A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  Jonathan’s eye-function had darkened in the glare. He turned his face rather blindly from side to side. “What’s happened? It was flat when I came here this morning.”

  “Someone’s dug a lot of holes,” Sam told him.

  A voice spoke. It rapped out words in a foreign language from overhead.

  “Down!” said Elio, and threw himself flat on the white ground.

  They all threw themselves down beside him. The whiteness was icy cold. The place where Vivian fell turned out to be on a slope, so that she rolled as she went down, and then slid. She ended flat on her back some way from the others, staring into the cloudless sky. The sky almost above her was filled by a half-transparent thing like a raft, which was floating in the air about fifty feet up. Leon Hardy told us wrong! she thought. He meant us to get killed! She did not dare move. The raft was bluish and she could see the bottoms of people’s feet through it. The faces of the people were peering down through paler bubbles at the edges of the raft. They were blank, squashed faces, covered in something yellowish, which must have been mind-suits rather like her own.

  The voice rapped out again and the raft fired on them. Whatever it was came down in whitish ripples. Vivian screamed. For just an instant, before her suit cancelled the weapon out, something seemed to be tearing the inside of her head away. Then she just lay and watched the white ripples and hoped that the others’ suits were working properly too.

  The firing stopped, but not because the people in the raft had finished. Another raft, a slightly greenish one, was coming in from higher up to attack the first one, moving very fast with a small whistle of wind. The first raft rose another fifty feet and sheered away sideways. As soon as it moved, Vivian saw a third raft, different again, with a mauve tinge, plummetting out of the high sky at the first two. Both the lower rafts shot away sideways, and then shot back again to attack the mauve one. They circled the sky, all three, up and down and around one another, fighting furiously without any sound except the thin whistling of the wind. Vivian had never imagined this kind of warfare. Since it was not aimed at her, her suit did not block very much of it out. Ripples sped sideways across her, bringing calm voices of madness, giggles of rage, hymns of nastiness, screams of exhaustion, tinkles of death, whistles of despair, and loud songs of horror. And none of it made a sound. Vivian had to lie on the cold ground and bear it, in all its back-to-front wrongness.

  Then, in the part of the sky that she could see between her own silvery feet, Vivian noticed a cloud of blue-grey smoke. It drifted nearer, fast and high, streaming this way and that and groping about as if it were looking for something, until it located the three fighting rafts. Then it came snaking in, grabbing for them like some enormous greyish glove. All three rafts tried frantically to get out of its way. One hurtled straight up into the air and a man fell off it. Vivian heard him give a real scream as he crashed to the ground. The second raft went low and hurtled past a few feet above Vivian, wobbling and weaving and spraying out ripples as if something was wrong with it. The last raft put on speed and raced away in the opposite direction. The cloud dived round and went after it. Two seconds later, the blue sky and the glittering white desert were completely empty.

  Sam rolled over on the slope above Vivian. “How many sides are there in this war?” he said.

  “Time alone knows!” said Jonathan, crawling to his hands and knees. “That was nasty!” He stood up, shivering.

  Vivian got up, with her teeth chattering, and helped Sam to his feet. Elio was the last to stand up. He raised himself slowly and painfully and, to their horror, most of the suit under his right arm had gone blue and melted-looking.

  “It is nothing,” he said. “Just something from that low-flying raft. I am all right. I was made to withstand adversity. Let us find that Casket before any more warriors appear.” He tore open his suit on the side opposite to the melted blueness and fetched out a small gleaming gadget. The suit sealed itself up behind it.

  Sam forgot his fright. “Hey!” he said. “That’s a Hundred and Ten Century metal detector! My dad’s got one. He says you can’t get one for love nor money these days. How did you get hold of it? Can I work it?”

  Sam got his way because Elio was limping and swaying and Jonathan was stumbling about with his hands out like a sleepwalker. With his eye-function dark in the glare and the veil of the suit in front of it, he could barely see at all. He switched it off disgustedly in the end.

  Sam confidently turned the metal detector to detect silver and went stumping off in widening circles. “My dad says there’s nothing to beat these,” he called out. “You can find needles in haystacks. Keep close. It’s showing something already!”

  They tried to keep up with Sam as he tramped off in the direction the cloud had come from, but it was hard going. The salty sand was a mass of holes and frozen hummocks, ditches, and mounds. One moment they would be sliding down a glittering slope, and the next, they would be having to jump a deep blue trench. Vivian had to help Jonathan most of the time. She tried to help Elio too, but he waved her away.

  “I am fine,” he panted. “My efficiency is in no way impaired.”

  Vivian did not believe him. Elio’s face, mistily showing through the suit, seemed to be twisted with pain. What will Sempitern Walker do if Elio’s badly hurt? she was wondering, when Sam pointed the detector at the side of a tall white mound ahead and it gave out a strong, clear cheeping sound.

  “Got it!” Sam bawled. “It’s here! Did you bring something to dig with, Elio?”

  “You won’t need to do any digging,” said a soft voice from the top of the mound.

  Their heads all jerked up to look at the silvery person standing there. It was a woman, as far as they could see. She was not easy to see, because she seemed to be made of masses and masses of trailing silvery whitenesses. All in silver, Vivian thought, which befits an Age where men create and kill in marvellous ways. She’s made of layers of mind suit! Under the silvery layers, Vivian could just pick out what seemed to be a lovely face.

  “Are you the Guardian of the Silver Casket?” Sam asked.

  “That is right,” said the woman. Her voice had a lilt to it, or a trace of a foreign accent. Vivian could just see very red lips move, smilingly, as the Guardian said, “And why do you come seeking me and my Casket two days before the proper time?”

  “A thief is trying to steal it, madam,” Elio said. His voice sounded forced and scratchy. Vivian was sure he was in a lot of pain. “This will bring about the destruction of Time City and possibly also render all history violently unstable. We therefore think you should take the Casket to the safety of Time City at once, where it will enable us to discover the mechanism of all the other Caskets, particularly the Lead.”

  Jonathan was shading his eyes with both hands in an effort to see the Guardian. “We need it urgently,” he said. “You see, we think the Caskets attract one another, and if they do, the Silver will help us to find the Lead before it’s too late to do any good.”

  “You do not have the Lead Casket?” said the Guardian. She sounded quite surprised.

  “Not yet, madam, but we know it is in Time City,” Elio said.

  “The Lead Casket is in Time City,” the Guardian declared. Her voice rang out, strong and comforting. “It can be found by using the Silver to attract it. Very well. As you need the Silver so badly, I will break the injunctions that were laid on me and give you the Casket now.” And to their great relief and surprise, her hand came forward among the floating draperies around her, a long silvery hand, holding a large shiny egg-shaped thing. As Elio hobbled awkwardly up the mound and took the Casket, Vivian saw that it was wonderfully ornamented, in lacy shapes. She was rather ashamed that it reminded her so much of an Easter egg.

  But she forgot that the next moment. A white flash of movement caught the corner of her eye. She looked round just in time to see a small silvery figure slide along the blue shadow of a nearby ditch and scramble among the hummocks beyond. “The thief!” she
yelled and dashed off after him.

  As she raced along the ditch and leaped among the hummocks, someone screamed “Vivian!” after her. She took no notice. She had the silver figure in sight now, with the sun glinting off it. The boy was running for his life across the uneven ground and she knew she could run faster than he could. She had nearly caught him last time. He had somehow got himself a mind-suit, but he was not carrying the Iron Casket and Vivian was sure that this meant he would not be able to escape by time-travelling this time. It’s the Caskets that time-travel! she thought, in a surge of understanding. Her frozen feet warmed up and the cold air hurt in her chest. She shut her mouth and pelted joyfully across the jumbled, pitted ground. The thief glanced round, saw she was gaining and swerved away desperately.

  Then the ground gave way under Vivian. Something the same colour as the white sand tore under her running feet, and then came apart all round her with a soggy ripping noise. She was pitching down into a deep hole. Much to her own surprise, her finger went to the low-weight stud on the belt under the mind-suit and pressed it in time to save her from breaking a bone. She went light as she hit the grey rocks at the bottom of the hole, and bounced, and came down again, where she lay staring up at a torn shape of blue sky high above.

  “Oh bother and damn!” she said. The thief had tricked her and got away again.

  “Are you badly hurt?” someone asked. It was a man’s voice, but it was high and quavering and nervous.

  Vivian lay quite still and turned her eyes carefully sideways. There was a mind-warrior in a silver suit like her own huddled at the other side of the hole. She remembered the man who had fallen screaming out of the raft. I shall pretend to be dead, she decided. Perhaps he’ll climb out and go away.

  “I ask because I had some skill in healing once,” the warrior said, in his nervous, fluting voice. When Vivian did not answer, he sighed loudly. “You may not believe this, but I am quite peaceful,” he said. “I was a lover of all arts before these terrible wars began. I painted pictures and made music. I even wrote an epic once.”

  Vivian went on lying still and tried to let her eyes fall gently shut. I’m dead, she thought. My last word was damn!

  The warrior sighed again. “Perhaps it will convince you that I am harmless,” he said, “if I were to recite you my poem. It is in twelve parts in the ancient manner and its title is ‘The Silver Sea.’ The opening line is ‘Mind and the men I sing’—this because it celebrates the great civilizations that once flourished around the shores of this sea. Do you follow me? Shall I recite?”

  No! Just go away! Vivian thought.

  Rasping footsteps sounded overhead. Elio’s veiled face looked down at her through the torn slit overhead. “Miss Vivian?” he said. His voice sounded thick and wobbly.

  Vivian sat up with a jerk. And far from trying to kill her, the warrior cringed away against the wall of the hole. “Oh Elio!” Vivian called. “You’ve hurt yourself trying to run after me!”

  “Are you all right?” Elio called down.

  “Yes,” she called back. “There’s a mind soldier down here, but I think his brain’s been hurt in the fight.”

  This was the wrong thing to say. Elio instantly came floating down on his low-weight-function. Even that hurt him. He gasped as he landed and turned to the warrior crouching by the wall. “If you have harmed this young lady, you shall pay,” he croaked.

  The warrior shook his head and held up both shiny hands. “Not I,” he said. “I am an artist and a man of peace. My mind is indeed hurt, but not in any fight.”

  Elio simply grunted at this and sank down to sit beside Vivian, panting. This seemed to interest the mind-warrior. To Vivian’s alarm, he left the side of the hole and came crawling cautiously towards Elio. She was very relieved when Sam’s voice boomed out overhead. “They’re in here.” The warrior at once darted back to cringe against the wall again. “Hold on to me,” Sam boomed. “Then press the stud and jump.”

  The slit above went dark. Vivian realised what was happening and scrambled up in time to give Jonathan and Sam a shove as they both came heavily down on Jonathan’s overweighted low-weight- function. That way they missed Elio and landed in the other side of the pit from the mind-warrior.

  “Ow!” said Jonathan. “What’s this now?”

  “It’s a shelter,” Sam told him, “with a warrior in it.”

  Jonathan made an exasperated noise and pressed his eye-function stud. He tried to peer round the pit in spite of its flicker being criss-crossed by an opposite flicker from the mind-suit. “I think Elio’s much worse than he says,” he whispered to Vivian. “Is that warrior fellow safe?”

  “He’s potty,” Vivian whispered back. “He’s the one that fell out of that raft and I think they got him with their ripples.”

  “No. I am not that one,” said the warrior. He was kneeling half-way across the pit, with his hands spread out in a helpless sort of way. Now he was under the light from the split covering and she could see him clearly, Vivian thought she had never in her life seen a face that was so much like a skull. It was the warrior’s real face too. He did not have a veil to his suit. “That man fell some metres away from here,” he said, “and I fear he is dead.” His skull of a face turned to Elio. “Forgive me, friend, but you seem badly hurt too. Will you allow me to help you? I was once quite good at healing.”

  Elio drew himself up proudly against the wall. “Thank you—no,” he said. “It is the merest scratch. I shall just catch my breath and then we shall leave. We have an important errand elsewhere.”

  The Warrior bowed his head politely. “Of course. Forgive me—how big is the scratch?”

  “No more than a foot long, and probably only six inches wide,” Elio said dismissively. “I cannot think why I allow it to inconvenience me.”

  Long before he had finished saying this, Sam, Jonathan and Vivian were shouting, “Oh Elio! That’s serious!”

  “It is?” Elio asked, looking questioningly from them to the warrior.

  “Most people would consider that a serious wound,” the warrior agreed.

  “I did not know!” Elio said. “I have never had my flesh injured before. Perhaps then I have been after all functioning quite well in adversity. Can you repair me, sir?”

  “I can try,” said the warrior. He crawled forward and stretched a bony silver-covered hand towards the crumpled blue part of Elio’s suit. Long before his hand came anywhere near, Elio made a noise that was almost a scream and threw himself away sideways. The warrior crawled after him, reaching out again. As far as Vivian could tell, he never did actually touch Elio. Elio went on making the noise and she and Jonathan and Sam all rushed to stop the warrior.

  “Stop it! You’re hurting him!” Vivian cried.

  “He’s killing him!” Jonathan said.

  “He’s an enemy! Stop him!” Sam shouted.

  Then they all fell quiet and stood still when Elio stood up with the silver egg under one arm. He ran his hand rather wonderingly down his crumpled blue side. He did not look well. His face was shiny with sweat. “That must have been pain,” he said. “Thank you, sir. You have given me another experience I have never had before. And the scratch appears to be mended.”

  “I am afraid I am not able to mend your suit,” the warrior said apologetically. He had gone back to his side of the pit, but he was standing up too. They looked at him nervously. He was very tall and almost as thin as a skeleton. “What are you?” he asked Elio. “You are not easy to mend either.”

  “I am an android,” Elio said. He said it as proudly as Jonathan said he was a Lee. “Are you one also? You do not strike me as normal for a human.”

  “I am not sure,” said the warrior. “I think, like you, I was specially made.” His skull face turned up towards the torn cover of the pit. He sighed. “It is over,” he said. “The woman has gone and I should go back to my task, the one. I was made for. I was designed to be Keeper of Faber John’s Silver Casket, if that means anything to you. But I think I
have been a poor Keeper.”

  “You can’t be!” Jonathan exclaimed.

  “He is potty!” Sam whispered loudly to Vivian.

  “I fear,” Elio said politely, “that you are under a misapprehension, sir. The Guardian of the Casket is female and she gave the Casket to me just now. This is it.” He took the silver egg from under his arm and showed it to the warrior.

  The warrior smiled, a sad grin that made him look more like a skull than ever. He shook his silver head. “That is not the Casket,” he said. “It is not even silver.” He came forward and stretched a long, bone-like finger towards the egg. He did not touch it. But one end of it melted and dripped like wax between Elio’s fingers. “See?” he said. “Primitive plastic.”

  Elio peeled silver stuff off his hand and looked at it dubiously. “Are you sure?”

  “Open the thing,” said the warrior.

  Elio took hold of the egg in both hands and pulled it into two halves. He held the halves dumbly out to the rest of them. “What does it say?” Jonathan asked, peering at them.

  “On one half,” Elio said disgustedly, “there is the legend A Present from Easter Island. On the other there is written Made in Korea 2339, which I take to be the place and date of its origin. We must go back to that female and show her we are aware she has tricked us.”

  “She has gone,” the warrior said desolately.

  “We will see about that,” Elio said. “I do not like to be tricked. And, if you are in truth the Keeper of the Silver, sir, then this female must be a born-human. Would you say she was?”

  “I think so,” said the warrior. “But she wore many mind veils to make me the more helpless against her and it was hard to tell.”

  “That’s the one!” said Jonathan. “Of course they were layers of mind-suit now I think!”