Down: Trilogy Box Set (12 page)

“Why do you have these?”

“They serve a number of functions. In a world where one cannot deprive a man of his life, banishment to a rotting room is the ultimate punishment. And it serves a practicality. The maimed can be aggregated in discreet places so as not to generally befoul the populated areas or the countryside, though that happens too.”

“How long have they been there?”

“I could not possibly answer that. Some as long as centuries, I should imagine.”

“That’s impossible. A body decays to bones within weeks in the heat.”

“Not in Hell. Human decay is exceedingly slow here. More the cruelty. Come, let us return to my house where we may have more food and drink before we retire for the night.”

“I don’t think I’m ever going to eat again.”

“Of course you will.”

Halfway up the hill John recovered enough to ask the most important question.

“I came here for one reason and one reason only, to find my friend. You seem to be a very well-connected man. Do you know where I can find her?”

“I have heard tell that your woman has been spirited off to Francia on board a ship, in the company of agents of the Duke of Guise.”

“Then take me there. Help me get her back.”

“It is beyond my capacity to do so.”

“I’ll find a way to pay you.”

“It is not a matter of payment. In the morning I will take you to a man who has the capacity to assist you.”

“Who is he?”

“He is the king of this realm, King Henry.”

“Is this a Henry I’d recognize from history?”

“Perhaps so. You would know him as King Henry the Eighth.”

Though she was standing on dry land, Emily still felt the rolling sea pulsing through her legs. The three-masted ship was at anchor off the rocky shore and the small rowing boat that had carried her to the beach was returning to the ship, battling the waves.

It was gray and damp and she felt grubby and in need of a wash. Her clothes, the same skirt, blouse and sensible shoes she had worn on the day of the Hercules experiment were smudged with dirt, her hair was matted and her skin was sooty from the oily lamps below the decks.

“My lady,” the soldier said, “we must go.”

He had been her constant companion during the crossing. As the storm lashed the ship, he reassured her, brought her broth and cushions, and offered apologies for her discomfort. With fair seas and a favorable wind, the passage from Brittania to Francia might take only half a day, he had told her. Unfortunately, the journey from Hastings had taken two gut-wrenching days and nights.

His name was Phillipe Marot. His English was passable, on a similar par to Emily’s French, and between the two of them they’d been able to cobble together an extended conversation. She had learned some basic information during her brief time in Britannia, but Captain Marot had given her a richer knowledge of the surreal world in which she found herself.

Her initial disorientation had been far greater than John’s for she had none of his preparation. In one moment she had been standing in the MAAC control room and in the next, she was in soupy mud in the middle of a rank village, urgently beckoned to come inside a rough cottage by two brothers, one calling himself Dirk, the other Duck. She thought she surely must be dead, until the sniffing lads assured her that she was very much and very strangely alive.

Soon she was in the hands of a foul character named Withers who, after she kicked and punched at his soldiers, had bound her hands and trussed her onto his horse to take her to a large house on a hill to be interrogated by an unctuous man called Solomon Wisdom. Before the light of the next day, confused and angry, an unsavory character named D’Aret who brought her to Hastings, picked her up. There, D’Aret, who repeatedly referred to himself as an ambassador and an agent of someone named the Duke of Guise, delivered her to a coastal house where a party of furtive Frenchmen held her in ropes until the next night when their torches summoned a small boat offshore. Under a moonless sky she had been rowed to a ladder dangling from a large sailing ship whereupon Captain Marot took charge of her.

The whole while she had battled raging anger and abject fear to try to figure out what had happened to her. Without pen and paper she had resorted to doing the math in her head and concluded that what had happened must have been a strangelet-induced phenomenon. She desperately hoped it was reversible. Her rational mind told her that the only conceivable way to return to her own place in space and time was for the Hercules experiment to be re-run with the same high-energy parameters. She had prayed to a God who seemed to be farther away than at any time in her life that her team would know what to do. And with a shudder, she had surmised that to get home again she might have to return to the same spot where she had materialized at the exact time that MAAC was up and running. The conclusion was crushingly apparent.

There might be no return.

Onboard the ship she had been taken to a locked cabin where completely alone for the first time since the ordeal began, she cried a river at the enormity of it all.

Whether she chose to call it Down, as Dirk and Duck called it, or Hell, it had to be some sort of alternative dimension with its own set of bizarre physical rules. Everyone and everything she knew and loved seemed desperately far away. She thought of John and wished she’d allowed him to apologize. The thought of being permanently trapped here, of not seeing him or any of her friends and family again, was so profoundly sad. And as the ship sailed farther and farther away from Britannia, her despair only bloomed.

Marot had heard her sobs and unlocked the door to offer sympathy and to express his wonder that a woman such as her had descended to his unhappy world. In the course of their turbulent crossing she would learn about Captain Marot and what awaited her once they made landfall in Francia.

Francis, Duke of Guise, Marot had told her, was an imperious lord, much feared by ally and foe alike. He had come to Hell in the mid-sixteenth century, the victim of a Huguenot assassin while still a hale and hearty man in his fifth decade. As such, it pained Marot to say, the duke harbored prodigious appetites for the fairer sex, and as a rich and powerful noble, the coin to procure virtually whomever he chose. Spies such as D’Aret were given broad remit to strike deals to secure choice women, and with redness in his cheeks, Marot informed Emily that none were choicer and more exotic than she.

“My European history’s a bit sketchy,” she had said. “I’m afraid I don’t know who this Guise man is. Or was.”

Marot had seemed more intent on her than the question. “Your accent is fetching. Is it of the Highlands?”

“Yes, I’m a Highland lass, born near Inverness.”

“The Guise family played a part in your land’s royal intrigues. The sister of the duke, Mary of Guise, married your king, James the Fifth and birthed your Mary Queen of Scots.”

“A bit before my time.” She had studied his face. He was rather handsome, perhaps in his thirties, with expressive eyes. Perhaps, she thought, she could turn him into an ally. “Tell me, Phillipe. You seem like a nice man, far kinder than the others I’ve met. Why are you here?”

“I am here because I deserve to be here. I participated in a shameful and atrocious act while a soldier in the service of the duke. It was in the year 1562, one year before the duke was killed and ten years before I myself perished in battle. The duke was returning to his castle in Joinville, near Paris, and decided to stop for a rest in one of his villages, Wassy-sur-Blaise. He had heard that the village harbored heretical Protestant tendencies and he wanted to see for himself whether this was true. Hearing church bells and a congregation at prayer inside the church he went inside, and to his dismay, he did hear a most foul, anti-Catholic, Huguenot rant. An argument ensued. I was in the market square myself with a company of gendarmes. Before long I heard shouts and cries. The duke stalked out of the church followed by a throng of villagers—men, women and children, and suddenly the order came to kill these Huguenots. I did not hesitate. I fired my archebuser, reloaded, and fired again and again. Women fell at my hand, children too. When we were done fifty were dead, many more shot through. I carried the shame of that day for the remaining days of my poor life. And here I am, condemned for eternity. My duke was already here when I arrived, already nearly as powerful as he had been on Earth. I found him and he took me into his employ once again. I continue to do foul deeds for him, though I fear none will be so foul as delivering you unto him.”

Now, standing on the rocky shore of the land called Francia, Emily weighed her options. She had no idea what horrors were coming. She might never have a better chance. So, while Marot was having a word with another soldier, an ugly, heavily bearded man, she took off, running as fast as she could down the beach, trying to find patches of flat sand between the rocks for her footfalls.

Marot shouted for her to come back and took after her but the bearded soldier was the faster of the two and caught up with her first. She was grabbed by the hair and thrown roughly to the pebbles and sand. The soldier raised his arm and was about to bring his club-like fist down on her when Marot arrived and thwarted him.

The two men argued while Emily cried in frustration and pain and began to shiver uncontrollably. Marot sent the bearded soldier away to cool off and had a blanket brought to her. He helped her up and surrounded by soldiers, she robotically followed him off the beach toward a cluster of houses.

“Can you ride?” Marot asked.

“Horses?”

“Of course, horses.”

“No.”

“It is of no consequence. There should be a carriage. I am sorry he hurt you. Please do not try to flee again. I can only control them to a point.”

They walked for a half a mile and at a small stone cottage two men emerged and spoke with Marot.

“We might have some food and drink before we embark,” the Captain told her.

“Just some water if it’s clean. My stomach’s still off.”

A covered carriage was brought to the house yoked to a team of four horses, with a cabin only large enough for two. Emily was made to climb in and Marot joined her. Saddled horses were produced for the soldiers and they began their overland journey. Marot told her their destination was the duke’s castle at Joinville and that if all went well they would arrive in the early hours of the following morning. The carriage driver, seated on an open-air bench, flicked the reins and they were off. Marot had a pair of short-barreled archebuser rifles propped against the carriage door and checked the powder to ensure it was dry.

“Are you planning on using them?” Emily asked, clutching the coarse blanket at her throat.

“I hope no, but fear not. If I do, I am an excellent shot.”

She thought of the children he had massacred and said, “Whom might you need to shoot? Isn’t this friendly territory?”

“There is no friendly territory. One is never safe, not even in a lord’s castle. There are thieves and scoundrels at every turn. The countryside belongs to no one and belongs to everyone.”

She decided to make her play. “I don’t suppose you could help me?” she said.

“Help you how?”

“To escape. I need to get back across the channel, to Dartford. I think that’s the only way I can get back to my home. Please help me.”

He looked miserable. “I wish I could, my lady, but there is no place for noble acts in this world. If death were the worst I could suffer, I would happily help you. After all these centuries, death would be sweet. Yet, my fate would not and could not be death. Instead, I would be punished and I would suffer the most vile consequences for all of eternity.”

“What would happen to you, Phillipe?”

He used the term, salles de décomposition, and then explained to her what rotting rooms were.

She fell silent.

The land was heavily forested and the road to Paris was no more that a ribbon of dirt or grass. The wooden carriage wheels rode rough over the uneven ground and Emily’s stomach had little chance of settling. Marot had a loaf of brown bread wrapped in a cloth and tried to get her to eat a few morsels. Finally, at midday, the temperature had risen enough to make the blanket unnecessary and she succumbed to hunger and ate some of the coarse bread.

“Did you have a wife?” she asked.

“I did, and a son. I was often away on campaigns with the duke so I saw little of them. I do not know if they even knew the manner and time of my death.”

“And here?”

“I do not have a woman. Yes, I have been with women from time to time but there are not so many here.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, of course. Women are not as evil as men. Is it not so in your time also?”

She nodded. “If women were in charge of things there wouldn’t be all these stupid wars or slaughter of innocents.”

“I think this too.”

In a clearing in the forest, Marot called for a halt and told Emily the party would briefly rest. He pointed to some stout trees and suggested this would be a place she might answer nature’s call.

She climbed down, and away from the prying eyes of the leering soldiers, relieved herself behind a trunk. She heard Marot bark orders to his men to keep vigilant as she looked up at the dull sky above the canopy. There was a pretty yellow bird in a high branch that looked something like a golden oriole and a pair of black squirrels cavorting lower down. It all seemed so natural, so ordinary, so much like the things she was accustomed to, until the spell was broken by desperate shouts that sent the wildlife fleeing.

She stood just as Marot appeared at her side, his face seized with fear. She made out one soldier’s cry, “Clovis est ici!” and asked Marot, “Who’s Clovis?”

“Come quickly. He is a very ancient lord, a very bad man who calls this forest his own.”

As Marot dragged her to the carriage a spear thudded and stuck into the tree trunk then arrows began to rain down. One of Marot’s men fell, an arrow through the dome of his head. The Captain pushed her under the carriage and ordered his men to cock their rifles but not to fire until his command.