Читать книгу: «Erasmus Hobart and the Golden Arrow»

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Epilogue

About the Author

Credits

Copyright

About Authonomy

About the Publisher

Dedication

For Julie, who taught me to love life,

and to the memory of Douglas Adams,

who taught me to laugh at it.

Chapter One

The sun was high in the sky as Erasmus emerged. Blinking in the unexpectedly bright light, he looked back at the privy behind him. Could he return for a pair of sunglasses? No, he couldn’t. Bringing even the simplest of modern technologies into another time could have profound effects on the development of the human species. Sighing with the burden of responsibility, he locked the door to the time machine and pocketed the key before shading his eyes with his hand and examining his surroundings.

He appeared to be in some kind of side street, which implied a relatively large settlement; about a hundred yards ahead of him he could see an open area, probably a marketplace. But he was struck by how quiet it was: mediaeval settlements were supposed to be hives of activity, centres of trade and intrigue. Perhaps it was a holiday. But wouldn’t people be out celebrating and the streets filled with bunting? He looked around at the surrounding buildings, all apparently empty, and shrugged. Perhaps that was one of those historical misconceptions. He walked on.

After ten or twelve yards, he felt himself step in something soft and looked down to see his boot had sunk into a pile of horse manure. Disgusted, he moved his foot and scraped it on the dusty ground; the manure was moist and streaks of it rubbed off on the hard road surface. That was also puzzling: if the manure hadn’t dried enough to flake, then it had to be relatively fresh.

For a moment he thought he caught a hint of movement in the alley to his left. He turned to look, but there was nothing: a row of wooden doors stayed obstinately shut; nobody moved behind the glassless windows.

So where was everyone? It was as if aliens had descended on the town during a busy lunch hour and carted them all off. He chuckled to himself. Aliens. A preposterous idea – the stuff of poor science fiction. He looked back to make sure his time machine didn’t look too out of place then continued towards the square, stopping periodically to scrape more horse dung from his boot.

The area at the end of the street was definitely a marketplace. The buildings surrounding it were all two-storey, timber-framed affairs of the type you would normally associate with rich merchants and their guilds. There was no sign of market activity, but that wasn’t surprising since markets wouldn’t take place every day. What was odd was that even here there was no sign of life.

He looked up at the upper storeys; the windows were all shuttered, preventing him from seeing if there were people inside. Mystified, he continued through the square, looking for some indication of where he was and when. Perhaps the more ostentatious buildings would have a construction date engraved somewhere – that at least would give him some idea.

As he approached the tallest of the buildings surrounding the square – something he presumed to be a town hall – he heard the sound of hooves approaching at a gentle trot from one of the side streets.

He listened carefully: in between the distinctive clops of the horse’s hooves he could just make out the tramp of more solid footsteps – perhaps a man in boots. As long as he was in the right country, the new arrivals should be able to tell him where he was and what was going on. Decided on his course of action, he walked towards the street from which the sound was emanating and, as he turned the corner, stopped in stunned surprise.

In many ways it was probably a fairly ordinary sight for its time: the woman on the horse carried herself with dignity and surveyed her surroundings with a look comprised in equal parts of contempt and arrogance; the two mail-shirted men who flanked her kept their hands on the hilts of their swords and their eyes assiduously on the ground, making no attempt to look at their lady.

And that was clearly what she was: a lady, a member of the ennobled classes. It wasn’t just her bearing, or the fact she was mounted on a chestnut mare, which itself appeared somewhat uninterested in the proceedings; it wasn’t that her long, dark hair showed signs of care and that her finely chiselled looks showed evidence of the lack of hard toil.

No, if Erasmus had been asked to put his finger on the nub of the argument, he would have said it was her apparel: she appeared to have been outfitted – if that was the word – by the same tailor who had provided the emperor with his new clothes. In short, she was completely naked and it was only the horse’s head and the lady’s hair that prevented Erasmus from having a grandstand view of one of the most famous, yet least seen sights in English legend. History, he corrected himself – if he was seeing it, then it had happened. He knew the woman was rich because he knew who she was. This was the woman who, according to the tales, had ridden naked through the streets of Coventry in protest at her husband’s oppressive taxation of the peasants. This was…

‘Lady Godiva.’ He couldn’t help himself and blurted the name out.

The party continued a step or two and, for a split second, Erasmus thought perhaps he hadn’t said anything or that the theorists had been right when they suggested time travel took you into a parallel dimension where you could be neither seen nor heard.

He was just preparing to step aside, in order to prevent the profoundly embarrassing feeling of people passing through him, when the guard on the left looked up, using a hand to blinker one side of his face so he could see who had spoken without committing the heinous crime of seeing whom he had spoken about. The other guard shot him a quick glance and then looked back at the ground. Godiva herself interrupted the appraising of her domain to look at Erasmus. Her expression changed from one of quiet dignity to rage.

‘What are you doing out here?’ she roared. Erasmus stepped back involuntarily, almost tripping over a stone in the road as he did so.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know what day it was.’

‘Didn’t know what day it was! Do you honestly expect me to believe that?’

Erasmus kept quiet. He knew he couldn’t tell her the truth and he wasn’t entirely sure what he could tell her that she would believe. Godiva gave him a scornful look, then turned her head so she could address one of the guards below. ‘Don’t just stand there,’ she said.

‘Yes ma’am,’ said the guard nervously, trying to fight his natural instinct to look at the person who was speaking to him.

‘Seize him, you fool.’

‘Yes ma’am.’ Both guards began to move purposefully towards Erasmus, each drawing their sword as they did so, whilst trying hard not to look back towards their mistress. Erasmus took a few careful paces backwards. Then he turned on his heel and ran.

‘Run after him, you fools,’ yelled Godiva. The two guards picked up the pace and pursued Erasmus as he sped across the marketplace.

Godiva herself pulled on the reins and her horse began to canter steadily. The increase in pace meant the horse sprang between steps and the force of its impact dislodged the braids of hair which had, up till then, been protecting her modesty by covering her breasts. The hair fell in front of her eyes and, intent on her pursuit, Godiva threw the braids over her shoulder, making no further effort to conceal herself as she continued.

‘Phwoaar,’ came a voice from the building to her left. Godiva turned and saw that, amongst the windows of the building, one was unshuttered and a man was staring out at her, his eyes wide.

‘Right, that does it,’ she snapped. She dug her heels into her horse’s sides. The beast wheeled round and brought up its forelegs, lashing out at the side of the building. The man backed away hurriedly, but wasn’t fast enough to prevent his face being bombarded with fragments of wattle from the wall.

‘Ow!’ he screamed, clutching his face. ‘My eyes, my eyes! I can’t see!’

‘Bloody peeping Alfreds,’ Godiva muttered. She guided her horse in the direction in which the guards had run.

Erasmus, meanwhile, had entered the side street. He could see his time machine ahead. His lungs were straining with the unaccustomed effort, but he had the advantage – he wasn’t, after all, encumbered by armour. Godiva’s angry yells were ringing in his ears, but he resisted the urge to look back, concentrating instead on the prize.

And so it was that he almost cannoned into a blurry shape that cut across his path. Refocusing his gaze, he found himself looking at the burly form of a man, rudely dressed and unarmoured, but holding a pitchfork in his hand like a peasant who had more than a spot of gardening in mind. Erasmus almost skidded to a halt, then took a step back and smiled amiably.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I wonder if I could just get past.’

The man said nothing, but glared fixedly.

‘Only. I’m trying to go over there—’ His words were cut off by an angry cry from behind.

‘Seize him, man.’

The peasant looked up and his expression faltered. Blood rushed to his face and he clamped a hand to his eyes as if to stop it escaping. Taking his chance, Erasmus tried to sidestep him, but with the pitchfork and the narrowness of the street, there was no way past. Erasmus turned to his right, where an alley led away. He couldn’t tell if there was a way through, but it was better than staying where he was. He ran.

The cry of ‘fool’ resonated along the alley, shaking the wattle and daub walls. A door to Erasmus’ right seemed to be shaken partially open. Erasmus paused, contemplating ducking into the building and waiting for his pursuers to pass. Then the door swung wide and three more peasants piled out, each wielding a pitchfork and wearing an angry expression. Suddenly Erasmus found himself wishing the aliens had visited.

He sprinted on, almost tripping over his feet in his haste. He stumbled to one side and put a hand out to steady himself. The wall beside him yielded, but held and he sprang back, his pace barely reduced. Behind him he heard the urgent thudding of heavy soles as his pursuers broke into a run. Their heavy breaths spoke of men used to steady effort rather than sudden bursts of exertion, which filled Erasmus with hope.

Then there was a sudden and heavy-sounding thump, followed by a grunt, a crash and several angry exclamations. Despite the urgency of his situation, Erasmus couldn’t help but turn back. Behind him, he saw the original pitchfork-wielding peasant lying on the floor with a man he assumed to be one of the second batch of pursuers. The other two appeared to have vanished.

Erasmus was just musing on this when he noticed a hole in one of the buildings lining the road. The continued commotion from this direction told its own story. Grinning to himself, he turned and continued his flight. Ahead of him was a junction, where another alley crossed his path left to right. Slowing his pace to a more sustainable jog, he turned left. If he was correct, the simple geography of the place suggested this passage should lead him on to one of the alleys he’d encountered on his arrival. From there it would be only a short flit to his time machine and safety.

The sudden arrival of two hefty peasants in his path ended this latest burst of optimism. From their reddened faces and plaster-covered clothes, Erasmus couldn’t entertain the hope they were just another pair of generic peasants, despite their generic pitchforks. These they levelled to deny him passage, leaving him staring at eight unpleasantly rusty tines. He backed off.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Surely we can talk about this.’

The low growl from the peasant on the left sounded anything but conversational. Either, Erasmus considered, the Stone Age had ended later than people thought, or the people of mediaeval Coventry had poorer than average communication skills. He dodged a lunge from one of the pitchforks, eyeing the corroded metal with concern.

‘You be careful with that,’ he snapped. ‘You could give someone septicaemia.’

The peasant ignored him, his gaze seemingly drawn over his shoulder. The sound of heavy boots from behind trod what was left of Erasmus’ hope into the ground. He raised his hands in surrender, then winced as he felt the point of a pitchfork prodded firmly into his back.

‘So what happens now?’ he demanded.

None of the men spoke.

‘You must be wonderful guests at parties,’ Erasmus muttered. He paused, awaiting a response, but received none. The man to his right avoided his gaze. The man to his left said nothing, but picked his nose with his free hand. Erasmus felt a sudden terrible uncertainty descending on him. What had only moments ago felt like a bit of an adventure suddenly felt much more sinister. Life in the Middle Ages, a memory told him, could be nasty, brutish and short. It was all very well when you saw such a thing written in one of the cheaper textbooks, but that was just words; something to be contemplated in the quiet security of a twenty-first century classroom. This was reality. And the quiet didn’t help. Erasmus felt like screaming for someone to just say something, but some deeply coded message in his DNA told him making a loud, sudden noise when surrounded by men holding pointy things was no way to pass your genetic material on. He settled instead for an unthreatening smile and a slight stretch to raise his hands higher.

‘Take me to your leader?’ he ventured.

Suddenly, the man to his left flushed. He withdrew his finger quickly from his nose and clamped his hand over his eyes. Momentarily distracted by the mucus the man was now smearing over his cheek, Erasmus took a second to realise that the peasant to his right was also doing his best not to look. The teacher glanced over his shoulder and caught a glimpse of two peasants with hands firmly in place and, beyond them, the body of an approaching horse.

There was no better moment. Erasmus looked to the building at his left. It looked solid enough, but then so did the rest of them. Tensing himself, he shoulder charged the wall. There was a sickening crunch as layers of twigs cracked under the impact, then the panel caved in and he tumbled through into the cottage beyond, landing on a pile of old rags. Stumbling to his feet, he took in his surroundings. Cracks of light suggested a door ahead. He took a step towards it and felt a sudden sharp pain on the side of his head. From the corner of his eye he saw a small, dishevelled figure wielding what appeared to be a broom. At least, he considered, it wasn’t a pitchfork. He raised a hand to fend off further attacks and ran. His assailant let out a blood-curdling screech, prompting him to run faster. She managed to land only one more blow on the small of his back before he crashed through the door, but the pain raced through him, spurring him on beyond his physical limits.

Outside, he heard the sound of feet as his pursuers gave chase. Fear lent him speed and he rapidly put distance between them. He came out of the alley into the side street, gratefully finding himself only yards from his privy.

Fumbling with his keys, he ran to the door. The sounds of pursuit rumbled in his ears and made it harder for his shaking fingers to put the key into the lock. Glancing down, he realised this was because it was, in fact, the wrong key. He tried a second and felt it bite just as the sound of boots became a thunder.

Quickly, he unlocked the door, opened it and threw himself into his seat, not even bothering to extract the key from the outside. Instead, he slammed the door and scrabbled for the controls.

Outside in the street, the peasants came to a halt. The guards pushed past them and approached the privy with caution. A few feet from the device, one of the guards paused and tapped his partner’s arm.

‘What is it, Smith?’ snapped the other guard.

‘I’ve just trod in summat, Sarge.’

‘Can’t it wait? We’ve got a man to catch.’

There was an eerie whine from inside the privy. Both guards shivered.

‘He’s not going anywhere, Sarge,’ said Smith. He began casually scraping the manure from his boot using the blade of his sword. His eyes, however, were firmly on the wooden box.

‘We ought to arrest him,’ said the sergeant, although his voice seemed to suggest this was a junior guard’s job.

‘No rush,’ said Smith. ‘We’ll just say we were waiting for her presence. It’s not like he’s escaped.’

Just as he spoke, a gust of hot air blew the dust up from the road. Guards and peasants covered their faces as if an army of naked women stood before them. Then, the sound of a thunderclap came from the direction of the privy and the guards dropped their hands to their sides and gaped. The street where the privy had stood was empty.

For a moment there was silence, then Smith, his wide-open mouth filling with dust, began to choke. They were still thus distracted when the sound of hooves came clopping up behind them.

Godiva forced the peasants aside and brought her horse to a halt next to the guards, narrowly missing Smith’s foot. She stared at them scornfully. The guards closed their mouths and attempted to look businesslike. This was made somewhat difficult by the fact they couldn’t look at Godiva to see her reaction.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘Vanished, ma’am,’ said the sergeant, keeping his eyes trained studiously on the horse’s head. The horse shook its head to dislodge some of the dust that was still drifting through the air and hmmphed scornfully.

‘Vanished?’

‘Into thin air,’ said Smith, trying not to look at either Godiva or the rear end of the horse, which was the part nearest to him. The horse’s tail lashed his nose and he sneezed.

‘He must have been an alchemist, m’lady.’

The horse shook its head as if in disagreement.

‘An alchemist?’ Godiva seemed equally unconvinced.

‘Must have been,’ the sergeant concurred.

Godiva mused on this a moment then wheeled her horse round. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘When we get back we’re going to see about a crackdown on alchemists.’ She started forward and the two guards stepped back to avoid being trampled. The peasants turned to study the nearest wall intently. Godiva ignored them and kept her eyes on the guards.

‘Lead on,’ she said.

The two guards walked on, a few yards ahead of the horse.

‘We got off lightly there,’ said the sergeant.

‘You might have done,’ said Smith.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That bloody horse just crapped on my foot.’

Chapter Two

The room was small, dark and dusty. The scarce amount of moonlight from the skylight revealing its contents to be a desk strewn with papers, two wardrobes, some steel racks and a single, bare light-bulb, currently switched off and hanging from the ceiling. It was also silent, as one would expect from a disused storeroom in a school after the children had long since gone home. A draught from under the door wafted in, toyed with some of the paperwork then left, evidently finding little to occupy its interest. Eventually, even the moon disappeared behind a cloud, as if popping off to find something more significant to illuminate.

It was whilst both wind and moon were absent from their posts that the room came to life: at first it was just a gentle breeze that seemed to blow from every corner of the room at the same time, then as the paperwork began to rise from the desk and distribute itself across the floor there was a sound like a box of firecrackers being dropped into a furnace. As the echoes of the sound died away the paperwork fell to the floor and in the room stood a large, wooden structure where no such item had previously been.

After a few moments, the door to the structure opened and a man dashed out, reached for the light switch and flooded the room with a warm, yellow light. The man was slight of build, but without any suggestion of athleticism. His hair was like a study in chaos conducted by a man who, far from keeping his pencils in size order, rarely kept them in the same place as each other. His face, flushed as it was with recent exertions, was otherwise unobtrusive: youngish, free from the lines of age or scars of experience, but with a glint in the eyes which suggested a man more knowledgeable than his years would usually belie and a warmth suggesting he was comfortable in that knowledge.

Erasmus Hobart, to his understanding the first time traveller in human history (or at least the first to depart – there was no telling where subsequent travellers might arrive), wiped the sweat from his brow and made a half-hearted attempt to gather up some of the scattered paperwork from around the room. Somehow the mundane nature of this task was made all the worse by the fact that what had gone before had been in such stark contrast.

He turned back to the stout, wooden privy that stood conspicuously in the middle of the room. It wasn’t an obvious addition to a teacher’s storeroom – even a school as old as St Cuthbert’s had plumbing – but were any inquisitive soul to guess at the reason for its presence, it was remarkably unlikely that they would have guessed remotely correctly. Erasmus’ experiments in time had remained a secret for almost two years now, from the earliest sending of inanimate objects to a few minutes before or hence, right up to his first personal trips, and the teacher had managed to avoid all questions, even when the topic of conversation moved to the distinct lack of 2B pencils.

He ran his hands over the surface of the time machine: it was warm, but not unduly so. Erasmus had often been concerned about the potential thermal effects of time travel: his early experiments, when he had sent small, unmanned devices a few minutes backwards or forwards in time, had invariably resulted in the machine getting extremely hot, which Erasmus assumed to be due to some kind of temporal friction. The chance occasion on which he had, due to budgetary restraints, made one of his experimental models out of wood he had been pleasantly surprised to find it was entirely unaffected. Pleasantly surprised because not only did it mean he could build a machine which wouldn’t spontaneously combust the moment you went farther than a week from home without having to find some exotic and undoubtedly expensive metal, it also allowed him to build one which wouldn’t appear out of place through most of recorded history. A time machine made from adamantium might well be extremely cool and wonderfully durable, but it would stick out like a sore thumb in the middle of a tenth-century village.

He gave the machine a final pat then let out a violent exclamation as he snagged his thumb on a rough edge, giving himself a splinter. Hurriedly closing the storeroom door, he headed out into the classroom, his thumb in his mouth. He rummaged through the drawers of his desk, looking for something small and sharp to extract the splinter. Eventually, he located a pair of tweezers and was just closing the drawer when a shadow fell across his desk. He looked up into the wrinkled, frowning face of the school’s headmaster.

‘Evening, Clarence,’ Erasmus greeted him politely.

The headmaster bristled visibly: he hadn’t spent thirty years studying, teaching and clambering his way up the greasy pole to be referred to as Clarence. Particularly not by teachers who were barely out of university. Feeling that complaint would achieve little, however, he reserved his indignation for a particularly loud snort.

Erasmus gave a concerned smile. ‘Are you coming down with something?’ he asked.

Clarence chose to ignore the comment. ‘You’re here rather late, Mr Hobart,’ he observed; his manner clipped and deliberately formal like a sergeant major striving to resist a speech impediment.

Erasmus looked up at the clock, which gave the time as a quarter to nine. Time had obviously passed in the present whilst he was in the past, which was interesting. Perhaps there was some kind of chronological concept of now for a given life form? He wondered whether the relationship was a one-to-one affair, or whether he could expect to go away for a week only to find that a year had passed in his own time.

Clarence tapped his foot impatiently until Erasmus regained his concentration and returned his gaze. The teacher looked at the headmaster with curiosity, as if only just aware of his presence.

‘I said, “You’re here rather late,” Mr Hobart.’

‘I know,’ said Erasmus. ‘But you know how it is. You start on the marking and before you know it the kids are back.’

‘And have you been here all the time?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Have you been out?’

Erasmus considered this, then gestured towards the door which separated the classroom from the school beyond. ‘I assure you, Clarence, I have not been through that door all evening,’ he said.

The headmaster’s expression flickered between doubt and satisfaction. Despite his misgivings over Erasmus’ sense of decorum, if the teacher’s claim was true he could only wish the rest of the staff would show the same level of dedication – perhaps then the school would be higher in the league tables. He glanced at the blackboard: it was covered in squiggles which, to his eyes, were an unintelligible mess. He felt no shame at his inability to comprehend the information – after all, he’d studied Latin at university, not this newfangled nonsense.

‘Is that for your history class?’ he said.

Erasmus looked at the board himself, as if seeing it for the first time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s physics.’

‘It looks very complicated,’ said the headmaster, caught between trying not to sound ignorant and wondering what Erasmus was doing scribbling physics notes on the blackboard of the history room.

‘Yes. I presume you didn’t come here to compliment me on my level of education, Clarence. What can I do for you?’

‘I was wondering if you’d seen anybody lurking about.’

‘This evening, you mean?’

‘Yes.’

‘Anyone in particular, or are you just hoping for company?’

The headmaster wrung his hands awkwardly. He wished that, of all his teachers, he could have found someone other than Hobart on the premises. The others might have been less dedicated, but they at least answered questions when prompted. Hobart could be astoundingly vague, and it was never clear if this was an act.

‘It’s just that Botch—’ he stopped himself from using the man’s soubriquet just in time, ‘that Mr Bulcher has reported a burglary.’

Erasmus nodded. The school caretaker, known affectionately to the students as Old Botchit, was a long-standing fixture of the school. Even Mr Salmon, the ancient maths master the students referred to as Guppy, seemed to have no memory of when the man had taken up the brush and cap and begun his duties. But then Guppy couldn’t remember his own arrival either – popular conjecture amongst the children had it he’d been beached when the waters of Noah’s flood had retreated. Botchit lived in a small cottage at the end of the school drive, a property that came with the job, and when the demands of the school were not upon him, he could usually be found tending his vegetable garden.

‘Burglary, you say?’ Erasmus remarked. ‘Have they been at his cabbages again?’

Clarence took a deep breath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken his privy.’

Erasmus scratched his forehead and blinked a few times. ‘His privy,’ he echoed, as if the concept were too fantastic to grasp.

‘Yes. You know – that damned outside toilet of his.’

Erasmus masked his awkwardness with a resigned shrug. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, he does keep saying he wants to get rid of it.’

‘That’s beside the point,’ said Clarence, his voice rising slightly in pitch.

Erasmus toyed with his tweezers then began to pick at the splinter in his thumb. ‘Anything else taken?’

‘Not that we can tell, no.’

‘It’s not really a problem then, is it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well. Bolcher’s been talking about getting rid of it; now it’s gone. Saves him paying the council a tenner to cart it off, doesn’t it?’

The headmaster flushed hotly, but refrained from comment. This argument wasn’t leading anywhere. ‘And you haven’t seen anyone this evening?’ he reiterated firmly.

‘Not as such, no.’

‘As such?’ Clarence could feel his temperature rising again.

‘Well, apart from yourself, that is,’ said Erasmus. ‘Obviously, I’ve seen you now, but I haven’t seen anyone else since the boys left.’ Erasmus told himself this was at least technically true: having travelled back in time, he could not have seen anyone after the boys left – at least not in their time.

Clarence, loosening his tie to allow some air to flow around him, shook his head. ‘If you hear anything, let me know,’ he said.

Erasmus nodded and Clarence turned to leave. A few steps from the desk he paused, then turned back to look at Erasmus. The schoolteacher raised his eyebrows quizzically and the headmaster paused again, balanced on the heel of his foot, then stood up straight and eyed the teacher critically.