by Bee Ridgway
“But now the end of the world has changed,” Alva said, her voice very soft. “Do you see, Nick, why they are desperate? Why we are desperate? The end has turned around and is racing back toward the beginning.”
Nick looked at Alva and she looked back at him. Her face was as placid as if they were discussing the weather. For the first time Nick let himself really think about the Pale and what it meant. He gripped the table half a second before he felt panic blow through him full force, panic in the form of the river, cold and deep, and it was filling his lungs, his eyes. . . .
“Nick!”
Someone was shouting his name.
“Nick!”
He felt a tickle on his face, like the wing of a butterfly. And then a sharp pain, like a wasp sting.
He slapped his hand to his cheek and heard a chuckle. He opened his eyes. He was on the floor of the pub, and Alva was bending over him. “What happened?”
“I had to slap you, like I had to slap Henry,” she said, smiling.
Nick clambered to his feet and slumped into his chair. He put his head in his hands. “It’s getting worse,” he said. “The more I am aware of the river, the more it seems to drag at me. Thinking about the Pale just now . . .”
Alva put her hand on his shoulder. “It is because you aren’t trained,” she said. “They sent you back with no training and expected you to be safe. It’s as if a pilot had taken you up in an airplane and then handed you the controls and said, ‘Land it.’”
Nick groaned. “Then train me, for the love of God. I’m fit, I’m halfway intelligent, I’m a soldier—train me!”
“Training takes months, Nick. To learn to jump, and to learn to do it safely—”
“Yes, yes, I know. They told me. It takes too long. But there must be something I can do to keep from being swept away every time I think about the river.”
Alva sat down opposite him again. “When it happens, what does it feel like?”
“Like all of time is stampeding through me—like a wind or a . . . well, like a river. And I am like a little boat, or a leaf—clinging to my mooring by the most fragile of threads. . . .” Nick found that his hand was in his pocket. He drew out the acorn.
“What is that?”
Nick closed his fingers. He didn’t want her to see it.
“An acorn.” She answered her own question. “The fruit of unenclosed land.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s what acorn means. ‘The fruit of unenclosed land.’” She smiled at him.
He clenched the acorn tightly in his fist and drew a deep breath. “I am in love,” he said.
Her eyes opened wide, but she said nothing.
“And this acorn . . . it is . . . it reminds me of that love.” He found that confessing it felt good. “I don’t know why, but it is.” Nick felt calmer now. The rushing in his ears receded. He smiled at Alva. “There. That’s my secret. You have the Pale and the Talisman and time travel and these catacombs. I have an acorn.”
Alva nodded. “I understand.” She sipped her beer and he sipped his. The moment felt . . . brotherly.
“May I ask you,” Alva said after a moment, “is that acorn from here? I mean, is it from 1815? Not the twenty-first century?”
“Yes. It is from now.”
Alva sucked in her cheeks. “I wonder . . .” She tapped the tabletop with one finger. “I think your acorn might be your salvation. I can’t train you to jump in one day, but I might be able to help you anchor yourself firmly to this time. Do you trust me?”
“Of course.”
She smiled. “You say that quickly, you who are meant to betray me.”
“I think you know that I—” He stopped.
“That you are Ofan?”
Nick frowned. He didn’t know if that was what he had been about to say.
Alva shook her head. “No, never mind. I do not need you to swear allegiance.” She stood. “Come. Get up. I’d like to try something.”
Nick got to his feet.
Alva took his hands.
“Are we going to jump? This is what Arkady did when—”
“Don’t worry. You are in the transporter. At the very worst you’ll jump to some Ofan bar brawl in the fifteenth century and they’ll just bring you back to me here. But I think this will work. I’m going to begin to jump with you, but I will let go of you just as we enter the river. When that happens, I want you to think about that acorn. Use it to stay here. To resist the river. I don’t want you to touch it, for this exercise is about your mind, Nick, not about the acorn itself.” She squeezed his fingers. “Are you ready?”
“No! What are you doing?”
But she was already doing it. Jumping with Alva was not like jumping with Arkady. With Arkady the feeling had been located in the gut, but with Alva it was in the head. Vertigo . . . he was tumbling, his thoughts were flying away . . . and then Alva let go of his hands and he was lost, tumbling away down a long, dark tunnel. . . .
The acorn. She had said to think of the acorn . . . don’t reach for it. Do it with your mind. Do it with your mind. He pictured the acorn, its shiny pale brown flanks, its nubbly cap . . . Julia. Julia’s dark eyes. Julia’s soft hand cupping his cheek, her kisses, sweet and urgent . . .
He opened his eyes. He was in the pub, and he felt strong and alive and firmly planted. Alva was smiling at him. Nothing had changed.
“There,” she said. “The acorn will keep you here. That’s all you have to do next time.”
* * *
“Do you think it is possible to stop the Pale?” Nick was standing behind the bar, washing up their mugs in a bucket of soapy water. Alva sat across from him, eating a packet of lamb-and-mint-flavored crisps she’d pulled out of a drawer. She had described them as “the really evil ones, from the 1980s.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think it. I believe it. But belief is more fragile than thought. I believe that the Pale can be turned back. But I might be wrong.”
“You can’t be wrong,” Nick said, his voice hoarse. “Surely there’s hope.” He set the two mugs upside down on a folded linen towel and planted his hands on the bar, his arms braced.
“I hope so. But all I base my belief on is human nature.”
“Then we’re doomed.” Nick plucked a crisp from her packet and popped it in his mouth. “Humans are the scum of the earth.”
Alva put her head on one side. “Maybe,” she said. “But we exist, and therefore we have to try to do good rather than bad.” She ripped the silvery bag along its seam and opened it out to make eating the crisps easier. “We have talents—ranging from perfect pitch to towering artistic or scientific genius. We usually celebrate these things as gifts from God. So by what right does the Guild say that your ability to manipulate time, which you share with a small fraction of your kind, is too dangerous for you to handle? Surely this talent—this gift—wouldn’t exist if we weren’t supposed to use it.”
“Maybe it’s a curse. Some people are driven to do unspeakable things and they do them well. We don’t encourage it.”
Alva rolled her eyes and ate a crisp. “Please. You know that having our talent isn’t the same as being a psychopath. If there is anything that unites the Ofan, that defines us, it is that we want to learn more about our gift. Now that the Pale is coming, we think we might be able to use it to help. But the Guild, with its vaunted tale of protecting the river, is slowly destroying our chance. Going to war against us—for God’s sake, it would be like going to war against the Island of Misfit Toys.”
Nick laughed. “The Misfit Toys band together and save Christmas.”
Alva touched her nose with the tip of her finger. “Bingo!”
“You’re mad.”
“I’ve already admitted that. But just because I’m paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get me. The Guild’s money and their power—no, let me go even one step further—the very existence of the Guild depends upon war. Because that is their beginning, they cannot imagine a way out of it a
lso being their end. Their omega must follow from their alpha. Trouble is, their finale is everyone else’s, too. They don’t give us a choice. They don’t even let us know about it!”
Nick shook his head and fished a particularly dark, extra-crispy crisp from the diminishing pile. “You’re foaming at the mouth, Alva. How the hell does the Guild’s existence depend on war?” He crunched the crisp between his teeth. There is nothing, he thought to himself, like trans fats.
Alva, meanwhile, was staring at him incredulously. “Surely you’ve figured that much out. War is the Guild’s recruitment machine.”
Nick swallowed and gave her back her look. “Rubbish. The Guild might be greedy and secretive, but they want to ease the suffering. They pick us up and dust us off and teach us medieval Finnish. . . .”
Alva threw up her hands. “Oh, use your head. You jumped from battle. I, too. I jumped from war—my village was sacked and I . . . well. It doesn’t matter.” Alva was quiet for a moment, making a line of crisps across the bar. When she looked up the passion in her eyes was banked and she spoke with quiet certitude. “What is the Guild without its thousands of workers, Nick? Without the drones who make it all run? Nine out of ten of us jump from war, did you know that?” She picked up a crisp from her line and broke it into pieces between her fingers, letting the crumbs fall. “War loosens our bonds to our natural time.” She broke another. “It sets us leaping like fish from the river. And the Guild is waiting for us with its nets. Some of us they keep, some they throw away.”
“What the hell do you mean? They take everyone they can find.”
“Oh, no, they most certainly do not!” Alva dusted off her fingers. “Think back to Chile. Who were your fellow inductees?” She sucked the salt and oil from her thumb. “Were any of them crazy? Homicidal?” She popped her forefinger in her mouth and gave it the same treatment. “Disabled? Maimed?”
“No.”
“Exactly. And those are the obvious things they weren’t. There are a lot of other filters, too. War traumatizes, and the Guild needs its members to be shocked and scared but not broken. Nor even breakable. Your run-of-the-mill Guild member isn’t an artist or a hermit or another lonely visionary type; the Guild wants team players. And they aren’t, for the most part, your ministers or your sea captains, either; the Guild doesn’t want too many inspirational or leader types. They fish the river for hard workers, followers, good-natured burghers. People who want to settle down and remake their lives as best they can.”
“I suppose that describes me.” Nick picked up a cloth and began wiping down the counter. “But I had two friends there . . . one was a genius. I mean, he had a gift for languages like nothing I’ve ever seen. And he wasn’t a follower. Neither was the other one.”
“Ah. But you see, they bait their hooks for another kind of fish, as well.” She reached across the bar and touched his ring. “Your kind of fish. Men and women who were powerful in their time. Either because they were born to power, or because they have extravagant beauty or a shining personality or great genius. You were a marquess. A prize indeed. Power. That was what they saw in you when you jumped.”
“Beauty and genius too, surely.”
She inclined her head. “Of course, my lord.”
“And the ones who don’t make the grade? They are Ofan?”
“No. Not necessarily.” Alva twisted her mouth in a regretful smile. “We are not saviors. We are simply a haven for those who manage to find us. We provide our members with, at the very least, a good pub.”
Nick couldn’t laugh at that. What would it be like to jump . . . to nothing? To be deemed too weird or too impassioned for the Guild? And to never find the Ofan?
Alva put her chin in her hands and watched him. “You’re judging us,” she said.
“I’m sorry for the others,” he said.
“It’s a cruel world. And the Ofan are selfish. We aren’t a secret, but we don’t advertise. If you find us you can join us. We will teach anyone who asks—just as I have taught you something today. And we will answer any questions. But you must find us and you must ask.” She shrugged. “At least we aren’t cannibals, feeding off the destruction of the world.”
“And the Guild is?” Nick hung the two dry mugs on their hooks over the bar. “You’ve said they use war to recruit. What you call recruitment, surely they see it as saving people like us from the horrors of conflict among Naturals?”
“Yes, that is what they think. And I’m sure they’ve told you that the Guild is a global organization with a presence in every age. But it isn’t true, Nick. The Guild is a bank, you said, and you were right. Have there been banks in every human culture? In every age? No. Follow the money, follow the mercantile economy, follow the flow . . . and you will find the Guild. No money, no market economy? No time travel, no Guild. It’s that simple.”
“So?”
Alva banged her hands down on the table and her eyes turned on again like black lights in a disco. “It’s clear as day! What makes markets? Armies! Set armies on the march, and money flows! Set an army moving across the landscape and you have the trickling beginnings of an economy, for they must eat, Nick. They must be paid. Turn your farmers into warriors and then into consumers. Now blow that picture up big. Set the world at war across time and space. Move your armies and your money farther and faster and deeper . . . before you know it you have a river. That river doesn’t flow with water, Nick, and it doesn’t flow with love. It flows with blood and money!”
Nick looked down at the foil crisp bag, then picked it up and scrunched it into a ball. Surely war itself wasn’t the Guild’s fault. Surely money wasn’t the Guild’s fault. Take away the Guild, and the milk of human kindness wouldn’t just bubble up from the sewers. Take away money, and people wouldn’t just turn to one another and start singing “Kumbaya.” Take away war, and money wouldn’t just become scrap paper. He sighed and looked for a trash can. When he couldn’t find one, he glanced up at Alva. “What do you do with anachronistic garbage?”
“Just leave it. Gordon is the bartender. He’ll deal with it later.”
Nick opened his hand and the bag uncrumpled with a tinny crackle. He wiped his greasy palm on the linen towel. The silence between them lasted a moment too long, and was suddenly awkward.
“My lover . . .” Alva paused. “Ignatz Vogelstein, my lover who recently died used to wind me up just to see me go. I’m sorry I let myself get worked up just now.”
“It’s fine,” Nick said.
“No. This was all too much to lay on you.” She looked down at her long, ringless fingers. “You’re writing the Ofan off as crazed conspiracy theorists now. And maybe we are. Who knows? The real point is, whether I’m right or wrong about the Guild’s past, we can all agree that the future—the Pale—isn’t acceptable.”
“No,” Nick said. “It isn’t. And I’m a grown-up. You don’t have to protect me from your version of the truth.”
“It’s just that the Guild’s plan—of just keeping on doing what they’ve always done, with the added distraction of killing Ofan—isn’t going to save them or us from the Pale. Maybe there is a talisman. Maybe we can find it and use it. I think it’s more likely that we will have to follow in Eréndira’s footsteps and risk everything to find the change we need . . . and that even then we might fail.”
Nick looked at the beautiful, contradictory woman who stood before him. Whore, philosopher, queen. He had known that she would mess with his head when he accepted her invitation to drink beer together, but he had no idea that his entire world would be shattered into smithereens down here in this weird simulacrum of a pub. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said.
“Yes. Mr. J. H. Christ saw it all for what it is. And he wasn’t alone. A lot of people can see the forest for the trees. Natural and Ofan alike.”
“Don’t tell me Jesus was Ofan!”
“Don’t worry.” Alice slipped off her bar stool. “He won’t be turning up in this pub.”
Nick laughed, a little shaki
ly.
Alva spared Nick a brief smile, but it faded quickly. “The situation couldn’t be more serious,” she said. “The future has changed, in spite of the Guild’s shepherding. They are scared, as well they should be. Their own future, their tame and miserable slave, has turned and is marching toward them. Toward us all.”
“Like a cornered tiger. That’s how Ahn described it to me.”
“Ahn should know.”
Alva went to the door and opened it, turning back and raising her eyebrows at Nick, who was still standing behind the bar like a moose in the headlights. “Are you coming back up to the sunlit lands with me, or do you intend to stay and become our publican?”
* * *
Nick stood on the top steps of the house in Soho Square. Solvig was fastened to a leather leash, and he was taking her home with him. In spite of his protests the huge animal was now his, and she seemed to know it. She stood by him, panting happily, her eyes fixed on his face.
As for Alva, the intensity she had succumbed to in the catacombs had lifted like a fog. “Don’t worry about the end of the world,” she said. “We are time travelers! We will sail our little skiffs up and down the river until we get it right. For now, you and I must play the game of marquess and mistress. When shall we meet again?”
“Must we actually go through with the charade? Surely not.”
“We absolutely must. The Guild has to believe that you are tricking me, and that I am enthralled with you. We are all searching for the Talisman, you see. And if you or I find it? If the Guild believes that you have conquered me, we will have a much better chance of selling them a lie about its whereabouts. So. Tonight? Shall we have dinner in some public place?”
Nick sighed. “Fine.”
Alva laughed. “You remind me of Ignatz! He was just as grumpy.”
“The last thing I want to do is remind you of your lover!”
Alva stared at him, shocked, her eyes filling immediately with tears.