His face looked pained as he studied the rolling line of hills to the right of the dirt road. Then his eyes widened as he spotted the flat-topped hill. ‘That one! There! You see it! Yes!’
Maddy followed the direction of his claw-nailed finger. The hills followed each other in almost symmetrical humps, some topped with villas, spilling hair-thin threads of smoke into the morning sky. But the one with the flat top was distinctive, as if a cheese-slice had scooped its crown off.
‘You sure?’
‘Yes! Y-yes!’ His eyes narrowed, his mouth widened with a manic grin. ‘Needed a flat place! Big … open … flat! Yes? An open place to mark out! Yes! Me and SpongeBubba!’
‘SpongeBubba?’
Rashim ignored her. ‘That’s it! That’s it! That’s the place!’ His eyes were wet with tears. ‘I never thought … I … I …’
‘And how long have we got?’
‘He said three days last night,’ said Bob. ‘Which would mean we have two days now.’
Maddy wiped sweat from her eyes and squinted through scratched glasses at the distant hill. It wasn’t that much of a hike for them. An hour at most. Then, once they were certain they had the precise location, they desperately needed to find something to drink. Even spoiled water would do. Anything. She’d worry about disease some other time – when they got back home.
‘Are you sure Caligula doesn’t know where to come?’ asked Sal.
Maddy bit her lip. ‘Does he know, Rashim? Does he know where your people arrived?’
Rashim smiled. ‘Stories … and stories. Mr Muzzy and me –’
‘Rashim! Does he know?’
He cocked his head. ‘We … kept secrets. We told … stories … we –’
‘I’d take that as a no,’ said Sal.
Maddy reached out and grabbed Rashim’s thin arm. ‘But he knows it’s sometime soon? Doesn’t he?’
Rashim nodded.
‘And by now he’ll know you’re missing.’ Maddy frowned. ‘He’ll be looking for you, won’t he? Does he know the Exodus people travelled in from the north-east?’
Rashim closed his eyes. ‘The day the Visitors came … in chariots of gold …’ His sing-song reverie wandered off into gibberish again.
‘There is only one main road into Rome from that direction,’ said Bob. ‘It is this one.’
‘Then let’s get off of it!’ Maddy scanned the road in both directions. It was deserted, except for a pale speck kicking up dust a mile away. A solitary cart or trader. Hopefully. Or perhaps a Praetorian scout – one of many sent in every direction, along every road out of Rome, looking for them. She didn’t want to waste another moment finding out.
‘Come on,’ she said, pointing towards the flat-topped hill. She could see there were trees around the base of it, even though it was a bald hill on top. They could hide somewhere in there for a day or two; wait it out until Rashim’s advance party were supposed to arrive.
‘Let’s go.’
CHAPTER 79
AD 54, outside Rome
‘Dry wood, that’s the secret,’ said Liam. ‘If it’s totally dried out, like charcoal, you don’t get any smoke at all.’
Maddy gazed at the fire. It was barely visible in the daylight. A few wisps of smoke from the cones and branches they’d thrown on, turning grey as transparent flames consumed them and the air above danced with the heat. There was, of course, the pleasant, always welcoming smell of a fire. It would carry, but no one was going to see where it was coming from. Certainly not from that road they’d left earlier.
She raised a hand to her eyes, and peered through the gently wafting evergreen branches of cypress trees at the road, two or three miles away. The weather was so dry this summer, anybody using it would kick up a plume of dust. She could see nothing.
Sizzling on a wooden spit were several wild hares Bob had caught for them, skinned from neck to lean shanks and naked except for furry heads and furry booties. Normally she’d be queasy at eating an animal she could recognize, but her mouth was salivating at the smell of them cooking, the savoury tang of crisping meat.
Rashim sat hunched over beside the fire, drooling at the glistening meat, chuckling at the sound of fat spitting into the fire.
Maddy glanced out once again through the branches of the hillside wood at the distant road. ‘I think we’re safe now.’ They’d seen a party of cavalry thundering along an hour ago, leaving dust trails behind them. From this distance they could have been anyone, but they’d seemed to have a purposeful, disciplined look about them.
Rashim had laughed gleefully as they’d passed by. Laughing that Caligula was going to miss his precious ‘rendezvous with Heaven’. They’d seen no one else since then, though. She looked at him curled over beside the fire. She studied the pitiful skeleton of a man. Malnutrition and complete darkness for so many years: she wondered how a human body could cope with that.
Downhill, through the trees, she could hear the faint splash of water. Bob and Sal were rinsing their tunics in a small brook. Clean water. Drinkable water, not like the rancid Tiber. They’d bring some back when they were done.
Maddy wandered over to where Liam sat, perched on a boulder that afforded him a view down the side of the hill. ‘I guess we ought to get some air to your wound.’ She nodded at the bandage tied firmly round his waist. There were a few spots of dark, dried blood that had soaked through. The wound must have opened while they were fleeing the palace, wading through sewage. Actually, as soon as they got back home, they were probably going to have to pump Liam so full of antibiotics he was going to rattle like a pill bottle.
Liam shrugged. ‘All right. Just be gentle with me now, Mads.’
‘Oh, tsk-tsk. Don’t be such a baby.’ She worked the bandage loose. ‘I’ll be careful.’
He winced as she unravelled the material. ‘Sorry. Hurts?’
‘Naw, not exactly. A little tender … just –’ he looked anxiously at her – ‘just worried this is the only thing holding me together.’ He laughed edgily. Not entirely joking.
‘Oh, I think you’ll mend.’ She smiled. There was something about Liam that felt indestructible. Maybe it was that stupid lopsided grin of his. Maybe God really did exist and spent his full shift every day looking after devil-may-care idiots like him.
‘Ouch! Go easy!’
‘Sorry.’
Even though she could see traces of ageing in his face, the silver flecks in his hair, that plume of grey hair at his temple … somehow she couldn’t quite imagine him as Foster yet. As that poor, frail, dying old man. Or perhaps maybe she just didn’t want to.
He should know.
‘Here we go,’ she said. The last layer was still damp. Blood that was not quite dry. She eased the material away from his skin, stuck to it as if by glue.
‘More slowly, please,’ he whimpered nervously.
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ She grimaced as his pale skin tugged at her soft pull.
She eased the last of it away and realized, as she looked at the puckered line of his wound, there was never going to be the perfect time to tell him … just a time. Too many secrets had already got in the way of them as a team, as friends. This was the last of them. She looked across at Rashim, muttering like Gollum as he sat on his haunches and studied the glistening meat.
‘Liam?’
‘Aye … how is it?’
‘Liam … you’re dying.’
‘What? It’s just a cut –’
‘No, Liam, listen … time travel, it’s actually killing you.’
He frowned. ‘What the devil are you going on about now?’
‘Foster told me. Going back in time, it ages you. It accelerates the ageing process.’
That silenced him.
She pointed at his temple. ‘Liam, come on, you must have noticed –’
‘Of course I have. I’m not blind.’ He took the bandage out of her hands and began winding it back round himself. ‘I’m not stupid either.’
‘Liam. I –’
/> ‘It’s killing me.’ He sighed. ‘I know that.’
‘You know?’
He paused then nodded. ‘I suspected as much.’ He busied himself winding the bandage again. ‘When we came back from the Cretaceous time. Edward Chan, that girl, Laura? I think I guessed it then that time travel made them sick.’
Maddy nodded. ‘They both took a lethal hit. It’s a bit like radiation poisoning – there’s no recovery. It does its damage and there’s no way back from it.’
‘That doesn’t sound so good.’
‘No, not good.’ She heard something in her voice she didn’t need right now. ‘Here, let me help you.’ She took the bandage back off him and finished the job with a knot. ‘I’m so sorry, Liam. I’m so very sorry. I should’ve told you as soon as I knew.’
She expected anger. Instead, she got a smile out of him. A heartbreaking one; the wistful, moist-eyed sort that old war veterans give on Patriot’s Day.
‘Liam?’
‘I got some extra time, Maddy. That’s a bleedin’ gift, so it is.’
Oh God, Liam, why can’t you just be angry with me? That would have been easier to cope with.
‘And I’ve already seen so many incredible things with that time.’ He grinned. ‘I’m up on the deal. What’s to be all down about there, eh?’
‘There’s something else.’
‘What?’
‘Liam … you’re Foster.’
‘Uh?’
‘You are Foster.’
He laughed. ‘I’m not as cantankerous as that old –’
‘No. Liam … I’m saying you are Foster. You’re the same person.’
For the second time in as many minutes she’d managed to shut him up.
‘I don’t know how that is. I don’t know how it works that you two are the same person; it’s just what Foster told me.’ She was struggling to explain it. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the loop we live in. Maybe we’ve all been here before and we don’t remember it. Maybe history and us, we’re on some big wheel that just goes round and round. I don’t know. All I know is what Foster told me.’
‘Right …’ Liam’s eyes were on Rashim’s sunken, tortured body, folds of skin drooping from bones that seemed to almost poke through in places. ‘Right …’
‘There are no more secrets now, Liam. That’s it. You know everything I know.’
He looked down at the hands in his lap. ‘Old man hands,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what me mam always said I had. All knobbly knuckles.’
‘Liam …?’ She rested a hand lightly on his arm. ‘Liam … I don’t know exactly what it means that you and Foster are the same, but it’s something important. Important to all three of us. We have to think it through. We need to talk it through. When we get back, we’ll do that. The three of us, we’ll –’
She could hear branches cracking, Bob and Sal’s voices. They were returning from the brook.
He nodded. ‘OK.’
Just then they emerged from beneath the shade of a tree with a cracked clay jug in Bob’s arms. ‘We found this!’ said Sal. ‘So Bob’s humped some water up for you.’
‘About time,’ croaked Liam. He even managed that stupid goofy grin for the pair of them.
‘We should eat,’ said Maddy.
Rashim nodded. ‘Yes, eat! Eat!’
‘Aye! I’m bleedin’ starvin’! We was just about to start on them coneys without you, so we were.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘Right?’
She could have wrapped her arms round him then and there, squeezed him blue just for Liam being Liam.
‘Yeah.’
CHAPTER 80
AD 54, outside Rome
‘Are you absolutely positive it was today?’
Rashim nodded, although not as vigorously or as confidently as Sal would have liked. ‘Today, yes, of course, of course, of course it is! … I remember!’ he muttered irritably.
They sat in a line in the shade of a row of bushes looking out across the flat top of the hill. Wild parched grass and heather swayed gently in the light breeze. They’d been sitting here in the shade as the day had warmed up, gradually sweltering, cooking in their own sweat as the morning passed interminably slowly and the sun beat down on the arid countryside.
Sal sighed. She wasn’t so sure this mad old fool was going to be their ticket home. He was too skittish. Too unhinged. Too completely weird and schizo to seem reliable. She looked at his lean face, all ridges and old scars; his wiry grey hair in tangled tufts, bald patches here and there like an attack of alopecia. Worst of all, his mouth: rotten gums and brown stumps of dead teeth. His breath was almost unbearable – like decaying meat.
She wondered how old he was. Seventy? Eighty? It was almost impossible to guess. But then, as Maddy had eloquently pointed out last night, seventeen years spent in a wooden box was going to ‘mess anyone up pretty good’.
‘Midday. Midday. Oh yes! Yes! It was about midday,’ Rashim muttered to himself.
But then again he’d said last night they’d arrived first thing in the morning, which was why they’d been sitting here like a row of gullible morons since daybreak.
‘Maddy?’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘If we do manage to get back to the archway, what if those “Bobs” who were after us are still there? You know? Waiting for us.’
‘We’ll just have to be ready to fight them.’ Maddy closed her eyes. ‘There were two of them left, weren’t there? A male and a female.’
‘I think so.’
‘Bob can handle the male … the rest of us –’ she glanced at Liam – ‘I’m sure between us we can handle the female one.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s if we can even get back.’
‘It may be possible that the tachyon beacons can be adapted to return a signal to our field office,’ said Bob.
If they turn up. And frankly Sal was pretty sure today was going to pass by without incident, the four of them listening to this old loon muttering, ‘Tomorrow will be the day … of course it is … I remember now!’
And the next day. And the next.
‘I don’t want to be stuck here,’ she said.
‘I know,’ sighed Maddy. ‘None of us do.’
‘It is coming soon,’ said Rashim. ‘I promise. Yes!’ His rheumy old eyes took in the wild meadow. ‘This is the place … for certain, yes.’ A long slender finger pointed out at the swaying grass. ‘Right there … me. That’s the spot I arrive.’
Sal nodded, less than convinced. She wanted to say, ‘Yeah. But what if you’re a whole year out? Huh? What then, Mr Genius?’ But she didn’t. It wasn’t going to help any. The mood was already pretty sombre out here. The other two, particularly Liam, seemed unusually quiet and distracted. Normally they could count on him to fuel them all with a generous helping of unrealistic optimism. And if not that, to say something pretty stupid and make them laugh.
‘Maybe I’ll go and get us some more water,’ she said.
No one answered. ‘Liam? You thirsty?’
He seemed to be a million miles away.
‘Maddy?’
She stirred as if she’d been poked. ‘Uh?’
‘Water? You want some?’
‘Uh … er, yeah. OK, yes, that would be good.’ She looked across and smiled. ‘Be careful, ’kay? Remember to keep out of sight. Those scouts are out there.’
They’d seen a few more yesterday, in pairs, careering along distant tracks and roads, almost certainly looking for them.
Sal picked their cracked jug up, got to her feet and turned to head down the slope, through the trees to the babbling brook at the bottom of the hill. She decided she might just sit with her feet in the cool water for a while. And there were several fig trees down there. She could pick a few and bring them back for lunch. That might cheer this miserable lot up.
‘Be back in a bit,’ she said. Not that anyone seemed to hear her.
Sal ducked beneath the low branches, picking her way slowly downhill past the humps of tree roots that surfaced from the
hard clay soil like the backs of writhing sea serpents.
‘Wait, Saleena!’ A deep voice.
She turned to see Bob crouching under the low, thorny branches to join her. ‘Maddy sent me to watch you,’ he said as he ducked past her and pushed his way through undergrowth and low pine needle branches.
‘Oh, so I’m not the invisible girl today, then?’
Bob looked back at her. Puzzled. ‘No. I see you quite clearly.’
She joined him. ‘Bob, can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m scared of those things … those other support units. Why –’ she stepped over a gnarled root – ‘why were they trying to kill us?’
‘I have no information on their mission, Saleena.’
‘You saw one of them, though, right? They looked exactly like you. Did they come from the same place as you? Are they like brothers and sisters or something?’
He stepped ahead and pushed the branches of a thick bush aside for her. She could see the glint of the stream below, a thread of silver curling its way through weather-worn boulders of flint and sandstone.
‘The unit I saw appeared to be almost identical. Most likely from the same foetus batch. I registered his AI ident only briefly. His software was only one iteration newer than mine. Inception date 2057.’
‘Hold on.’ She run-stepped the last few yards down a steep bank and stopped herself against one of the boulders, blistering hot to the touch. ‘Hold on,’ she said again, ‘you make it sound like the same people … the same company made you.’
Bob scuttled down, keeping an ungainly balance. ‘Correct. The unit I encountered was also manufactured by W.G. Systems.’
‘Who are they? W.G. Systems? They like a weapons manufacturer or something?’
Bob settled down on the hot stones beside the stream. ‘I will fill your jug if you like.’
She handed it to him. ‘Thanks.’
‘They are one of the largest profitable organizations at the time of my inception. I have only common-source market information on them.’
‘Well, that’ll do.’
‘The company was founded in 2048 by Roald Waldstein. The same year –’