‘We rescued two of them but there was still one missing,’ said the policeman. ‘It was a dark night and we were shining our torches and powerful floodlights. We were about to give up when the beam showed us a little patch of white. It was the girl’s cheek. She was up to her neck in the mud. We were just in time. A few more minutes and she would have been gone forever.’
After the police left, our teacher, Mr Rowley, showed us a photo of the famous Bog Man, a guy who died in a muddy bog in Denmark about three thousand years ago and got preserved like a mummy.
I thought of my list.
Of all the ways to die in Londinium, being drowned in the evil grey mud of the River Thames had not occurred to me.
But it seemed that was to be my fate.
I was going to end up as Bog Kid.
19
Mud Woman
If you have a fairly good memory for words and can imitate Yoda from Star Wars, then you can probably speak Latin. The trick is to put the verb at the end.
Powerful you have become.
Patience you must have.
When nine hundred years you reach, look as good you will not.
My first proper Latin sentence to a proper Roman Londoner was, ‘Gratias ago.’
Thanks I give.
Or ‘Thank you.’
I said it to the woman who was coming to pull me out of the mud and save me from a sticky death. Dressed in a brown sack with holes poked in it for her head and arms, she clomped towards me across the mud like Frankenstein’s monster. On her feet were strange shoes that looked like tennis racquets made of strips of wood and tied with leather thongs. They weren’t snowshoes; they were mud-shoes. That’s why she was able to walk out on the marshy foreshore to help me.
She had dirt-brown dreadlocks, a toothless mouth and crusted streaks of mud on her face. Her arms were scrawny but surprisingly strong as she grabbed me beneath my underarms and tugged.
I tried not to giggle and finally came out with a sucking sound and lay flat on my back on the mud. I must have looked like a Magnum bar, only coated with grey mud rather than chocolate.
‘Thank you,’ I said again in Latin.
In reply she grabbed my tunic and tried to tug it over my head.
I was trying to think how to say, ‘That’s very kind of you, but I can wash it later, once I’m on dry ground,’ when I realised she wasn’t trying to help me.
She was trying to rob me of my tunic.
I couldn’t really be offended. After all, I had just stolen it from the Mithraeum villa. But that didn’t mean I was going to let her have it.
I sat up and pushed her away.
That was when she unlooped the wooden-handled knife hanging from a tattered rope belt around her waist.
In a hoarse voice she said something that I didn’t understand, but the way she was brandishing the knife made it crystal clear what she wanted.
‘Nego!’ I shouted. It was the only word I could think of in my panic. It literally means ‘I say no, deny or refuse’, and probably was the ancient equivalent of ‘I should think not!’
‘Furcifer!’ she growled, and thrust the knife at me.
If I hadn’t been so skinny she would have got me. But I managed to roll to one side and she only put the dagger through my mud-encrusted tunic.
A surge of adrenaline gave me strength to grab her bony wrist and twist it until she screeched in pain and dropped the knife. I tossed it over her head and shoved her onto her back.
‘Furcifer!’ she screamed at me. ‘Furcifer!’
Ignoring her screams, I pulled off her mud-shoes, slipped my gooey feet into them and began to stagger towards drier land.
I didn’t make very good time because I hadn’t done the laces of the mud-shoes properly and they were clumsy. Also, my muddy tunic kept flapping between my legs. When I reached the knife, I picked it up. No point making it easy for her to try to stick me again.
When I thought it was safe, I looked back.
I almost screamed.
The woman was only a few metres behind me, crawling on her belly and using her elbows to drag herself forward. Behind her a snail-trail of water reflected the red sunset and looked like blood. She was a terrifying sight.
20
Mini-Volcanoes
In my panic to get away from the woman I tripped over one of the mud-shoes and it came off. I had to sit and put down the knife so that I could tie it on. My fingers were slippery and clumsy. At last I managed to tie the thong. I rose unsteadily to my feet just as she reached me. We both lunged for the knife, but I got it first and squelched away as fast as I could.
Looking back, I saw her still lying where I had left her. She was shaking her fist at me, but I could tell she was exhausted. I almost felt sorry for her and as soon as I reached relatively dry land, I took off the mud-shoes and held them up to show I was leaving them for her.
I wasn’t leaving her the knife though. That might come in handy.
I shaded my eyes against the last rays of the setting sun. No sign of Dinu.
I feared the worst.
Looking further inland, I saw some low mud-and-thatch huts on my right and some clay beehive-shaped things on my left with smoke coming up from some of them. Beyond them was more smoke, a kind of low-lying smog.
That must be Londinium, or rather Southwark.
That was where the blue-eyed girl had been buried and probably lived too.
That was the way I needed to go. The only problem was that the path to the beehive structures was blocked by two people coming towards me: a little man with a wispy beard and a boy about my size. The boy’s eyes were red and swollen, which made him look a bit like a pig. They both wore loincloths a bit like the Tarzan mop-rag I had on underneath my tunic.
It seemed that decent clothes were hard to come by in Londinium.
As they got closer I could see from their angry expressions that they weren’t coming to help me.
I waved my knife at them and shouted, ‘Desiste!’
They stopped and frowned at each other. Later I realised I’d used the singular imperative as if I only wanted one of them to stop. Maybe they had been confused. Or maybe they were as frightened of me as I was of them. After all, I had a knife and they didn’t. Now barefoot, I ran straight towards them and they jumped aside, staring at me wide-eyed.
I kept going across the scrubby ground towards the beehive buildings, only stopping when I nearly fell into a big round pit filled with water. I saw a wooden ramp going into it and noticed chunks cut out of the grey mud. It was a kind of clay quarry. Maybe they were making pots. Or roof tiles.
The thick mud was drying on my legs and arms; I was starting to feel like the Thing, that Marvel superhero who is made of rock.
The sun had almost set and a quick glance confirmed that nobody was around so I went down the ramp and washed off as much of the mud as I could.
I came out, shivering and dripping. Now I was coated in a thin film of grey but at least I didn’t look like the Thing any more. I peeked around one of the clay beehives to see if Dinu had appeared yet. He was nowhere to be seen.
But the mud woman was.
She had reached dry ground, replaced her mud-shoes and was now talking to the man and the boy and pointing towards my hiding place. They turned to look, but I shrank back out of sight. Next time I looked, all three of them were heading away from me towards the mud-and-thatch huts.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I edged around my beehive to see two skinny men in grubby tunics bending over the base of another big beehive. They were shovelling pieces of wood into a space underneath it. I could see the red glow of coals inside.
It must be a kiln, for baking pots. Thankfully, the men didn’t notice me as I backed away and hid behind one of the other kilns, gratefully soaking up some of its warmth.
Up above, the first star had appeared in a dark blue sky along with a thin sliver of moon.
Leaning against the kiln, damp and barefoot, I prayed that age-old prayer.
Star light, star bright,
First star I see tonight
I wish I may, I wish I might
Have the wish I wish tonight:
May I survive and find the girl
Return back home and get five mil.
The sound of men’s voices made me tense all my muscles, ready to run.
But it was only the kiln-slaves going away, luckily in another direction.
I realised that if anyone saw me wearing nothing but a damp slave’s tunic and with a knife in one hand, they would probably assume I was a crazed runaway. They would attack first and question me later.
I badly needed a belt for my knife, but had no idea where I would find one. Then I remembered my loincloth. I put the knife on the ground, reached up under my tunic, undid the knot and pulled out the rag. Using my knife, which was disturbingly sharp, I cut the rag into three strips. I stretched them out, which was not difficult as the weave was so loose. Next I tied the strips together at one end, used my heel to anchor the knot to the ground and wove the three strips into a plait. I knotted the other end and was relieved to find this braided rag was long enough to go around my waist. Once I had tied it, I realised I could tug up my damp tunic to let a flap hang over the makeshift belt. This raised the hem of the tunic to just below my knees rather than almost to my ankles, making walking much easier. It also made a kind of pouch down the front of my tunic. For a moment I considered dropping the knife down there, but it was not a folding knife, and the razor-sharp blade might cut me.
In the end I stuck the knife between the belt and tunic. Now I felt like a Halloween pirate, but that was better than being a half-naked Tarzan.
Meanwhile, it was getting darker.
I needed somewhere safe and warm to sleep. Probably best to stay where I was. I guessed it was almost mid-summer and that it would be light again in a few hours.
So I found the warmest kiln, the one the slaves had recently stoked, and I lay on my side, curving my damp body slightly so that my thighs, belly, chest and cheek were pressed against the warm clay. The ground beneath me was baked hard as concrete, but at least it was dry. My empty stomach gurgled loudly, but I was too exhausted to take any notice. I fell asleep almost at once.
I dreamed I had gone back in time to Pompeii and was sleeping next to a mini-volcano. Then I dreamed that men were shouting questions at me and kicking me.
The mini-volcano had been in my dream.
The kicks and shouts were real.
21
Singing Stars
I was jolted awake by a kick to my ribs. A flickering torch showed me the wild-eyed faces of two men. They were painfully thin, with mangy tufts of hair on their heads. I recognised the two kiln-slaves who had been tending the fire earlier.
‘Abi!’ They were shouting. ‘Abi!’
They pointed out into the darkness.
‘I’m not doing any harm,’ I mumbled in English. ‘It’s the middle of the night. Just let me stay here till morning.’
‘Abi!’ insisted the one with the torch, and swung his foot in the direction of my ribs.
I rolled away and then pulled out my knife. That made them both jump back.
But the one with the torch kept saying, ‘Abi!’ and jabbing the flaming end of his stick at me.
I pulled myself to my feet too quickly; a sudden dizziness swept over me. I leaned against the warm cone of the kiln to steady myself.
I tried to remember the Latin phrase I had memorised.
But they only shouted, ‘Abi!’ and the one without a torch gestured as if swatting a fly. I remembered Solomon Daisy’s warning about misunderstanding gestures, but I was pretty certain this one meant, ‘Beat it!’
I sighed and used my knife to point into the darkness. ‘Londinium?’ I asked.
‘Abi!’ they repeated together. ‘Abi!’
‘All right, all right,’ I muttered.
Once out of the circle of torchlight, I put my knife back in my belt of plaited rag. The night was full of frogs croaking. The air was mild but damp, with a swampy smell. It was so dark that I hardly dared to move. I just stood there on waste ground, afraid of what I might step on.
After a while I sat down. There were sharp pieces of broken pottery scattered around, but I pushed them away and finally curled up on damp earth.
I longed for my own bed and my duvet or even the stupid hippy bedspread my gran had made when she was at university. I tried different positions but couldn’t fall asleep. The croaking of the frogs was too loud. I heard ducks quacking too. There was also a bird with a call like a squeaky toy, maybe a coot. I never knew the night could be so noisy.
Finally I rolled onto my back and opened my eyes.
The sky was full of more stars than I had ever seen in my life.
There were a trillion of them, blazing like diamonds. I could clearly see the brighter stars that made up constellations and also a band of stars so crammed together that they formed a big curve of light, like a diamond rainbow.
I had seen the Milky Way once before, on holiday in Greece. It was impressive then, but nothing like this. This was literally awesome.
The croaking frogs seemed to be singing out the message of those stars: We are here! The universe is vast. We are eternal.
And I realised something. Those terrifying stars are always there, but we don’t see them any more.
I was hypnotised.
It felt like they wanted to pull part of me into them. Like I was falling upward.
I thought, This is a dream. I’m going to wake up any minute.
But it was too real to be a dream. The swampy air was too heavy and the frogs were too loud and the stars were too bright.
What had I done? I would never find my way back and my gran wouldn’t know what had happened to me and she would worry for the rest of her life.
I stared up at those stars for a long time. Eventually I must have fallen asleep, because I woke with a jerk to the sound of a mosquito whining in my ear.
The awe-inspiring stars had been replaced by a colourless pre-dawn sky. Mist blanketed the ground around me.
I sat up, rubbed sleep from my eyes. Mosquitoes were swarming around my legs. I had already been bitten several times.
I pushed myself up on my knees. Strangely, I didn’t feel hungry. Just dizzy.
Then I nearly screamed. A huge hole yawned in the ground only a few paces away. Craning forward I saw that it was a rubbish pit, full of jagged shards of pottery, the corpse of a dead rat and other disgusting things. If I’d kept walking in the dark I would have fallen in and probably broken my neck.
At least I had survived the night.
I slapped at a mosquito and hoped it wasn’t a malaria carrier.
It was now light enough for me to see the flat grey shapes of people and animals moving through the low mist about a stone’s throw from where I sat. They were all heading in one direction. North-east, I think. Some had baskets on their backs or sacks full of goods. A few had little donkeys. A slow-moving ox-cart trundled along at the same pace as the pedestrians. It held a giant leather sack full of liquid, like an ancient tanker truck.
I stood up and waited for another wave of dizziness to pass. Carefully going around the death pit, I picked my way through weeds and pottery shards to the road. Another ox-cart passed by, this one piled high with chopped firewood. A man in a tattered tunic had a big dog on a lead. For some reason the dog suddenly yelped and bolted. His tattered owner ran after him. A barefoot man wearing a woolly hat and something like a big nappy was driving a herd of small pigs with a stick. The pigs also seemed restless and started to squeal, so I waited for them to pass before I stepped out onto the road.
When I say ‘road’, I mean a kind of sticky river of mud studded with gravel. There were no trees at all, apart from a single dead one up ahead, a silhouette in the mist. To my right were marshy grasses and big puddles of water reflecting the rising sun. I noticed small tombs either side of the road and realised this must be a
burial ground. Smoke was rising up from a bonfire, and as I got closer I heard music and saw about thirty men, women and children standing around it with their hands lifted.
The swirling smoke made them look like ghosts and I shuddered. They were even moaning in a spooky way, making a sound like nothing I’d ever heard. Flutes trilled and someone was shaking a tambourine or maybe some kind of rattle. It was unearthly.
Then I realised it wasn’t a bonfire.
It was a dead body being burned on a pyre.
A gust of wind wafted smoke across the road and the travellers on the road started coughing. I got a noseful of it too. My empty stomach flipped as I smelled something like incense mixed with bacon.
A little firewood-laden donkey stopped and began to make an incredibly loud hee-haw noise. Its owner started beating it with a stick, but it wouldn’t move.
He stood there, hitting it again and again.
I couldn’t bear to watch so I hurried on, hoping to put the death and misery behind me.
Then I saw the guy on the cross.
22
Grave Concerns
The thing I had mistaken for a dead tree turned out to be a person nailed to a cross. It looked a lot like the sculpture of the crucified Jesus in church, only instead of his head being to one side it had flopped forward so – thankfully – I couldn’t see his face.
It was the most horrific thing I had ever seen. Then it got worse: he moved. The poor guy was still alive!
My head was fighting with my stomach about whether to pass out or throw up, but my feet kept me moving until I was past it.
But I wasn’t done with death quite yet.
Once again I heard the sound of singing, along with a flute and jingly tambourine. This music was more like a tune, and I could make out words in Latin.
It was another funeral, but these people were burying the body, not burning it. The mist parted to show me mourners and musicians on the left-hand side of the road. There were fewer of them here than at the cremation, only a dozen or so, gathered around an open grave and singing. The ones without instruments were lifting their hands and faces to the sky. Unlike the other mourners, these ones were dressed all in black or grey.
The Time Travel Diaries Page 6