“Phoenicia?” she said.
“The Med coast of the Middle East anyway. Turkey, Israel, Lebanon. Or they will be someday,” he said.
Caroline was aware that her throat was dry, and her stomach burned with hunger. She sat up, and the effort made her dizzy.
“Hey! Little help here!” Dwayne called upwards to be heard over the slow creak and knock of the oars.
A shadow crossed the bar of light blazing down from the opening in the deck above them. Bohrs dropped into the hold and stooped to approach them.
“We need food and water if we’re going to be of any use to you,” Dwayne said.
“That’s reasonable.” Bohrs shrugged. “We’re nearing port. I’ll have something sent down.”
Bohrs left them without another word.
A crewman came down and set bowls of watery gruel on the sacking and left. They had no choice but to kneel over the bowls as best their bonds would allow and eat the mess like dogs. It was loaded with onions and a meat Caroline didn’t care to guess at. It was greasy and unsalted and cold.
“Every bit. We don’t know when these fuckers will feed us next,” Dwayne told her.
They had both cleaned their bowls when Bohrs and the hanged man came down into the hold with handguns in their fists. The man with the Ray-Bans came down the ladder next and unlocked Caroline from the hull, then, using a knife, freed Dwayne. They were urged to climb up to the main deck.
The samaina was pulling into the sheltered harbor of a port settlement that did not give as lovely a first impression as Rhodes had done. The harbor wall was more of a curving jetty of piled stones. The buildings about the port were shabby structures. The wharf they tied up to was crumbling. Lateen-rigged fishing boats with sagging sails and frayed lines were bobbing on ratlines along its length. Men sat in the shadows of awnings slung from the fronts of hovels that lined the waterfront. None made a move to stir from their places to help tie up the lines tossed from the newly-arrived vessel.
Dwayne and Caroline were guided onto the wharf by the hanged man and Ray-Bans. Bohrs led the way along the wharf and through the narrow lanes and faded buildings of the town. The hanged man carried a hemp sack slung over his shoulder. The only inhabitants they saw were the ragged men sitting in the shade, sharing a clay jar of wine. There were no remarks between them as three cloaked strangers led a naked man and woman past them.
They walked from the last of the buildings and past goat pens to a trail that climbed to a headland that overlooked the harbor. Bohrs urged Dwayne and Caroline to take a seat on the ground in the shade of some date trees that lined a wide clearing of barren sand atop the rise. The hanged man opened his sack and handed out plastic bottles of Evian water. Ray-Bans crouched to give Caroline and Dwayne a drink of the cool spring water.
“Don’t worry. We recycle,” Ray-Bans said. This is the first he’d spoken to them. He had a Texas drawl.
Bohrs stepped up to them.
“We’re a little ahead of schedule, so we’re going to wait here awhile. Feel free to take a little nap,” he said.
“Like the one on the boat?” Caroline said.
“Yeah, I feel a little bad about that. But we couldn’t have you trying to talk to the crew. We like to keep them in the dark as much as possible. Temporal integrity and all that shit,” Bohrs said.
“Why go to this trouble? Why not pick us up in The Now?” Dwayne said.
“The Now. I like that,” Bohrs said, smiling. “Trouble is, when you people decided to disappear, you seriously dropped off the goddamn map. It was easier to go back into the books and see when you might pop up.”
Caroline sat silently battling with her curiosity. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“The kid wrote about you,” Bohrs continued. “It appeared in a codex he handwrote himself. The ink on the pages actually changed as you two went along, fucking up the past. Freaky, huh? Sir Neal owns an original of the kid’s full manuscript, and that provided a lot more detail, including the slave market and, well, you know the rest.”
“The full Profectus Praxus? That was lost when the library at Alexandria burned.” Caroline could not help herself.
Bohrs only smiled.
“You were there? You were at the library?” she said.
“Before the fire. Sir Neal had a shopping list,” Bohrs said. “What do you think of that, huh?”
“I’m not sure,” Caroline said, suddenly dizzy again. “Okay, since we’re just bullshitting,” Dwayne said. “The words on the handwritten documents changed. Does that mean all the books reprinting it changed too? And if Praxus died before writing about any of what happened to him, how do we still know about it?”
“We’re learning more about that as we go,” Bohrs said. “The whole Butterfly Effect thing is a non-starter, it turns out. These anomalies don’t have the wide-reaching impact that the brainiacs theorized they did.” He nodded to Caroline at the word “brainiac.”
“You mean, the only writings affected are the ones physically touched by the author?” Caroline said.
“You can still read all of the kid’s writing in books and on the Internet if you want to. Even if he didn’t write them after all.” Bohrs crushed an empty Evian bottle and tossed it to the hanged man, who stowed it in the sack with the others.
“That’s some fucked up shit right there, am I right?” Ray-Bans said, lighting up a Marlboro from
