Caltraps of Time (29 page)

Roydon followed Richard down the ladder when they came over the place. ‘Wait, Royo, I’m coming too,’ called Sal and clambered down third. Richard said nothing, but his face was set as he peered at the ground before fixing into it on its long prong his gadget for recording millionths of millionths of millionths of a second.

‘Can’t make it out — the dyke’s rubble, the fence is all rotted away; brambles and nettles everywhere too, and all those docks,’ muttered Roydon. He turned, his eyes searching along what he hoped was the line taken by that hurrying speck so long ago. Richard straightened his back and stared at him, but said nothing. ‘The fool thinks,’ Richard said to himself, ‘because we snatched him from a cog-slipper, that all domain-time is frozen for ever, doesn’t realize most of it’s moved sixty-one years on, is going onward all the time, let alone what’s shunted or rebounded.’

Sal, who, a little way off, was anxiously watching Roydon, happened to glance at Richard and read his expression in a flash of intuition. ‘Roy!’ she shrieked. At that moment an unexpected and violent gust of instinctive drive invaded the hollow. At the cry, which sounded to him like his wife’s voice, Roydon’s pale face turned white. He rushed off along the old hedge-line. The hedge seemed to him to swing round and to flicker beside him — was she running along its far side?

Sal, racing at an angle to cut him off, had reached twenty strides when she vanished. Two seconds later and some way off, Roydon vanished too. ‘Richard, you fool, come up!’ roared Paul from the helicopter. ‘That patch is a maze of little domains. Come up! We can winch you down where she vanished.’ But when Richard, white and babbling, was lowered down on the spot, he saw five paces onward the brink of a deep quarry. Below, men in tiny white shorts working ultrasonic excavators, far in the future, were gaping at the broken body.

Roydon’s flickering hedge was the edge of a furze thicket. Roydon was running on dry heath. It was very hot. The flickering was the bobbing of twenty-seven crouching heads. A dozen bone-tipped wooden spears flashed towards him, aimed at his hamstrings. Three struck him high in the calves, one went in above a knee. He fell. The skin-clad figures, quacking and barking, loped towards him.

‘Leave Richard. We must get that madman!’ shouted Fenn Vaughan in Paul’s ear. ‘I’ve pinpointed his vanishing. I think I saw something strike him just before.’

‘All right. Swing her round, Peter. Let Fenn con.’

In ten seconds the craft was over the point of Roydon’s disappearance, a patch of heath. Half a naked, shaggy thigh could be seen, and a queer coughing uproar rose from the ground. Paul and Fenn, stun-guns at the ready, slipped down the ladder.

The tribe was tying Roydon up with leather thongs. He looked dazed. With blood-curdling howls Fenn and Paul rushed on them. A flash of lightning and a simultaneous crack of thunder completed the tribe’s panic, and in a torrential rain-squall they scattered over the heather. Paul and Fenn carried Roydon a few paces back inside the domain bounds where the helicopter could again be seen ghostlily through the diminishing downpour, and slashed his bonds loose, looking anxiously about them. From the helicopter’s wall the echo of a blackbird’s call could be heard ten feet away, somewhere in the nineteenth century. Paul clamped emergency dressings on the wounds. Roydon staggered to his feet. ‘Must find her,’ he said thickly.

‘We’ve had one death on your account — we don’t want three. Up the ladder, you fool, before the tribe comes back.’ The sun was glinting on the wet heath.

At that moment an even fainter echo from the helicopter’s base reached the group on the ground. ‘Miriel, Miriel,’ it seemed to say. The men and women in the craft, speechless, were gesturing wildly to one side. ‘Up the ladder to the red mark — they’ll trawl you over,’ shouted Paul. All three clambered post-haste above the red three-metre mark.

‘We’ll drop you quietly and try to pick up Richard,’ said Peter’s voice at last. The helicopter drifted some metres north, its loaded ladder swaying dangerously. An old gentleman clad in a sombre jacket, a deal of lace at the neck, and breeches, was kneeling on the ground by a little plot of smooth grass. He did not look up even when the three dropped beside him, and seemed not to hear the noise of the machine, which now vanished southward. A green May morning burgeoned all around him. ‘Miriel, Miriel!’ he was crying.

At last he looked up at the group around him. He seemed not quite right in the head: at any rate he gave little sign of surprise. ‘Here is a lock of her hair cut off when she came to us, here is a lock of white hair when she was taken, here is her ring, her wedding ring. She besought I would bury them near to the place where she came to us, for her body is in Mafford churchyard and her soul with her Maker, but her heart, I fear, is here, though she cherished our people for sixty years. Who are you, sirs? Are you of the company of the blessed angels? Are you come to take me to Heaven to be with her?’

‘She was my wife,’ said Roydon quietly.

‘Ah, sir, but she was an old old woman when she departed this life on Friday last. How can that be?’

‘Never mind; it is true. I should like to see her grave, though I know now where it lies: I have seen it long since. Did she live here all her life after she came to you?’

‘Yes, sir, she was, as you might say, the mother of our little flock. Mourned and lamented by one and all, sir, by young and old, by man and woman, and a noble stone they will put up, sir, at the head of the grave. Matthew is carving it but ‘twill not be ready for a day or two, I fear. She was the mother of our village, though her heart, I fear, was elsewhere, and that gave her a sadness, a kind of resignation all her days. Resigned to God’s will she was, and indeed she loved our people dearly. Miriel has cherished and succoured our village, but she will not come among us again.’ And the old man, smiling sadly, nodded off among the meadow flowers.

Roydon picked up the ring and slipped it on the little finger of his left hand. His spear wounds were yelling at him, but in his heart a vast dark grey calm was spreading.

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