Tanglewreck (16 page)

‘A cardinal!’ whispered Gabriel.

‘Let the captive be brought forward. His Holiness commands it.’

The guards took Regalia Mason through a tiny locked door. Silver and Gabriel heard them lock it noisily again on the inside.

Gabriel looked round quickly, then darted over to the ladder. He propped the ladder against the wall, climbed up it, and over on to the balcony.

No!
thought Silver, longing to call him back and knowing
she couldn’t. There was only one thing she could do, and so she ran across the flagstones, and climbed up after him.

Kneeling side by side, they peered in.

The room was dark, even though the day was bright and the sun was hot.

They were directly behind the massy carved chair of the Pope himself. On the wall opposite him was a mirror flanked with gold candlesticks. The candles were lit, in spite of the sun. They could see the shadowed face of the Pope in the mirror, which meant that if they were not careful …

Suddenly the door opened, and in came Regalia Mason, her wrists bound behind her back. The Pope raised his hand. She was released. He raised his hand again, and the guards left the room, bowing and walking backwards. The red cardinal sat in a corner ready to take notes.

The Pope spoke. ‘So, Maria Prophetessa. We find that you still pursue your sorcery.’

‘I am an alchemist, not a street magician.’

The Pope nodded, his fingers tapping his lips. ‘What marvel have you brought me to buy your freedom?’

‘I have brought you Time itself.’

He watched her open the bag. He half expected the Universe would fall out, rolled up like a ball, hidden in its own thoughts. Had not St Augustine said that before Time began, the Universe had hidden in its own thoughts, waiting?

He understood that; each of us is a tiny universe, waiting.

He waited. From the bag she drew out a timepiece, bigger than a table clock but less grand than a papal clock. Angels decorated its double face. The twenty-four segments of the hours were etched with pictures. She said that each segment was an hour and that each hour was a century. The clock began with the birth of Christ, and it would run until the End of Time.

On the stroke of midnight on the last day of the twenty- fourth century, so the prophecy ran, Time would cease for ever.

The clock now stood in the sixteenth century, at 1582. Pope Gregory turned it over in his hands while she talked.

He smiled when he saw the pictures; he knew what they were, invented over two hundred years earlier for family friends of his, the Visconti of Milano. They were known as the Tarot cards. Some called them a harmless card game, some said they were much more; something occult and forbidden.

The zero hour showed the picture of a carnival Fool in tattered clothes, his little dog jumping beside him, as he stepped cheerfully off the edge of a cliff.

The first hour showed the Magician, Lord of the Universe.

The second hour showed the High Priestess, sitting between her pillars, Keeper of the Mysteries.

The third hour showed the Empress, Mother of the World.

The fourth hour showed the Emperor, worldly ruler of this realm.

The fifth hour showed the Pope himself, hooded and veiled, all-powerful between Heaven and Earth.

The sixth hour showed the Lovers – three of them. He sometimes called this picture the Eternal Triangle.

The seventh hour showed the Chariot Driver driving his Chariot, pulled by black and white sphinxes; worldly success and secret knowledge.

The eighth hour showed a woman taming a lion.

The ninth hour showed the Hermit, lantern in hand.

The tenth hour showed Dame Fortune turning her wheel.

The eleventh hour showed Justice, sword and scales hanging by her.

The twelfth hour, which was the zero hour, returned to the Fool.

The Pope turned the clock to its reverse face and scrutinised what he saw.

At the thirteenth hour was a man dangled upside down, one leg crossed over the other.

The fourteenth hour showed an angel, one foot on sea and one on shore, pouring green liquid from one gold cup to another.

The fifteenth hour showed the Devil.

At the sixteenth hour, a tower struck by lightning exploded.

The seventeenth hour showed a naked star-maiden by her pool pouring golden water.

The eighteenth hour bayed the Moon, silver and mysterious over a deep pool.

The nineteenth hour showed the Sun.

The twentieth hour showed Judgement: an angel with a trumpet.

The twenty-first hour showed the World, spinning and glorious, and complete.

And here the Pope frowned and paused, because his cards were only twenty-two – three rows of seven according to the sacred numbers, and the zero of the Fool. What were these other images he saw now? These final two?

Maria Prophetessa was smiling.

Cut in silver and gold were two images of the future. One was a road winding through the stars. The other was a child holding a clock.

Out on the balcony, Silver felt for the bag with the two pictures in it. Yes, it was still there, but how could they be in two places at the same time?
But this isn’t the same Time
, she thought to herself.

Pope Gregory looked carefully at the picture of the child and the clock. The clock was the clock he held in his hands. And the child?

‘The Timekeeper,’ said Maria Prophetessa.

The Pope poured them both wine. He reminded the woman he could have her burned and tortured.

‘For keeping a clock?’ She smiled again, her smile cold in the heat of the Italian summer evening. She was not afraid of him. He was slightly afraid of her, even though she was a woman and therefore inferior.

‘God has decreed the hours and the days,’ he said. ‘We have evidence that you do not follow our new calendar.’

‘Not so,’ said Maria Prophetessa. ‘Much of magic was worked in the ten days that you took away. We call them now our secret days – locked out of Time, but powerful still.’

‘You will be burned for this,’ said the Pope.

He was about to call for the guards, but his gaze fell on the strange beauty of the clock, and he felt himself compelled to know more of it. He tapped his long hawk nose with his fingers.

‘What do you say is the purpose of this clock, this Timekeeper?’

Maria Prophetessa paused as the evening shadows fell in bars across the window, and then she began to speak.

‘Long ago on the banks of the Nile, the holy priests of the great god Ra ordained that there should be twelve hours of daytime and twelve hours of night.

‘Ra, falcon-headed, Ruler of the Sun, punted his boat across the sky every day, and at night sailed through the Underworld, until it was time for him to be reborn at daybreak.

‘The worshippers of Ra understood the ancient mysteries of the Universe, and to them was revealed a prophecy that
the dying god would be reborn at the End of Time.

‘This god would be the new ruler of the Universe.

‘The great dynasties of Egypt passed into the Sands of Time, and the sphinx’s head was buried in the dust. Moses, the Israelite, brought a new god out of Egypt, made not of gold, nor in the image of an animal, but in the image of Man. This God Yahweh had a son, Jesus, whose birth we saw in a star.

‘The pattern of the Heavens is clear. Twenty-four centuries will pass until the End of Time.’

‘And then?’ said the Pope, watching her.

‘The god will be reborn and Time will belong to him.’

‘But you say that Time will no longer exist.’

‘Time will exist no more as we have known it.’

‘This is a mystery,’ said the Pope.

Maria Prophetessa inclined her head.

‘And the child? Who is the child in the twenty-fourth symbol?’ said the Pope.

‘She is the Child with the Golden Face,’ said Maria Prophetessa.

‘And what is the meaning of that?’ asked the Pope.

‘I do not know. Not all can be revealed.’

‘You do not know, or you will not say?’

‘The child is a mystery, like the clock,’ said Maria Prophetessa.

The Pope said, ‘You are not a believer.’

‘I do not believe what you believe, that is all the difference between us, but I am a believer.’

‘You are a heretic.’ The Pope banged his fist on the table.

‘I do not believe what you believe,’ she said again.

‘You have been arrested on suspicion of sorcery and heresy, and in your defence, you offer me a clock?’ The Pope was snarling like a wolf.

‘I am offering you the secret of Time!’

‘How did you come by this clock?’ demanded the Pope.

Maria Prophetessa was silent.

Then the Pope did a terrible thing. He took the clock and hurled it at the wall, where it broke into pieces.

‘Curses on you to the limits of the Heavens!’ shouted Maria Prophetessa, on her hands and knees trying to capture the beheaded angels, pendulum rods, tiny cogs, jewelled numbers.

The Pope laughed at her. ‘I care nothing for your sorcery, woman, and I care nothing for your toys. The clock is destroyed, and your raving prophecies with it. The Church of God will last until the End of Time and the End of Time will be that day when God takes His flock to His Heaven, and Hell is shut for ever on your weeping.’

Maria Prophetessa lunged forward to grab at the wounded fragments of the clock, and, as she reached past the Pope’s chair, she looked out on to the balcony and into the faces of Silver and Gabriel.

There was a second’s pause, and then she twisted a vial from round her neck and flung it straight at them, crying, ‘Away with you, away with you, it is not the time!’

The Pope looked round, surprised, but saw nothing,
because Silver and Gabriel had vanished.

He rang the bell, and the guards came and dragged away Maria Prophetessa, screaming oaths and curses as she went.

Then the Pope bent down and carefully collected all the pieces of the clock and put them into the bag and put the bag into his drawer, and locked it.

Abel Darkwater was leaning forward, watching the Pope intently. He had half-hypnotised him, and his memories were cast behind him on the wall.

As the Pope returned to full consciousness, Darkwater was saying, ‘You failed. You did not destroy the Timekeeper.’

‘The pieces were stolen from me.’

‘And taken to Peru, where a new emerald was cut, to replace the one you kept to wear in your ring.’

The Pope shrugged his shoulders.

‘And it came by way of a pirate ship to England in the reign of Elizabeth the First.’

‘She was a heretic,’ said the Pope. ‘We excommunicated her.’

‘And then its history is hidden until it was found again in Jamaica in 1762 by an apprentice to a clockmaker called Harrison.’

‘And where is it now?’

‘That is the question,’ said Abel Darkwater.

For many minutes the Pope and Darkwater were silent. A
serving nun came and brought them wine.

‘All could be altered, oh yes, if I had the Timekeeper again. If I had it, we could thread our way fine as a needle back through the fabric of Time, and what has happened need not happen.’

‘What has happened has happened,’ said the Pope.

‘Indeed it has, oh yes, but it need not.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘I am saying,’ said Abel Darkwater patiently, ‘that the last of the hours of the clock are the ones that matter to us. In the twenty-first century, where I am living at present, there begins for the first time in Time, if you will pardon the expression, disturbances, rents, tears, in Time’s fabric, which, if properly understood, allow us a moment to change history, I mean, to choose our future. Your old enemy is your enemy still. Would you be defeated by her?’

‘Maria Prophetessa?’

‘How she winds through Time!’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘Her name now is Regalia Mason, and it is she, oh yes, it is she, who stands at the head of the company called Quanta, which, if we do nothing …’

‘Will become the Quantum,’ said the Pope, his eyes flashing like his emerald ring.

‘The Quantum,’ repeated Abel Darkwater. ‘Ruler of the Universe, a new god indeed.’

‘And if we act now?’ said the Pope.

‘Victory will be ours.’

‘And Maria Prophetessa?’

‘She will be destroyed.’

The two men smiled at one another – the smile of a crocodile and the smile of a wolf.

For the second time in how many minutes, hours, days, months, years, were Silver and Gabriel lying face down in the dust?

They had no idea how much time had passed or where they were now.

‘She threw something at us,’ said Silver, trying to get up. ‘The something she threw, threw us,’ said Gabriel, rubbing his bruises. ‘Be you hurt?’

Silver shook her head and looked round. ‘Gabriel! We must be back on Philippi, there are three moons!’

‘This be a wasteland,’ said Gabriel, slowly looking around.

They were at the edge of a scrubby field piled high with scrap metal: cars, washing machines, cookers, filing cabinets and bikes with their wheels off. As they walked through the heaps, some smouldering, some cold, Gabriel was filling the baggy pockets of his blue coat with hooks and nuts, wires and clips.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Silver.

‘Throwbacks put to use all that we find,’ he said simply.

‘Did you understand what Regalia Mason, I mean Maria Prophetessa, was saying?’

‘Yea,’ said Gabriel.

‘So, what was she saying? And anyway, the Pope broke the clock.’

‘She spake all of the prophecy and the clock,’ said Gabriel. ‘I do not think the clock is broke for ever. Remember Micah my father found it many years after, in Jamaica.’

‘But it was broken then,’ said Silver.

‘It may be that you will mend it,’ said Gabriel.

He did not say more. What he had seen and heard had frightened him, not for himself but for Silver, and he had made a silent vow that he would protect her at any cost, even his own life. While he was thinking these thoughts, Silver took his hand.

‘Look,’ said Silver. ‘That’s weird, that’s really weird.’

About half a mile away, but clearly visible in the distance, was a big red London bus. Small figures were running round it. As Gabriel and Silver stood still, watching, they didn’t see a group of four men closing in on them. The men wore long coats and bobble hats and their faces were rough and unshaven. Two of them carried baseball bats. Suddenly Gabriel sensed them and he grabbed Silver’s hand.