to invade England. So he had headed there, and witnessed the landings, but not felt an urge to report them. Rather, another item of foreknowledge told him to head for Canterbury in 1094 to interview the archbishop there, one Anselm: a man who didn't know it but whose work, like Avicenna's, was to shape the future of science.

  And so on. After that, it wasn't hard to work out what his mission was: to interview philosophers, thinkers, sages. Those promptings had brought him here and, for the first time, things were going wrong. Still, there was no doubt that the Home Time would appreciate this on-the-spot report of a witch's trial, even if he had no intention of providing an on-the-spot report of a witch's execution, so he had let things get this far. But now it was far enough.

  He now had enough energy stored for the first phase of the escape. He pulled his wrists away from each other with a sharp jerk, and the manacles snapped with a satisfactory crack. He began to concentrate on phase two, the feet, and as he did so he again thought back.

  'Do you speak any other language?' It was the turn of the Correspondent's own counsel, Saxton. Neat, prim, fussy. 'French? Latin? Greek? Would you recognize any of them if I spoke them now?'

  'No, sir, I speak none of those,' Marks said.

  'Then what is the significance of a man speaking a language you do not know? It is surely unremarkable.'

  Marks' mouth moved silently. Eventually he said: 'On its own it is of no significance, but taken in conjunction with other events, it acquires meaning.'

  An eloquent little speech for an uneducated serving man, the Correspondent thought with a wry smile, and no doubt quoted verbatim from his prior briefing by Whitrow. Yet, somehow the Correspondent didn't doubt that Marks believed every word he was saying. Whitrow might prime a witness, maybe even bribe a fictitious testimony into existence, but he couldn't force that witness to act as well as Marks must have been acting.

  And there was the rub. Surely the most telling witness for either side would be Bacon himself, yet the Lord Chancellor was conspicuously absent. There was more than a witchcraft trial going on here. The next year, the Correspondent knew, Bacon would be tried by his peers for the less supernatural, more straightforward offence of taking bribes. He would confess and be fined, imprisoned at the king's pleasure and banished from court and Parliament. Would that have happened so easily, the Correspondent wondered, if he had not already been tarnished by association with a witch trial? A small fact left out of the history books. Not that there could be any reasonable suspicion aimed at the man himself – he was Lord Chancellor, after all, and even under James Stuart's witch-hating regime, stronger evidence than a single deranged steward would be needed to bring down a peer of the realm – but this trial could be used simply to chip away at the man's integrity. All that was needed was a conviction. The steward's testimony must have been a godsend to the anti-Bacon brigade, and the verdict was known in advance.

  The chains that bound his feet went the same way as those that had been on his wrists. The Correspondent stood up to face the door to the cell, and began to concentrate for a final focus of energy.

  When he was ready, he stood facing the door, barefoot. He put his hands together and began a measured pattern of breathing. He closed his eyes and visualized the lock of the door. Then he visualized the energy that flowed through his body. Door
and body were the only items in the universe. His body was completely relaxed, there was no tension or effort in it, and it was as if in a dream that he pivoted on one foot and spun and brought his heel against the lock of the door. The wood shattered and the lock flew out into the passage.

  He smiled grimly and swung the door open. Pausing only to render the gibbering jailer unconscious and put his boots back on, he left the building.

  By the time Whitrow began his summing up, the Correspondent was so caught up with that nagging feeling that he could only give half his mind to the proceedings.

  First, Whitrow said, there was no Sir Stephen Hawking. This had been verified by the College of Heralds. Whoever he was, the defendant had gained entry to the house of the Lord Chancellor by deception.

  Second, he had spoken in the same tongue as the mysterious apparition. He had not vanished, as the spectre had, which probably showed that . . . third, while the 'third man' was clearly some kind of ghost, perhaps demon, the false Sir Stephen was very real and solid and therefore a necromancer, a medium, a warlock and probably any number of other kinds of undesirable magical practitioner.

  Saxton made a half-hearted attempt at defence but it was clear the court had made up its mind and Saxton wasn't going to fly in the face of opinion, apart from covering his own reputation by drawing the court's attention to the fact that there was only one witness and that all evidence was circumstantial.

  The verdict and the sentence came very soon after, and while the Correspondent could have broken free, he chose not to. Too many people, a major hue and cry if he got away, more likely a pistol ball in the back. And then came that crack to the head that caught even him by surprise, and he woke up in the cell.

  Robert Marks stirred in his sleep, looked up and convulsed. The Correspondent reached down and hauled him out of bed. The woman next to Marks opened her mouth to scream, and the Correspondent squeezed her throat with his free hand just long enough to make her pass out harmlessly. Then he looked back at Marks, and smiled.

  'Wh–who are you?' Marks whispered, and only then did it occur to the Correspondent that all the bygoner could see with his normal, unaugmented vision was a shadow.