Overtime (6 page)

Blondel was as good as his word. For years he wandered through France and the Empire, singing under the walls of castles, until at last his money was all spent and he had nothing left to sell or mortgage. He was sitting in abject despair in a small inn in Lombardy when he happened to get into conversation with a small group of travelling merchants. Pardon their asking, they said, but were they right in thinking that he was the celebrated Blondel?

Tired though he was, Blondel knew an artist's duty to his public and forced a smile on to his face. The merchants bought him a drink and said that they had long been admirers of his work. They thought he had originality and flair and what do you call it, that thing, relevance. They all thought he had a lot of relevance, and did he have an agent?

‘What's an agent?'

The eldest merchant broke the silence first. He leaned ever so slightly forward, smiled in that way people do when they're appalled but fascinated, and said, ‘It's like this ...'

Blondel raised a polite eyebrow. He wasn't really all that interested, but it does no harm to listen.

‘Look,' said the merchant, ‘there's you, right, all creative, thinking high thoughts, goofing about humming and saying to yourself, Isn't the colour of my true love's hair just a dead ringer for a field of sun-ripened corn? That's great, absolutely. What you don't want to be bothered with is hiring a hall, getting your posters out, fiddling around with the popcorn concessions and getting the parking organised. That's where an agent comes in.'

Blondel thought for a moment. ‘Like a steward or something?'

The merchant blinked. ‘Well,' he said, ‘yes. Sort of. Anyway, the main thing is, you'll be free to exercise your whatsit, artistic integrity, absolutely safe in the knowledge that the ticket office will be manned and the warm-up band'll be there on time.'

‘How do you mean?' Blondel asked.

The merchants looked at each other.

‘When you do your gigs,' one of them said. ‘Concerts.'

‘What's a concert?'

There was a long silence. It was as if God had said
Let there be light,
and the void had replied,
Sorry?

‘Um,' said the eldest merchant. ‘It's like, lots of people gathered together in one place to listen to you singing.'

Blondel arched his brows. ‘That sounds nice,' he said, uncertainly. ‘Would they want to be paid, or do you think they'd make do with a cup of wine and something to eat?'

The youngest merchant said something very quietly under his breath, but the only word Blondel could catch was Idiot. ‘I don't think so,' said the eldest, in a rather strained voice. ‘In fact, they'd probably pay you ...'

‘A token fee, of course,' one of the others added. ‘Just a sort of little thank you, really...'

‘I don't know,' Blondel said. ‘It sounds a bit, well, you know. Accepting money from strangers. Not quite the thing, really.'

‘Covers expenses, though,' said the eldest merchant quickly. ‘And a man as shrewd as you are, you'll see in a flash that that's got to be a good idea. I mean, you can get your message across to a wider audience, fulfil your destiny, all that sort of thing, and it won't cost you a penny. In fact, there might even be something in it at the end of the day, after expenses have been paid. You know, like ten per cent—'

‘Five per cent,' said one of his brothers quickly.

‘Five per cent of the net takings, all for you, to spend on what you like. We'd take care of all the rest of it for you.'

‘Really?'

‘No worries,' said the eldest merchant. The middle partner, who had been writing something on the back of the wine list, nudged him and pointed at what he'd written. The merchant nodded. ‘By the way,' he said, ‘my partner here would like your, um, autograph. Not for himself, you understand, for his wife. She's a fan.'

Blondel frowned; it seemed a curious way to describe someone - flat, with crinkly edges, swaying backwards and forwards. Then the penny dropped and he realised that the man had meant a fan-
bearer.
One of those people who stood beside you and waved one of those big carpet-beater things. King Richard had had two of them in Cyprus, where it got very hot around midday.

‘Certainly,' he said. ‘Where shall I sign?' He squinted. ‘Will underneath all this small writing do?'

The merchants assured him that that would do perfectly.

 

To his surprise, the Blondel Grand European Tour (as the merchants described it) was a tremendous success, and Blondel was able to carry on singing under the walls of all the castles in Christendom, frequently to audiences of well over ten thousand, without haying to contribute a penny to expenses. For their part the merchants never seemed to grow tired of following him about and finding him castles to sing under, and if they insisted on him singing a lot of other songs as well as
L'Amours Dont Sui Epris,
Blondel didn't mind that in the least. He liked singing and was always making up new songs.

Eventually, however, Blondel found that he had sung under every castle in Christendom, and still he hadn't found the King. When he mentioned this to the merchants, they said that that was too bad, but they'd been thinking for some time now that the acoustics under castle walls didn't do him justice anyway, and what did he think to having a nice large arena built somewhere central with good parking facilities, proper acoustics and a seating capacity of, say, fifty to sixty thousand? It would, they said, take his mind off not being able to find King Richard.

And then, after Blondel had been singing to capacity crowds in the special arena for a month or so, a messenger came to see him. A great deal of detail can be omitted here; suffice to say that the messenger confirmed that Richard was alive and well, and was indeed being held captive in a castle. The problem was that the castle was very difficult to get to.

Blondel replied that he didn't care; he'd given his word to the King, and he wasn't going to give up now.

The messenger shrugged his shoulders and said that that was all laudable, but Richard hadn't been abducted by the King of France or the Holy Roman Emperor or any one of those small-time outfits. He was in the dungeons of the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes.

‘So what?' Blondel asked. ‘Where is the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes?'

‘Good question,' said the messenger.

Blondel then requested the messenger to stop mucking about.

The Chastel des Larmes Chaudes, said the messenger, was hidden. Not only was it hidden in space, it was also hidden in time; it could be in the present, the past or even the future. Also, could Blondel please let go of his throat, as he was having difficulty breathing?

The messenger departed in search of witch hazel for his neck, leaving Blondel even more despondent than before. After all, time was time; nobody could travel to the past or the future. Nevertheless, he said to himself, he had come a long way and he wasn't going to let something like this stand in his way. The least he could do would be to put the problem to his agents (or rather his management company; they had incorporated under the name of the Beaumont Street Agency) and see if they could come up with anything.

‘No problem,' they said...

 

‘And that,' Blondel said, ‘is how it happened. More or less.'

‘More or less,' Guy repeated. ‘Are you saying that you're...'

Blondel nodded. If his hand instinctively reached for something to sign his autograph on, his brain checked the impulse.

‘You're telling me,' Guy went on, blundering through the words like a man in a darkened room, ‘that you're nine hundred years old.'

To do him credit, Blondel simply nodded. Guy closed his eyes.

‘Um,' he said. ‘Mr... Monsieur...'

‘Call me Blondel,' Blondel said.

‘Thank you, yes,' Guy replied. ‘Blondel, do you have a bathroom in this, er, castle?'

‘Bathroom?'

‘A priwy,' Guy said. ‘A latrine. Er.'

Blondel raised an eyebrow. ‘Not as such,' he said. ‘After all, this is the twelfth century we're in now. Well, mostly. I get the electricity for the machines from the twenty-third century. By the time I reach there I'm going to have the most enormous bill. But the plumbing is, well, pretty medieval. Why do you ask?'

Guy thought hard, seeking to find the best possible form of words.

‘I don't know about you,' he said at last, ‘but I find physical discomfort is a great barrier to concentration, and just now I feel I ought to be concentrating on what you're saying.'

‘Ah,' Blondel said, ‘I see. Very sensible of you. We all use the channel that runs round the edge of the main hall. That's through the door immediately behind you.'

‘Thank you.'

An empty bladder, Guy always felt, gives you a whole new perspective on things. Problems which had seemed insurmountable a few minutes before gradually begin to take on a new perspective. When he came back into the study a few minutes later, he was feeling much more able to cope.

‘Well,' he said. ‘Blondel, eh?'

‘Yes indeed.'

‘Pleased to, er, meet you.' Guy smiled weakly. ‘Actually,' he said, ‘I write songs too. That is, I, well, dabble a bit, you know.'

A very brief flicker of pain flashed across Blondel's eyes, and for a moment Guy wondered what he'd said; then he understood. It was the pain of a man who, for nine hundred years, probably more, has had strangers say to him, ‘Let me just hum you a few bars, I expect it's the most awful rubbish really,' and has then had to perjure his soul by disagreeing. Guy changed the subject quickly.

‘So,' he said, ‘how do you do it? The time travelling, I mean. Does it just come naturally, or ...?'

‘Good Lord, no,' Blondel said, smiling. ‘Not a bit of it. My agents fixed it for me. You see,' he said, standing up and opening a drawer of his filing cabinet, ‘they originally come from the twenty-fifth century.'

Guy swallowed. ‘Oh yes?'

‘They do indeed.' From the drawer, Blondel produced a bottle of port. ‘Have some?' he asked. ‘2740. It's going to be one of the best years on record, so they say. Mind you, it all tastes the same to me.'

Guy shook his head. The thought of drinking something that hadn't been grown yet did something unpleasant to his stomach lining.

‘In the twenty-fifth century,' Blondel said, ‘time travel will be as familiar as, say, air travel is to you. It'll be so commonplace that they'll need to advertise it on posters to persuade people to use it instead of other, more convenient methods. “Let the clock take the strain. We've already got there.” That sort of thing. You sure you won't join me?'

Guy, who didn't wish to appear rude, accepted a glass.

‘Now,' Blondel went on, ‘orthodox time travel operates on a system called Bluchner's Loop. It's very technical and I really don't understand how it works, but it's something about the law of conservation of reality. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics,' Blondel frowned, then shrugged. ‘Something like that,' he said. ‘I read an article about it once in
Scientific Oceanian
but it was all Greek to me. Anyway, it means that when a person travels in time, then time sort of heals up after him as soon as he's moved on; it means that whatever he does in the past, for example, the present and the future will be exactly the same as if he'd never been there. In other words, I couldn't stop the Napoleonic Wars by going back in time and poisoning Napoleon in his cot. No matter how many times I killed Napoleon in infancy, he'd still be there in 1799 overthrowing the Directorate. All right so far?'

‘More or less,' said Guy. ‘Very good port, this.'

‘Like San Francisco,' Blondel agreed. ‘That's orthodox time travel. My agents - the group of people who became my agents - found another way of travelling through time. It wasn't nearly as safe as the orthodox way, but it meant you could take things with you. The orthodox way, you see, only lets you take yourself; which can be awfully embarrassing, so they tell me. It means, for example, you run the risk of turning up at Queen Victoria's wedding with no clothes on. Another?'

‘Thanks.'

‘There's another bottle after we've finished this,' Blondel said. ‘Plenty more where this is coming from. In fact, if you like, we can have the same bottle all over again.'

‘No, really,' Guy said, ‘a different bottle will do fine.'

‘My agents,' Blondel said, ‘saw at once that this new form of time travel had all sorts of possibilities. Commercial possibilities, I mean. The trouble was that if they told anybody about it, it'd be suppressed immediately; too dangerous. So they kept it to themselves. They used it for all sorts of clever financial deals, apparently. I've never been much of a money man myself so I don't really understand it all, but it seems they move money about throughout the centuries.'

‘Why?'

Blondel shrugged. ‘Tax reasons.'

‘Ah,' Guy said. That, he felt, would account for it.

‘What they used to do,' Blondel said, ‘and please excuse me if I get the tenses wrong, was to take money from the future and invest it in the Second Crusade; you know, King Richard's crusade. Well, don't you see?'

‘No.'

‘Oh. Well, I'm not a hundred per cent sure myself. But it occurs to me that if you start bringing lots of things - you know, gold coins, that sort of thing - back through time and depositing them in another century, then that's going to make the century they end up in rather - what's the word? - unstable. Volatile, even. You run the risk of upsetting the balance of nature, or physics, or whatever. I think that because they made rather a mess of time at about that point, they made the next bit of history go all wrong. It couldn't happen the way it was supposed to happen, because of all these influences from the future upsetting it. On the other hand, it had already happened - because, well, it did - and as a result of it happening, history's what it is today. Or then,' Blondel scratched his ear, and continued. ‘Anyway, I think that because of this imbalance or instability or whatever you like to call it, the whole thing sort of blew a fuse. Since the Crusade could neither happen nor not happen, history just washed its hands of the whole thing and left a great big gap. A hole, if you like. And Richard fell into it.'