The History Keepers: The Storm Begins

by Damian Dibben

  He had pins and needles down one leg, so he carefully shifted to a more comfortable position. When he saw the two tiny yellow eyes staring at him from the blackness, he shrieked out loud, shot back and knocked over a pile of boxes. Panting with fear, he gazed around, scanning the darkness. The eyes flashed again, and a rat scurried across the space into the shadows.

  ‘Rats! I hate rats!’ he found himself cursing.

  Jake realized that the voices had stopped. A moment later the hatch creaked open, and in a flash Nathan was at the foot of the ladder, his drawn sword in front of him.

  ‘Identify yourself or die!’ he commanded in a deep, menacing voice.

  Jake picked himself up and put his hands in the air.

  ‘What the hell were you thinking?’ Nathan demanded, banging his fist on the table.

  Jake was standing uneasily in the dining area, facing three sets of unsmiling eyes (four, counting Mr Drake’s). Like Nathan, Topaz and Charlie had changed into sixteenth-century clothes. Topaz looked beautiful in a creamy silk gown with a square neck and trumpet-shaped sleeves. Charlie, who managed to appear like a young scientist whatever he put on, wore a doublet and hose in small red check, along with a felt cap that had a feather in it.

  ‘Do you think this is some kind of game?’ Nathan continued. ‘We are on a mission. There are lives at stake. Not just lives – civilizations!’ he added dramatically.

  ‘I was just—’

  ‘You were just what?’

  This was a very different Nathan to the playful joker Jake had met on his arrival.

  ‘I just wanted to find my parents.’

  ‘It’s not your job. We have to take him back,’ Nathan decided emphatically.

  ‘Ce n’est pas possible. We’re just twenty leagues from the horizon point.’ Topaz gestured towards the Constantor hanging over the dining table. ‘We’ll lose a day.’

  ‘Can’t be helped. He’ll jeopardize everything. Turn her round, Charlie.’

  ‘Topaz is right. We’ll lose a whole day,’ Charlie said before slipping back to the stove, where he had three separate pans on the go. With a professional flick, he tossed some large field mushrooms.

  Again Nathan struck the table in annoyance. ‘Well, he can’t travel the distance. A first-timer? This isn’t a pleasant stroll to 1805. It’s three hundred and fourteen years. If he detonates, we’re all doomed.’

  Jake looked up at Nathan in horror. Did he really just hear the word ‘detonate’?

  ‘Besides which – look at him,’ Nathan continued. ‘He’s wearing school uniform. Think he might stick out a little.’

  ‘Oh, really. You have enough clothes and accessories for an army in your cabin,’ Topaz pointed out.

  But Nathan was resolute. ‘We put him out on the rowing boat – he finds his own way back.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd!’ said Topaz. ‘How will he make it alone?’

  ‘Not our problem.’

  ‘He’s a diamond, Nathan. Grade one, according to Jupitus Cole. He’ll survive. Anyway, as group leader, it’s my decision.’ Topaz turned to Jake. ‘You can stay. But when we arrive in Venice, you remain in the background. Understand?’

  Jake nodded. He looked at them all seriously. ‘I’m sorry I came on board. I made a mistake. But now I promise to do anything I can to help.’

  Topaz’s face softened a little.

  Nathan shrugged and slumped back in his seat. ‘Grade one, huh?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Who would have thought …?’

  ‘What exactly does it mean … to “detonate”?’ Jake wondered.

  ‘If your body isn’t prepared for high levels of atomium – which can take some practice,’ said Charlie, turning away from the stove, ‘you can stall in the time flux: your atoms split into millions of particles, making you explode like a hydrogen bomb, and taking us all down with you.’ He took a dish out of the oven and tested its contents. ‘This courgette soufflé is perfection. I may have surpassed myself.’

  Though Jake now had no appetite, the dinner that Charlie had ‘rustled up’ would have won him an award in any top London restaurant. It included cherry tomato tartine, stuffed miniature peppers with marinated mushrooms à la Grecque and framboise torte with chantilly. Charlie, it transpired, had learned to cook in Napoleon’s kitchen in Paris, but the experience had left him a firm vegetarian.

  After the plates had been cleared away, Topaz placed a veneered box on the table. There was utter silence. She opened it and took out a vial of atomium and a Horizon Cup. For the last half-hour Jake had been imagining his detonation. He wondered how gorily explosive it would be.

  The atomium was once again repulsive – like the liquid that seeps from old batteries, Jake imagined – and its effect was quicker and more alarming than the first time. The moment Jake took it, he nodded unsteadily and passed out. He was woken up by Charlie jabbing a finger into his chest.

  ‘Wake up. You mustn’t sleep. Wake up.’

  Jake tried to focus on the jumble of faces above him. He was slumped over the dining table.

  ‘Wake up! It’s dangerous to sleep.’

  ‘Are we there? Venice?’ Jake asked, drifting off again.

  Nathan nodded at Charlie, who filled a glass with cold water and tossed it into Jake’s face. He woke with a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘I don’t want to explode.’

  After two minutes he collapsed again. It carried on like this for half an hour – until Topaz shouted down from the deck, ‘Five minutes to horizon!’

  Jake’s state suddenly altered completely. A jolt of electricity threw him up out of his seat. ‘We’re flying!’ he shouted – and started dancing around the cabin in what looked like an Irish jig.

  Nathan was embarrassed, and Mr Drake squawked excitedly.

  ‘I need to speak to Topaz!’ Jake announced as he swept up the stairs onto the deck.

  She gasped as he took her in his arms like some romantic movie hero, then laughed in confusion. Charlie appeared on deck, also shaking his head in amused bewilderment. Jake was about to kiss Topaz when the Constantor clicked into alignment and he seemed to shoot into the air like a bullet.

  His alter ego – or whatever it was – hurtled to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere where the blue turns to dark space. From here, Jake could see the ocean curving, the continent of Europe; France, Spain, the boot of Italy. Britain lay under a cloud of mist, just like the map on TV weather forecasts. He spun round, hurtling back towards the sea, and saw himself on the deck of the Campana, holding onto Topaz. Then he collapsed on the wooden boards, shaking and laughing.

  Charlie looked at his wristwatch, tapped it with his fingers and smiled. ‘We made it: 1506, July the fifteenth.’

  Jake noticed a number of things at once. It was now dark and very hot; the ocean was as flat as a pancake and the sky shimmered with millions of stars. But his head throbbed as never before in his life and he felt he would rather die than look Topaz in the eye. He took off his blazer and carefully sat down facing the stern and the retreating sea.

  It was the dead of night and everyone was fast asleep on the Mont St Michel. The occasional flickering taper was all that moved in the silent corridors and staircases. Outside, amongst the dark granite towers and turrets, the seabirds were quiet in their nests.

  Then a figure in a dark blue cloak, carrying a candle, emerged from the gloom of an archway and tiptoed along the passage to the door of the communications room. The form – impossible to tell whether it was a man or a woman – stopped, looked around and, slowly and carefully, opened the creaking door and slipped inside.

  The deserted room was bathed in ghostly moonlight. At its centre stood the glass cabinet containing the Meslith nucleus. Four further machines could be seen on desks along one side of the space. The figure approached the first of these, sat down and started typing, making the electric rod fizz with a brilliant light that reflected like shooting stars around the room. The intruder whispered the words of the message as they appeared:

 
; ‘Agents arriving July 15th, Quay Ognissanti, Venice …’

  Having completed the task, the figure stood, replaced the chair under the desk, dusted down the keys of the Meslith machine with a handkerchief and stealthily left the room.

  As the person crept back along the passage and through the archway, the message started on its journey across space and time …

  The flickering signal that had lit up the crystalline rod now jumped to the lightning conductor that jutted out from the steeple at the apex of the Mount. Here it flashed again, with greater intensity, lighting up the dark clouds, then launched itself into the time flux.

  It made its journey through the dark matter of a trillion atoms, finding its route across the centuries.

  The code, almost perfectly intact, arrived, still flickering, at a Meslith machine that sat on an old table in a high-ceilinged room. In front of the table a window opened out onto the rooftops of a dark and ancient Venice. A sleeping figure was woken by the glinting light, which picked out a great scar running down the side of his gleaming shaven head. He sat up, then dragged his bulky frame off his straw mattress and called out. Two guards, both clad in black breastplates and crimson cloaks, came into the room. The man with the scar pointed over to desk. The light from the Meslith machine lit up their faces.

  They smiled.

  11 THE JEWEL OF THE ADRIATIC

  THE CAMPANA SAILED through the hot night, gliding effortlessly across the flat ocean. Topaz was at the helm, guiding its progress.

  Charlie came on deck and spotted Jake sitting in the shadows of the rigging. He grinned at him. ‘Feeling better now?’

  Jake nodded sheepishly. ‘How long will it take to get to Venice?’

  ‘From Point Zero, usually four days, but we hurdled. That’s why the atomium was so strong.’

  ‘It certainly was,’ Jake muttered, ashamed. ‘What do you mean “hurdled”?’

  ‘We jumped horizon points. Saved ourselves nearly three days. I think his highness may be ready for your fitting.’

  Jake accompanied Charlie down the stairs. He tried his best to look only at his feet, but he was unable to resist a furtive glance at Topaz. She stood at the wheel, scanning the horizon with her large indigo eyes, the great panorama of stars shimmering around her.

  Ten minutes later, Nathan, Charlie and Jake were all squeezed into the boys’ cabin. Jake was trying on one of Nathan’s outfits. He’d already found a pair of breeches, some stockings and a voluminous white shirt gathered at the neck. Charlie helped him into a velvet doublet.

  ‘Please be gentle,’ Nathan begged. ‘That piece is priceless. The velvet is finest Sienese and the fleur-de-lys were hand-embroidered in Florence with real gold thread.’

  ‘The sleeves are meant to be like that, are they?’ asked Jake, referring to the gaping holes down their length.

  ‘They’re slashed. That’s the fashion,’ Nathan announced in a voice as dry as dust.

  ‘Shoes?’ asked Charlie.

  ‘These are a little outdated for 1506 – especially for Italy – but they’ll have to do. I’m short on shoes,’ Nathan lied as he presented Jake with a pair of boots.

  Jake put them on and the other two stood back to inspect him. Inside, Jake may have felt awkward, but he looked the part. He seemed to stand up straighter.

  ‘Do I get a sword?’ he asked hopefully. He had noticed Nathan’s extravagant rapier of ornate dark silver; Charlie and Topaz were also armed.

  ‘I don’t really see the need,’ Nathan replied curtly. ‘You’ll be seeing no active duty.’

  ‘But still, he’ll need one,’ announced Charlie as he tucked into his third bowl of framboise torte. ‘In case of emergencies.’

  Nathan grunted in irritation. ‘I’ll be left with nothing at this rate.’

  He threw open one of his trunks. There were at least twelve swords carefully arranged in the velvet casing. Jake’s eyes lit up at the sight of them. His hand instinctively reached out for the most impressive: a double-bladed duelling sword, the hilt crafted in the shape of a dragon.

  ‘No can do,’ said Nathan, removing Jake’s hand. ‘Reserved for special occasions only.’ Instead, he selected the most basic, least interesting of the weapons. ‘Ever handled a sword before?’ he asked, passing it over carefully.

  ‘Of course. Fencing club at school. I was commended,’ Jake told him, lying shamelessly. He tried to show off with a few flamboyant thrusts, but the sword flew out of his hand and landed with a clatter on top of Charlie’s framboise torte.

  Charlie did not flinch, just carefully removed it from his pudding, passed it to Nathan and carried on eating. Nathan, unimpressed by the display, put the sword in its scabbard and fastened it around Jake’s waist.

  ‘That’s where it stays. It’s purely decoration, do you understand?’

  ‘What are these?’ asked Jake excitedly. Beside Nathan’s trunk lay a large leather wallet containing a collection of fake beards and moustaches.

  It was Charlie’s turn to remove Jake’s hand.

  ‘Ne touche pas!’ Nathan warned in a terrible French accent. ‘Those rats’ tails are Charlie’s pride and joy. Personally I go au naturel – disguise myself purely with my facial expression.’ Nathan demonstrated by narrowing his eye and furrowing his brow.

  Charlie tutted and snatched up his prized collection. ‘You know as well as I do, Nathan, that they’ve saved your skin on more than one occasion.’ He closed the wallet and fastened it to his belt.

  Jake couldn’t help but smile. He loved the way Charlie, though only fourteen, behaved like a mad old professor.

  ‘Well, you’d better have a look at yourself.’ Charlie held up the mirror.

  Jake did a double-take. There was a bold adventurer staring back at him.

  The Campana sailed on through the morning, across the endless calm of the Mediterranean. The hot sun rose high in sky, reaching its zenith before starting its slow summer descent.

  Jake took in deep breaths of fresh sea air as he surveyed the horizon. He looked down at his sword and, checking that he couldn’t be seen, surreptitiously unsheathed it.

  ‘Stand back, villain!’ he exclaimed, holding up the weapon to an invisible foe. ‘It is I, Jake Djones of Greenwich—’ He stopped – it didn’t have quite the right ring to it. ‘It is I, Jake Djones, special agent of the History Keepers’ Secret Service, defender of good, nemesis of all evil. You have breathed your last—’

  Jake stopped again, aware that eyes were upon him. Charlie and Mr Drake were peering round the mast, watching the spectacle. He reddened in embarrassment and quickly sheathed his sword again.

  At three in the afternoon, Topaz sighted their destination. Far in the distance, shimmering like gold in the afternoon heat, they could see the distinctive silhouette of Venice.

  As they drew closer, the air started to fill with a cacophony of sounds. The quay was teeming with activity, with vessels of all sizes and types arriving or setting sail, unloading or stocking up. Jake had never seen so many ships in one place – a shimmering forest of rigging, masts, banners and flags, with sailors, merchants and traders all shouting for attention.

  ‘The city of Venice, the Jewel of the Adriatic,’ said Charlie, as if giving a guided tour. ‘Originally founded in the sixth century, Venice inhabits a crucial position between Europe and Asia. And although recent Spanish discoveries in the New World have gone some way to diminish Venetian power, its merchants and bankers still dominate world trade. The candy-coloured building there,’ he said, pointing at a glittering pink edifice, ‘is the palace of the doge. The watch tower next to it is the Campanile, though of course it is yet to reach its full splendour.’

  As their ship was moored between a small fishing boat and a vast Persian galleon, Jake gazed in wonder at the extraordinary sights that greeted him. He knew that he would never forget that moment: the sight of all those people teeming on the shore, all belonging to a different era from his own. It was as if one of the old paintings he loved so much had act
ually come to life.

  There were rich merchants in doublet and hose, soldiers in armour, there were men in turbans and long robes and poor women in rags. There were dogs everywhere. An elegant lurcher belonging to an aristocratic lady was playing with the rough-haired terrier of a street seller. There were cats watching from wall tops or circling the people in search of fish heads. There were goats and horses and parrots in cages. (Mr Drake studied these with great interest and a hint of sympathy.) Jake was bombarded with smells – spices, crates of fresh herbs, fish and fried meats.

  As he watched the scene, his heart thumped with excitement inside his new adventurer’s clothes. Suddenly he caught sight of a tall figure wearing a black breastplate and a crimson cloak and hood. The man stood perfectly still as the crowd surged around him. Although his face was not visible, Jake had an uncomfortable sense that he was staring directly at the Campana.

  He turned to Charlie. ‘Do you see that man there? I think he’s looking at us.’

  Charlie followed his gaze, but the man was no longer to be seen. Jake scanned the crowd for the crimson cloak, but he could not find it.

  His eyes lit instead upon a skinny boy coming along the quay, surreptitiously reading the names of the ships as he passed them. He was red-cheeked, gawky and kept bumping into people and apologizing. When he saw the Campana, the boy stopped and checked the name against some writing on the parchment he held in his hand. He then looked at Charlie and, half reading his notes, announced stiffly, ‘Welcome to Venice – what cargo do you carry?’

  Jake guessed that this was some kind of code, as Charlie answered in the same deliberate way, ‘We carry tamarind from the east.’

  At this, the boy relaxed, grinned and waved at everyone on the ship. ‘Buon giorno – Paolo Cozzo, Italian liaison, sixteenth century.’

  Nathan sprang down onto the quayside beside him. He was a good foot taller than the Italian boy. ‘Why don’t you use a loudspeaker next time, so everyone can hear?’

  It took Paolo a moment to register that Nathan was being sarcastic. He grinned and nodded, then wiped the sweat off his brow. Charlie jumped ashore, followed by Topaz.