“Have you seen my phone Magic? I dropped it when we hit the ground.”
“You can use mine,” he replied.
“Thanks – but unless it’s got a time travel app, I don’t think it’s going to help,” I said.
“It’s got a torch,” he replied.
“Ah, now you’re talking.”
With the light, I could see Nik and her ankle clearly. I didn’t know if it was broken or not, but it was very swollen and looked painful. I needed to get us back to the present as soon as possible, but without the phone we were a bit stuck – to say the least. I looked around using the light and noticed we seemed to be in a newly formed corridor. The walls were made of brick, but the floor was damp earth. In some places, there were small pools of water. Worst case scenario: my phone could be in one of those.
“We’ve got to find the phone,” I said to Magic. “I don’t want to be here for the next two thousand years.”
“I’ll call it,” said Magic.
“Unless China mobile, GPS or Wi–Fi were around in 209 BC, I don’t think you’ve got much chance of doing that,” I replied.
“Do you have an app that helps you to find your phone?” He asked. “You just have to whistle or snap your fingers and it plays a sound to let you know it’s there.”
“Hey, great idea! No I don’t.” It really was a good idea, and definitely one we should use – if we ever get the phone back.
We continued searching for my mobile using the lights on both Magic’s and Niki’s phones. These were consuming battery power quickly, and we were running out of time. Suddenly Magic called me.
“Joe – over here!” He’d found the phone stuck in the mud about three metres from where Niki was sitting. A black phone with a black case wasn’t the easiest thing to find down there.
“Brilliant!” I cleaned the phone as best as I could with my clothes and tried to switch it on… without success. I tried a few times, but no use. I sighed deeply. “Ok, let’s go to plan B.”
“What’s plan B Joe?” Magic asked.
“There’s no plan B,” replied Niki, “we have to make one up.”
“We really should get Niki to a hospital,” Magic said sincerely. He still hadn’t grasped the fact that we’d travelled two thousand two hundred years back in time. And why should he? Apart from falling down a hole, we had no evidence that we were now stuck in a previous civilisation. But evidence was on its way.”
No doubt having heard our voices, a man looking like a guard appeared from the corridor. There was no chance to get away – not with Niki’s broken ankle – so we just had to try to bluff our way out of there. The man was squat and short and looked strong. He spoke to us in a gruff tone. I certainly couldn’t understand a word, though his speech did sound like Chinese. Nik didn’t seem to understand what he was saying either, but Magic got it. Later he told us the man’s language sounded very similar to the local Xi’an dialect he’d learned at home. He replied to the guard in the same tongue. The man didn’t understand at first, but Magic repeated himself slowly, which seemed to work. They conversed for a while, and then the guard looked carefully at Niki’s ankle, and then disappeared. He returned a few minutes later with what looked like a wooden stretcher. I took one end whilst Magic took the other. “What did you say to him?” Niki whispered to Magic.
“I told him there had been uprisings against the government in our village. We are strong supporters of the Qin government, and had been attacked… that’s how your ankle was broken. We managed to escape with our lives, and are seeking sanctuary here. He seemed to buy that. He’s taking us to a place that will be more comfortable to rest. There is a Physician there who can treat your injury. Apparently, they get many injuries on the building site.”
“And death, I would think,” I added.
As we were walking, the corridor suddenly opened into a huge courtyard, and I could barely stifle my amazement. This was what I had come to see! It was like a small city, with a huge Palace at one end, and large ornate buildings around the other sides of a rectangular plaza. According to archaeologists, the Imperial underground Palace is about the size of fifteen football pitches! It was an amazing sight. Constructed of stone, it had four towers – each with gold inlays and beautifully decorated windows. The style had many similarities with what I had seen in Ancient Egypt, and I wondered if the two civilisations had a common root. Certainly, they shared the same belief of an afterlife and the importance of the Emperor or Pharaoh taking his treasures, wives and servants into the next life. I really wanted to explore, but we had to go where we were directed. As we crossed the square, we could now see the sun as it streamed down from a semi–cloudy sky. I was then aware of a wall surrounding the city, which must have been around four metres high. No doubt that the edge of this wall was where we fell earlier. We proceeded through a narrow lane between two of the buildings surrounding the square, which led to other buildings. The guard took us into one of these.
“How’s the ankle?” I asked Nik.
“I’d forgotten about it when we saw that amazing palace,” she replied, “but it’s still painful.”
We were brought into a room which smelled of herbs and other strange odours. Dried plants and things I couldn’t recognise hung from the ceiling – not dissimilar to some of the Chinese medicine shops I’d seen and smelled in London and Shanghai. Magic had been chatting with the guard on way to what appeared to be the Physician’s room. As soon as we were all inside, the guard called out and another man in different dress appeared from a door to one side. He seemed very surprised to see us, and questioned the guard. Magic told me the Physician asked who we were and why we were there. The Physician was clearly not as sympathetic to our cause as the guard, but agreed to help. After gently feeling her ankle, he said something to the guard and went back to the room he came from. Whilst he was away, Magic told Niki in modern day Mandarin that the ankle was very badly sprained, but not broken. The guard was listening to them, and asked Magic what language this was. He told the guard we were from the West Provinces, and I was a Muslim. The guard nodded in understanding. The Physician returned a couple of minutes later with a long piece of cloth, and a pottery container. He soaked the cloth in some sort of liquid inside the pot, and wrung it dry. He then quickly tied this very tightly around Nik’s ankle. She cried out in pain for a moment. The Physician told her not to walk on the ankle for ten days and not to wash the leg until then. Whilst the Physician was attending to Niki, the guard left the room and returned with a pole that could be used as a crutch. Magic thanked him for all his help.
We were led out of the Palace area and up some steps to take us back to where we came from. As we were leaving, the guard said something in a serious tone to us all. Magic nodded and replied in a similar tone. Once we were outside of the main entrance, I asked him what was said.
“He stressed that we must not breathe a word of what we have seen here today. He helped us because he sees us as brothers, and we should all help each other – but other guards would not have allowed us to leave with our lives. He thinks Qin Shi Huang was a great man who accomplished what none had managed before him – to unite so many kingdoms under one country. He fears for the future because there is no–one else like Qin Shi Huang, and there are too many against the Qin government.”
“We were lucky that he found us then,” I remarked. “How’s the ankle Nik?”
“Much better,” she said. “At first, when he put the bandage on, it felt cold, but now it feels warm. The heat is soothing, and I’m glad it’s not broken.”
“Well, we don’t know how long we’re going to be here, so you’d better get a good rest,” I said.
“Still nothing from your phone?” she asked.
“No, nothing. It’s as dead as…” I was going to say, ‘as dead as Emperor Qin,’ but thought better of it. “A dodo.”
“What’s a dodo?” asked Magic.
“Oh, it’s a flightless bird which will become extinct in about nine
teen hundred years’ time,” I replied. Magic looked at me blankly. “You still haven’t got your head around this time travel idea, have you?”
Magic shook his head. “It’s hard to take in… it feels like a dream just now. A very real dream.” Magic paused for a moment, and then said, “Joe, what will happen if we can’t get home?”
“Don’t worry about that – we’ll get home, I’m sure of it.” But the truth was, if I couldn’t get my phone to work, we were going to be stuck in the year 209 BC.
***
Thirty–Six
Having accepted that we were not going to return home for a while – if ever – we looked for somewhere to spend the night. There weren’t really a lot of options. In the distance, Magic spotted smoke rising from some buildings, and we decided to investigate. We had already consumed the food supplies we’d brought with us, and I didn’t know where our next meal was coming from, or where we would rest our heads that night. So finding food and accommodation was a priority.
As we reached the buildings, we realised this was temporary accommodation – probably for the labourers who were employed on the building of the Mausoleum. I had read that 700,000 people were hired to complete the tomb, but all of them had to be redeployed by the government to fight with the army and quell the peasants’ uprisings.
If this was a labourer’s camp, then understandably there was a quiet and deserted feel to the village, though we could hear children’s and women’s voices at one end. We walked in that the direction of the sounds to investigate. A woman must have heard us approach, and carefully came out of a small wooden building brandishing a large knife.
“Stay away!” she said in Xi’an dialect.
“We mean you no harm,” Magic replied. “We seek only shelter for the night.”
“Where are you from?” the women asked, dropping the knife to her side.
Magic told her we were from the West, and had come to visit relatives who were working on the building of the Qin Mausoleum. We had not realised they had been taken away to fight with the soldiers. The woman seemed to believe his story, and said we could stay the night if we didn’t mind helping her with a few things. Her husband and his younger brother were away with the other labourers and she had no–one to help with gathering food or with other chores. We said we’d be glad to help. The woman also asked about Niki’s ankle, and offered to take a look at it for her.
As we were helping to harvest the vegetables that had been planted in a neighbouring field, it was a chance to talk to Magic.
“I’m impressed, Magic,” I said.
“Impressed with what Uncle Joe?”
“You speak the language, and you know the right things to say.”
“Ah yes – my parents taught me a lot. But they never told me about time travel.”
“I guess not. How do you feel about staying here?”
“In 209 BC you mean?” I nodded. “I don’t know… maybe I could get used to it. I’d miss my phone and computer though. And I’m not sure I’d like to eat traditional food all the time.”
“I know what you mean.”
We took the food back to the make–shift home for cooking. Niki and the woman, whom was called Yong, were trying to have a conversation.
“She’s teaching me the local dialect,” Nik explained. “It’s not so difficult.”
“What are you teaching her?” I asked.
“About men,” she replied with a smile.
“Which is harder?” I asked.
“The language.”
We ate a simple dinner made by Yong and Niki, with home–made wine. After we’d finished, Yong sang to us. It was a beautiful melody, and we all clapped in appreciation. Magic sang his favourite Karaoke song, which Yong thought was very funny and very beautiful at the same time, though she couldn’t understand a word. I wondered what she thought of us… we must have seemed very strange to her. By this time, we were all tired, and Yong showed us where we could sleep. Nik and I shared one bed, and Magic the other. It was warm and cosy there and we felt safe in Yong’s small home. I soon drifted off to sleep.
*
We awoke the next morning to the sound of voices. It was light, but couldn’t have been much more than seven. Yong came to our bed urgently.
“Soldiers here – are they looking for you?” Niki understood the words ‘soldiers’ and ‘you’, which was enough to get us out of bed quickly.
“Someone must have told them,” I said, “maybe the doctor?”
We had no time to philosophise about who informed on us or why; we just had to escape as soon as we could. Magic was already awake and getting dressed when we went to his room.
“I heard… we have to go now.”
We quickly said our goodbyes and hugged Yong, who gave us some food to take with us. Soldiers were searching other homes, and would be at Yong’s very soon. Nik could not run with her damaged ankle, so Magic carried her. We had reached about fifty metres from the house when I heard a ringing noise, and then a swoosh as an arrow landed just a couple of metres behind us. We stopped to see four soldiers, two of whom were aiming crossbows in our direction. There was nowhere to hide, and nowhere to go. We turned to face the soldiers. They did not look at all friendly, and were getting closer and closer.
“You two run!” urged Niki, but there was no way we would leave her at the mercy of these killers.
I was mentally preparing myself to fight, as the soldiers were now just a few yards away. This was not the way I wanted this trip to end.
“What’s that sound?” asked Magic as the ominous–looking warriors stopped just two paces from us.
“Oh my god – it’s the alarm on my phone!” I whispered. I quickly removed the phone from my pocket – it was working! “It must have been the heat…”
“Joe, just do it – now!” Niki hissed as one of the soldiers grabbed her arm. I changed the date as Niki kneed the soldier in the groin and she and Magic grabbed my arms – and we were gone.
The scene had changed. The workers village was no more and the soldiers had vanished. Instead in the distance we could see tanks driving across the countryside. “What year is this?” Niki asked.
“It looks like the Japanese invasion of China,” Magic said, “so it must be…”
“Nineteen thirty–six,” I said. The others looked at me with puzzled brows.
“I just entered any number!” I exclaimed. “I thought you wanted to get away as quickly as possible! Ready to go home now?”
“That would be nice,” replied Nik.
*
Back in 2015, we returned to the tree where we’d left our twenty–first century clothes and caught the local bus back to downtown Xi’an. We didn’t even change our clothes; if people wanted to stare, let them stare. We’d just escaped death in Ancient China.
On the way back to town, I sat next to Magic.
“Thanks again for all your help Magic – we couldn’t have done it without you.”
“You’re welcome Uncle Joe… I’ve never had an experience quite like that one. And I know that it’s true now… time travel I mean.”
“Oh really… and what convinced you?”
“Believe it or not, it wasn’t seeing the winter snow, or marvelling at the underground Palace, or being chased by the soldiers.”
“Then what was it?” I asked.
“It was seeing the Japanese tanks.”
“Really? Why’s that?”
“Nobody would ever allow Japanese tanks to be driven across the countryside again – not even in a War movie. Not after what happened in the past in China. It had to be real.”
***
Thirty–Seven
Having returned home to London via Shanghai, we needed a couple of weeks to recover from our time trip to ancient Xi’an. For one thing, Niki needed time to mend her ankle and get that better. I thought it would magically fix itself merely by returning to the present day – but no such luck. Perhaps we could have reverse engineered the accident by
jumping back to a time just before it happened and making sure she didn’t fall – we did consider that. But seeing as it was only a sprained ankle, it wasn’t worth the trauma of another trip to the same place in 209 BC. The thoughts, feelings and sounds of the crossbow–wielding soldiers still haunt us. (I’ve since changed the ringtone on my phone; but every now and then I hear it on someone else’s mobile, causing my heart to skip a beat!).
After satisfying our curiosities in ancient Egypt and China, what next for the time–travelling duo? Early retirement perhaps? We did seriously think about this, after nearly getting ourselves killed in China. But we couldn’t not time travel – it was the ultimate thrill, and there was still the hope that we can use it to do something really worthwhile. And there was always more money to win, of course.
One thing we had not yet done was visit the distant future. I had been reading my copy of ‘The Time Machine’ by H.G. Wells which Niki gave me for my birthday. This had fuelled my desire to travel in that direction for a change. In Wells’ novel, a young man travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers a very, very different world to his present one. Should we jump to the same period of time to verify or refute his picture of humanity in that era?
In the end, we decided that since this had already been done (albeit in a work of fiction), we would leap as far into the future as we had recently gone back in the past – that is, 2,200 years forward in time. We thought this was far enough forward to make the Earth a very different place, but communication with the natives should still be possible to some degree. So 4,200 CE it was.
*
Preparing for a trip to a future World was not easy. For starters, we had no idea what sort of climate would greet us on arrival. Scientists had been talking about Global Warming for a long time now – could the future be much warmer and wetter? Would sea levels rise to such a height that many coastlines around the World would disappear – perhaps whole countries sinking beneath the waves? Or would parts of the planet be wiped out by the sort of nuclear war that we had managed to avert in 2056? The choice of where and when we jumped back in time was therefore rather important. Finding ourselves fifty metres under water would not be the best start to a trip.