A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  That was enough to set Vivian bending over the history chart in earnest. She fell asleep that night murmuring, “First Unstable Era 300 AD to 2199. Second Unstable Era 3800 to 3950. Third Unstable Era 5700 to 6580. Fourth Unstable Era—Oh, isn’t history long!” And when she woke in the morning her head was still swimming with things she almost knew.

  As she went downstairs that morning, Sempitern Walker came flying down past her in a rustling plum-coloured cloak. “Elio!” he shouted. “Elio!” Vivian hurried down after him, certain there was going to be another ceremony and another fuss. But it did not look like it. Elio was waiting in the hall with Sam’s father. “Oh, you got him. Good!” said the Sempitern, swooping down on the pair of them. “Any news of that holo projector yet?”

  “Time Patrol is working on it, sir,” said Elio.

  “Among about a million other things. That projector must have its own power pack. It’s not drawing any from the City,” Mr Donegal said, and he nodded at Vivian. “Hallo there.”

  To Vivian’s surprise, Sempitern Walker nodded at her too and said, “Good morning,” before he swept Mr. Donegal and Elio off to his study, leaving Vivian rather disappointed that there was no more rushing about than that. She was still hoping and listening when she and Jonathan had to set off to Duration.

  Sam was waiting by the fountain in Time Close as usual. “I’m not speaking to either of you,” he announced. “You went off without me.”

  “Well we had work to do from Dr. Wilander,” Jonathan said.

  “I don’t mean that, stupid!” said Sam. “I mean you went without me wherever your two time-ghosts were coming back from. You’re green mean obscenes, both of you!”

  “No we didn’t,” said Vivian.

  “Stupid yourself!” Jonathan said, stalking ahead to the archway into Aeon Square. “We haven’t been there yet.”

  “Then you will soon,” Sam said, pounding after him in a patter of shoelace. “What’s the difference? I know you’re going to.”

  “I’d go without you this moment if I’d the least idea what we were doing!” Jonathan said angrily over his shoulder.

  “And you’ve no right to blame us for something we haven’t done yet!” Vivian added, also over her shoulder.

  The Court Jester apparition was leaning against the brick wall under the archway. The long mad-looking face turned towards them as they came through. Jonathan nearly ran into Vivian, because they had both been looking the other way until the last minute. They stumbled to a stop and stared. Somehow, in the dimness under the arch, the false ghost seemed both harder to see and a great deal more solid. He towered over them both. And he seemed to be watching them earnestly.

  “Well, I do blame you!” Sam said, stumping into the archway after them. He stopped when he saw the apparition. His voice went to a heavy whisper. “It looks awfully real!”

  Jonathan swallowed rather. “But he’s not,” he said. “If you tried to touch him your hand would hit the wall.”

  The Court Jester’s mouth spread into a long, long smile. “Come try me,” he said. His voice was distant and indistinct, like a man speaking in another room. And he held out a long shadowy arm, almost in Jonathan’s face. Jonathan ducked away back from it hurriedly.

  That left Vivian out in front. She pulled in a deep breath. “I’ll try,” she said, and went forward towards the out-stretched arm with her own arm and hand held stiffly out like a sleepwalker. And her hand met something. As it did, it gave Vivian a jolt of the sort of fear you feel on finding yourself face to face with a large fierce dog. Not that the ghost was fierce. She just had the feeling that it hated to be touched. The arm she met was not exactly solid, but it was not nothing either. It was coldish, and the cloth of the sleeve was rough. And though her hand did not sink into that arm, she knew that the flesh and the cloth over it were made of something that was spread thinner than normal. “I can feel you,” she said, and found she was whispering. “You’re not a hollow gramophone, are you?”

  “No. I am real,” the ghost said in its strange muffled voice. “You may all touch and believe.” Its smile died away and it looked sad, but it stood patiently holding its arm out while first Jonathan, then Sam, came and put their fingers on the rough cloth of its sleeve. Sam prodded a bit and the ghost endured it patiently. Sam backed away looking awed. Jonathan cleared his throat, but even so his voice came out choky.

  “It’s… sort of solid.”

  The ghost took its arm away and for a moment they all stared at one another, as if everyone including the ghost needed to recover from the experience.

  “What do you want?” Jonathan said at length.

  “To make my trouble known,” said the ghost. The dejected thread of its voice seemed to wind about the archway and come to them from several directions at once. Probably, Vivian thought, its voice was spread as thin as the rest of it. “I have tried to make folk in the City hear me,” it said, “but I have little substance here without my Casket and they take me for a ghost.”

  “Well you can’t blame people for thinking that when you go galloping about playing the bagpipes in the middle of a ceremony,” Jonathan said.

  The ghost shook its head, with a sad, puzzled smile. “Did I do that? My memory is not good. I did not remember until last night that it was you I should be speaking to. Then I came and tried, but a powerful man dismissed me in the name of Chronologue and I had no choice but to depart.”

  “You mean you wanted us?” Jonathan said incredulously.

  “What are you,” said Sam, “if you’re not a ghost really?”

  “Myself,” said the ghost. “I am the one who was set to guard the Iron Casket and I failed. You saw how I failed. You saw the Casket dug up and stolen from its place.”

  “Oh!” they all said, and Vivian thought, Of course! This was the man with long legs who had run past them so easily up the Tor, shouting at them to hurry. He had looked a lot more solid then. She looked down at his almost-solid foot standing on the cobblestones. She recognised those pointed shoes now. From the look of Sam and Jonathan, they knew him too.

  “But why did you go and vanish?” Sam said. “You just let the boy get on and steal it!”

  The Guardian of the Iron Casket spread his big pale hands helplessly. “I did what I could. When I saw the theft begin, I ran to the early days of the Age of Iron and from there I ran back to the late days, pulling the threads of history as I came. In the first ages of Time City this should have summoned powerful help from the folk of the City, but the allotted span of the City is ending and it made my power to summon weak. Only you two answered the summons.” This made Sam and Jonathan give one another self-conscious looks. “So then,” the Guardian’s thin voice muttered on, “I surrounded the thief in the threads of history and wrapped them round any who would help in the Age of Iron, to drag them together. And all who came was one girl, and the three of you arrived too late.” The long face looked desperately sad.

  “And why did you come here?” Vivian asked.

  “I did not know what else to do,” the Guardian admitted. “When the Iron Casket leaves its hiding place, the Age of Iron ends and I must return to the City. So here I came to Time City, hoping that my casket had been restored to its place in the Gnomon. But it is not there. It has been stolen.”

  “We know. We didn’t do any good at all,” Jonathan said. He was so worried that he almost looked like Sempitern Walker. “Look, is Time City really coming to an end? Isn’t there anything we can do?”

  The Guardian gazed at him sadly. “It is moving into its last days. The Great Year is nearly ended, yes. But if the Guardians of the other three Caskets could be warned and the Silver, the Gold, and the Lead brought to the Gnomon safe from the thief, then the first days might come again.”

  “Then we’ll do—” Jonathan began, but Vivian interrupted him eagerly.

  “Who is that thief?” she said. “The Time Lady?”

  The Guardian’s long pale face turned to her in a look of utter reproach
. He shook his head, slowly and sadly, and faded away while he did it, into the wall of the archway. They were left looking at rows of narrow red bricks with an after-image of a sad long-legged shape against them. Vivian could have kicked herself. She felt hot and cold and weak in the legs, the way you do when you have said something perfectly dreadful. She wished she had known that it was a dreadful thing to say. Meanwhile, Jonathan was crunching his pigtail between his teeth and still looking as anguished as his father, and Sam seemed to be holding his breath. He let it out in a sort of roar.

  “Don’t just stand there! Do something!”

  “Yes, but we’ll have to think how to first,” Jonathan said. He began to walk out through Aeon Square, frowning and chewing his pigtail. Vivian went after him. She could tell by the flapping of shoelace that Sam was just behind. “If that really was the Guardian of the Iron Casket and not another student joke,” Jonathan said.

  “No, it was too sad,” Vivian said. “And too real.”

  “Then things aren’t the way we thought,” said Jonathan.

  “And that boy’s not got anything to do with the Time Lady,” Sam said. “So get on and think. It’s your sort of idea we need now.”

  Jonathan turned and snapped, “I am thinking! But my mind needs to adjust first. Besides, do you know where the other Caskets are? Have you any way of knowing which bit of thousands of years of history is the Golden Age? Or the Age of Lead? No, I thought you hadn’t. So shut up!”

  He marched on across the Square with Vivian, followed by heavy breathing and expressive flapping of shoelaces. But of course they all had to gather round Faber John’s Stone in the middle. Jonathan stared down at a whole new spiderweb of cracks spreading out from the new cracks of yesterday.

  “I think Time City really is in its last days,” he said miserably. “What do we do? How do we find those other Guardians?”

  “I have a bit of an idea,” Vivian said hesitantly. Jonathan whirled round on her and Sam jerked his chin up to stare at her. She felt rather a fool. “Well—if the Twentieth Century is part of the Age of Iron,” she said, “and I suppose it must be if the Iron Casket was stolen from it, then it’s part of an Unstable Era, isn’t it? Don’t you think the other three Ages may be Unstable Eras too?” She squatted down and spread Dr. Wilander’s horseshoe-shaped chart out on the fractured stone. She knew it quite appallingly well by now, the long white stretches and the shorter grey ones. And, as she remembered, the grey blocks were very evenly spaced through history, as if they had been made that way on purpose. It was the first time in her life that she had found learning anything even remotely useful. “Look,” she said.

  Jonathan unclenched his teeth from his pigtail and knelt down to look. “But there are seven, no, eight, other Unstable Eras.”

  “Six of them are little ones—only a hundred years or so,” Vivian said.

  “Only three long ones,” Sam said, breathing windily across them. He was lying on his stomach with his chin almost on the chart.

  “And those are all about thirty centuries apart,” Jonathan said. “I never realised before.” He put his finger on the Third Unstable Era, 5700 to 6580. “Then this could be the Silver Age, if that comes next after the Age of Iron. And—” his finger moved round to the last long grey block “—this could be either the Age of Lead or the Age of Gold. But that means the fourth Age has to be one of the short ones. Anyway, it’s worth looking at the Third and the Ninth Unstable Era—what is it? Ninety-two Century to One Hundred—”

  They were interrupted by a loud bell ringing from Duration. The last few children were running hard across the bottom of Aeon Square.

  “Oh great Time!” Jonathan said. “I’ve never ever been this late!”

  They scrambled up. Vivian scooped up the chart and folded it as they raced over the flagstones. They were going to be late. The bell had stopped long before they got to Duration.

  “You’ve got it, V.S.!” Jonathan panted as they ran. “But we’re going to need help finding out which Age is which. Let’s pump Wilander.”

  School was not so bad for Vivian that morning, even though she arrived late. Probably it was because she knew what to expect now. She spent quite a lot of time using her pen-function to draw long-legged men in tall squashy hats and thinking about the poor sad Guardian of the Iron Casket. She wondered what a person who was not quite real spent his time doing in the City. Fading in and out, looking for help, she supposed. So it hadn’t been a student joke after all…

  Then she thought about what the Guardian had said. It sounded as if he couldn’t tackle the thief himself. Perhaps he was too ghostly, now that Time City was coming to the end of its days. So he had caused a wave of chaos in the Twentieth Century and the history before it, trying to get help, and all that must have happened was that Sam’s father and Time Patrol wasted their time hunting him.

  We ought to tell them about the thief! Vivian thought uneasily. The Guardian seemed to think that the thief was going to go on and steal all the Caskets—or polarities, or whatever. And that could be right. Why steal only one, if you could time-travel the way that boy could? He was probably travelling towards the Silver Age at this very moment. But as Jonathan had pointed out, if he and Vivian and Sam told anyone about it, they would be in trouble. And no one listened to Jonathan’s hints. Almost the only thing they could do was to do what the Guardian wanted and go and warn the other Guardians themselves. They could do that if the time-egg worked properly. But they had to know where to go first. Jonathan was right. They would have to get Dr. Wilander to tell them this afternoon.

  She expected that Jonathan would want to rush off early to Dr. Wilander. So she was very surprised not to see him at all during the lunch-break. At twelve thirty-five by her belt clock, there was still no sign of him. Vivian waited a few more minutes and then tore herself away from the eager crowd who wanted to hear more about the war. Very nervously, she set out for Perpetuum on her own.

  Jonathan was in the grassy space with the statues outside Continuum. He was leaning against a vast statue of a woman without any arms, talking eagerly to one of the students. It was the young man who had offered beer money for a film of the Guardian interrupting the ceremony. Vivian remembered the short white kilt and the young man’s brawny legs beneath it. The young man had one of those brawny legs comfortably hooked over the great foot of the statue as he talked to Jonathan, and the rest of him was sprawled on the grass. From that position, he saw Vivian before Jonathan did and gave her a friendly wave.

  “Oh, is it that late already?” Jonathan said. “Leon, this is my cousin V.S. Meet Leon Hardy, V.S., he’s from One Hundred and Two Century.”

  Leon Hardy rose gracefully to his feet. “Pleased to meet you, Vee,” he said and smiled, two rows of white teeth in a brown face. Vivian was rather taken aback by him. He was so like a film star.

  “Isn’t One-hundred-and-something an Unstable Era?” she said doubtfully.

  “Just after the end of the Ninth,” Leon told her. “The last Fixed Era before the Depopulation—but that’s not for centuries after my time. My time is busy repairing the mess left by the Demise of Europe. It’s a very exciting time, full of new technology, and I came here to learn all the Science I could.”

  “We’d better go,” Jonathan said.

  “Or Wilander will throw you down all the stairs in Perpetuum,” Leon said, laughing. “I heard he threatened to do that to Enkian once. Right, young Jonathan. Payment for the eye-witness account coming up. Expect to hear from me in a couple of days or so.”

  So that’s what they were talking about! Vivian thought. She walked beside Jonathan down the arched corridor of Continuum, wondering why it was that people you could admire perfectly well as film stars were the people you didn’t quite like in real life. “What did he mean about payment?” she asked.

  “Tell you later,” said Jonathan.

  Vivian looked and saw that Jonathan was walking with his most bouncing and lordly stride. Oh no! she thought. He’s got o
ne of those ideas of his again! I hope he isn’t going to kidnap someone else now!

  10

  CEREMONIES

  They ran up most of the many stairs of Perpetuum. It seemed to be one of those days when you are late for everything. Even with the low-weight-functions of their belts to help, Vivian and Jonathan threw themselves into SELDOM END almost five minutes late. Dr. Wilander sat lighting his pipe. All he did was stare at them through the smoke, but neither of them dared move or speak until he grunted, “I see you don’t intend to waste any more time making feeble excuses, at least. Sit down. Vivian, how is your translation?”

  “The second part is peculiar,” Vivian admitted.

  “Then get on and make sense of it while I tear a few pieces off your cousin,” Dr. Wilander growled.

  Vivian did her best, while she listened to the clicking of book-cubes and Jonathan’s teeth crunching hair. It was very peaceful in the odd-shaped wooden-smelling room—too peaceful. As Vivian’s breath came back, she slowly realised that Jonathan was asking almost no questions at all. Those he did ask had nothing to do with Unstable Eras. Vivian had a nagging feeling that something was wrong. She had no idea why Jonathan had decided not to fish for information about the Four Ages, but she thought she had better try fishing herself—if she dared, that was.

  “Er—” she said.

  Dr. Wilander turned his great head to look at her. “Yes?”

  Faced with those clever little eyes looking at her through the smoke, Vivian lost her nerve. “I don’t know if this Symbol means comic or old,” she said.

  “Try antic—that means both,” Dr. Wilander grunted, and turned back to Jonathan.

  Vivian sighed and made an attempt to chew her pen-function. Her teeth clacked together on nothing. Come on! she told herself. Ask! Be cunning or you’ll never get home to Mum. But it was no good. She was too frightened of Dr. Wilander to say anything, until Dr. Wilander swung his bulk round in her direction.