What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  They’re coming.

  He surged up the grassy rise toward the inner court, trying to remember what he had seen. The keep loomed to his right, blank and imposing. It was too dark to see, but he had an idea there was only one way in from this side, that he could get trapped if he went in there. But to turn left—toward Leicester’s building—took him back toward his pursuers. If they had seen him enter the courtyard, he could run right into them as he doubled back . . .

  The inner court was covered with close-cropped turf, and Thomas’s shoes made no sound as he dashed across, hands in pockets to silence the coins. He ducked through a doorway and, for the first time since getting off the bus, stopped running. He flattened himself up against the stone door frame, stared back into the inner court, and sucked the air into his lungs. He couldn’t keep this pace up. The pain in his shoulder was spreading into his chest. He needed a strategy. He had been thinking no more than five seconds when two things happened at once.

  First, two figures appeared no more than a hundred yards away, shadows revealed only by their movement against the hard face of the keep. They entered at a run, but then stuttered to a halt, spitting words at each other that rebounded meaninglessly to where Thomas stood gripping the stone. One of them shrugged out of his coat and let it fall where he stood. They barked orders at each other, and then, as Thomas was starting to lose them in the gloom, they began to move again, surging apart with a professional urgency like hunting dogs corralling their prey. One went toward the keep and vanished, probably inside. The second came directly toward where Thomas was standing, loping across the grass, his posture low and spread, ready to fight. Something flashed in his right hand. A blade of some kind.

  The second thing that happened was that with a sudden steady patter, it began to rain.

  CHAPTER 36

  Thomas thought fast. One of them was coming right at him, but they couldn’t have seen him or they would both have come. If he could get past this one, he could get out while the other searched the keep. He looked east, the way he would go to get to the outer court and back the way he had come, and tried to remember where exactly he was. He was turned around, and he couldn’t make sense of his memories. It was the dark and the panic of pursuit. It wouldn’t let him recall anything useful.

  Stop.

  He closed his eyes, breathing as slowly as he could, and tried to picture the place as it had been in daylight.

  Think.

  Any moment they might see him.

  Wait. One more second.

  He opened his eyes and looked around him.

  He was in the oriel, he thought, the entrance to the state apartments and great chambers. If he went east, he would reach Leicester’s building, but that was part of the castle’s latest construction and it was comparatively well preserved. Though the floors were gone and many of the walls were ragged around the tops, they were far too high to get over.

  So, no way out in that direction.

  He struggled to remember more, even picturing the guidebook floor plan, then he ducked back against the far wall and looked around. Behind him rose a thin tower, a shard of masonry that rose up like a chimney, and below it, more wall with fractured window traces high above the ground.

  No way out there.

  He could cut west through the apartments and great chamber toward the Saintlowe Tower. From there, he figured, he could move through John of Gaunt’s great hall, then down to the perimeter wall, and out by the ruined Swan Tower. Then he could find the road back to Daniella Blackstone’s manor house and safety. If he could lose them in the castle, they’d never track him beyond it.

  If they were still running, he thought, they’d be here by now. They’re stalking you.

  He hugged a lump of broken wall and listened. The rain was falling hard now, bouncing off the weedy, fractured pavement, making the russet stone black and slick so that the castle seemed to fade into the night. What light there had been had dropped to almost nothing. He kept still, but he knew that he might neither see nor hear them till they were on top of him.

  The rain surged harder still, drumming the ground. It cooled him, which was all to the good. His heart was thumping in his chest, the ache in his shoulder had become a constant throbbing, and his breathing was heavy. Maybe the downpour would make him harder to spot. He moved deeper into the shadows, his eyes on the tops of the walls ahead to keep himself oriented. He could see the jutting bay window of the great hall ahead and, to his left, the taller ruin of the Saintlowe Tower. A few more yards that way, he thought, and he’d be through to the great hall, then down to the wall and out toward the Blackstone house before his pursuer knew where he was.

  He stood still another moment, straining to hear, peering back into the dark and irregular hollow of the chamber behind him.

  Still nothing.

  He took another step, still looking back the way he had come. Then another. He tried one more but bumped up against something solid and cold. He turned quickly and found a wall.

  No, he thought. There has to be a way through . . .

  Fear gripped him as he scanned the stone for a door or window through to the structures ahead, but there was none. The great chamber might once have connected to the Saintlowe Tower, but it did so on the second floor, which was now gone. At the ground-floor level, there was no passage.

  Thomas turned, his back to the wall. Any moment now his pursuer, finding no way out through Leicester’s building, would round the corner. He kicked off his left shoe, pulled off his sock, and reached into his pockets.

  He was straightening up from his task when he found the man standing there. It was the bald one with the earring, and even in the darkness Thomas could see that his face was hard and impassive. The blade in his hand was short and curved so that it traced three quarters of a circle, ending in a cruel point: a lino cutter. He stood his ground, arms spread, and then he tilted his head very slightly, his eyes still on Thomas, and called over his shoulder,

  “Here!”

  Thomas took a breath.

  “Look,” he said, forcing his fury and terror down into his gut, “I don’t know what you want . . .”

  This was a lie. He knew what they wanted, and it didn’t involve conversation. He had hoped that pretending to misrecognize the situation would make the bald man lower his guard, but it seemed to do the opposite. He tensed, the lino cutter rising a couple of inches, but he took no step and Thomas knew he was waiting for the other guy to join them.

  “I have money,” said Thomas, taking a step forward and turning his right shoulder toward the knife man as if reaching for a wallet, trying to sound weak and apologetic. The other responded as expected, sweeping the blade across Thomas’s stomach.

  Two inches closer and it would have opened him up. As it was, Thomas was ready for it. He pivoted to his right, catching his attacker’s knife hand in his right and pushing it away from him. It took all the strength he had just to deflect the weapon, and his shoulder screamed its protest. In the same instant he brought his left hand with its sockful of heavy coins down hard on the bald head like a mace. The first swipe stunned him, but he didn’t go down, so Thomas— rage pulsing through him like adrenaline—hit him again, harder, catching him just above his right temple. There was a dull thump as the blow connected. The lino cutter fell from the man’s hand as his legs buckled, and he fell like a tree.

  The other would be coming, and who knew what he would be armed with. Thomas picked up the lino cutter, but he didn’t like the brutal feel of it. He pushed it into his pocket and looked around. If he went back, the other guy would see him, maybe meet him. He turned back to the wall, slipped his bare left foot back into his shoe, and started looking for somewhere to climb.

  There was a place in the corner. The chamber wall was no lower, but there was a heap of what looked like rubble but was actually the masonry remains of some great buttress. Thomas looked for handholds and began to climb.

  The stone was slick with the rain, but it didn’t c
rumble in his grasp, and he was able to kick his shoes into crevices just deep enough to bear his weight. He hauled himself up a foot at a time, doing all the work with his left side, till he reached the uneven lip and found himself looking into the shadowy shell of the great hall where Henry V had vowed to turn the dauphin’s tennis balls to gunstones . . .

  “For many a thousand widows shall this his mock mock out of their dear husbands, mock mothers from their sons, mock castles down . . .”

  Back where he had come from he heard a shouted curse. Thomas’s other pursuer had found his companion. For a second Thomas crouched motionless beside the fractured bay window of the hall, gazing back and down through the rain like some medieval gargoyle, glaring through the darkness.

  He slung one leg over the wall and lowered himself down, hanging for a second and dropping the last two feet into a silent crouch. Then he moved quickly and lightly, straight through the hall cellars toward the inner court, slowing to a halt before making a break from the shadows. He could feel the lino cutter in his pocket and the weight of the coins dangling from his left hand. He was angry, outraged by the attack still, but he didn’t want to fight if he could avoid it, and not only because he might lose.

  The great hall was above him, open to the sky and the driving rain. The building had long windows down the sides so that the structure felt little more than a stone frame, narrow columns of rock and great revealing spaces. He felt vulnerable, but the thought of making a break for it, of dashing into the openness of the courtyard, was terrifying. Again he tried to remember what he had seen when he had visited in daylight.

  There were towers and a complex of rooms to the left of the entrance to the hall cellars, but he knew he had exited the castle over there when he had been in daylight. Somewhere. There was a doorway, small, hard to see, that led down the embankment to the perimeter wall. He was sure of it. He leaned fractionally out, and there was his other pursuer, only yards away.

  He was turning very slowly on the spot, his hands splayed. One of them grasped what looked like a nightstick or a piece of pipe. He seemed disoriented, but he was being calm, professional . . .

  Thomas flattened himself inside the stone alcove at the entrance and waited to see which way he went. After a moment, he risked another look, shifting fractionally, his cheek mashed hard against the stone.

  The man with the stick was nowhere to be seen.

  Thomas leaned out farther and looked all around, including up. If he could climb, so could they. Then he looked left and saw the doorway into one of the towers. The Strong Tower. Suddenly, he was sure. Down there, he remembered was a long spiral to a storeroom that felt like a dungeon. But farther back, lost in the shadows of the chambers above it, was the almost invisible exit he had been looking for.

  He gambled. The door into the tower was more obvious, and if his pursuer had gone in there he had a moment, but probably no more than that.

  He ran, as lightly as his driving and uneven gait would let him, past the Strong Tower, under the second and third stories of the hall, and through the narrow door that led to the rolling mounds of the outer courtyard and the curtain wall. The rain was falling harder than ever, and he was moving on memory now, skirting north, past the window with the iron grill that looked out over the fields that had once been the mere. Then to the Swan Tower, and the tumble of stone he vaulted like a country stile, and he was out.

  There was no sign of pursuit.

  CHAPTER 37

  Thomas sat on the edge of his bed and removed the dressing from his shoulder. It had started to bleed again. He swabbed at it with cotton doused with an antiseptic called Dettol that his wary landlady had given him, and then retaped it as best he could. He took double his usual pain medication, then lay on his back, trying not to move. It took him twenty minutes to fall asleep, twenty minutes of staring blankly at the dark ceiling, mapping the contours of its plaster in his mind, and he was still in the same position when he woke the following day, having slept through breakfast.

  The landlady scowled, but cooked him a fat sausage, fried egg, mushrooms, and—for reasons he couldn’t quite grasp—baked beans, telling him he needed to build up his strength. He hadn’t told her what had caused the wound in his shoulder or what had happened to him the night before, so he figured he just looked like hell. Her scowl deepened when he asked her for directions to the local police station.

  Thomas fished in his pocket and drew out a clear plastic bag containing the lino cutter with its almost circular hook of a blade.

  “Nasty little weapon,” said the policeman.

  “I thought you could check it for prints,” said Thomas.

  “An excellent idea, sir, thank you.”

  The policeman was so deadpan that Thomas wasn’t absolutely sure if he was being sarcastic. The whole exchange had been like this since he had showed up at the station. Everyone was businesslike and formal, but there was an edge of humor to everything they said, a slightly ironic dryness that Thomas found disorienting. While he had been waiting to give the details of his attack, he had heard the beginning of an exchange between a cop and some guy who had come in to pay a traffic ticket. The police officer had checked the details and remarked,

  “Good morning, wing commander. Couldn’t quite reach takeoff speed, could we?”

  The other guy had shrugged and smiled in a sheepish fashion before drifting after him to pay his fine.

  The policeman assigned to Thomas’s case—a Constable Robson—had responded with similar witty detachment.

  “And you led these men into the castle because you figured you could dump boiling oil on them or shut the portcullis on their horses, did you, sir?”

  “Well, no,” said Thomas, bewildered and responding as if that had been a real question, “it was just close by and I had been there recently, so I figured I might know it better than the guys who were after me.”

  “It was close by,” the constable repeated. “Handy, even.”

  “Right.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” the policeman said, smiling amiably. “I mean, it’s not often that you can hide from muggers in a castle, is it? I’ll bet they built it with you in mind.”

  “Are you saying you don’t believe me?” said Thomas, genuinely unsure.

  “Certainly not, sir,” said the constable, still cheery. “I’m just remarking on the handiness of the castle’s locale in relation to that of your pursuit and subsequent assault.”

  “I could give you a description of the two men,” said Thomas.

  “Absolutely,” shrugged the genial cop, “why not? They weren’t wearing armor or carrying some sort of battering ram, were they? Only that might make them easier to spot in the high street.”

  “I’m afraid not,” said Thomas, trying to decide if he was irritated or amused.

  “Well that’s a pity. We get so few bands of medieval marauders these days up for a weekend’s pillaging, that they would have stood right out. As it is . . .”

  “There’s probably not much you can do,” said Thomas.

  “It’s a question of man-hours,” said Constable Robson. “You weren’t robbed. You weren’t injured. You may have been scared, but that’s a tough thing to devote resources to. I mean, I’m scared of Angelina Jolie. And Cliff Richard, actually. Gives me the willies. Never been able to explain it. Anyway, you see my problem.”

  “Yes,” said Thomas, smiling now.

  “But I thank you for the lino cutter. I was planning to remodel my kitchen and this will come in right handy. Only kidding, sir. We’ll get this checked out, and give you a bell if anything comes up.”

  “Sightings of marauders, for instance,” said Thomas.

  “Vikings, perhaps,” the cop agreed. “We haven’t seen any round here for centuries, so they’re due for a rampage.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Back on the high street, Thomas asked a suited man where he could find a liquor store and got a blank stare.

  “A place to buy wine,” he
tried.

  “A pub or a bar?”

  “To take home.”

  “Oh,” said the man, light dawning, “you mean an off license.”

  “Okay,” Thomas shrugged.

  “There’s a Threshers on the Warwick Road,” said the man, pointing. “Nice not to have to work, eh? Have one for me.”

  Thomas wasn’t sure if this was friendly banter or mockery for being jobless, so he just smiled, thanked him, and followed his pointing finger.

  After last night, he was ready for a drink, but had no intention of buying except, he told himself, for research purposes. He located the so-called off license and paced the aisles of wine racks till he located the champagne selection. It was, unlike the standard American supermarket selection, all French except for a bottle or two of Italian spumantes and an English brand called Nyetimber Classic Cuvée. There was Moët Hennessy, Taittinger, and Louis Roederer. No Saint Evremond.

  “Help you find something, sir?”

  The man was portly and wearing a green apron. He had a clipboard in one hand and carried his head to one side like a solicitous chicken.

  “A friend of mine recommended a champagne house to me, but I can’t find it anywhere,” Thomas lied. “Saint Evremond.”

  “No, I’m afraid we don’t stock that, sir,” said the proprietor. “Saint Evremond, you said? I’m not familiar with the name. Hang on a sec and I’ll look it up.”

  He waddled away and returned with a hefty and well-thumbed tome with a torn dust jacket sporting the title A Companion to Wine. He flipped it open and started riffling through, running one fat index finger down the entries repeating the name under his breath.