‘But I am the Keeper and Guardian of the Treasure!’ cried the man.
‘Tell that to the Vandals,’ said the Security Man. ‘If they’ll listen, hur, hur.’
‘Onyx!’ said Rosetti. ‘Tell this Keeper that it is a great honour to meet him, and that news of his learning has spread as far as Britannia.’
‘But it hasn’t.’
‘It has now. And tell him we would like to admire the Cup.’
Onyx was already talking. The Keeper listened, frowning. Then his eyes lit up and he started to jabber and his hands traced in the air the outline of a goblet that was unmistakably the Greyte Cup, otherwise the Holy Grail.
‘He says he is delighted you have such good taste,’ said Onyx, translating. ‘For this is an ancient cup that survived the doom of drowned Atlantis. Of course it has been a bit spoiled when the silly Emperor had his name engraved upon the knop. But he would be delighted to show it to us. It is just over there.’
The Keeper shouted an order at the packers. And suddenly there was a packer standing up, and there in his hand, glittering in the hot Roman sun, was the Greyte Cup.
‘Grab it!’ said Owen.
‘Be subtle,’ said Rosetti, pushing his spiky-haired colleague gently but firmly behind him. ‘And get ready to run.’ Then, to the Keeper, ‘Atlantean, you say? I should have said earlier.’
‘No, no,’ said the Keeper. ‘Certainly it has the metals and shape of Atlantis.’
‘Show me,’ said Rosetti, putting out his hands. The Keeper handed him the Cup.
‘ARRRRRRRRR,’ cried a great voice somewhere. There was a tramp of nailed shoes. A squad of large barbarians came round the corner at a run. There was a roar of noise and a blur of movement and a cluster of sweaty faces grinning with effort and painted blue, perhaps with woad. The lead barbarian was wearing a tunic bearing the device of a dagger. It looked like a Footer shirt. A Skool Footer shirt. The squad rushed between Rosetti and the Keeper and ran on. A smaller man was bringing up the rear. He looked round. Onyx could not see his face properly, but she could have sworn that he had an extra eye in the middle of his forehead.
The Keeper stood with his mouth open and his hands outstretched, as if he had just handed Rosetti the Cup. Rosetti stood with his mouth open and his hands outstretched, as if he was about to receive the Cup. But neither of them had the Cup.
The Cup was gone.
‘After them!’ yelled Onyx.
‘Guards!’ yelled the Keeper.
‘Careful!’ yelled Rosetti.
‘That was a Dagger Footer shirt! Those were Games Skoolies!’ yelled Owen.
‘Those aren’t!’ yelled Onyx, pointing.
A group of men in horned helmets were running towards them. Some were waving swords, others axes.
‘Vandals. Ooer,’ said Onyx, summing up the general view.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen!’ cried the Keeper, stepping in front of the Vandals and standing there on wobbly knees. ‘Just in time! Here you will see the er treasure of the Emperor, all packed up and ready to go! Provided you put it on public display obviously!’
‘Display?’ said the lead Vandal. ‘Course we will, we’ll show it to our wives. Outta the way, fungus face.’
‘Rrrr!’ cried the Vandals, and dived into the cart with an expensive clanking noise.
‘Off we go,’ said Rosetti in a very small voice.
‘What about the Cup?’ said Owen.
‘Cups are no good to people who have been chopped up with axes,’ said Rosetti.
‘See what you mean. Keeper, I should run if I were you.’
The Skolars tiptoed away. ‘What will the Emperor say?’ moaned the Keeper, already running.
‘Goal!’ said the large, silly voice of the Emperor from beyond a pall of smoke.
‘Hmm,’ said the Keeper, disappearing over the horizon.
The Skolars slunk back to the patch of scrub, dodging a couple of Vandal patrols carrying bulging sacks. And there was the dovecote.
‘No Cup?’ said Miss Davies, looking up from the Time Dove she was feeding.
‘I had it in my hand,’ said Rosetti.
‘It was snatched,’ said Onyx.
‘By Footerers,’ said Owen. ‘From our own time.’
‘I saw Slee,’ said Onyx.
‘And Damage,’ said Rosetti.
‘Impossible. In. Quick,’ said Miss Davies.
A gust of smoke eddied through the dovecote. Cries in Vandalese came from outside. ‘Off we go,’ said Miss Davies as something thunked into the door.
Flutter, coo, nest thoughts. The smoke had gone. From outside came the distant cries of Games sufferers and the familiar pong of Skool.
‘To the Study,’ said Miss Davies. They waded through the other Skoolies. When they were sitting down, she said, ‘Tell me what happened.’
‘We had the Cup nearly in our hands,’ said Rosetti. ‘But it was snatched away. By Slee. And Damage. I told you.’
‘You are imagining things,’ said Miss Davies. ‘How would those idiots travel in Time?’
‘Dunno,’ said Owen doggedly. ‘But they did.’
Miss Davies smiled. ‘I think not,’ she said. ‘The art of Time voyaging has vanished since my father’s time. You must have been seeing things.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Owen, and opened his mouth to start arguing.
Onyx knew that if he started he would never stop, so she cut him off. ‘The Keeper said it came from Atlantis. It must have survived the Drowning, come through Jerusalem and arrived in Rome.’
‘Atlantis, eh?’ said Miss Davies. ‘I always thought it was mythical. Well, time for prep.’
‘Slee and –’
‘You’ll be late!’ trilled Miss Davies, and waltzed from the room.
The Skolars washed off the grime of burning Rome. Then they climbed into Skool Uniform and marched up to Big Skool and took their places. Elphine was there. She had blue dye on her face.
‘You’re all inky,’ said Onyx.
‘Never,’ said Elphine.
‘You’re blue,’ said Onyx, pointing.
‘That was off of Slee’s hand,’ said Elphine dreamily. ‘He walloped me one. Slee’s fantastic,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said Onyx, peering at the blue dye. It was not ink. It was woad. As worn by Vandals at the Sack of Rome.
‘You got a boyfriend yet?’ said Elphine.
‘Two,’ said Onyx, blushing violently. Her heart was hammering too. But that was nothing to do with fibs about boyfriends. It was because this was proof that Slee had been in Rome.
After Prep was Tea. People threw food while Security Masters patrolled the aisles writing names in notebooks. Founder’s Day was a mere twelve days away, and everyone was pretty excited, except for Onyx and Rosetti and Owen, who were rather worried, and threw food to stop themselves thinking about it.
‘They were in Rome,’ said Onyx, ducking to avoid the blizzard of flung buns. ‘I’ve got evidence.’
‘Wha?’ Rosetti tossed a pat of butter at the ceiling, where it clung.
‘Slee and Damage.’
‘So you keep saying,’ said Rosetti. ‘But like Miss Davies said: how would they get there?’
‘They must have a machine.’
‘Never,’ said Rosetti. ‘Two, in the same Skool?’
‘I tell you, they’re finding out where we are going in Time and getting there before us and nicking the Cup.’
‘They can’t be,’ said Rosetti. ‘Because if they had nicked the Cup before us, it wouldn’t have been there for us to see. Ow.’
‘Wha.’
‘My head hurts.’
‘Well, someone’s nicking it,’ said Owen, logical as always. ‘And we did see it, and no Dread Thing has happened. The reason for this is as follows. One, it is always nicked just before it would have disappeared anyway, in the storming of the Temple or the Chartres fire or the Sack of Rome. And like Miss Davies said, it’s half real and half legend, so the normal rules do not apply.’
> ‘This is not logical.’
‘But it is true, because I have seen it,’ said Owen, ‘so it must be logical, but in a way we do not yet understand. The other logical thing is that someone else has got a Time Machine, and they know where we’re going, and they get there first. And I did see Slee and Damage and they are Dr Cosm’s favourites, so I think it is Dr Cosm. And I’m going to look for their machine. Tonight.’
The butter pat on the ceiling had been melting steadily. Now it dropped on the head of a Security Master.
‘Nice shot,’ said Owen, and trudged away.
As Rosetti watched him go, this thought was in his head:
Onyx had a mind like a firework display, brilliant, but shooting in all directions. Owen was different. He had never, ever known Owen to be wrong.
At ten o’clock, half an hour after lights out, Owen sat up. In the next bed Rosetti was breathing evenly. Owen put on his dressing gown, pulled a paper bag with eyeholes over his head, and padded silently out of the room. Hong, phew, snored Rosetti as Owen closed the door.
Owen went along the corridor and trotted down the stairs. He ducked into an alcove to let a master crunch by. Then he flitted out into the Cloisters.
A three-quarter moon was hanging in a slate-black sky. Shadows lay jagged across the grey grass, and the Duggan Cube was the colour of bone. Owen flitted from shadow to shadow until he was in the Cube porch.
He gimmicked the keypad (easy, to one of his giant mind) and pushed open the door. Inside, the corridors were lit pale blue. He paused, listening. Was that a footfall behind him? Silence, except for the distant hum of pumps and the roar of his breath inside the paper bag.
On the video screens in the Control Room, the small figure padded down the corridor and made a rude sign at the camera. But Otto was asleep at the console, dreaming of his new life as Deputy Headmaster of the Universe. And Dr Cosm was in his white bed, snoring behind his new locks, dreaming of Tests.
Or so Owen hoped.
Owen had no idea what a Time Machine looked like. But there was nothing that could possibly have been one in any of the classrooms. Silently, he checked the Control Room. It smelled of sleeping Otto. He checked the labs. Nothing. He went down to the cellars. They stretched away far and empty under the dim lights, as tidy as only Dr Cosm could make them. Nothing there either. There was only one place left.
He took a narrow steel staircase that wound into the very core of the Cube. A door ahead of him said HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS LAB – KEEP OUT.
‘No,’ said Owen. He gripped the door handle and pushed it down. There was a clunk of precision machinery. The door swung open. He went in, leaving the door open.
The High Energy Physics Laboratory was bigger on the inside than on the outside. On the steel floor under the blue lights stood a table surrounded by six chairs. All were made out of a pale-grey metal that did not reflect the lights. In the middle of the table was something that looked like a flower vase with no flowers in it. Owen stooped over the table to examine the vase. A sound made him look up.
The door was closing.
He leaped across the room and tried to push it open. But it was too powerful for him, and it clunked shut.
Owen sat down on one of the metal chairs. Telling lies made him feel really, really ill. What would he do when Dr Cosm came in tomorrow morning and asked him what he was doing? It would be awful. And there was another thing. Owen had read a book once. In the book someone had got stuck in a place and it had been silly because the shut-up person had been there for days but he had never needed the lavatory. Owen needed the lavatory now. He looked around. He spotted the vase thing in the middle of the table. He emptied it out and put it on the floor –
The door was opening.
‘Psst,’ said a voice.
Owen looked up, heart hammering. He saw Rosetti, dressed like him in dressing gown, pyjamas and paper bag.
‘Quick!’ cried Owen, and sprinted out of the door and into the lavatory.
Rosetti took a look around the High Energy Lab. The door was closing again, slowly. He put the vase back on the table and slid out into the corridor. Owen came out of the lav. Rosetti said, ‘I hope you didn’t flush the –’
The corridor filled with a huge roar of flushing.
‘– bog,’ said Rosetti. ‘Run!’
A door slammed upstairs. Otto had woken up. Now he was pressing buttons. Sirens began to sound.
They ran out of the labs, dived through the outer door as it closed, sprinted across the Cloisters and up to their dorm. They flung their paper bags into the waste-paper basket, leaped into their beds and closed their eyes.
Two minutes later the dorm door opened. They heard heavy footsteps and smelled the reeking breath of Dr Cosm. Then to Rosetti’s intense relief Miss Davies’s voice rang like silver bells upon the air. ‘Doctor?’ she said. ‘Hello. A charming evening, is it not?’
‘There has been trespassing,’ said Dr Cosm. ‘Alarms have sounded. Paper bags have been worn on heads to evade CCTV.’
‘Nothing to do with my Skolars,’ said Miss Davies primly. ‘My Skolars know how to behave. Perhaps it was your nasty science people –’
‘Not nasty,’ said Dr Cosm. ‘Rigorous. Correct.’
‘Whatever,’ said Miss Davies. ‘Now I think you should trot along. Goodnight.’
‘Sss,’ said Dr Cosm, like a defeated serpent, and left.
Miss Davies came into the dorm. She went to the waste-paper basket, pulled out the paper bags and tore them into tiny fragments, then sat on the chair between Owen’s and Rosetti’s beds. She said, ‘Well?’
‘I told you. I saw the Duggans in Rome,’ said Owen. ‘And Onyx saw Slee’s woad on Elphine. I went to look for their Time Machine.’
‘And I followed him,’ said Rosetti. ‘Just in case. Because he can’t tell lies and I can.’
‘Teamwork. Excellent,’ said Miss Davies absently. ‘Time Machine, though? How could they?’
‘Dunno, but they must have,’ said Owen, stubbornly. ‘They were there. Look at this.’ Owen put something into Miss Davies’s hand. Rosetti passed her his reading-under-the-bedclothes torch.
‘Yes?’ said Miss Davies from above the pool of yellow torchlight.
‘It is a coin,’ said Owen. ‘I found it when I emptied the vase on the table. It is a five-sesterce piece bearing on one side the head of Valentinian the Third. The one we saw playing football one thousand five hundred and fifty-three years ago this morning. Look,’ said Owen. ‘It is brand new.’
There was a silence. Then Miss Davies said, ‘Golly.’
Then there was a really long silence, because Rosetti and Owen had gone to sleep.
As the Skool clock boomed nine the next morning, the Librarian raised gloomy eyes from his catalogue. The little enemy girl was here again, all clean and shiny in the morning sun, her pigtails sticking out like the hands of a clock at twenty past four. The Librarian knew her name was Onyx Keene, but that was not what the Librarian called her. What the Librarian called her was Asthma Attack.
‘Morning, Libo!’ cried Onyx, dumping her notebook in her usual corner and pulling a wheelbarrow out of the rack. ‘Where’s all the Ancient Egypt?’
The Librarian pointed dumbly, his handkerchief pressed to his face. ‘If you want me,’ he said indistinctly, ‘I shall be on the windowsill in the nice fresh air.’
The barrow rumbled. From his perch on the windowsill, the Librarian watched Onyx plunge sneezing into the dust drifts. Pages began to turn and dust to billow. From the cloud came cries of ‘Atishoo!’ and ‘Ptshah!’ And, finally, ‘Yeahchoo!’ followed by the thump of feet heading down the Tower’s stairs.
Interesting, thought the Librarian, who knew his shelves well. Asthma Attack had said Ancient Egypt. But she had actually taken the books on Atlantis. Obviously she was trying to mislead him. Ahahaha, thought the Librarian, reaching for the telephone and dialling Dr Cosm.
‘Very interesting,’ said Dr Cosm. ‘When I achieve Absolute Power you wil
l profit from this, Librarian. Benefits and rebates will accrue. Oh yes indeed. Nyahahaha.’
‘Nyahahahaha,’ said the Librarian.
‘Shut up,’ said Dr Cosm.
Next morning it was time to hand in the Lovely Writing part of the Greyte Cup work. This was Onyx’s responsibility. Of course she had finished her poem, an Ode to Wisdom, three days ago. Since there were a couple of hours before handing-in time, she concentrated on colouring in the capital letters. Thus it was not until the lesson after Break that the Skolars were able to have discussions in the Study.
Miss Davies started. She said, ‘About other Time Machines. I’ve checked the pigeons. There are none missing. And nobody else has the skills.’
‘What is the motto of the Polymathic Skolar?’ said Rosetti cheekily.
Onyx’s hand shot up. ‘There is more than one explanation for everything!’ she cried.
‘Including Time Travel,’ said Rosetti.
‘Also there are more ways of getting ancient coins than fetching them from the past,’ said Miss Davies.
‘Now. Do your research, Onyx. Because as soon as the pigeons are ready we really, really must collect the Cup because there are only ten days left till Founder’s Day. Meanwhile we will concentrate on Hard Sums and Running. Strictly according to the timetable.’ She looked at her tiny gold watch. ‘Starting in five minutes, with Hard Sums.’
‘Hooray!’ cried Onyx.
After Miss Davies had gone, Owen and Onyx bustled about filling their pencil cases. Rosetti stayed at his desk, watching a large spider in its web. It reminded him of Dr Cosm. But with another part of his mind he was thinking timetable. Table. Time.
Funny.
Why did the word sound so important?
Then the bell rang, and boots roared in the corridors, and it was business as usual at Abbot Dagger’s.
Next morning in the Library the Librarian found a parcel on his desk. He unwrapped it feverishly, but not feverishly enough to raise any dust. Inside it was a gold inhaler for his asthma. From a Wellwisher, said the card.
‘Oo!’ said the Librarian, hugging himself. ‘How kind!’
For the writing on the card, thin and spidery, was the writing of Dr Cosm, who would any day now be Ruler of the Universe and Headmaster of the Academy.
Abbot Dagger's Academy and the Quest for the Holy Grail Page 9