Romani Armada (49 page)

They emerged onto the street and Demyan scrambled to dig out his sunglasses and put them on. Even though the day was a lovely overcast fall day, the sun still drove into the back of his eyes.

Rhydder strode across the road, pulling out the card for the car. The Corvette was sitting safely on the other side of the road, a small blessing in disguise. That was a complication Demyan would not have wanted to deal with. He could have replaced any number of modern day luxury cars, but a cherry red ‘68 Corvette Stingray replica would have been a pain in the neck to find.

Demyan slid into the passenger seat. “That was my one chance to convince the woman to work on Pritti, and you took it away from me.”

Rhydder was leaning against the low-slung window frame as if he was struck by a thought. Then he straightened. “Wait here,” he told Demyan and headed back to the apartment.

* * * * *

They scrounged for coffee and calories, the best cure for shock that Marley could think of. She took care of the coffee while Gawain took care of the calories. Of the two of them, he was the better scraps-cook, simply because he had been doing it longer than she had.

The knock on the door came just as she switched on the gas under the kettle and they both looked at each other. She could even guess Gawain’s thought.
What now?

She opened the door. Rhydder stood with his hands in his pockets, perhaps trying to look non-threatening. He made no attempt to step into the apartment.

“What?” Marley demanded.

“Romanov’s patient,” Rhydder said. “He forgot to mention a couple of things.”

Marley shrugged.

“Pritti is only twenty-nine,” Rhydder said. “She won’t make it to thirty.”

Marley took a breath to speak, then let it out. There was nothing she could think of to say to that.

Rhydder pulled his hand out of his pocket. There was a business card in it. He held it out. “That’s my number. Call if you change your mind.”

Reluctantly, she took the card. “You said there were two things,” she reminded him as he turned to leave.

Rhydder looked over his shoulder. In the dim light of the hallway, his eyes were very black indeed. “Today is Pritti’s birthday.” He turned and walked down the hall.

He didn’t look back.

Marley slammed the door shut on him and stamped her foot, making Gawain pull his head out of the cold cabinet, puzzled. She crumpled the card in her fist while she gripped her temples with her other hand.

“Goddammit!” she cried.

* * * * *

Rhydder navigated the Corvette out of Gershom and drove out of Hammerside, heading for the landing strip outside the city limits where he could lift the car into semi-ballistic mode. Romanov fumed silently beside him.

When the phone buzzed on the dash, he smiled and answered it.

She didn’t bother identifying herself. “I’ll do it, but there’s conditions. I have to protect myself.”

“I would expect nothing less,” Rhydder assured her. He wheeled the car over the edge of the road, making Romanov swear softly, startled.

“When can we set this up?”

“Now,” Rhydder said simply.

“Now?” She seemed surprised.

“Pritti has no time and you have plenty of it. Why not? Besides, I don’t want to give you time to think about it and recant.”

“I wouldn’t do that.”

Rhydder held back the response he wanted to make. Instead, he said, “We’ll be there in five minutes.”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Bushland, near Beechworth, Victoria, Australia, 1879:
Ryan pulled a thick roll of very large notes out of his saddle bag and handed it to Justin. “See you back home,” he said. He glanced at Adán. “I’ll see you again,
amigo
.”

“That will be agreeable,” Adán told him.

“No, wait a moment,” Deonne said quickly. “I’m confused. Justin told you about this place, so you jumped here ahead of us to make sure it was clear. Okay, I get that. But now you’re expecting us to go back to the 23
^rd
century?
All
of us?”

Ryan gave her a small smile. “There’s been no time wave in your natural time. There has been no wave at all associated with anything Justin has done in Liping, or here.”

“Justin said that, too. Perhaps it will come through later?”

“You were less than two hundred years in the past. The wave should have reached us almost immediately, if you had changed anything of significance. But as far as we can establish, Justin was
meant
to pull you out of Liping. Both of you. He was meant to bring you here. Time has simply been waiting for the twenty-third century end of the loop to occur so the loop would close up on itself. So, no time wave.”

“But that means that time knew that two hundred years after Liping, Justin would jump back. Are you saying it can read the future?”

“Time has no shape,” Justin told her. “It’s only humans who experience time as a line.”

“Another way to look at time,” Ryan added, “is to realize that all moments, everywhere and everywhen, are all happening at the same moment. Time is what gives them shape. Time is the fourth dimension, the one that makes sure all those moments happen in the order they should.”

“But you just said all moments happen at the same time!”

“They do, except that time separates them. Time is the reason there are consequences.” Ryan gave her another small smile. “It’s a chicken and egg thing, Deonne. If you try to figure out if Justin jumped back to Liping because you were in danger, or if you ran into danger because Justin went back to Liping, you’ll make yourself crazy.”

“I hadn’t even thought of that!” she said, horrified.

Adán chuckled. He seemed to have no problems following Ryan’s logic.

Ryan surprised Deonne by hugging her. He kissed her cheek and looked into her eyes. “I’m proud of you. I will see all of you back home soon.”

He moved back a few steps, then bent his knees, jumped, and was gone with the same gale-force wind swipe that had characterized Nayara’s jump.

Adán was staring at the empty place where Ryan had been standing. “It seems so simple, yet…” He shook his head.

“It really is that simple,” Justin said, tucking his watch back in the little pocket on his waistcoat. “Yet it can be a disaster to the entire universe if you don’t do it right.” He walked over to the horse and unhitched it, then clicked his tongue to coax it into walking forward.

Deonne watched, fascinated, as the horse followed him as he headed back to them. Of course, Justin would have learned how to handle horses the way she learned how to operate a vehicle. Only he would have been much younger.

“What is this mysterious thing we are to do here?” she asked, running her fingers over the pins holding her hair up off the back of her neck to check they were secure. She had managed to pin her hair in a neat roll, while Adán held the camera up while it was running in self-image mode. It was a high-tech mirror that worked well enough for her to see what she was doing.

Justin walked the horse in a tight circle so it was standing next to them and handed the reins to Adán, who patted the horse’s head and stroked its nose with the palm of his hand. He looked just as comfortable with the animal.

“We’re going to Beechworth,” Justin said.

“Where you lived? Why?” she asked sharply, as he fitted his hands around her waist and lifted her. He placed her on the saddle and lifted her skirt out of the way. “You’ll have to hook your knee over the horn of the saddle. Sidesaddle…you’ve seen it?”

She nodded and lifted her knee up and around the rise at the front of the saddle, while Justin slid her other boot into the stirrup. He patted her ankle. “We won’t be doing any trotting or galloping, so you should be fine. Just be sure your ankle is covered by your dress.”

“It’s rude to show your ankle?” she asked.

“It’s very forward,” Adán said. He smiled at the idea.

Deonne plucked at the sleeve of her dress. “But this dress is made of some sort of chiffon. It’s practically see-through. You can see what I’m wearing underneath if you look hard enough.”

“It’s muslin,” Justin said. “They’re considered the highest of high taste, muslin dresses. My sister—” His face clouded over.

“Is that what her white dress was made of?” Deonne asked gently.

He drew in a breath and nodded. “Anyway,” he said, changing subjects. “You’ve said more than once that I don’t talk about myself and I suppose I don’t. I thought, since we had to hide out somewhere in time, I’d show you instead of telling you. Both of you,” he added, glancing at Adán.

Adán smiled. “Lead the way.”

It was a long but easy walk through bush and across natural meadows, to reach the edge of the burgeoning town. Justin walked ahead, while Adán led the horse. Every now and again one of them would step back to check Deonne was comfortable. It was her first time on a horse, but this one seemed to be very placid and even-footed. It didn’t snort or sidle at anything.

Beechworth was a thriving place. Houses spread out across the valley and up the sides of the hills, a dun-colored carpet of shacks, cabins and more luxurious houses with verandahs and gardens.

The roads were unsealed gravel and dirt, rutted by the passing wheels of coaches and carriages. Horse paddies were everywhere, making Deonne more than grateful she did not have to step through it.

Adán and Justin kept to the center of the narrow street, only moving off to one side if a faster moving horse or carriage came up behind them, or passed in the opposite direction.

The cabins they went by were rough affairs, with small windows, no fences, and little in the way of decoration or gardens. Some had vegetable patches just outside their front doors, but they were struggling, weedy lots.

Justin had said he lived in a shack. He had grown up in something like this.

As they travelled further toward the heart of the town, the houses became larger and better established, although they were still tiny by Deonne’s estimation. The most common type of house seemed to have a door in the middle, a window on either side and a verandah. The roof extended over the front of the house to cover the verandah. But despite their diminutive size, these houses all had glass in their windows. They were painted and curtains hung in many of the windows. They all had well-tended gardens. Most of the gardens were the practical sort, filled with vegetables and trees that Deonne suspected were fruit trees. Some had additional flowers and shrubs hugging the fence line. Low picket fences separated each yard.

The center of town was easy to recognize. The buildings abruptly became much larger and grander and many more people and horses, carts and carriages appeared. There were sidewalks – wooden planks laid side by side along the side of the road. Justin and Adán moved over to walk on the planking, while the horse walked alongside, its hooves making an echoing clopping sound now they were among higher buildings.

At a crossroad, the buildings leapt to two and three stories, with verandahs and balconies on all floors, tin roofing, brick chimneys and big glass windows. They were all painted a dull red color with white trimming, if they were not made of brick.

From the open doors facing the center of the cross roads Deonne could hear loud talk and laughter. From all four buildings.

They passed an open door and a distinct, recognizable odor washed over them.

“These are bars?” Deonne asked, amazed. “All four of them?”

Justin dropped back to her side. “Hotels,” he corrected. “Australians like a cold one after a hard day’s work.”

“More than one,” Adán said, looking over his shoulder at them. “I thought I had a head for liquor, but I learned when I came to Australia that I had been a goldfish among whales. Drinking is a cheap past time for most of them.”

“The hotels provide accommodation, too,” Justin added. “There are many people who live almost permanently in the hotel rooms. Most of them are single men with good paying jobs.”

“What sort of jobs?” she asked.

“About twenty years ago, gold was discovered in the area,” Justin said. “This town, then, was not much more than a hut or two and one shanty hotel. Then the gold rush hit, and the town built itself almost overnight. Almost everyone in Beechworth works in the gold mining industry in some way or another, or they provide services that support the gold.”

“Miners?” Deonne asked, thinking of the hovels they had passed on the edges of town.

“Miners, engineers, administrators. Business owners. Speculators.” Justin grinned up at her. “Then there are the wives, the children, and the whores. A single woman doesn’t stay single long in this town. There are too many lonely men.”

She glanced down at her gloved left hand, where the wedding band was covered by soft kid. Now she understood better why Justin had put it on her finger.

“Your mother came here to get married?” she guessed.

“The marriage didn’t happen. Three days before the wedding, the man she was going to marry died in a shaft cave in.”

“But she stayed?”

“She met my father,” Justin replied. He was speaking easily, with no hesitation or coyness. But he was looking around, absorbing the reality of the town as he walked. It was distracting his attention enough to allow him to speak freely. “She got pregnant, but found work in the Beechworth Arms as a barmaid, despite her condition. I suspect my father may have arranged it. His reputation had been building by then.” He pointed to one of the smaller hotels on the intersection.

Adán pointed to the biggest hotel. “I lived there for nearly a year.”

“You worked in the town?” Deonne asked.

“I was a civil engineer by day, overseeing the building of shafts and tunnels. At night time, I made more money.”

“Professional gambling,” Justin said.

“Among other things. A booming new and raw town offers unique opportunities if you look for them. I doubled my personal worth three times in five years.”

“Why did you leave?”

“Beechworth became too settled and controlled. There were other boom towns, further out from Melbourne. I headed north. Then, a few years later, I met Justin.”