Time's Chariot

not provoke me, Mr Marks,’ the Correspondent said more quietly, in English. ‘Now, what was this man wearing?’

‘He was — he was dressed like… like you, sir. A doublet, a tunic, a sword…’

‘He was unremarkable? You would walk past him in the street and not notice?’

‘Why, yes, sir.’

The Correspondent had to remember that Marks had only seen the man through a crack in the door. A perfect description was unlikely. ‘You said at the trial that I shouted,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir…’

‘In this strange language.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Marks’ voice trembled.

The Correspondent shut his eyes as he tried, desperately tried, to remember. There was the ring of conviction in Marks’ tone: the steward still believed everything he was saying. And the Correspondent, who had been perhaps one tenth convinced when he gained entry to the Marks’ room that evening, was now nine tenths convinced.

He tried for another five minutes, but could get nothing more out of the man that had not already been said in court.

‘I am leaving now, Mr Marks,’ he said. ‘I’m bored of this world and I am returning to the nether regions of fire and damnation, where the demons play with their pitchforks and the souls of men who betray them. Do not mention to anyone that I was here.’

He reached out and sent Marks the same way as his wife. Then he walked to the window and looked up at the moon. He made contact and the familiar tone rang out between his ears.

‘RC/1029,’ he said, ‘requesting assistance.’

‘State nature of problem, RC/1029,’ said the neutral voice in his head. It was as uninterested as ever. The Correspondent had thought that for this, his first ever contact that wasn’t just to file a report, it might be different. Clearly not.

‘I have a problem with my memory,’ he said. ‘I am having difficulty remembering an individual.’

‘Diagnostic solutions are available for downloading,’ said the voice of the lunar station.

‘Please download them. How do I run them?’

‘They are self executing. Downloading and running now.’ There was a pause, and then it was as if the blood was roaring in his ears. The noise grew louder and louder. He winced, and gritted his teeth, and put his hands over his ears but to no avail. Now the noise seemed to be vibrating his entire cranium from the inside.

Suddenly it stopped.

‘Existence of short and long term memory block confirmed,’ said the lunar station. ‘Cause of blockage unknown.’

‘Can you remove it?’

‘It is possible blockage may be self-induced due to previous psychic trauma,’ said the station. ‘A defence mechanism exists in all Correspondents for such an eventuality.’

In other words, he might have flipped and the block was the only thing keeping him sane. The Correspondent shut his eyes. ‘Do it,’ he said.

‘It is done.’

‘I don’t feel any different.’

‘Effects will become noticeable over a short period of time. Diagnostic solutions are now removed.’

‘Thank you,’ the Correspondent said. ‘RC/1029 signing off.’

He turned from the window to look at the two still forms on the bed, then left the house. By sunrise he was out of London, heading north into Hertfordshire.

And by sunrise he had remembered. It had all come back. He remembered the man appearing, and he remembered it hadn’t been the first time. For six centuries he had been roaming this earth, obeying the promptings at the back of his mind to seek out certain people of a philosophical bent and interview them; and every time he had interviewed a philosopher, the man had appeared with his mind-jamming device and his blue crystal. The Middle East, France, Germany, Spain, Africa, England — the man had always been there. Avicenna, Anselm, Abelard, Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Siger, Scotas… and others, most lately Francis Bacon.

This time-travelling Home Timer. This lying time-travelling Home Timer, because one of the things that had kept the Correspondent going when times got hard had been the promise that if he made it to the twenty-first century, he would return to the Home Time, and there was no other way home. But now it seemed he could be brought back at any time.

He still had no idea what the man’s mission was. Did every correspondent get this treatment? Were the messages he had been sending to the lunar station a waste of time?

No, because the stranger had done nothing to him, the Correspondent, except take his memory of each event. It had always been the philosopher who received his fuller attentions — a blue crystal, which turned red when applied to the head.

So the stranger’s purpose was a mystery, but the Correspondent remembered him now. He remembered, and he was already planning what to do next time, because now he had seen the pattern he had a pretty good idea when the next time might be.

ELEVEN

The air that gusted past Jontan’s face was heavy with moisture and laced with salt that kept his mouth permanently dry. It roared in his ears. In his experience, air moved at a sedate pace at the whims of the weather monitoring stations: it was horrible to imagine it rushing by like this naturally.

Everything was grey: the clouds overhead, the sea to his left and the coarse, scrubby grass he was walking on along the cliff path. The one consolation — no, two consolations were that Sarai was there too, and she was walking slightly ahead of him, which meant he could indulge in his usual favourite pastime of looking at her. Like him, she was wearing a borrowed thick, wind- and waterproof jacket. It did her no justice, but he knew the outline within well enough to let his imagination do the rest.

She stopped and looked back along the cliff path. They both had caps on with flaps pulled down over the ears and she peered at him from under the peak of hers. ‘Come on, Jon,’ she said. He trotted the next couple of steps to catch her up, and together they followed after Mr — ‘I doubt I’m a Commissioner any more’ — Daiho, who strolled thirty feet ahead.

It was he who had insisted they come for a walk with him before their evening meal — ‘before we all go stir crazy’. Mr Daiho’s patrician instincts seemed to be taking over and with no one else to sponsor here in the Dark Ages, he had naturally adopted them, even though Mr Scott was their actual employer. Patricians, Jontan thought vaguely, could probably sponsor whom they liked. He had never thought it might be an issue in his own life.

And Mr Daiho had a point. He had been spending fifteen, twenty hours a day for the last month symbed up to the kit they had brought with them, taxing their one symb junction to its limits, while the two journeymen did their best in these primitive conditions to keep the gear going and the cultures in the tank alive. (As opposed to Mr Scott, Jontan thought as darkly as he dared, who as far as Jontan could see had come along to this benighted time purely for the fun of it.) Perhaps they indeed needed the break.

But going on a walk in this storm was another matter, though Mr Daiho said it was a perfectly normal May day. Maybe they were going stir crazy, but at least back in the hotel they were indoors and protected from the elements and supplied with such creature comforts as this whenever-it-was time could provide. But when a patrician suggested something…

A stone pillar loomed on the cliff top ahead, and he wondered if this was their destination. Jontan fixed his mind on the pillar and carefully put everything else out of his mind: the men who walked a discreet distance behind