It was a little ginger tom, full of inquisitiveness and charm and just a little bit demanding. It introduced itself to her gently, inserting its presence into her pictures and, when she sat on a rock to do some workings, rubbing itself around her legs, then jumping on her shoulder and giving her affectionate kisses.
For a moment she wondered if there was any evil cat disease that belonged in the past that scientists had cured before she was born. Only for a moment. She loved the feel of affection. The sun and the cat and the bees buzzing and the perfection of her research made the day perfect.
Her eyes were alert when she came back to the caves. It took them a couple of minutes to adjust to the artificial light, but when she did, the first person she saw was Geoff Murray. He disguised how hard he worked beneath a veneer of laziness. Sylvia thought of that cat, arduously winning her affections, and she thought of the cat’s colouring - consistent and elegant - and she thought of the lines the cat’s body made, lithe and sinuous. All this she saw in Geoff as he lounged, his work negligently distributed around him.
She told him about the cat.
* * *
Guilhem needed to stretch his legs. He also needed to let the village know that he was around. He might have been put aside and his judicial skills ignored, but he was no nonentity. He may never be given the role of consul: he was a knight, not a doctor or a notary. Still, he would make the village accept him. To that end, today, he would be seen. He would walk the long street and the curved one. He would walk from the tower at the top past the church and past the last house and right down to the Devil’s Bridge. Then he would turn right round and walk up again. He would be seen.
While he was being seen, Guilhem noticed small things. He noticed Berta sweeping up garbage, her big keys clattering ostentatiously with every movement. Obviously there had been an accident. Guilhem walked around it, careful of his shoes. He didn’t know and didn’t care that the accident was Sibilla throwing her best green jug at her latest amour… and missing. The jug now sported a bold crack.
The cooper’s doors were wide open and the light flooded in, showing him busy with barrels. Always barrels. This place would not exist without a constant supply of barrels. Wine and oil and prayer lined the street and kept Saint-Guilhem from falling into the clutches of greedy Aniane. It had saved them from the Cathars and the Inquisition. The barrels the cooper crafted kept the dark from this small town, trapped between mountains and shore. Guilhem didn’t know that the cooper was the cousin of Guilhem-the-smith and that the reason he was working so furiously was because he was the one who had discovered Sibilla with her latest amour and that Sibilla was (because of the affair) hanging onto his wife’s ring, instead of redeeming it for coin. His wife was due back from Aniane. Guilhem’s cousin had taken the ring back and failed to pay. Life at this moment revolved around a fractured jug.
He left the cooper behind and passed Fiz. The first person whose name he knew, and whose personality reached out to his own. “Another Guilhem,” he had said, ironically. “An unusual name.”
“That’s why everyone calls me Fiz,” explained the boy.
“Your father was also Guilhem?”
“Maybe.” Fiz was working, for a change, sawing wood on a portable rack. There was always building to be done around here. Why were they always busy, always building, always making things? What was it all for?
The knight went into Saint-Barthelmy’s for protection. He made his courtoisie and said a prayer. When he left, he turned right. Looking up and back, on the right was the castle. Below it lay the square tower that always made him think of Pézenas. Towers in Saint-Guilhem weren’t as squat and heavy and demanding.
If he left the village at this point and walked through the last of the fortifications, he would reach the hillside in mere moments. Paces away. And then, the path led near Artemisia. It was tempting. It was always tempting.
Today, however, he had an aim. He needed to be seen.
The best way to be seen, his cousin always said, was to stand with one’s feet a little apart, to raise one’s head a trifle, and to stare. He chose to stare at the castle and its structure. This, also, his cousin had taught him. Know your enemies, but also know your friends. Know their strengths and weaknesses. Know their walls and their doors and their gates and their men. Watch for their moment of vulnerability.
Philippe the king had said this once, when he was suffering a rare moment of communication. Guilhem’s last conversation with him had been quite different. More typical. Silent. The tall one had stood with his feet a little apart and stared at his cousin until Guilhem’s thoughts tangled and he shifted his feet uncomfortably. Today, his feet were firm and his thoughts were clear. He wondered, as he looked up at the building on the peak, if Philippe had visited this town when he had visited this region, over a year ago. Had he analysed the defence and the people? Had he noticed how Fiz joked with the woman who swept, how each and every member of the town informed each other continually, of what was going on? Glances and gestures as often as words, but the flow of information was constant. What did this mean?
He ran out of walking, suddenly, and sat down there, in the shadow of the castle, without regard to anyone around him. He opened his flat-bottomed leather purse and withdrew his signet ring. One day, it would matter. One day, he would matter.
Guilhem went back to his house and spent the rest of the day working with his man on his equipment. The town was for now, but Artemisia was his entertainment. In his equipment was his future. His armour and his horses were his path to that future.
Meanwhile, Saint-Guilhem and its bones and its abbey and its people went about its business, regardless of Guilhem’s small posturing. Those bones were the key to their calm. The objects of their worship and the cause of their security in so many ways.
Bones of the past. Memories of the dead. The means by which the first Guilhem could talk to them, be with them, protect them from ill. If Guilhem’s walk had taken him into the abbey, he might have remembered this.
* * *
Mac had finally mastered drawing on a hand-held. He was on a slope at the End of the World, looking up at the high path that led to the castle, attending only to what lay before him. Artemisia caught him by surprise and tickled him.
“What are you doing?” she asked, when he had recovered from the attack.
He showed her. “You historians probably know all this already. I grok it when I draw it. My stylus helps me understand, but.” He had sketched a pack mule. “I’m trying to get the baggage right - how pilgrims strap it, and how knights use it for their equipment and how supplies are carried to the castle. It’s not all the same. Look at how this smaller set of bags are strapped right around the mule, and how this big set, on this other mule,” he scrolled across with his further finger, “uses the bags to take the work out of the balancing.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Artemisia sat on the ground, out of sight of the line of pack ponies and mules that was making its way laboriously up the ridge. “Also, the only evidence I’ve seen for the fourteenth century is one painting at Uffizi.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all I’ve seen,” Artemisia corrected. “This sort of thing is hardly my area. Paintings and sketches only show us a small amount of it, even so. Here we’re looking at material goods in a different context, without the eye of a painter intervening. What you’re doing, sketching the everyday and all the variations you find, will expand our knowledge.”
“I could photograph it as well, if I had use of the camera,” Mac suggested.
“You could. I’ll ask Luke. No, on second thoughts, I’ll ask Ben.”
“Shouldn’t we be doing this with absolutely everything? Documenting it? Even if we can’t go too close?”
“In theory, yes. In practise, this isn’t an historical expedition. I’m here to advise, really, not to research. I asked about the camera, and about recording the conversations with Guilhem, but Luke said no, not really.”
>
“It must be killing you inside,” said Mac. Artemisia didn’t say anything, but it was nice that Mac understood. “When I signed up, I thought, because we’re going to the past…”
“It’s all about the science,” those words weighed heavily on both of them. “The environmental stuff and Sylvia’s delta T and the Big Secret Formulae Luke spends his time on. That, and making money when we get back. Luke will OK anything that has a potential income stream attached. History is not important.” She was proud that she said this with resigned realism.
She hated it. Hated being in the Middle Ages and people not CARING. She wanted to shout that last word. Instead, she bit her tongue. No use making waves.
“Surely big movies will want the history?”
“No, not really. Lots of words, not much actual history, in movies. Do you know what medievalists call Braveheart?”
“Tell me.” Mac seemed eager for secret knowledge. Artemisia almost regretted what she was going to say.
“‘The film that shall not be named.’ Most film history is total garbage. Most documentary history is primary-school stuff. There’s no money in it for the expedition.”
“But you think Konig will let me have the camera?”
“Not ahead of anyone else,” Artemisia warned. “He doesn’t privilege the history side, but he does have a sense of it being a part of what we’re here for. Have you noticed, too, that he likes it when we all do interesting work?”
“He’s fucked up,” said Mac. “But he wants it to work. Sylvia is fucked up and only cares about her own skin. Our Great Leader is just fucked up.”
“But his science is intense and amazing. It has to be.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
In Case of Trouble
They were heading for the three month deadline. Underground, everyone held their breath. A third of their stay was nearly up.
Then the race began. It was almost time for a big report. For every single aspect of their lives to be documented and sent back to the future. Even Mac was involved. Sylvia hadn’t quite set things up for Mac to be involved. She did Pauline’s reports and requisitions, but Mac had to do his own. He insisted. He loomed over Sylvia as he insisted.
“Oh, very well,” she was peeved. “You can work on Artemisia’s machine. Use her password.”
“Thanks, Mac,” Artemisia said, as she logged him on. “Exactly what I needed.”
Artemisia had been bored before even she started. She had her requisitions all prepared. Old French material, Old Occitan material, recent research covering the region, work on Templars, on knighthood, on medieval masculinities, all the main journals. It was very straightforward. She was requisitioning the electronic library she had expected to find when she arrived. Language training. Just as essential as it had been when they arrived, just as far away.
Mac gave her his goofiest smile, and took over her machine. Artemisia worked on zombies in her room for a little, but she had no new thoughts and became bored again very quickly. Then she tried reading nineteenth century histories on a hand-held. After a bit, she gave up entirely. Artemisia went outside and slept in the southern sunshine until she was called.
Mac was longer than anyone, except Geoff, expected. This was because Geoff kept ‘borrowing’ him. It was not easy to file reports: there were hyperlinks and categories and code numbers.
“Secret passwords,” said Geoff, gloomily.
“We can’t just send our work, we have to turn it into arcana first.” Mac was no better than Geoff at decoding the systems, but they refused to ask the systems’ designer and they refused to be defeated.
Early on, Sylvia provided entertainment. “There’s a beetle in my bed!” her voice was shrill and she entered the office area running.
“Careful,” Geoff advised. “You’ll trip.”
“What sort of beetle?” asked Tony.
“What were you doing in bed at this time of day?” Ben gave himself a wry smile as he regretted what he had said. “Here, let me sort the beetle out for you.”
Three minutes later, Dr Konig triumphantly bore the beetle aloft, in a specimen jar. “It’s a cave beetle,” he pronounced. “Not Mac playing a joke on you.”
“I don’t care if it’s a dung beetle,” Sylvia was not in a forgiving mood. “I want it gone.”
And that was it. For hours, it was dull and beyond dull.
Eventually, Mac and Geoff settled down at Geoff’s machine, leaving Artemisia free to work again. Mac woke her up and brought her back into the cold. “About bloody time,” she said. “I thought I wasn’t going to get to my reports until next year.”
“Bugger off,” said Cormac, very cheerfully. “This is complicated.”
“Besides, yours is easier. You don’t need as much time as us educated folks,” Geoff claimed. “You write everything as you go. And look at what you’re doing at this precise second, you’re just copying and pasting text you wrote for the Bulletin Board. Lazy git.”
“Admit it,” said Artemisia. “History is more fun than science.”
“You have a wild imagination,” and Geoff mussed her hair as he walked past.
Artemisia couldn’t help but run her eye down Mac’s requisition list as she added her own. Some of the items were obvious. More of the chemical that made the toilets function so interestingly, jelly beans, ammonium nitrate, a set of tools to replace the ones that had gone missing (probably fallen down cracks in the mesh) and detonators. She wondered about the detonator caps. For Artemisia, to wonder was to ask.
“I have the training, if that’s what you’re on about.” Cormac was curiously defensive.
“No, it’s why. I’m curious, is all. Explosives.”
“Ben asked me. In case of things going wrong. We can hide everything from the natives if we blow things up and run.”
“He thinks there’ll be trouble?”
“He’s someone who prepares for trouble,” said Mac darkly, and finished with the formatting of files and gave Geoff back his computer.
When Artemisia reported to Sylvia that her files and requisition orders were in, Sylvia’s response was a disheartening, “Oh, I didn’t know you had any.”
Artemisia responded to the comment by logging back into the requisition form and adding a request for a hard copy of Padel’s Old Occitan manual to her exceptionally carefully designed library request. If she could leave it lying around, maybe someone would pick it up. She then encrypted her files before she sent them to Sylvia. She didn’t trust Sylvia not to look and edit. In fact, after that comment, she didn’t even like Sylvia. She had been trying to, she told herself. Really trying.
Artemisia handled her dislike of Sylvia far more professionally than Sylvia handled her dislike of Artemisia. Sylvia unencrypted the files, looked through everything, designated the library request as ‘low priority’ and added her confidential assessment of Artemisia.
Luke noted this in his covering remarks. Neither jeopardised the viability of the expedition, Luke also noted, but left Sylvia’s assessment of the library’s need standing. There were no crises the current system couldn’t handle.
When it was all done, it sat for days, waiting for the window for upload. When Botty flicked on there would be new provisions and all the samples would go and there would be fresh food. Everything was ready, waiting. Sylvia was delegated to start the data zipping across the years, the microsecond Botty’s platform went live.
Sylvia dwelt on her comments, however, while she waited, ready to press that magic button. She had acted on her justified feelings, but they would hear nothing back for a full month, and even then, there would only be a limited datastream, so she might not get a full response. Only data, from this lot of requisitions. All the non-electronic items would be processed in the final material exchange, in three more months. The others would criticise her, but it was none of her doing. Foreordained is foreordained. She felt aggrieved.
Mainly, Sylvia was annoyed by the length of the bibliography Artemisia had requeste
d. It intimated that Sylvia’s decisions regarding the library could have been better handled, and it was wrong of Artemisia to suggest this. She should have simply found another way around the problem. If there was a problem at all.
Sylvia didn’t have long to ponder on the misdeeds that comprised Artemisia. Timebot’s light blinked on.
Sylvia sent the datastream. The rest of the team watched the physical material flick out and replacement material flick in. The moment the designated section of Botty’s platform was crowded with goods, they rolled full fridges off that section and the old just as full ones to replace them. They hefted boxes and crates and tubs and did everything within the bare half hour of the wormhole. Botty’s light changed to red five seconds before incoming, which led to one mad scramble and a hurried dive for the floor when Cormac and Geoff were too busy hauling to notice the colour shift.
“Nearly went back,” Cormac grinned at Geoff. Geoff wasn’t paying attention. Instead, he was looking at the last load to appear, the one that had nearly displaced him into the wormhole. One of the fridges was a slump of metal. Its rollers were weirdly intact. “Freaky,” said Cormac, admiringly.
“Worrying,” said Geoff.
I hope I don’t end up like that, on the way home, thought Artemisia.
Luke looked unconcerned.
“We’ll do the sampling from that container again,” Luke told Sylvia. “Just in case it didn’t get back in order. The data can be retransmitted with the next monthly report, just to be certain it arrives intact. I’ll redo our calculations, too. See if anything needs recalibrating. Sylvia - check the supplies. We should have enough redundancy, but I want detail of what’s gone.”
The big question Luke didn’t address was Artemisia’s thought - what this meant for them. What if the failure had melted a person, not a piece of equipment?
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