The Dragon’s Apprentice

by James A. Owen

  He didn’t often join in, and on the few occasions when he tried, he was either maligned by the others or just dismissed entirely. The most useful contribution Rose had ever heard him make was to suggest that someone be flogged—but then that was usually all he ever suggested.

  “Lord,” Shakespeare said under his breath as he quietly rose and moved into the adjacent corridor, “what fools these immortals be.”

  Rose caught him by the arm before he could disappear into the bowels of Tamerlane House. “I heard you,” she said plainly. “You know what we need to do, don’t you?”

  Shakespeare looked uncomfortably flummoxed and tugged at his collar. “I, er, I don’t know what you’re talking about, child,” he said, guiding her over to a more remote corner of the hallway. “After all, there’s no one to flog.”

  Rose didn’t reply to this but simply kept a steady gaze on the increasingly uncomfortable Caretaker until he finally sighed and shook his head.

  “All right, I submit. You’re more perceptive than I gave you credit for.”

  “Everyone here in Tamerlane House is more perceptive than anyone gives them credit for,” said Rose. “You have an idea, don’t you? Why don’t you tell them?”

  “Do you know,” he said with a mingling of resignation and melancholy, “what they say about me? Out there, in the world?”

  Rose was confused. “You’re honored and adored,” she finally answered. “Your work is held up as the greatest of achievements—greater than any produced before or since.”

  Shakespeare put his head in his hands. “That’s exactly what I mean. Do you know what kind of a burden it is to have such a reputation? To be, as I am, revered? It is troublesome bad, and more than any man should be expected to bear. And it was worse when I was recruited to be a Caretaker. My fame had outstripped even my life, and always, those around me—even my elders and betters—looked to mine own words for counsel.”

  He sighed heavily and looked at Rose. “It is a great responsibility to make decisions, and more so to be trusted, and risk being wrong in the counsel given, the choices made. Much, much worse.”

  At last Rose understood. “But,” she said gently, “if you could convince them it was all reputation and not reality, that you were not as well-suited to the task as they thought you to be, then no one would ever look to you for advice.”

  Shakespeare nodded once, then again. “It has been a difficult fiction to maintain, especially in those dark days when no one quite knew what path to take, save I—and I could not break my act, lest it give me away.”

  “Sometimes it’s better to do the right thing than the comfortable thing,” Rose said firmly. “Like right now. You know, and you won’t help. How is that a good way to live?”

  “It isn’t,” Shakespeare agreed, “but after so long, I don’t know how the fellowship would countenance a newly confident Will.”

  “They’ll accept you,” Rose prompted, “if you’ll just go tell them what to do.”

  For a moment his eyes brightened, as if his resolve had returned—but then he slumped back onto a couch in the corridor. “I—I can’t,” he admitted. “You just don’t know how hard it is, being William Shakespeare.”

  Rose folded her arms and sat back. “Oh, you don’t think so? Would you like to trade places with me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’m the one they call the Grail Child, even though I’m no longer really a child, and I’m supposed to be the descendant of more gods than even exist anymore. Odysseus was my grandsire. Merlin was my uncle. And my entire childhood was about being ready to give up my life to save my cousin Arthur. Believe me, I understand what it is to live under the pressure of high expectations.”

  Shakespeare rubbed his chin, appraising her. Then he smiled. “I do believe you’ve cornered me, dear child,” he said at last, still smiling. “If you’ll be so good as to accompany me, we should go have a word with Jules.”

  Rose stood and offered him her arm. “My pleasure, Master Shakespeare.”

  He groaned and took her arm. “But please,” he said as they left the room, “just call me Will.”

  “Pull the other one,” Shelley said dismissively when Rose suggested to the assembled Caretakers that Will had a plan. “His wick isn’t lit. How is he going to be of any help? All he ever wants to do is have people flogged.”

  Will reddened at this, but Rose shook her head. “He’s brighter than you think,” she said firmly, “and if you’ll just give him a chance, maybe he’ll surprise us all.”

  “I have not been myself,” said Will, “not for a very long while. But circumstances dictate that I need cast away the mask of the fool, if we’re to succeed.”

  “It was all a ruse, was it?” Twain said with a wan smile. “Well played, Master Shakespeare.”

  “I knew it all along,” said Byron. “I was just playing along to be polite.”

  “Oh, do shut up, you nit,” said Shelley. “All right, Master Wordsmith,” he said to Will. “If you are indeed a closeted genius, what pray tell is your great plan to solve our dilemma?”

  “We’re going to build a bridge,” Will declared firmly, and with as much courage as he could muster. “A bridge between the worlds.”

  John’s mouth dropped open in a mix of amazement and shame, and he noted a similar expression on Charles’s face. In the stress of the moment they’d forgotten the message from the ghostly Hank Morgan: You must build the bridge. Shakespeare’s Bridge. You can’t get back without it.

  Charles began to say something about the ghost pirate, but Verne caught his eye and shook his head. The meaning was clear: not yet.

  “If the trumps won’t work, then why would a bridge?” Ransom was asking. “That’s quite a conceptual leap.”

  “We don’t even know how the trumps work,” said Will, “just that they do. But I have another plan.

  “It was the stones that gave me the initial idea,” he explained, “after I’d read about them in your books, Bert.”

  “Mine?” Bert said in surprise. “What did my books have to do with your discovery?”

  “The cavorite,” Will answered. “The material in your stories that made space travel possible.”

  “It’s also a major component in the watches,” said Verne. “It’s part of what allows them to function as time machines.”

  “That’s what I’m driving at,” said Will. “When you activate them, one doesn’t simply view another time, one is transported to that time, whole and unharmed.”

  “Or whole and unclothed, in Morgan’s case,” Twain said with mock seriousness.

  “Har har har,” Morgan said drolly. “Only you would see traveling in time as an opportunity for a practical joke. But I think I see what Shakespeare’s getting at. The Anabasis Machines do have an effect on the physical person, so it’s as if there is an effect on space as well as time.”

  “Better,” Will said, smiling. “I think it means space and time may be, in fact, the same thing.”

  “Pppthhbbbth.” Burton blew a raspberry and folded his arms. “This is why we never tried to recruit him,” he said dismissively. “He is a moron.”

  Will blushed slightly but refrained from responding to Burton’s slur. Instead he continued. “We know there are cavorite mines where the material can be found in large quantities, which is where we’ve gotten it for use in various devices. But I’ve found another place where it resides, if in less abundance. It’s laced throughout all the stones in the Ring of Power. And it’s in the very foundations of the Nameless Isles.”

  That got the Caretakers’ attention. There was a flurry of discussion, argument, and expressions ranging from intrigue to disbelief. It took several minutes before Verne was able to bring the room to order again.

  “These are indeed astute observations, especially coming from … ah, one such as yourself, who is not trained in the sciences. But I fail to see the significance of your discovery.”

  “There’s one other place where the
cavorite is plentiful,” Will went on, nonplussed by the resistance of his colleagues. “Avalon. The island that exists in two worlds at once.”

  “Half there, and half not,” Grimalkin said, having suddenly appeared over Burton’s shoulder. “Sounds implausible to me.”

  “Get away from me, cat,” Burton exclaimed, swatting at Grimalkin with a fork as its midsection disappeared, leaving two thirds of a cat, which then walked away in opposite directions.

  “What is it you’re proposing, Will?” asked Verne, pulling them all back to the discussion at hand.

  “Come with me,“ Will said, rising from the table. “I’ll show you.”

  Shakespeare led them all out into the night air, to one of the large storage sheds at the back of the house. He walked inside and took a seat at a makeshift desk, amid the straw, and gardening tools, and odds and ends. Above the desk on a support beam were several drawings of a bridge, all drawn in Shakespeare’s hand.

  “I’ve done all my work out here,” Will explained, “so no one would see. Nobody comes out here much anyway.”

  “Who helped you with these?” said Ransom, amazed. “No offense, but I didn’t know you had engineering skills.”

  “None taken,” Will said, hooking a thumb over his shoulder. “I did indeed have some help.”

  Standing at the rear of the shed was the giant Tin Man—formerly the Caretaker Roger Bacon, one of the great inventors of history. He moved forward and put a supportive hand on Will’s shoulder.

  “It appears,” Verne said, putting his arm around Rose, “that you and Master Bacon have both been better judges of character than the rest of us.”

  Morgan and Ransom, who were both examining Will’s drawings, looked at Verne and nodded. The bridge might work.

  “All right,” Verne said to a beaming Shakespeare. “Ask what you will of us, and then get to work. Time’s a wasting.”

  Will chose several of the burlier Caretakers—Hawthorne, Dumas, and Irving among them—to help him and the Tin Man build the bridge. Bert, Rose, Laura Glue, and Fred decided to go into the kitchen and find something else to eat, while the others returned to the meeting hall. Before they got there, Charles had already started an argument with Ransom about Chronos time and Kairos time.

  “You’re far too concerned about reconciling your own experiences with everyone else’s,” said Ransom. “You need to understand: There is no such thing as past or future, not to the individual. To the individual, there is only the Now.”

  “It’s one great advantage to being a tulpa,” said Verne. “We get to live in Kairos time, because we’ve already done our years in Chronos time.”

  “That stands to reason when we’re talking about you, and Burton, and the other members of the Society,” said Charles, “but where does that leave Bert? H. G. Wells is still a contemporary, still in our, uh, ‘Prime Time.’ Yet he seems to travel as freely between worlds and times as you do.”

  “Bert is a dimensional anomaly,” Verne explained. “The one I originally recruited is the one you know, the one you have met, Charles. In the beginning of his apprenticeship, they were one and the same, until his first trip through time.

  “We were equally inexperienced with the intricacies of time travel, and the problem arose when he took his trip into the future.”

  “The one he wrote about in The Time Machine, yes,” said John.

  “Exactly,” said Verne, “but unlike his unnamed time traveler, Bert did not safely return to the point at which he left, or moments after. He overshot the mark and arrived two full years before he ever left, and at a point when he was barely an initiate as a Caretaker. Bert, our Bert, was older, more experienced, and brought with him a three-year-old daughter.”

  “Aven,” Jack said, exhaling. “That was Aven.”

  Verne nodded. “We didn’t know how to send him back to try to fix the anomaly, and we weren’t even sure what had gone wrong to begin with. Even Poe himself was at a loss as to what to do. Finally we realized that Bert could not leave, but also that the younger version of himself could no longer be a Caretaker.”

  “How did he—the young one—take the news that he was being displaced?” asked John.

  “To the Devil with that,” said Charles. “How did he react when he met himself?”

  “The other Wells—let’s call him Herb—and Bert have never met,” Verne replied. “To have another version of himself walking around—and to be fully aware of him—would have interfered too much with Herb’s Prime Time. Too many variables would come into play. So Dickens and I conferred with Bert, and we agreed that he should continue in his role as the third Caretaker. As for Herb, I realized I would have to not only cease instructing him in the disciplines needed to become a Caretaker, but I would also have to convince him that many of the secrets I had shared were fictions. Only one man was meant to live the lifetime that was already being lived.”

  Charles cleared his throat and raised his hand for attention. Jack slapped his forehead in resignation—he and John were comfortable mingling with the Caretakers Emeritis as equals, but Charles, for some reason, still felt like he was in grammar school among the greats.

  “I don’t mean to contradict you, Jules,” Charles said, “but then how do you explain Chaz? I wasn’t there myself during the Dyson affair, but he was essentially me from an alternate dimension. Yet he was able to come here to this one without changing my position with you at all.” He paused and looked around nervously. “Or has he?”

  Twain clapped him on the back and blew a puff of well-intentioned cigar smoke in his face. “Worry not, dear boy, worry not. For one thing, you were already far deeper into your course than young Wells was. Shades, you were already a full Caretaker! And for another, your friends didn’t bring him back here—they dropped him off several centuries back. No fuss, no muss.”

  “Samuel’s right,” said Verne. “He fulfilled a purpose in this dimension, but in a different time. Think of the temporal plane as a great map.” He pointed to a whorl of wood on the top of a table. “This is you, in this time. And this,” he said, pointing at another pattern on the opposite side, “is where Chaz ended up living his life. One person, two temporal places. He never interfered with your Prime Time. But if we had kept Herb in the loop, so to speak, then both he and Bert would have been in one spot,” he finished, tapping the first whorl. “Not good, temporally speaking.”

  “Also, Chaz wasn’t precisely you, Charles,” said John. “He was Charles-like, but he had lived in a different world there in the Winterland. He might have started taking on more of your attributes, but he was not you, and his thinking had become different enough that he certainly could not have taken your place.”

  “Bert and Herb also diverged in this same way,” Verne said, vigorously nodding his approval. “You’ve no doubt noticed that Herb’s viewpoints and my own were often at odds when it came to writing.”

  “And science, and politics, and social development,” intoned John. “You were at opposite ends of the spectrum on just about everything, Jules.”

  “And so it is with Bert, also,” Verne agreed, “but with the difference that he and I are colleagues, whereas to Herb, I was a potential mentor who abandoned him.”

  “Why abandon him if he was going to end up going into the future in two years anyway?” asked Jack. “What was the need?”

  “That’s just it,” Dickens put in, as he went to refill his pipe. “He never went.”

  Verne coughed. “Yes. We made certain that his studies never reached the point that he really believed in time travel, not really, and we made equally certain that he would never lay eyes on the device, much less use it.”

  “How much did he know?” asked John.

  “Enough to know that I was no longer being truthful,” Verne said, casting a sorrowful glance at Dickens, who nodded. “That single rift widened into a chasm, and in only a few years, he was no longer the man who was once so suitable as an apprentice Caretaker. The imagination, and integrity, and
ingenuity were still there, but the spark of belief was gone.”

  “But he still wrote The Time Machine, didn’t he?” John asked. “Or was that our Bert?”

  “They both did,” said Twain, “only Bert’s will never be published. Of all of us, only he has written the full and accurate version of his adventures into the Histories. He feels no need to express himself outside of our quorum because in a way, he’s already out in the world doing it.

  “Granted, he reads his counterpart’s work—and, I daresay, improves upon it, especially in his nonfiction—but the paths of Bert the Caretaker and H. G. Wells the respected author diverged a long time ago.”

  Jack scratched his head and squinted at the others. “But without being involved in the Archipelago,” he said wonderingly, “how was he able to create all those extraordinary stories?”

  “Because he’s a brilliant writer,” said Dickens, who had just come back into the discussion. “A great many of us have been inspired by our adventures in the Archipelago and incorporated some of those tales into our stories. But not everything is borrowed—we are, after all, still writers of great ability.”

  This last comment brought up a round of grunted assent and table thumping, which, Jack figured, was probably why Dickens said it.

  “Conversely,” Dickens continued, “there have been many talented men and women who had the imagination to be Caretakers, and who believed in the Platonic idea of the Archipelago, even if subconsciously, but yet never had the chance to become Caretakers themselves.”

  There was more grunting and “hear, hear’s” and table thumping, and several of the Caretakers recited names.

  “Chesterton,” said Barrie, “and he’s still living, I should note.”

  “Charlotte Brontë,” said Dumas. “And Jane Austen.”

  “Longfellow,” said Barrie, “and John Ruskin.”

  “George Gordon,” said Twain.

  “I’m right here,” Byron said, irritated.

  “So you are,” Twain said, winking at Jack.

  “We could name a hundred, or a thousand like them,” said Dickens, “all brilliant, and all completely ignorant of the affairs of the Archipelago of Dreams. Yet still, they created great works. As have those here. After all,” he concluded, looking at Jack, “you don’t base all of your own writing off of your experiences as a Caretaker, do you?”