A Girl in Time

by John Birmingham

  He could only hope he'd done the right thing in giving Cady that watch. He didn't know if these pagan savages had even heard the Good Word. It was more'n possible, he supposed, that baby Jesus had not yet turned up in that manger. But a man had to have faith, and so Titanic Smith sent the only prayers he had to the only God that mattered.

  “Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …”

  At the far end of the stadium, he found himself confronting that shadow.

  Batiatus sat on a small throne surrounded by licksplittles and toadies, all of them dressed like him in their bedsheets. The slave master was saying something important. You could tell from the air of grand significance that surrounded him as he stood forth and orated. Smith was actually glad of not having the watch. He didn't much need to hear any more hot air from this pompous goose.

  As Batiatus performed, another man appeared next to Smith. He turned his head and thought for the merest second that he recognized one of the gladiators who had helped him from the tunnel.

  “Hello, John Smith.”

  “Goddamn!”

  Smith jumped away like a jack rabbit on a hot griddle.

  “Chumley!”

  It must've looked right comical to anybody watching on, and sure enough, the toady circle around Batiatus did start braying with laughter.

  Chumley smiled, an empty sort of expression.

  “My name is Apprentice.”

  Hot blood and jumping beans roiled up inside Smith. The last time he'd laid eyes on this verminous character, two innocents had died. His aches and pains and deep melancholy of the soul suddenly seemed less hurtful. Smith bunched up his fists and made ready for the man who had murdered poor Gracie and Bertie.

  There could be no doubt he had done so.

  The Chumley they'd met in London was gone, his nervousness and incertitude replaced by cold calculation in the face of the stone killer standing in front of Smith.

  “So, you're one-a-them,” said Smith, his voice low and accusing. “An apprentice. I figured as much.”

  “And you are an elusive,” said Chumley, calmer. Almost reserved.

  He looked so different from the last time Smith had seen him a day ago, and some thousands of years from now. Maybe twenty pounds heavier. His skin burnished bronze by the sun hereabouts. And scarred. The man was a relief map of scar tissue.

  “We have been searching for you, John Smith. And I have been waiting for you,” Chumley said. “You understand that this must end now. You cannot go on.”

  His voice had changed too. He'd sounded like all of the other Londoners before. Now he sounded like no one. It was a voice without accent or shade of dialect.

  In the stands above them, Batiatus finished with a flourish and sat down, waving one pudgy hand in their direction. Chumley turned towards the slave master and performed some type of salute, before striding away, putting a good ten yards or so between himself and Smith.

  “You can go to hell,” Smith shouted up at Batiatus and his hangers on. He offered no salute, and refused to move, drawing scandalized gasps and glares from the small audience.

  Chumley watched him closely, both wary and curious.

  “They think you a stranger, John Smith, and they are right. You do not belong here.”

  “You seem plenty settled in, Chumley.”

  “To these people I am il Scissore. I arrived here some time ago. I will depart when my work is done, and I will soon be forgotten, as will you.”

  A guard jogged up carrying two swords. When he threw them to the ground, Smith saw that one of the swords was his Bowie knife. The other was a wicked sharp-looking length of steel, maybe half a foot longer.

  He felt the old ice water trickling into his guts. He felt the pain that was on him already, and the pain that might be coming down the trail real soon.

  This weren't no practice.

  These ghouls intended for them to die under the high sun, purely for their amusement. And Chumley aimed to kill him for some reason known best to himself.

  A drum began to beat and a trumpet sounded. It weren't no bugle call that Smith knew from his cavalry days, but the effect was the same. Across the stadium grounds men stopped and answered to the call. Those closest walked over, but briskly. The gladiators and guards farther away came at a trot. In less than a minute a crowd of more than a hundred had gathered in a loose circle around them.

  The guards formed an inner ring, their spears and shields separating Smith and Chumley or il Scissore—from the onlookers.

  He looked at the man he was supposed to fight.

  Strangely, there was no more animosity in Chumley's demeanor than a surgeon might feel toward a tumor. About as much mercy, too.

  “You ain't some savage, Chumley,” Smith said over the clamor of the gathering mob. “Don't see as why we have to cut into each other for the merriment of that infernal cur.”

  He jerked a thumb in the direction of Lentulus Batiatus.

  Chumley did not bother to follow the gesture.

  “Batiatus is a minor escapement,” he said. “If it were not through him, we would make the adjustment somewhere else.”

  “Adjustment?” Smith called out. The noise of the crowd forced him to raise his voice.

  “You caused this complication to arise, John Smith, this and twenty-eight more. You cannot be allowed to create further disorder.”

  Chumley stepped forward and picked up his sword.

  He stood back and nodded at Smith's Bowie knife.

  “You are expected to defend yourself,” he explained.

  “And if'n I don't.”

  “I cannot strike you down on my own initiative. But have no doubt Lentulus Batiatus will order your death if you refuse the contest.”

  Smith spat in disgust.

  “This ain't a contest, you idiot. It's an abomination, and the devil has a fire pit set aside for the likes of Batiatus.”

  “No,” said Chumley. He did not shout but he somehow projected his voice over the growing uproar. “In three days, Lentulus Batiatus will die at the hands of his own slaves and chattels, but that is all that will happen to him.”

  Smith staggered forward, kicked from behind by somebody, occasioning a great eruption of laughter among the crowd.

  He turned to confront whoever had done it, but found two guardsmen with spears leveled at him.

  They seemed to think he should pick up his knife.

  32

  The waffle plan was not working out.

  “Jesus, Cady, I can't make waffles here,” Georgia said, “and you promised them waffles. You promised the original redneckulous murder-chubby a feast of sugary hi-carb goodness. What the forgetful fuck were you thinking?”

  “Oh, I don't know,” snarked Cady, “that maybe you'd prefer to spend this evening doing something other than blowing a duet on his nasty little meat whistle?”

  They bitched and argued with each other in a relatively quiet corner of the kitchens, which were huge, much larger than either of them were expecting. But that made sense. The women here, and it was mostly women, weren't just cooking for Batiatus. They had a couple of hundred gladiators and guardsmen and even more slaves to feed. This place probably ran 24/7, and it did everything with log fires and artisanal hand-drawn hipster water.

  “Shut up! The two of you just shut up and cook, now!”

  Their supervisor—some sort of Old Testament sous chef—had a cane just like Judge Judy's. It was almost as though she was hoping to grow up into a vicious old hag herself, one day. She whipped at them both with the thin wooden rod. It stung like a bitch.

  “Ow!” Cady cried out.

  Georgia just swore and dodged away from the next blow, infuriating the woman who lashed Cady even harder on the backswing.

  “Fuck!”

  Cady tried to avoid the blows like Georgia but only flinched and stumbled into a stack of cooking pots which went crashing to the flagstone floor, further enraging their latest tormentor.

  Before sh
uffling off to whip and thrash random kitchen hands, old Jude had given Cady and Georgia over to this would-be troll. The problems started when they couldn't keep up the pretend-lesbian hand-holding routine to give Georgia access to the universal translator. Cady, whose mad kitchen skills began and ended with pop tarts and microwaved cookie dough, was not well suited to mediating the increasingly fraught exchanges between the Georgia and their latest tormentor.

  “Do you two even know how to cook?” the woman snarled. “I should send you to the barracks right now. You can spread your legs there. It will not matter to them that you are so useless. To them you are just a cooze anyway.”

  She looked ready to lash Cady with her cane again, raising it on high for a scarifying blow, when her expression changed and she tumbled over backwards, crying out in alarm.

  The younger woman who had shadowed Judge Judy down in the prison cells, stood behind her, smiling enigmatically.

  “Drusilla, you must be more careful in the kitchens. The floor is slippery and dangerous. Look how you have fallen.”

  Drusilla fixed their savior with a glare, but said nothing. Cady could tell there were layers of meaning to the exchange that were completely beyond the power of the watch to translate.

  “I will supervise them. You can attend to the skinning of the eels.”

  It seemed as though Drusilla might object, but another of those unreadable, unspoken exchanges changed her mind, and she butt-scuttled away, only getting to her feet when she was well beyond reach.

  “I am Calista, prophetess of Antioch,” the woman said, turning to Cady and Georgia as though Drusilla did not exist and had not just been humiliated.

  “Thanks,” Cady said, a little warily. “I'm Cady, programmer of iOS. This is my friend, Georgia, maven of Bungie. We shouldn't be here.”

  Calista smiled. “Nobody should be here.”

  “Cady, what's going on now?” Georgia asked. “What's Wonder Woman after?”

  “Dunno. Gimme a second and I'll find out.”

  The businesses of the kitchens went on around them, uninterrupted by the small drama in the furthest corner. Pots and pans rattled. Oven fires burned. Cleavers chopped through meat and bone and bit deeply into wooden butchers' blocks.

  Calista seemed little interested in their waffle-making venture. She kept glancing back over her shoulder as though watching out for someone.

  Judge Judy maybe?

  “I have heard of your feats this morning, that you arrived by sorcery, and by even greater sorcery you slew four dogs of Batiatus before they took you in chains.”

  Cady gave Georgia a slightly pained look.

  “Er, I think they think we're like masters of the dark arts or something, and we laid a bunch of Voldemort curses on those dudes those morning.”

  “The ones Smith shot?”

  “Yep.”

  “Awesome,” Georgia deadpanned.

  Cady took a bet on Calista not being a narc.

  “So, it was two guys, not four,” she said, “and it was our friend Smith who killed them, not us. But otherwise, yeah, you got our number.”

  Calista narrowed her eyes. “Excellent. And this Wizard Smith? He can bring more of this magic?”

  Cady blew her cheeks out. How to tell her that Batiatus now wielded the magic six-shooter? Probably straight up.

  “He doesn't have his magic wand anymore. The fat guy has it.”

  “I see,” said Calista. “And the spell you cast to travel here. Why have you not left by the same magic?”

  “I wish we could,” Cady said, keenly aware of the watch tucked away in her jeans. If these assholes got hold of that, too, they were screwed with a capital F. “We travel by the stars and they are not in alignment,” she improvised. “But you're like a kickass prophetess, right? You already knew that.”

  Calista of Antioch nodded sagely.

  “I understand,” she said, not pleased, but accepting of the fates. Her stars and fates probably weren't in tiptop alignment either.

  “How about you ask her what's going down here?” Georgia suggested. “What's her gig? Chief executive troublemaker would be my guess. Be nice to know for whom.”

  “Good point. So, er, Calista. We're not from around here. We seem to have got on everyone's bad side. Is there some way we could, you know, not be enslaved or anything?”

  “You seek your freedom?” the woman asked, her tone sharp, but not accusatory. She doubled her watchfulness.

  Yep.

  Troublemaker.

  “Yeah. Freedom rocks,” Cady said, trusting the watch to make to make the translation.

  “Then we are allies,” Calista whispered fiercely. “You will stand with us when the time comes?”

  “Mmm … sure. Why not?”

  She clasped Cady's forearm, and then Georgia's.

  “For now,” she said, “tend to your waffles.”

  “So, what the hell is going on?” Georgia asked as soon as they were alone again.

  Cady carefully scoped out the room. It was chaos, but organized in a way that was just beyond her ability to understand.

  “I'm not sure,” she said, “but I think we've come under the protection of the maximum kitchen dyke. She has magic powers, and I think she wants to overthrow the system.”

  “Great,” said Georgia, clearly unimpressed. “So now we have to be time-travelling lesbians?”

  “You wish.”

  They were quiet for a moment.

  “Cady, what are we gonna do? I can't make waffles. I can't be a lesbian. Ruby Rose really scares me. And not even sexy scare. She just terrifies me, all those tattoos and that haircut.”

  Cady put her arm around her friend and gave her a reassuring hug.

  “We have a way out,” she said quietly, “or we will, soon.”

  Georgia pushed back out of the embrace. “How?”

  “The watch,” Cady explained. “It resets every twenty-four hours. I told you that, right?”

  “Jeez, I dunno, maybe. It's been a bit crazed since you got back, you know.”

  “Fair call. Anyway, look. They took my phone, with the timer, but tomorrow as soon as the watch ticks over a full day here, it reboots or goes live or whatever. We can jump away, just like we jumped away from Seattle. We just have to be in physical contact with each other.”

  Georgia was quiet for a few seconds.

  “What about Marshal Smith?” she said.

  “He gave me the watch.”

  “So?”

  “I think he wanted us to use it.”

  “Cady! We can't leave him here.”

  “Georgia, he could be dead.”

  “You're reaching,” her friend said sharply.

  “And you're in denial,” Cady shot back

  “No, you're being cruel and unusual.”

  “Oh, don't make me roll my eyes.”

  The rapid fire back and forth came to a halt with each of them glaring at the other.

  “No, Cady,” Georgia said at last. “Don't make me hate you, again. You're just being a selfish bitch. Again. And you know it. We can't leave without him.”

  Cady wanted to say something cutting, to pull her friend down off that high horse. But in that perverse way the human mind at full gallop can leap from one thought to another, hers went from the idea of “high horse” to “Smith”—because “high horse” was totally the sort of old-school bullshit he would've come up with—and from Smith to Chester, the horse he'd left behind in the vast wastes of time. She thought of how quietly, grievously wounded Smith had been by the loss of that old friend, by that abandonment, however unintended.

  And her face started to burn with shame.

  Georgia smiled, her eyes lighting up. “There it is. Your conscience. I knew that feeble, pussy ass little bitch was in there somewhere.”

  “God, I hate my stupid conscience,” Cady mumbled. “It’s always getting in the way.”

  Georgia returned the hug that Cady had given her a few moments earlier.

  “No,
baby,” she said gently. “Trust me. Your conscience almost never gets in the way. Unless I'm around to give it a push.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “And you.”

  They were hugging it out when Drusilla returned.

  Perhaps things might have gone differently if Drusilla hadn't snuck up like that. Maybe if she'd stayed in character and started screeching like a harpy as she ran at them with her little whacking stick, they might have had a chance to prepare themselves.

  But the first either of them knew she was there was when she whipped Georgia across the back and screeched some old timey curse about Medusa's pubes turning into snakes or something, raising the cane for another blow.

  Georgia cried out in shock and pain, and before Cady really understood what had happened, or what was about to happen, her friend snapped out a side kick that took Drusilla in the sweet spot and folded her up like a cheap, Chinese umbrella. The girls stood looking at each other dumbly, unsure what to do next. Drusilla made the decision for them, screaming a banshee curse and raising the cane as if to whip them both in the face. Georgia yelled her own war-shout and busted out some high level aiki-jutsu move which broke the woman's arm in all sorts of places and sent her flying across the nearest table. Pottery jars went flying and crashing everywhere.

  There was a second, maybe less, of complete silence.

  It was like they were on stage and every spotlight had fallen on them. Every actor was in place and all eyes were on the principals.

  Cady and Georgia.

  In that brief, eternal, suspended moment Cady saw everything. The armed guards, at least eight of them, turning-turning-turning in their direction. The fearsome glare of Judge Judy. Just behind that malignant old hag, Calista, her eyes wide, then narrow, her face morphing and distorting. Slaves, servants, prisoners all, looking to Cady and Georgia, to the guards, to Calista, to the old woman.

  And then it began.

  The old hag had just started screeching at the guards when something flashed and her head came off. Like, right off, revealing Calista to be holding a heavy, blood-smeared cleaver.