Time Riders

by Alex Scarrow

  Liam looked at them and struggled hard not to grin proudly.

  My own little army of tin soldiers.

  ‘I’d like to hang on to them, please,’ said Liam.

  John frowned for a moment, then understood what he meant. ‘’Tis so, then.’ He placed a hand on Liam’s shoulder. ‘Bring me back what was taken, Liam. Before ’tis too late.’

  He nodded. ‘Aye, Sire. We’ll get it back.’

  ‘I do have one condition I insist on.’ He nodded at Becks. ‘Lady Rebecca will stay here in Oxford with me.’

  Liam drew back. ‘What?’

  John tipped his head subtly and a pair of soldiers appeared from nowhere and grasped her upper arms. Liam heard the scrape of a sword being drawn and Bob getting ready to swing it.

  ‘Bob, stop!’ he shouted. He spun round to face Becks. Already she had one hand round the throat of the unfortunate man to her right, squeezing his larynx. His eyes bulged and his feet shuffled and scraped against the flagstones.

  ‘Becks! Put him down!’

  She stared at the man defiantly for a moment, before releasing her grip. ‘As you wish.’ The man gasped, dropped to his knees hacking and coughing up phlegm on to the ground.

  John puffed anxiously. ‘Good grief!’

  ‘She’s a feisty one, Sire,’ said Cabot. ‘She can fight just as well as any man I’ve seen.’

  ‘So it appears,’ said John. ‘Nonetheless I insist she remain here until you return with … it.’

  They could fight their way out of here, out of the keep. Liam knew that between Bob and Becks this courtyard would be nothing but a carpet of dead and dying men on the flagstones inside a minute. But he suspected a more intelligent solution was needed.

  ‘May my friends and I talk in private for a moment, Sire?’

  John sniffed. ‘If you wish.’ He waved a hand and the soldier standing beside Becks helped his colleague to his feet and took him across the courtyard to join the other guards, where a soft hubbub of laughter and ribbing ensued – a grown man, a King’s guard … bettered by a girl!

  John took a dozen slow steps back from Liam and started humming tunelessly.

  Liam, Becks, Bob and Cabot converged and began talking with muted voices.

  ‘We should stay together!’ said Liam. ‘You’ll miss the return window if we leave you down here!’

  ‘The scheduled window,’ said Bob, ‘is due in three days, one hour and –’

  ‘The one-hour back-up window will follow and there will be another after that in ten days’ time,’ interrupted Becks. ‘We also have the final back-up set for five months, twenty-six days, one hour and seventeen minutes from now.’

  Liam realized Becks seemed to be making a point. ‘You’re suggesting you stay here?’

  ‘Affirmative. There may be an opportunity to acquire tactically useful data here: additional information on the Treyarch Confession.’

  Bob nodded. ‘She is correct. Also, now that we have a method of communication with the field office we will also be able to provide them a separate time and location stamp for Becks.’

  He was right, they could open a portal right here for her. She wouldn’t need to make her way up to Kirklees. Liam looked at her. ‘You’re OK with this?’

  ‘It is the correct tactical choice,’ she replied.

  Liam glanced at John, looking up impatiently at the sky and still humming. ‘I think he’s got a bit of a thing for you, Becks.’

  ‘A thing?’

  ‘You know … I think he fancies you.’

  Cabot snorted a dry laugh, then quickly blessed himself with a guilty glance to the heavens.

  ‘Yes! You’ll have to be careful!’

  ‘I will be able to deal with him,’ she replied calmly. ‘I will use his … desires and motivations … to my advantage.’

  ‘You can’t let him know you’re some sort of robot from the future,’ said Liam. ‘Do you understand? That’s too much contamination.’

  Becks studied Liam for a moment, then her cold, emotionless face seemed to melt, transforming into a warm and sensual smile. She tossed her dark hair for good measure. Liam felt something flutter inside him … desire?

  Oh come on, Liam. Meat robot, remember?

  ‘My AI has already learned much. I have observed female rituals. I have also read Harry Potter. I know what body language and verbal inflections work most efficiently on human males.’ The smile remained on her face – teasing, encouraging, bewitching. She even managed a wink: clumsy and forced, but still enough to make his heart flutter. ‘I will be fine, Liam O’Connor.’

  She will at that.

  Liam nodded. ‘All right, then. You stay here. See what you can find out. We’ll let the field office know exactly where you are so they can beam a tachyon signal to you. If something goes wrong, Becks … if for some reason Maddy doesn’t contact you with a schedule for a window here, make sure you get to Kirklees in time for the six-monther. Do you understand?’

  ‘Affirmative. I have no wish to self-terminate.’

  ‘All right, then … that’s that.’ He looked at Bob and Cabot, nodded, then turned to face John. ‘Lady Rebecca agrees to stay, so she does.’

  ‘Of course she does,’ said John. ‘I will make her most comfortable.’

  Liam stepped forward and offered John a polite nod. ‘We’ll be off now, Sire.’

  ‘Please waste no time, Liam,’ said John. A momentary flicker of tension crossed his face. ‘I have heard rumours King Richard is already in France.’

  ‘We’ll be back before you can say póg mo thóin.’

  John’s heavy brows locked in mild confusion again. For a moment his lips pursed as if he was going to actually have a go at saying it.

  ‘It’s just a turn of phrase where I come from, Sire.’

  ‘Right.’ He dismissed Liam with a curt nod. Liam turned and pulled himself up into the back of Cabot’s cart. Bob followed him up, the cart’s axles creaking under his weight.

  ‘It has been good to see an old friend again,’ John called out to Cabot. ‘Lord knows ’tis been a while since I’ve had one.’

  ‘We shan’t return empty-handed, Sire.’ Cabot clacked his tongue and goaded the horses to life with a sharp tug on the reins. The cart slowly clattered forward across flagstones towards the castle’s front gate. Liam looked out of the back canvas to see the men – his men – forming up and dutifully falling in behind them: a short column of ruddy-faced soldiers in dull chain mail, marching heavily in their wake.

  He caught one last glimpse of Becks, that teasing smile of hers packed away for later use. She nodded a farewell at him as they clattered beneath the archway and out on to the bridge.

  CHAPTER 35

  2001, New York

  Sal watched Adam across the archway, bustling around their kettle and fridge, making them some tea.

  ‘Are we not telling too much?’ she asked Maddy. ‘Showing him too much? I thought Foster said we were, like, this top-secret organization.’

  Maddy looked away from the monitor towards him. ‘I know, I know,’ she muttered guiltily. ‘But I … he’s useful, Sal. We need him.’

  ‘So what happens, though … when we’ve fixed things up and it’s all back to normal? What’re we going to do with him then?’

  Maddy said nothing … which Sal misinterpreted. Her eyes suddenly lit up. ‘He can stay?’

  ‘No!’ she replied quickly. ‘No – we can’t recruit him!’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘He can’t stay, Sal. He can’t. I just can’t take in anyone we – just because we, you know? Just because we like them.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because this is a team already. A four-man team, just like Foster said. The agency is made up of four-person teams. Each with their own role and –’

  ‘But with Becks we’ve already got five in our team!’

  ‘I know! All the more reason not to be taking on any more!’

  They watched Adam pour water from the kettle into severa
l chipped mugs, stirring the tea with a tinkling sound that echoed across the archway.

  ‘So what’re you going to do, Maddy?’

  She sighed. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Because –’ she bit her lip and looked away – ‘he’s not going to last very long.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I checked his name, Sal. Checked it against the roll-call of tomorrow’s victims …’

  Sal’s gaze returned to the desk, to Maddy. ‘Shadd-yah!’ she whispered. ‘No. Tomorrow? Don’t say to me he’s …?’

  Maddy nodded. ‘He works for a company called Sherman–Golding Investment … they’re on the ninety-fifth floor, north tower.’ Maddy realized her voice was wobbling ever so slightly. ‘He’s one of them that never made it out.’

  They heard his footsteps approaching. Both turned to see Adam carrying a steaming mug of tea in each hand.

  ‘Here you ladies are. Nice cuppa.’ He frowned, puzzled. ‘What’s up with you two?’

  Maddy fixed a wide smile on her face. ‘Hey … absolutely nothing.’ She reached for her tea. ‘Thanks.’

  He glanced back at the kitchen table. ‘I’ll just go get the biccies. Mum always said a cuppa tea’s too wet without something to dunk in it.’

  They watched him go. And Maddy found herself wondering what sort of a person this job was turning her into – that she could just knowingly let someone as likeable as Adam walk blindly to his death.

  CHAPTER 36

  1194, Nottingham

  The town of Nottingham glowed in the dark. Not the welcoming glow of lanterns and night-watch fires but from several buildings set aflame.

  As the cart and its escort of guards slowly approached the entrance to the town, their ears picked up the faint ring and clatter of melee weapons and the roar of a defiant crowd.

  Through an open and unmanned gatehouse they entered the walled town to see a thoroughfare cluttered and messy with broken slats of wood. A funeral pyre burned in the middle, stacked with a dozen corpses. The smell of cooking human flesh made Liam gag.

  Cabot sitting beside him on the jockey seat turned. ‘All right, lad?’

  ‘Jay-zus! The smell,’ he grunted, wiping a string of dangling bile from his chin. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘’Tis a rebellion, I think.’

  Liam noticed some women and children in rags and on their knees around the fire, presumably grieving for those bodies burning in the flames. He spotted a cart laden with what at first he thought was a pile of bark-stripped firewood, pale knobbly branches of beach or willow. Then he realized he was looking at arms and legs – bodies, stacked on top of each other.

  ‘Starvation and disease has come to Nottingham,’ said Cabot, shaking his head. ‘Farmers no longer work their farms only to have all they yield taken in taxes. So food rots in fields and ’tis the towns that feel it first.’

  ‘Where is everyone?’

  Cabot tipped his head towards the centre of the town where it seemed most of the night’s amber glow and the roar of voices, the ring of blades, seemed to be coming from.

  ‘I’ll wager they are turning on the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle.’

  Cabot reached through the canvas into the cart, pulled out his sword and sheath and rested it across his lap as he goaded the horses forward along a muddy avenue between tumbledown shacks. ‘We may have to fight our way in.’

  The noise and the amber glow increased with intensity as they rounded a bend in the muddy rutted track and finally the crenellated top of a stone wall came into view. Along its base a sea of humanity swarmed by the light of hundreds of flaming torches. Activity seemed to be focused around two large thick oak gates at the base of a guard tower. From the confusion and movement amid dancing shadows and flickering firelight, Liam guessed the people of Nottingham were doing their very best to attempt to build a bonfire against the gates. The soldiers on the wall were in turn firing crossbow bolts down into the crowd, and ducking back to avoid being pelted with stones and javelins and one or two arrows.

  One of the guards John had assigned to escort them jogged forward to the cart. Edward – Eddie, he seemed to be called. The other men deferred to him although they all seemed to share the same rank.

  ‘Sire,’ he called up to Liam. ‘If those see us here … they will turn on us!’

  He was right. It seemed none of the hundreds in front of them had yet noticed the cart and its escort tucked back in the shadows of the alleyway between a long thatched granary and a thresher’s mill.

  ‘We’ll have to fight our way in,’ said Liam.

  ‘Sire?’ Eddie stared up at him with astonishment. He looked like he’d seen a fair few battles in his time with, like Cabot, a face that had taken its share of damage. But that command seemed to unsettle him. ‘Sire … that would be suicide!’

  Liam nodded uncertainly. It didn’t look too good. But then they did have Bob. He turned in his seat. ‘Uh … Bob?’ He realized his mouth was dry and his voice fluttered with nerves. He hated how every other man around him seemed to manage not to sound like a quaking child, and yet he sounded to his own ears like a boy still.

  Bob’s bristly head emerged through the flap of canvas.

  ‘We need you to do your thing.’

  ‘Affirmative,’ his voice rumbled, and he disappeared back through the flap. A moment later the cart wobbled as Bob emerged from the back and dropped heavily to the ground. He strode to the front of the cart, his chain mail jangling and clinking. He stood beside the driver’s seat, his head almost on a level with Liam’s and surveyed the scene ahead. ‘You intend for us to enter the defensive structure ahead?’

  Liam felt his stomach twitching and writhing with apprehension. He nodded. ‘What do you think, Bob? Can we do it?’

  Bob gave it some thought and eventually nodded. ‘I estimate a high probability of success. Eighty –’

  ‘I d-don’t want to hear a number! Please!’

  Bob nodded obediently. He reached up with a big ape hand and patted Liam’s shoulder heavily. ‘Do not be afraid, Liam. I will clear a way.’

  He looked at the soldiers. All of them had unslung their shields from their backs and unsheathed their swords, ready for action.

  ‘Have the guards form up behind me, either side of the cart.’ Bob glanced at Liam, his eyes lost beneath the firm ridge of his brow and the rim of his chain-mail coif. ‘And stay close to me.’

  Liam looked at Cabot. ‘Got that?’

  He nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, aye … I’ll stay right close.’

  Liam gave Eddie the order to have his men form up in two rows of six either side of the cart and then nodded at Bob that they were ready.

  Bob turned towards the crowd and strode forward, a longsword held aloft in one hand. The cart rolled along behind him, both horses skittish and nervous, snorting their unease, and the flanking guards moved with it, hunkered down behind their shields.

  The first heads in the crowd turned towards them as they emerged from the shadows, voices raised, alerting others. Liam could almost see the idea spreading from one to another: an easier target than the sheriff’s castle, an easier target on which to vent their rage. A dozen soldiers to make a brutal example of, and a cart no doubt loaded with gold sovereigns or, better still, food destined for the sheriff’s table.

  A roar of excitement and anger rolled across the crowd, the goal of setting fire to the castle’s gates forgotten for now.

  Oh boy. Liam had no weapon to clasp. Right now he’d give anything to be holding one of those Nazi pulse rifles in his hands. Even unloaded, the weight of it would have felt better than twiddling his thumbs.

  Just ahead of them Bob’s purposeful stride switched to a slow loping jog. Cabot barked at his horses and the cart picked up a little more speed, while Eddie and his men broke into a trot beside them.

  The castle wall loomed before them. Above the roar of the crowd Liam could hear raised voices from the wall. Perhaps they’d recognized the
round helmets and long shields of their guard as king’s men and were preparing to open the gates for them. The crowd, though, looked unwilling as yet to part, despite the imposing form of Bob’s seven-foot frame.

  A cluster of a dozen men – by the look of them, not townsfolk carrying little more than pitchforks and stones, but more like the brigands who had jumped them in the woods – squared up to Bob’s approach. Liam caught sight of the rusted glint of a sword’s blade swinging round at Bob’s head. He deftly ducked the blow and shouldered into the man with the force of a charging bull, knocking him back into the crowd and a dozen people off their feet.

  One of the men took the opportunity, with Bob adjusting his balance, to lunge a pike at his stomach. The tip of it bit deep into his mail, breaking some chains, piercing his skin and going some way inside. Bob responded with a roundhouse sweep of his longsword that cleaved into the side of the man, cutting him completely in two, the momentum continuing into the shoulder of the man standing beside him. Both men collapsed as Bob jerked the pike’s blade clear of the torn tissue and shattered bone and prepared to swing it again in the other direction, but the rest of the men quickly pulled back.

  Meanwhile, halted by the exchange in front, the cart and the guards were fending off the closing press of people either side. Missiles of all kinds clattered down on them: stones, sticks, chunks of broken masonry.

  Something punched Liam’s shoulder. He screamed out in pain and grasped where he’d been hit. There was blood. Beside his legs Eddie’s shield clattered and clanged from the missiles raining down on them.

  ‘Sire!’ Eddie called up, jabbing the tip of his sword to ward off the nearest of the rioters. ‘Sire! We must keep moving!’