“I told Escott and Hope exactly the same thing,” Langstrade said, evidently reading Michael’s expression. “I told them that Cecilia had ruled them both out, and that I had no intention of going against her wishes—ever.”
Michael felt tears welling up in his eyes, even though he knew that the whole issue might be redundant if the world as he knew it really did come to an end in less than three hours’ time. He blinked the inconvenient moisture away.
Langstrade looked at Marlstone, defensively. “I’m not really an aristocrat,” he said, as if what he’d just done were something for which he needed to apologize. “I was nearly in my teens when Father got the Earldom. We were already rich, obviously, but…well, Father didn’t shop around for a wife for me, as if I were just an instrument for forging social alliances, and I’m not going to shop around for a husband for Cecilia. She can make her own choice. Why not?”
“You’ll get no argument from me on that score, Milord,” Marlstone told him. “If I had a daughter, I certainly wouldn’t want her to marry a pompous ass like Hope or a flippant ironist like Escott.” The way he glanced at Michael suggested that he wouldn’t have wanted his hypothetical daughter to marry an artist with philosophical delusions, either, but he still had sufficient reserves of politeness not to say so.
“Right,” said the second Earl. “Mustn’t idle around, though—Emily will be wondering where I am, and I’ve other guests to attend to. Until then…is there any point in saying good luck, or are we way beyond the reach of luck now?”
“We’re never beyond the reach of chance,” Marlstone said, presumably refusing to use the word luck because he was a scrupulous calculator of mathematical probabilities who thought the concept a superstitious illusion, “any more than we’re beyond the reach of Fate. Paradoxical as it might seem, they co-exist. Maybe they wouldn’t, in a universe in which time machines were impossible, but that’s not the universe we’re living in.”
At least for now, Michael thought—but he said nothing aloud.
Lord Langstrade went back into the Maze, without any apparent fear of getting lost, and Marlstone went back over the fake drawbridge into the Keep, carefully closing the door behind him.
Michael continued to paint methodically and inexorably, while his heart gradually decelerated its racing pace. Marlstone’s right, he thought. I have no idea what’s going to happen at noon, any more than he does, and I have no idea what I’m supposed to do afterwards. At least he knows what he wants to do, even though he has no idea how he’s supposed to accomplish it. All I know—all I’ve known since I received the invitation that brought me here—is that I’m in love with Cecilia, and that she’s in love with me. That’s more than enough for me, but how can it be enough for the Mistress of the Labyrinth? The time machine must have brought me here for some other reason than that. After all, the time machine can’t care whether or not I love Cecilia, can she? She has to be concerned with bigger issues than mere human affection. She’s had to create the Maze, the Keep and the mechanical parts of her own body—not to mention founding the secret college along the way, perhaps just to make sure that we had a steam locomotive to bring us here.…
The painting took over again then, absorbing him so completely that he had no mental energy to spare for such idle speculations. He moved his eyes and his hand from the Keep to the tree, intent on placing every leaf correctly. It was, after all, a symbol, not only of the continuity of existence, but of the growth of character and possibility, of efflorescence and fruition, of sturdiness and endurance, of rootedness and ambition. He had a moral duty do it justice, if he could—and he still had more than two hours in hand before noon.
Ten o’clock had, however, already chimed when he was rudely jerked out of his reverie by the sound of a scream. It had come from somewhere inside the Maze, due west of his position. He had no doubt whatsoever that it was Cecilia’s voice, and knew that she must have been on her way to see him, to bring him the glad news. He did not know whether she had been seized by a dragon or a Minotaur, or overtaken by some direr fate, but he knew that he had been wrong about the timing of the catastrophe. Like the events of last night, it had been impatient to begin; it had not waited for noon.
The time when heroism was to be required had arrived early.
CHAPTER TWENTY
BEYOND THE REACH OF HISTORY
Michael moved with a swiftness of which he had not thought himself capable, throwing aside his brush and palette and tearing off his smock as he raced into the Maze. Because he was only flesh and blood, he had no alternative but to follow the course of the path he had memorized, going back and forth and around and around in what seemed to be a deliberately perverse series of traps and delays. His course was unobstructed by any enormous heads, but he did have to hurdle two recumbent bodies, lying unconscious on the path. The first was Jack Langstrade, whose right hand was clutching the shaft of his catapult. The other was Jack’s father, who lay upon his walking-stick. Under normal circumstances, Michael would never have passed them by without trying to render assistance, but the circumstances were far from normal.
Eventually, he reached a third prostrate body: Cecilia’s. She was lying unconscious in the outermost ring, not far from the entrance. He picked her up and carried her out on to the lawn facing the Hall. He laid her down on the ground as tenderly as he could.
He rubbed her wrists and slapped her face very gently, hoping to restore the blood-flow to her brain. Her eyelids fluttered momentarily, and then opened to reveal her blue eyes, which stared into his face, blankly and uncomprehendingly. Michael supported her head with his left hand, while he opened the palm of his right hand in order to use it, very awkwardly, as a fan, directing a current of air into her face. “Cecilia, my love!” he exclaimed, in an agonized tone, throwing etiquette and discretion to the winds.
Whether it was his words, his hand-gestures or merely the support he was providing that did the trick, Cecilia seemed to return more fully to her senses. She opened her eyes much wider, and stared at him with more intelligence in her eyes. The expression that came into her face was not, however, a loving one.
She sat up. Immediately, she pulled way from Michael’s tentative embrace, and looked wildly around. Her flickering gaze took in the expanse of lawn, the wings of Langstrade Hall, the ornamental hedge of the rose-garden, the driveway to the gate, the meadows in which cattle were silently grazing, the distant steeple of Cribden Church, the grey water of the tarn, and the horizon formed by the distant Pennines. Then her gaze settled on Michael’s face again. It was still devoid of the slightest hint of love.
“When the hell is this?” she snarled, in a voice quite unlike her usual melodious trill.
“We’re in the grounds of Langstrade Hall, my darling,” Michael told her, thinking that she must have been severely disorientated by whatever crisis of identity had caused her to scream and swoon—although that did not render her casual blasphemy any less startling.
“Not where, you moron—when?” was her equally astonishing reply.
Michael’s thoughts reeled dizzily from the shock of the insult, but he contrived to reply: “It’s some time between ten and eleven o’clock on Saturday morning.” The expression on her face told him, very clearly, that the information was insufficient. “August seventeenth, 1822,” he added, automatically, before the realization fully sank in that the person looking at him through Cecilia’s gorgeous blue eyes was not, in fact, Cecilia.
Twenty-four hours before, he would not even have been able to entertain such a thought, but now he leapt to the conclusion with almost no effort at all. He had been possessed himself, albeit as a ghost, and knew that it was possible.
“What have you done with Cecilia?” he spat out, with deadly hostility. “Where is she?”
Not-Cecilia’s face took on an expression of extreme bewilderment. “1822?” she repeated, incredulously. “T
hat’s not…you can’t mean 1822 A.D.?” Something in Michael’s expression must have told her, then, that it might be wise to reply to his question, if not actually to answer it. “She’ll be perfectly safe,” was the counter-move she came up with, “provided that nothing happens to me. Help me to keep this body safe, and you’ll get her back soon enough. If not.…”
Michael had never known that he was capable of such hatred as he felt at that moment—nor such frustration, for he realized that he could not attack the futuristic Viking who had stolen Cecilia’s body in any fashion at all. Indeed, as the other had been so quick to say, he had to do everything possible to protect her from harm, if ever Cecilia were to resume control of her own flesh and blood.
“You have to help me,” not-Cecilia said, in a voice heavily laden with menace. “You have to tell me what I need to know. If I can do what I need to do, I’ll be gone in no time—back to my own cherished flesh. If not.…” Again, the dire threat was left hanging, but there was a question in the flinty blue eyes.
“All right,” Michael said, swiftly. “I’ll help you.”
“Okay,” the Viking said, cryptically. “What do you mean by 1822?”
“What else could I possibly mean but 1822 A.D.?” Michael countered, genuinely nonplussed.
“Don’t be stupid—that’s minus 273 E.C. It would have been quite impossible to build any kind of time-bending apparatus then.”
“It is, nevertheless, 1822 A.D.,” Michael assured her, stiffly. “According to the father of the young woman whose body you have possessed, it’s the thousandth anniversary of Harold Longstride’s epic duel with Emund Snurlson—which is why Lord Langstrade gave Gregory Marlstone permission to test his time machine in the Keep.” More to the point, he added, for his own secret edification, it’s the day that her father refused requests for her hand from James Escott and Quentin Hope, so that she might make her own choice of husband. I won’t let you take her away from me.
Not-Cecilia seemed to have stopped listening. She was looking down at her own body, stretching out her limbs for appraisal. She did not seem to like what she saw in the least. Her own body, Michael inferred, was probably a great deal more muscular, almost certainly male. Evidently, the Viking from the future had not been able to exercise much choice in the selection of a victim of possession. She looked up at Michael again, fearfully this time. Then she looked wildly around for a second time, and muttered: “Think, damn it!” as if exhorting herself to a vitally necessary effort.
Not-Cecilia’s eyes followed the line of the hedge to either side, then flicked back to the House, as if searching for some proof that this could not be the year that Michael claimed. “It’s impossible,” she said, her blue eyes accusing him of lying. “There weren’t any computers in minus 273 to make the calculations, and no nuclear reactors to power a machine. Mind you, if the damn thing’s been vamping from us it’s probably been bleeding energy from every tuned-in time machine between the twenty-second and the fifty-fifth—but it would still need an initial impulse of its own to initiate the transition. That would have to be maintained for days, in local terns, if the void weren’t to be warped into hopeless paradoxicality. Good God, were there even steam engines in minus 273?”
Michael was not at all sure about the propriety of giving information to the enemy—although he felt reasonably sure that the Viking, unlike the Mistress of the Labyrinth, really was an enemy—but he couldn’t prevent himself from replying, with a certain injured pride in his tone: “We certainly do have steam engines in 1822, in wonderful abundance. You are in Yorkshire, Madam—the very cradle of the Industrial Revolution. I traveled here from London on Thursday, in a train pulled by the Sir Richard Trevithick, the steam locomotive reckoned to be the seventh wonder if the world.”
In the distance, as if to add emphasis to his words, Cribden’s church clock began, unhurriedly, to chime eleven.
Not-Cecilia stared at him. Michael had never seen Cecilia’s cornflower-blue eyes so harsh and steely, and hoped never to see them so harsh and steely again. “You’re lying!” she said. “You’re trying to distract me, while the opposition puts the grabs on the machine. Railway locomotives weren’t invented until Victoria’s reign. George IV was still on the English throne in 1822.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Michael said, reflexively. “There hasn’t been a monarch in England since Charles I, and there’s never been a King George at all.”
The color seemed to drain out of not-Cecilia’s face. “Oh, luck!” she said, making the word sound like the worst oath ever to be emitted by a mortal mouth. “I’ve been dropped into a bloody alternate! How the hell am I going to get out of this?” She started as she saw someone come out of the Hall, using the same side-door that Lord Langstrade’s quartet of ghost-hunters had used the evening before.
The first person to make her exit was Lady Phythian. She was running, as if fleeing, at a surprisingly rapid pace. The second, a few moments later, was Quentin Hope. He was carrying a shotgun, and seemed to be about to raise it in order to fire at the unarmed dowager—but then he thought better of it, as the door that he had swung shut behind him suddenly exploded, a vast hole having blasted in the upper part of the batten by a gunshot. Hope set off running too. The door was kicked open again, and James Escott emerged, similarly equipped with a shotgun, one of the barrels of which was still smoking.
“Oh, luck!” not-Cecilia said, again. She dived into the gap in the hedge, pulling Michael after her, and hid behind the corner of the entrance to the Maze. “An alternate with steam-powered time machines,” she muttered, hardly pausing in her train of thought. “Of all the hellish…well, impossible or not, it’s got to be eternity-fodder now. Where is the bloody steam engine, then?”
“What steam engine?” Michael replied, innocently.
Not-Cecilia groaned again. “I haven’t a lucky clue what a stream-powered time machine would look like, you stupid monkey-brain, but I’m damn sure I can’t see any trace of one. Where’s the lucky time-field being projected from?”
Michael couldn’t help frowning at the flood of what was obviously intended to be extremely indelicate language, but he knew that this was no time to lose control of himself. Marlstone’s time machine had already opened a substantial portal to invasion from the future, even though there had been more than an hour left before noon. The world as he had known it was, as anticipated, teetering on the brink of annihilation. The idle speculations floated in the rose-garden had not been so idle after all. It was, indeed, possible that the present day—or the morrow, at least—might be utterly transformed by an influx of wisdom and technology from future eras. But would that wisdom come from Hope’s Euchronia or Escott’s mechanized Inferno? And would it obliterate the interval of history between the two time machines, or merely start a new branch in the tree of time, as Carp had suggested? More to the point, was there still time to stop it happening, or control the outcome?
It must, Michael decided, be possible to control the outcome, because that must be exactly what the futuristic Viking wanted to do. Should he, therefore, tell her where Marlstone’s time machine was, or should he do everything practicable to keep her away from the Keep?
“What the luck do I know about steam engines, anyway?” not-Cecilia muttered to herself, before pulling herself together. She took another peep around the corner, and Michael did likewise. Lady Phythian was fleeing across the lawn at an angle, and Hope was following her, but Escott seemed undecided as to whether to take another shot at Hope or let him go. Behind them, the younger Lady Langstrade and Carmela Monticarlo appeared at the side-door of the Hall. For a moment, it seemed that they were about to step through, but then Michael heard the very faint sound of a violin, carried across the lawn on a fugitive breath of breeze. Lady Langstrade and Carmela both looked around, then stepped back inside and closed the door
Not-Cecilia put her hands to her head, as
if she had fallen victim to a sudden headache. “Come on!” she croaked, harshly, “tell me! If you ever want to be reunited with your lucky Cecilia, you’ve got to help me!” Her expression suddenly became deeply suspicious. “Who the luck are you, anyway?” she snarled. “You can’t really be a native, or you’d have been taken over, if not by one of ours, by one of theirs. You’re messing with my head, aren’t you? This isn’t minus 273, and you’re from somewhen downstream. What is it that you’re trying to stop me figuring out?”
“The time machine is in the Folly,” Michael said, quickly coming to a decision, although it seemed to him that he was merely casting a die and trusting to luck—the non-obscene kind of luck that was the only kind he knew.
“Folly?” echoed the visitor from the future. “What folly?”
“The Keep,” Michael explained “It’s supposed to be a replica of a ninth-century keep built by Harold Longstride to defend the dale against Viking invaders, following his victory over Emund Snurlson.
Non-Cecilia simply stared at him, utterly nonplussed. “It’s powered by a nuclear reactor, isn’t it?” she said. “Fission or fusion?”
Unable to answer this question, Michael simply stared at her. His thoughts, meanwhile, were running on apace. This is how the invasion from the future works, he told himself. Cecilia, Lady Phythian, Hope and Escott—and probably others, including Jack and Langstrade, who are already in the Maze—have been dispossessed of their bodies by the Viking raiders from the future, and the Mistress of the Labyrinth will have to stop them getting to the Keep if she’s to protect the time machine from being taken over and brought into full attunement with some future machine, or machines, so that the physical invasion can begin. But whose side should I be on? Which result will I prefer?
Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine Page 24