“So Brad and Chayyaputra were yelling at each other,” I prompted Ingrid.
“He was angry,” she said again. “About us setting his building on fire. He thought it had been your idea, Thalia, and he said some things about you that… well, Lensky got angry too. I think he tried to hit Chayyaputra again, only he was on guard this time and his grackles protected him. Then Chayyaputra said he was going to teach you a lesson by disposing of Lensky.”
“You said he wasn’t dead!”
“He isn’t. I don’t think. Chayyaputra said that would be too easy for him. And you. He said he was going to transport Lensky through space and time to a place where you’d never find him.”
I closed my eyes for a moment, fighting off despair. Where was Brad now? Maybe I’d been too confident about dealing with ‘lost.’
“Then he said a bunch of stuff that didn’t make any sense. The grackles were keeping Lensky from reaching him, I think. He was having fun taunting Lensky about what he was going to do, too much fun to just do it right away. But then – then everything went quiet. And I called you.” Ingrid’s eyes were rimmed with red. “Thalia, I am as bad as Prakash. I didn’t even try to help. I froze as soon as Chayyaputra said that about sending Lensky out of his own time.”
A very small part of my mind, the part that wasn’t focused on staying quiet and repressing my own urge to wail with grief and fear, reminded me that Ingrid’s experience of being trapped in the wrong time had left her so nervous that she wouldn’t even teleport if she could avoid it. Eventually, I supposed, I would not hate her.
For now, I didn’t much care how guilty I made her feel. I needed to know every word Chayyaputra had said, to comb through them for any possible clue. “Go back over it again. Don’t leave anything out.”
“I told you,” said Ingrid, “it didn’t make any sense.”
“I don’t care, tell me anyway!” There had to be a clue somewhere, there had to be. Because… I did not know what I was going to do, if there wasn’t.
Once I had teleported to Lensky when I didn’t know where he was. But we’d been in the same town – and the same time – then. Now when I reached out mentally to him, I felt nothing. A blank emptiness. Distance, or years, or the evil work of Chayyaputra: something was hiding him from me.
If I was to find him, it would have to be by old-fashioned detective work, the way Jimmy and I had once located Ingrid and Colton in the Britfield of 1957. Lensky might not be able to teleport himself back here, but he was easily as bright as Ingrid or Colton when it came to sending messages to the future. There would be clues. There might be some even now, in what Chayyaputra had said.
“Ingrid. Concentrate.”
She closed her eyes. “I don’t remember – ohh…. Yes… He said that since we’d brought fire and flood on his building, he was going to give Lensky a first-hand experience of fire and flood under a bombers’ moon.”
Will stirred. “A bombers’ moon? You’re sure those were his words?”
“I told you it didn’t make any sense.”
“What else did he say?” Will’s eyes were blazing now. What was he seeing that I had missed?
“Oh, then he talked about chess, of all things.”
“What exactly did he say about chess?”
“That Lensky was a pawn who was going to meet a rook. And then he went back to his nasty, gloating threats. He said that if Lensky was very unlucky, he would live through the night without being burnt or blown up or buried, and then he would have a long, long time to think about Thalia grieving and searching for him.”
“Burnt, blown up, buried,” Will repeated slowly. I wished he wouldn’t. I was already seeing nightmare images of what could have happened to Brad. “And he specifically mentioned a rook? You’re sure about that?”
“Oh!” Colton exclaimed. “Bombers’ moon.”
I snapped my head around to look at Colton. “That phrase means something to you two?”
“England,” Will said, “the Blitz.”
That wasn’t quite enough to clarify it for me.
“When the moon was full and the skies were clear,” Will amplified, “that was what the English called it – a bombers’ moon, meaning the German planes could see to bomb London.”
“So… you think somewhere in London? During the war? Those five years?” A long period, but it was a lot more checkable than all the millennia of human history. Or the future… I had no idea what I’d do if Chayyaputra had possessed the power to transport Brad into the future, so I decided not to think about it.
“Oh, the Blitz only lasted about nine months,” Colton said, “and there wasn’t a clear sky every time the moon was full.”
Better and better. From uncounted millennia, to five years, to nine months.
“But Chayyaputra said,” Will put in, “that if Lensky survived that one night, he would have a long time to live and grieve. The rest of his life. So he can’t have been sent where he would be in danger day after day. I’m thinking – the last night of bombing. May 10. It was a terrible night, possibly the worst night of the Blitz. And there was a bombers’ moon that night.”
I began to feel a tiny, tiny sliver of hope. It was almost painful. Was it possible that they had figured out the city and the day? If I could take myself back to London on that date, might I be able to teleport across the city to wherever Brad was? Would it be much harder than finding him in Austin had been, that one time I teleported to his presence rather than to a known location? All right, London was bigger. But I knew him so much better, now, than I had then.
It still bothered me that we were leaning so much on a single reference. No, that wasn’t right. ‘Bombers’ moon,’ and ‘burnt, blown up, buried.’ My heart gave a painful squeeze. I had to stop that. Think of it as a reference, not a prediction. A puzzle piece. “So I need to put myself in London on May 10 of – what year?” During the second world war, was all I knew.
“1941,” Will said, “but I think we can narrow it down more than that. One of the parts of London that suffered most on that night was the Elephant and Castle district.” He seemed disappointed by my lack of response. “Don’t you get it? Elephant and Castle – Rook! Think what the chess piece looks like.”
I couldn’t picture it.
“Nowadays it’s just a tower,” Will said, “but it used to be an elephant with a tower on its back. That was the sign for the Elephant and Castle pub. See, that’s the rook Chayyaputra meant! That district took the worst of the bombing on May 10.”
Three reference points. I’d have liked more, but you go with the data you have. If this wasn’t enough, I could come back and start the slow grind of searching contemporary publications for the clues that Brad would surely have left me, as soon as he had a chance.
But I didn’t think that would be necessary. I guess some of Will’s absolute certainty must have rubbed off on me. “You can use the pub like a beacon,” he said, “but you’d better get there right at the beginning of the bombing. And whatever you do, don’t go inside.”
“Why not?” Okay, so it was a bar, so what? I’ve been in bars; I’m twenty-four, not sixteen.
“Because it burned down that night, and I’m not sure exactly when or what happened. You don’t want it getting hit by a high explosive bomb while you’re inside, do you? So don’t be inside.”
17. Falling stars
London, May 10, 1941
The first thing he noticed was the noise. The city was dark, but from somewhere came an uneven, whining drone that might have been caused by some poorly maintained machine in a factory. Except that it seemed to be moving towards him, getting louder and louder. He stuck his hands in his pockets and shivered. This place – wherever it might be—was cold. As his eyes adjusted, he realized that it was not as dark as he’d thought; a full moon turned the city street before him into a pattern of sharp, crisp lights and shadows. And maybe it wasn’t that late, either. There were still people on the street.
A wailing siren overrode
the distant noise. The few people who were out on this dark street glanced up at the sky, then ran. On the far side of a star-shaped intersection he saw the outline of a low, squarish brick building without windows. Most of the people headed for that. Others seemed to disappear as if the street had swallowed them up. He began to understand how after a man pushed past him. “If you’re not using this doorway, mate, get out of the way!” Lensky turned and saw the deep, arched entrance to some kind of shop behind him.
“Get to a shelter, you idiots!” somebody else shouted as he ran past.
Lensky backed up into the doorway where the first man was huddled. There was plenty of room for them both. He wanted to ask what they were hiding from, but clearly everybody else knew. He didn’t want to be marked as a stranger or a madman in this place – wherever and whenever it might be. He kept his mouth shut and watched and listened.
The high-pitched, irregular sound of engines was much louder now.
Suddenly the night bloomed with hundreds of white, flickering lights. They came down over the city like cascades of diamonds, like clusters of falling stars. Was this what Thalia saw when she talked about her magic-enhancing stars? And if so, why was he seeing them now?
He didn’t think they could be the same as the invisible stars that Thalia claimed to carry in a pocket and hold in the palm of her hand. These stars were much larger than that, and they were falling directly overhead and all around him. They whistled as they came down, then clattered upon landing like a bunch of empty tin cans. As he watched and shivered, he saw two blue-white flames spring up, one on a window ledge and the other on a house roof.
He could see clearly now: more flares were dropping, hundreds of them, bathing the street in a white glare that eclipsed the moon. He stared at the weirdly beautiful scene, trying to pick up some clue as to where he was. And when. But he wasn’t ready to think about that part yet.
What he could make out in the strange, cold light looked like an ordinary city street of office buildings with small shops occupying the ground floors. The building style was somewhat old-fashioned, not much like the blank facades of glass and granite in a modern city. And he might not even be in America: the signs were in English, but what American city had so many separate little shops? He could see signs for a greengrocer’s, a tailor’s and a tobacco shop among more normal-looking stores. All the windows were smaller than he was used to seeing. The lettering of the signs, like the style of the buildings, was curiously ornate.
His gaze stopped, arrested by a black empty square that didn’t reflect the light like the other shop windows. Oh – there was no glass in the window. A sign tacked to the door read, “More open than usual.” Open even when closed, eh? And what kind of a city was it where nobody looted the unprotected shop?
The tin-can clattering noise sounded again, louder and closer, and a sizzle of bluish-white flame sprang up across the street. Two more of the mysterious stars came down almost immediately afterwards, just a few doors farther down the street.
“Come on!” his companion in the doorway shouted. He ran across the street, shoulders hunched, and began kicking and stamping at the flame. “What you waiting for, think the bloody wardens can put them all out?”
Lensky awoke from his near-trance into a reality in which the flickering white lights were not beautiful stars, but nasty little things trying to incinerate whatever they touched. He ran down to the two new fires. One was on the pavement; he stamped on it. The other one had landed in a flower box which he wrenched free and threw upside down onto the pavement, so that the dirt could smother that flame. But even while he was working on those two, more fires started up and down the street. Then he heard a new noise: a faint whistling that grew and grew into a deafening shriek, then into a roar that ended abruptly. He looked up just in time to see the wall of the nearest house shudder and bulge out in a way that solid bricks should never have been able to do, swaying as though they were no more than a heavy curtain.
A body slammed into his back, taking him down into the gutter. “Cover your head, you bloody fool!”
Lensky wrapped his arms around his head as the sound of falling bricks and timbers overrode all the other noises around him. Something struck his shoulder as he waited to be buried in the rubble.
After a long, tense moment the sounds of the collapsing building ceased. He hadn’t been buried under it after all. He hadn’t even been seriously bruised.
The man who’d pushed him into the gutter hadn’t been so lucky. A jagged piece of timber had gone through his back. His neck was twisted, the eyes open and staring.
Lensky’s head felt thick and confused. What should he do? Oh – close those eyes. That was what you did for people when they were dead. But as he got to his knees, all thought of the dead was driven out of his mind by the sound of whimpering. It seemed to come from under the remains of the collapsed building.
“Oh, please, someone, help me!” The whimpering turned to quiet, gasping sobs. By the light of the still-falling incendiaries he could see that a large beam had fallen at an angle in the pile. It was almost buried under bricks and dust and broken timbers, but there was a space beneath it where somebody might have survived. He couldn’t reach it now: there were more bricks and debris blocking the way to that space.
He began throwing bricks aside, trying to get to whoever was trapped. It was harder after he got rid of the bricks and had to deal with the pile of dust and sand and small stuff at the edge of the beam. He scooped it out with his bare hands, frantic with the fear that whoever was under the beam was being suffocated by stuff like this even as he worked. “It’s all right, you’re going to be all right,” he said over and over as he scooped and tossed. It seemed to take forever just to clear that small heap. Was that a rag he saw under the beam? If only he had a flashlight – No, not a rag; part of a woman’s dress. He reached one arm under the beam, groping for the woman, and caught hold of something – a shoulder, he thought. When he gripped it and tried to haul the woman out, he heard her thin high scream over all the other noises that filled the air.
“Are you hurt?” he shouted into the narrow space. “Trapped?”
“No – no, it doesn’t matter. Pull me out. I won’t scream.”
He pulled, felt her body shifting, dragged her towards him.
The mass of rubble above them also shifted. He wondered if he would be able to get her out before it moved again and buried them both. With one more desperate heave he got her mostly out from under the beam, but when he tried to pick her up she clung to something underneath there.
“Let go of that, whatever it is!” he shouted at her.
“I can’t! It’s our Ellie! I’ll not go without her!”
Lensky felt a warning tremor in the beam that sheltered them. “Let go. I’ll get her,” he promised, and lifted the young woman in his arms. Her back was wet. No – her back was raw, laid open on one side from shoulder to hip. He tried to imagine what kind of courage had prevented her from crying out while he dragged that open wound across broken stones. Couldn’t.
There were two more people behind him now, quietly and efficiently moving the bricks and other debris that he’d tossed out of his way without thinking. He passed the injured woman to them and plunged back under the beam. Almost immediately he found what she must have been holding on to: a small, cold hand. He pulled, hoping to get the kid out of the rubble quickly, and the hand came loose in his.
It was cold as ice against his fingers.
***
Someone was washing his face, pouring water over his eyes. They didn’t seem to want to open, but slowly he became aware of a warm yellow light that was quite unlike the devilish blue-white of the falling stars.
“With us again? That’s good!” said the woman holding the bowl of water. She dabbed at his face again with a damp rag.
“What happened? Where am I?” Too late he remembered that he shouldn’t betray his ignorance. Fortunately, the woman took his question as natural under the circumsta
nces. Less fortunately, the answer left him clueless as before.
“Reporting Post 12, Newington Butts, Elephant and Castle.”
Something about a rook stirred in his memory.
“I’m Mrs. Dabney,” she introduced herself. “I’m a WVS volunteer. One of the wardens found you wandering around outside. You were a terrible mess; we thought at first you were wounded, but it seems to be just your hands. Bombed out, were you?”
“I remember digging through rubble.”
That seemed to be the right answer.
“Do you remember anything else?”
Yes, but he didn’t want to remember it. “Was – was I with anybody?”
“No, but…”
“But what?”
“I’m so, so sorry,” Mrs. Dabney said. “You were alone, but you were carrying a child’s hand. Your daughter?”
“No. A neighbor’s child.” So to speak. “She, ah, the mother was badly injured—”
“They’ll have taken her off to hospital, then.”
They were sitting at a small table with some playing cards on its top and an opened metal box partially covering the cards; it looked as though Mrs. Dabney had tried to push the players’ hands of cards aside to make room for her first aid kit. Such as it was. He glanced at the contents of the box and read the hand-printed labels. Gauze, Vaseline and boracic acid powder appeared to be the mainstays of the kit. No clotting bandages, no wound spray, no antibiotics… It was remarkably primitive.
He looked around the small, cluttered room, continuing to take stock. In two corners of the room there were buckets full of sand; a third corner housed an odd assortment of tools – a shovel, a hacksaw, two crowbars. There was something like an old-fashioned bicycle pump leaning on a bucket of water.
“Salvation Army!” called a clear young voice from just outside the room. “Penny for a cup of tea and a bun.”
Lensky shoved one hand into his pocket, then remembered that any small change he might have would be modern American coins. He strongly suspected they wouldn’t be accepted here. He shook his head at Mrs. Dabney’s questioning look.
A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4) Page 18