TimeRiders 05 - Gates of Rome (41 page)

‘I don’t even know when that is.’

‘It’ll be
after
2001, surely,’ said Liam.

‘Well, obviously.’

‘The Exodus Project occurs after 2056,’ said Bob.

‘How do you know?’

‘The Stone Men were running AI software that is a later generation than mine.’

‘2056?’ Liam turned to Maddy. ‘Is that
when
our agency came from?’

‘That’s a safe-ish guess, I suppose.’

‘What about it?’ asked Sal. ‘What if we go into the future?’

‘Why, Sal? You know better than me and Liam what it’s like. It’s grim.’

Liam nodded. ‘That man who came through to Robin Hood times …’ He tried to remember his name. ‘
Locke
… I think it was. I remember he said something about hearing rumours of our agency in the 2060s, so. He said it was bad
then. Really bad.’ Liam met her gaze. ‘Sort of end-of-the-world kind of bad.’

The end
. Words that were all too familiar to Maddy.

Maddy stopped walking. ‘Guys … that message in the Voynich Manuscript. You know Becks has it in her head. All decoded and everything?’

Liam and Sal stopped walking and turned round. ‘What about it?’ said Sal.

‘You know I said Becks couldn’t tell me what it was?’

They both nodded.

‘Well actually, Becks told me she could only tell me what the message was when certain conditions arose.’

‘What
certain conditions
?’ asked Sal.

‘She said “when it’s the end”.’

‘The end?’ Liam laughed scornfully. ‘Great! What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I dunno,’ Maddy shrugged. ‘But I get the feeling we’re all headed for something pretty nasty.’

‘We?’

‘Everyone! I’m talking, like,
mankind
.’

Liam made a face. ‘Well, that’s cheered me up no end, so it has.’

‘See … I think something awful happens one day. Something that wipes us all out. That’s what I think Pandora is. It’s a warning about that.’

‘That poor man …’ said Sal. The other two knew who she meant: that unfortunate soul who’d arrived out of nowhere back in New Orleans, 1831. An arrival that had been catastrophic, that had inadvertently caused the death of a young man called Abraham Lincoln. He’d arrived presumably without properly probing and checking his destination. He’d arrived in a hurry … presumably leaving his own time in a hurry. Arrived and instantly fused with the bodies of a pair of horses.

‘That man was the one who was warning us about Pandora,’ said Sal.

‘Joseph …’ Liam looked at her. ‘That’s what he said his name was, didn’t he?’

‘Yeah. He was the one that left you that note, Maddy.’

‘Yes.’ She sighed. ‘Yup … I know.’ She shook her head. ‘But what do we do? Huh? So we’ve got a warning from some guy from the future that something awful happens to mankind. What the hell was he trying to tell us? Change history so it – whatever
it
is – doesn’t happen?’

Sal nodded slowly. ‘I think so.’

‘But we’ve also got a duty to make sure history
doesn’t
change,’ said Liam. ‘That’s what Foster told us. Remember?
For good or bad … history has to go a certain way
.’

‘My point exactly,’ said Maddy. ‘I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do any more, Liam. And now we’ve got whole freakin’ platoons of support units being sent back to kill us. So, obviously we’re making somebody angry. Doing something wrong!’

‘Or something
right
?’ volunteered Sal.

Maddy rolled her eyes. ‘See? Welcome to
my
world. The world of Not-Having-A-Freakin’-Clue-What’s-Going-On.’

They stood silent, in the middle of the road, the rising sun making hard shadows that stretched long and slender across the cobbles.

‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ said Liam after a while. ‘I trust Foster. He said we should keep history as it is. For good or bad it has to go a certain way. Well … if that means that one day there’s an end,’ Liam pressed his lips together – a conciliatory smile, ‘then, well … I suppose it is what it is.’

‘We’re
just following orders
,’ said Maddy.

‘Aye.’

‘You know who said the very same thing?’ Maddy didn’t wait for him to pull out an answer. He wasn’t going to know. ‘Nazis, that’s who. Concentration camp guards.’

‘So, what are you saying we do, Maddy?’

She turned to Sal. ‘I’m saying I don’t know. I just don’t feel like trusting anyone right now.’

Liam nodded at that. ‘Let’s just get home, then?’

‘Let’s get home. If we can. And then we’ll figure it out from there.’

Rashim had mentioned that the Exodus group had travelled most of the one-hour journey on a broad brick road. Winding the memory backwards, he said that it eventually became a broad dusty track. Two lanes, busy with cart and foot traffic. The old man had said it had taken them an hour … but they had travelled quite slowly because their multi-terrain vehicles were heavily laden: people crammed in below, equipment stacked all over. Slow, then. Not much faster than a person could jog. His words. Hardly precise.

But he did mention a range of hills. Nothing too spectacular, hills that would be on their right coming out of Rome. And one hill beyond a gently rolling valley with a notably flat top.

As it approached midday, Maddy scanned the horizon. There were hills ahead of them, as he’d said. And beyond their smooth outline, on the far horizon, the more distinctly sharp-edged silhouette of a range of mountains.

‘Rashim!’ she called out.

He twitched slightly on Bob’s back.

‘Give him a prod, Sal.’

She obliged.

He lurched, opened his eyes then howled at the bright daylight. His eyes instantly clamped shut. ‘
What is this?
Where am –!?’

‘It’s OK! It’s OK!’ Sal reached up to calm him. ‘We escaped, remember?’

The old man winced and covered his face with his hands at the glare of daylight, or perhaps it was some sort of agoraphobia – a mortal terror of the infinite openness all around him. Maddy wondered how much of her sanity would be left if she’d spent seventeen years cooped up inside a large packing crate.

‘Rashim, over there … those hills? Are they the right ones?’

Bob eased him down to the ground and he shaded his almost completely shut eyes against the painful brilliance of the morning sun. ‘I … think … yes. Or maybe … I’m not sure.’

‘Come on! We need to be sure.’

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.’

‘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.’