“I’m meeting with the one who speaks our language today,” he said. So that strong young man took Sylvia by the arm and pulled her from her comfortable seat. He pushed and shoved her until she was half running and half stumbling ahead of him. He didn’t treat her kindly, but he herded her to the ribbon-covered bush. There he handed her over to Artemisia, with an explanation.
“She simply doesn’t pay attention to the instructions of others,” Geoff told Luke, later.
“Only with small things,” Luke argued. “She’s there where it counts.”
* * *
“I have more than one string for my bow.”
Guilhem’s mind was not participating in this conversation at all. Armour. That’s what really concerned him. Guilhem was thinking of a new suit and calculating how to gather together 25 livres tournois. Wishing he had spent less in Montpellier.
With new armour, he could sell his soul and become a mercenary. The opposite of a Templar. Only temporary oaths. Only temporary obedience. No chastity.
It was tempting. He didn’t need new armour, but he knew that he would do better if he had equipment. Some of his stuff was fine, but bits had been battered and bent in war and would never be the same. And he had sold all he had captured, in order to ransom Philippe. Damn friends. Without that ransom, he would have had more choices. Why did Philippe get away with everything, and Guilhem with nothing?
If I were a minstrel, I would sing of William, for he will be my hero. If I were a troubadour, I would sing of love and war. Here am I, Guilhem, sitting under a tree beyond the end of the world, singing a small song. I sing to a woman who is here no longer, for if she were still present, she would know that I know that she comes from a place far beyond our knowledge.
* * *
Pauline was chatty at dinner that night. “I saw a couple of builders today, when I went for my walk. They had a plumb level and were checking a wall they were building. I didn’t know they had plumb levels back now.”
“Back now?” Geoff smiled lazily across the trestle table.
“Here now? Then?” Sylvia suggested possibilities.
“And a plumbline, hanging from a bloody rope?”
Mac was puzzled. “Didn’t you know they had buildings in the Middle Ages?”
“Baths, too,” said Artemisia.
Pauline ignored them both. “Their lines were dead straight. Different plumbline, but the same bloody technique my late husband used when he built our extension.”
Artemisia looked down at her plate. Explanations weren’t going to help. Pauline would just look like an idiot. Was it ethical to not brief people, when she was the person who had been brought back all these years just to brief people, though? Artemisia was saved by Luke.
“Pauline, what were you doing in town?”
“I wasn’t in town,” Pauline justified. “Not really.”
“And your jobs as cook and doctor took you there?”
“Actually,” Sylvia challenged, “I took her there. No-one should stay underground forever. And you did say that I could keep an eye on things.”
Ben’s head whipped up. He looked at Sylvia, gauging what she had just admitted. He looked at Luke, gauging what he might actually have permitted. “Luke,” he said, very calmly, “Can I have a word with you after dinner?”
“Must you?” Luke sounded long-suffering.
“So you’ve been expecting it?” Ben’s voice was low, almost threatening.
“Oh,” said Luke, “I always expect talks from you.”
* * *
As the pressure of season eased, the villagers had time to compare their recent experiences. There was that woman from under the hill who sat by the wall so very often, staring at them. There was the water that had run red. There was the bad harvest. There was the late bird migration. There were deaths and portents and small accidents. They all added up to the whole town (with the possible exceptions of Fr Peire, Guilhem-the-smith and young Fiz) being spooked. Something had to be done.
Guilhem had his own concerns. Bernat had decided that he should join the Templars and had told his aunt and uncle. He refused to go to Pézanas. He paid no attention to village concerns. In fact, he had his hands over his ears and a blindfold over his eyes and he noticed nothing, by choice.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Wild Harvesting
Back in Melbourne, the scientists had laid a very clear foundation for the time team’s work. It was a brilliant team of scientists, and, like all brilliant teams of scientists in the field of modern physics, they worked with statistical certainty and with an utter acceptance of the implications of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Luke, of course, was one of them. He defined uncertainty as security in a way that only a few advanced thinkers were capable of.
It was Artemisia who discovered what this meant in terms of their own lives. She had been trying to find out more about the waiver she hadn’t signed, and why it perturbed Ben so much. In fact, she was trying to find out why Ben was so worried and why Luke was so insouciant. Nothing added up.
She found the original team on file. Bill who Tony had replaced, the two historians who she had replaced. Pauline’s daughter. The original doctor. They had all been recruited a while earlier. Up to two years earlier, in fact. This made sense in terms of coming to such a strange place. It didn’t make sense of the library, but it made sense of the clothes and the supplies and why there were no shoes that fitted Artemisia. Shoe measurements had been done very early.
Tony and Pauline and Artemisia were wearing outdoors clothes that fitted by happenstance. Tony was the same size as Pauline’s daughter, who was larger than Lucia even, if Artemisia read the clothing sizes correctly - Pauline’s daughter was Amazonian - Artemisia found this ineffably funny. She had assumed that the other Dr Adamson was tiny and delicate. This was because of the way Pauline protected the tiny and delicate Dr Smith. Pauline was the same size and sex as one of the missing historians.
This was interesting, but didn’t answer the need for the waiver. Nor why everyone had dropped out. Artemisia asked Geoff. It was he who finally explained.
“The likelihood of us surviving is quite high,” he explained, “but you can’t take all the doubt out of it. Coming back in time or going forward in time is risky.”
“How risky?”
“Dead risky,” he joked, but his eyes were serious.
“So why is Luke so bloody unconcerned?”
“Partly because for him the science is bigger than anyone. Partly because he’s super-Luke. He cannot die.”
“And Ben? If he knows it all and doesn’t like it, why did he come?”
“Harvey twisted his arm, I believe. Made it hard for him to refuse. He said something to that effect in the briefings.”
“Ben did? How odd.”
“Not Ben, Harvey.”
“Remind me not to ever date Harvey again,” Artemisia said, not quite bitterly.
“You dated Harvey?” Geoff was incredulous.
“How do you think I got here?” And now Artemisia was indeed bitter. Because she had to come. Because she would have come to get her sister that medicine, even if she had known that she was risking her life. But she wished, oh how she wished, that the choice had been hers. “I’m going to call Harvey ‘Saruman’ in future.”
“Why?”
“Beautiful voice. Working towards evil.”
Geoff laughed and said, “You need coffee.”
“I’m a tea drinker now,” Artemisia confessed.
“What?” Geoff was astonished.
“I can’t take instant coffee anymore. If only we had beans!”
* * *
Geoff brought in fresh fish.
“No,” said Luke.
“Naughty boy,” said Sylvia.
“No-one saw me,” Geoff wasn’t bothered by their comments, so this was more as reassurance than excuse. “Should I put them back?”
Luke sighed. “Take them in to Pauline,” he said. “But don’t do this aga
in. We don’t despoil our environment.”
When Geoff was finished with his delivery, he had another to make. He had a found item.
“This smells fishy,” Artemisia said.
“Fish for dinner.” Geoff was still cheerful.
“You need to quit stirring.”
“Never. Now tell me what my found object is. At once!”
“You’re totally daft,” was Artemisia’s response. “Totally.”
“It’s an agnus dei,” she said, a few minutes later. “An amulet. Women and children carry them, I think. I’ll look it up for you. In the meantime, if you could get rid of that smell…”
Geoff leaned close to her. “You don’t love me, then?”
“I don’t love anything that smells so very much like a fish.”
Geoff laughed and went to clean himself and the amulet.
* * *
The time team celebrated Halloween with sweets and with a bang-up meal. Luke wanted the others to try fancy dress, but they refused. Instead everyone watched an old football game and microwaved the last of the popcorn.
Three times that night Luke made slighting references to Ben about his Jewishness and the festival being foreign to him. Pauline snickered each time. Ben found himself edging out of the group with each comment and he finally gave up and sat on the ledge outside the front door, looking at the dark hills and the stars and remembering the Halloweens of his childhood. Australians knew nothing of Halloween and Luke knew nothing of Ben. He consoled himself with these thoughts, but they didn’t really help.
The moon and Aries were kissing in the sky, while Taurus was edging below the horizon. Tony also sat there in the dark, listening to the merriment below, the cat on his knee, thinking that to loneliness there is an end.
* * *
“Now they’re making planks by the cartload,” reported Pauline. “Bloody good industry it is. Every plank identical.”
“Just like real wood. For real carpentry.” Artemisia was unable to refrain from being sarcastic. Honestly, she thought, I am my worst enemy. I should accuse Pauline outright of having zombie ancestry.
Pauline ignored her anyway. “And I saw two blokes with a whacking great saw between them, making the planks. Or maybe not planks. Something with wood, any old how.”
“And what,” Luke’s smooth voice interrupted her tale, “were you doing there? Again?”
“Taking a walk.” Pauline’s face was without guile.
“You have no work that takes you to the village. You are doctor and you are cook - not historian and not scientist. I repeat, what were you doing there?”
Pauline was stubborn. “Taking a walk. I was in costume. No harm done. And I was outside the village.” And besides, her face said, you let me do it before.
“You are confined to quarters for the next two weeks. After that, you may walk only within two hundred metres of this hillock we live under.”
“Boss, that’s unfair.”
“No. You’re endangering our lives because you can’t fucking follow instructions - that’s unfair.”
“Dr Wormwood goes there.”
“Not to the village. She doesn’t go within 300 metres of the fucking village.”
“She talks to locals.”
“To one local. Who is our official intermediary. And Dr Wormwood has nine years of university training to equip her for that conversation. Remind me how much history you have studied?”
“It wasn’t bloody dangerous.” Pauline was recalcitrant.
“So why didn’t you ask permission?”
Everyone was silent. Pauline looked at Sylvia. Obviously she had asked permission. Sylvia, was, however, busy being silent.
“I see,” said Luke. “Everyone except Artemisia and Tony and Geoff is confined to within a three minute walk of one of our entrances. You three will only go where you have to - no new contacts. Understood.”
“Yes, sir.” They all chorused, like good schoolchildren.
Cormac and Sylvia glared at Pauline, as if it were all her fault. It wasn’t. Pauline was just being honest about the amount of transgression - everyone except Artemisia was regularly visiting the outskirts of town, despite Sylvia’s run-in with the villagers and despite the children nibbling at the edges. It was tempting, to see how close to the big towers one could creep without being seen.
Artemisia had warned them and warned them, and she knew what the next step was going to be. Everyone who was grounded refused to speak to her.
There was no virtue in being right.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Cues
2 November (All Saints)
The team was assembled outside at dawn, by Theo’s command. Sylvia and Geoff were observing the last of the lunar eclipse. With the moon in shadow, Aries and Taurus shone brightly.
Theo stood on the rocky plateau above the caves, enchanted by the feel of the air and the audience. He launched into a lecture, talking about the nature of narrative in the universe. “Observe the moments of clash and change,” he declared, “those are the points that will give us our new understanding. We yearn for the elegance that emerges from dynamism, not the dull patterns than emerge from a simple, static state. Our presence here, today, will give us the power over the narratives of time, of space, of dimensions we’re only now learning to measure.”
“What shapes our thought?” Mac asked, as if it hadn’t occurred to him before.
“Maths,” said Sylvia, finished with her observations, sucking up to Theo.
“English lies,” added Ben.
“You know what I’ve been thinking,” said Artemisia almost defiantly, “I’ve been thinking about the cultural limitations of scientific processes. You get what you set out to find. Your language and your preconceptions govern that.”
The others looked at her as if she had sprouted horns.
* * *
Tony was remarkably chatty at dinner that night. No-one knew how to respond. This didn’t perturb him. He simply addressed his remarks to whoever was sitting opposite. “I don’t understand,” he commented to Ben. “I don’t understand how people behave. I was watching you all today and it’s like you follow secret cues. Like my plants. They have biological cues waiting and when something small happens, when the temperature changes or the air becomes moist, they follow those cues and it looks as if they magically grow or blossom. I know how cold this season was by how my plants behave. I don’t know any of your cues. I don’t know why any of you behave the way they do. Humans are strange.”
He went silent and shuttered while he thought it out. When he emerged from his thoughts, it was Sylvia sitting opposite. “I don’t know why you behave so strangely,” he announced, again, as if it were a new thought. “You must have those secret cues. Reacting to environment, perhaps. I don’t know if they’re genetic. I want to know. When I get home I shall study it. I shall keep notes on it now, however. I need more data.”
Sylvia’s mouth was agape, but Tony didn’t notice. He turned back to his meal and finished eating, slowly and methodically.
Ben had taken his dinner outside. It wasn’t comfortable outside. The wind made his teeth ache. Still, outside was better than inside. Grounding meant being surrounded by politics every minute of the day. Grounding meant that he could never take a break from being nice.
Not that he wasn’t guilty, he reflected. He himself had been a little more daring than the others and had walked quietly up to the big old wall of one of the churches and had laid a hand on it, wondering. He’d faded into the background quickly when he saw a group of people, arguing. They weren’t arguing amicably, but they weren’t passionate, either. Neither side was paying much attention to the other. A word here and there was understandable - they were speaking a kind of French, for certain. Ben’s political brain interpreted them as factions, perhaps, or having a long-standing difference. If Artemisia had been there, she would have told him that they were arguing about. Or she would have told him to get out.
What Ben Konig
didn’t know was that the argument was linked to the precise wall he had so tenderly admired. The parishioners were arguing the old arguments, about the roles of the two parishes and the needs of the two parishes and how the folk from under the hill were getting in everyone’s way.
“We need to send a priest in,” the cordwainer had said. “That knight does no good.”
“Which priest?” That was the question and that was what had started the discussion. It had moved on to boundaries, however, and old unresolved disputes. It was that stage that Ben overheard.
Sylvia hurt, however, more than anyone. She took Tony’s comments personally. He was watching her, and she didn’t deal well with anyone analysing or criticising her. She took this to Luke, who had championed her so much in the early days.
“Grow up, Sylvia.”
Luke was tired. Everyone was still grounded. What hit harder than the loss of personal freedom this time was the loss of research.
The workstations become silent hubs of pained effort as the effects of the grounding hit. Artemisia wondered who would explode first. Guilhem was away, so she was grounded too. It didn’t worry her.
When Guilhem returned, the unease from under the hill invaded everything they talked about. Guilhem shared the mood.
He had been in Pézenas, this time at his aunt’s instruction. Bernat had again told him he should join the Templars. That his family would appreciate the holiness of it all. And Guilhem knew that Bernat was lying. All he wanted was another link into yet another ruling family. He lost his temper at the hypocrisy of this man. Finally, he and Bernat had fought openly. There would be consequences. Guilhem did not want to face them.
“The desert surrounds us,” he said, pensively, kicking at a stone. “It’s like forest. It hides dangers.”
“Dangers?”
“Borders.” The word he used was military - ‘marches’ it had become in modern English. Artemisia had reached the stage where she annotated Guilhem’s speech almost automatically, barely missing a word.
Tactical boundaries - ones that needed defending. Artemisia needed to check if he really meant that. “Like where you have battles?” she asked.
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