Time's Chariot (10 page)

London, 1620

The Correspondent lifted his head gingerly and
winced as pain stabbed through it. He quickly
turned his pain receptors off and cast his senses
down into the rest of his body, where his healing
powers were working flat out. The bruises had almost
cleared up, the cuts had mended and the most
serious injury – the broken rib that had pierced a
lung – was all but whole again. As was the lung.

He tried to open his eyes. The swelling had gone
down but the lid of his right eye was glued shut by
encrusted blood. He spat on a finger and rubbed it
on the blood to dissolve it. The eye opened slowly
and he looked around, carefully so as not to set off
another explosion inside his skull.

It was a cell; something he had always tried to
avoid, usually with success, in his 600 years as a
correspondent. He lay on a plank bed set into the
wall. Straw covered the floor, the only light was
moonlight shining through a grill high in the wall,
and the whole place stank to high heaven of
unwashed humans and the stuff that came out of
them.

Luxury
, he thought with only a slight sense of
irony. Planks, cells, straw; these things all cost
money in the England of 1620. It was not unusual
to see prisoners who couldn't afford the cost
of their imprisonment begging on the streets of
London, under guard. No doubt there would be an
accounting for this, too; his captors would have
seen he was clearly a man of means, so they must
have thrown his unconscious form in here first and
intended to settle the bill later.

Later. His internal clock told him it was shortly
after one in the morning. The sun would rise at
about 4:00: he had three hours of darkness. He
hoped that being hanged at dawn wasn't
literally
dawn but he didn't intend to find out.

He sat up and only then realized that his hands
and feet were manacled – with iron, of course,
allegedly proof against witchcraft. Another incidental
expense. He looked at his bonds with
irritation. They didn't present a problem in the
long run, but he had better get started now.

He sat on the plank, feet on the floor, hands
motionless on his lap, and began to channel energy
into the muscles concerned. And while he was
doing that he began to sort the facts out in his
mind, prior to preparing a report.

The trial was in a large, gloomy room lined with oak
panelling, and was crowded. People nowadays
tended not to wash as much as the Correspondent
would have liked and the finery of their clothes
couldn't hide the stench.

The main witness for the prosecution was a
terrified individual named Mr Marks, steward for
the household of Francis Bacon – Lord Chancellor
of England, Baron Verulam and soon to be created
Viscount Saint Albans. Marks' story bore no resemblance
to facts as the Correspondent
remembered them. A lot of things weren't making
sense, but the Correspondent put the matter on
hold while he gave the testimony his full attention.

'Tell us,' said the prosecuting council, a tall and
balding man named Whitrow, 'in your own words,
the events of that evening.'

The witness spoke, with constant fearful glances
at the prisoner in the dock. 'Well, sir, on that
evening – that is, the sixth of June, sir – I was bringing
food for my lord and his, um, visitor.'

'Is this visitor present here?'

Marks was struck dumb, and the look of sheer
terror he gave the Correspondent was unfeigned.
Whitrow followed the man's gaze and smiled without
humour. 'He is bound with iron and
surrounded by good, God-fearing men. He can do
you no harm. Answer the question.'

'The visitor was the man in the dock, sir,' Marks
said, almost in a whisper.

'The man who calls himself Sir Stephen
Hawking?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Carry on.'

Yes, carry on, the Correspondent thought. This
was interesting.

At first, the steward's testimony bore out his own
recollection perfectly. The familiar inner promptings
had led him to seek an interview with Bacon,
using as an excuse a desire to discuss the recently
published
Novum Organum
. In the book, Bacon
exhorted for the abandonment of prejudice and
preconception, and for observation and experimentation
in science. The principles of the book
influenced the whole direction that science was to
take in subsequent centuries. Naturally, the
Correspondent had to interview him.

And then came that baffling point where the
recollections of the Correspondent and Marks
diverged. The Correspondent remembered that
they had discussed empiricism, politics and the
transition of the monarchy from the Tudors to
the Stuarts – Bacon had served the last Tudor
monarch and the first Stuart, and was a rich fund of
anecdotes about court life under the two regimes.
It had been a pleasant time, with food and drink
duly brought by Marks to Bacon's panelled and
book-lined study. Then the Correspondent had
retired to his own lodgings.

To be woken by the sheriff's men. He could have
fought, yes, but they had come for him by surprise,
and in large quantities, and they were armed.
There were some things even he couldn't do – not
all at once. Swords, spears, arrows he could handle,
preferably if he was facing them. Bullets, from any
direction, were quite another matter; the bygoners'
discovery of gunpowder, in his estimation, had
been a major step backwards and had made his life
significantly harder.

He frowned as Marks gave his damning
evidence.

'My lord and that man were talking and laughing,
sir. I could hear them through the door. I put
the tray down on the floor so that I could open the
door, and then I heard a third voice.'

'Go on,' said Whitrow. The room was silent.

' 'Twas a man's voice, sir, and it spoke . . . I don't
know what it spoke, sir. It was not English. It was a
babble.'

'Who spoke?'

'Sir, it was neither my lord nor this man here
who spoke. I looked through the crack in the door
and I saw it was a third man, and I heard the man
in the dock shout something, then speak in
kind . . .'

Debate ensued between the counsels as to the
significance of this: Marks argued that there was
only one way into his lord's room, and that
was through the door, and he swore no other man
had entered the house – yet alone that room – that
evening. This the Correspondent was prepared to
agree with. But, a third man? And he himself had
apparently spoken with the stranger, in this strange
tongue . . .

Something was nagging at the back of his mind,
like the sudden reminder in the day time of a
dream some nights back. A strange sense of
familiarity . . .

'And why did you look through the crack?'
Whitrow asked.

'I feared for my lord, sir. I heard such anger in
the visitor's shout.'

'Hawking shouted?'

'Yes, sir. The, um, third man spoke, and this man
shouted, and . . .'

'Very well. And what else did you see?'

'My lord was as if frozen, sir. He seemed to see
without seeing, like this.' The steward gave an
impression of a glassy eyed stare. 'This man had his
back to me – I could not see what he was doing. It
was blue, sir.'

'What was blue?' Whitrow didn't sound surprised
at the sudden change of tack; he had no doubt
gone through this thoroughly with Marks
beforehand.

'The thing he—'

'The stranger . . .' Whitrow prompted.

'—the stranger held in his hand, sir. He held it
to my lord's head. And then . . . then . . .' Marks was
on the verge of collapsing in tears.

'Go on,' said Whitrow, with surprising gentleness.

The Correspondent heard the eagerness that
lay beneath the words – the anticipation of the trap.

'The newcomer vanished, sir. Just . . . vanished.
And I fled, sir. I was that scared. I fled.'

He had done a lot for his Home Time masters in six
hundred years, but letting himself be captured,
beaten to a near pulp and sentenced to death on a
charge of witchery was surely the most devoted.

After meeting Avicenna in Isfahan, he had found
he had no desire to stay there any longer. At first he
had wandered here and there with no real sense of
purpose, reporting on what he saw, helped by the
scraps of foreknowledge that would suddenly pop
into his mind. He had soon learned to rely on their
guidance. For instance, he had known that Isfahan
and the whole area were about to be overrun by
Turks, and at the same time he had suddenly found
within himself the urge to head for Constantinople
and, hence, Europe. He had spent some years
wandering in France, then suddenly received the
knowledge that the Normans were about to invade
England. So he had headed there, and witnessed
the landings, but not felt an urge to report them.
Rather, another item of foreknowledge told him to
head for Canterbury in 1094 to interview the archbishop
there, one Anselm: a man who didn't know
it but whose work, like Avicenna's, was to shape the
future of science.

And so on. After that, it wasn't hard to work out
what his mission was: to interview philosophers,
thinkers, sages. Those promptings had brought
him here and, for the first time, things were going
wrong. Still, there was no doubt that the Home
Time would appreciate this on-the-spot report of a
witch's trial, even if he had no intention of
providing an on-the-spot report of a witch's
execution, so he had let things get this far. But now
it was far enough.

He now had enough energy stored for the first
phase of the escape. He pulled his wrists away from
each other with a sharp jerk, and the manacles
snapped with a satisfactory
crack
. He began to concentrate
on phase two, the feet, and as he did so he
again thought back.

'Do you speak any other language?' It was the turn
of the Correspondent's own counsel, Saxton. Neat,
prim, fussy. 'French? Latin? Greek? Would you
recognize any of them if I spoke them now?'

'No, sir, I speak none of those,' Marks said.

'Then what is the significance of a man speaking
a language you do not know? It is surely
unremarkable.'

Marks' mouth moved silently. Eventually he said:
'On its own it is of no significance, but taken in conjunction
with other events, it acquires meaning.'

An eloquent little speech for an uneducated
serving man, the Correspondent thought with a wry
smile, and no doubt quoted verbatim from his prior
briefing by Whitrow. Yet, somehow the Correspondent
didn't doubt that Marks believed every
word he was saying. Whitrow might prime a witness,
maybe even bribe a fictitious testimony into
existence, but he couldn't force that witness to act
as well as Marks must have been acting.

And there was the rub. Surely the most telling
witness for either side would be Bacon himself, yet
the Lord Chancellor was conspicuously absent.
There was more than a witchcraft trial going on
here. The next year, the Correspondent knew,
Bacon would be tried by his peers for the less supernatural,
more straightforward offence of taking
bribes. He would confess and be fined, imprisoned
at the king's pleasure and banished from court and
Parliament. Would that have happened so easily,
the Correspondent wondered, if he had not already
been tarnished by association with a witch trial? A
small fact left out of the history books. Not that
there could be any reasonable suspicion aimed at
the man himself – he was Lord Chancellor, after all,
and even under James Stuart's witch-hating regime,
stronger evidence than a single deranged steward
would be needed to bring down a peer of the realm
– but this trial could be used simply to chip away at
the man's integrity. All that was needed was a conviction.
The steward's testimony must have been a
godsend to the anti-Bacon brigade, and the verdict
was known in advance.

The chains that bound his feet went the same way
as those that had been on his wrists. The
Correspondent stood up to face the door to the
cell, and began to concentrate for a final focus of
energy.

When he was ready, he stood facing the door,
barefoot. He put his hands together and began a
measured pattern of breathing. He closed his eyes
and visualized the lock of the door. Then he
visualized the energy that flowed through his body.
Door and body were the only items in the universe.
His body was completely relaxed, there was no
tension or effort in it, and it was as if in a dream
that he pivoted on one foot and spun and brought
his heel against the lock of the door. The wood
shattered and the lock flew out into the passage.

He smiled grimly and swung the door open.
Pausing only to render the gibbering jailer unconscious
and put his boots back on, he left the
building.

By the time Whitrow began his summing up, the
Correspondent was so caught up with that nagging
feeling that he could only give half his mind to the
proceedings.

First, Whitrow said, there was no Sir Stephen
Hawking. This had been verified by the College of
Heralds. Whoever he was, the defendant had
gained entry to the house of the Lord Chancellor
by deception.

Second, he had spoken in the same tongue as
the mysterious apparition. He had not vanished,
as the spectre had, which probably showed that . . .
third, while the 'third man' was clearly some
kind of ghost, perhaps demon, the false Sir
Stephen was very real and solid and therefore a
necromancer, a medium, a warlock and probably
any number of other kinds of undesirable magical
practitioner.

Saxton made a half-hearted attempt at defence but
it was clear the court had made up its mind and
Saxton wasn't going to fly in the face of opinion,
apart from covering his own reputation by drawing
the court's attention to the fact that there was only
one witness and that all evidence was circumstantial.