“Not at all,” Douglas answered from the staircase. “It is I who should be thanking you. Farewell, Doctor Bacon—until we meet again.”
“Go with God, my friend,” called Bacon, closing the door once more.
On the landing below, Douglas met a robed church official ascending the stairs and, behind him, a squat fellow carrying a pail in one hand and a pike in the other. He could not avoid being seen, so he smiled, bowed, and wished them both a good day—all the while moving towards the door. He collected Snipe, who was hovering about the entrance like a sullen cloud, and hurried off across the market square. He lingered in town long enough to visit the chandlers and purchase a dozen large candles, then went on to procure some parchment and a flask of ink, some uncut quills, and a new pen knife. He arranged for all these things to be taken to Master Bacon’s lodgings when the church bells tolled prime.
“Come, Snipe,” he said. “We had best make ourselves scarce for a while.” He struck off down the street in search of an inn where they could wait for the Oxford Ley to become active and the assault on the Skin Map to begin in earnest.
CHAPTER 30
In Which Priorities Are Realigned
Incredible as Kit’s unprecedented appearance seemed to everyone concerned, the tale he unfolded for them was more incredible still. Sitting in the tiny kitchen of the mountaintop observatory, Kit held his listeners rapt. Over big bowls of Brother Lazarus’ spaghetti puttanesca, Wilhelmina’s floury bread, and numerous glasses of the abbey’s hefty red wine, he described life in the Stone Age as he knew it: River City Clan and its organisation; the order and rhythm of daily existence; the flora and fauna; the various individuals and their orientation to the clan and to their world; their unstinting care, support, and respect for one another; and their extraordinary means of communication.
Wilhelmina, leaning on her elbows with chin in hand, her dark eyes wide, kept up a steady, murmuring stream of translation for the priest, who shook his head in continual amazement. Shorn of his matted, shaggy locks and shaved clean, Kit no longer looked like the Wild Man in a circus sideshow. In his clean black cassock he might have passed for one of the abbey’s resident monastics—except the things he was describing were things no monk had ever put into words. Story after story, each more astounding than the last, poured out in a flood of verbal astonishments. Every now and then Brother Lazarus would jot down a note for later reference, or a question. But neither he nor Mina wanted to interrupt for fear of missing something amazing.
They talked long into the night and the next morning. After broaching the subject of mounting a return expedition to explore the cave and retrieve the painted symbols from the walls, Brother Lazarus beetled off to consult his superiors. Meanwhile, Kit and Wilhelmina sat outside the observatory tower on a wooden bench, taking in the bright morning sun.
“I found that plaque in the church at Sant’Antimo in Italy and followed the trail,” Mina explained, “and it led me here to Brother Lazarus. His real name is Giambattista Beccaria, and he is a traveller— like us.” Her voice took on a no-nonsense tone. “That is a secret you will take to the grave—for his good as well as for ours, no one must know about any of us.” She lightened again. “You can trust him, Kit. He is one of us. Actually, he’s the one who’s responsible for finding you the first time.”
“I’ve always wondered how you managed to pull that off.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I figured.” Crossing his arms over his chest, he stretched his feet out in front of him, leaned his head against the back of the bench, closed his eyes, and tilted his face to the sun, enjoying the warmth. “Have a go.”
“Okay,” she agreed, turning her eyes to the valley, lost in a blue haze of morning mist. “I don’t know about you, but my life has ceased to have linear chronology. I seem to be here, there, and everywhere. Time gets a little fuzzy.”
“You got that right,” affirmed Kit, his voice hoarse from talking more in the last twelve hours than he had in the previous twelve months combined. “Go on.”
“I’ve been coming to Montserrat for a few years now. On one early visit I actually arrived and realised that I had returned before the last time I was here! From Brother Lazarus’ point of view, we had not yet had the previous visit.” She gave a little laugh. “That was a real mind bender. In the end, I had to go away again because it was all just too weird.”
Kit gave a passable imitation of an En-Ul grunt of agreement.
“Anyway, it has taught me not to make any assumptions, to keep quiet and observe what’s going on around me and try to blend in so I don’t alarm anyone. I’ve also learned how to calibrate my jumps better. I can leave right now, go back to Prague for a month or two, and then come back here and you won’t have arrived yet.”
“Yeah,” murmured Kit. “But you would know that I was going to arrive eventually, right?”
“Maybe. Sometimes.” She clasped her hands and unclasped them. “I don’t always know what I’m going to remember. You just said I found you in Egypt.”
“Right. You do remember that, don’t you?”
“Kit, I have no memory of that at all. For me—the Mina you are talking to right this moment—it hasn’t happened yet.”
He raised his head, opened his eyes, and stared at her. “Man, that is weird,” he said after a moment. “Mina, you showed up in Egypt just in the nick of time to break Giles and me out of the tomb. You were wearing something like army fatigues, and your hair was tied up in a scarf—it was light blue. You got us out of that terrible crypt where Burleigh had locked us and left us to die. Are you telling me you don’t remember any of that?”
“I have the scarf. But the rest of it?” She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “Sorry. I don’t have any memory of that.”
“Well, what is the last thing you recall?”
“I remember going to Egypt to meet Thomas Young and to collect you and Giles and the map,” she said slowly. “Then we all went back to Prague and ran into Burleigh. I sent you to the gorge, took Giles home, and came here. That’s all.”
“But before that—you don’t remember coming to Egypt the first time and breaking us out of the tomb?”
“Sorry.”
Kit sat up and put his head in his hands, rubbing his temples with his thumbs. Fearing she had caused an information overload, Mina put a comforting hand on his neck and massaged it gently.
“But it happened,” he said, his voice falling softly.
“Not to me,” she told him. “Not yet.”
Kit nodded, trying to penetrate this new mystery.
“Listen, when we’re together we occupy the same time frame, and the sequence of events is the same for both of us,” Mina suggested. “But when we are separated we go to different times, right? So if we meet up again in a third place, like we are right now, why assume that we’ll meet each other at the exact point where we left off ? We might be catching one another before or after some arbitrary point in the sequence of events.” She offered a reassuring pat. “Does that help at all?”
“A little,” Kit allowed. “Maybe.”
The silence stretched between them for long moments that seemed like hours.
“Cosimo said it wasn’t time travel,” observed Kit at last. “He was always at pains to point that out, and I never understood why. He’d say, ‘Remember, Kit—this isn’t time travel.’ I remember thinking: when it so obviously is time travel, why make such a big deal of denying it?” He looked around at Wilhelmina and gave a half smile. “I think I’m finally beginning to understand why.”
“Well, it is time travel, and it isn’t. When we make a leap, we do travel in time, after all. But that isn’t all we do.”
“That’s right. We leave one reality and enter another that is on a different time stream—like stepping from one merry-go-round onto another. Maybe one merry-go-round has not made as many revolutions as the other, but everything else is more or less the same.” He considered this for a moment, then said, “I o
nce asked Cosimo whether it was possible for you to meet yourself in another world. You know? Suppose you popped into London and went to your house, knocked on the door, and—Ta-da! There you are meeting yourself face-to-face. Could that ever happen?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he didn’t know if it could happen, but that it somehow never did,” Kit replied. “It must be that the same person cannot occupy the same reality in two different bodies—something like that.”
“I went back to London and visited the bakery and my flat. I even went around to your place, but you weren’t there. It was strange, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder if I would meet myself there.” She thought a moment. “So if I went to a place where there was another Wilhelmina, I would . . . what?” She looked at Kit.
“I don’t know. But this idea that once we start jumping around in space and time our lives no longer maintain a linear chronology must be tied up with it somehow.”
“Brother Lazarus is convinced that it all has to do with consciousness,” Mina said. “If that is true, then it might be that you have only one consciousness, and it cannot be in two places at the same time.”
“So you’ve been coming here and consulting with Lazarus a lot?”
“He’s the best,” Mina said. “A trained astronomer with a deep knowledge of cosmology and physics—a huge asset. All that, plus he understands ley travel.”
“I wish I did,” sighed Kit. He regarded Mina thoughtfully for a moment. “I wonder when we’re going to catch up to one another. We have to get synchronised at some point, don’t we?”
“I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.” Her gaze was earnest and sympathetic. “You endured such hardship. I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have sent you there.”
“Really, it’s okay.”
“I looked for you every day—for weeks. Why didn’t you just stay put like I told you?”
“But I did,” Kit insisted. “If I’d waited any longer I would have taken root. I went back every day for as long as I could, but the line never became active again. I waved your little ley lamp around until I was blue in the face, but could never raise a signal.”
“And here was I thinking you’d just got bored and wandered off somewhere.” Mina regarded him with a sympathetic look. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“I feel responsible.”
“You’re not hearing me, Mina,” he said, force coming once more to his ragged voice. “I count it a privilege to have had the opportunity to spend time with the clan, and to learn what I did. I’d go back there any day.” He smiled knowingly. “Besides, if none of that had happened, I never would have discovered the Spirit Well.”
“If it is the Spirit Well.”
“What else could it be? There is no such thing as coincidence, remember?” He turned his gaze to the blue-misted valley stretching into the distance far below their mountain perch. “I used to think that was just something Sir Henry and Cosimo said—one of their little mottos.”
“And now?”
“Now I know different.” His eyes lost focus, as if gazing through a window into a wider, more intricate landscape beyond. “Everything happens for a reason. You don’t have to convince me. I’m a believer.”
Kit fell silent for a moment, lost in contemplation.
“Tell me again how you found the Spirit Well,” Mina suggested at last.
Kit nodded, considering how best to explain. “I mentioned the Bone House, remember?” he began.
“I remember,” she replied. “But I can’t quite picture what it looks like or exactly what it’s for.”
“Think of an igloo made of the skeletons of prehistoric animals— a huge mound of intertwined bones—and that’ll give you a rough idea. The clansmen carried bones from a kill zone to a clearing in the forest—it’s the dead of winter, right? Then En-Ul—I told you about him, remember? Well, the Bone House was made for him—so that he could go and sleep in it. He called it Dreaming Time—”
“The Dreaming Time,” repeated Wilhelmina softly.
“No,” corrected Kit. “Not the Dreaming Time, just Dreaming Time.”
Mina’s face scrunched up in bewilderment. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not exactly sure. But it seemed that En-Ul went to sleep so that he could dream, and what he dreamed was time.”
“Like looking into the future, something like that?”
“Maybe,” Kit allowed with a shrug. “I got the sense that he somehow entered into the flow of time and was able to manipulate it, or create it. Maybe he saw the future and was able to shape it. I don’t know. He was better at reading my thoughts than I was at reading his. Anyway, he took me down there to sit with him while he did it, and while I was there, a ley portal opened up. It registered on your ley lamp. I fell through it and ended up in the most breathtakingly beautiful place I’ve ever seen—definitely not of this world.”
“The Bone House created the portal?”
“Either that, or the clansmen built the hut there because they sensed the portal was there.”
“Just like the mound builders who made Black Mixen Tump,” concluded Mina. “They knew it was there.”
“Exactly,” agreed Kit. “It seems that primitive humans were far more sensitive to earth energies and things like that than we are.”
“Which is why they marked them,” suggested Wilhelmina, thinking of the standing stones, wells, dolmens, mounds, crosses, cairns, and such scattered willy-nilly across the whole wide world. “Okay, so you fell through the floor of the Bone House and ended up in this amazing place—what happened then?”
“I walked around a little, taking it all in, and I came to a pool of light—I don’t mean an area of sunlight in a shadowy place, I mean an actual pool filled with a sort of liquid light—think of honey made of light, or . . . or . . .” Words failed him, so he shrugged. “You’ll just have to see it for yourself to understand. I was standing there looking at it when I heard a noise on the other side of the pool.” Once again Kit’s eyes lost focus as he revisited the memory of a miracle.
“Then what happened?” asked Mina softly.
“I look up, and this man appears, and he’s carrying the body of a woman . . .” His voice took on the reverent quality of one reporting a marvellous dream. “She was wrapped in a long white robe and had long black hair; her skin was sickly pale, like grey clay. She was obviously dead in his arms. He comes up to the pool and without a second’s hesitation he simply strides into the pool with the dead woman and sinks down into the liquid light. He keeps walking until they are completely submerged in this syrupy liquid.” Kit shook his head in awe at the memory. “They seem to be under for a long time— but it must have been only a few seconds . . . you know how time stands still? But then when he surfaces again, the woman is alive.”
Wilhelmina gave him a sceptical look. “Are you absolutely certain she was dead? You only saw her across the pond—how do you know she was dead?”
“Mina, she was dead—stone cold dead. You weren’t there. You didn’t see her. But trust me, Arthur was carrying a corpse.”
“How do you know it was Flinders-Petrie?”
“Because,” Kit explained, “when he came up out of the pool with her and put her down on the grassy bank, I saw his chest. It was covered with tattoos—the Man Who Is Map, just like in the tomb painting. He was wearing the Skin Map. Mina, he was the Skin Map.”
“And that’s how you guessed the pool was the Spirit Well?”
“That’s the first thing that popped into my mind. I remember seeing those symbols and thinking, that’s Arthur Flinders-Petrie at the Well of Souls.” He paused. “It is the Spirit Well, I just know it.”
Wilhelmina considered this. “I wonder . . .”
“You doubt me?” said Kit. “You think I’m making this up?”
“No, no,” Mina countered quickly. “It’s just that since we don’t know exactly what the Well of Souls is supposed to be, we can’
t say for certain that is what you saw.”
Kit stood. “Come on, let’s go. I’ll take you there and show you.”
“Right now, this instant?”
“Why not? I can easily find my way back.” He gazed down on her with an intensity Mina had never seen in him. “What are you waiting for? If I’m right, we’re this close to solving the mystery of the Skin Map.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, “just pause a minute and let’s think about this. If we have to travel back to the Stone Age, we should have some equipment. Knocking about in a cave in total darkness is not my idea of fun. We should have torches, at least—maybe ropes too, and . . . I don’t know—a weapon of some sort in case things get sticky?”
“Sure. Whatever,” agreed Kit. “Then you’ll go with me?”
“Yes, and we’ll take Brother Lazarus with us.”
“Fine.”
“Right. So, as soon as he gets back we’ll start assembling the things we need. It will take a bit of time to get everything, and anyway, if this is as important as we think it is, then it is worth doing right.”
Kit had to admit that she had a point, and in any case there was nothing to be gained by arguing about it, so he let it slide. “There’s something I haven’t told you,” he said, taking his seat again. “I saw Baby—the cave lion?—I saw it in the cave. In fact, it sort of led me out.”
“You followed it?” Mina regarded him askance. “Brave man.”
“I didn’t know I was following it at the time,” conceded Kit. “I lost my light and then heard the chink of the chain and moved towards the sound.”
“You’re sure it was Baby?”
“Positive. That chain.”
“All the more reason to take a weapon with us,” Mina concluded. She thought for a moment, then asked, “These cave paintings—are you sure you can find them again?”
“Pretty sure. Why?”
“Because we can copy the symbols in the cave and test them against those on our piece of the map.”
“But we may not need the map anymore,” Kit pointed out. “I can find the Spirit Well again without the Skin Map.”
The Spirit Well (Bright Empires) Page 28