And yet, somebody did live there. I knew that. I also knew that she was a woman in her late fifties. She was blonde, hard faced, badly dressed and, if it’s not too impolite to say so, looked like both a junkie and a wreck. The bags under her eyes implied that she had not had a good night’s sleep in a very long time and the curl of her mouth reminded me of the hungry bear. More worrying that all that, when she came out of the cabin to ‘greet’ her new guest - me - she pointed a rather antique looking, heavy-scoped hunting rifle (one of the really old ones that probably fired the old-style gunpowder-fired bullets) directly at my face and didn’t let it waver. Her entire facial demeanour told me in no uncertain terms that she would sleep a whole lot better tonight if I made one false move and gave her an excuse to pull the trigger. She reminded me of actress from an old film, and she had undoubtedly brought misery along with her.
“Mr. Strauss,” she said. Calmly, like she knew me. Ad yet I had never met this woman before in my life. Mind, she was a woman and she looked angry, so truthfully I was ruling nothing out. Not yet. “I’m having a really bad day today,” she continued. Her voice sounded slightly snarly. “So you’d better have a damn good reason for coming all the way out here.”
Wherever you are now and whatever you are doing, if you’re reading this and thinking you’re having a bad day, you’re not. Really you’re not.
Because - and you’re just going to have to trust me here - you don’t even know what a bad day is.
SEVEN
Monday, October 24, 1644.
Arques, Perpignan, France.
The Vertue of the COFFEE Drink.
The Grain or Berry called Coffee, groweth upon little trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia.
It is brought from thence, and drunk generally throughout all the Grand Seigniors Dominions.
It is a simple innocent thing, composed into a drink, by being dryed in an oven, and ground to powder, and boiled up with spring water, and about half a pint of it to be drunk, fasting an hour before and not eating an hour after, and to be taken as hot as possibly can be endured; that which will never fetch the skin off the mouth, or raise any blisters, by reason of that heat.
It supresseth fumes exceedingly, and therefore good against the head-ach, and will very much stop any defluxion of rheumas, that distil from the head upon the stomach, and so prevent and help consumptions and the cough of the lungs. It is excellent to prevent and cure the dropsy, gout, and scurvy. It is very good to prevent mis-carryings in child-bearing women. It is a most excellent remedy against the spleen, hypocondriack winds, or the like.
It will prevent drowsiness, and make one fit for business, if one have occasion to watch, and therefore you are not to drink of it after supper, unless you intend to be watchful, for it will hinder sleep for 3 or 4 hours.
It is neither laxative nor restringent.
So said a poster advertisement of the era.
What they neglected to mention was that it was also thick, black and tasted like it had come hard and fast from the dunny-end of a horse. But he drank it anyway, because he was cold. Really, really cold.
Hercule sat as close to the spitting fire as he dare, his autumn long-coat removed to dry as he did his level best to warm his bones. The cottage, a one-roomed crumbleshack near the southern edge of his estate, had many more holes in the walls than it had windows (of which there was but one) and even inside he could still feel the wind brushing past his face and keeping his cheeks as ruddy as they had been on the journey down. His ankle hurt from more than one awkward slip along the way. The harvest moon was in its last quarter and the absence of any other lighting this far from town had required him to carry a torch. But the wind was strong. Too strong. The torch blew itself black before he was a quarter of the way down the hill.
Hercule had tried this new ‘coffee’ drink before, in a ‘coffee house’ during an earlier stay in Paris when he had attempted, unsuccessfully it transpired, to find favour with the classes of his father, but he had forgotten just how bad this ‘bitter invention of Satan’ from the arabic lands could taste. The controversy surrounding the popularity of the beverage and the effect it might have on body and soul had been so great in days past that, in 1615, Pope Clement VIII himself had been asked to intervene. Before making a decision, he had decided to taste the beverage for himself. He found the drink so satisfying that he gave it Papal approval.
Hercule winced as he sipped tentatively once more. Clement, like Cardinal Mazarin, might well have been a man of God, but it was abundantly clear to him that neither one of them were men of taste.
Though he owned it, reluctantly, tonight was the first time that Hercule had actually entered this tiny cottage. Ever. He had certainly not entered since Eli had become his employee and tenant over six months ago and he suspected that the only difference now was that it was probably more of a midden than it had been when it had roofed the pigs. Clothing and boots were strewn and pots and pans seemed to have no place to call their own. The bed, little more than straw with a loose sheet over, was dirty from a man collapsing full-clothed after a day on the estate. Books, papers, drawings and detailed geometric diagrams seemed to inhabit every spare corner.
Eli was an oddity of a man to be sure. As he had been an oddity looking for cheap paid work and had also seemed a capable man, however, it had mattered little to Hercule. As he now pottered the room straightening his mess, shirt discarded and muscles rippling, Hercule could see welt-marks aplenty on his back, sure signs that his tales of having worked the ships were true and that he had fallen foul of a cat on more than one occasion. His claims that he could not remember but one vessel name also told Hercule that he had probably sailed with the Spaniards but again, it mattered little. Hercule had little spare money for upkeep of the meagre scrap of an estate that the last remaining Montmorency had been thrown and Eli, clearly not Spanish nor French himself, would find it hard to find work in this area. With war raging on almost every border, suspicions of foreigners was rife. With the northerner’s arrival here, however, two needs had been served well. Eli had said that he would work hard and work hard he had, at whatever tasks had been placed before him. Six days a week, dawn until dusk.
And tonight; beyond.
“My guards ride in soon,” Hercule said. “Tomorrow, perhaps. The morning after? Soon. The King’s own men!” He sounded overly pleased with himself. “They will escort me safe to Valenciennes where I shall command my own army and show the Spanish a harsh defeat.” He smiled.
“And is that why you do not sleep tonight, Master?” Eli asked, his French fluent. His best guess was that it was fast approaching midnight. “You are afraid?”
Hercule almost choked on his coffee and, for once, it was not the taste. “Good Lord, no!!” he said defensively. “I have nothing to fear from the dogs. Besides, at Valenciennes I shall command, I shall not fight. Brains are my weapon.” He tapped his temple knowingly.
“Then let us hope you are fully armed,” Eli said. Deliberately, he tried to keep his tone as close to encouragement and as far from sarcasm as he could manage. He was not completely sure he had managed it.
Hercule nodded, blindly. His mind was elsewhere. “Béatrice will have the child out before the month is done,” he continued, changing tack. “There are housekeepers who will tend to her and a surgeon readied to be called from town, but you will keep an eye for them? Assist or collect the things that might be needed?”
“I shall that, Master. I am in your employ and I serve you both.”
Hercule nodded, still thinking. “Good. Good.”
Silence fell, leaving only the endless creaking of beams and trees in the wind to quell it.
Hercule was not here tonight because he feared Valenciennes. Indeed, he was excited at the prospect. A new life beckoned, and it brought with it a high degree of renown. No, he was here tonight because the sound of thoughts chasing each other in his head had become too much to bear. He worried that, so soon after being found (or so he suspected), his priz
e might vanish whilst he was away fighting. The chances of that would, of course, be greatly increased if he told someone about his suspicions and yet here he was searching for the best way to tell someone. This was a sensitive matter; not one he wished to share with anyone, let alone a man he had known for such a short time. A man whose virtues, if indeed he was possessed of any, were still a decidedly unknown quantity. He could not shake the thought that if he told this man all, then he might soon find himself lifeless on a cold stone slab, his body run through and his groundsman living the life of a nobleman in some foreign land soon after.
But yet he needed help.
Not knowing how best to play this, the creaks and strains from the winds seemed ever more insistent in his ears. As though they were somehow urging him.
Looking around some more, he noticed a small hand-built table laden with an array of glass jars and tubes, of the kind an alchemist might have to hand. It intrigued him and he stood to take a walk over.
“You practice alchemy?” he asked.
Eli looked over and smiled. “Do I have the look of an alchemist?” he asked.
It was true. Eli looked like no alchemist Hercule had ever encountered, but then nor did have the look of a man who might possess such tools and equipment at all. He was a slender man, as apothecaries often were, but his muscles were well pronounced. More unusually for such a trade his thick, black beard was both desperately uncut and violently unkempt and his shoulder length hair fell like wiry black rain to his shoulders. He wore filthy ochre breeches and ragged boots. His face was dirty from the day’s work and his general appearance, like that of this room, demonstrated that he was by and large a roughard. One who had clearly not been expecting company tonight.
“I have a chest that can make me cough myself awake,” Eli explained. Hercule instantly looked shocked and covered his mouth and nose but, with a gesture of his hand, Eli reassured him. “Worry not, it cannot travel man to man,” he said. “But I heard talk of a good soil which surrounds a pine forest in Montpellier. Some say that within the soil is a mineral which can ease my chest and put paid to my sleepless nights.”
“So you work to make... medicines? You practice apothecary?” Hercule asked.
“Of sorts,” Eli continued. He walked over to the table, tidied a ramshackle chair under and pointed to various soils, jars and powders in turn, “but I am no expert. I simply heat the soil with a candle and add an alcohol,” he explained. “Whilst the things I do not need from the soils seem to settle, the things I do find a home within it. I then pour that liquid into another jar and heat it yet higher until the spirit is gone. Then I am left only with the goodness. This powder here...” he pointed to a pile of red powder laid on a piece of finely woven cloth. “Then, I mix this powder with a tree-gum I can eat safe, so that I can form the powder into a small tablet.” He picked up one of the tablets; large in size, red in colour and shaped into a rough-edged cylinder. “It is easier to swallow that way.” He placed it down again.
Hercule looked unconvinced. “Does this... work?” he asked.
“The process does,” Eli explained, finally throwing on a shirt, though not a clean one. “As for the medicine, I do not yet know. I have not tried it. There is more work to be done in refining the mineral and removing all that is not required.”
“Then you are a man of knowledge?” Hercule smiled inside, feeling that he had just found his shoe-horn.
Eli shrugged. “I am a travelled man,” he explained.
Hercule pondered. “And on your travels, have you heard talk of the Tables of Testimony?”
Eli shook his head, almost disinterestedly. “I confess, I have not.”
Hercule sighed. He had no desire to explain everything and so decided, for a number of reasons, to keep the details to a minimum. “They are sacred tablets of stone,” he explained, “said to contain the word of God himself carved upon them. They are spoken of in the bible itself and it is said, with some high degree of belief, that they bring great power to those who possess them.”
Hercule started to pace the room, picking up items for examination or glancing through the window at the blustering leaves as he saw fit. “They say that they were stolen from the Temple of Jerusalem when the city was sacked quite mercilessly during the crusades. They also say that they did find their way in convoy across Europe and that, at some time around a millennia after our Lord perished, they did vanish again. Somewhere in this very area. There is talk that they are lain waiting to be found. In le-Chateau, perhaps, or les-Bains? Many have looked, but none have found. They are a treasure which seemingly works very hard to remain lost to this world.”
Eli looked puzzled. Lifting his own roughened mug he took a sip of his own coffee, without wincing, and narrowed his eyes. “And you tell me all this... why..?”
“Because I need service of a good, strong pair of hands,” Hercule explained. “Now. Tonight. I have lain awake this deep into the night, my body writhing and my mind and heart racing each other. I believe I have the clevers that others do not, but alas I do not have the strength.”
Eli’s eyes narrowed further. “Strength for what...?”
“To extract the Tables,” Hercule said excitedly. “For they are hidden well, and tight. But I do believe I have found them.”
EIGHT
Thursday, August 20, 2043.
West of Bull Run Peak, California.
The outside of the cabin wasn’t in that bad a state. Well, it was, given that it hadn’t changed even one iota since I’d last described it but, when you compared to the inside… well, it was bordering on luxury by comparison.
The inside was just a few rooms. A kitchen area separated from the living area by only a few ramshackle units, a door into what appeared to be a bathroom and another into what I assumed would be a bedroom. Not only was everything in a state of complete disrepair, but every spare inch I could see was piled high with papers, drawings and diagrams; all different shapes, papers and sizes. Some were newspaper clippings whilst others were hand drawn. Almost all, including the clippings, had copious notes erratically written either at the side of, or across them. It stretched into every visible inch of space, including the bathroom. There were dust sheets laid over items I took to be furniture and the whole place looked like a hoarder’s wet dream. The walls were the same. Instead of wallpaper, which wouldn’t have suited a cabin such as this anyway, she had notes, cuttings and drawings pinned just about everywhere. The only unpinned area of wall space contained not one TV, because that would have been daft, nor two, three or even four. There were, in total, five TVs; three really old flat-screens attached directly to the wall, badly and at askew angles I might add, and two desperately old tube TVs standing on boxes of, well, more crap I guess. Each was tuned to a different channel and it also seemed that each, at a set point, flicked itself to another channel entirely. The sound was low, but audible enough to be cacophonous when combined. It was channel surfing for the dangerously insane.
The more I looked, the more I could see that there was barely anything modern at all in the room. It was as though the 21st century was waiting outside and the cabin had picked up the gun and was resolutely refusing to let it come in. The flat-screen TVs may have been early 20th century but I wasn’t even sure about that. Hell, I’m no antiques expert. All I did know is that, in the context of the 2040s, this whole place was positively Amish.
Granted, in one of the corners, on a paper-littered desk, was a computer. Sort of. It wasn't a recent one by any stretch, but it was nothing too embarrassing either. Just the kind that someone of her age might own the world over. Just old enough to be borderline collectable. Given that quad-thread fibre optic cables had no desire whatsoever to be run out this far, I suspected that it was somehow connected to the old satellite dish outside. Probably by two tin cans and a fairly lengthy stretch of ragged string.
Outside, when I had asked how the hell she had known my name, she hadn’t answered. Instead, she had just looked beyond me, into the
trees and then along the track, the one I would have used to get there had I even known it existed. Then she said, in no less harsh tones than before: “Were you followed?”
At that point I hurt everywhere, I was scared, grieving, injured, confused and annoyed and it had all fallen into one desperately unstable melting pot. “Yes,” I said, resignedly. “They’re about three and a half minutes behind me. About three hundred of them. Riding unicorns. Or squirrels, it’s hard to tell.” She narrowed her eyes and looked behind me again, suspiciously. My shoulders fell that universal distance that shoulders fall when people the world over are about to say the word ‘Duh!’ “How the hell should I know?” I said eventually. “I know… why don’t we just… wait and see?” I too turned and looked. Purely for effect.
Listening closely, she had looked around and about for another minute or so and then, seemingly satisfied, she had ushered me in. By which I mean she had waved the gun in the general direction of a piece of wood attached to the cabin. One that may or may not have previously been a proper door. It certainly had glass in it. Once.
So now, inside and looking round at a place I would no doubt have lived in myself if I’d remained eighteen, single and slovenly for the rest of my natural life, I asked again. “Who the hell are you? How do you know my name?”
She didn’t answer. Again. Instead, she hurried round the confined space dodging boxes like she was on speed, biting her nails and looking (I think) for a kettle. Seeing the boxes piled high in the kitchen, I figured she had as much chance of finding one in there as she did of actually finding the stove.
I looked to the TVs, each still showing a different channel. Some looked like news channels while others seemed to focus more on history; documentaries with original footage as opposed to reconstructions. The right hand one flicked over on some unknown cue to show an archeological dig somewhere in Europe, a scruffy group of experts knee deep in mud.
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