‘Fistik!’ she spat, then, dropping his wrist, grabbed his shoulder and turned and shoved him stumbling forward. He got only a couple of metres before running straight into a wall of flesh. The hands that gripped his shoulders were huge and solid enough to compress the flesh off his bones. This man was enormous, dressed much the same as the woman, and by his features probably related to her. While he held Tack immobile, he and the woman exchanged a machine-gun conversation over his head, in their distinctive staccato language, then the man shoved Tack past him and on. Tack glanced back to see them walking behind him, the male with his weapon drawn.
The woman waved him on impatiently. ‘What is the name of heliothant with whom you travel?’
Tack stopped and turned towards them. ‘He didn’t give me his name—said I hadn’t yet earned that privilege. He told me just to call him Traveller.’
The man said, ‘That is believable. Now you will keep moving ahead of us and answer our questions as you proceed. If you delay again, I will burn off your legs and carry you.’
Tack quickly turned and kept on moving. He had no doubt this would be his only warning.
‘Describe this Traveller,’ demanded the woman.
After Tack did so, there ensued another of those staccato conversations. Abruptly the male and female were up on either side of him, catching him each by an arm and running with him. He found himself half running, half floating, and when he stumbled being lifted and carried forwards. In a few minutes the cramps returned to his legs and he began stumbling more frequently, terrified that the man would carry out his earlier threat. Apparently these two had no time to spare even for that. The woman released him and, still running headlong, the man hoisted Tack up and slung him over a shoulder. Then the mysterious pair accelerated away at a stupendous pace. Soon they were out of the trees and onto the grasslands again.
‘Deinth!’ the woman shouted a warning.
Tack saw the huge animal suddenly bearing down on them. This close he saw how it did resemble an elephant, but with a short powerful trunk and shorter tusks protruding from its lower jaw. But it did not need to have recognizable characteristics for Tack to know that its earlier trauma had left it very pissed off indeed. It roared triumphantly as it thundered down on them in its own surrounding dust cloud, shaking its massive head from side to side. Tack expected his captors to veer away from it, but instead they ducked low and were under the red mouth and compost breath, between its forelegs then out through the side between foreleg and rear, then up and running again. Behind them the bellowing creature turned to pursue them, its two-metre legs making it a match even for these two apparent superhumans. The bizarre chase continued ever further out into the grasslands, the deinotherium neither gaining nor giving ground.
‘Fist mantisal-ick scabind!’ panted the the woman.
Tack saw her whirl round and drop into a crouch, drawing a weapon that bore some resemblance to a long-barrelled Colt Peacemaker. It emitted an arc-welder flash, then a dull and actinic explosion blew to gristly fragments most of the creature’s head. It skidded down on its knees, only its trunk and lower jaw still attached by a gory bridge of flesh to the stump of its neck. Its momentum was such that it nearly somersaulted, but such was its huge weight that it flopped back and slumped onto one side. Before Tack could see more, the man came to halt and unshouldered him ungently to the ground.
‘Saphothere,’ hissed the woman, as more weapon fire erupted. Tack managed to raise himself to his knees just as a mantisal appeared above them. The woman was firing out over the grasslands as the white-haired figure of Traveller wove towards them, blasting away. Something else was happening that Tack could not quite fathom: there were sheets and lines slicing through the air, against which the weapon discharges flared impotently. The man guided the mantisal lower, then gestured for Tack to climb inside. As Tack hesitated, he reached out to grasp his arm and, wrenching his shoulder, threw Tack aboard. Then the female was screaming, her right arm burning like wax caught in a gas torch. Once the man was in the mantisal, the strange thing began drifting towards the woman as she loosed a fusillade towards Traveller. Then she too was safely inside and the world just folded away.
6
Traveller Thote:
The temporally active scales the beast drops, which Maxell named tors, it guards until they are taken up by a suitably vulnerable individual. Usually this person will be someone who would have died, so the beast is naturally attracted to events in recorded history where it can easily select its candidates. By this means it creates a lesser paradox to affect its own position on the probability slope. Already it has initiated three torbearers in Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius, two from Nagasaki, and three hunters who had the misfortune to be in the Tunguska River valley in 1908. It is impossible for us to detect these initiations until they are made in the time-line concurrent for both Cowl and us, thereafter the torbearers become increasingly difficult to detect as they are dragged back through time. But once they are located in time, it is then only a matter of how much energy we are prepared to expend to get to them. And get to some of them we shall, for they may be our only access to Cowl.
Polly gazed at a huge house, glimpsed through the trees, with bustling activity all around it: people disembarking from carts or dismounting, grooms leading their horses away, groups of others standing chatting—colourful fabrics bright in the sunshine.
You’ve moved in space as well as time. You earlier shifted just outside this place and it has taken some hours of travel to reach it again.
Ignoring Nandru, she asked, ‘King Henry VIII lives here?’
‘Oh dear, you have not travelled much in our fair country have you?’ replied Berthold. ‘This is one of our King’s hunting lodges. He is here for the stag and boar, and for all-night drinking and tupping—as a rest from his toils in our great city of London.’
Mellor grunted contemptuously, ‘Toils,’ and spat over the side of the wagon.
Then again, it would be surprising had you not moved in space as well as time. I have to wonder how the scale puts you down so gently on the Earth’s surface, considering that not only is the planet revolving, as it hurtles around the sun, but it’s precessing and wobbling at the same time. Just thinking about the calculations involved would make my head ache. Had I a head…
‘Nandru, just shut up, will you?’ Polly replied subvocally, wondering if it was just her imagination that Nandru seemed to be displaying a babbling nervousness at the prospect of encountering such a famous historical figure.
As Berthold drove the wagon out from the woodland, four guards wearing steel breastplates and helmets over padded clothing stepped out onto the track ahead. Two of them bore pikes and the other two carried crossbows. One of the latter, who wore a brocaded velvet jacket over his breastplate and a sword at his hip, held up his hand until Berthold drew the wagon to a halt. ‘Get down from there. I’ll not crick my neck to just speak to the likes of you,’ he ordered.
Berthold leapt down, swept off his hat and bowed. ‘Good Captain, we are here at the express invitation of Thomas Cromwell, the Earl of Essex himself. Myself having entertained him in the Saracen’s Head in Chelmsford, he thought my skill sufficient to have me perform before His Majesty.’
The captain withdrew a thick sheaf of paper from a leather wallet at his belt. ‘Name,’ he demanded.
Watching this exchange, Polly realized that over the centuries it was only the clothing of tinpot officials that changed.