Extraordinaires 1 (19 page)

D
amona hadn't lost her temper for thirty-two years. She surrendered herself to it now.

‘Who?' She stood in front of the time machine. She shook both fists in the air. ‘Who can I punish? I will tear their throats out!'

The time machine slowed, hissed and crackled. Her people in the workshop stared. Uncertain, afraid. More edged through the far door, a crowd. Behind them, noise and shouting. Labour. Activity. Progress.

Hilda was in a chair. Two friends attended her. She had her head in her hands. Weeping. She raised it when Damona approached. ‘The phlogiston. It's gone.'

‘I know.' Damona's rage subsided, dwindled. The young woman looked sick. An angry red mark bloomed on the side of her neck. ‘You were shot?'

‘With this.'

Damona took the dart. It was well made for Invader stuff. Well balanced. A reservoir for refilling. Someone was good. ‘How much phlogiston did the machine use?'

‘Much.' Hilda gestured at the cabinet. ‘But they have taken the rest. Our stockpile.'

‘You moved our stockpile here?'

Hilda's face crumpled. ‘It was the efficient place for it.'

It made sense, but it was a disaster. It would take months to refine that much phlogiston.

Damona hissed. She was impatient, now, after all these years. Revenge was close. She wanted it now. She studied the machine. ‘How far back did they go?'

‘I had the controls set.' Hilda's voice was choked. ‘Two hundred and fifty years.'

‘Do we have any more phlogiston?'

‘Some. In the main workshop.'

‘Enough for another test?'

Gustave bustled forward. ‘They were the two young Invaders you brought in earlier, Eldest.'

Damona grunted. Invaders. Trouble, always. The world would be better off without them.

She gave the dart back to Hilda. She put her hands on her hips. Head back. She studied the time machine. ‘Hilda?'

‘Can the machine operate again?' The young engineer smiled, slowly. ‘Maybe. How far back, Eldest?'

‘The same.' She searched the faces. ‘Rolf. Magnus. Assemble a raiding team. I have a special mission for you.'

Magnus flinched, Rolf looked thoughtful. They jogged off in opposite directions.

Days of labour. Brainwork. Effort. Years of planning. Years of toil. Alone.

Damona now saw her dream made real. A time machine. Made by the True People to right a wrong. When it was ready the past would be mended. No more dispossession. No more persecution. No more wandering, lost and hunted.

Signe, my great-granddaughter, this is for you. And for all those who were taken before their time.

A grim smile. About her, people muttered, wondering. Damona went to the time machine. Stood in front of it, proudly.

‘All is not lost,' she announced. She lifted her arms. Made fists. ‘We now know the machine works.' They brightened. Smiled. Cheered. ‘We will succeed!'

Rolf and Magnus pushed back through the door with others. Armed. Eager. Ready.

‘Rolf. Magnus. We will send you back through time. Take your team. Find the Invaders. Bring back the phlogiston we need.'

Rolf cheered. Magnus asked: ‘And the Invaders, Eldest?'

Damona thought of Dr Ward. ‘Bring them back, if easy. If not . . .' She shrugged.

Hilda pushed through the crowd. She held a bundle of metal mesh. ‘Eldest! If they are coming back, we need to make preparations!'

‘Quickly,' Damona said. She smiled at those assembled, together, as one. Her people. ‘Go. Hunt.'

K
ingsley nearly choked when he staggered up the stairs that led from the underground river. The air was thick with smoke. His eyes watered. He found it hard to breathe. Evadne blundered into his back, pushing him forward and out into the open.

‘This is an escape?' She flapped a hand and adjusted her phlogiston-filled satchel on her shoulder. ‘Out of the frying pan, I'd say.'

‘Where are we?' Kingsley had trouble working his mouth. Since arriving in the stinking dark cave, his brain had felt as if it had been pumped full of water and squeezed. Thoughts were heavy and imponderable and he had trouble articulating the simplest thing.

In addition, his wild self was terrified – the smoke and the grinding, thunderous sound filling the air made him want to either flee or hide.

‘I've no idea,' Evadne said. ‘Keep your wits about you.'

‘This way,' he mumbled.

Together they stumbled into a street of two-storey, half-timbered buildings that jostled side by side with each other. In the narrow gap between them was a churning sea of frightened people.

Men, women and children shouted and screamed, pushed and clawed at each other. Kingsley coughed, and grimaced at the dark and smoky air. Then he looked up.

The sky was orange, and black, and red.

‘The world's on fire,' he muttered.

Evadne wrapped her scarf around her face, pushed back her satchel and then dragged at his arm. He nearly tripped, but shambled with her to a crooked lane between two buildings. They climbed over a pile of broken pots, then Evadne had to stop and cough.

Kingsley leaned against rough timber. Muck and cobblestones were underfoot. Low, old buildings leaned towards the middle of the alley like conspiring gossips.

Noise nearby – shouting and the roar of . . . artillery?

Without thinking, he took Evadne around the waist and, bent double and coughing, they hurried through the smoke. A terrified hound caught up to them and raced past, howling. Part of Kingsley wanted nothing more than to join it.

A bone-aching concussion rocked the ground nearby. They were nearly bowled over by a man and woman who were adopting much the same mode of locomotion as they were, but were simply much better at it. Their wooden shoes clocked on the cobbles as they fairly sprinted past, just ahead of a tide of ash and hot air.

Evadne cried out and dropped to all fours. ‘My spectacles!'

Kingsley stopped dead, acutely aware that his next step could be the end of Evadne's seeing, at least for the moment. He held out his hands, ready to ward people off. ‘You said you carried extra sets.'

‘The Neanderthals took them,' she said, almost weeping.

Another roar, then Kingsley shuddered at the shrieks from nearby. Someone – man, woman or child, he couldn't tell – was both terrified and without hope, but unwilling to stay silent in the face of whatever was coming for them.

‘I have them!' Evadne cried but when she put them on she made a sound of disgust. ‘I must find water. I can hardly see.'

Kingsley was starting to think more clearly and had a notion that water might be in short supply.

Another explosion nearby. More people pushed into the lane behind them and hurried in their direction. Kingsley and Evadne pressed against the half-timbered wall and let them past.

‘This is bad,' he said softly as a welter of details impressed themselves on him. They were insistent, demanding that they be taken together to make a whole, but he shied away from them and their implications. Of all the times in London to be sent back to . . .

Evadne gripped his arm. ‘What is it? I can hardly see.'

‘Nothing.'

‘As bad as that, is it?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘People only say “nothing” to a question like that when the answer is dire.'

Kingsley flinched as a gigantic crash reverberated down the lane. They both had to shy away as a wave of dust, ash and smoke swept past them. ‘We seem to be on fire,' he said.

‘I can tell that, even with only a tiny patch of unsmeared vision, but something else bit you. What is it?'

‘The people hustling past us. Unless they were from a nearby theatre, their clothes are hundreds of years old. But they're new. If you see what I mean.'

More hot ash and embers were driven at them. Kingsley turned away again, shielding Evadne. He screwed up his eyes. When he opened them again, she'd tilted her head and was looking at him through one corner of her spectacles. ‘Thank you. I couldn't see that coming.'

‘We need to get away from here.'

‘Follow the strange dressers. They seemed to know which way to go.'

‘Good idea.'

‘In an emergency, I don't care how people are dressed, as long as they're helpful.'

Kingsley would never have said that he knew every street and byway of London, but he quickly admitted to himself that they'd emerged into a district that he'd never been in before. In the smoke and grit whipped up by the wind he couldn't make out any landmarks, either, but the nature of the buildings and the clothing on the panicked pedestrians confirmed the conclusion he'd come to.

Evadne rebelled against her almost helpless state, but after smearing her spectacles even more badly, she gave up and allowed Kingsley to drape his arm and pull her close, steering the way through the panicked streets. Explosions continued to punish the air, sending up sparks, dust and a chorus of shrieks with every detonation.

Sometimes
, Kingsley thought,
all it takes is one point to fix a bearing.
In London, a few marks were unshakeable and he saw two of them at once – the river and the Tower. Immediately, he knew they were north of the river, not far from the City.
If that's the case
, he thought, fending off a man who was carrying a rooster,
where are the Houses of Parliament?

They weren't there. Instead, a rambling pile of buildings, grand enough but rather ramshackle, sprawled along the riverbank. Then his eye was dragged back along the river. ‘Tower Bridge isn't there.'

Two men in gorgeous velvet knee breeches ran past. They were carrying a small barrel on a sling between them. Their hats were wide brimmed and dashing. Their hair was long, as were their cloaks, and their beards were pointed. Scabbards flapped at their sides.

A man dressed in a leather apron staggered past, singing with more gusto than talent. He had a tankard of beer in each hand. Hardly thinking, Kingsley pointed past him. When the drunkard followed the direction of the gesture, Kingsley relieved him of one of the tankards. ‘That woman!' he shouted in the man's ear. ‘She's calling you!'

The man clearly had trouble understanding Kingsley, so Kingsley leered, then winked. The man leered back and swayed off, swinging his shoulders and swimming through the crowd.

‘Here.' Kingsley gave the tankard to Evadne. ‘Use it to wash your spectacles.'

She made a face when she smelled it. ‘Beer?'

‘Ale, I'd say. It's most likely cleaner than the water around here.'

She made another face, but carefully dipped the spectacles in the beer before using her handkerchief. ‘Better. Smelly, but it will do for now.'

‘I want you to tell me I'm not dreaming.' He slapped at his shoulder, which had started smouldering, the victim of a drifting spark. He pointed. ‘You see the Tower. What's on the river near it?'

‘Boats. Lots of them.'

‘Any bridges?'

Evadne put a hand to her mouth. ‘Where's Tower Bridge?' She swung her gaze. ‘Where's Big Ben?'

‘Remember how you told me to keep an open mind? It's your turn now.'

Ash and embers swirled about them. The people in the tiny crossroads were undecided about whether to panic, to sing or to pray, so they were doing all of them at once.

Evadne looked at them and then at Kingsley. ‘Tell me.'

‘I think we've landed ourselves in the Great Fire. Welcome to 1666.'

‘I'm willing to accept that the Neanderthals have a working, phlogiston-powered time machine that's shot us back almost two hundred and fifty years,' Evadne said. ‘What I'm keenest to discover, though, is a way for us to get back home.'

They'd made their way across London Bridge, along with thousands of others, in the hope that the river would provide a barrier from the fire beast that was consuming the world. From their viewpoint, on the walls of the dilapidated and rambling maze of buildings that a weeping man told them was Winchester Palace, they could see the explosions as the city authorities did their best to make firebreaks to stop the spread of the conflagration. The velvet-clad cavaliers that Kingsley had seen earlier were no doubt King Charles's men, running gunpowder for the desperate task.

Unlike all those around them, Kingsley and Evadne had the small comfort of knowing that the city would survive. From where they were, however, that appeared most unlikely. The entire vista was afire. Flame rolled across rooftops like a stormy ocean, wave on wave sweeping across London, devouring with a hunger that was unquenchable. Boats made the perilous crossing, ferrying passengers across the ash-laden water.

The wind roared towards the fire from the east, sucked into its greediness, but the fire itself outroared it, a vast grinding underlying a hissing and coughing that sounded like a great jungle animal. Nothing could stand in its way. It would consume and continue to consume until the world ended.

‘Have you read Mr Wells's novel?' Kingsley asked Evadne as they gazed at the catastrophe.

‘
The Time Machine
? Of course.'

‘It looks as if we're living what he dreamed,' he said.

‘Two hundred years.' Evadne put her satchel on the parapet beside her, then she stood with her arms wrapped around herself.

‘Nearer two hundred and fifty.'

‘A new London will rise from this.'

He gazed at the shabbiness of the old bishop's palace. The whole edifice had an air of neglect – tumbledown outbuildings, shrubs and small trees rooting in the cracks between stones, ivy questing indiscriminately. No-one had protested when they, along with hundreds of others, had mounted the walls to gaze at the inferno across the river. ‘The old London looks as if it won't be missed.'

‘It will be, but it will mostly be forgotten.'

‘Time does that.'

‘And what are we going to do?'

‘I've never met a trap I haven't been able to find my way out of.'

‘I'm reassured.'

‘It's just a matter of thinking about basic principles, looking for weaknesses, taking opportunities . . .'

‘And multiplying platitudes?'

‘I love a multiplying platitude,' he said solemnly. ‘So fulfilling.'

She crossed her arms, then uncrossed them to cover her mouth when she yawned. ‘I'm tired.'

‘You should be. You haven't slept for two hundred and fifty years . . . Negative two hundred and fifty years. A long time.'

‘Then sleep would appear to be a solution.'

‘And food.' Kingsley gazed across the city. Were they, indeed, trapped? He glanced at the wan Evadne. A small smudge of soot marred one cheek.

He saw how she was fingering the chain of her pendant. ‘Are you missing Clarence?'

‘Clarence?'

He gestured at her hand.

‘Ah.' She drew out the pendant and clicked it open. She studied it for a moment before sliding it back under her collar. ‘I was thinking that he'd enjoy it here. He's a scholar of Stuart drama.'

‘A remarkable fellow, Clarence. I couldn't invent someone so accomplished.'

‘What are you suggesting?'

‘Far be it from me to suggest anything. I simply bow down in front of Clarence. Or his picture, in any case.'

‘And so you should.'

Evadne gazed back at the spectacle of the fire and Kingsley turned to gaze at her. A thought came to him, unasked for and surprising. It wasn't hard to imagine, if things went sour and they had to remain in 1666, building a life here with this mercurial, accomplished and dauntless young woman.