The Time Traveler's Almanac (87 page)

“Aye, very,” he agreed as she came alongside the bed. Her hair was silver, loose on her shoulders in soft waves like a maiden’s. He blinked. Her skin was mahogany, her eyes angled at the corners like a cat’s and shiny as gooseberries. She was stunning and not quite human, and he held his breath before he spoke. “Madam, I beg your patience at my impertinence. But, an it please you to answer – what
are
you?”

She squinted as if his words were as unfamiliar to her as hers to him. “Pray,” she said, self-consciously as one speaking a tongue only half-familiar, “say that again, please?”

He tugged his bonds, not sharply. The sensation was dulled, removed.
Drunk or sick,
he thought.
Forsooth, drunk indeed, not to recollect drinking …
Robin. Robin and his villains – But Kit shook his head, shook the hair from his eyes, and mastered himself with trembling effort. He said it again, slowly and clearly, one word at a time.

He sighed in relief when she smiled and nodded, apprehending to her satisfaction. In her turn, she spoke precisely, shaping the words consciously with her lips. He could have wept in gratitude at her care. “I’m a woman and a doctor of philosophy,” she said. “My name is Satyavati Brahmaputra, and you, Christopher Marlowe, have been rescued from your death by our science.”

“Science?”

She frowned as she sought the word. “Natural philosophy.”

Her accent, the color of her skin. He suddenly understood. “I’ve been stolen away to Spain.” He was not prepared for the laughter that followed his startled declaration.

“Hardly,” she said. “You are in the New World, at a university hospital, a – a surgery? – in a place called Las Vegas, Nevada—”

“Madam, those are Spanish names.”

Her lips twitched with amusement. “They are, aren’t they? Oh, this is complicated. Here, look.” And heedlessly, as if she had nothing to fear from him –
they know, Kit. That’s why they left only a wench to guard thee. An Amazon, more like: she’s twice my size
– she crouched beside the bed and unknotted the bonds that affixed him to it.

He supposed he could drag down the curtain bars and dash her brains out. But he had no way to know what sort of guards might be at the door; better to bide his time, as she seemed to mean him no injury. And he was tired; even with the cloths untied, lethargy pinned him to the bed.

“They told me not to do this,” she whispered, catching his eye with her dark, glistening one. She released a catch and lowered the steel railing. “But in for a penny, in for a pound.”

That expression, at least, he understood. He swung his feet to the floor with care, holding the gaping gown closed. The dizziness moved with him, as if it hung a little above and to the left. The floor was unfamiliar too; no rushes and stone, but something hard and resilient, set or cut into tiles. He would have crouched to examine it – and perhaps to let the blood run to his brain – but the woman caught his hand and tugged him past the curtains and toward a window shaded with some ingenious screen. He ran his fingers across the alien surface, gasping when she pulled a cord and the whole thing rose of a piece, hard scales or shingles folding as neatly as a drawn curtain.

And then he looked through the single enormous, utterly transparent pane of glass before him and almost dropped to his knees with vertigo and wonder. His hand clenched on the window ledge; he leaned forward. The drop must have measured hundreds upon hundreds of feet. The horizon was impossibly distant, like the vista from the mast of a sailing ship, the view from the top of a high, lonely down. And before that horizon rose fanciful towers of a dominion vaster than London and Paris made one, stretching twenty or perhaps fifty miles away: however far it took for mountains to grow so very dim with distance.

“God in Hell,” he whispered. He’d imagined towers like that, written of them. To see them with his own undreaming eyes – “Sweet Jesu. Madam, what is this?” He spoke too fast, and the brown woman made him repeat himself once more.

“A city,” she said quietly. “Las Vegas. A small city, by today’s standards. Master Marlowe – or Miss Marlowe, I suppose I should say – you have come some five hundred years into your future, and here, I am afraid, you must stay.”

*   *   *

“
Master
Marlowe will do. Mistress Brahma…” Marlowe stumbled over Satyavati’s name. The warmth and openness Marlowe had shown vanished on a breath. She folded her arms together, so like the Corpus Christi portrait – thinner and wearier, but with the same sardonic smile and the same knowing black eyes – that Satyavati had no doubt that it was the same individual.

“Call me Satya.”

“Madam.”

Satyavati frowned. “Master Marlowe,” she said. “This is a different … Things are different now. Look at me, a woman, a blackamoor by your terms. And a doctor of philosophy like your friend Tom Watson, a scholar.”

“Poor Tom is dead.” And then as if in prophecy, slowly, blinking. “Everyone I know is dead.”

Satyavati rushed ahead, afraid that Marlowe would crumple if the revelation on her face ever reached her belly.
A good thing she’s sedated, or she’d be in a ball on the floor.
“I’m published, I’ve written books. I’ll be a tenured professor soon.”
You will make me that.
But she didn’t say it; she simply trusted the young woman, so earnest and wide-eyed behind the brittle defense of her arrogance, would understand. Which of course she didn’t, and Satyavati repeated herself twice before she was certain Marlowe understood.

The poet’s accent was something like an old broad Scots and something like the dialect of the Appalachian Mountains.
Dammit, it is English.
As long as she kept telling herself it was English, that the foreign stresses and vowels did not mean a foreign language, Satyavati could force herself to understand.

Marlowe bit her lip. She shook her head, and took Satyavati’s cue of speaking slowly and precisely, but her eyes gleamed with ferocity. “It bears not on opportunity. I am no woman. Born into a wench’s body, aye, mayhap, but as surely a man as Elizabeth is king. My father knew from the moment of my birth. S’death, an it were otherwise, would he have named me and raised me as his son? Have lived a man’s life, loved a man’s loves. An you think to force me into farthingales and huswifery, know that I would liefer die. I
will
die – for surely now I have naught to fear from Hell – and the man who dares approach me with woman’s garb will precede me there.”

Satyavati watched Kit – in that ridiculous calico johnny – brace herself, assuming the confidence and fluid gestures of a swordsman, all masculine condescension and bravado. As if she expected a physical assault to follow on her manifesto.

Something to prove. What a life—

The door opened. Satyavati turned to see who entered, and sighed in relief at the gaudy jacket and red hair of Professor Keats, who paused at the edge of the bedcurtain, a transparent bag filled with cloth and books hanging from his hand. “Let me talk to the young man, if you don’t mind.”

“She’s – upset, Professor Keats.” But Satyavati stepped away, moving toward Keats and past him, to the door. She paused there.

Keats faced Marlowe. “Are you the poet who wrote
Edward II?
”

A sudden flush, and the eyebrows rose in mockery above the twitch of a grin. “I am that.”

“It’s a fact that poets are liars,” the old man said without turning to Satyavati. “But we
always
speak the truth, and a thing is what you name it. Isn’t that so, Marlowe?”

“Aye,” she said, her brow furrowed with concentration on the words. “Good sir, I feel that I should know you, but your face—”

“Keats,” the professor said. “John Keats. You won’t have heard of me, but I’m a poet too.”

The door shut behind the woman, and Kit’s shoulders eased, but only slightly. “Master Keats—”

“John. Or Jack, if that’s more comfortable.”

Kit studied the red-haired poet’s eyes. Faded blue in the squint of his regard, and Kit nodded, his belly unknotting a little. “Kit, then. I pray you will forgive me my disarray. I have just risen—”

“No matter.” Keats reached into his bag. A shrug displayed his own coat, a long loose robe of something that shifted in color, chromatic as a butterfly’s wing. “You’ll like the modern clothes, I think. I’ve brought something less revealing.”

He laid cloths on the bed: a strange sort of close-collared shirt, trews or breeches in one piece that went to the ankle. Low shoes that looked like leather, but once Kit touched them he was startled by the gummy softness of the soles. He looked up into Keats’ eyes. “You prove most kind to a poor lost poet.”

“I was rescued from 1821,” Keats said dismissively. “I bear some sympathy for your panic.”

“Ah.” Kit stepped behind the curtain to dress. He flushed hot when the other poet helped him with the closure on the trousers, but once Kit understood this device – the zipper – he found it enchanting. “I shall have much to study on, I wot.”

“You will.” Keats looked as if he was about to say more. The thin fabric of the shirt showed Kit’s small breasts. He hunched forward, uncomfortable; not even sweet Tom Walsingham had seen him so plainly.

“I would have brought you a bandage, if I’d thought,” Keats said, and gallantly offered his jacket. Kit took it, face still burning, and shrugged it on.

“What – what year is this, Jack?”

A warm hand on his shoulder; Keats taking a deep breath alerted Kit to brace for the answer. “Anno domini two thousand one hundred and seventeen,” he said. The words dropped like stones through the fragile ice of Kit’s composure.

Kit swallowed, the implications he had been denying snapping into understanding like unfurled banners. Not the endless changing world, the towers like Babylon or Babel beyond his window. But— “Tom. Christ wept, Tom is dead. All the Toms – Walsingham, Nashe, Kyd. Sir Walter. My sisters. Will. Will and I were at work on a play,
Henry VI
—”

Keats laughed, gently. “Oh, I have something to show you, Kit.” His eyes shone with coy delight. “Look here—”

He drew a volume from his bag and pressed it into Kit’s hands. It weighed heavy, bound in what must be waxed cloth and stiffened paper. The words on the cover were embossed in gilt in strange-shaped letters.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,
Kit read, once he understood how the
esses
seem to work. He gaped, and opened the cover. “His plays…” He looked up at Keats, who smiled and opened his hands in a benediction. “This type is so fine and so clear! Marry, how
ever
can it be set by human hands? Tell me true, Jack, have I come to fairyland?” And then, turning pages with trembling fingers and infinite care, his carefulness of speech failing in exclamations. “Nearly forty plays! Oh, the type is so fine – Oh, and his sonnets, they are wonderful sonnets, he’s written more than I had seen—”

Keats, laughing, an arm around Kit’s shoulders. “He’s thought the greatest poet and dramatist in the English language.”

Kit looked up in wonder. “T’was I discovered him.” Kit held the thick, real book in his hands, the paper so fine and so white he’d compare it to a lady’s hand. “Henslowe laughed; Will came from tradesmen and bore no education beyond the grammar school—”

Keats coughed into his hand. “I sometimes think wealth and privilege are a detriment to poetry.”

The two men shared a considering gaze and a slow, equally considering smile. “And.…” Kit looked at the bag, the glossy transparent fabric as foreign as every other thing in the room. There were still two volumes within. The book in his hands smelled of real paper, new paper. With a shock, he realized that the page-ends were trimmed perfectly smooth and edged with gilt.
And how long must that have taken? This poet is a wealthy man, to give such gifts as this.

“And what of Christopher Marlowe?”

Kit smiled. “Aye.”

Keats looked down. “You are remembered, I am afraid, chiefly for your promise and your extravagant opinions, my friend. Very little of your work survived. Seven plays, in corrupted versions. The Ovid.
Hero and Leander
—”

“Forsooth, there was more,” Kit said, pressing the heavy book with Will’s name on the cover against his chest.

“There will be more,” Keats said, and set the bag on the floor. “That is why we saved your life.”

Kit swallowed.
What an odd sort of patronage.
He sat on the bed, still cradling the wonderful book. He looked up at Keats, who must have read the emotion in his eyes.

“Enough for one day, I think,” the red-haired poet said. “I’ve given you a history text as well, and” – a disarming smile and a tilt of his head— “a volume of my own poetry. Please knock on the door if you need for anything – you may find the garderobe a little daunting, but it’s past that door and the basic functions are obvious – and I will come to see you in the morning.”

“I shall amuse myself with gentle William.” Kit knew a sort of anxious panic for a moment: it was so necessary that this ginger-haired poet must love him, Kit – and he also knew a sort of joy when Keats chuckled at the double entendre and clapped him on the shoulder like a friend.

“Do that. Oh!” Keats halted suddenly and reached into the pocket of his trousers. “Let me show you how to use a pen—”

The slow roil of his stomach got the better of Kit for an instant. “I daresay I know well enough how to hold a pen.”

Keats shook his head and grinned, pulling a slender black tube from his pocket. “Dear Kit. You don’t know how to do anything. But you’ll learn soon enough, I imagine.”

*   *   *

Satyavati paced, short steps there and back again, until Baldassare reached out without looking up from his workstation and grabbed her by the sleeve. “Dr. Brahmaputra—”

“Mr. Baldassare?”

“Are you going to share with me what the issue is, here?”

One glance at his face told her he knew very well what the issue was. She tugged her sleeve away from him and leaned on the edge of the desk, too far for casual contact. “Marlowe,” she said. “She’s still crucial to our data—”