Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (14 page)

9

"After that," says Eric, winding down his story at last, "Black Bill Bartlemaine lived out the rest of his days in peace. No exciseman dared come near him or disturb his tranquillity, and Lord Kinneston's men kept the news of Black Bill's return from their master for fear he would send them back to Tadscombe again. But the local people weren't so afrighted. This was just their own native son Black Bill come here among them again. He took himself the young widder as his new wife, the one he'd had afore having perished while he was gone, and he lived to be an old man, surrounded by his grandsons."

You can tell by the slur in Eric's voice that the grockles have appreciated his tale. Now, when he finishes, none of them says anything for a while, letting the snapping of the fire do their talking for them.

"I must be getting home," says Eric at last, timing this perfectly for the landlord's call that he's ready to close for the night. "It's been a long evening, and I've enjoyed meeting you folks, but I have to be up early in the morning to take my boat out, harvest the generous crop of the mother sea."

That's one of his many lies, of course. There aren't any fish still surviving this close to the shore, not any longer.

Jo set me free from the beach of the drowned so I could discover myself in my next future. At first I thought she'd returned me to my own world, but here things are very different. Where I came from there was no place called Plymouth, no place called Exeter, and I'm sure if I'd ever thought to hunt for it on a map I wouldn't have been able to find a place called Tadscombe, just as I wouldn't have been able to find the Gansiello Mountains region, where William came from. I can't find the Gansiello Mountains region here, either. And there aren't any giants in this world, giants like Jo.

When she told me in that final instant on the beach that she was sending me to my own future, I didn't understand what she was telling me – and wouldn't have cared if I had. But now I know. She was sending me to the future I would make for myself, assembled from a past I would also make for myself. I suppose that's what we all do: create our own futures, mould our own pasts. We do it every second of our lives, only we don't realize we're doing it. And we do it in our deaths as well. Only then does the contrast between one invented world and the next become great enough for us to recognize what's happening. The worst of it is that we don't have any control over each new future we make. That happens at a level lower than the conscious.

The landlord's telling us it's gone closing time, and that while he loves us all dearly he'd really prefer us to, well, bugger off into the night, please, so that he can clear up and eventually get to his own bed. There's a shuffling of chairs and a tussling with coats as the grockles ready themselves to go. A couple of the younger ones fuss around Grandma, ostensibly to make sure she has her stick but more likely to check she's still awake, or at least alive. They laugh among themselves, congratulating each other on achieving yet another memorable evening of holiday they can tell their friends about when they get home to whatever smoky city they come from.

This is
my
future, all right, and I can't escape the fact, but it's not the one I'd have chosen to create. I don't know from where inside me came the concept of places like Exeter, like Plymouth, like Tadscombe. They're in a county called Devon, I learned as I awakened a few hours ago – or a few moments? – to this new reality. And Devon is itself a part of England, an overseas province of the Fortusan Empire, which believes it is in the process of conquering the world, although it seems to me what the Empire is doing is destroying it. I'm powerless to stop the destruction of the future I made. Perhaps that's only right.

Maybe it would have been a different future had its past – which I had likewise to create in order to bring this present into being – not contained both the beach of the drowned and Black Bill Bartlemaine, who returned from that place before me but never told all of what he'd seen there.