The Copernicus Archives #2 (2 page)

L
ight flared violently on the wet sand below me. A torch. A face materialized behind it. The flame moved, and two more torches were born. I watched the first one bob up away from the water and vanish into the streets. All this time there were voices of men shouting, grunting in labor.

A flat-bottomed boat—
this same
barge, the one we'd been studying seconds before—was no longer a skeleton, but was hulled and half decked and stacked with cargo and crawling with men in britches and tunics and boots and cloaks. Among the barrels and crates, a shape twitched. His face caught the moonlight.

My heart stopped. I knew him. “Omigod . . .”

It was Helmut Bern. Victim of Kronos. Scientist of the Teutonic Order.

I so wanted Lily, Wade, and Darrell to see all this with me, but they weren't here. I wasn't clear if anyone I saw could see or hear me.

Bern clawed his way from the boat, crying out in inarticulate German. His eyes were jammed closed, as if he were tortured by a headache as piercing as mine. His arms, visible through his shredded robes—he was dressed a little like a monk—were all wounds and sores. Boils, maybe? I don't really know what boils are.

Then—I have no idea how—I was on the sand next to him.

This is soooo insane!
I told myself.
I have to wake up! Becca, wake up! Someone—wake—me—up!

But the more I tried, the more I couldn't wake up. Huge, modern London had simply disappeared. No more clogged traffic and skyscrapers and steel office buildings and banks and luxury hotels. Now there were sloping fields of grass, and trees and timbered houses poking up where big buildings had just been, and dirt and cobblestoned paths in place of paved streets, and the deep darkness of a sky filled with more stars than I had ever seen.

In the near distance stood the famous Tower of
London. It's still there today. Back then—the year Kronos was set to travel to—the Tower was the largest structure for miles, a massive block of white stone with corner towers, surrounded by a high wall. It loomed over the whole rambling city, an oppressive presence. Not the palace I'd read it began life as but a horrible, sorrow-filled prison.

Helmut Bern convulsed on the sand and rolled over onto his hands and knees. He lifted his head to the moonlight and gave out a cry like a dying animal. Ignoring him, the other boatmen climbed, grunting, into the streets behind me. They called to one another—also in German.

Bern was teetering on his feet now and stumbling from the barge toward a path sloping up from the river, staggering from wall to wall to keep from falling.

“Helmut Bern?” I found myself saying. It was weird. Bern was the only person I knew there. And even though he had tried to kill Sara—and me—his was a face I knew. It's funny how a familiar face means more when you're lost.

I moved toward him, raising my hand to get his attention—“Bern? Helmut?”—when a man barreled past, accidentally brushing my arm where Galina had shot me with a crossbow. It ached for a second, and it
startled me that I could
feel
anything in this dream, but I shook off the pain.

The man who had rushed by was tall and broad-shouldered. He wore a long, thick cloak, forest green, and a black velvet hat. I remembered seeing him in an earlier blackout, when Bern and I were being sick over the side of the sailing ship. This man now slid his arm under Bern's shoulder, spoke to him in German.
“Lassen Sie mich Ihnen helfen. Bitte kommen Sie mit.”
(Let me help you. Please come with me.)

They struggled up and away from the water to where I'd heard the horses clomping and wagon wheels screeching. A thick smell like an open sewer filled my nose. It was awful, but I followed after the men, knowing—somehow—that I wasn't
really
going anywhere. I'd discovered that while I blacked out, I didn't actually leave the place where I was. And no matter how long my visions seemed to keep me in the past, pretty much no time passed in the present.

A child's voice called out suddenly in the night. A girl's voice.

“This way, please. Father is waiting for you!”

The girl stood at the end of a lane, holding a lantern. She wore a shawl over her shoulders, and when a sudden breeze ruffled her bonnet, the ends of her hair coiled up
behind her. “This way!” I glanced at the signpost nearest me. Allhallows Lane. I hurried to keep pace with Bern and the green-cloaked man. The girl waved to them. Her face told me she might be eleven or twelve years old. Nearly my age. The lantern's light shone warmly on her cheeks.

“Meg,” boomed a man I couldn't see. “Meg! Where are you?”

“Here, Father!” The girl—Meg—turned and vanished, drawing the wobbly light of her lantern around the corner of Allhallows. Still unseen, I followed the men street after street until we came to a short cobbled passage.

I read the signpost. “Bucklersbury,” I said aloud. My voice was muffled.

The other sailors had split off. It was only the girl and the three of us—if I could even think of myself as one of them. We went left onto Bucklersbury, and I saw the girl on the doorstep of a long, low, rambling building. “Our house is called the Old Barge, sirs. You see why!” The door opened from the inside.

I wanted Wade and everyone to see this with me.

“Father is waiting for you,” Meg said, waving in Bern and the man with the green cloak, whom I now saw carried a leather pack over his shoulder. Just before Meg closed the door, I slipped inside and
followed them into a warm, dry room.

The room had a low ceiling, and the air smelled of burning wood and too many people and the warm aroma of baking bread. All the scents combined into a strange kind of potion, and I felt my tensed-up muscles begin to relax.

A man in a simple long robe and soft shoes swept into the room.
“Nam blandit quam ut domus!”
he said, his arms open wide. It was something like “Welcome to our house.” “I am Thomas. At your service.”

“I am Nicolaus,” said the man in green, embracing Thomas. “This fellow is a stranger, and I fear he is quite ill.”

I stopped breathing. Nicolaus. He pulled off his hat, and I caught his face for the first time as he turned to the hearth fire. Nicolaus. It couldn't really be.

Except that it was.

I knew him from his famous self-portrait. He was dressed in many layers, with tights beneath his robes that were like thick leggings. Cold had rosied his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He placed his bag down and threw off his cloak.

The man standing in front of me, as real as life, was Nicolaus Copernicus.

“M
eg, dear, call your stepmother, please,” said the man named Thomas. “Nicolaus and I will help our poor friend into the next room.”

Shivering, I moved aside and watched, amazed, as Copernicus and Thomas helped Helmut Bern toward a long daybed. The whole time, Bern bled from his nose and stared wildly about like he was crazy.

No one in the room saw me. I felt like a spy, lurking in that house. I knew I wasn't
physically
there
back
then
, but Bern obviously was, and he was in bad shape, convulsing, twitching, barely able to stand.

Sara would have been the same if we hadn't rescued her in time.

Together Nicolaus and Thomas laid Helmut Bern
down and covered him with a rough-knitted blanket. Then several women in plain long dresses and bonnets appeared from a back room. One of them balanced a basin that brimmed with steaming water, another an armful of cloths. Meg trailed them, holding a brown ceramic mug of something hot.

I stood in the corner, barely breathing, while Thomas led Copernicus to a smaller room. I followed them, knowing I was invisible, but tiptoeing for fear of making a sound. They sat together at a small candlelit table. Thomas brushed his hand across the table as if sweeping away invisible crumbs.

“In the morning,” he said, “we will take your friend to Charterhouse. A hospital. I will support his care until he recovers. They will know best how to treat his ailment.”

“He is less a friend than a stowaway,” Nicolaus said in thickly accented English, but softly, as if not wanting Bern to hear. “He came aboard in the Netherlands in a monk's robe, but says he is not a monk. Sadly, I fear the man is doomed. This may be leprosy that he suffers. My brother, Andreas, has it.”

“Ah . . .” Thomas trailed off. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet, too. “I received your letter, Magister. I will do as much as I can and tell no one. Except perhaps Margaret, who is very close to me. Look, here
she is. Meg, come meet our guest properly. Nicolaus Copernicus is an astronomer of great renown.”

“Like Herr Kratzer?” said Meg, with a curtsy. She smiled, and her cheeks dimpled. I liked her right away. Meg was Margaret. Just like my sister, Maggie.

Copernicus turned to Thomas. “Are you saying Kratzer is here?”

“He teaches my daughters. The German community is large in London. Meg, our guest is far more famous than Herr Kratzer. Believe me.”

“Oh, I do!” She curtsied again. “I always do, Father!”

I felt stupid, not knowing who these people were. Thomas. Meg. Herr Kratzer. I had to remember everything and decrypt it later. Lily would help me by searching online for answers. I
hoped
Lily would help me.
If
I ever got back to the present. And
if
anyone believed that my fevered brain hadn't made all this up.

Meg tugged a sheet of paper from a pocket in her dress and set it on the table. “Father, did I do it properly?”

Thomas held the sheet to the candle. I leaned over to see. In a small, neat script was a series of strange letters.

“Yes, very good, Meg,” her father said. “Nicely formed.”

“What is this?” Copernicus asked. “A secret language between you two?”

“A playful code I invented for my latest little book,” Thomas said, tugging a slim volume from a shelf behind him. He handed it to the astronomer, who opened it to the beginning and ran his finger along a page I couldn't see.

Copernicus studied the characters on Meg's paper, then the book, and smiled. “I see, yes. If I may . . . here are more words to decipher.” Glancing back and forth from the book to Meg's paper, he picked up a quill that lay on the table, dipped it into a brass ink bottle, and wrote four words in the odd characters.

I stared at the “letters” to memorize them. Three circles with lines in various places, three boxes with lines, a small
c
, three letters that looked like
LOL
, something like the French cookie called a
macaron
, another
l
, a backward
c
, a dome, a box with a dot, a triangle.

“I'll decode them right now!” she said, taking the paper from him.

“But listen, Meg,” said Nicolaus. “The first two words are for your sister Elizabeth to decipher. The other two
are for you, yes? Remember these words. They will be important to you in, oh, about ten years.”

“Ten years? What do you mean, sir?” she asked.

Nicolaus smiled. “In ten years a good man will come to paint your picture. And, oh, yes, tell Elizabeth not to kick the sleeping dog!”

What
that
meant, I had no idea. But Meg laughed and scooted away to another room, leaving the two men alone—with me.

“She is my dearest,” Thomas said softly.

“I know. I can see the way you two trade glances. And now . . .”

Copernicus removed a wooden box from his sack. He unclasped the leather strap binding it and opened the lid away from himself. A rich yellow light flashed from the box onto both of their faces. Thomas shielded his eyes. “My goodness!”

“It is amber, already a thousand years old. Older,” Nicolaus said. “When my friend the artist does come to you, have him build a better box to hide it in. This is soaked by seawater. Seal this item's two equal arms separately, or, believe me, they will overwhelm you. Thomas, I tell you, this object, like so many of its brothers, is terribly dangerous.”

I was confused by “two equal arms,” but I knew I was seeing an incredible thing—Copernicus in the very
act of transferring a relic to a Guardian. To Thomas. But to Thomas
who
?

I tried to edge around, but I feared I might make a sound, so I never saw what was inside the box, only the bright golden light that shone out of it. Thomas took the box and closed the lid. The room darkened as before to dull candlelight.

“Voteo facio quod possum,”
he whispered.
“Cujuscumque periculum.”

I promised myself to remember the Latin, even though I know only some of the words. But I already guessed their meaning: “Upon my life I will.” The vow that every Guardian makes. The promise to protect the relic to the end.

Just then a tiny black-haired girl in a blue tunic peeked around the corner at the two men. She was very young. Two years old, maybe, or even less. But she was beautiful, with the sweetest pink face and rosy lips, and deep, dark eyes that seemed to glow like coals. She made a noise in her throat as she toddled into the room, clutched the hem of Thomas's robe, and tugged it, grumbling happily.

“But who is this little angel?” Copernicus held his arms open. She ran to him.

“Alas, a foundling,” Thomas said. “The poor child suffers from an unnamed wound and cannot speak a
word. But her eyes are language enough, yes? We call her Joan Aleyn. She is as dear to me as are my own daughters.”

A bell rang twice in a distant room.

“Ah, a courier from the king. Business calls me,” Thomas said, standing. He smiled, then grew serious. The light in the room seemed to focus on his face, and the lines around his eyes gave him a look of pain. “I promise, my friend, until my dying breath, to do as you ask. Stay here for now. Come, Joan. Let us see what your sisters are up to, yes?”

Thomas took up the wooden box, snatched the tiny girl into his arms, and drifted into another room, leaving the great astronomer alone.

Copernicus followed Thomas with his eyes. I didn't breathe. He leaned back at the table; then he let out a deep sigh. He dipped into his satchel once more and took out what I knew instantly was his secret diary—the diary that at that very moment was in my own bag!

He stared at the book's leather cover and brass corner ornaments. They were far less worn than they would be five centuries later. He turned to a clean page. He picked up Thomas's pen and dipped it again in the inkwell.

I felt alone, so alone, among all these dead people. I wanted to get back to the others, to today, to wake up from this dream, or whatever it was, and forget it.

But a voice in my head said,
Not yet.

I had to admit that since our relic hunt began, I'd come to know Nicolaus Copernicus as I knew my own friends. I wanted to talk to him, to open my bag and show him what I had. I wanted to scream to him:

Do you know what my friends and I are doing? We're Guardians just like your friend Thomas!

I burned to see what page he was writing on, so that I might read it later—the page he wrote while I stood near him. I moved closer, an inch maybe, no more. The candle's flame quavered, as if the air was disturbed. Surely not by me. I was a ghost. Copernicus lifted his eyes from the page and observed the flame wobbling. I breathed as silently as I could. Still, the flame's tongue reacted, as if the air around me had rippled.

Copernicus set down his pen.

He turned his face to me.

“Rebecca Moore,” he said.