She flashed one of her carefully selected smiles at him.
John’s face seemed to have reclaimed some of its colour. ‘Behind such beauty, you have a mind just as cunning as any ambassador or general. I … I –’
Becks eased herself from his tight grip and pushed him gently back. ‘My lord, we should set forth immediately.’
‘Yes … yes, that would be advisable.’ His lovelorn puppy eyes cleared and focused on more practical matters. ‘Yes, we must assemble a caravan immediately.’
Yet he stared at her in silence for a while longer, his blue eyes narrowing, marvelling at her. ‘If only it were the way of things that I had been king … you would truly make a formidable queen.’
A part of her mind calculated whether she should reveal his future to him; whether knowing what fate awaited him would strengthen his resolve to stand up to Richard. But a hard-coded protocol reminded her that knowledge of the future to any man was just as big a contaminant to history as any careless time traveller. There were other ways to ensure he found a bit of backbone and stood firm against Richard when the time came.
‘Be strong for me now,’ she said gently, teasingly. ‘And perhaps I will yet be your queen.’
CHAPTER 56
1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
‘What are you going to do with me?’ asked Liam.
Locke looked up at him. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. ‘My merry men,’ he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, ‘were rather keen to make an example of you. It’s down to the fact that you’re a rich Norman and they’re all poor Saxons.’
‘But I’m Irish, not French!’
He shrugged. ‘All they see is a rich young man in expensive clothes.’ He pared a hunk of venison off the bone and handed it to Liam. ‘As it always was, it shall always be … rich overlords, a poor underclass and a world of hatred between them.’
Liam chewed on the meat, surprising himself at how hungry he was. ‘Mr Locke, the things you’ve said about your time … it doesn’t sound too good.’
He smiled sadly. ‘No … No, it isn’t.’ Locke held him with his eyes. ‘In my time things are going very badly … very quickly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Where do I start? We – we’ve exhausted the world of its resources. The world ran out of oil in the late 2030s. It ran out of coal and natural gas in the 2050s. It ran out of many of the essential minerals and ores at the same time. We lost so much land to the advancing seas, land that contained fertile soils, mines, oilfields. And there’ve been wars. Plenty of them. Regional wars, as billions of dispossessed people migrate from flooded lands to already crowded lands.’
Locke shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a mess all of our own making. Perhaps if we’d changed our ways at the beginning of the twenty-first century … if we’d managed to control our population, if we’d all been less greedy wanting our shiny new things, then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s an exhausted world. It’s a dying world.’
Liam looked at the hunched form of the robot in the corner; just a dark outline and two pale blue eyes. ‘Mr Locke, why did you come back here? It wasn’t just to escape that world, was it?’
Locke sighed. A long silence followed, and outside they could hear the evening routine of camp: voices raised, several dogs barking hungrily. Liam had imagined the camp might have been alive with folk songs around a fire, the good-natured exchange of merry freedom-fighters. Instead it was the desperate sounds of a refugee camp – a hundred ragged half-starved outlaws living off what they could trap or steal.
‘You’re right. There was a mission.’ He picked at his teeth. ‘A mission of sorts. An objective.’ He frowned for a moment, as if trying to remember what it was. ‘In my time there are only a few of us left. No longer influential, no longer the silent power behind presidents and popes. We’re just a small band of believers.’
‘Believers?’
‘Templars.’
Liam stopped chewing. ‘You’re one of them knights? But you’re … you’re from the future, so you are! You saying they’ve got Templar Knights in the future?’
He laughed softly. ‘Well, not if you mean men running around in chain mail and waving big swords, Liam. But yes, there are Templars … men who believe. Men who still hope, even now at this late stage, that God will step in to save us from ourselves.’
Locke’s face reminded him a little of Cabot. A face etched with a lifetime of memories and set with a grim determination to see the right things done.
‘We put our faith in technology. All of us. We saw we were running out of oil, but instead of using less of it, we assumed technology would eventually find us a miracle. Free energy, harmless energy for all. But there was no man-made miracle. We used up oil and then there came the Oil Wars. The world became obsessed with fighting itself for dwindling resources, and the oceans and the skies grew more polluted. The ecosystem began to collapse. There was a hope technology could engineer new forms of genetic life that could restore the balance, bacteria that would eat carbon out of the air and help to cool our world down again. But it was too little and too late. All we did was create bacteria that poisoned the sea with big toxic blooms. The more we tried to bail ourselves out with technology … the worse we seemed to make it.’
Locke shook his head. ‘So all that’s left now is blind faith … that there’s something else that can help us.’
‘God?’
He shrugged. ‘Who can say? God or perhaps something Godlike. Something greater than man, something or someone who can help us.’
Liam looked down at the candle. ‘I’m not a real believer, Mr Locke, truth be told. If there is a God, he’s never bothered yet to speak to me.’
‘I’m not sure what I believe either … but hope, belief is practically the last thing we have left.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much.’
‘And we have a knowledge …’
Liam looked up. ‘Knowledge?’
Locke seemed reluctant to continue, as if debating with himself whether to say more. Finally he spoke in a voice little more than a whisper. ‘Knowledge of a prophecy.’
‘What?’
‘A prediction … a prophecy. Something we’ve known about for over a thousand years.’
‘You say “we” … you mean, the Templar Knights?’
‘Yes. Us … the name has changed, of course, depending on which conspiracy nuts you listen to. Templars, Masons, the Illuminati … Priory of Sion, New World Order. There have been all sorts of imaginative and ridiculous names for us over the decades and centuries. But we started out simply as an order of soldier-monks in Jerusalem.’ He laughed drily. ‘No more, basically, than janitors, temple security guards – hence the name Templars.’
Liam recalled Cabot’s story. ‘But something happened, didn’t it? Something was discovered by the security guards.’
Locke nodded. ‘You know the story, then?’
‘I suppose I know some of it. I know some knights found a scroll and it became known as the Grail. Right?’
‘Indeed. The Grail … a chalice, a cup: a symbol of containment. Containment, yes … but not of a liquid, not the blood of Christ. But a secret.’
‘Secret? This prophecy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
Locke laughed. ‘Just like that? You ask and expect me to tell? Secrets that men like myself have been keeping and passing down from one brother to another? From grandfather to father to son?’
Liam thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘Why not? Who am I going to tell, sitting here?’
Locke laughed some more. ‘Maybe I will trade secrets with you.’
Liam nodded. ‘All right.’
‘So, then –’ Locke hacked another chunk of meat off for Liam – ‘tell me, why exactly were you sent back here?’
Liam wondered whether to mention the Voynich Manuscript. It was what had started off this mission, the first breadcrumb
in a trail that ultimately had led him here, into this mud hut in the middle of Sherwood Forest. ‘The Grail,’ replied Liam.
‘You wish to decode its secrets too?’
‘Aye.’ A question suddenly occurred to Liam. ‘How did you know where to find it?’
Locke sat up. ‘The Grail disappeared from history at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It simply vanished. Became nothing but a myth from then on. But we’ve always known it existed. And we’ve always known it was never just a mere cup.’
He began to carve another ragged hunk of meat from the bone. ‘We have Templar records. Letters of instruction, personal correspondence dating back to the brotherhood’s inception and papal blessing in 1129. So … we’ve always known King Richard got what he came for in the Holy Land. But it is there that the trail goes cold. Until, that is … the Second World War.’
Liam’s eyebrows lifted.
‘A German bombing raid over Oxford in 1943 damaged some ancient castle buildings. Old crypts were disturbed, unearthed. And, as a result of that, documents that hadn’t seen the light of day for over nine hundred years emerged. One such document was attributed to King John, written actually before he became king, written while his brother Richard was still being held for ransom in Europe.’
Locke passed another hunk of meat over the candle to Liam. ‘It was a letter of instruction to some knights to transfer King Richard’s “sacred possession” north to Scotland. John, we suspect, intended to hide it from his brother to use as a bargaining chip. Or maybe he really did think his brother’s haul from Jerusalem would be far safer in Scotland. But history tells us it never arrived there. It became lost. John’s letter of instruction was the very last mention of it.’
Locke half smiled. ‘There was a date on John’s letter. So, we finally knew a pretty exact where-and-when for the Grail. And the brotherhood has, of course, known that since the letter finally surfaced courtesy of a Luftwaffe bomb. The plan therefore, Liam, was to retrieve the Grail and decode its secrets.’
‘But you can’t, can you?’
‘Ahh, I presume you know about the key?’
‘The key to decoding it?’
‘A cardan grille. A template with viewing slits in, that one rests over the encoded text. Yes. And without that, the Grail is just a scroll full of meaningless words.’
‘And King Richard has it?’
‘Indeed.’
Liam frowned. ‘So, how were you planning on getting this grille off him?’
‘To lure him here, of course. Stir an uprising in Nottingham that he’d insist on dealing with himself on his return. He does have a reputation for that … recklessly leading from the front. A taste for the blood-rush of battle.’ Locke glanced at the motionless squatting form of the robot. ‘And, if such an opportunity presented itself, my big friend here, Rex, in the heat of battle might be able to get through to Richard …’ Locke shrugged. ‘It’s not much of a plan, but it’s all I’ve got.’
He turned to Liam and smiled, not unkindly. ‘But you’ve done such a good job of winning the locals round that my fledgling uprising looks like it’s going nowhere. Six months ago I had nearly a thousand men out here in the woods. Most of them have returned to their homes now, what with your pardon. I presume the amnesty for outlaws was your idea?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Liam replied. ‘Your uprising was causing waves in the future.’
Locke’s smile faded. ‘Well, I imagine it isn’t any longer.’
‘But you have the Grail. That will still bring Richard to you, right?’
‘Of course. He wants what I’ve got, and I want what he’s got. Perhaps we’ll make a deal?’
Liam frowned, a question occurring to him. ‘You said your brotherhood has known where the Grail might be intercepted for ages? Since, what? 1943? So when exactly have you come from, Mr Locke?’
The last time Liam had asked Locke the question, he’d replied rather cryptically, ‘The end.’
‘Is it much farther into the future than me?’
Locke said nothing, the half-smile frozen on his face, teasing Liam.
‘A hundred? Two hundred years? … Five hundred?’
‘The End,’ said Locke again, offering nothing more.
‘The End?’ Liam hunched his shoulders. ‘Ahh, come on, what is that supposed to mean? Do you mean the end of the century?’
The older man said nothing.
‘The end of what? … End of the world?’
Locke relented. ‘It really boils down to how you interpret this world around us, Liam. In a scientific way, or a spiritual way. Is it an ending … or a beginning?’
Liam ground his teeth with frustration. ‘That means nothing to me, so it does! That’s just the kind of mumbo-jumbo I’d expect from a priest.’
‘The prophecy, Liam. We’ve always known the Grail contained a detailed prophecy. Something happens on a certain date, a certain year.’
‘Something?’
‘Something.’ Locke spread his hands. ‘We don’t know. That’s what I came back to find out.’
‘Something,’ uttered Liam again. ‘Something good or something bad?’
‘I suppose if you have faith, Liam, if you can believe in a caring God, then it can only mean something wonderful will happen.’
‘And do you?’
Locke scratched the tip of his nose. ‘I suppose I’ll make my mind up when I’ve managed to decode the thing.’
CHAPTER 57
1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
Moonlight illuminated the forest track in front of Bob. It was just possible to see the dark stains of congealed blood in places, the scuff marks of boots, the glint of several twisted and broken loops of chain mail, and the pale feathered fletching of a few arrows deeply embedded in the dirt.
Bob reined the horse in and stepped down on to the track.
It was silent except for the hiss of a breeze through the endlessly stirring trees and the far-off hooting of an owl. He examined the signs of battle more closely.
Heavy boots close together had rucked the dirt, and many small gouges in the mud suggested arrows that had embedded themselves in the ground and been retrieved later. Bob nodded with calm certainty that this was the site of the ambush that had happened over twenty-four hours earlier.
He wandered over to one side of the track, pushing aside the thick ferns and bracken that filled the forest floor between the stout oak trunks. He soon found the first body, hastily pulled out of sight and dumped amid a thick clump of nettles, stripped of anything of value and left as carrion. He picked his way along the edge of the track, finding several more bodies, all of them stripped of their mail and their leather boots and left with nothing but their leggings and blood-stained tunics.
Half a dozen bodies in total. He flipped the last of them over; to his relief, none of them was Liam.
Relief.
Bob queried his mind for greater clarification. His on-board hardware looked dispassionately at the impulses coming in from the organic nub of flesh that barely deserved the term ‘brain’. The tiny electrical impulses fired off by the rat-brain-sized organ conformed to a pattern that humans would call an emotion.
Yes. Relief.
He stood up and listened to the night, hoping that beyond the hiss of stirring branches he might hear the faint and distant cry of human voices raised in drunken celebration or calling for help. But he heard nothing. Just the owl.
Bob’s decision-tree had been here before. On his very first mission he’d lost Liam in the aftermath of a battle for the White House; Liam had been taken away in one of a column of prison trucks. His AI then had been woefully unprepared for the decisions it had to make. But he’d managed to do it. He’d managed to reprioritize the mission goals to put rescuing Liam at the very top. Technically, a breach of his programming, but also something he’d been proud of.
This time round, it was a far easier decision. This mission’s goals were so poorly defined and ambiguous that devoting what wa
s left of the six-month mission envelope solely to finding his friend Liam was a nanosecond evaluation.
But how?
He could wait until dawn and attempt to identify a visual trail. A body of men moving through the thick undergrowth of Sherwood Forest would leave behind something that even an inexperienced tracker could follow.
He decided that was to be his plan of action, and settled down to a hunched-over squat amid some nettles to wait for the light of dawn. He wouldn’t sleep. Instead his mind would do what it always did when the rest of the world was in slumber: a defrag. A chance to play through the endless terabytes of data stored on his hard drive.
Memories.
To replay it all, every single image, every sound, every sensation, every smell. To try and make connections, to make associations, to understand a little better what it would be like to have a real brain. To be a real human, instead of an engineered tool … a meat robot.
He’d just started unpacking and sorting through a slideshow of memories when he detected the faintest odour of woodsmoke. Not the ever-present odour ingrained into the tunic he was wearing, the smell of melted tallow mixed with stale sweat. This was on the air … a fire burning somewhere out in the forest tonight, caught on the fresh breeze and carried for miles.
He sniffed loudly, his broad nostrils flexing like a horse’s.
The faint odour again.
He stood up quickly, scanning the woods in a steady 360° arc, hoping to detect just the faintest flicker of light deep in the woods. He saw nothing. But … he had the odour. Not just the smell of dry seasoned logs, but the vaguely minty odour of pine needles burning.
A campfire.
He decided to follow his nose.
CHAPTER 58
1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
It was morning and a mist mingled with the white smoke of a dew-damp cooking fire, drifting up through the canopy of branches above.