“Is that Pammie?” she called. “Thought I knew your voice. Look, Pammie, this man’s been bombed out of his house with nothing but the clothes he was wearing – and they’re a disaster themselves, because he immediately started digging to rescue his neighbors. How about a free cup of tea for him?”
“All right, Virginia,” the girl said, “just this once, but don’t go telling anybody.” She ducked under the low doorway, hands full. “Here, you’ll be needing these,” she said, handing Lensky a mass of dark knitted stuff that turned out to be a pair of gloves and a watch cap. “There’s no charge for the hat and gloves; they’re donated. And here’s your tea. I’ll collect the mug on my next round.” She set a cracked mug of brownish liquid on the table, with two small rounded pieces of bread.
“Do you have any sugar for the tea? He’s recovering from shock.”
Pammie shook her head with regret. “I’m sorry, we ran out of sugar half an hour ago. Everybody is shocky.”
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Dabney sighed, “I never use my ration anyway.” She rummaged in a black handbag and pulled out a small round box, dumped the contents in Lensky’s tea and stirred briskly.
“There you go, drink up, you need it,” she encouraged him.
As the Salvation Army girl left, three men trudged into the room. All were wearing broad-brimmed metal hats, dark blue uniforms almost covered by yellowish dust, and grim expressions.
“The shelter?”
“Bloody sandwich shelters,” one of the men said. “Blast sucked out the walls and the concrete roof crushed everybody inside. Nothing we could do, nor the heavy rescue squad neither. They’d have been better off on the street than hiding in one of those jerry-built death traps.” He gave Mrs. Dabney a stern look. “If you get caught outside, Mrs. D., mind you make for the basement under the Sally Army post. That’s proper pre-war building, that was. It won’t collapse on you.”
“I heard,” put in another man, “as they run out of cement when they quick-built all them brick shelters and just kept putting them up with nothing but lime mortar.”
“Nonsense!” said Mrs. Dabney. “Mr. Churchill would never have allowed such shoddy work.”
“Churchill,” Lensky croaked through a throat gone suddenly dry. He realized that he’d been kidding himself when he thought he had adjusted to being whisked into a different time. Everything he’d noticed so far had been ambiguous, but this…
“Old Winnie wasn’t PM then, it was that tosser Chamberlain.”
Winnie… Winston. Churchill.
The Master of Ravens had somehow moved him, not only across an ocean, but across eighty years, or close to that. Nearly half a century before he’d been born… and into the middle of a war. Lensky looked down at the mug of tea which he’d been using to warm his hands, and gulped it.
“So you got bombed out?” The elderly man who’d spoken first looked at him. “Waiting to be called up, are you?”
Suddenly Lensky realized that he was the only able-bodied young man he’d seen since awakening to this nightmare. Two of the wardens had white hair, and the third limped on an artificial foot.
“No – I’m American,” he said.
“Ah! A war correspondent. You’ll be sick of war and ready to head for home now, I’ll be bound.”
Home. “You have no idea,” Lensky said. “But I… can’t leave just now.” America wasn’t in the war yet? So this must be before December 1941.
“He’s a hero!” Mrs. Dabney put in. “Bombed out in that first strike tonight, and what does he do but crawl out of the rubble and dig like a maniac to rescue his neighbors.”
“Eh? Well, if that’s your notion of fun, Yank, stick around. We’ll likely have more for you to do before the night’s over. If—"
A whistling scream drowned out whatever the warden had meant to say next. All three of the wardens and Mrs. Dabney threw themselves to the floor; so, tardily, did Lensky. He felt the floor recoiling and springing back, punching him in the stomach, and almost lost the sugary tea he’d just drunk. A roar succeeded the shrill noise of the approaching bomb.
“That’ll have taken out some of Walworth Road,” said one of the wardens as the noise died away.
“Sounded farther north than that to me,” said another one, scrambling to his feet. “New Kent Road?”
“Come on, mate!” The man with the artificial foot gave Lensky a hand up. “Wherever it was—we can use your help! Bloody rescue squad never shows up in time to be any bloody use.”
They left the post, already running. People in the street pointed the way to where the new bomb had hit.
18. The death of a city
London, May 10, 1941
I stepped from the black space and glowing lines of the in-between into a tapestry of fire.
I was facing a narrow, tall, ornate building with a painted statue overhead, and the statue was – yes – an elephant with a tower on its back. For the first time I allowed myself to believe that Will’s analysis had been correct and that I would find Lensky somewhere around here.
But I was late; clearly the bombing had already started. On either side of the building the streets were going up in flames. The fire was almost beautiful if you didn’t think about what it meant: a shimmering light and color show of pinks, yellows, oranges and reds. Halfway down the left-hand street a single building flared up in blue and green fire. I wondered what chemicals had been stored there to color the flames.
I wondered if they were explosive.
And I wondered if I could compose myself enough to reach out for Lensky, to teleport across London if necessary. I’d hoped that he would be right here, at the building Will had called, “Lensky’s rook.” It did look as if I’d come out of the in-between at the same place I’d started, give or take seventy or eighty years. The queer, old-fashioned buildings were completely different from the last ones I’d seen in our own time, but I was still standing at a six-armed intersection. There couldn’t be so many of those in London, could there? Furthermore, the Elephant and Castle pub had been my target. But Lensky was nowhere to be seen – and I would have seen him; the fires made the streets as bright as day. Perhaps I’d come through too early after all, to a time just before Shani Chayyaputra tried to maroon him here? Or perhaps some of Will’s reasoning was wrong? Or – I would not think of this – all the reasoning was wrong, and Lensky was in some other place, in some other century.
I’d taken several agonizing days to prep for this journey. Ben kept telling me, “Take as long as you need, it’s time travel! You can go back to 1941 today or next week or next month!” Intellectually I knew he was right. But every hour I waited felt like an hour in which I was abandoning Lensky. I hadn’t flown to London until the night of May 9 – our time – and I’d been at the Elephant and Castle intersection in modern London on the morning of May 10. And now I was still in May 10, only it was night, and it was 1941.
Everybody in the Center had helped to prep me. I was wearing a vintage dress located by Ingrid and a shapeless black coat belonging to Meadow, and a scarf tied under my chin concealed my unfashionably short hair. I’d attracted some curious glances in modern London, but evidently I didn’t look strange enough to cause any excitement in the vibrant diversity of a modern city.
London of this time was less diverse, and women paid more attention to the dictates of fashion, so blending in was correspondingly more important. Where I couldn’t or wouldn’t match the styles of 1941, we’d gone to some length to find a workaround. For instance, women of this era carried purses, but I hadn’t wanted to have to keep track of one. Being without a purse wasn’t enough to make me conspicuous, but substituting a fanny pack was unthinkable. Annelise – who actually knows which end of a needle to thread, putting her way ahead of the female mathematical community – had stitched unobtrusive side pockets into the seams of my dress to hold tissues, burn gel, sugar cubes, a handful of stars, and all the antique English coins Jimmy had been able to scrounge from local collectors and dealers. T
he really important stuff was stitched and pinned into the front of the dress. The only flagrantly non-period aspect of my appearance was the heavy silver belt I wore, with its ornate buckle.
Mr. M. had flatly refused to allow me to go back to the Blitz without him. And now I was very glad of his company. Will and Colton had drilled me on recent history and on the hour-by-hour history of this particular night, but they hadn’t prepared me for the feelings – the terror and the urgency that filled the streets of London tonight. A city cringing under a rain of death and fire! I realized how lucky we were in America; not only had I never experienced anything like this, but I’d blithely assumed that I would go my entire life without such an experience.
I saw an old man covered in dust stumbling towards me out of a burning street. “Where is my house, where is my house?” he cried over and over.
A woman cringed in a doorway next to the Elephant and Castle pub, sobbing breathlessly.
Someone farther away was screaming.
I hadn’t expected the noises either: the roar of fires, the continuous tinkling clatter as if somebody were repeatedly dropping a tray of silverware, the uneven drone of airplanes overhead, the recurring thud of heavy guns firing, a shrill whistling in the air.
The whistling grew louder. It turned into a deafening roar and ended with a crash that knocked me down.
I was slow getting to my feet, still shaky from the long teleport across the years and disoriented by the blast. Some men in funny-looking, broad-brimmed metal hats came running out of a building to my left. One of them stopped dead in front of me, swore in Polish and hauled me upright.
This one wasn’t wearing the metal hat, only a dark knitted cap that covered most of his blond hair. His sport coat was torn, and his pants were a disaster: ripped, stained in places with something dark, and covered with yellowish dust.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” he said. “I can’t be expected to pick you off the ground in every century of human history.”
“Brad!” I threw myself on him and hugged him. Under the layers of dust and grit he was warm and solid as ever. The cold fear deep inside me melted. In that moment all I wanted was to stand there forever, holding him close and feeling his strong, steady heart beating against mine. “You’re hurt?”
“No, just dirty.”
“Well, you can wash up when we get back.” I began building the picture in my mind: the modern Elephant and Castle intersection, with the dawn of a new day in 2018 just breaking.
“Kiss your girl and come on, Yank!” one of the tin-hat men called.
He took my shoulders and held me away from him. “I can’t go yet, Thalia. They need me here.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that he was an insufferable egotist. Need him? Nonsense! This war had already been fought quite competently without his help! But he talked over my objections. “Go to a shelter. No, not that one.” He waved at a sign saying “AIR RAID SHELTER” in front of a squat brick building, then pointed across the intersection and down a different street. “Those brick things aren’t safe. See the Salvation Army post? Get into their basement and wait there for me. I’ll be back.” He crushed me to him for a quick and totally unsatisfactory kiss, flavored with dust and grit.
And then he ran after the tin-hat brigade.
‘Safe’ wasn’t a word I’d have used for any part of this fiery nightmare. I started towards the street he’d pointed at.
Away from a screaming that suddenly raised to an agonized wail. It sounded like somebody burning to death.
It probably was somebody burning to death.
“It’s that way,” Mr. M. said helpfully, and he didn’t mean the Salvation Army post.
When I turned in the direction he’d indicated, I saw men holding fire hoses and pointing them at a tall house that was going up in flames. Even as I watched, the spray of water from the hoses shrank to a stream, to a trickle, to nothing.
The front of the house collapsed on itself, briefly revealing the interior in cross-section – walls, rooms, furniture, all bright with licking tongues of fire – and a man in one of the ground-floor rooms, lying awkwardly face-down across the floor under something. The flames blazed up around him and he screamed again. It was the worst sound I’d ever heard.
His hair was literally on fire.
“Mr. M! I need the strongest personal shield we’ve ever raised! Help me do the shield, feed your stars into it.” My own stars were streaming from my hand into a sphere just outside the shield, building camouflage all around me. It’s not nice to confuse outsiders by letting them see our topology applications, and besides, somebody might have tried to stop me.
I probably looked like a pattern of moving flames as I picked my way into the burning house; that was what everything around me looked like. The firemen certainly didn’t seem to notice anything. But then, they were busy calling for help: Send more pumps! Fix the bloody hose! What the (expletive) happened to the (obscenity) water pressure?
They were beginning to sound like Meadow Melendez.
I dropped camouflage once I was inside the building, because I was afraid the trapped man wouldn’t respond well to a disembodied voice. From here it was obvious how he’d been caught: a sofa had fallen through the ceiling, landing squarely across the backs of his thighs. I had to drop my shield in order to grip the thing and heave it up. Heat flared around me, instantaneously drying my mouth and throat. “I can’t hold this up for long,” I croaked, “pull your legs up!”
As soon as he did that I dropped the sofa, grabbed him and raised both shield and camouflage around us both. I tried to pull him to his feet. “Can you walk? I need you to walk.” I could teleport us if necessary, but I’d have to drop camouflage; we still couldn’t manage three applications simultaneously, and the shield was absolutely necessary. With his wobbly cooperation I got him vertical, but he was unsteady on his feet. I put his arm over my shoulders. It was a good thing that Londoners of this era, the ones in slum districts like this one anyway, were not very tall.
“I can walk,” he half-whispered. “Can’t see though.”
“Don’t worry about it, I can do that part.” His voice sounded very rough. Had the fire injured his throat, or was it just irritated from the clouds of ash and dust?
Getting out was trickier than getting in; the floor was covered with burning debris and I had to guide him to sidle along a narrow plank that provided the only smooth path to the street. I could sense the fires raging at my shield, consuming the additional stars Mr. M. was sending into it.
Once outside, I dropped both shield and camouflage, momentarily exhausted. One of the firemen exclaimed, “Where the bloody hell did you come from?”
I waved a hand back at the burning house.
“I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it. I never saw you in there, lady – and nobody could have walked through that fire!”
“You must not be very observant,” I said. “Didn’t you notice when there was a gap in the flames? That’s when we took our chance to get out of the building. I guess you were too busy complaining about the water pressure.”
His mouth opened and then closed again. “All right. I’m insane. I’ll deal with that later. Just go to a shelter, Miss. Please!” He pointed at the brick building that Lensky had warned me against.
“He’s badly burned.” I waved at the man’s face, which was so horribly blistered that he hardly looked human. “Can you—"
“First aid at the wardens’ post.” He pointed at the building the tin hats – and Lensky – had come from.
I had to steer my man over there; his eyes were covered with blisters. I hoped he was not permanently blind. After handing him over to a very proper English lady in a very dusty uniform, I actually did set off for the Salvation Army post.
But I never got there. Blue-white stars kept falling from the sky and turning into fires on the ground. There were always more fires springing up all around us, and more people trapped by them. I popped sugar cubes to counter
the drain of doing so much applied topology, and kept on collecting people from burning buildings. I quickly discovered that my first trip had been comparatively simple. Most of the time there was no path by which to reach the trapped people. They were on landings above collapsed stairs, or screaming out a third-floor window of a house whose first and second floors were already ablaze beyond even my ability to shield, or cornered behind the burning rubble of a shattered building. I had to start teleporting myself in and the fire victims out. Some of them realized they hadn’t been moved in just the usual way and got hysterical about that, but I quit worrying about it when I realized that their cries were just blending in with the general confusion of the night.
Without Mr. M. I’d never have been able to do it; as I said, we still can’t do three applications at once. I left shielding entirely up to him while I teleported under camouflage. Even with his help, I was exhausted before I finished. And slightly scorched in places where the fires had been too much for the shield. Well, when we got back I’d match the rest of the Center staff that way, wouldn’t I?
A Salvation Army volunteer shouted something about tea and buns for a penny. I felt in one of my pockets and offered her the first coin I found.
“I can’t change a florin! That’s too much, luv, haven’t you a penny?”
I was definitely not well enough briefed for a friendly discussion about the values of various coins.
“Ah, use the change for people who haven’t got a penny?”
“Oh,” the girl exclaimed when she heard my accent, “you’re Canadian, that’s why you don’t know our money.”
It seemed slightly surreal to be chatting about coins and Canadians while bombs were still thundering down out of the sky, but I would be whatever she wanted me to be if it would get me out of this conversation. I nodded, fished two sugar cubes out of a pocket, dropped them into the lukewarm tea and drained the mug.
A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4) Page 19