Alex Scarrow - Gates of Rome

Liam shrugged. ‘All right. Just be gentle with me now, Mads.’

‘Oh, tsk-tsk. Don’t be such a baby.’ She worked the bandage loose. ‘I’ll be careful.’

He winced as she unravelled the material. ‘Sorry. Hurts?’

‘Naw, not exactly. A little tender… just — ’ he looked anxiously at her — ‘just worried this is the only thing holding me together.’ He laughed edgily. Not entirely joking.

‘Oh, I think you’ll mend.’ She smiled. There was something about Liam that felt indestructible. Maybe it was that stupid lopsided grin of his. Maybe God really did exist and spent his full shift every day looking after devil-may-care idiots like him.

‘Ouch! Go easy!’

‘Sorry.’

Even though she could see traces of ageing in his face, the silver flecks in his hair, that plume of grey hair at his temple… somehow she couldn’t quite imagine him as Foster yet. As that poor, frail, dying old man. Or perhaps maybe she just didn’t want to.

He should know.

‘Here we go,’ she said. The last layer was still damp. Blood that was not quite dry. She eased the material away from his skin, stuck to it as if by glue.

‘More slowly, please,’ he whimpered nervously.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ She grimaced as his pale skin tugged at her soft pull.

She eased the last of it away and realized, as she looked at the puckered line of his wound, there was never going to be the perfect time to tell him… just a time. Too many secrets had already got in the way of them as a team, as friends. This was the last of them. She looked across at Rashim, muttering like Gollum as he sat on his haunches and studied the glistening meat.

‘Liam?’

‘Aye… how is it?’

‘Liam… you’re dying.’

‘What? It’s just a cut — ’

‘No, Liam, listen… time travel, it’s actually killing you.’

He frowned. ‘What the devil are you going on about now?’

‘Foster told me. Going back in time, it ages you. It accelerates the ageing process.’

That silenced him.

She pointed at his temple. ‘Liam, come on, you must have noticed — ’

‘Of course I have. I’m not blind.’ He took the bandage out of her hands and began winding it back round himself. ‘I’m not stupid either.’

‘Liam. I — ’

‘It’s killing me.’ He sighed. ‘I know that.’

‘You know?’

He paused then nodded. ‘I suspected as much.’ He busied himself winding the bandage again. ‘When we came back from the Cretaceous time. Edward Chan, that girl, Laura? I think I guessed it then that time travel made them sick.’

Maddy nodded. ‘They both took a lethal hit. It’s a bit like radiation poisoning — there’s no recovery. It does its damage and there’s no way back from it.’

‘That doesn’t sound so good.’

‘No, not good.’ She heard something in her voice she didn’t need right now. ‘Here, let me help you.’ She took the bandage back off him and finished the job with a knot. ‘I’m so sorry, Liam. I’m so very sorry. I should’ve told you as soon as I knew.’

She expected anger. Instead, she got a smile out of him. A heartbreaking one; the wistful, moist-eyed sort that old war veterans give on Patriot’s Day.

‘Liam?’

‘I got some extra time, Maddy. That’s a bleedin’ gift, so it is.’

Oh God, Liam, why can’t you just be angry with me? That would have been easier to cope with.

‘And I’ve already seen so many incredible things with that time.’ He grinned. ‘I’m up on the deal. What’s to be all down about there, eh?’

‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘Liam… you’re Foster.’

‘Uh?’

‘You are Foster.’

He laughed. ‘I’m not as cantankerous as that old — ’

‘No. Liam… I’m saying you are Foster. You’re the same person.’

For the second time in as many minutes she’d managed to shut him up.

‘I don’t know how that is. I don’t know how it works that you two are the same person; it’s just what Foster told me.’ She was struggling to explain it. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with the loop we live in. Maybe we’ve all been here before and we don’t remember it. Maybe history and us, we’re on some big wheel that just goes round and round. I don’t know. All I know is what Foster told me.’

‘Right…’ Liam’s eyes were on Rashim’s sunken, tortured body, folds of skin drooping from bones that seemed to almost poke through in places. ‘Right…’

‘There are no more secrets now, Liam. That’s it. You know everything I know.’

He looked down at the hands in his lap. ‘Old man hands,’ he whispered. ‘That’s what me mam always said I had. All knobbly knuckles.’

‘Liam…?’ She rested a hand lightly on his arm. ‘Liam… I don’t know exactly what it means that you and Foster are the same, but it’s something important. Important to all three of us. We have to think it through. We need to talk it through. When we get back, we’ll do that. The three of us, we’ll — ’

She could hear branches cracking, Bob and Sal’s voices. They were returning from the brook.

He nodded. ‘OK.’

Just then they emerged from beneath the shade of a tree with a cracked clay jug in Bob’s arms. ‘We found this!’ said Sal. ‘So Bob’s humped some water up for you.’

‘About time,’ croaked Liam. He even managed that stupid goofy grin for the pair of them.

‘We should eat,’ said Maddy.

Rashim nodded. ‘Yes, eat! Eat!’

‘Aye! I’m bleedin’ starvin’! We was just about to start on them coneys without you, so we were.’ He looked at Maddy. ‘Right?’

She could have wrapped her arms round him then and there, squeezed him blue just for Liam being Liam.

‘Yeah.’

AD 54, outside Rome

‘Are you absolutely positive it was today?’

Rashim nodded, although not as vigorously or as confidently as Sal would have liked. ‘Today, yes, of course, of course, of course it is!

… I remember!’ he muttered irritably.

They sat in a line in the shade of a row of bushes looking out across the flat top of the hill. Wild parched grass and heather swayed gently in the light breeze. They’d been sitting here in the shade as the day had warmed up, gradually sweltering, cooking in their own sweat as the morning passed interminably slowly and the sun beat down on the arid countryside.

Sal sighed. She wasn’t so sure this mad old fool was going to be their ticket home. He was too skittish. Too unhinged. Too completely weird and schizo to seem reliable. She looked at his lean face, all ridges and old scars; his wiry grey hair in tangled tufts, bald patches here and there like an attack of alopecia. Worst of all, his mouth: rotten gums and brown stumps of dead teeth. His breath was almost unbearable — like decaying meat.

She wondered how old he was. Seventy? Eighty? It was almost impossible to guess. But then, as Maddy had eloquently pointed out last night, seventeen years spent in a wooden box was going to ‘mess anyone up pretty good’.

‘Midday. Midday. Oh yes! Yes! It was about midday,’ Rashim muttered to himself.

But then again he’d said last night they’d arrived first thing in the morning, which was why they’d been sitting here like a row of gullible morons since daybreak.

‘Maddy?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘If we do manage to get back to the archway, what if those “Bobs” who were after us are still there? You know? Waiting for us.’

‘We’ll just have to be ready to fight them.’ Maddy closed her eyes. ‘There were two of them left, weren’t there? A male and a female.’

‘I think so.’

‘Bob can handle the male… the rest of us — ’ she glanced at Liam — ‘I’m sure between us we can handle the female one.’ She shrugged. ‘That’s if we can even get back.’