The Book of Feasts & Seasons

by John C. Wright

  “I meant, talk while making sense.”

  “What do you not understand? If you touch the time machine, if you make any effort to use it, all the events which you will set in motion become, for you, actualized: a real possibility. The events springing from those possibilities become real. And this includes those time travelers downstream of you, unhappy with your actions, who seek to revise them.”

  “Revise how?”

  “The simplest way, the least complex energy state, as it were, to prevent time paradoxes, is to kill the time traveler just before he starts.”

  I said, “And so you’ve never touched the thing? You were afraid someone from the future would pop into existence next to you, and shoot you with some sort of ray gun? Why not go back and prevent your parents from ever meeting? The fact that you are standing here now–”

  He shook his head. “Men still have free will. Not until the very moment I use the time machine will I have stepped into the fourth dimension. They would have to stop me right at that moment. There are time-energy considerations involved.” He looked at the brass and copper machine and sighed. “Oh, I have polished it, replaced old wires, kept the jars charged. I have sat in the saddle and toyed with the levers, yes, even powered up the solenoid and heard it hum. When I wanted to remember something I’d forgotten, for example. But actually to attune the cylinder and engage the drive? No. I’ve never done that.”

  I said, “You don’t know me. What if I climb on that thing and just fly away? Become master of the world myself? Why take the risk?”

  “I must see if it works.”

  “What does that mean? Must?”

  He spread his hands. “Can I explain the agony of living with this thing in the attic so many years, unable to know whether the machine actually works or not? A machine I am afraid to touch? Perhaps everything I read was a lie. Perhaps it is merely a stage magician’s trick. I cannot live on faith. I have to see it. I have to see it work with my own eyes!”

  “So if I jump on this thing, this magic time travel machine, every time traveler from hereafter to eternity might come gunning for me? Fine. You picked me because you know how badly I need to see her again. See her alive, I mean. I’ll play along. But there is one condition.”

  “What is that, Mr. Went?”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “It would mean nothing to you.”

  “Tell me anyway. If the Time Cops arrest me, I won’t talk.”

  “They will not arrest you or question you. When they act, they kill. My name is Professor Pajo Mandic. I am descended from Tesla’s sister Milka.”

  I turned again and threw my leg over the saddle. “You said the machine moves through space as well as time? Guided by what, exactly?”

  Professor Mandic stepped behind the machine and turned a crank, so that the large copper disk behind the saddle started slowly rotating. He threw an old-fashioned double-throw switch and the crystal bar between my legs began to glow.

  I wondered if my legs were wrapped around something radioactive, even though it was too late to worry about such things now. I also wondered when I had started to believe any of this might be real. But the fact that I was nervous the antique contraption might blow up made the hope that it could carry me into yesterday seem possible.

  Professor Mandic said, “Touch your ring to the axis of the cylinder, and engage the first lever. It controls how many days per second—subjective seconds—you will be in motion. The second lever controls how many degrees into the fourth dimension you will be rotated. The greater the angle, the less contact you have with the three-dimensional world, and the less time, subjectively, your voyage will take. If you stay at less than forty-five degrees, you will see the sun like a ribbon of fire, and winter snow appear and disappear in blinks of an eye across a vast panorama. If you find yourself suffering from motion sickness, use that leather sack there. The first time traveler discovered an odd yaw and pitch and sway which made him nauseous. Wait? What are you doing?”

  Because it was not my wedding ring I touched to the cylinder then. It was my crucifix.

  If I could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would I go and see? I had only this one opportunity. Yes, I wanted to see my wife again. I would have given anything to see her again. It would be like an amputee regaining his lost right arm once again.

  But there was someone I wanted to see more. I needed an explanation.

  I landed, or materialized, or whatever the word is, at the foot of a cross on which a man hung dying.

  The sun was beating down and the flies were crawling on his face, and he cried out when he saw me, such a cry of hopeless pain as I had never heard. Immediately I leaped from the machine and went to him, to see if there was any way I could get him down without hurting him further. He croaked at me, a word I did not understand.

  The nails were not driven through the palms of his hands, as it is depicted in religious art, but right through the middle of his forearm, between the radius and the ulna, which looked even more painful. Other spikes had been driven into and through his lower legs, between the tibia and fibula.

  He was naked, which is also not the way he was usually depicted in religious art. I could see insects crawling through his pubic hair. He did not have a free hand to scratch them or pluck them away.

  Only then did I notice he was not alone. There were many more than two hanging to either side of him. The man to his immediate left had died and hung there motionless, his head bowed, withered like a mummy in the sun.

  Perhaps I was still queasy from the gyrating motions of the time machine, or the sudden change from cool night to scalding day, but the sight of so many naked men, all dying, all with bloodstains marking their arms and legs, all gasping for breath, and the stench of their wounds crawling with flies, made me lightheaded. And some of the men had voided their bowels after being raised up, so smears of fecal matter ran down the base of the crosses and their legs.

  Worst of all was the sound, the gasping, grating, harsh, and horrible sound. It was all those men fighting desperately to breathe.

  Not many people talk about how crucifixion works. It is one of the more painful, humiliating, sadistic, and lingering deaths ever invented by man. The victim is hung by his arms to put pressure on his ribcage so he cannot breathe. The exposure will eventually kill anyone strong enough, but, before that, the pressure of all the body’s weight suspended from the dislocated shoulders, after several hours, or days, weakens the same muscles in the chest used for drawing breath until the victim can no longer breathe.

  In order to take a breath, the victim must straighten his legs, which are also nailed by spikes to the cross, and this relieves the pressure for a moment, so he can draw in a ragged, gasping lungful of air. But eventually, his legs lose their strength, and ever so slowly, ever so painfully, he is unable to lift himself. And so, in the end, he suffocates. The fortunate ones die more quickly of shock and exposure.

  I stepped around to the back of the cross, not because I had any thought in mind, but only because I saw no way to get him down from the front. The splinters were driven into his buttocks and his back, which was red, raw, and bleeding. The spikes protruded through the wood, but I did not have any carpenter’s tools. I pushed helplessly at the red point of one spike with my fingers, not because it could do any good, but only because I could not stand by and do nothing.

  I looked left and right. There were about twenty-four or thirty men nailed there, all told. Some were children no older than fourteen. Some were graybeards already dead, and crows were eating their eyes with stabbing motions of their beaks that looked perversely like a kiss. Perhaps some of the others, if they had been immediately flown by helicopter to modern emergency rooms, could have been saved.

  “Hoy! Get away from there!” This was in Greek, which I did understand.

  I looked to the left. I saw a group of dull-faced children, bellies bloated with malnutrition, throwing stones at one of the crucified men whose eyes had
been torn out by birds, hitting him in the crotch and belly, grinning little dull-eyed gap-mouthed grins when he moaned and thrashed. They scattered at the voice.

  The voice came from a little ways beyond them. A man in the iron helm and segmented leather skirt of the Romans was standing near a fire of coals, warming a bit of food on a stick, with an open flask nearby. I remember how impressed I was that, in a place like this, reeking as it did, he could eat his picnic luncheon at leisure. He reminded me of a friend who worked in a morgue and could eat a ham sandwich next to a ripe and newly sawed-open corpse without thinking twice about it. People get used to things, including things they shouldn’t.

  There was a second soldier with him, but he was lying down, having propped his shield up with his spear to form an impromptu parasol to keep his head in the shade.

  The soldier slowly picked up his javelin (a four-foot length of wood and iron with a wicked tip) and slung across his shoulder his eight-sided shield set with a lightning-bolt motif. “Stay back, you. The traitors’ bodies are the property of Rome.”

  At this, the other men hanging to the left and right now stirred and began crying out, some in tongues I did not understand, others in Greek and Latin.

  But I understood them. They were crying for water.

  I remembered reading somewhere that starving men lose their sensation of hunger after a while, but men dying of thirst merely get more and more thirsty as they die.

  The mummified man I had thought was dead now stirred to life and called out to the soldier in Latin, “Break my legs, break my legs! Die! Let me die! The land of shadows!”

  They were calling out to the soldier, their tormentor, for water or for a merciful death, not to me.

  The soldier was now close enough to prod me with the butt of his spear, which was a lump of lead the size of a child’s fist. “Is your head in the air? No gathering blood, necromancer! We don’t want your black magic. You barbarians are civilized now!”

  Necromancer? He could not even imagine I was looking for a way to help the dying man.

  I said to the soldier, “I am a stranger here, and have lost my way–”

  He wasn't interested. He stepped close to me, so close that I could smell the fish and alcohol on his breath, and backhanded me across the face hard enough to knock me down.

  My Latin classes had not encompassed First Century cursing, so there was a lot in what he said that I did not follow. But I got the gist. “Is this the way you talk to your betters? I march under the arms of Rome, cur. My children will be citizens. Don’t lift your eyes to me!”

  I started crawling backward, inching toward the time machine, but he stepped forward and stepped down with the iron sole of his marching sandal upon my hand, driving it into the warm, bloodstained stones of the execution ground, pinning me in place.

  “I did not give you leave to go!”

  “I lost my way, sir,” I pleaded, gasping with the unexpected pain.

  Only now did he seem to take in my untimely clothing. “I’ll say. What are you? A Saxon? A Scythian?” He peered suspiciously at the machine. “Your cart seems to have lost its wheels.”

  I did not raise my eyes to him, not wanted to be beaten again, and reviled myself for my cowardice.

  “Robbers,” I said, “They took my horse, too.” It is hard to know a man’s mood if you are afraid to look him in the face. That makes it risky to lie, because you cannot gauge his reactions.

  “Horse?”

  “Donkey,” I corrected. Horses were creatures of war, not used for other purposes. I was in a time before the invention of the horse collar. The plough-horse was a thing of the future. Slaves ploughed the fields.

  “Why didn’t they take your–what is this?” He was no longer stepping on my hand, but had strolled over to the machine. “This big copper disk?”

  “It is for astrology. To read the stars.”

  “Ah? You tell fortunes?” He raised his voice and called out to the other soldier. “Hoy! Cratus! Come find out if your wife is whoring around on you! We have a soothsayer here!” The other soldier grunted a word I did not know, probably another swearword.

  “If I may be permitted, sir,” I said, “I can show you the secret. May I rise?”

  He was curious, and waved me over to the machine, and he did not stop me as I slowly seated myself on the saddle. I had never opened the double throw switch, so I need only tap the handle once, clicking the second wheel over, and this put ten days between us.

  This time, it was raining, and there were still crosses along the roadside, but no one was occupying them. My landing startled a pack of dogs snuffling hopefully at the foot of one and they ran off yelping.

  The time machine did not have an umbrella or hood, and I wondered how well the works would stand up to being rained on. I squinted at the dials, and added up days by the tens and hundreds, and arrived at a figure. I was sure I had made a mistake, and then checked it again.

  I had not arrived in 33 AD, the date I expected the memento of the crucifix to land me. I am not sure if I had counted correctly, or added leap-year days correctly, or remembered the date when the Julian calendar switched to the Gregorian. I had landed in 3 or 4 BC–the nativity.

  I could see, despite the rain, that the country around here was pockmarked with small caves. I picked the nearest one, and began hauling the machine toward it on its skids, seeking a place to hide it. After about an hour of sloshing through the rain, and, later sweating in the sun after the end of the brief shower, I had a bright idea. I walked to the cave, looked around, picked up a small chip of rock, walked back to the machine, sat on it, held the rock to the cylinder axis, and tapped the lever lightly.

  The world blinked, and I was in the cave. I returned the wheels to their original setting, worked the lever again, and poked my head carefully out of the cave, and heard myself talking to the soldier a hundred yards or so away. I pulled some dry bushes in front of the cave mouth, and walked parallel to the road for some time, afraid being seen by any soldiers, and horrified by the nightmarish line of crucified victims dying in the sun.

  Eventually, I passed the last occupied cross. Not many minutes’ walk after that, I came across a line of people walking the road, some driving laden donkeys. They were not dressed as colorfully as one might expect from a Hollywood costume drama, and no one there even came up to my shoulder height. I am not sure how odd my clothing looked, in dark trousers and a white shirt (I had removed my coat and tie, leaving them in with the cave with the machine), but no one gave me any close looks as I started walking alongside them.

  I tried once or twice to start a conversation with my fellow wayfarers, first in Latin, then in Greek. No women would talk to me at all, as each pulled their shawls in front of their faces and turned away. The men flinched, and mumbled something apologetic in tone, and cast their eyes down, and would not answer more than that.

  Something in the foot-weary way they shuffled, the way they kept their eyes down, reminded me of photos I seen in various war torn times and places. These people looked like refugees.

  At one point, we all walked past something that looked something an energetic troop of Boy Scouts had made: tall poles lashed together with line, with a small platform topmost. I almost did not recognize it as a watchtower, until I saw the eagle on a pole above it: the all-conquering eagle of Rome.

  At the foot of the watchtower, two soldiers were beating a man and taking his donkey, which was a young, healthy animal. They threw his bundle off its back into the dirt, and drove him back with blows from the butts of their lances. They led the young donkey away, laughing at their good fortune, to a paddock that had that same Boy Scout precision lashed-together-expertly look as the watchtower.

  I should mention the clothing and gear of the Romans was handmade, like that of the natives, but it looked as if it were handmade by better, more competent hands. It made them look like a superior race of beings, and that superiority showed in their voices and postures and the light in their eyes. It
was the immense confidence, no, the pride that comes from knowing you can trample another man’s face, and tell him to kiss the sole of your boot. And knowing that he would.

  Not refugees. I did not recognize what was I was seeing because, well, frankly, no one has ever occupied Kansas City, or hung rebels up on trees by the roadside to die slowly in the sun with spikes through their forearms and thighs.

  They were a conquered people.

  All the hope had been beaten out of them. The conquerors methodically killed anyone who caused them trouble, anyone who showed too much leadership, too much initiative. They killed the hopeful ones.

  A trio of small raggedy children now darted out of the crowd of the road, and made as if to snatch the bundles and fallen belongings of the beaten man. His head was bloody, and maybe he was dazed, because he did nothing to stop them. I ran forward, shouting, slapped the biggest child, the pack leader, across the back of his head hard enough to make him drop his loot—it was a crudely woven cloak or bedroll, nothing more—and the other urchins screamed like birds and fled. I put the bedroll back with the pile. The pile was more than one man could carry, which was why he had been using a donkey.

  He stood there looking at me with big eyes. I saw the look in his face, the empty, wary look. He was expecting me to pick up some choice possession and make off with it. He thought I was a lion beating off jackals, not someone trying to save the deer.

  Instead I passed him my handkerchief. I motioned to his head. I pantomimed daubing the wound.

  He said something, in a dull, dazed tone.

  I said, “Do you speak Greek?” I actually used the word koine which I remembered was the word for common Attic.

  In the same tongue, he whispered, “Beware. They watch.”

  It was true. The Roman soldiers were looking at me with flat, cold-eyed stares. They probably did not like my height, and my straw-colored hair. It is not my fault I was raised in Kansas. We have to be tall enough to see over the cornrows.