by Alex Scarrow
Bob had already made the decision to find and rescue him. He was just waiting for his code to spit that out as a formal menu option.
But finding him, finding where exactly the Hood’s men were encamped within the forests of Nottingham, could take days, weeks, perhaps even months. He didn’t have that kind of time. He had just twenty-three days left until either he returned to 2001, or his silicon mind fused itself here in 1194.
Little time to waste.
If there’d been a skirmish in the forests — an ambush, logically — it would have occurred on the forest track north-east between Nottingham and Kirklees Priory. There would be detectable signs of the fight still: bloodstains, scuff marks … perhaps a trail to follow. Perhaps the raiders were still in the vicinity.
He turned to look up at the men in the guardhouse above. Several faces were peering curiously down. One of them he recognized as belonging to one of the original guard that had escorted them here from Oxford nearly six months ago. Like Eddie, a veteran with experience. He pulled the man’s name from his database.
‘Jethro Longstreet?’
‘Sire?’
‘Under the authority of the Sheriff of Nottingham, I am promoting you to garrison commander of this castle in my absence.’
He could see the man’s eyes widen with disbelief.
‘You will continue the daily patrols of the farms outside.’ His voice echoed around the castle’s walls. ‘You will continue supervising morning food distribution in the town marketplace. You will also maintain the training regime for these new recruits. I will be absent for several days. Are these instructions perfectly clear?’
‘Aye … aye, sire.’
‘Then proceed in this role.’
He turned to the men standing nearby. ‘And bring me a horse immediately.’
CHAPTER 55
1194, Oxford Castle
Becks detected noises of distress coming from the castle’s outer walls: raised voices, high-pitched and signifying alarm. And one of those voices she identified as John’s.
A few minutes later he staggered into the great hall, gasping, looking for her. His eyes found her standing beside an arched window doing her best to look serene and ladylike. He came quickly over.
‘’Tis true! I have j-just this minute heard!’ he stammered.
‘What is true?’
‘R-Richard … he has s-set foot in England!’ John’s face was ashen with fear and damp with sweat. ‘The messenger … the messenger arrived this morning! He tells me he set foot in Dover yesterday!’
Becks consulted her database and a map of England. It was 118 miles from Dover to Oxford. A piece of data she didn’t have was how many miles an army from this period could travel in a day. However, a determined man could cover that distance in two days. John had already told her his brother most likely would gather supporters along the way, with his growing army eventually catching up with him.
‘Do you believe he will come to Oxford immediately?’ she asked.
John nodded frantically. ‘He will come here directly … b-because he believes the Grail is here!’ He swallowed nervously. ‘I will have to be the one to tell him — tell him that it’s lost. It was on my instructions the Templars were taking it north to Scotland.’ John’s nerves spilled out and became a manic laugh. ‘He’s going to kill me!’
‘I will protect you,’ she said calmly.
He wandered over to the balcony and looked out across the city. The heat of a mid-morning’s sun was baking the castle’s stone walls, and the air shimmered above the crenellations, making the dark slate rooftops of Oxford’s shacks and hovels dance and undulate beneath the cloudless blue sky. ‘Why has your colleague, Liam, not managed to find it yet? It does not sound like he has even started to look for it!’
There had been several couriers from Nottingham over the last few months, bearing a detailed account of matters up there. Most of Liam’s reports had been on his efforts to win the starving people round, to carefully rebuild some semblance of royal authority, law and order … all in John’s name.
‘He has been busy stabilizing the region,’ she replied. ‘Only when he has the support and sympathies of the people will he have a chance of locating this outlaw who has stolen your Grail.’ She was quoting Liam’s words from the last report.
‘I know! I know!’ snapped John. ‘But we have no more time now for making friends of the peasants! Richard will be here this very night … maybe tomorrow.’ He turned to look at her, trembling as he spoke. ‘Do you understand? There will be blood when he discovers it is lost! My blood!’
Becks’s eyes narrowed. She looked back out at the walls of the castle, the walls of Oxford. ‘You could hold out against him. Prevent him from entering the city.’
John scratched at his beard; a nervous tic of his that Becks had noticed gradually become increasingly pronounced over the last six months. ‘The city would fall to him,’ he said. ‘The people here love him.’
Becks nodded slowly. His evaluation was, of course, quite correct. She trawled through her database of history for this period and immediately hit upon the obvious solution. A solution that, as it happened, would also align with history as it was meant to happen.
‘You must retreat north to Nottingham,’ she said. ‘The castle has a better defensive configuration, and the city is sympathetic to you.’
John licked his lips, breathing noisily through his nose as he gave her suggestion serious thought. ‘NO! No … that w-will anger him f-further!’
Becks’s store of data on the correct timeline indicated a successful defence of the city and a siege by Richard that lasted several weeks. The siege concluded with John’s surrender and Richard demonstrating uncharacteristic mercy for his brother, letting him live as long as he swore allegiance to him.
That was the history that needed to happen now to prevent an unacceptable level of temporal contamination.
‘Nottingham is loyal to you,’ she said. ‘The city will hold. This may give the sheriff enough additional time to locate the Grail for you. The Grail could then be used as a bargaining tool, allowing you to negotiate an acceptable surrender.’
He looked at her. ‘You think that is possible?’
‘Of course it is possible. Liam may already have enough local intelligence from the people to successfully locate these outlaws. Winning their loyalty and support as he has been doing has been a necessary first step.’
‘Perhaps you are right.’ He cupped his chin in a shaking hand. ‘Yes … yes. Perhaps then, that’s — yes, that’s what I should do.’
‘The other alternative is to remain here,’ she added. ‘Which I calculate would be a tactically poor choice.’
He reached out for her and grasped her arms suddenly. ‘What would I do without you?’
She flashed one of her carefully selected smiles at him.
John’s face seemed to have reclaimed some of its colour. ‘Behind such beauty, you have a mind just as cunning as any ambassador or general. I … I — ’
Becks eased herself from his tight grip and pushed him gently back. ‘My lord, we should set forth immediately.’
‘Yes … yes, that would be advisable.’ His lovelorn puppy eyes cleared and focused on more practical matters. ‘Yes, we must assemble a caravan immediately.’
Yet he stared at her in silence for a while longer, his blue eyes narrowing, marvelling at her. ‘If only it were the way of things that I had been king … you would truly make a formidable queen.’
A part of her mind calculated whether she should reveal his future to him; whether knowing what fate awaited him would strengthen his resolve to stand up to Richard. But a hard-coded protocol reminded her that knowledge of the future to any man was just as big a contaminant to history as any careless time traveller. There were other ways to ensure he found a bit of backbone and stood firm against Richard when the time came.
‘Be strong for me now,’ she said gently, teasingly. ‘And perhaps I will yet be your queen.’<
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CHAPTER 56
1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire
‘What are you going to do with me?’ asked Liam.
Locke looked up at him. ‘I don’t really know,’ he replied. ‘My merry men,’ he said with a hint of sarcasm in his voice, ‘were rather keen to make an example of you. It’s down to the fact that you’re a rich Norman and they’re all poor Saxons.’
‘But I’m Irish, not French!’
He shrugged. ‘All they see is a rich young man in expensive clothes.’ He pared a hunk of venison off the bone and handed it to Liam. ‘As it always was, it shall always be … rich overlords, a poor underclass and a world of hatred between them.’
Liam chewed on the meat, surprising himself at how hungry he was. ‘Mr Locke, the things you’ve said about your time … it doesn’t sound too good.’
He smiled sadly. ‘No … No, it isn’t.’ Locke held him with his eyes. ‘In my time things are going very badly … very quickly.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Where do I start? We — we’ve exhausted the world of its resources. The world ran out of oil in the late 2030s. It ran out of coal and natural gas in the 2050s. It ran out of many of the essential minerals and ores at the same time. We lost so much land to the advancing seas, land that contained fertile soils, mines, oilfields. And there’ve been wars. Plenty of them. Regional wars, as billions of dispossessed people migrate from flooded lands to already crowded lands.’
Locke shook his head sadly. ‘It’s a mess all of our own making. Perhaps if we’d changed our ways at the beginning of the twenty-first century … if we’d managed to control our population, if we’d all been less greedy wanting our shiny new things, then perhaps we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now. It’s an exhausted world. It’s a dying world.’
Liam looked at the hunched form of the robot in the corner; just a dark outline and two pale blue eyes. ‘Mr Locke, why did you come back here? It wasn’t just to escape that world, was it?’
Locke sighed. A long silence followed, and outside they could hear the evening routine of camp: voices raised, several dogs barking hungrily. Liam had imagined the camp might have been alive with folk songs around a fire, the good-natured exchange of merry freedom-fighters. Instead it was the desperate sounds of a refugee camp — a hundred ragged half-starved outlaws living off what they could trap or steal.
‘You’re right. There was a mission.’ He picked at his teeth. ‘A mission of sorts. An objective.’ He frowned for a moment, as if trying to remember what it was. ‘In my time there are only a few of us left. No longer influential, no longer the silent power behind presidents and popes. We’re just a small band of believers.’
‘Believers?’
‘Templars.’
Liam stopped chewing. ‘You’re one of them knights? But you’re … you’re from the future, so you are! You saying they’ve got Templar Knights in the future?’
He laughed softly. ‘Well, not if you mean men running around in chain mail and waving big swords, Liam. But yes, there are Templars … men who believe. Men who still hope, even now at this late stage, that God will step in to save us from ourselves.’
Locke’s face reminded him a little of Cabot. A face etched with a lifetime of memories and set with a grim determination to see the right things done.
‘We put our faith in technology. All of us. We saw we were running out of oil, but instead of using less of it, we assumed technology would eventually find us a miracle. Free energy, harmless energy for all. But there was no man-made miracle. We used up oil and then there came the Oil Wars. The world became obsessed with fighting itself for dwindling resources, and the oceans and the skies grew more polluted. The ecosystem began to collapse. There was a hope technology could engineer new forms of genetic life that could restore the balance, bacteria that would eat carbon out of the air and help to cool our world down again. But it was too little and too late. All we did was create bacteria that poisoned the sea with big toxic blooms. The more we tried to bail ourselves out with technology … the worse we seemed to make it.’
Locke shook his head. ‘So all that’s left now is blind faith … that there’s something else that can help us.’
‘God?’
He shrugged. ‘Who can say? God or perhaps something Godlike. Something greater than man, something or someone who can help us.’
Liam looked down at the candle. ‘I’m not a real believer, Mr Locke, truth be told. If there is a God, he’s never bothered yet to speak to me.’
‘I’m not sure what I believe either … but hope, belief is practically the last thing we have left.’
‘That doesn’t sound like much.’
‘And we have a knowledge …’
Liam looked up. ‘Knowledge?’
Locke seemed reluctant to continue, as if debating with himself whether to say more. Finally he spoke in a voice little more than a whisper. ‘Knowledge of a prophecy.’
‘What?’
‘A prediction … a prophecy. Something we’ve known about for over a thousand years.’
‘You say “we” … you mean, the Templar Knights?’
‘Yes. Us … the name has changed, of course, depending on which conspiracy nuts you listen to. Templars, Masons, the Illuminati … Priory of Sion, New World Order. There have been all sorts of imaginative and ridiculous names for us over the decades and centuries. But we started out simply as an order of soldier-monks in Jerusalem.’ He laughed drily. ‘No more, basically, than janitors, temple security guards — hence the name Templars.’
Liam recalled Cabot’s story. ‘But something happened, didn’t it? Something was discovered by the security guards.’
Locke nodded. ‘You know the story, then?’
‘I suppose I know some of it. I know some knights found a scroll and it became known as the Grail. Right?’
‘Indeed. The Grail … a chalice, a cup: a symbol of containment. Containment, yes … but not of a liquid, not the blood of Christ. But a secret.’
‘Secret? This prophecy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
Locke laughed. ‘Just like that? You ask and expect me to tell? Secrets that men like myself have been keeping and passing down from one brother to another? From grandfather to father to son?’
Liam thought about it for a moment, then nodded. ‘Why not? Who am I going to tell, sitting here?’
Locke laughed some more. ‘Maybe I will trade secrets with you.’
Liam nodded. ‘All right.’
‘So, then — ’ Locke hacked another chunk of meat off for Liam — ‘tell me, why exactly were you sent back here?’
Liam wondered whether to mention the Voynich Manuscript. It was what had started off this mission, the first breadcrumb in a trail that ultimately had led him here, into this mud hut in the middle of Sherwood Forest. ‘The Grail,’ replied Liam.
‘You wish to decode its secrets too?’
‘Aye.’ A question suddenly occurred to Liam. ‘How did you know where to find it?’
Locke sat up. ‘The Grail disappeared from history at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It simply vanished. Became nothing but a myth from then on. But we’ve always known it existed. And we’ve always known it was never just a mere cup.’
He began to carve another ragged hunk of meat from the bone. ‘We have Templar records. Letters of instruction, personal correspondence dating back to the brotherhood’s inception and papal blessing in 1129. So … we’ve always known King Richard got what he came for in the Holy Land. But it is there that the trail goes cold. Until, that is … the Second World War.’
Liam’s eyebrows lifted.
‘A German bombing raid over Oxford in 1943 damaged some ancient castle buildings. Old crypts were disturbed, unearthed. And, as a result of that, documents that hadn’t seen the light of day for over nine hundred years emerged. One such document was attributed to King John, written actually before he became king, written while h
is brother Richard was still being held for ransom in Europe.’
Locke passed another hunk of meat over the candle to Liam. ‘It was a letter of instruction to some knights to transfer King Richard’s “sacred possession” north to Scotland. John, we suspect, intended to hide it from his brother to use as a bargaining chip. Or maybe he really did think his brother’s haul from Jerusalem would be far safer in Scotland. But history tells us it never arrived there. It became lost. John’s letter of instruction was the very last mention of it.’
Locke half smiled. ‘There was a date on John’s letter. So, we finally knew a pretty exact where-and-when for the Grail. And the brotherhood has, of course, known that since the letter finally surfaced courtesy of a Luftwaffe bomb. The plan therefore, Liam, was to retrieve the Grail and decode its secrets.’
‘But you can’t, can you?’
‘Ahh, I presume you know about the key?’
‘The key to decoding it?’
‘A cardangrille. A template with viewing slits in, that one rests over the encoded text. Yes. And without that, the Grail is just a scroll full of meaningless words.’
‘And King Richard has it?’
‘Indeed.’
Liam frowned. ‘So, how were you planning on getting this grille off him?’
‘To lure him here, of course. Stir an uprising in Nottingham that he’d insist on dealing with himself on his return. He does have a reputation for that … recklessly leading from the front. A taste for the blood-rush of battle.’ Locke glanced at the motionless squatting form of the robot. ‘And, if such an opportunity presented itself, my big friend here, Rex, in the heat of battle might be able to get through to Richard …’ Locke shrugged. ‘It’s not much of a plan, but it’s all I’ve got.’