Alex Scarrow - The Doomsday Code

‘Of course it is,’ Maddy said coolly. ‘That’s why this — time travel — has to be kept so secret.’

‘But — but think how it could revolutionize history! Historians could visit the times they study; see for themselves how things were and not rely on — ’

‘And with each historian casually joyriding back into the past, the precious history they’d be studying would be altered, mutated, with echoes of change ricocheting back through time, tiny waves affecting tiny decisions causing bigger waves affecting bigger decisions. And all of a sudden in 2001 we’re all speaking, I dunno — Chinese, or we’re all suddenly dinosaur lizard-men, or there’s no New York any more and it’s just radioactive ruins! All because somebody decided it would be a coolthing to go back in time and see a bit of history for themselves!’

Sal looked at Maddy. Her cheeks were mottled pink with anger, or embarrassment.

Jahulla, what’s up with her?

‘Sorry,’ said Adam meekly. ‘I was just saying.’

Maddy turned to look at him. ‘That’s why we’re here, Adam. Stuck in this archway. Stuck in these same two freakin’ days, watching the same things over and over! We’re here because there are morons in the future. Idiots! Crazies! Power-hungry lunatics who think time travel’s just a game ! A neat idea! We’re stuck here watching history … and I’ve got no idea how long we’re gonna be here — me, Sal and Liam.’ She looked at Sal. ‘Forever?’

Sal shrugged. ‘I hope not.’

Maddy’s outburst left a long silence filled only by the hum of computer fans and soft purring motors of the growth tubes in the back room.

‘You OK?’ asked Sal.

Maddy chewed her lip in silence for a while. Then eventually nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she sighed. ‘I’m OK.’

‘Sorry,’ said Adam. ‘It’s just all so new and exciting to me.’

Maddy shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry. I … I was rude. I didn’t mean to crank off at you. It just sort of gets to you — this. Knowing about all this. I’m tired.’

Sal decided to lift the mood. ‘Well, the good thing is they found the right gravestone. Right?’

Maddy nodded. ‘Right.’

‘We’ll know what they’re up to this time,’ she added.

1194, Beaumont Palace, Oxford

The cart drew to a halt on the dirt and cobblestone track leading up to the flint-walled grounds of the royal residence, and Cabot dropped down off the cart’s seat on to the track with a heavy smack of sandals.

‘Morning!’ he called to the cluster of soldiers up ahead blocking the way.

Staring at the tall stone buildings beyond the low wall — the steep gables, the crenellations, the flumes and chimney-pots from which thick columns of woodsmoke floated, the fluttering rooftop pennants decorated with royal coats of arms, Liam found he couldn’t help but giggle. Yet another sight a young man from 1912 Cork was never meant to see.

‘What is funny?’ asked Bob.

‘Oh, I’m not laughing, Bob. It’s just exciting. Seeing this … seeing a real medieval king’s palace.’

Cabot’s exchange with the pack of soldiers was already over. They — five of them in winter cloaks and heavy chain-mail, puffing clouds of breath — disinterestedly watched him trudge back towards the cart.

‘What’s the matter, Mr Cabot?’

‘John is not here,’ he replied as he pulled himself up on to the seat. ‘He has moved to Oxford Castle.’

To Liam’s disappointment they had skirted round the walled city of Oxford a mile or so back and not entered through the large archway into the busy thoroughfare he’d glimpsed beyond. However, over the top of the thirty-foot-high stone wall, he had spotted tendrils of woodsmoke coming from several steep rooftops and thought he’d caught sight of the crenellated outline of a keep somewhere in the middle.

‘The guards say ’tis the unrest in this region that has driven him to the castle for safety.’

Liam looked back at the low flint wall, the open ground beyond that decorated with cherry trees and the structure of Beaumont Palace itself; it was not unlike a cathedral, long and low with a vaulted roof of timbers. And, he noticed, no motte or other defensive earthworks around the place. Hardly the safe retreat of a ruler in times of trouble.

‘Oxford Castle,’ said Cabot, grabbing the horses’ reins and turning them slowly round. ‘I know it well. ’Tis a strong keep and the city itself very well protected by its wall. Good place for John.’ Cabot’s dry laugh sounded humourless. ‘That is, unless the people of the city have also turned against him.’

The late-afternoon sun peeked through scudding clouds as the cart rattled unchallenged under Oxford city’s main gatehouse into a marketplace thick with the activity of traders closing up for the day.

Liam sat on the seat beside Cabot, chuckling with undisguised pleasure at the sight and the smell of the place. Market stalls, no more than flat hand-drawn carts, were being loaded with the unsold flotsam of the day: rotten, broken heads of cabbage and snapped turnip roots. He saw a trader stacking the remaining skinned hares and rabbits head to toe, a baker collecting the last unsold stale loaves of bread, and, among all the traders packing up for the afternoon, he saw a wandering rabble of very old and very young beggars in dirty threadbare rags, pleading for the scraps too unfit to sell and destined for a pig’s trough.

‘’Tis a bad time for the poor,’ said Cabot.

Liam’s gleeful smile all of a sudden felt wrong. Poverty. Grinding poverty. He’d seen that before; beggars in Cork, of course. But that was for money. Money that would perhaps end up going towards a drink. But this … this was begging for the food that pigs would eat.

‘Aye,’ he said quietly.

Across the market, a thin veil of smoke hung, the collaboration of woodsmoke from a dozen outdoor pyres and the mist of warm breath from a thousand mouths in the cooling air. The air smelled overpoweringly of two things: woodsmoke and dung. Woodsmoke … Liam had noticed that every place and every thing seemed to smell of that. If there was one odour that would remind him of the twelfth century for the rest of his life, it would be that. And it mercifully covered up at least some of the cloying stench of festering faeces, a heady brew produced by animals and humans alike.

Cabot noticed him wrinkling his nose. ‘’Tis one of the reasons I choose a monk’s life, far away from the city.’ He nodded ahead of them. ‘Oxford Castle.’

It was approaching dusk now; the grey sky deepening to a midwinter’s blue. The now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t sun was gone, lost behind the city’s wall. Emerging through the low-hanging haze of smoke and mist ahead of them, Liam spotted the tall and square-sided Norman keep of Oxford Castle. Through high-up slitted windows, he glimpsed the amber glow cast from warming braziers and flickering torches.

Cabot steered the cart up a weaving cobblestone thoroughfare, narrowing in places where shanty-town huts and sheds encroached like scab tissue around a sore. Through open flaps of tattered cloth Liam caught the fleeting images of pale and curious faces lashing out: faces smudged with dirt, and gaunt from hunger. Eyes that stared without hope at the flickering of a tallow candle inside, eyes that glanced his way momentarily with only passing interest.

Liam’s hope of seeing green fields and fair maidens and chivalrous knights in gleaming armour and merry men skipping round maypoles and florid-cheeked buxom wenches laughing with simple peasant joy … now seemed rather naive.

This is grim.

The cart crossed over a wooden-slat bridge, over a muddy-coloured river that had frozen over at the edges. Ahead of them, a tall stone archway announced they’d arrived at Oxford Castle. Liam watched a gate guard approach the cart.