Cowl

  Polly found herself standing at the edge of a rough track. Distantly she could again hear the tinkling of bells, and that muted conversation and laughter.

  ‘But what is it? What’s it for?’

  Christ knows. But I heard enough then to know that somehow time travel was involved, and that the monster it came from hunts through time, taking victims that are somehow irrelevant to the future. You know, if that thing hadn’t attacked when it did, we would have still been around in an area that was subsequently carpet-bombed. I’ve thought about this a lot. I think it was coming to take dead men before they died.

  Thinking about that made Polly’s head ache. She turned onto the track and headed towards the human sounds. Shortly a covered wagon rounded a corner, pulled into view by a big white shire horse. The vehicle was hung with the bells she had heard, and painted with the words ‘The Amazing Berthold’ and its woodwork was intricately carved. Polly paused in its path as it approached, the driver and his elderly companion peering at her suspiciously, then she moved to one side of the track. As the wagon drew alongside her, she observed a young dark-haired man holding the reins, his clothes straight out of some historical interactive, and his broad flat hat sporting a couple of pheasant feathers. He pulled on the reins to halt the horse, then reached down to haul up the wooden brake.

  AT LAST IT WAS ending, and the world was returning in coloured flashes like a strange species of lightning. Gradually revealed through the mantisal’s glassy spars was a landscape seemingly little different from the one they had recently departed. They rematerialized above grassland a few hundred metres away from the edge of dense forest. Then Tack began to note the subtle but disturbing differences. Here the cloud-dotted sky was a deeper blue, the green of sprouting grass was hazing up through the trampled sea of older stalks, and everywhere were scattered yellow, red and lavender flowers. The distant trees were also tinged with the green and yellow of new growth, and there were birds racketing up into the air. A balmy breeze, carrying with it the smells of hot spring, dispersed the cold from the skeletal cage of the mantisal.

  ‘Best get to the trees as quickly as we can,’ said Traveller. ‘Out here we’re likely to get stomped.’

  Tack saw that the man was tired again and his eyes lifeless. Traveller gestured to a distant elephantine shape coming towards them.

  ‘Mammoth,’ Tack said.

  Traveller snorted. ‘Wrong. They’re ten million years in the future. That thing over there is a deinotherium—a rather larger and more bad-tempered ancestor of the elephant. So let’s move.’

  They dropped out of the mantisal and walked away from it. Glancing back, Tack saw the strange thing fold out of existence, leaving a cold mist that swiftly dissipated. Nearby he saw huge skins of excrement covering the ground, some old enough for plants to be pushing up through them, and some new enough to be covered by legions of flies contesting ownership with dung beetles the size of golf balls. Avoiding these, they tramped on towards the trees, keeping a wary eye on the approaching beast.

  ‘How big is it? I can’t really tell,’ Tack asked.

  ‘About four metres high at the shoulder. We could bring it down with our weapons, but even this far back in time every drastic action we take creates difficulties for the mantisal.’ Seeing Tack’s puzzled expression Traveller went on, ‘We come from the potential future, and no matter how careful we may be our actions here affect that future.’ He gestured all about them. ‘Our presence here is even now moving this time-line down the probability slope, leaving as the main line all this without our presence. Therefore, in each jump through time we make, the mantisal takes us not only back in time but back up the slope to mainline time. And the more we influence each time we are in, thus affecting our probable future, the more slope it has to carry us back up on the next jump. Luckily, the further back we go, the less we affect our probable future.’

  Reflecting on their previous conversations, Tack said, ‘I’d have thought the danger would increase the further back we went.’

  His expression showing his customary irritation, Traveller glanced across at him. ‘Which shows just how little you understand. As I said before: kill your father before your conception and you’ll end up right down the slope, where it would take the full energy output of the sun tap for a whole day to propel you back onto the main line. But to achieve the same screw-up here, you’d need heavy weapons—and as far back as, say, the Jurassic, nothing less than a tactical nuke.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Traveller said nothing more for a while then, relenting, added, ‘Errors like that do not accumulate through time. There’s an effect called temporal inertia. By travelling back in time and killing your father, you push yourself down the slope because of the paradox you’ve created. Kill your direct ancestor a hundred million years in the past, and you’ll still be born.’

  ‘But doesn’t that mean … predestination … some controlling intelligence?’

  ‘Only in the way that a tree is predestined to grow towards the sun, and only in the way that some god might have made that tree. Evolutionary forces are macroscale as well as microscale.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Enough. Just think about what I’ve already told you. It is doubtful you’ll be able to understand it all anyway. You still think linear.’ Just then the deinotherium let out a roar and was suddenly charging towards them, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  ‘It is probably in must,’ said Traveller. ‘Pick up your pace.’

  Tack did so readily, glancing back the way they had come as he broke into a trot. ‘Perhaps that’s pissed it off,’ he commented.

  Traveller looked back, too, and his expression changed. The mantisal had returned, hovering just where they had previously abandoned it. Tack now did a double-take—it clearly wasn’t their mantisal, since it contained four individuals who were even now scrambling out of it.

  ‘Umbrathane,’ Traveller hissed. ‘Run!’

  The order was reinforced through Tack’s programming, so without conscious volition he found himself obeying. As he ran he drew his seeker gun, and he wondered if he had received some subliminal instruction to do that as well. A triple flash to his side: Traveller was firing with that weapon of his, then sprinting past Tack to turn and fire again. Suddenly the grass to their right was burning and the air full of smoke. Again the deinotherium roared, and now they could feel the thunder of its progress.

  ‘Shed the pack!’

  Still running, Tack obeyed, regretting the loss of the equipment it contained. But regret was dispelled when Traveller came sprinting past him with the same pack slung from one shoulder, as if its weight was of no consequence. Tack glanced back and saw the four newcomers heading directly towards them. Then the elephantine mass of the enraged animal thundered in between, drawing a veil of dust between them and their pursuers.

  ‘Move faster!’

  From somewhere inside himself, Tack found his last few ergs of energy and accelerated. But no matter how fast he ran, or dodged from side to side, Traveller was in front of him, behind him, to the side, crouching and firing, then up again and sprinting away. Traveller was fast, more so than any human Tack knew of, and the man made Tack feel slow and clumsy, which he had never felt before.

  Behind them, the deinotherium’s aggressive roaring changed to a panicked trumpeting, and Tack glimpsed back to see it turning aside, smoke boiling off its hindquarters, as black-clad figures moved quickly past it. Suddenly a tree exploded to Tack’s left, and it was only then that he realized they had finally reached the forest. Loud detonations and flashes continued to move off to his left—the direction Traveller had veered in as they entered the trees. Tack just kept running as hard as he could. In fact he could not stop, and knew that if Traveller did not cancel his last instruction soon, he, Tack, would die of a ruptured heart.

  Stop.

  The order at last came through Tack’s comlink as he was running, in the agony of lactic overload, dow
n a black tunnel of trees. He immediately sprawled forwards on the ground, his muscles locking with cramps and his lungs feeling torn as he gasped for breath. Distantly he could still hear the trumpeting animal.

  Hold your position and, excepting myself, kill anyone who comes to you.

  It was some minutes before Tack could even pull himself to his knees. His seeker gun was clasped tightly in a hand as white as tooth enamel, and it took him a severe effort of will to unclench his fingers and drop the weapon. For a while he tried to massage the agonizing cramps from his legs, then taking up his gun again he dragged himself to cover amongst dense ferns beneath a fallen forest giant, partially supported off the ground by its own massive side branches. There he lay still and listened to the deinotherium’s cries of outrage fading away.

  After a hiatus, the birds started singing. He found nothing in their song to comfort him as he lay with his jaw still clenched rigid, while he tried to rub the agonizing knots from his legs. Slowly the pain was dispersing, but it would be some minutes before he would be able to get about on them again. As yet no suspicious sound or sign of movement.

  Then the birdsong suddenly stopped again, and the most glorious face Tack had ever seen gazed down at him—before a hand like a nest of steel bars grasped the back of his collar and hauled him out of hiding.

  THE WATCHER, MIND AND body in glass, had tracked the course of the tor over brief centuries from this particular vorpal sensor, finally turning it out from interspace to track her progress in the real world. Upon seeing the girl thrashing her way through the woods and talking to herself, it was not difficult to surmise that this was one torbearer who would not survive long. But the omniscient voyeurism was almost addictive, and there had been something odd about those insane monologues … After a brief exchange with the girl, the wagon driver, presumably the Amazing Berthold advertised, jumped nimbly down to the ground and swept off his hat. And the watcher decided to listen in.

  ‘Dancing before the King at Court, or standing at the bows of some ship travelling to far Lyonesse,’ the man said, perhaps in response to an earlier question from the girl, which the watcher did not feel inclined to track back to.

  The man went on, ‘Perhaps standing at a window of the Bloody Tower, awaiting the harsh fate bestowed upon the beautiful and innocent. Maybe far away on—’

  ‘You are as interminable as a three-onion fart, Berthold,’ said the older man on the wagon, before replacing in his mouth the stick he had been gnawing.

  The girl was studying both men intently, obviously starving because of the parasitic drain of her tor, perhaps fascinated by their smallpox-scarred faces, which were inadequately covered by the neatly trimmed beards they wore.

  ‘But, Mellor, it is my interminable rhetoric that puts the groats and pennies into my pouch and the pheasant pie into your mouth.’

  Mellor removed his stick. ‘No, I would venture to suggest it is the juggling and pratfalls which do that and your athletic servicing of either lord or lady.’

  Berthold frowned, then returned his attention to the girl. ‘You have the face of an angel, my lady. Tell me, whence do you come, and whither do you go?’

  The watcher noted now that Berthold was eyeing, with some puzzlement, her clothing, his attention finally resting on her army boots. It must be the odd clothing that caused him to use the honorific ‘my lady’, for in this age skin unscarred by smallpox was the preserve of milkmaids naturally immunized by an earlier infection of cowpox.

  ‘I’m a traveller from … the East,’ said the girl.

  Yes,’ said Berthold, ‘it is said that their garb is most strange and that the women wear trews. Most interesting.’

  Ah, the human capacity for self-deception, thought the watcher.

  The girl at last found something to add. ‘I am also a hungry traveller.’ Bertold turned to Mellor. ‘How far to go?’

  ‘Another six miles, by my reckoning, and we were instructed to arrive not before tomorrow morning. Berthold, what is in your mind?’

  ‘I am thinking that the nobility value novelty most high, and are never averse to the sight of a pretty face.’ Berthold turned to her. ‘Climb up here with us and travel a little way. We shall soon make our camp and I am sure Mellor has some pie to spare. Tomorrow we shall eat like kings in the house of a King, and shall leave it with as much as we can carry.’

  The watcher wondered if the girl had any idea what age she was in and how lucky she was not to have ended up dumped behind a tree with her throat cut.

  Mellor snorted then spat a gobbet of phlegm over the side of the wagon, but he shuffled aside to allow the girl to sit beside him. Once Berthold, too, was up beside her, squashing her up against Mellor, the watcher felt some sympathy for her, and some amusement at her expression. By her dress she must have come from an age where people were not so unconcerned about body odour or about the things living in their beards.

  ‘Geddup there, Aragon,’ said Berthold, as he released the brake and snapped the reins across the horse’s rump. The animal looked back at him, let out a snort identical to Mellor’s, then slowly began to trudge up the track. After listening for a while to Berthold’s subsequent ‘three-onion farts’ as he described interminably his adventures as a travelling entertainer, the watcher tracked forwards in time.

  Late afternoon inexorably slid towards evening, and before sunset Berthold pulled the wagon over to a clearing below a huge oak tree. While Mellor freed the horse from its harness, the girl and Berthold collected fallen wood from around the tree. When Berthold then struggled to use a tinderbox to get a fire started, the girl took out a propane cigarette lighter, thought for a moment, then hurriedly put it away again.

  Very wise, the watcher whispered in her glassy domain. The consequences for the girl might be proximity to more flame than would be healthy.

  Soon a good blaze was going and beside it rested enough wood to keep it fed for some time. Only then, in fading light, did Mellor fetch a sack of food from the back of the wagon. The bread looked stale and the hard pies seemed to contain, along with meat, fat and jelly, the occasional bone and unidentifiable organ webbed with rubbery tubes. But for someone who had earlier tried eating acorns, it was doubtless all ambrosia. Though eating plenty themselves, Mellor and Berthold watched the girl’s guzzling with awe.

  ‘You were hungry,’ commented Berthold.

  Pausing to wipe crumbs from her face, the girl said, ‘Yes, I was … and you say there’ll be more tomorrow?’

  ‘Tomorrow I shall entertain the King himself, then our pouches will be filled with silver and our sacks filled with salted venison and pork, pheasant pies and sweet pastries.’

  After washing down, with small beer, her latest mouthful, the girl prompted, ‘The King, yes …’

  Berthold obliged her, ‘Yes, good old Harry himself—Henry the VIII, under God alone King of this fine green country.’

  The girl choked on another mouthful of pie and had to cough it into the fire.

  THE WOMAN TOSSED TACK out into the open as if he were an empty coat, then slowly approached as he struggled upright. But, as he brought his gun to bear, she was on him in a second, slapping it out of his hand.

  ‘Pishalda fistik!’

  Under the impetus of Traveller’s last order, he swept his foot out towards her legs, while aiming a straight-fingered blow to her throat. She caught his outstretched hand and twisted it so hard that he must follow it round or feel it break. Pulling his kris flick knife from concealment, he clicked it open and swung it towards her neck. Next thing he knew he was on the ground again, flat on his back and disarmed.

  ‘Esavelin scrace, neactic centeer vent?’ she said, casually inspecting the flick knife before closing it.

  ‘Yeah, about four o’clock in the afternoon,’ muttered Tack, hauling himself to his feet and preparing for attack again.

  Desist.

  Tack paused, grateful for this order from Traveller, aware that he had as much chance of killing this woman as he had of killing
Traveller himself. Now, inactive, he had more time to study her. Approaching two metres in height, she moved with the same wiry strength as Traveller. Her face was utterly beautiful but strong, her cropped hair a dyed black that was growing out bright orange, and her eyes the colour of strawberries. She wore loose black fatigues, and a loose shirt underneath what looked like a sleeveless Kevlar jacket. Some sort of gun was holstered across her stomach, and various odd-looking instruments were affixed to her belt. His knife she now placed into a pouch also attached to the same belt.

  Tilting her head she studied him with apparent confusion. ‘Century twenty-two primitive. With you want what they?’

  Tack could only suppose that somehow Traveller was watching this scene from nearby, and wondered why no shots had been fired. Unexpectedly, Traveller answered that same question as if the link between them ran deeper than just the comlink.

  I am five kilometres south of you, and will be with you in fifteen minutes. Try to stay alive and try to delay.

  Tack did not know how Traveller could see what was going on, though he guessed at some sophisticated sort of bugging—which should not be so difficult for a race advanced enough to travel in time.

  ‘Answer me!’ the woman spat.

  ‘What was the question?’ Tack asked.

  The woman paused, as if listening, then, carefully articulating each word, said, ‘What do the Heliothane want with you?’