Langue[dot]doc 1305

by Gillian Polack

  “I wish you’d brought this to my attention earlier, Dr Smith.” Luke turned formal when he was unhappy.

  Sylvia just let it flow over her. “We’ll manage.”

  * * *

  Artemisia found a café that had wifi. She set up her Skype account. She ordered a drink and waited for the call from Australia. It didn’t take long for Harvey to appear on her computer screen.

  “Sorry to bother you. I was looking for you. I was given your email by your Department Chair,” he had explained. “It’s been a long time. I wanted to talk.”

  That was why, here in Nîmes, Artemisia was nattering on the net. The Chair had already let her know all this, by email. Not a job, she had commented, but it might lead to something. Artemisia couldn’t take anything seriously today, not this chat and not France. Her mind was in a hospital in Australia, recovering from the last round of chemotherapy. She had perfected polite babble, however, and it helped her cover her hurt.

  “My research was half an excuse. I came here on a kind of pilgrimage,” Artemisia explained, “Then I discovered this is the country of heroes. I came to see Saint William and Saint Gilles and found that William was a lot more than that. It was wonderful. This whole region has been special for a thousand years. More.”

  “You’re going to stay and explore, now you’ve finished your research?”

  “Can’t,” Artemisia almost sounded regretful. “I’m in-between jobs, as you know, and my sister needs medical care. I’m going back to Melbourne to lose my academic career as quickly as I can. Sorry — that sounded flippant. It’s just that losing a career is such a strange thing to do.”

  “Do you want to?”

  “Go back to Melbourne? Of course. It’s where my sister is. Where I have contacts and can find a job. In a whacking great hurry.”

  “To dump your career? I might be able to help you avoid that. I need a medievalist. Right away.”

  Artemisia looked across at the stranger on her screen. Until this moment he hadn’t been a stranger. He’d been a friendly voice in a foreign land. He’d been an old flame she’d almost forgotten whose email had popped up in her in-box the day before.

  His face was serious. He didn’t look as if he was asking questions that would undress her soul.

  Artemisia took a sip of her citron pressé and the tartness of it and the golden light undid the floodgates. She told Harvey everything. About her sister fighting cancer, about there being no permanent jobs in her field anywhere and none at all in Australia and not even a contract job around for months. “Who needs an expert on Anglo-Norman and Norman hagiography?” she asked, denying the obscurity of her knowledge with her face and hands even as she claimed it with her tongue, paying no attention to Harvey’s reassurance that he had a job for her. He was a scientist - there was no job. Besides, he wasn’t the sort of person to race into employing anyone without due planning and calculation.

  Melbourne would give her some sort of job, any sort of job, and those experimental medicines would be paid for and her sister might survive.

  She suddenly realised that Harvey was now a stranger. Three dates ten years ago. Several friends in common. She felt raw.

  “I must go,” Artemisia said. “It was lovely to talk to you again. Sorry about the confession.”

  “You needed it,” Harvey still had his sunshine-laden, sympathetic voice. It had, perhaps, grown warmer with age. She would date him again, if life were different. “When do you arrive? What flight?” She told him and they left it at that. Normally Artemisia would have reflected on Harvey’s words, but she really didn’t care.

  After she left that odd conversation, she went to the Roman temple. Its perfect proportions would soothe her, as they had last time she passed this way. There was nowhere to pray. The temple was denuded and full of tourists. She knew this. She also knew that the shape of stone would be gentle on her, make life easier. Telling Harvey had been a release, in a way, but not the one she needed.

  After the temple and its perfect proportions, she collected her baggage and made her way to Montpellier, where she left her hire car at their bright little airport and took the first part of the wearisome journey back to home and her sister.

  * * *

  Two tired days later and she emerged from Immigration. Home, she thought. I’m home.

  A taxi, was her next thought, when she took in the white brightness of Tullamarine and the damp chill of Melbourne in winter. Get home fast. Damn the cost.

  “Can I offer you a ride to Carlton? It’s still Carlton, isn’t it?” asked Harvey. Artemisia was too tired to be astonished. She merely accepted. She accepted everything he said and everything he suggested. That was how she agreed to go to Saint-Guilhem-le-Désert twice in a subjective two-month period. She hadn’t quite processed, even once she accepted, that the second visit was for nine months, and that it started sometime in the early fourteenth century, and that she couldn’t quit if it didn’t work out. All she knew was that Harvey had promised her work as an historian.

  Artemisia was mainly concerned about her sister. The initial sum she’d be paid would more than cover the experimental treatment Lucia’s doctor recommended, and would still leave enough to outfit Artemisia herself for her little expedition. Her main feeling was relief.

  As soon as Lucia was up to receiving calls, Artemisia paid her a visit. Lucia was at home, in bed, looking determinedly cheerful.

  “You know,” Artemisia said, “you don’t fool me.”

  “I don’t?” Lucia was amused.

  Artemisia took a long look at her sister, slender beyond sanity, pale as a vampire, hair sharply short. She didn’t look too bad, but this was between treatments. Resting up so that her cure didn’t kill her. “I know what you get up to in your spare time.”

  “What spare time?” Lucia challenged her sister.

  “The time when you’re not colouring your hair that unnatural brown. The time when you’re masquerading as…as…”

  “Your imagination is failing you, my life.”

  “Jetlag,” Artemisia claimed. It had to be jetlag. It couldn’t be because she had just noticed that Lucia’s infamous eloquent hands had been silenced by exhaustion. “Which reminds me, I need to give you your presents now.”

  “Afraid I might die on you,” Lucia mocked, her voice gentle.

  “I got a job. Nine months incommunicado. So you get your presents now.”

  “What sort of job is that?” Lucia’s voice was full of wonder.

  “A completely bizarre one. But it pays a lot.”

  “No,” said her sister.

  “Yes. It will make me happy.”

  “But your career…”

  “Would you believe that I’m participating in a scientific project as a bloody medievalist? And it’s only nine months. The worst it will do is give me a break from undergraduates. If you won’t let me pay for that damn treatment, I’ll say ‘no’ and get a job as a…”

  “Check-out chick,” Lucia supplied. “You always say ‘check-out chick.’”

  “Well, I will.”

  “You’ll write to me in the nine months.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Then I need my presents, now!” They smiled at each other, remembering the same demand over many years of birthdays. At Easter, she always ate her eggs first. At Christmas she always opened the first package. Nine months would be hard on her, but Artemisia saw her sister lean her head back as if her neck was no longer strong enough to hold it and she wished that she could know that Lucia would get through. This is why she was going to the past. Not because of the excitement, but because she wanted her sister to be able to hold up her head, walk down the street, tear into wrapping paper, talk with her hands.

  * * *

  After she had seen Lucia, Artemisia went to see her new boss. She was blanketed in jetlag. What Professor Mann had to say was hardly reassuring, but whenever she thought she might back down, she remembered Lucia’s head, resting against the back of the couch. Mann talke
d about the great science and the progress for humankind. He extolled the physics and the crack team of scientists at both ends and the government support.

  “And the history?” Artemisia prompted.

  “It’s all history,” Mann said, expansively.

  “And what if we change the people in the region? What if we change history?”

  “It’s all covered. We’re living in a cave system,” he said, carefully, as if to a first year student. “Self-sufficient. No impact. Troglodytes. Our protocols cover everything outside those caves. History will be fine.”

  Artemisia accepted, but not because of Mann’s reassurances. She accepted because she wanted Lucia to live.

  Chapter Three

  Assembling the Team

  “So,” Luke ran his hand through his hair for the fifty-first time. “We can’t get anyone else?”

  “Lucky to get the people we have,” Konig said, picked up his briefcase and left Luke’s office. Not a word of farewell. Ben Konig assumed that they knew each other well enough. That he could take liberties. “Don’t know how we even have a historian, to be honest.” Konig threw this into the room from the doorway, as a parting volley.

  We, Luke mouthed after him, his mental powers so exhausted that he couldn’t even think the word across the desk - Konig’s French Government support had nearly cost them the expedition. Ben Konig didn’t deserve to be ‘we’ - he was the evil other.

  Luke blamed the evil other - in its amorphous mass - for the formidable clauses that had scared half the expedition away after training, so close to departure. Everyone had known the risks: those clauses had created confusion.

  Then Professor Theodore Lucas Mann realised something. He prided himself on not being petty; he was a big man with a vast soul. Sometimes, however, he allowed a smallness into his munificent existence. Professor Theodore Lucas Mann leaned back in his big chair and smiled.

  Not everyone had signed the waivers and forms. Not everyone had been able to get to the briefings. One of the team members was going into the past gloriously unprepared by the bureaucrats. If it weren’t the night before the most momentous day in human history, Luke would be thinking about the expedition and the need for preparation, and would snap his fingers and call Dr Artemisia Wormwood in and have her working the whole night long, making up lost ground. He was so annoyed with Konig, and so longed for the last sleep in his own bed, that he merely copied the briefing to his data file for transmission back.

  Wormwood could be briefed in situ. And Konig could be blamed for not having ensured that she had signed his stupid French forms. Luke went home for one last night with his partner.

  * * *

  Artemisia lay in bed, thinking about her situation. Living underground, in a cave. And the local saint is, of course, Benedict. Patron saint of speleologists. This was the first thing she’d checked. Straight after she’d transferred almost all of her advance to her sister’s bank account. Before she’d bought the things the expedition shopping list had suggested.

  The saint. His patronage. Not enough time to check out the state of his hagiography, but there was a library waiting for her in the Middle Ages. It was promised.

  She had a sudden urge to check Benedict’s saint day. Something was niggling. Something that Professor Theodore Lucas Mann had said about them knowing the locals and timing the start to fit local customs. He thought he knew everything, this man in charge.

  He knew something, she soon discovered. It’s the vigil of Benedict, thought Artemisia. Tonight is my last night in the world I know and tomorrow the first day in the world I’ve studied and which I don’t really know, not at all. The only thing I know about it, for certain, is that Lucia won’t be there.

  * * *

  With the exception of Professor Mann, the group was assembled along with the possessions they would carry. It was the first time the group had been together, and even now it lacked Cormac Smith and Luke Mann. It was in a conference room at Melbourne University. A nothing-room that could have been anywhere on the planet, furnished with nothing-chairs devoid of all specific nature.

  Smith had been on the far side for three months, living ancient time while the others lived modern. They were still living modern, but were dressed in clothes that were suitable for nine months underground, their backpacks leaning ready by the door. Poised.

  “We only have twenty-five minutes, and that includes provisioning,” a harried young man explained. His hair was white and rumpled and he looked thirteen, but the nametag he wore suggested he had a doctorate. “Wait here. Don’t leave. Be ready to move quickly.”

  The group of strangers looked around at each other. Artemisia knew what she saw. Aliens. Scientists. People she would live in a hole underground with for long enough to drive them all mad. Her late night thoughts had been along these lines and the crowd she was looking at was not reassuring. Artemisia hated meeting new people. It took her a while to relax and to get to know anyone. It will pass, she told herself. It’s just nerves.

  She’d met Mann the day before. “Call me Luke,” he’d said, jovially. He’d called her Artemisia once and Wormwood twice, not bothering to ask which she preferred. It almost made her regret the name change eight years ago. But without the name change, she would still have family and Lucia was the only family she was willing to own.

  The harassed young man passed around a sheet of paper with names on it. Suddenly each of them was looking up and down and across, trying to work out who was whom.

  “This’ll keep us busy till the time comes,” joked a tall lanky bloke with the most shaven scalp and the most soulful brown eyes Artemisia had ever seen. “I’m Geoff.” Geoff Murray, meteorologist and atmospheric scientist. Artemisia knew this for Murray was pointing at his name, on the list. Must be my age, Artemisia realised. Or a couple of years older. Like the harassed young man, he didn’t look it. He lounged lazily. She envied him his temperament. She was wound to almost breaking point.

  “Artemisia,” she added, quickly, then just as quickly looked down at her paper, hiding behind her hair, like a teenager. Life in fast-forward was not comfortable.

  “Pauline,” an older voice added. “But call me Doc.” Cook, it said on the sheet, Pauline Adamson. Artemisia looked up at the woman, in her sixties with shoulder length hair, beautifully kept, and wondered where the nickname came from.

  “Tony,” said an Asian Australian, short and deep-voiced. He was a plant genome expert. His hair was almost as non-existent as Geoff’s. He had the most alert gaze Artemisia had ever seen - his eyes soaked everything in. It was almost uncomfortable.

  “I’m Ben,” and a rather gorgeous man in his mid-thirties gave a small bow. Dark hair and pale grey eyes. Germanic cheekbones. A bit Prince Valiant. He obviously knew he was gorgeous, too. Ben Konig, the sheet said, biologist and zoologist. Whatever did they need a zoologist for?

  “Dr Sylvia Smith,” the last woman said, abruptly. She was so very small. Compact and pretty and even winsome, with a soft voice and sweetly waving short hair. The sort of woman who mostly got what she wanted, Artemisia guessed, noticing how her soft and gentle manner had switched on when Smith realised she was under observation. She was Mann’s offsider, apparently, also a planetary astronomer and a geologist. More power to her. Though why she needed a title when everyone else was happy with first names or nicknames…maybe it was something to do with the manner. I have to try to stop disliking her. Disliking someone at first sight will make it difficult to work in a closed environment. I have to stop disliking her.

  Artemisia sighed. Apart from that, silence prevailed.

  “Hell,” said Ben Konig, when the silence went on for too long, “Just because most of us haven’t met before, doesn’t mean...”

  At that moment the door opened. “It’s time,” said the young man, harassment transformed into a jubilant grin. “Time for Botty to beam you down into the Middle Ages!”

  Chapter Four

  New Residents in the Languedoc, March 1305


  “Sir,” said Guilhem, formally, and gave the proper bow. “My respects.” He didn’t remove his hat. Not quite polite, but sufficient. Not a hint of homage, for homage he would not give. Enough courtesy to show how reluctant those respects were, and how he hated being made to travel from the back of beyond to report to a commander whose knowing look showed that he was going to exploit the politics of it all.

  The Templar commander was a shade more polite. Only a shade. The big man was obviously not yet certain that he wanted to have Guilhem reporting to him, much less to recruit him.

  Guilhem smiled. The recruitment was his idea, to push away some other notions his aunt had. He was playing on the concept his aunt possessed about his profound spirituality, based largely on the emotions he had brought back from that pilgrimage to Jerusalem.

  Guilhem was not above using his own foibles to save his skin. A year or so in a hermit hole in the middle of nowhere was better than marrying a foul-mouthed turd or entering a monastery. If it redeemed his honour in the eyes of the family, then he would be satisfied. If he chose to join the Templars, then his uncle would be satisfied. Someone was going to come out of this happy.

  There was no report to give this time. Just a wary game to be played, setting things up for the rest of the year. Guilhem intended to delay all the encounters with his new Templar friend and to give him as little information as possible.

  His new Templar friend wasn’t stupid. This year of considering joining the Templars and licking his wounds was going to be lonely and fraught with politics. Guilhem could tell that from the way Bernat kept an eye on him even as he turned away to talk to a servant. They both had to be careful not to make enemies of the other. Guilhem didn’t need more enemies at this moment. And Bernat? No-one wanted to make an enemy of someone from Guilhem’s family.

  For the whole meeting, neither was humble and neither offended the other. It was a very courteous and cold dance.