Richard’s eyes narrowed. ‘Do not anger me further, little brother,’ he said quietly, ‘I have been patient enough with you.’
John quickly held the scroll towards the candle burning on the table in the centre of the tent.
‘STOP!’ yelled Richard.
‘I will burn it, brother — I will!’
Richard’s wide-eyed stare flickered from the candle to the edge of the parchment, mere inches away. His face darkened with rage, his lips twitched, his hands slowly reaching for the sword beneath his cape. Then, like sun piercing through scudding grey clouds, his demeanour changed. He suddenly laughed.
‘Good God, you’ve grown some fighting spirit!’
John held the scroll where it was.
‘So be it! You will have my word.’
‘Nottingham will not be punished?’
Richard slowly shook his head. ‘They will not.’
John felt his guts loosen. He struggled to keep a gasp of relief inside him.
‘Then you can have your piece of parchment,’ he said as calmly as he could manage. He held it out towards King Richard. Richard took it from him, unravelled several inches of it to be sure it was the Grail. He examined it in silence for a moment, before carefully rolling it up again.
‘As king, my word is of course law,’ said Richard.
‘You will honour that?’
He nodded. ‘I will. Now … kneel and kiss my hand.’
John steadied himself with a deep breath, then stooped to hold Richard’s proffered hand.
‘You are going to see, little brother, the making of one Kingdom stretching from this miserable wet island of England to Jerusalem. One Kingdom under God … under me.’
John struggled to suppress a wry smile on his own face as he pursed his lips. There’d been something about Lady Rebecca’s whispered assurance — an assurance about things yet to be — something in the way she said it that he could actually believe it to be true.
‘Kiss my hand!’ commanded Richard.
‘Yes … yes, of course,’ muttered John.
CHAPTER 83
2001, New York
Adam stood beside Sal and gazed out at the darkness. America, at least what they could see of it, a dark wilderness of tall cedar trees beneath a clear night sky and a crescent moon that gazed down at its own shimmering reflection on the gently rippling surface of the East River.
‘It’s like … It’s just how I imagine America must have looked before Columbus first landed,’ Adam whispered. ‘Out there somewhere, there must be tribes of Native Americans, running around, free and living just as they were back in the fifteenth century.’
Sal nodded. ‘I like it like this. No people.’
‘So … Maddy said you came from 2026?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Tell me, what’s it like?’
She shrugged. ‘Crowded. Busy. Noisy. At least where we lived it was.’
‘Is there any really cool … you know, technology?’
‘Like?’
‘I dunno — flying cars or something?’
Sal snorted. ‘No. It’s all rickshaws and battered old Nanos. The air’s thick with toxins and stuff. And there were the troubles in the north.’
‘Troubles?’
‘Terrorists, bombs. Things weren’t so good with Taliban-Pakistan. My father worried about what was going to happen in India. What with that and the flooding areas and migrants.’
They listened to the woods, the call of a heron, the lapping of the river up the shingle banks nearby.
‘The future doesn’t sound so great,’ said Adam.
‘Uh-uh. I remember … everything felt so … so — ’ she struggled to find a word that worked — ‘so …
‘Sheesh, that’s
‘New York’s not so good,’ she replied. ‘They started evacuating parts of it.’
‘Flooding?’
‘Uh-huh. And growing crime and food riots and stuff. Like we were having in Mumbai.’
‘Jesus,’ Adam sighed. ‘You make the future sound depressing.’
‘Sorry,’ she replied softly.
‘No — not your fault, Sal. Thanks for, you know, being honest about it.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Makes you wonder why you bother doing anything if that’s how it all goes. Like, why am I bothering with my consulting job? Saving up for a retirement that sounds like, well … a nightmare.’
‘It’s only a nightmare for the poor,’ she replied. ‘For those with lots of money it’s just …’ Sal hesitated.
‘Sal? What is it?’
She looked at him. ‘I think there’s a big wave coming.’ She leaned around and ducked her head under the shutter. ‘Maddy! Time wave! Big one!’
Maddy pulled herself off the bunk and staggered bleary-eyed to join them in the doorway.
‘There it is!’ said Sal, pointing east.
A dark wall approached; like last time, rolling in from the Atlantic, looking like a mountain range advancing rapidly towards them.
‘Better come inside, so you’re not right on the edge of the concrete,’ Maddy said, pointing at the crumbling edge of the field office’s force-field effect. Adam and Sal shuffled quickly inside and crouched on the floor just inside the archway.
‘Here it comes,’ uttered Maddy. ‘Just hope this one gets us back.’
Adam watched the churning black wall approach like a tsunami, blotting out the sky, the stars, the crescent moon. ‘I wonder whether we’d be better hanging on to this,’ he said, nodding at the wilderness. ‘Given how it all goes in the future.’
‘Too late,’ said Sal.
The time wave rolled over Manhattan and the distant tall trees quivered and shook and vanished and swirled into a maelstrom of flickering possibilities. As the wave swept across the broad river, Adam thought he saw the ghostly outline of skyscrapers forming. Then, with a fresh gust of wind pushed before it, the wave was over them; a destructive tornado passing momentarily overhead, eating up reality that shouldn’t be and laying down, in its wake, reality that should.
And then as soon as it had arrived it was gone.
Outside, a cobbled street littered with plastic bags and several wheeled dustbins. And the ambient noises of New York.
Sal was the first to step out. She looked to her left, towards the river, and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘looks like we’re back home.’
Adam and Maddy joined her. Manhattan glistened, flickered, shimmered in the night; the sky punctuated with the far-off winking lights of commercial airliners coming in to JFK and LaGuardia. A distant police siren, the booming of someone’s sound system.
