Time's Chariot

‘Very well. And what else did you see?’

‘My lord was as if frozen, sir. He seemed to see without seeing, like this.’ The steward gave an impression of a glassy eyed stare. ‘This man had his back to me — I could not see what he was doing. It was blue, sir.’

‘What was blue?’ Whitrow didn’t sound surprised at the sudden change of tack; he had no doubt gone through this thoroughly with Marks beforehand.

‘The thing he—’

‘The stranger…’ Whitrow prompted.

‘—the stranger held in his hand, sir. He held it to my lord’s head. And then… then…’ Marks was on the verge of collapsing in tears.

‘Go on,’ said Whitrow, with surprising gentleness.

The Correspondent heard the eagerness that lay beneath the words — the anticipation of the trap.

‘The newcomer vanished, sir. Just… vanished. And I fled, sir. I was that scared. I fled.’

He had done a lot for his Home Time masters in six hundred years, but letting himself be captured, beaten to a near pulp and sentenced to death on a charge of witchery was surely the most devoted.

After meeting Avicenna in Isfahan, he had found he had no desire to stay there any longer. At first he had wandered here and there with no real sense of purpose, reporting on what he saw, helped by the scraps of foreknowledge that would suddenly pop into his mind. He had soon learned to rely on their guidance. For instance, he had known that Isfahan and the whole area were about to be overrun by Turks, and at the same time he had suddenly found within himself the urge to head for Constantinople and, hence, Europe. He had spent some years wandering in France, then suddenly received the knowledge that the Normans were about to invade England. So he had headed there, and witnessed the landings, but not felt an urge to report them. Rather, another item of foreknowledge told him to head for Canterbury in 1094 to interview the archbishop there, one Anselm: a man who didn’t know it but whose work, like Avicenna’s, was to shape the future of science.

And so on. After that, it wasn’t hard to work out what his mission was: to interview philosophers, thinkers, sages. Those promptings had brought him here and, for the first time, things were going wrong. Still, there was no doubt that the Home Time would appreciate this on-the-spot report of a witch’s trial, even if he had no intention of providing an on-the-spot report of a witch’s execution, so he had let things get this far. But now it was far enough.

He now had enough energy stored for the first phase of the escape. He pulled his wrists away from each other with a sharp jerk, and the manacles snapped with a satisfactory crack. He began to concentrate on phase two, the feet, and as he did so he again thought back.

‘Do you speak any other language?’ It was the turn of the Correspondent’s own counsel, Saxton. Neat, prim, fussy. ‘French? Latin? Greek? Would you recognize any of them if I spoke them now?’

‘No, sir, I speak none of those,’ Marks said.

‘Then what is the significance of a man speaking a language you do not know? It is surely unremarkable.’

Marks’ mouth moved silently. Eventually he said: ‘On its own it is of no significance, but taken in conjunction with other events, it acquires meaning.’

An eloquent little speech for an uneducated serving man, the Correspondent thought with a wry smile, and no doubt quoted verbatim from his prior briefing by Whitrow. Yet, somehow the Correspondent didn’t doubt that Marks believed every word he was saying. Whitrow might prime a witness, maybe even bribe a fictitious testimony into existence, but he couldn’t force that witness to act as well as Marks must have been acting.

And there was the rub. Surely the most telling witness for either side would be Bacon himself, yet the Lord Chancellor was conspicuously absent. There was more than a witchcraft trial going on here. The next year, the Correspondent knew, Bacon would be tried by his peers for the less supernatural, more straightforward offence of taking bribes. He would confess and be fined, imprisoned at the king’s pleasure and banished from court and Parliament. Would that have happened so easily, the Correspondent wondered, if he had not already been tarnished by association with a witch trial? A small fact left out of the history books. Not that there could be any reasonable suspicion aimed at the man himself — he was Lord Chancellor, after all, and even under James Stuart’s witch-hating regime, stronger evidence than a single deranged steward would be needed to bring down a peer of the realm — but this trial could be used simply to chip away at the man’s integrity. All that was needed was a conviction. The steward’s testimony must have been a godsend to the anti-Bacon brigade, and the verdict was known in advance.

The chains that bound his feet went the same way as those that had been on his wrists. The Correspondent stood up to face the door to the cell, and began to concentrate for a final focus of energy.

When he was ready, he stood facing the door, barefoot. He put his hands together and began a measured pattern of breathing. He closed his eyes and visualized the lock of the door. Then he visualized the energy that flowed through his body. Door and body were the only items in the universe. His body was completely relaxed, there was no tension or effort in it, and it was as if in a dream that he pivoted on one foot and spun and brought his heel against the lock of the door. The wood shattered and the lock flew out into the passage.

He smiled grimly and swung the door open. Pausing only to render the gibbering jailer unconscious and put his boots back on, he left the building.

By the time Whitrow began his summing up, the Correspondent was so caught up with that nagging feeling that he could only give half his mind to the proceedings.

First, Whitrow said, there was no Sir Stephen Hawking. This had been verified by the College of Heralds. Whoever he was, the defendant had gained entry to the house of the Lord Chancellor by deception.

Second, he had spoken in the same tongue as the mysterious apparition. He had not vanished, as the spectre had, which probably showed that… third, while the ‘third man’ was clearly some kind of ghost, perhaps demon, the false Sir Stephen was very real and solid and therefore a necromancer, a medium, a warlock and probably any number of other kinds of undesirable magical practitioner.

Saxton made a half-hearted attempt at defence but it was clear the court had made up its mind and Saxton wasn’t going to fly in the face of opinion, apart from covering his own reputation by drawing the court’s attention to the fact that there was only one witness and that all evidence was circumstantial.

The verdict and the sentence came very soon after, and while the Correspondent could have broken free, he chose not to. Too many people, a major hue and cry if he got away, more likely a pistol ball in the back. And then came that crack to the head that caught even him by surprise, and he woke up in the cell.

Robert Marks stirred in his sleep, looked up and convulsed. The Correspondent reached down and hauled him out of bed. The woman next to Marks opened her mouth to scream, and the Correspondent squeezed her throat with his free hand just long enough to make her pass out harmlessly. Then he looked back at Marks, and smiled.

‘Wh–who are you?’ Marks whispered, and only then did it occur to the Correspondent that all the bygoner could see with his normal, unaugmented vision was a shadow.

‘Don’t you remember me, Mr Marks?’ he said pleasantly. He had had no idea where Marks might live; it had seemed a reasonable guess to look up in the attic of Bacon’s own residence, and it had paid off.

‘You!’ There was total despair in the man’s moan. The witch he had sent to the gallows had come for him. ‘I am dead.’

‘That’s a point of view.’ The Correspondent looked around him. The room was not large and the bed took up most of it. ‘We’ll sit here, Mr Marks, and at the slightest hint of resistance on your part, the tiniest thought of raising a hue and cry, I will kill you and drag your soul down to be feasted upon by my lord the master of darkness and chaos. I make myself clear?’

They sat facing each other on the edge of the bed. Marks was bolt upright, rigid in the moonlight.

‘Mr Marks, you have compromised my mission. My masters were most definite that I should remain undetected,’ the Correspondent said truthfully. ‘However, I will let you live if you answer some questions. Tell me about the third man you saw in your lord’s room with us.’

Marks’ eyes bulged. ‘Sir?’

‘A simple enough question. Tell me about him. What did he look like?’

‘Look like, sir?’

‘For God’s sake answer the question, man, it’s simple enough!’ the Correspondent snapped. He used the language of the Home Time, and to Marks it was the unearthly gabble of Hades. The steward almost fainted. ‘Do