by Tom Holt
“Maybe we could try barter,” the white knight said. “Nice sword or helmet, look good hanging over the bar.”
The black knight tried the door. “It’s shut,” he said grimly.
“What do you mean, shut?” the white knight demanded angrily. “It’s not Lent.”
“Well,” the black knight said, “it’s locked and there doesn’t seem to be anybody about.”
“We could try breaking the door down.”
No more Mr Good Guy, apparently. Talking of which…
But it had been so long, so very long, that he couldn’t remember how it had started, how he’d come to meet the white knight in the first place, to fight with him, to start the endless, pitiless cycle they’d both been trapped in. Why was I the bad guy? he tried to remember. What did I do? Was it just because, when I bought my armour, the only colour they had in my size was black? He considered what little he knew about himself. He didn’t feel evil, but presumably they all say that, the sackers of cities, burners of monasteries, oppressors of peasants – not that he could remember ever having done any of that stuff. And even if he had been bad seven hundred years ago, surely that was all long since gone and obsolete. Everything that had made up his world had presumably passed away and been forgotten. It occurred to him that an hour or so with some coarse-grade sandpaper and wire wool would be all it would take to make him the white knight, and then…
“Ah well,” the white knight said sadly, as he tried to peer through a gap in the curtains. “Better be getting back, I suppose.”
For a considerable time the black knight was so stunned he couldn’t speak. “You what?”
“Getting back,” the white knight said. “To the abbey. Before they notice we aren’t there.”
The black knight shook his head so violently he almost twisted a gorget rivet. “Not likely,” he said. “I’m not going back, not ever.”
“You can’t be serious.” The white knight sounded horrified.
“Too right I’m serious,” the black knight said. “Nothing on earth could possibly make me go back in there and carry on with that ridiculous bloody farce. No, thanks all the same, this is where I make a fresh start.” He paused. You can’t spend seven hundred years with someone and not feel anything, even if that person’s spent all that time hammering on your skull with a sixpound broadsword. “If you want to go back, that’s up to you. I’m staying.”
“But you can’t.”
Not an attempt at persuasion; a statement of fact. At the back of the black knight’s memory something nasty stirred, prompted by the total conviction in the white knight’s voice. It was true: he couldn’t stay here, just like he couldn’t flap his arms and fly like a bird. “Why not?” he asked feebly.
“You know perfectly well.”
“Remind me.”
The white knight’s expression was a subtle blend of exasperation and fear. “Because we haven’t got the answer yet. You know, to the question.”
An answer to a question, how novel. But there was definitely something tapping inside the eggshell of his memory.
Eggshell.
He closed his eyes. He’d known defeat five times a day, every day for seven hundred years. Played 1,277,500. Won 0. Drawn 0. Lost 1,277,500. But that had just been swordfighting, and it didn’t matter.
“Oh,” he said. “That question.”
“Which came first, the—”
“Yes,” he snapped. “Thank you, I remember now. We can’t leave till someone gets the right answer.”
“Exactly.” The white knight didn’t half sound relieved. “And that hasn’t happened yet, obviously.”
A tiny flicker of hope. “Maybe it has,” he said. “Maybe that’s why it stopped and we were able to come out here. Maybe it’s over.”
The white knight shook his head slowly. “They’d have told us,” he said. “There’d have been an official announcement. Heralds, that sort of thing.” He gave the pub door a last pointless nudge with his hip. “No, there’s just been some sort of glitch, that’s all. When we get back, it’ll be business as usual.”
The black knight sagged. Of course it would, and fairly soon all this would feel like it had been a stupid dream. “Tell me something,” he said. “After you’ve won the fight and I’ve been knocked out—”
“Killed,” the white knight corrected him. “I kill you.”
The black knight shrugged. “Whatever,” he said. “Afterwards, what do you do? Before it all resets to zero, I mean.”
So the white knight told him: the monk, the abbey, the glowing altar, the chicken, the egg; go now, you are not worthy. “And that’s more or less it,” he concluded.
“You’re kidding.”
The white knight shook his head. “Always the same,” he said. “Never varies. I’ve tried doing something different ever so many times, but somehow, you know, I just can’t.”
Suddenly getting cracked on the head – killed even – didn’t seem all that bad in comparison. “Rather you than me,” the black knight said. “What’s it all supposed to mean?”
Shrug. “Come on,” the white knight said. “We really should be getting back.”
Slowly they turned round and trudged back the way they’d come. The black knight’s feet were killing him. Five times a day, he thought; I get killed five times a day. Frequent dier points and everything.
“Well,” the white knight was saying, “it was fun while it lasted. It’ll be something we can look back on. Until we forget about it, of course.”
The black knight stopped. They’d turned the corner, and from that stretch of overgrown drystone wall you could see right across the valley. “It’s gone,” he said.
“What?”
“The building,” the black knight said quietly. “You know, the one we live in. This is where we left it. But it’s not here any more.”
“Chicken,” Polly said.
“Egg,” said Don, almost but not quite simultaneously.
Mr Gogerty smiled and shook his head. “Guessing’s not allowed,” he said. “You’ve got to know. That’s the rule,” he added, “apparently.”
Don gave him a puzzled look. “But there’s only two possible answers,” he replied. “Therefore, one of them’s got to be right. So…”
Mr Gogerty stretched his impossibly long legs. “You remember in maths exams,” he said. “The answer doesn’t count unless you show how you got there.”
“Oh.” Don slumped in his chair. “So we’ve got to prove it is what you’re saying.”
Mr Gogerty rubbed his chin. “I don’t think it’s like proving it to a jury,” he said. “As long as you know, that’d be all right. But you don’t, do you?”
Don frowned. “Well, no. But it’s one of those impossible things – paradoxes. The whole point of it is there isn’t a right answer.”
“Neither,” Polly said sharply. “That’s got to be it. The answer, I mean. Neither came first.”
Mr Gogerty smiled at them as though they were children. “I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “In fact, I spent three years trying to prove it myself. I argued that the egg represents the future, just as the chicken represents the egg, with the moment of egg laying being the present. Since any reasonably stable material object exists in all three temporal locations – I was here five seconds ago, I’m here now, I’ll still be here in five seconds’ time – it’s pointless to differentiate between them. I’m me in all three locations. By that argument, the chicken and the egg that came out of the chicken are essentially the same, therefore indivisible in space and time. Therefore neither came first. I put it rather better in my doctoral thesis, but that’s basically what I argued.”
“And?”
“I won a prize,” Mr Gogerty said, with more than a hint of pride. “A consolation prize, of course. E for effort. They gave me this watch.” He rolled back his cuff. “One of the proudest days of my life, except it meant I’d failed. Sorry,” he went on. “‘neither’ is not the right answer. Nor is ‘both.’ ” He grinned. �
��That didn’t stop them giving Otto van Helsing the Siegfried Award in 1896 for suggesting it. But it’s wrong.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Polly said, and it was interesting to see how both men cowered ever so slightly at the briskness of her voice: Mr Gogerty, who’d battled with the Undead and faced the unthinkable horror of the existential void, and Don, who was used to her by now. “This pencil sharpener—”
“A shape-shifting trade artefact of considerable power,” Mr Gogerty mumbled.
“This pencil sharpener,” Polly repeated, “won’t let Don’s upstairs neighbour come back from wherever he’s gone to unless we can tell it which came first. But according to you there’re only four possible answers, and they’re all wrong.”
Mr Gogerty had never married, and his relationships with women had all been brief and disconcerting. “Not necessarily,” he said, and was taken aback when Polly made a noise like an exploding pressure cooker and stomped across the room with her arms tightly folded. “It’s the difference between guessing and—”
“Yes, all right,” Polly barked. “I still don’t see what all that’s about, but never mind. What you’re saying is that, for all practical purposes, there’s no way of getting that stupid man back. Well?”
“There’s a theoretical possibility.”
Polly snarled at him. “If people have been trying to answer your stupid puzzle since eighteen ninety-something and they still haven’t managed it, then the chances of us three doing it in the foreseeable future have got to be—”
“Your watch,” Don said.
Don was a master of the art of quiet interrupting, a useful and necessary art, since nothing else could be relied on to shut his sister up when she was in full flow. Mr Gogerty nodded. “What about it?”
“It’s got three…”
Mr Gogerty smiled. If he’d been noticed and taken off for training twenty years ago, Don Mayer might have had a future in the profession. “That’s right,” he said. “It’s a special watch. It tells the time in the present, the past and the future.”
Polly’s explosive snigger proved Mr Gogerty’s long-held belief that talent doesn’t always run in families. “That’s silly,” she said. “What you mean is one dial’s a few minutes fast and one’s a bit slow. So what? I could—”
Mr Gogerty lifted his arm, wrist cocked, so she could see the dials. She glanced at it, then shook her head.
“Big deal,” she said. “It’s a watch with three dials.”
“Let me see,” Don said, leaning over her to look. “She’s right,” he said. “It’s a watch with three dials. But they’re all showing the same time.”
Mr Gogerty was disappointed. Don had looked at the hands, not the dials themselves, which was why he hadn’t noticed that on one dial the numbers ran anticlockwise, while on another there were no numbers at all. The point, in other words, had gone so far over his head you could have bounced a radio signal off it. Never mind.
Don was looking thoughtful. “You’re sure that thing works?” he asked.
“Of course,” Mr Gogerty said. “I wind it twice a day, without fail. Why do you ask?”
“Nothing,” Don said. “Just curious.” Quite suddenly he wanted them all to go away so he could think. “Well,” he said with an effort, “thanks ever so much for coming. You’ve explained it all just fine.”
“No, he hasn’t,” Polly objected. “He hasn’t explained a damn thing.”
“And it looks,” Don ground on, “as though there’s nothing we can do to get that poor man back, so I suppose I’d better forget about it and get on with my life.” He hesitated, then reached down the back of the sofa cushions and pulled out the brass pencil sharpener (without box). “I think you should take this,” he said. “Give it back to the bloke you’re working for.”
“Don,” Polly said dangerously. He ignored her. It got just a little bit easier each time.
Mr Gogerty was staring at the pencil sharpener a bit like a dog watching a seagull, a bit like a seagull watching a dog, a bit like stout Cortes in the poem, a bit like the plant supervisor at Chernobyl a moment or so after one of his colleagues said, “Oops.” Don was holding the thing out to him, the way a cat brings you a dead mouse, almost pointing it like a gun. Mr Huos will be so pleased, Stan told himself. Or I could save the world. Save the world, tuppence a bag. Not that anybody would thank me for it, because of course nobody would ever know; whereas Mr Huos paid good money.
“Well,” Don said. “Take it.”
A bit like injections, Mr Gogerty thought. As a boy he had been terrified of injections. It couldn’t have been the pain; someone who got into as many fights as he had wasn’t bothered about pain, and anyway it’s only a little prick from a needle. But every time he had to have an injection he lay awake at night trembling for a week beforehand, and when he got to the doctor’s, it took his mother, his uncle Royston and two nurses to hold him down. Try as he might, he simply couldn’t hold still and let them jab him, and now, try as he might, he couldn’t raise his arm, reach out with his hand and take the pencil sharpener. The thought of touching it, his skin in contact with the metal, was more than he could bear to think about.
It would be different, of course, if it was in a box.
Polly was looking at him, and Don was frowning. “You wouldn’t have such a thing as a plastic bag?” he asked.
“You want me to wrap it for you?”
“If you wouldn’t mind,” Mr Gogerty said. “The truth is, I’ve got an allergy to copper alloys. They make me come out in boils.”
The look on Don’s face said, clear as anything, You’re lying to me, but why? “Hold on,” he said. “I’ll get you a carrier.”
Polly waited till her brother had left the room, then leaned forward and hissed, “If you’ve been playing games with us, I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got. Understood?”
Mr Gogerty nodded. Don had left the thing on the floor while he went to the kitchen. “I don’t suppose,” he said slowly, “anything odd’s been happening here. Apart from what you already told me. Anything to do with time.”
Polly was about to say, No, of course not. Then Don came out of the kitchen, and she remembered. “The fridge,” she said.
“Fridge?”
“The man from the shop called to tell Don when his new fridge was going to be delivered. But that was before we found out the old one had just died.” She looked up, just sufficiently worried to forget the lie about the allergy. “Is that the sort of thing?”
She had his undivided attention. “The old fridge,” Mr Gogerty said. “Has it been taken away yet?”
Don shook his head. “No, they said they’d take it when they delivered the new one.”
With the speed and grace of a leaping panther, Mr Gogerty rose to his feet. “Kitchen through there?”
“Yes. Here,” Don added, “don’t you want this? I’ve wrapped it like you asked.”
Mr Gogerty snatched the bag from his hand as he brushed past on the way to the kitchen. As he went, it occurred to him that he was quite possibly going to his death, and that there were so many things he’d never done – because he’d been too busy, because he’d always assumed there’d be a tomorrow. He’d never been to Florence. He’d never seen the midnight sun in Norway or the sudden, stunning sunset of the South African veldt. He hadn’t won the Shumway Award, or watched his son play football, or composed a piano concerto, or sat up all night on a high mountain to greet the dawn. He hadn’t surfed in California, or hunted wild pigs the hard way in New Zealand, or walked to the South Pole or the source of the Amazon. He hadn’t played chess with the Dalai Lama. He hadn’t given the Mayers a bill for this consultation.
Oh well, he thought, and then for some reason he added, next time.
“Why’s he gone in the kitchen?” he heard Polly say, and Don answered, “Dunno. Maybe he wants a drink of water.” Not the epitaph he’d have wanted. Come to that, he’d never wanted an epitaph of any kind. He’d planned on living for ever,
or as near as made no odds.
A fridge. He opened the door, and no light came on. There was a powerful smell of decayed vegetable matter, but all the shelves were Mother-Hubbard bare.
To hell with it, he thought. Then he clambered into the fridge, which sort of grew to accommodate him, and closed the door behind him.
“That,” said Ms Byron, clawing the ground with her foot, “was a shambles.”
Thirty female lawyers and the greatest living interpreter of Kindertotenlieder all tried to look away simultaneously. It was clear they felt deeply ashamed of what had just happened: the crashed car, the failed attempt to contact the two humans. They assumed it was their fault, naturally.
Kevin Briggs didn’t share that view. They’d just done what they were told. The fault – if there was one, and it hadn’t all just been bad luck – lay with the commander-in-chief, not the poor bloody infantry. He shuffled his feet and fluffed up his neck feathers; a bit like trying to put on an overcoat without using your hands.
It had started to rain, a fine sprinkle of small, thin drops that lay on his feathers but didn’t soak through. It was weather to match the general mood of the flock, which for some reason Kevin didn’t share. True, ever since they’d dug their way out of the coop they hadn’t actually achieved anything, apart from scaring a middle-aged woman out of her wits, but that (Kevin reckoned) was because their entire approach had been fundamentally unsound. Get to a phone, Ms Byron had said, or a computer or something; tell the outside world, and the world will come and rescue us. But Kevin had an unpleasant feeling that it wasn’t going to be that simple, which should have been depressing but somehow wasn’t. In his mind a sentence beginning All we need to do is was trying to take shape, and although it was still very much a work-in-progress, he was quietly confident that the rest of it would follow sooner or later. Meanwhile, there was a rather enticing-looking clump of nettles in the far corner of the yard, and he was feeling (for want of a better word) peckish.
He wandered across. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, he remembered, reckoned you could turn a bunch of humble nettles into a first-class gourmet feast just by adding two pints of cream, a pound of Stilton cheese, some finely diced Parma ham, a bottle of Chablis and a few other bits and bobs. Standing on tipclaw, he reached up and nipped off a corner of nettle leaf. Not bad, he thought. Tastes a bit like—