Time Riders: The Doomsday Code (26 page)

Truth was that mob of bandits, whether led by some hooded figure or not, appeared to be operating further away now that Nottingham and the surrounding area was back under some semblance of order. The farms were now regularly patrolled by their raw recruits, and the daily sight of a column of one hundred men in chain mail appeared to have been enough of a disincentive to those villains that no crops had been flamed or ruined so far this year.

This time last year, Liam had learned from Cabot, they’d been raiding every farm they’d come across – the workers killed, animals butchered or stolen, fields left in flames. And a summer had passed in which little food could be set aside for the winter. The previous sheriff had done nothing to prepare for the inevitable famine, except, of course, to ensure his own castle was well stocked.

Liam had been stunned at how much the simple gesture of offering bread to the poor and starving of the town had achieved, ending the riots with one stroke. These hardy people were prepared to endure endless hardship and sacrifice and even offer their unfailing loyalty … so long as their noble-born masters treated them like human beings.

A simple idea for a poor lad from Cork, born in the year 1896, to understand; almost impossible for these French-born lords and barons to comprehend, though – most of whom didn’t even bother to speak the same language as the peasants they ruled over.

What a difference five months has made.

Liam realized, once again, how there was a bewildering one-sidedness to things. He and Bob had arrived back in 1194 at the beginning of January, a cold desolate month of dark grey days. Now it was June. Winter had ended, spring had been and gone, and summer appeared to have arrived early, the trees already thick and green with budding leaves. But for Maddy and Sal, he imagined only half an hour or an hour would have passed; the time it took to recharge the displacement machine.

He shook his head.

‘What is the matter, Liam?’

‘I just realized something.’

‘What?’

‘I’m ageing faster than the other two.’

‘Maddy and Sal?’

‘Aye.’

‘That is correct. For you much more time has passed.’

He tutted. ‘But that’s not fair, is it? We keep doing long missions like this … I could end up an old codger while they’re still bleedin’ teenagers.’

Bob looked at him, uncertain how to respond. ‘It is an unavoidable consequence of time travel, Liam.’

He sighed. ‘Ahh well, I suppose I agreed to this kind of thing when I let that old man Foster take me.’

They walked in silence for a while, the walls echoing with the clank and rasp of Eddie’s recruits drilling.

‘We have another tax collection organized for today, don’t we?’

‘Affirmative.’

Half a dozen of the nearest nobles’ estates had been paid a visit by Bob, Liam and half the castle’s garrison. Each time they’d returned with wagons loaded with grain and a tithe of coins. The nobles and barons all pleaded poverty when they turned up outside their walled keeps, all claiming that John’s taxes had left them destitute and starving, but it was surprising how well fed they and their household servants all seemed to be, and how well stocked their granaries were. Meanwhile their tenant farmers beyond the walls looked as much like scarecrows as the people of Nottingham had last winter.

‘We’ll do the visits first, then you can return with the loot, but I need to go on to Kirklees.’

Bob stopped. ‘You should not travel without an escort, Liam. There are still bandits in the forest.’

‘I know … I know. I’ll take some men with me, I promise. On horseback we should make it before nightfall; we can stay at the priory and return early tomorrow. I just think it’s time to update the others, and make sure Becks is ready to come back. Her mission clock is ticking down too.’

‘Affirmative.’

Eddie called out and his men ceased drilling. Liam watched the recruits at rest; a pair of young women moved among them with water butts strung from poles across their shoulders. They served the hot and thirsty men ladles of water that they drank and splashed across their sweaty faces.

‘I wonder,’ said Liam, ‘I wonder how she’s doing?’

‘Have I told you, Lady Rebecca … have I told you how
beautiful
your eyes are?’ John cooed from her lap. He looked up at her, a blissful smile stretched across his face. ‘Have I, my dear?’

Becks nodded and smiled down at him faintly. ‘One hundred and twenty-seven times, Sire,’ she replied matter-of-factly as she gently stroked his cheek.

He laughed. ‘You are so … so
precise
!’ He sat up suddenly and looked at her intently. ‘That is why, I think, I have fallen so in love with you. You are not like all the other women I have known … feather-headed moo-cows who think of nothing but poems and silly frivolities. You are …’ He frowned, struggling to find the right words. ‘You are so very
different
!’

She nodded slowly, carefully weighing up what was the most appropriate thing to say back to him.

She giggled shyly, a gesture she’d observed other women use all the time in response to flirtatious flattery. ‘I thank you for your kind words, Sire.’

He frowned. Mock serious. ‘Sire?
Sire?
You
must
call me John, my dear. Please. In fact I am yours to call whatever you wish!’

She nodded. ‘Then I shall call you John.’

He smiled dreamily and collapsed back, his head cradled in her lap once more. ‘I have never felt so content,’ he murmured, his eyes closing as she stroked his troubled brow. ‘Never in my miserable life, not even with so many things to vex me – troublesome barons, no money, unrest, troubles, troubles, troubles …’ He continued, she pretending to listen, nodding at what she calculated were the right moments, but the cognitive part of her mind was busy elsewhere.

[Mission time remaining: 588 hours 56 minutes]

Time was running out. Another three weeks and she would have to return to 2001. If
frustration
had been an emotion she could emulate, she supposed she’d be feeling it now. Just over five months of this, simulating love-play with the Earl of Cornwall and Gloucester. That first night he’d visited her room unannounced, expecting her to surrender herself to him … she had miscalculated the response and thrown him to the floor. That was the night, he later admitted, that he’d fallen head over heels – literally – in love with her.

At first, she’d been uncertain how effective and convincing her responses were going to be to his overtures, his poems, his breast-beating declarations of utter infatuation. But then one of the household maids had spotted her awkwardness and taken her to one side. An older woman, with a lifetime of experience to offer her, she listened intently. The maid gave Becks advice on how best to respond to all the things John was likely to say, how best to please him.

She’d wondered how exactly to translate the nugget of advice into a practical behavioural response strategy. Cross-referencing it with modern language idioms, she concluded the old lady meant:
Play hard to get.

Which was the tactical solution she’d decided to adopt. And it appeared to have worked. John, to use another modern expression, ‘was like putty in her hands’. Like a fawning puppy. She understood that gave her some degree of leverage; that she could ask favours of John that no one else would dare to ask. But a part of her AI understood human behaviour enough to know that to ask him too much about the thing she wished to know more about was to invite his suspicion.

This thing, of course, was the
Treyarch Confession
.

In the last five months, she had chosen to raise the subject less than half a dozen times. On each occasion she’d only asked after ensuring John had consumed enough wine to render him insensibly drunk.

His rambling replies had yielded
some
useful information.

The Confession was something that his older brother, Richard, had come across as a much younger man, back when the sons of Henry II were all still boys and living at Beaumont Palace. It was apparent that John was not lying when he said he had no idea how the document found its way into the royal library, but that somehow his father had acquired it.

According to John, throughout his childhood he had memories of how his father guarded it carefully and read it frequently. It became an obsession of his older brother Richard, an obsession to find out what mysterious story was contained in this Confession. And one day, when he was merely twelve years of age, Richard finally discovered the Confession hidden carefully in his father’s library of scrolls, parchments and manuscripts.

And it changed him.

As John muttered on about love, in her lap, Becks replayed in her mind the audio file of the last occasion they’d spoken about the Confession. He’d been lying by the fire as it roared and crackled from a fresh log, his voice thick with drunkenness, his words slurred.

‘
Overnight it seemed … Richard was utterly transformed
.
He was still an awful bully. But now … now he was a bully with a singular vision of destiny. He said he would take Father’s kingdom and make it an empire. That God had shown him the way he would do it
.
I know … I know this is why the stupid fool went to the Holy Land. As soon as Father and our oldest brother Geoffrey died and Richard became king … that’s the first thing he did – launch his bloody crusade.
’

Becks heard her own voice. ‘
God showed him the way he would do it?
’

‘
Yes … yes … it was in that wretched Confession, wasn’t it? The Grail story, you see? It was all in there. It was what turned him into the crazy man … what’s made him so, so very dangerous.
’

‘
Is the Confession still in the royal library?
’

‘
I … I … would not know, nor care to know. It … I suppose Richard would consider Oxford the safest place for it to be kept. But, please … enough of that madman, my dear … I’m getting stomach pains thinking about him.
’

A pause. ‘
You fear him?
’

Another pause. A long one. Then finally …

‘
I am terrified of him.
’

‘
Because he will blame you for losing the Grail?
’

No sound except the crackle of flames on scorched wood. Becks, however, recalled his gesture, a silent nod of the head, his eyes wide with the look of a man considering his own imminent death.

‘
I fear I will be a dead man on his return.
’

She recalled the haunted look on his face. ‘
Let me at least enjoy whatever time I have left … with you … and not speak his name again tonight?
’

Sébastien Cabot greeted Liam with a cheerful wave as he clucked his tongue and reined in his horse. Behind him the crunch of boots and horses’ hooves on hard sun-baked soil ceased as Eddie ordered the men to a halt.

‘Sire!’ called out Cabot, stepping through the gate of the priory’s front gardens to meet him. ‘’Tis a wonderful surprise!’

Liam swung a leg over his horse’s back and stepped down out of the stirrups on to the ground. He was hot and clammy beneath the quilted tunic and the robe of office. He ran a sleeved forearm across his damp forehead, pushing dark sweat-soaked hair out of his eyes.

‘It’s hot, so it is,’ he said needlessly.

Cabot winked slyly. ‘Good for the grapes and apples.’

The two stared at each other for a moment, then Liam extended a hand. Cabot grasped it with both. ‘Has been too many weeks since last I saw ye, my friend.’

Liam nodded. ‘Busy. Very busy.’

‘What has brought ye this way, sire?’

‘We paid a visit to Sir Guy’s estate, and Sir Raymond’s this morning. Both pleading poverty, but, like all the others, both very plump and extremely wealthy. So we collected what they owed.’

‘Long overdue, I would say.’

‘Aye.’ Liam wiped the damp from the thin downy bristles on his upper lip. ‘Sébastien,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m also here to … uhh … to talk.’

The old man nodded. ‘Of course.’

Liam turned to gesture at his soldiers, all of them exhausted from the miles they’d covered so far today, and equally hot under their vests of chain mail. ‘Would your brothers see to these soldiers? A little water? A little food maybe?’

‘Of course, sire.’ He turned and bellowed orders across the garden, and several monks emerged from a small orchard beside the barn, baskets in hand.

‘Ye wish to go somewhere private?’ asked Cabot.

Liam nodded.

‘News of yer good work in Nottingham has spread,’ said Cabot. ‘Ye are fast becoming a popular sheriff, young Liam.’

‘But not so popular with all them noble fellas, right?’

‘The nobles hate ye.’ He shrugged. ‘They see ye as a young pretender. They each wonder why it is that John has not chosen
them
to administer the north. And,’ he chuckled, ‘ye actually make ’em pay the taxes they owe.’