by Tony Abbott
“It can’t make any sense,” he said for the hundredth time since they’d left Crete.
She turned her face to him. “It won’t. It never will.” She crossed the sidewalk to the wall. It was shabby, pocked by time, neglected. The dust of crumbling concrete and stone collected in the crevice where it met the sidewalk.
“As much as this is part of the story, I’ve never actually been here before,” Roald said. “I was in jail in Berlin. It all seems like decades ago. There has to be a door. . . .”
They felt along the ivy and pulled it away where it was too thick to see beneath, until they uncovered a round-topped plank door with an old iron latch.
He jiggled it free. Using his shoulder, he pushed the door inward and slipped through. The courtyard inside was paved, or it had been once. There were wide cracks running between the uneven cobbles, weeds growing up from below, some a foot or more high.
“The Sala d’Arme was in that building?” Sara said, half questioning, half astonished at the wreck of it.
Roald nodded. “The fencing school started by the swordsman Achille Marozzo in the sixteenth century. Where the kids met Carlo Nuovenuto, except . . .”
“Except that Hans Novak lived and died in the sixteenth century. He was Copernicus’s assistant, not a time traveler, and there was no Carlo, and the children never met him. Is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. I guess. I don’t even know.”
Sara tried to assemble the facts in her mind. But facts, she had learned, became twisted when the thread of time coiled through them.
The sheer impossibility of it all—the wall of water suddenly collapsing into nothing, the battle evaporating, the island silencing, and she and Roald watching—dumbstruck—as the sun rose peacefully on that Mediterranean isle as it must have done every morning since the days of King Minos. She had been forced to accept the idea that what was true, and what couldn’t possibly be, were ideas that depended on which life you lived—on which lives you lived.
Yet such truths collided in her mind like shooting stars, crisscrossing one another in a staggeringly beautiful, but finally incoherent, display.
So as she’d done time and again, Sara imagined the scene on Crete in September 1514, after her foolish children had commandeered the time machine and gone back to its origin. And how the device must have lain in a smoldering heap, destroyed before it ever made its first journey.
What had been done there?
What, finally, had happened to the children?
What’s happening?
While flames from the astrolabe and its relics leaped and danced against the labyrinth’s wall paintings, Becca felt a sudden strange surge of joy.
There isn’t any way to get back to the present. We’re trapped in fifteen fourteen forever, except . . . except . . . except . . .
Except that a handful of words bobbed to the surface of Becca’s mind, sank away, and bobbed up again, like debris in a slow-moving river. A heavy green beast of a river. Without thinking, she approached the fire and kicked at it. A partly singed golden arrow tumbled smoking from the flames.
“Becca?” said Lily. “What in the world?”
In the blistering inferno of the astrolabe’s destruction, words came and went until she spoke them out loud.
“I will come back for you.”
The others turned to her.
“It’s what Helmut Bern told me before he died,” she said. “He breathed his last breath. It sounded like ‘kkkk.’ It was horrible. But I know now it wasn’t his last breath. He was trying to tell me something. He was trying to say ‘Kronos.’”
Wade frowned. “Kronos? Kronos One? The machine he crashed in fifteen seventeen? He found it again in fifteen thirty-five after you told him where it had crashed. It’s how he came back to the future. We know that. It must be in Paris. In the future. Where we used to be.”
“No, it’s not there. At least, I don’t think so. I don’t think it’s gotten there yet,” she said. “Don’t you see how it works? But maybe not. Maybe no one does. Because it doesn’t work until this moment right now.”
Darrell groaned to himself. “I know this will get me in trouble, but, Becca, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Bern said he would come for us. He meant in Kronos!”
“But Wade’s right,” said Darrell. “Bern crashed Kronos in fifteen seventeen, which is still three years from now. Even if we go to find it first, we’ll be so ancient!”
“Three years . . . but no . . . ,” said Lily. “Oh my gosh, Becca, you’re brillianter than all of us put together. Hold on!”
She slipped the camera from her pocket. “It’s on its last seven percent of battery, but . . . the video I took of our journey . . .” She reversed the video, then stopped it. “Yes! Look! We had a near collision with a ball of light, remember that? Well, there shouldn’t be anything else in the timehole. Not after Kronos Three was marooned at Königsberg. But our near collision wasn’t in fifteen seventeen. Look, you can see the dial on the console, and it reads just a few minutes from now.”
“That’s what I mean!” said Becca. “It’s Helmut in Kronos One. He’s coming for us!”
“Are you saying there’s another time machine?” Hans said.
“Not a great one,” said Becca, “and only your relics can keep the passengers from radiation poisoning, but he has Sagitta . . . or he will.”
She looked at Nicolaus. He seemed to be working on it, too. “Yes, yes. Your friend Bern could have followed your timehole back here—”
All at once, the air roared with hot wind, spinning in a miniature tornado around them. And Kronos materialized, Helmut Bern at the controls.
“You came for us, Helmut,” said Becca.
He smiled, dressed in the splendid robe Michelangelo had just given him. “He gave me this before I left fifteen thirty-five. Remember, you helped me to the rowboat, Becca Moore. You brought me here today. I told Michelangelo that, and he said he would put it into his new fresco. It was then I realized I could help you home. You, Magister, you were very kind to me once, too. You helped me—or you will in three years—to the house of Sir Thomas More in London.”
Nicolaus looked confused. “If you say it is so, I am happy. But now, to complete the circle, I think I must give you this.” He retrieved the arrow-shaped relic from the edge of the fire. “As you know far better than me, Sagitta will help you home to your present.”
Saying good-bye to Nicolaus Copernicus and Hans Novak was next to impossible. It was heart wrenching, but, like every meeting and good-bye the children had experienced lately, it was ultimately brief.
Finally the time came, and the children climbed into Helmut Bern’s machine. He inserted Sagitta in the niche he had made for it, and he powered up the engine. Sagitta’s travels from the past to the future and back again, then back again, boggled Becca’s mind. The interconnections of time and space were absolutely bewildering, she thought.
But they were saving their lives.
“In order for things to work out right,” Helmut said, “we need to make several stops.”
“And one more,” said Wade. “Königsberg in two years.”
“Ah, yes. There, too. Strap in, all.”
As Helmut twisted a cumbersome sequence of levers and switches, the machine sputtered, then roared. The mechanism that powered Kronos was crude, but it was obvious from the way he worked the controls how much Helmut had tinkered with and improved them. With the added element of Sagitta among the devices powering the machine, they departed the shades of Copernicus and Hans and left Crete, roaring into the shrinking hole, slowing a few moments later in the courtyard of the Teutonic castle at Königsberg.
The four children rushed upstairs, in time to see Cassiopiea—Galina—tremble in the arms of Albrecht, with their daughter on her breast. Her features suddenly eased, and a sudden great shower of tears told them that she had that very moment passed away.
The sheet was pulled over her face,
and her husband and daughter sobbed uncontrollably.
Galina, the young wife of Albrecht von Hohenzollern, had died in 1516.
Becca cried, too. “It’s too sad.”
“At least we were here to see it,” Wade added.
Departing the castle, they found Helmut by the humming machine. He was staring into the shadows of the courtyard.
“Someone’s there,” he said. “Unlike the others of this time, he sees us.”
A figure emerged from the shadows. It was Ebner von Braun.
“Please,” he said, “please take me with you. The past is a horrible place. The death. The odor! And I saw Galina vanish—simply vanish. It must have been when her younger self died! I am bereft with sorrow!”
Helmut was angry and swallowed hard. “I would very much prefer not to take the sad little man with us. He did murder me, remember? Let him stay here and rot.”
Becca wanted to turn away from the evil gnome, too, but her heart ached from the scene she’d just witnessed. “Helmut, you showed us compassion. Let’s do the same.”
“You’ll have to face justice, von Braun,” Wade said.
Ebner nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. Although, heh-heh, you may have a bit of a problem proving anything ever happened! Bern is quite alive. The world may not be destroyed. Perhaps I am just a sad little man, after all. And nothing more?”
Leaving that argument for later, they launched Kronos into the future again, this time to retrieve Fernando Salta in Madrid in 1975.
Ebner adjusted his glasses. “The other man I killed in Paris? Awkward.”
Becca understood now that she and her friends were the shadows lurking at various points in history as they traveled forward with Bern. They had been at the Place des Vosges, again in Madrid, and everywhere Bern took them on their ride back to the present.
“I get it now,” Darrell said as he gripped the sides of his seat. “We were in all those places but we only know about it now. It’s like we go only one direction in time, forward. But time can go both backward and forward. If we decide tomorrow to visit yesterday, we won’t know about it yesterday or even today, but only tomorrow, because that visit to yesterday only happens the day after today.”
Lily laughed. “Darrell, you nailed it.”
After a slow walk threading the streets and alleys of Bologna, Wade and the others slid through a round-topped door in a wall and entered the courtyard of the Sala d’Arme.
His father and Sara stood gazing bewilderingly at every stone and black window of the former fencing school. It was no longer a living place. Abandoned—for how many years?—it was a shell of memory, perhaps nothing more.
“Mom,” he said.
She turned. “There you are. Becca, how are you feeling?”
“Fine,” she said, patting her unwounded arm. “My parents and Maggie are out taking a tour of the city, but I wanted to be with you.”
Becca had died and come back to life, if that was even the right way to say it. And Wade had been close to her ever since they arrived back in the present with Helmut Bern. He walked with her now not because he had to. She was fine. It was because, wherever she went, he wanted to be there. She hooked her arm through his.
“It’ll be so amazing to be together again, all of us,” she said.
Roald smiled. “And you, Lily?”
“My mom and dad are resting at the hotel. They’ll join us for dinner later,” she said. “They’re good. I’m good. We’re all good.”
Wade smiled. “I love that hotel. Darrell, have you noticed that the ceiling over our beds doesn’t have a single skull-shaped stain on it? Pretty remarkable, I’d say.”
Darrell laughed for a second, then stopped. “Wait . . . what?”
For the next minute, Lily gave Darrell a look that burned like lasers.
“Anyway . . . ,” she said finally, “I think I’ve pretty much convinced my family that when we get back to the States, we’re not moving, but staying in Austin. They argued with me, but I told them the relic hunt is over—or never happened or whatever—and I need to be with the most important people in my life. Bottom line, I told them, ‘I need my friends or it won’t work.’ No way am I moving away from you guys. No way.”
“Sounds perfect,” Darrell said.
“I think we can say that your journey here in Kronos closed up the timehole that opened when you flew back to fifteen fourteen,” Roald said as they left the courtyard. “Helmut’s tinkering with the machine might just have made that possible. There shouldn’t be any more horrors, not that kind anyway. But there are loose ends.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Wade. “Five hundred years, how could there not be? It was one crazy journey. Or a bunch of them. Galina may not be here, but Ebner von Braun is out there. Helmut Bern, too. He promised to destroy Kronos, but we didn’t actually see him do it. He certainly knows what the Legacy was all about. And we do. We’ll never forget.”
There was room for doubt. There always would be. But if there was one thing Wade had learned, it was that nothing was a coincidence. And nothing was impossible.
Nothing.
Some of the horrors Copernicus believed he was responsible for still existed. The famine in the Ukraine, the war in early China. How? Maybe those things existed for other reasons and because of other movements in time, and his time machine hadn’t caused them, after all. Or not alone anyway.
Wade didn’t know. Logic didn’t work on this problem, and the more he tried to make it work, the more his brain sputtered. It was a flawed cosmos, after all, so maybe making sense of it was a waste of, well, time.
At the opening in the wall, Wade turned and looked once more at the derelict fencing school. “The past seven months of our lives have been . . . what exactly have they been? A dream?”
“Nope.” Darrell pushed into the street, brighter now that the sun was higher in the sky. “Lily and I have been pondering this. Everything happened, then unhappened.”
“Right,” she said. “We lived it all, then it all unlived itself.”
“Right, but we didn’t.”
“So it’s like we’re us,” Lily said, “but we’re—”
“—also other people, too,” Darrell said. “It’s what you science people call an enigma, a paradox, possibly a conundrum.”
Wade snickered, but maybe Darrell and Lily had gotten as close to it as anyone. They were different now. How could they not be, after what they’d all experienced?
“We changed,” said Becca. “And if I can be corny, I think it’s because of love. I mean, we saw it everywhere. Copernicus and his brother. Hans Holbein and Joan Aleyn. Galina and Albrecht. It was—is—everywhere, holding the whole business together. Time, the universe, everything. Nicolaus said so, too, in his own way.”
“And a kind of compassion, too, right?” said Wade. “Helmut Bern told us that. It started with you, Becca. If it wasn’t for you being nice to him, he might not have come back for us. The big quest for the relics might be over, but not the journey. This journey.”
He waved his hand between Lily and Darrell, then between himself and Becca, and quickly dropped it. “You know. Life.”
Darrell fake gagged, but Lily gave him a look and he stopped. Then he suddenly scooped her off the ground and swung her around twice, and set her down again, all for no reason. Or maybe for every reason.
“Lily, I’m so glad you’re not moving!” he said.
“Oh, I’ll move. But only if you guys do. Wherever you go, I’m right there with you!”
If, like Wade suspected, there was no more possibility of time travel and they’d take no voyages more dangerous than life itself . . . he knew that they’d remember, and remember always, and never stop talking about, the quest for the Copernicus Legacy.
As Sara and his father wound through the labyrinthine streets to their hotel, Wade strolled with his friends as slowly as they possibly could and still keep moving.
Breathing in, he sensed it would be a hot day, clear and long and happy and fu
ll of the scent of espresso and diesel and the aroma of autumn flowers.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Endings are bittersweet. In this case, mostly sweet. Readers of the four volumes of the Copernicus Legacy, of which this is the last, and of the two installments of its associated series, the Copernicus Archives, will find in Crown of Fire the completion of an epic journey that began for me five years ago, and I—and I hope those readers—have come to know its participants like a close and loving family. When Wade, Becca, Darrell, and Lily walked into my life, they stayed, and are here still, walking, talking, joking, running in my heart constantly, enlivening my days, making life larger and more exciting than it might appear from the outside, but I think this is the pleasant fate of all writers.
Readers ask, “Where do your characters come from?” My answer is from the world, certainly, but mainly from the mind and heart and emotional history of the writer. This is true even of the evil characters. So it’s no surprise that I love that trio of very bad folks—Markus Wolff, Ebner von Braun, and, of course, the classy young villainess, Galina Krause, she of the odd and sorrowful past. I am close to them all, and I know some readers are, too, despite the, um, negative things that they do. Nobody’s perfect.
I also have to mention Rosemary Billingham, Simon Tingle, Isabella Mercanti, Archie Doyle, Helmut Bern, and the dozens of supporting personnel who added such quirky color to my interior life through the last five years. Oh, and Nicolaus Copernicus, himself. He and his world (a big one, including Leonardo da Vinci, Lucrezia Borgia, Thomas and Margaret More, Magellan, Barbarossa, Joan Aleyn, Hans Holbein, and a vast array of others) blossomed with life in my mind, too. I do love history, and I’m happy to have sketched some of these remarkable characters on the page.
Maybe I’m most proud of taking readers on a long global journey to different countries and continents, into varied cultures, and through several religions, in the same way that I learned about those things when I was young—by reading about them. Creating an international landscape in these six volumes was a feature impossible to attain, I think, with a shorter sequence of books, and for that I will always thank my gracious editor and the fabulous people at Katherine Tegen Books.