Timeline (41 page)

He turned to the third basin, near Marek.

“Now, my Lord,” Johnston said, picking up a wooden stick, “I pray you observe what follows.” He dipped the stick into the third bowl, coating the tip with the oily, foul-smelling mixture. He held the stick in the air. “As you see, there is no change. And there shall be no change for hours, or days, until . . .” With the theatricality of a magician, he splashed the stick with a small cup of water.

The stick made a hissing sound, began to smoke, and then burst into flames as the Professor held it. The flame was a hot-orange color.

“Ah,” Oliver said, sighing with pleasure. “I must have a quantity of this. How many men do you require to grind and make your substance?”

“My Lord, twenty will do. Fifty is better.”

“You shall have fifty, or more as you will,” Oliver said, rubbing his hands. “How quickly can you make it?”

“The preparation is not lengthy, my Lord,” Johnston said, “but it cannot be done in haste, for it is dangerous work. And once made, the substance is a hazard within your castle, for Arnaut is certain to attack you with flaming devices.”

Oliver snorted. “I care nothing for that, Magister. Make it now, and I shall put it to use this very night.”

:

Back in the arsenal, Marek watched as Johnston arranged the soldiers in rows of ten, with a grinding bowl in front of each man. Johnston walked down the rows, pausing now and again to give instructions. The soldiers were grumbling about what they called “kitchen work,” but Johnston told them that these were, in his words, the herbs of war.

It was several minutes later when the Professor came over to sit in the corner with him. Watching the soldiers work, Marek said, “Did Doniger give you that speech, about how we can’t change history?”

“Yes. Why?”

“It seems like we’re giving Oliver a lot of help to defend his castle against Arnaut. Those arrows are going to force Arnaut to push his siege engines back — too far back to be effective. No siege engines, no assault on the fortress. And Arnaut won’t play a waiting game. His men want quick scores — all the free companies do. If they can’t take a castle right away, they move on.”

“Yes, that’s true. . . .”

“But according to history, this castle falls to Arnaut.”

“Yes,” Johnston said. “But not because of a siege. Because a traitor lets Arnaut’s men in.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, too,” Marek said. “It doesn’t make sense. There are too many gates in this castle to open. How could a traitor possibly do it? I don’t think he could.”

Johnston smiled. “You think we might be helping Oliver keep his castle, and so we’re changing history.”

“Well. I’m just wondering.”

Marek was thinking that whether or not a castle fell was actually a very significant event, in terms of the future. The history of the Hundred Years War could be seen as a series of key sieges and captures. For instance, a few years from now, brigands would capture the town of Moins, at the mouth of the Seine. In itself, a minor conquest — but it would give them control of the Seine, allowing them to capture castles all the way back to Paris itself. Then there was the matter of who lived and who died. Because more often than not, when a castle fell, its inhabitants were massacred. There were several hundred people inside La Roque. If they all survived, their thousands of descendants could easily make a different future.

“We may never know,” Johnston said. “How many hours have we got left?”

Marek looked at his bracelet. The counter said 05:50:29. He bit his lip. He had forgotten that the clock was ticking. When he had last looked, there were almost nine hours; there had seemed to be plenty of time. Six hours didn’t sound quite so good.

“Not quite six hours,” Marek said.

“And Kate has the marker?”

“Yes.”

“And where is she?”

“She went to find the passage.” Marek was thinking that it was now late afternoon; if she found the passage, she could easily make her way inside the castle in two or three hours.

“Where did she go to find the passage?”

“The green chapel.”

Johnston sighed. “Is that where Marcel’s key said that it was?”

“Yes.”

“And she went alone?”

“Yes.”

Johnston shook his head. “No one goes there.”

“Why?”

“Supposedly, the green chapel is guarded by an insane knight. They say his true love died there and that he lost his mind with grief. He’s imprisoned his wife’s sister in a nearby castle, and now he kills anybody who comes near the castle, or the chapel.”

“Do you think all that’s true?” Marek said.

Johnston shrugged. “No one knows,” he said. “Because no one has ever come back alive.”

05:19:55

Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, Kate waited for the ax to fall. The knight above her was snorting and grunting, his breath coming faster, more and more excited before he delivered the killing blow—

Then he was silent.

She felt the foot in the middle of her back twist.

He was looking around.

The ax thunked down on the block, inches from her face. But he was resting it, leaning on it while he looked at something behind him. He started grunting again, and now he sounded angry.

Kate tried to see what he was looking at, but the flat blade of the ax blocked her view.

She heard footsteps behind her.

There was someone else here.

The ax was raised again, but now the foot came off her back. Hastily, she rolled off the block and turned to see Chris standing a few yards away, holding the sword that she had dropped.

“Chris!”

Chris smiled through clenched teeth. She could see he was terrified. He kept his eyes on the green knight. With a growl, the knight spun, his ax hissing as he swung it. Chris held up his sword to parry. Sparks flew from clanging metal. The men circled each other. The knight swung again, and Chris ducked, stumbled backward, and got hastily to his feet again as the ax thunked into the grass. Kate fumbled in her pouch and found the gas cylinder. This foreign object from another time seemed absurdly small and light now, but it was all they had.

“Chris!”

Standing behind the green knight, she held up the cylinder, so he could see it. He nodded vaguely, continuing to dodge and back away. She saw he was tiring fast, losing ground, the green knight advancing on him.

Kate had no choice: she ran forward, leapt into the air, and landed on the green knight’s back. He grunted in surprise at the weight. She clung to him, brought the canister around to the front of his helmet, and fired gas through the slit. The knight coughed and shivered. She squeezed again, and the knight began to stagger. She dropped back to the ground.

She said, “Do it!”

Chris was on one knee, gasping. The green knight was still on his feet, but weaving. Chris came slowly forward and stabbed the sword into the knight’s side, between the armor plates. He gave a roar of fury and fell onto his back.

Chris was on him immediately, cutting the laces of his helmet, kicking it away with his foot. She glimpsed tangled hair, matted beard, and wild eyes as he swung the sword down, and severed the knight’s head.

:

It didn’t work.

The blade came down, crunched into bone, and stuck there, only partway through his neck. The knight was still alive, looking at Chris in fury, his mouth moving.

Chris tried to pull the sword out, but it was caught in the knight’s throat. As he struggled, the knight’s left hand came up and grabbed his shoulder. The knight was immensely strong — demonically strong — and pulled him down until his face was inches away. His eyes were bloodshot. His teeth were cracked and rotten. Lice crawled in his beard, among bits of discolored food. He stank of decay.

Chris was revolted. He felt his hot, reeking breath. Struggling, he managed to put his foot on the knight’s face, and he stood up, forcing himself free of the grip. The sword came free in the same moment, and he lifted it to swing down.

But the knight’s eyes rolled upward and his jaw went slack. He was already dead. Flies began to buzz over his face.

Chris collapsed, sitting on the wet ground, trying to catch his breath. Revulsion swept over him like a wave, and he started to shiver uncontrollably. He hugged himself, trying to stop it. His teeth were chattering.

Kate put her hand on his shoulder. She said, “My hero.” He hardly heard her. He didn’t say anything. But eventually he stopped shivering and got to his feet again.

“I was glad to see you,” she said.

He nodded and smiled. “I took the easy way down.”

Chris had managed to stop his slide in the mud. He had spent many difficult minutes working his way back up the slope, and then he took the other path down. It turned out to be an easy walk to the base of the waterfall, where he found Kate about to be beheaded.

“You know the rest,” he said. He got to his feet, leaned on the sword. He looked up at the sky. It was starting to get dark. “How much time do you think is left?”

“I don’t know. Four, five hours.”

“Then we better get started.”

:

The ceiling of the green chapel had fallen in at several places, and the interior was in ruins. There was a small altar, Gothic frames around broken windows, pools of stagnant water on the floor. It was hard to see that this chapel had once been a jewel, its doorways and arches elaborately carved. Now slimy mold dripped from the carvings, which were eroded beyond recognition.

A black snake slithered away as Chris went down spiral stairs to the crypts below ground. Kate followed more slowly. Here it was darker, the only light coming from cracks in the floor above. There was the constant sound of dripping water. In the center of the room they saw a single intact sarcophagus, carved of black stone, and the broken fragments of several others. The intact sarcophagus had a knight in armor carved on the lid. Kate peered at the knight’s face, but the stone had been eroded by the omnipresent mold, and the features were gone.

“What was the key again?” Chris said. “Something about the giant’s feet?”

“That’s right, so many paces from the giant’s feet. Or gigantic feet.”

“From the giant’s feet,” Chris repeated. He pointed to the sarcophagus, where the feet of the carved knight were two rounded stumps. “Do you suppose it means these feet?”

Kate frowned. “Not exactly giant.”

“No. . . .”

“Let’s try it,” she said. She stood at the foot of the sarcophagus, turned right, and went five paces. Then she turned left, and went four paces. She turned right again, and took three paces before she came up against the wall.

“Guess not,” Chris said.

They both turned away and began to search in earnest. Almost immediately, Kate made an encouraging discovery: half a dozen torches, stacked in a corner, where they would stay dry. The torches were crudely made, but serviceable enough.

“The passage has to be here somewhere,” she said. “It has to be.”

Chris didn’t answer. They searched in silence for the next half hour, wiping mold off the walls and floor, looking at the corroded carvings, trying to decide if one or another might represent a giant’s feet.

Finally, Chris said, “Did the thing say the feet were inside the chapel, or at the chapel?”

“I don’t know,” Kate said. “André read it to me. He translated the text.”

“Because maybe we should be looking outside.”

“The torches were in here.”

“True.”

Chris turned, frustrated, looking.

“If Marcel made a key that took off from a landmark,” Kate said, “he wouldn’t use a coffin or sarcophagus, because that could be moved. He would use something fixed. Something on the walls.”

“Or the floor.”

“Yes, or the floor.”

She was standing by the far wall, which had a little niche cut into the stone. At first she thought these were little altars, but they were too small, and she saw bits of wax; evidently, they had been made to hold a candle. She saw several of these candle niches in the walls of the crypt. The inner surfaces of this niche were beautifully carved, she noticed, with a symmetrical design of bird’s wings going up each side. And the carving had not been touched, perhaps because the heat of the candles had suppressed the growth of mold.

She thought, Symmetrical.

Excited, she went quickly to the next candle niche. The carvings depicted two leafy vines. The next niche: two hands clasped in prayer. She went all around the room in this way, checking each one.

None had feet.

Chris was sweeping his toe in big arcs across the floor, scraping away the mold from the underlying stone. He was muttering, “Big feet, big feet.”

She looked over at Chris and said, “I feel really stupid.”

“Why?”

She pointed to the doorway behind him — the doorway that they had passed through when they first came down the stairs. The doorway that had once been elaborately carved but was now eroded.

It was possible to see, even now, what the original design of the carving had been. On both left and right, the doorway had been carved into a series of lumps. Five lumps, with the largest at the top of the door and the smallest at the bottom. The large lump had a sort of flat indentation on its surface, leaving no doubt what all the lumps were meant to represent.

Five toes, on either side of the door.

“Oh my God,” Chris said. “It’s the whole damned door.”

She nodded. “Giant feet.”

“Why would they do that?”

She shrugged. “Sometimes they put hideous and demonic images at entrances and exits. To symbolize the flight or banishment of evil spirits.”

They went quickly to the door, and then Kate paced off five steps, then four, then nine. She was now facing a rusty iron ring mounted on the wall. They were both excited by this discovery, but when they tugged at it, the ring broke loose in their hands, crumbling in red fragments.

“We must have done something wrong.”

“Pace it again.”

She went back and tried smaller steps. Right, left, right again. She was now facing a different section of wall. But it was just wall, featureless stone. She sighed.

“I don’t know, Chris,” she said. “We must be doing something wrong. But I don’t know what.” Discouraged, she put her hand out, leaned against the wall.