He really was outmatched today. Firus didn’t have a clue how he’d managed to win this one.
It was almost time to find out.
But first, a proper survey of the field. Firus was a general, so he supposed he must have a general’s eye. If that meant he had to stand up and try to assess the situation, then he would.
He raised his head above the broken column. With his general’s eye, he deduced that there were an awful lot of soldiers pouring down from the hill ahead, and not too many in the ruins with him. He decided that that wasn’t a good sign, but it obviously hadn’t mattered. What mattered right now was where the cavalry were, how many columns of infantry there were, and whether that green flag bobbing down towards his defences was that of Hidius’ 43rd or 45th regiment. He always got them muddled up.
“We’ve got no chance!” shrieked a pale young man by his side.
“No, we don’t,” said Firus.
Then, the first shots rang out from Hidius’ chargers. The young man developed a bloody leak about his chest and dropped to the grass.
“How unfortunate,” Firus observed. It would be even more unfortunate when the regulars bore down on his ragged little group of rebels and tore them all apart with one decisive and annoyingly synchronised swing of their axes. He wasn’t going to stick around for that part. He might still need some of his men alive when he got back.
Musket balls chipped at the barricade inches from his ear. He sank back to the mud and cursed. It would have been better to see more. Perhaps this time he’d get one of those ‘cameras’ he’d been seeing all over the other side.
Off to his left, the chargers had parted and let the axemen through. It wasn’t going too well for his boys, judging by all those screams for mercy. The cannons were also in place at the top of the ridge, he noticed. One seemed to be pointed quite perfectly at him.
“Time to go,” he muttered. He brought out a little bronze device from his jerkin pocket. The cannon erupted fire. “Most certainly time.” He clicked a button and the slaughter was cut short.
The slaughter, in fact, would never happen at all.
He was alone now, crouching behind, well, nothing at the foot of a grassy ridge. Several yards away was a road, coated in that thick tarry stuff they didn’t have back in the day. The road led off way to the left, along the bottom of the hill, where it opened out into a yard for those horseless metal carriages about half a mile away. Beyond rose a rather impressive building, all glass and white metal and terrifying stairs you could see between. “Osbodikins,” Firus huffed. He got up, brushed off his jerkin, and reached for his satchel of clothes. It was obviously still two hundred and twenty five years away. “Osbodikins,” he said again. Then, he pocketed his little bronze panel and set off for the tower of metal.
The natives gave him a wide berth as he walked through the sliding doors and into the entrance hall. They usually did anyway, on account of his hideously outdated twirling moustache he simply refused to remove before his studies (if he had he would be hideously outdated back home), but this time it was worse. It took the screams of two little girls before he realised there was still scrambled brains all over his jerkin. He brushed it off absentmindedly into a bin and silently reprimanded himself for his foolishness. The beginnings of massacre he had just witnessed were distracting him a lot more than usual. He needed to concentrate very hard today to avert disaster.
He paid for his ticket at the desk with the shiny paper notes he always kept hidden in his left breast pocket. He’d consider a membership later, he said quite agreeably. He had days out at English Heritage centres all the time. He just had an inkling that Firus’ star fort, in a valley just west of Preston a couple of centuries ago, probably wouldn’t cut it as a valid address for his amazing welcome pack.
Onwards, into the main exhibit. A fancy upright glass scroll greeted the trickle of newcomers from the lobby. On it was a rather dramatic introduction in neat white lettering. “You are now standing on the spot where the great English rebel Firus Foratius woke up on the morning of August 5th 1898 to the sight of an oncoming Roman battalion?” Firus read aloud. He looked incredulously back through the shimmering glass walls along the ridge. “Not even bloody close. Thanks for the exercise.” He read on. “The War of Independence was going well for the provincials. But the Battle of Bowland, just five days earlier, promised to be a Pyrrhic victory for Firus. The emperor had had enough of the uproar. It was time to bring down the full might of Rome upon the haggard core of Firus’ troops while they licked their wounds in the ruins of the Britannic Temple beneath this very hill.”
Another child was staring at him. “Sorry for reading aloud,” Firus said. He spread his hands in mock exasperation. “I just can’t get the hang of this modern dialect. Bloomin’ bloody inelegant it is, laddie.”
There was another glass scroll just ahead. And beyond, the exhibits started. Bits of metal, bits of wood. Firus just hoped he didn’t look quite so rusty. “Yet, it seemed it was Firus’ destiny to claim the right to our heritage once again...” Thank heavens for that, he thought. “...even at this very early stage in the trials that awaited him.” Buggerlugs.
He tried to focus on the first part as he wandered through the cannonballs and axes, because he thought he’d already done quite a bit of hacking off heads for one lifetime and couldn’t be arsed with a lot more. But even that wasn’t very helpful. Time and time again (and in multiple times, as it happened), he had pondered over the bronze device, why it had come to him, and who or what had decided to turn his fate around. And there was more. If in this age he’d already won, and first time round he was naturally rather apt to lose, then how had he come up with such insane genius to read about now? Time travel just didn’t make sense, he concluded for now. He’d probably read about how he’d come up with the whole thing in the next visitor centre, and descend into utter madness at last. It would probably be welcome.
All the awe-inspiring relics of evil brain-mashing tools were of no interest to Firus. They were just here to draw the modern sheep in. What he really needed was the boring signs behind them that absolutely no-one ever looked at.
He drew out his battered leather notebook and got to work. He’d invested in one of these ballpoint pens in one of the gift shops for about three times the salary of one of his soldiers way back when. It made less people go quiet than his fabulous quill, and you could never attract too little attention when you were on the run from your own miserable failings as an upstart general. Because if he’d found a device, then who was to say the Praetorian Guard hadn’t either?
He got to work, filling in details about all the decisions he was going to make when he got back. It was pretty impressive, how he would herd the axemen onto the flanks by concentrated fire, and then spearhead a sortie through the centre to the heart of the Roman officers. Who could possibly have thought that up? It certainly wasn’t him.
There were hours of writing ahead of him, because he discovered there still wasn’t enough money in his pocket for one of those cameras to automatically record it all, and there was a distinct lack of alleys out in the countryside like this within which to waggle his knife in the face of the scallywags that haunted them. Absolute vermin in England these days. The Romans wouldn’t have stood for it. Maybe he shouldn’t be here at all.
After a while, he found a good excuse for a quick coffee break. He’d learned that he would have to crumble the horse of the 43rd regiment before the 45th. All those flags seriously drove him crazy, and the cafe would be a much better brain-racking location than this sorry gallery.
He found a sign and marched away. But at a junction between the displays, he heard a sound that stopped him dead. It was the sound of swords clashing. Surely not here? he thought. Or maybe he meant now. Had he really been followed this time? By assassins and some sort of guardians that had attempted to thwart them? It couldn’t be true. Yet he had to know. Better a sword through the breast than a musket ball in the buttocks. He hurried towards the ruckus.
For once, he’d been right the first time; it hadn’t been true at all. He had come upon an auditorium of sorts, where a crowd of onlookers had gathered beneath a dome of helmets and shields suspended by tiny twines of transparent rope. He pushed through the muttering gawkers.There was a swordsman alright, but no assassin, for no Roman legionnaire could ever get away with such a hilariously clean-shaven chin as this. The armour he wore was decent, but with odd details that easily identified its wearer as an imposter to Firus’ trained eye. He’d grown woefully familiar with legionnaires these past few years, often screaming, blood-soaked and at rather too close a range for comfort.
“Ah, a fellow student of the age,” the man said cheerily. “And an enemy, by the looks of you.” He gestured towards a metal rack of weapons by his side. He’d obviously been drawing blade against blade himself for the pleasure of the wide-eyed lemmings all about him. They had to get their eighty pounds-worth of fun somewhere, Firus supposed.
“I know a modest amount,” Firus replied, bowing low. It was a disappointingly accurate statement. “Just passing by.” Then he noticed the demonstrator’s grip and his blood boiled. “You do realise you’re holding that all wrong?” He just couldn’t help himself sometimes. He hadn’t fought for his people so that they could fleece each other with cheap parodies of what he’d done. At least get it right if you’re going to rob someone. That’s what the English stood for.
The man beamed, and Firus raged. His teeth were far too crooked for a legionnaire. Dentistry was going on the list of thing’s he’d messed up. He was really starting to regret kicking the empire out, but the device had only one return setting, and it was too late to turn back now. Might as well carry on with that messing up.
“Why don’t you show us how it’s done while I finish my piece?” The demonstrator beckoned, and pointed out the replicas again. “A rebel is always welcome in my camp these days.” The audience chuckled politely. Firus scowled. It really wasn’t very funny, was it?
Sighing, he took up a sorry excuse for the sword he’d abandoned in the disintegrating Britannic Temple and began to twirl. The audience gasped and cooed and flashed those excruciatingly out-of-reach cameras in his face. He hated to admit it, but he was much better at faffing about with a sword than faffing about with an army.
It was all pointless, because none of the patrons handed him those coveted notes as he’d hoped. He’d seen plenty do it with performers in the streets of the modern cities, but there again those ones hadn’t just spent eighty pounds on a museum pass. Ninety with gift aid.
While he twirled and flailed, the man droned on about this sword and that axe and the fascinating and completely irrelevant story about how an apprentice smith in London had revolutionised pommel design ten years after the war ended, and Firus zoned out. But when his arms started to ache and he sheathed the shoddy implement back into its display stand, he zoned back in at quite the right time.
“Join us at one o’clock to mull over the curious case of the Mill Hill Treasure, and what Firus himself wrote of its mysterious disappearance,” the attendant drawled. Several of the guests raised eyebrows and muttered ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ in a way they hoped would convince them this was all a day off well spent. None approached Firus, because his part in their education was over and so he had ceased to exist, but that could only be a good thing with such an extraordinary revelation on the table. He’d wrote about this battle when he could have left it to the historians of the future? What insanity! And a treasure too? He’d never read the little panels about his later life after the war, but the sketches of him sitting shoeless against a public house in rags did nothing to suggest he’d made it out rich.
Maybe it was time to change that.
The crowd was gone. It was just Firus and the attendant, who was busying himself removing a hair from the otherwise meticulous carpet and doing his best to pretend all the ‘oohs’ belonged to him alone. “Excuse me?” Firus ventured.
“Yes?” the man said. He looked so sweet and welcoming and in need of a good rap on the temple, standing there fretting in his armour. “And, errrr, good work with the sword. For an amateur.”
“I was lying then. I’m actually a postgraduate student studying the English War of Independence at the University of Preston, and I’d simply love a perusal of Firus’ notes.” It was too late to turn back now. “What a fine man! A hero! A genius! An icon!”
The man was frowning. “University? It split years ago. Do you mean the Lancashire Polytechnic Academy of Further Education or the Preston Higher Learning Institute of Humanities?”
Firus stiffened. “The Lan- the first one.”
Suddenly, the demonstrator brightened. “Fine. I have a vendetta against the institute. One of their bumbling professors informed me last year that my costume was inaccurate. Inaccurate! After all these years of hard work.”
Firus opened his mouth and closed it again with a decisive snap.
“Please, fellow student, step this way. I’m sure we can authorise a private viewing.”
“Apologies,” Firus called ahead as he was led through a hidden door at the back of the auditorium. “About the university thing. I’m so obsessed with the past that I practically live there.”
The man led him down a plain corridor and then into the equally plain archives study. It was easy to see that his fight for prosperity for the lowly Englishman had only been moderately successful, Firus reflected as he clunked down into a moulded plastic chair. The man bustled off, bustled back with a pair of thin gloves, lectured him on preservation policies, then bustled away and bustled back again with a leather-bound notebook remarkably similar to the one Firus was carrying now. Then, the man lectured him on the career of Firus up to the Battle of Mill Hill whilst he carefully turned through the tome filled with his writing. Firus was quite familiar with that subject and unfortunately learned nothing new.
At long last, the man finished his detailed reminder of preservation policies and left. Then, Firus took out his knife and tore the book to pieces.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
It wasn’t entirely random. He'd noticed a small mark on the corner of the middle page when his tiresome guide was tiresomely guiding him, just a curl of a quill, and it would have meant nothing to anybody else. That was the point. He'd used the same trick to smuggle instructions to his men to relieve the siege of Workington just days into the war. He didn't think this was a belated reply from them.
He sliced apart the folded pages and turned them inside out; sure enough, there was writing there. There'd also been plenty of his own scrawls on the fronts too, but he didn't have time for all that now. The curator might be back any minute, and he wasn't sure even the most enthusiastic student could get away with such hands-on study.
Silently, his hands shaking slightly, he read the hidden note.
To me,
Greetings Firus. It's Firus. This is a tad odd, isn't it?
Hopefully this note will somehow reach you before we win the Battle of Mill Hill. Repelling the attack here is the easy bit, but in case you can't be bothered with more than a few minutes of study at a time as I suspect, I summarise the strategy as follows: Smokey's skirmishers from centre to left flank, Rogius's irregulars to the right; Gerarro's horse up through the centre to the Roman command post; follow with your axemen to circle the two split groups of legionnaires and engage in joyous massacre. There, I'm harder working than me.
Firus' head hurt. But because he was a masochist, he read on.
But at this juncture, it's not all a stepping stone on a steady rise to glory. You cannot eat glory; I've tried. I've tried to eat a lot of things lately, and I don't think this story has a happy ending for us.
Unless you go back and change it. Because I know you're a lazy vagabond layabout with just the right level of hawkishness about the nose to rally the rabble to our cause, you won't have read up about the Mill Hill treasure. By the time I found the pathetic scatter of coins in that little hut beneath the trees east along the ridge, it was long gone. But the Roman cowards we captured told all. The scouts behind our lines that unearthed the ancient troves of the Britannic temple, thinking the battle won, lying low and waiting to be named heroes by Hidius himself. They got away when we lead the charge against their leaders. They won't again.
It's not all about legacy, Firus. They'll remember us for a few centuries, I'm sure, yet that is just a tiny speck of time within the infinity of the cosmos. Our death is even sooner. Why not enjoy life while it lasts?
So I implore you. For once, don't be the legend they write about. Go after the gold instead, and live as a king after all this hardship is done. For you have a use, like a horse, like a hunting dog, and that is all our people care for. So why should we care if just a couple more die on that wretched hill without a few seconds of your inspiration? A mere speck of time, remember. Use it wisely.
PS. Enjoy the redheaded strumpet. The goldenhead has syphilis.
Yours, as you are mine,
You
Firus sat back. He stared at the tiled ceiling for a while. Then, he took out his pen and drew two circles on a blank space in the parchment. He wrote dates beneath them. He drew a line with an arrow to mark the march of time. He drew more arrows looping back between the two circles. Finally, he annotated both circles with the legend of me. He sat and stared at that for a while instead. He even rotated his fingers around the loop in the weak hope that would bring forth the founts of understanding. Then, he gave up.
Just in time. Slowly, he came round to the sound of soft, pattering footfalls from the corridor. There was an equally soft tap at the door to the archive room. “Did you find what you were looking for?” came the gentle yet eager voice of the demonstrator.
No, he wanted to say. Why would anyone look for this? He’d only come here to find out how to win a battle centuries ago, for Gods’ sake. Suddenly, not a lot made sense, did it?
The door started to open. He’d have to think about it long ago.
He stuffed fistfuls of parchment into his pocket. His fingers found the device waiting there. He flicked a switch.
And found himself in open, peaceful field. The ridge above him was blessedly free from trained murderers.
There was, however, quite a commotion further along the hill.
“Bloody historians!” he cursed. Surely there’d been some evidence of his cunning victory he had just read about left in the soil. There was no time to consider, well, anything at all right now. His ragged troops were still screeching amid the dirty columns, waving open palms and scrabbling for the fields behind them. On the hill, the full might of Hidius’ 17th Legion, tasked with nipping this outrageous uprising in the bud before the empire experienced an embarrassing shortage of Whitby scampi in the near future, watched their first wave go with the hopefulness of fellows not too fond of blades chopping at their own faces.
That was the problem with the bronze device - it brought him back to the exact point he left, not the nice, relaxing start of the bloody thing. And now, in lamenting the limitations of a second chance he should never have, he knew himself for the true English nob he was.
He legged it across the grass. He was huffing and puffing a few yards in. He’d enjoyed more sugar in his few visits to English Heritage than he could find now in a year. He really had to stop it.
At long last, his fingers found the smoothed ridges of cracked granite. He was at the temple, and in the shade of this fallen colonnade lay his satchel, his sabre, the clothes that would get him lynched by both sides if anyone had sneaked a peak.
An ashen young man was just starting to panic by his side. His cap and wrinkled shirt were filthy; they’d been out in the country for weeks now. His fingers were trembling so badly he could hardly keep a grip on his musket.
“We’ve got no chance!” he shrieked. Firus was starting to see a worrying pattern in the outlooks of his youths.
Firus comforted him by backhanding him hard across the cheek. “Shut up, man! We don’t if you’re going to stop me thinking.” His eyes roved the little knots of men loading guns behind the jagged walls. Gerraro was there, tending his horse; further on, Rogius, kissing his latest love goodbye; and Smokey just behind, his loyal men banded around him, assessing the hill carefully and preparing to move out. He was probably the only one among them with an ounce of noggin.
At least Firus had his memories. He just wished his information had come from a more reliable source.
More shots rang out across the field. A musket ball thudded into a wall where the boy had been seconds before.
The chargers were doing what they did best. They had calmly extricated themselves from the struggles and were halfway down the hill again, shooting as they went, and behind, the clinking armour of the legionnaires gleamed like gold in the sun. He’d start hearing those screams for mercy again any time now.
“Smokey! Charge from centre! Wheel left! Rogius, up the right! Divide the regulars.” His lieutenants were looking from him to the Romans and back again incredulously. It was always at this moment in the battle when Firus thought he saw their true feelings about him in their eyes, that he was just a bumbling buffoon making it up as he went along, and that their deaths were inevitable underneath his crazy command. How little they knew. How little he knew.
“Go!” he screamed.
Shots were chipping out granite and hearts all along the line now. Men were falling and their friends were coiling back, cringing against walls as the axemen hastened to meet them. But whatever their thoughts, he could still rely on Smokey and Rogius to get their men organised. He thought of his letter about his ‘use’. He could rely on it for another time, at least.
The flanks thinned; men toting axes and swords and pitchforks swelled at the centre of his line. Firus cried out some gibberish about England and green skies and blue beaches and white hills, and even the kids gurgling for their mummies stood and cheered. His nose must indeed be pretty hawkish.
They faced the shots and waited. Men and boys fell but the others stood firm. And at last, when the chargers parted and the axemen lumbered onwards, Firus clambered up onto a convenient stump of column and screamed for victory. The cannons on the hill fired and a heavy metal ball tore out the turf at the spot he had skilfully and purposefully left just moments ago.
The rebels charged and met the might of Rome. Heads flew. Blood sprayed like rain across the temple. His lines buckled as heavy axes clove his first line to chunks. But heavy axes are difficult to raise once more, especially when they’re stuck in someone’s poor ribs, and the rebels swarmed over their fallen into the fists and shortswords that awaited them. Slowly, they pushed forward. The legionnaires began to part, herded to left and right.
At least, that was what Firus knew must be happening. He wasn’t going to watch everything straight after he’d read it all. He was up on the column for a slightly wider view.
Eastwards, along the ridge, there stood a grove of oak. The ragged ruins of the vast temple complex stretched even to the trees, but there was something else. The thatched peak of an old crofter’s cottage. And right now, it held enough gold to live like a king.
He looked back. Gerraro’s cavalry were poised, spears in hand. The path to the cannon and Hidius himself lay open and waiting between the jostling broils of men. His own horse was waiting, armoured and saddled, beneath his vantage point.
He peered out among the blood and bodies. The ashen youth was still going. His sword was broken, but now he ducked and wrenched an axe from a crawling foe. He’d been wrong; there really was a chance. No, a certainty. The real chance was for Firus this time.
And if he didn’t lead the charge as the history books told, then maybe that youth would be lying dead on the field when he’d otherwise fathered a line that led to someone he’d met at the museum half a mile and two centuries away from now.
There again, that someone would have just forked out hundreds for his jabbering family to stare at some signs for a few hours while nursing an endless toothache courtesy of free England’s decidedly unsatisfactory dental care. Maybe it was better for everyone if he just took the gold.
Anyway, none of it mattered in the end. It was all just a speck of time.
“Gerraro! Now! Charge for the artillery!” he screeched. The horses broke into a trot, and then a thunderous gallop. He leapt down from the column and into the path of two of Gerraro’s young men. “Alexius! Ferrius! I have a special assignment for you. Something that could change the course of history.”
He’d decided now, and that was it. His men were struggling and dying on the hill, but the battle would be won. Everything required was set in motion. He mounted his horse and plunged eastward, flanked by his two guards. The clash of steel on steel dimmed. The roar of cannon dissipated like a retreating storm.
All was at peace in the grove. They left their horses under the watchful eyes of Britannia, and approached the cottage from the mounds of crushed rock that had been her home.
The door was ajar. Firus heard something move within. It could have been anything; the clink of a peasant’s rough iron tools, the desolation of a home by foreign invaders. But it wasn’t. It was the cool crunch of gold, a shift from hand to hand, chest to chest. The counting of a fortune. Hopefully there was even someone conveniently logging it all so he knew how many marble likenesses he could manage in his outer atrium.
“Draw your swords,” he said, a harsh, dry whisper of trepidation. Even distracted, a couple of unarmoured Roman scouts could snuff them all out in seconds if they weren’t careful.
Slowly, he edged open the door. The wooden planks creaked and groaned, filling the mud-lined void with sound. He winced. Then he stopped dead.
The single room was bare, but for a large chest in the centre. The chest was open. It was filled with gold, and so was his heart.
Firus stepped forward. So did the Romans; in a mere moment, a fragment of a speck of time, Alexius and Ferrius were just blood-soaked corpses on the floor. Firus shouted something inarticulate, raised his sword, and froze. Hidius flicked a glittering coin nonchalantly between the fingers of one gauntlet, casting golden ricochets from his armour. He held his pistol steady and true in the other.
“Ave, Firus.”
“Piss off.”
The scouts around him leant forward, shortswords aloft. One punched him high in the ribs and conjured twinkling sapphires of light before his eyes. Outside, a trembling roar rippled outward from the hill as something exploded in a clattering shower of metal. It echoed dull and muddy in his ears.
Hidius was disappointingly handsome up close, Firus thought, especially in that fancy general’s garb. What a waste of a name. It didn’t particularly matter, because this was the end and he’d never be laughing with his lads ever again, because that pistol was going off up his hawk-nose any second and there was nothing he could do about it.
He hoped he was still winning the battle.
Hidius took a step closer, trapped him in an appraising stare. “Why did you have to be such a fool, Firus?” he growled. “I’ve been leaving clues about this unholy fortune all over your camp for months.”
Firus smirked. “I’m just an incompetent buffoon, it seems.”
Hidius shook his head, scowled. “If only that were so. You’ve won this war so many times in so many ways that I simply can’t trust myself to keep you long enough for a trial. Truly, I’m sorry to end your defiance so unceremoniously.”
“I beg your pardon?” The room swam before his eyes; superimposed onto the bare floor he saw shimmering loops, circles, arrows, his diagram in the study. “So many times?”
The gun never faltered. Hidius’ grip was that of an iron statue. But now his face contorted into a pained grin, the mark of triumph at the end of a long suffering. “A man with time on his side should be invincible,” he said, savouring every word. “A man with the determination to win back his homeland, no matter how flawed his reason, has to be applauded in some way. But such a man who, in victory, has the audacity to demand of Saturn His great gift again and again, risking it all, for this?” He turned and flung the coin furiously against the side of the treasure chest. “That man has one inevitable fate. Greed is a deadly weakness.”
There was a muffled pounding of feet just beyond the door. “General,” panted the guard who emerged from the maelstrom of blood and steel outside. “The battle is lost again. It is time to go.”
Time to go? Firus raised his head, stood straight. He was a man with time on his side.
“Not today,” said Hidius emotionlessly. “Goodbye, Firus. Your covenant is ended.”
Firus raised a finger, others fumbling in his pocket. “Wait! I-”
Hidius’ pistol erupted in fury and flame.
Darkness came, but pain did not. When he opened his eyes, the cottage was gone. So was Britannia. The hill remained, and sliding darkly beneath it like a snake was the road. He followed it to its mouth, that futuristic monolith of glass, the burst of gunshot ringing in his muffled ears.
He was a dead man. He saw the deadly fire again and again, reflected in the smooth facade of the museum. But he was walking and breathing, so maybe he wasn’t so dead after all. After a time, he even began to think, and that was when he shuddered like someone almost drowned, and clung to the gasping hope that he was quite alive.
Yes, he had pressed that little nameless device just before the bullet tore into him, and he was alive, but maybe that was a curse. He was a fool, a not-quite-trained monkey imitating perfectly all the things his own distant intellect had instructed him in. But then the instructor had turned out to be a fellow ape all along, driving him to seek out a secret defeat when victory had roared all around him. And here, far from it all (a good bloody thousand yards or so) he would witness the aftermath of his greed.
But he wasn’t really thinking at full monkey capacity yet. Where he thought to see imperial auxiliaries ordering the lines in the lobby, there were the same old grinning greeters in gaudy cardigans. Between their lips, where he expected regimented ranks of Roman-cared dentures, straight and smart, there lingered some truly terrifying English gnashers. The sign ahead reminded him of an arduous journey ahead of his imminent rout of Hidius. Nothing had changed.
The attendant had been there all along, flapping and fretting like a mother goose behind a concealing screen of bored security guards. When he saw Firus he stomped his way across the tiles, honking out relief and anger and concern all at once. “Good heavens, there you are! What happened? Where’s the diary? How did you get out? Why?”
There was a deeper meaning to many of those questions. But for now, there was his immediate safety to think about. Firus patted fretfully at his jerkin and found luck was on his side. He’d picked up his notes from the desk upon his first visit, and the bound leather looked about right. Silently, he handed over the book and nursed his chest where the bullet should have torn into his flesh.
When the attendant spoke again, he was in the cafe, a cup of burnt-smelling coffee cooling in his hand. It was two hours later and the sun was blazing high over the hill through the glass wall. He’d been alone among the modern Britons; the demonstrator had evidently just approached by his shoulder. “Everything seems to be in order,” he puffed importantly. “Just don’t scare me like that in future. I’ll ask again - did you find what you were looking for?”
“Yes,” said Firus, as if coming out of a dream. He’d obviously been thinking hard, and the looped arrows behind his eyelids had come loose from their diagrams and wrapped themselves tightly around his brain. “But it wasn’t what I expected.”
The attendant looked at the visitor’s dirty costume, his vacant expression, and the tangled scribble of notes on his napkin. He decided he was an eccentric, and that was alright. All the best academics were eccentrics. “It’s nearly one o’clock,” he continued brightly. “Care to join me for the next demonstration? You might have some fresh insights after a rest.”
Firus nodded. A rest sounded good. But, as he stretched his legs and allowed himself to be led away to the auditorium, the questions began to crystallise in his head. Had he really already won the war? Who was Hidius? Saturn? Where had the bronze thing originated? How had he reset time? And the most fundamental of all: why?
They passed the picture once more, a less-than-flattering one of Firus, propped up against the wall with one shoe and a pretty unfairly proportioned hooter. That might just be his first answer.
Unease became guilt as his new friend opened the diary with delicate gloved fingers and projected the mystery to the gawping crowd. “The secrets of Firus himself surprised us. Tales from the time, not to mention the private letters of his officers, suggest an impulsive, brash, headstrong character with more than a little luck on his side. But here....” He flicked the pages as quickly as he dared, showing flashes of maps and arrows. “Here, we see a different side, a side of care and deliberation. Apart from the frustrated monologues on the subject of this afternoon’s discussion, we see, laid out on these very pages, thirty-eight obsessive copies of his strategy for the upcoming Battle of Mill Hill.”
Firus was pretty sure there were thirty-nine. He drew the sword from its resin scabbard.
The flash of its decently authentic steel kindled a sudden hope in his heart as he turned to face his audience. He was still the hero they told him he was. He still hadn’t took the bait. Or the bullet. And he never would. The little bronze button lay unpressed in his pocket. It just had to stay that way.
There would still be a hard road to victory ahead of him, though. Modern fruitcake was awfully dry.
Slowly, because he had all the time in the world, Firus raised the sword and began to twirl.