The Chronicles of St Mary's Omnibus, page 60
‘Miss Lee, please telephone Dr Black at Thirsk and ask her to contact me when she has a moment.
‘Tomorrow morning, first thing, we start our new assignment. Thank you, everyone.’
I never thought they’d let me get away with it, but it was worth a try.
‘We have a new assignment? Already? That was quick. I thought we’d get a bit of time off, at least.’
There was muttering. I let them mutter. I knew what our new assignment was. Gradually, silence fell. I let it settle. Tim got it first, but he knew me very well.
‘You’re kidding!’
‘Nope!’
‘How did you wangle that?’
‘Wangle what?’ demanded Van Owen. ‘What’s going on?’
I grinned at her.
‘Come along, Miss Van Owen, think for a minute.’
They all just stared at me. It was a wonderful moment.
I held up the file. As I once said to Dr Bairstow – deep down, very deep down, I was having a shit-hot party.
‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to Troy.’
THE END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to :
Everyone at Accent Press for their support and encouragement.
Ahmet for his technical support and explaining patiently that toast crumbs in your laptop are A Bad Thing.
Mike and Jan for their hospitality.
DRAMATIS THINGUMMY
Dr Edward Bairstow
Director of St Mary’s.
Mrs Partridge
His PA and Kleio, Muse of History.
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
Madeleine Maxwell
Chief Operations Officer.
Tim Peterson
Chief Training Officer.
Kalinda Black
Liaison Officer at Thirsk University.
Mary Schiller
Senior Historian.
Greta Van Owen
Senior Historian.
Mr Clerk
Historian.
TECHNICAL SECTION
Leon Farrell
Chief Technical Officer
Mr Dieter
Technician
MEDICAL SECTION
Dr Helen Foster
Does not play well with others.
Nurse Diane Hunter
The object of Markham’s affections.
Turk
Allegedly a horse.
SECURITY SECTION
Major Ian Guthrie
Head of Security.
Mr Markham
Security Guard.
Mr Randall
Security Guard.
Mr Evans
Security Guard.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
Professor Andrew Rapson
Head of R&D. Should not be allowed to play with matches.
Dr Octavius Dowson
Librarian, Archivist, and matches hider.
IT DEPARTMENT
Polly Perkins
Head of IT.
OTHERS
Mrs Theresa Mack
Kitchen Supremo.
Mrs Mavis Enderby
Head of Wardrobe.
Mrs Shaw
Peterson’s assistant and bringer of chocolate biscuits.
Miss Rosie Lee
A nightmare.
HISTORICAL FIGURES
Isaac Newton
Mirror-stealing troublemaker.
Irate Cambridge citizens
Self-explanatory, really.
Gloucester citizens
Possessed of a death wish St Mary’s can only admire.
9lb Double Gloucester Cheese
An instrument, if not of death, then certainly of major concussion.
King Priam
King of Troy.
Queen Hecuba
His wife.
Kassandra
They should have listened to her.
Hector
Hero of Troy.
Andromache
His wife.
Astynax
Their Son.
Paris
Not as guilty as everyone thinks.
Achilles
Blond psychopath.
Ajax of Locris
Not a good man in a temple.
Helios
More trouble than everyone else put together – even in a world which contains historians.
Henry V
Assorted Armies
English, French, Greek, Trojan …
Our ancestors
All of them. All 250 of them.
FROM THE FUTURE
Chief Farrell
Yes – him.
FROM THE PAST
Chief Farrell
It gets complicated. Don’t sweat it.
Professor Eddington Penrose
Retired physicist. A good man in a fight.
VILLAINS
Ronan
Trouble from the future.
Assorted raptors
A monolith
With a mind of its own.
PROLOGUE
Troy fell.
That’s what it says in every record from Homer onwards. Just two words. Short and impersonal. Troy fell. Words which completely fail to convey, even slightly, the carnage, the brutality, the suffering, the horror, everything that must inevitably accompany the end of a ten-year war and the fall of a great civilisation.
Because I was there, on the blood-soaked sand, amongst the Trojan women lined up on the beach for export, all empty-eyed with shock and grief.
I was there.
I saw infants torn from mothers already grieving for dead husbands, sons, and brothers. Some were tossed carelessly aside as useless. Some were spitted there and then. Some were flung into the surf where they bobbed, wailing, for a few seconds. Now and then, a woman would find the strength to fight back and a frantic struggle would break out. All along the beach, men strode, cursing, shoving, and punching. Urgent to restore order, divide the spoils, and get away.
I crouched on the sand, head down, watching from under my brows. I saw Andromache led past, silent in her grief, to be handed to Neoptolemus and begin her days serving the people who had hurled her tiny son from the city walls.
Somewhere, my people were safe – I hoped. I was the only one outside. I was the only one stupid enough to be caught. Any minute now, rough hands would drag me forward, pull down my tunic, assess what they saw, and allocate me to some grinning Greek. I would be loaded on to a ship with the others. If I was lucky. If I wasn’t good slave material – and believe me, I wasn’t – I’d be pushed onto the ground and raped repeatedly and violently until I bled to death in the sand. I was under no illusions. It was happening all around me.
This is where a passion for History gets you. Right in the front line. Up close and personal, while History happens all around you. And, occasionally, to you. I could have been a bomb-disposal expert, or a volunteer for the Mars mission, or a firefighter, something safe and sensible. But, no, I had to be an historian. I had to join the St Mary’s Institute of Historical Research. Over the years I’d been chased by a T-rex, had the Great Library fall on me, grappled with Jack the Ripper, and been blown up by an exploding manure heap. All about par for the course.
More women were fighting now, clawing and shrieking. They were cut down without a second thought. There were so many of us that the Greeks could afford to be wasteful. The city had been emptied. Every Greek would go home laden with the spoils of war – weapons, temple goods, gold … and slaves.
Long lines shuffled towards the boats. I don’t know why they were in such a hurry. It would take them days to clear the city. Maybe they feared the aftershocks.
Footsteps approached. I crouched lower and pulled my stole around my head. The two women in front of me were yanked away. I saw dirty feet in scabby leather sandals. Someone grabbed my hair and hauled me roughly to my feet.
My turn.
The city burned behind us. Black smoke billowed towards the heavens, sending out an unmistakeable message to gods and men.
Troy had fallen.
Before that, however, there was this …
‘I really don’t see how you can blame me for this, Dr Bairstow. I wasn’t even here.’
And, of course, that was my fault too. Apparently, if I had been here, then none of this would have happened. I failed to see the logic of this argument.
‘I fail to see the logic of this argument, sir. We both know if I’d been here at the time of the – occurrence – then I’d be blue, too. However, I wasn’t, so I’m not. Blue, that is. But, until he regains his normal colour, I’m very willing to stand in for Dr Peterson on this assignment.’
I wasn’t, of course. With so much to do for the upcoming Troy assignment, there was no way I wanted to spend a day with an elderly professor from Thirsk University, no matter how many Brownie points it would earn us, or how much Dr Bairstow would appreciate this favour to an old friend. However, the honour of my department – to say nothing of St Mary’s – was at stake, so I really had very little choice.
Heads would roll for this. Starting with one in particular.
Back in my office, I requested the pleasure of Dr Peterson’s company.
My assistant, The Rottweiler, or Miss Lee if you want to use the name on her payslip, delighted at the opportunity to drop someone in it, replied smugly that he was already on his way.
Peterson, of course, was my primary target, but while I was waiting for him to materialise, a very acceptable substitute was also available.
I called Major Guthrie, Head of Security, supposedly cool and level-headed, and implicated as deeply as everyone else. He gave me no opportunity to speak.
‘You can’t blame me for this.’
‘You underestimate me.’
‘No, seriously, Max, by the time I realised what was happening, the damage was done.’
‘They’re historians, for God’s sake. What did you think would happen as soon as my back was turned? That they all would sit down and crochet something?’
My voice started to rise.
‘Yes, but …’
I gave him no chance.
‘And as for those idiots in Research and Development – how could you not guess?’
I knew he was laughing at me. It didn’t help.
‘I turn my back for one day. Just one bloody day. And when I get back my department – my entire bloody department – is blue!’
‘Not your entire department,’ he said, defensively. ‘Mrs Enderby and a couple of others from Wardrobe are still – pink. Or black in one case, of course. And a sort of brownish-coffee colour in another …’
I could hear Tim Peterson’s voice in the corridor. I snarled, ‘This discussion is not over,’ snapped off my com link, and turned to face my prey.
He stuck a blue head round the door. ‘Did you want me?’
Rosie Lee opened a file and pretended to read.
I drew a deep breath.
‘Before you start,’ he said, ‘it’s not my fault.’
‘You’re blue!’
‘Well, so is everyone else. Why are you picking on me?’
‘In my absence, you are supposed to be responsible for my department.’
‘And so I was. I responsibly did a risk-assessment thing-thingy …’
‘Which took the form of …?’
‘I asked Professor Rapson if he thought everything would be OK and he said yes,’ he said, with his what have I done now? expression. ‘And then,’ he continued, warming to his health and safety in the workplace theme, ‘I performed a safety check …’
‘Which took the form of …?
‘I kicked the big rock and it seemed OK.’
I breathed heavily. ‘Did you, at any point – any point at all – issue the instruction “do not paint yourselves blue”?’
‘No, I can’t say I did. I didn’t see the need.’
‘Why the fu – why ever not?’
‘They were already blue, Max. It was too late. They were blue when they turned up. It seemed a good idea at the time.’
‘So from whom did this idea originate?’
There was a bit of a silence.
I strode to the door, crossed the gallery, and thundered down to the blatantly listening throng of blue historians.
‘Bring me the head of Mr Markham!’
He turned up about ten minutes later, continuing the blue theme.
‘Hey, Max. How did it go?’
I’d been to Thirsk to see friend and ex-colleague, Kalinda Black, and attend a presentation. One day. I’d been away one day …
‘Never mind that. Explain to me, in terms I will understand, just what the hell happened yesterday.’
‘Well, it’s like this …’
Disregarding the digressions, excuses, and ramblings, it went something like this:
Ignoring such previous disasters as the Icarus Experiment, (when Mr Markham had set the bar high by managing both to burst into flames and knock himself senseless), Professor Rapson had set up the Monolith Experiment. The idea was to transport a monolith across the lake to a pre-dug hole in Mr Strong’s cherished South Lawn, taking the opportunity to investigate the methods used to transport Stonehenge monoliths while doing so.
Obviously, the entire history section had volunteered, together with a good number of technicians and security personnel, for whom anything was better than working. A decision they would later come to regret. Many of them had entered into the spirit of the thing by dressing in what they considered appropriate costume, and – the crux of the matter, as far as I was concerned – painting themselves blue (on no historical grounds whatsoever, it should be said).
Tragically, according to Markham, Chief Farrell, head of the technical section, and Major Guthrie had both rained on the parade slightly by insisting on non-prehistoric orange lifejackets, which everyone felt detracted slightly from the realism of the experiment.
As frequently happened with the professor’s experiments, everything had started well. The monolith (represented by a large concrete block manufactured especially for the occasion), rolled down to the lake in a suspiciously well-behaved manner, but sadly blotted its copybook in the last few yards. An unforeseen increase in velocity led to a corresponding decrease in direction-control, and the whole thing, monolith, rollers, and those stupid enough to forget to let go of the ropes attached to it (which was all of them) hurtled down to the jetty, reached escape velocity, and crashed down onto the waiting raft, which immediately sank with all hands.
Permian-style extinction was only avoided by the Chief and Guthrie who managed to stop laughing long enough to fish bobbing blue people out of the chilly water with long sticks and deposit them on the bank, coughing up copious amounts of lake water.
It was at this point that the unwashable-offness of the blue dye had become apparent. Apart from that, beamed Mr Markham, it was generally agreed by everyone that this one had been a stonker.
Twenty-four hours later, most of the unit was still blue and likely to remain so. A variety of soaps and cleaning fluids having proved inadequate, it seemed dermabrasion might be the best way to go. I described a scenario in which Mr Strong’s floor-sander and I played leading roles.
‘Calm down, Max,’ said Peterson, after Markham had departed, thereby reducing the number of Smurfs in the room by fifty per cent. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘The problem is that the biggest assignment of our lives draws ever nearer. Our first big briefing is next week. I have a ton of stuff on Wilusa that I need to look through. I’m putting together a series of lectures to the technical and security sections on the fall of Troy and Chief Farrell wants to talk to me about Number Eight. Again. I really don’t have time to escort an elderly professor around 17th-century Cambridge just because I’m the only non-blue person in the building. How long before this stuff wears off?’
‘No idea. It’s been over twenty-four hours now. I think it’s starting to fade, don’t you?’
‘No.’
‘What? Not at all?’
‘No.’
He scrubbed his face with his sleeve and inspected the result. Along with the rest of the history department, he wore a blue jumpsuit so the general effect of blueness was overwhelming. The IT section, who wore black, looked like giant bruises. The technical section, with their orange suits and blue faces, could probably be seen from all three space stations.
‘Not even just a little?’
‘No. Just who is this Professor Penrose, anyway? And what does he have to do with us?’
‘Oh, you’ll love him, Max. He’s a really decent old buffer. He did a lot of the background science stuff when the Boss was setting up St Mary’s and now, finally, he’s retiring, and the Boss is giving him this jump as a going-away present. Apparently, his big ambition has always been to meet Isaac Newton – a big hero of his – and the Boss said yes. So, tomorrow, a quick dash to seventeenth-century Cambridge and a glimpse of the great man. Nothing to it.’
‘Aha!’ I said, indulging in Olympic standard straw-clutching, ‘I’ve already done that period. In 1666 I was in Mauritius chasing dodos, so I can’t go. Oh, what a shame.’
‘No problemo. The jump’s set for 1668. No cause for alarm.’
I sighed.
‘It’ll do you good. You’ve been head-down in research for months. You could do with a break. It’ll be a nice day out for you.’
‘I’ve just had a nice day out. And look what that led to. God knows what will happen if I disappear again. I’ll probably get back and –’
