Arcadia

62

‘Thank heavens I found you! Welcome back, Professor!’ Rosie cried as Lytten stumbled through the pergola and shook his head in relief and surprise. ‘Now do you believe me?’

Lytten didn’t answer, but leaned against the old sink, breathing hard. He seemed suddenly very tired.

Rosie was surprised; she had recovered relatively quickly, she thought. It wasn’t her story, though; maybe that made a difference.

‘What’s been going on? Has something terrible happened?’

Lytten pointed back at the pergola, still glowing faintly in the corner. Rosie turned to see what was so obviously causing him concern. ‘Chang,’ he said. ‘What’s he doing?’

‘Who?’

He was too appalled and fascinated to reply. Instead he stared at the scene of Chang and Rosalind struggling together in full view of both of them in the cellar.

Chang grabbed hold of Rosalind and was gripping her tight. In the half-light metal briefly glimmered, a knife to her throat, the knife Jay had presented as the weapon which had murdered Thenald, and which he had placed as evidence by the altar for all to examine. Rosalind fought back, trying to kick him, stand on his foot and wriggle free, but he paid no attention. Instead he was forcing her ever closer to the light, dragging her backwards, looking over his shoulder. He was much stronger than she was, and there was enough light to see the terror on her face, the tears rolling down her cheeks.

Step by step, ignoring her screams and attempts to bite him, he manoeuvred towards the light, occasionally almost picking her up and swinging her off her feet. There was no one to assist; no one could possibly intervene. The stone circle was deserted.

He stopped, panting with the exertion, but the girl kept struggling. One more heave, though, and it would be done. Already they were close enough for the light to illuminate their bodies, the short girl and the powerful man locked in a bizarre embrace. He bent slightly, summoning all his strength, one arm still tightly around her waist, the other hand holding the knife to her throat. Then he relaxed. She screamed one last time and fell from his grip onto the grass, rolling away from him, scrabbling to get away from the knife.

He shuddered for a moment, then fell sideways as if he had been pushed, blood pouring from a wound in his leg. Rosalind looked back at her attacker as he stood there, pulling at the arrow that was sticking out from him, blood splashing onto the ground. With an agonising look of pain he succeeded, but only at the cost of opening a jagged, bloody wound as the barbed end tore through his flesh. He wavered, now very unsteady on his feet, but focused on Rosalind lying on the ground. He still had the knife in his hand, and with uncertain steps he began to come towards her.

There was a shout in the distance from the bushes. Antros was hurrying towards them, as he was afraid of hitting Rosalind if he fired again, but he was too far away to reach them in time. If Rosalind got up and ran for safety, she would get a knife in her back, without a doubt.

So she did the opposite. With one almighty effort of will she launched herself forward and cannoned into Chang as he advanced towards her.

It was enough, but she paid a price. The weakened Chang toppled backwards into the light, but not before he made a desperate stab with his knife into Rosalind’s side. She screamed out in pain as a pair of hands grabbed her from behind and prevented her from following him through.

With one strong movement Antros all but threw her to one side and she fell heavily onto the ground. He stepped back, pulled another arrow from the sheath, metal-tipped like the first, strung it and pulled back. With one smooth movement, he aimed directly at the shadow on the other side and released it.

‘Look out!’ Rosie cried, and pushed Lytten to the left just as he tried to push her to the right. The result was that neither moved. Both crouched down fearfully and glanced towards the pergola. As the arrow entered the light, there was a sharp bang and fizzing, and Lytten’s cellar was plunged into total darkness. Not only had the machine evidently closed down, it had also short-circuited the entire house. Chang was screaming in agony in the darkness, which at least gave Lytten something to do. Taking a box of matches out of his pocket, he carefully found his way to the fuse box in the corner by the stairs.

‘Come and hold this, will you?’ he said. Her hands were trembling. ‘Steady,’ he said in a surprisingly calm voice. ‘Ignore Mr Chang. We can’t help him until we can see what we are doing. Concentrate on holding the match still.’

She managed, just, and the match — several of them, one after another — gave enough light for Lytten to extract the fuse, find the wire and repair it. Then he pushed down the main switch and the dim light bulb hanging from the centre of the room came on again.

‘Thank heavens for that,’ he said. ‘Now, go upstairs and phone an ambulance. This poor man needs to get to a hospital. Go on.’

He almost pushed her up the stairs, and then began to deal with Chang. It was a nasty-looking wound, but Lytten — whose eye was more expert than he liked — reckoned that it was not mortal, as long as the bleeding could be staunched. He ran upstairs and got some clean cloth, then knelt by the injured man and pressed hard, reassuring him with touching gentleness as he waited.

Rosie did a good job. The ambulance came swiftly, and Chang was taken off their hands after some emergency first aid as he lay on the dirty cellar floor. He was all but unconscious from the shock and pain, but at least it meant he had fallen silent.

‘How the hell did this happen?’ the driver asked. ‘Why is he in fancy dress?’

Good questions. ‘The police will explain,’ Lytten said curtly. ‘I’m afraid I cannot. Or rather, will not. Just do your job.’

Then he turned to Rosie. ‘We have a lot to discuss, but not at the moment. I have something I need to do, and according to Mr Chang it is urgent. You can go home or stay here. Or, if you are up to it, you could accompany Chang and see he is all right. It is entirely your choice.’

Considering that Chang had just tried to stab her, in a manner of speaking, Rosie was understandably reluctant to go anywhere near him. ‘I want to come with you,’ she said in a frightened voice.

‘You can’t. What time is it?’

Lunchtime, she told him. He had been gone for a couple of hours. She’d had a bit of difficulty resetting the machine, and it had taken longer than she thought.

‘Is that all?’

‘How long do you think you were gone?’

‘About six hours. Maybe more.’

‘What are you going to do now?’

‘First of all, I am going to get out of this dressing gown. I look ridiculous. Then I will go to the police station to talk to Detective Sergeant Maltby about Mr Chang. And I need a chat with Angela.’

‘What happened in there? In Anterwold?’

‘Well,’ he said, after a moment to arrange his thoughts into something which passed for coherence, ‘I played the role of a returning deity.’

‘Goodness.’

‘And I had to preside over a trial to decide who killed Thenald.’

‘Who did you decide had done it?’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t have the faintest idea. Henary figured it out. It was Chang. He is some sort of associate of Angela’s. At least, that’s what he says. Oh, and Angela is a time traveller from the future.’

‘I know that,’ she said, as though it were not so very interesting. ‘How am I? The other me, I mean?’

‘Until Chang intervened you were blossoming, my dear. Healthy, self-confident and rather forceful. You seem quite decided to marry Pamarchon, and he seems suitably enamoured of you, so I’m sure you’ll live happily ever after.’

‘Oh. That’s nice.’

‘Pamarchon is the spitting image of an old student of mine. If he has his character, you will get on very well.’

‘So I don’t want to come back?’

‘No. You and I parted on rather bad terms because of it, I’m afraid. That’s what I need to talk to Angela about.’

‘Henary looks like you, you know.’

‘Yes. I feel a little embarrassed about that. Jay looks remarkably like another student of mine. Gontal is clearly based on an unpleasant chemistry teacher who gave my cat his name. Antros was a corporal in the army during the war. In fact, nearly everybody seems to have been dredged up from my memory. It was very peculiar. Just as well I never met Hitler. I really do think you should go home, by the way.’

‘After all this? Not forgetting the spies, the people being arrested, the blood on the cellar floor? You think I can just go home and do my prep?’

She had a point.

‘Very well. You can sit over the road from the police station and wait, if you really want to.’

It wasn’t hard for Lytten to see Angela at the police station; after a long conversation with Maltby and a phone call or two to London, all objections were waived. In the end, Lytten promised to write a letter of commendation praising Maltby for his intelligence and diligence, Maltby promised to make sure nobody asked too many questions about Chang, and finally Angela was let out. She looked a little tired.

‘Henry! How lovely,’ she said distractedly when the cell door opened.

‘I’m sure. Can we get straight down to business, please?’

‘The Volkov business?’

‘No. The cellar business.’

‘Ah. That.’

‘I’ve just spent nearly six hours in that invention of yours.’

‘Oh, dear. Rosie should not have done that. That was really rash of her. Where is she, by the way?’

‘One is over the road, the other is still in Anterwold. I did my best to persuade her, and Chang tried to use more forceful methods. But she stayed. I gather that may cause you problems.’

‘Potentially, but it doesn’t surprise me. What about Chang?’

‘In hospital. One of my more dramatic literary creations shot him with an arrow when he attacked Rosie.’

‘That fits as well. He is having a difficult time, poor man. He’s not made for an active life.’

‘Nor am I any more.’

‘He was meant to find out where Anterwold came from. Did he manage that?’

‘He did,’ Henry said. ‘He came to the conclusion that Anterwold is our future, or will be once a nuclear war intervenes. Humanity has to be nearly wiped out to prepare the ground for this paradise of mine. A dark age, lasting centuries, with only a few survivors holding on in the furthest reaches, preserving what little knowledge they can by weaving it into stories that are transmitted by word of mouth, then written down as the Story.’

‘I see,’ she said. ‘I was afraid of something like that.’ She looked up at him. ‘Is it what you had in mind?’

‘I didn’t have anything in mind. It was just a few jottings in a notebook until you got involved.’ They stared at each other for a few seconds. ‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘What are you going to do now? Are you just going to sit there?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, her face clearing suddenly. ‘I am going to try and save the universe, or rather, see if it can be saved. If that sounds a little ambitious, then I am going to visit your aunt. Oh, by the way, Sam Wind was here. He thinks you are a Soviet agent. I hope that’s all right.’

It took some time to persuade Rosie to stay behind; she was very upset and wanted to be around the only people who understood why. But Angela was adamant. There was nothing she could do. If she wanted to be useful, then she should go back to Lytten’s house and stay there. Make sure nobody came in, and allow no one, under any circumstances, to go into the cellar. Shoot them, if necessary. If she wanted to clear up the blood, though, that would be most helpful.

Rosie most certainly did not, but she agreed to the rest and went off, although not very happily. Angela then led Henry to her car and they drove to Tudmore Court, near Devizes, Wiltshire.

‘How did you get me out?’

‘Surprisingly easy. I can be very persuasive when I have the head of MI6 on the phone to back me up.’

‘Isn’t that just grand of you.’

They didn’t talk much; Angela was working and driving at the same time, while Henry was lost in thought. Only after an hour, her calculations finished, did Angela say:

‘What did you think of Anterwold?’

‘Oh, it was... astonishing. It works quite well. But I don’t know how it will behave when its horizons expand. I knew I’d imagined it as a variety of England, but I suppose there are other people scattered over the world. Are they at the same technological level? I didn’t bother with any of that. How does that work?’

‘Those elements will be produced by logical inference from the basic information in your notebooks. For example, I remember you state that no one has troubled the place greatly for a long time and that the occasional coastal raid is easily dealt with by a militia. That supposes low population and a matching technological level elsewhere. It doesn’t sound as though you’re suddenly going to get Panzer tanks landing in the south.’

‘I wish more things survived. Of us.’

‘You’d be surprised what they will find if they look. Think how much survived the dark ages. It’s probably there, if they only search in the right places. Lord only knows what they’d find in that Story of yours if they read it properly. And, of course, a Rosie is there to help them. She’ll be instructing them in Shakespeare and Julius Caesar soon enough.’

‘I made Catherine look like you.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. She surprised me. I scarcely sketched her at all, but she took on the appearance of a major figure in my real life.’

‘I’m flattered. How closely does she resemble me?’

‘Not identical; a long way from that, but you can see the relationship. Everything that happened in there was because of her, and I didn’t think of any of it. It was odd.’

Angela took a corner at an alarming speed, then said, ‘Interesting. I don’t think you should go back into Anterwold, you know.’

‘I don’t want to. Besides, I thought you were going to close it down?’

‘I don’t know that I can. All I can hope to do is modify conditions to prevent the original machine being used. If I get that right, then preceding events will change. With luck either I will not create Anterwold or Rosie will not go into it. If that happens we will never know about it, of course, because none of this will have happened. This trip is to find out if that is possible.’

‘How?’

‘I want to see if it is possible to destroy the Devil’s Handwriting. If I can’t, then I’ll have to think again.’

‘Do you know what’s really strange?’ Henry said, once he had decided not to query her on that remark.

‘In comparison to...?’

‘I’ve been reading a manuscript by a colleague of mine, Persimmon. He lays out what he thinks is the perfect technocratic society. Hell on earth.’

‘So?’

‘He is quite stupid, you know, but he has forecast the future remarkably well. The nightmare he conjures up is extraordinarily like the one you and Chang describe.’

Angela fell silent for a long time.

‘Now,’ she said eventually, ‘you’re just trying to give me a headache.’