by Alex Scarrow
Liam looked up at the overcast grey sky. A fresh breeze nipped across the Thames, coaxing white crests from the muddy water.
‘It is a bit on the fresh side.’
‘I should have p-packed a jumper.’ Rashim managed a faltering smile. ‘Maybe next time.’
The execution cart rattled along the cobblestone road parallel to the Thames. Liam watched London Bridge recede behind them, still standing proud despite the great fire that had threatened to engulf it some twenty years ago.
The north side of the street was lined with spectators that had gathered to watch the execution procession led by the Lord High Marshal on horseback. There were jeers and the occasional badly thrown missile that arced over their heads and into the river, but most of what they could hear was excited cheering. Not for them, not in support for them, merely an expression of the carnival atmosphere that accompanied a public hanging.
The cart finally turned right, in towards Execution Dock, and came to a halt facing on to the river. A ‘stage’ of planks erected on wooden beams that protruded out over the Thames awaited them. Beyond, boats and dinghies, pinnaces and ferries hovered out on the choppy water: ‘paid for’ seats for those who wanted the best possible view.
The chaplain who’d been sharing the cart with them and quietly reading aloud prayers from the King James Bible stepped down first then offered Liam a hand to help him.
‘I’m all right, thanks.’
Rashim followed, stumbled on the cobbles, which provoked a ripple of laughter from the watching crowd behind them.
‘Pay them no heed,’ muttered the chaplain. He helped Rashim to his feet. ‘This will be your last chance to confess your sins, my son. Will you not let me hear you?’
Rashim shook his head. ‘It’s … it’s n-not something I believe in.’
‘God forgives whether you believe in him or not. I beg you to reconsider –’
Liam turned round. ‘Will you not just let him be?’ he snapped, then offered the chaplain the ghost of a smile. ‘The kindness you can do us, sir, is to let us get this over with as quickly as possible.’
Rashim nodded again. ‘Y-yes. P-please.’
Liam stepped close to him. Both their hands were bound behind their backs. To untie his hands, to allow him to hold his friend, put an arm round Rashim, would have been a kindness too.
‘It’ll be all done and dusted in five minutes. Just brass it out, eh?’
Rashim looked at him, ashen-faced. ‘I … I envy you, Liam.’
‘My good looks, is it?’
He sputtered a nervous, chittering laugh that sounded like the puffing of a small steam engine. ‘N-no … no f-fear. I envy th-that.’
‘I’m frightened too,’ he confided with a whisper. ‘Just damned if I want these mawkish souls seeing it.’
The Lord High Marshal beckoned for them to be brought up the four wooden stairs on to the stage. The hangman stepped towards them and gently grasped Liam’s shoulder. ‘Come along now,’ he said softly. ‘The drop will be quick enough, boys.’
They took the steps up on to the stage, the wood planks echoing hollowly and creaking beneath their boots.
The hangman positioned Liam by the shoulders, squarely in the middle of a long trapdoor. He nodded tacit approval. ‘Perfect. Good man.’ He placed Rashim on the trapdoor beside him then reached up to pull down the nooses of rope hanging from the frame above.
‘Liam?’ hissed Rashim.
‘Yes?’
‘They … they never f-found us. Never did c-come for us.’
He’s talking about the girls.
‘I know that.’
Rashim’s face twitched with a glimmer of hope. ‘P-perhaps it’s n-now? Perhaps this is w-what they w-were waiting for all … all along?’
Liam gave that a moment’s consideration. No. He vaguely remembered how it all worked, the rules, the dos and don’ts. Not right here. Not with an audience. They wouldn’t open a window here. If a rescue had been coming, it would have arrived before now, surely? But Rashim didn’t need to hear those thoughts. Instead, he turned to him and nodded.
‘Yeah, it’s possible,’ he said. ‘Perhaps.’
The hangman had Liam’s noose in his beef-pink hands and eased it over his head. ‘Lift your chin just a bit, there’s a good lad.’ Liam did so and he fitted the rough hemp rope snug under his jaw, checked the knot and gave it a firm testing tug. He then set about the same ritualistic process for Rashim.
Liam looked up at the featureless grey sky. Bland. A monotone. It reminded him of something from long, long ago. And then he quickly had it – that curious white mist that you had to step through to reach the past. That other strange dimension.
Chaos … yes, that’s what we called it. The chaos dimension.
Only he didn’t recall the chaos dimension having seagulls. The birds swooped and fluttered out over the river, hovering on the breeze as if delaying their onward journey a moment or two to watch this spectacle like all the other onlookers gathered that morning.
‘All done here!’ announced the hangman.
Beside him Liam could hear Rashim’s ragged, panting breath: in and out, in and out, in and out like a blacksmith’s bellows. And now … now the fear was finally biting Liam. He gritted his teeth. He wasn’t going to show them the slightest hint of scaffold-terror.
I won’t give them that. I won’t!
He closed his eyes and thought of his long-dead wife, Fleur: her long dark kinks of hair, her brown eyes, her full lips. A million and one unique little things she did, habits she had, sayings she whispered into his ear in the still of a hot night. Sayings and homespun, inherited tribal truisms from her old world.
Then the girls, his two girls, his all-but-forgotten sisters-in-time. Comrades bound together by their fate. Closer than family. Closer than brothers and sisters. And that big clumsy man-mountain – the support unit, Bob. A compressed lifetime of memories. A precious thing and, best of all, all of those memories were entirely his. Not someone else’s. Not a fiction conjured up by some lab technician.
His.
He could hear Rashim whimpering next to him and spared a thought for his friend of so many years, his partner in crime.
‘Hey! Hey, Rashim?’
‘Uh … huh …?’
‘Why are pirates so big and scary?’
Rashim turned to look at him. Wide-eyed, his skin as grey and colourless as the sky above. ‘I … I d-don’t … I … ’
‘Because they arrrrrrrre.’ Liam offered him a lopsided grin. ‘Get it?’
Rashim managed a flickering smile.
Then, with the clunk of a lever, the trapdoor opened beneath their feet.
And they dropped.
Chapter 71
1889, London
‘ … both were hanged by the neck at Execution Dock in London until they died. As was customary for pirates, their bodies were left dangling above the Thames at low tide until “three times covered by a high tide”.’ Maddy looked up at Sal and saw tears in her eyes. Beyond her, even Bob and Becks looked more sullen than normal.
‘Their bodies were then cut down and quartered, their heads cut off and displayed on spikes on London Bridge … ’
Maddy closed the book. She’d read out enough of that.
‘They tried … ’ Sal said, ‘they tried to call out for us … They named everything they could with words we’d pick up on.’ She looked up at Maddy. ‘And we missed them. We were too late.’ Sal pressed her lips together, holding back tears. ‘Oh God, poor, poor Liam.’
‘No, screw it. Hang on. It’s not over yet.’
Sal cocked her head.
‘Think about it! We can intercept them earlier, Sal. Earlier! There’s nearly two decades of them in the past. Two whole decades when we now know exactly where they are and what they’re getting up to!’
‘Maddy is correct,’ said Becks. ‘Liam and Rashim can very easily be reacquired now.’
‘See? The ice queen agrees with me!’ said Maddy with a smile. ‘I kno
w that all sounded pretty grim, but this is good news! We’ve got a baseline date and location to work backwards from in order to identify a precise window to open. We just need to do some more research, hit some history books and stuff.’
Sal nodded and wiped her cheeks. ‘Right … I get it.’
Maddy shrugged. ‘So, it’s all good.’ She smiled. ‘We’ve found them. We’ll figure out a time-stamp and go back and get them long before they get hanged!’
Sal still looked morose.
‘Sal? I thought you’d be happy!’ Maddy felt a little exasperated. They had an end marker – this admittedly grim account of the execution. There would almost certainly be written records made by the Admiralty Court clerks of the trial and, in those records, eyewitness accounts of the various acts of piracy conducted by Liam and Rashim, along with the dates they occurred. Enough there to start with. Failing that … they could pick any time they wanted in the two decades preceding, find somewhere on the island that was quiet and pop back. Surely it wouldn’t be too hard to go back, look around, ask some questions and be pointed in the general direction of where Liam and Rashim were holding court? But, ideally, what she wanted was a specific eyewitness account. Something relatively early in their long entrenchment in the past; after all, retrieving a middle-aged Liam would be kind of weird. She just needed to fish around for some witness account that gave them a precise enough time and place.
‘We’ll get them back, Sal. Sheesh … this is going to be the easy bit! You’ll see.’ She looked up at the two hovering support units. ‘We’ll have them back in time for tea.’
‘I know.’ Sal nodded. ‘I know we’re going to get them back … it’s just … ’
‘What?’
‘It’s just … I dunno, the thought that … that –’ she nodded at the closed history book on the table in front of them – ‘that awful thing … actually happened to Liam and Rashim.’
Maddy followed her gaze and all of a sudden the buzz, the exhilaration, the happiness felt clumsily ill-judged and misplaced. She had no real understanding of how time really worked, whether it was a line or looped back on itself; whether the future and the past were parallel rail tracks that ran side by side, or whether there were an infinite number of universes in which every possible event, every possible timeline was played out. But she realized, as she looked at the history book proudly announcing its coverage of ‘Famous Military Victories’, that somewhere, in some dimension … both Liam and Rashim had experienced death by hanging.
The thought sobered her and she moderated her tone from the boo-ya-we-scored-a-touchdown tone to something a little more reserved.
She gave Sal a hug. ‘Let’s go find them and bring them home. Eh?’
Chapter 72
1889, London
> Ready to open the portal again in one minute, Maddy.
‘Thank you, Bob.’
They’d tried this several hours ago, but the pre-release build-up of energy in the displacement machine had caused a copper wire to melt and the whole process had collapsed and left them in momentary darkness. It had taken her and Bob most of the afternoon to diagnose the fault and replace the Victorian-era cable with a length of far more reliable electrical flex that they’d brought with them from 2001.
Time to try again.
She turned to look at the marked squares in the middle of the dungeon’s floor. The spherical return portal would – hopefully, this time – appear a foot above the floor over there.
With Becks and Sal spending a couple of days picking through relevant books in the library, they had managed to isolate a perfect time-stamp, the perfect window to open. Just as Maddy had expected, there were in fact extensive notes on the trial of the ‘Notorious Pirate Kings of Pandora’. The trial, it seemed, had caught the public imagination and been followed by many of the people of London. She’d even found notes on it in Samuel Pepys’s diary who, it seemed, had bought tickets to attend one of the big prosecution days of the trial.
God, there’d even been a novel written about them. A novel written by none other than Charles Dickens entitled The Pirate Tyrant. There’d been a play too, by John Dryden – The Pirate and the Plantation Owner.
But it was the very precise testimony of Lord Thomas Modyford that had given Maddy the most accurate time and place. The most reliable window of opportunity.
> Thirty seconds.
All right, it wasn’t the perfect place to extract them from: there would be witnesses. But then half of them would be pirates and therefore full of all manner of superstitious claptrap, and not to be trusted in anything they said. The other witnesses were Modyford himself and a number of soldiers. Perhaps this window might result in some minor contamination. There might possibly be a need for them to go back and tidy things up. On the other hand, perhaps not.
History has a course it ‘wants’ to steer after all.
But, by Modyford’s account of things, there had been a moment of confusion during the incident he’d spoken of at the trial; there had been ‘much smoke, shouting, fighting, bedlam … the firing of muskets in close order’. Enough confusion presumably going on, then, that one might excuse the account of something quite so strange as a person simply disappearing in the middle of it all as the product of post-traumatic shock.
> Twenty seconds, Maddy.
Either way, fix or no fix required after rescuing them, this location was too good for her to pass up.
‘Stand clear, guys,’ she said needlessly. The displacement machine’s hum was building towards its inevitable crescendo, the moment of its energy release, like an archer releasing his bowstring. Their electric lamp dimmed, the computer monitors flickered as the current pooled in their time machine.
> Ten seconds … nine … eight …
She smiled at the thought of Liam and Rashim actually ending up as characters in a Dickens novel. She would have liked to have read it before bringing them home, or at least found some way to preserve a copy from the corrective sweep of the ensuing time wave. What a souvenir that would make.
> Five … four … three …
She felt the build-up of static electricity in the room, her hair lifted ever so slightly by it, goosebumps along her arms. Then the strong puff of displaced air and all of a sudden they were looking at a churning spherical pattern, a Van Gogh oil painting of blue sky and blue sea, wooden planks and twisty-turny figures in bright crimson.
‘OK, Bob … go grab them for me.’
1667, PORT ROYAL, JAMAICA
The sudden unexpected gust of wind across the deck made the lifeless sails above them all snap and rustle. It was enough to disturb the finely balanced stalemate. A musket discharged. That was enough to convince every other sweaty finger currently resting on a trigger to twitch convulsively.
The mid-deck suddenly filled with plumes of powder smoke as a dozen guns clapped and boomed in a discordant symphony. Liam felt something hot skim his ear. Instinctively he ducked down, fearing another shot in his direction. As the boom of gunfire faded, he heard the clash and ring of blades, the barking of voices in the swirling mist.
He drew the cutlass from his belt and turned and readied himself for the figure moving quickly out of the smoke towards him. He raised his arm in readiness to get in an early swipe across the man’s midriff. As he did, the figure drew closer, became clearer … and much bigger.
Bob’s granite-slab face emerged through the last tendrils of smoke like an Easter Island monolith rising from a haunting sea mist. Liam could see he had already collected Rashim, grasping him by his collar. Rashim was struggling and flailing instinctively: he obviously hadn’t yet seen whose giant crane-like hand had grabbed him from behind. Bob extended the other enormous hand towards Liam.
‘Come with me if you want to live, Liam.’
1889, LONDON
A handful of heartbeats and a chaos dimension eternity later, the three of them tumbled out of the mist into darkness and a tangle of limbs and curses on the cold, hard floor of the dungeon.
As Liam lay on his back looking up at a curved ceiling of damp bricks, gasping, trying to make sense of the last jumbled ten seconds of his life, he heard something shrill and irritating hooting merrily.
‘Skippa’s home! Skippa’s home!’
Then into his field of vision, looming over him, a pair of faces he knew so very well. A pair of faces he’d begun to worry he might never see again.
‘You all right down there, boys?’ said Maddy. ‘Don’t bother getting up now.’
And Sal. She didn’t wait. She dropped down on to her knees and planted a kiss on his cheek. ‘Welcome home, Liam.’
Chapter 73
1889, London
Liam watched the barges on the River Thames from Blackfriars Bridge. Watched them coming in to be loaded and unloaded: a ballet of industry and manpower in the beating, smoky heart of London.
There had been a time wave that had arrived only minutes after he and Rashim had stumbled through into the dungeon. It almost seemed random. Sometimes a wave took hours to arrive, sometimes days; in this last case, for whatever reason, it had merely been minutes. A small wave, not a roiling bank of black filling the sky but a shimmer that had seemed to affect nothing more than the words on the pages of countless books in countless libraries around the world.
Maddy said it was a shame that the wave had arrived so quickly. She’d wanted to show him and Rashim the two history books she’d pinched from the library. She’d said their unintended long stay in the past had led to quite an adventure. Apparently he and Rashim had become rather notorious figures of seventeenth-century English history.
According to her, they’d both lived another two whole decades in that time. And during those years they had built a budding nation on the island of Hispaniola. They’d also become something of a problem to England and Spain, enough of a problem that they had sent an army and a fleet of ships across the Atlantic to deal with them.
Maddy also told them what their fate had ended up being; that both he and Rashim had been hanged like common criminals in a place a stone’s throw from where this whole unintended adventure had begun. London Bridge.