A Tale of Time City (7 page)

“How much does a tour cost?” Vivian asked. But the waitress arrived to take their orders just then. She was a cheerful young lady in frilly pink pyjamas who clearly knew Sam and Jonathan rather well.

“Hallo, you two,” she said. “How many butter-pies this morning?”

“Three, please,” said Jonathan.

“Only three? said the waitress. “One point five, then. Numbers?”

“I’m not allowed a number,” said Sam.

“I know about you,” the waitress said. “I meant your friends.”

“I’m paying,” said Jonathan, and recited a string of numbers.

“Yes, but are you in credit?” said the waitress. “Show.”

Jonathan pressed one of the buttons on his belt and held his hand out with a row of signs shining on his palm. The waitress looked, nodded, and pressed buttons on the pink matching belt round her pyjamas.

“I must get Elio to give me more credit,” Jonathan said when the waitress had gone. “I shall go broke paying for everything. Sam’s not allowed any credit. When they gave him his first belt, he took it apart and altered the credit-limit. Then he spent a fortune on butter-pies.”

“A thousand units in two days,” Sam said happily.

“How much is a unit?” Vivian asked.

“Um—about two of your pounds,” said Jonathan.

Vivian gasped. “Weren’t you sick?”

“All night,” Sam said cheerfully. “It was worth it. I’m a butter-pie addict.” His face lit up as he saw the waitress coming back. “Here they are! Yummee!”

While they ate and let the hot part trickle into the cold, Jonathan seemed to feel he had to go on showing Vivian Time City. He pointed to the gleaming white building across the square. Vivian was rather embarrassed to find that the tourists’ heads were turning to look at it too. “There’s Time Patrol, where we were last night,” he said. “And there—” He pointed towards the end of the square
and tourist heads in strange hairstyles swung that way as well as Vivian’s. “That building’s Duration, where Sam and I go to school. I expect you’ll be going there with us when half-term’s over.” Then he pointed back along the arcade, and once more all the heads turned where he pointed. “That’s Continuum behind us, where all the students are, with Perpetuum and Whilom Tower beyond that…”

Vivian was so embarrassed at the way the tourists were listening in that she stopped attending. Instead she thought: Half-term! It’s their half-term and they were bored with nothing to do. That’s why they thought up this adventure with the Time Lady and saving Time City, to make life exciting. I can just hear them whispering together about V.S.! It’s still not
real
to them!

“…and opposite Agelong, where my mother works. Those twin domes—those are Erstwhile and Ongoing,” Jonathan was saying. “Then there’s Millennium at the end of—”

“I need another butter-pie,” Sam interrupted.

Jonathan pressed another stud in his belt. A clock-face appeared on the back of his hand. It said a quarter to twelve. “No time,” he said. “We’ve got to show V.S. the Endless ghost.”

“After that then,” said Sam.

“No,” said Jonathan. “It’s my last credit.”

“You count tomato pips!” Sam said disgustedly as they got up to go.

“How does your belt work?” Vivian asked. “It seems like magic to me!”

She soon wished she had not asked. There were now crowds of
tourists in the square. Jonathan said, “Energe functions,” and dived vigorously this way and that among the people, shooting bits of explanation over his shoulder. Vivian followed as best she could, trying to understand, although almost the only parts of it she grasped were words like
and
and
the
. “And mine’s made in Hundred and Two Century so it’s got a low-weight function,” Jonathan said. “Look.” He pressed another stud and took off from beside Vivian in a long, floating leap. He landed, and at once took off in another, and another, floating this way and that among the groups of people.

“He’s gone silly!” Sam said disgustedly. “Come on.”

They dodged among the people, trying to keep Jonathan’s green swooping figure and flying pigtail in sight. It took them between buildings beyond the glass arcade. Vivian had a glimpse of the twin domes Jonathan must have been talking about on one side and, on the other, a most extraordinary place like a lopsided honeycomb that seemed to have stairs zig-zagging dizzily all over it. Then they were at a grand flight of steps. Jonathan’s green figure was bounding down them like a crazy kangaroo. They saw him bound right across the broad crowded road below, where he dropped straight down at the top of a leap and landed with a bump, looking a little cross.

“Good. It’s run down. He’ll have to wait for it to recharge,” said Sam. They ran across the road, where Jonathan was leaning against a stone wall. Below and beyond the wall was open countryside, with a river winding through it. Jonathan was watching a barge unloading at a wharf a long way below.

“The River Time,” he said to Vivian, just as if nothing had happened and she and Sam were not hot and out of breath with trying to keep up. “This road is the Avenue of the Four Ages and it leads to Endless Hill. Look.”

A bit like the Mall, Vivian thought, or perhaps the Embankment, what with the river on one side. And Jonathan is a maddening boy! Worse than Sam!

There were arches over the Avenue made of lacy metalwork, and in some way these arches were made to fly long streamers of light, like flags or scarves, in rainbow colours. It looked very festive, since it was full of crowds and clots of people all hastening towards the hill at the end. There the Avenue led into flights of steps up the round green hill, to the tower at the top. The tower looked old. Very, very old, Vivian thought, and dark, although she could see sky through the windows in it.

“That tower’s called the Gnomon,” said Jonathan. “It has Faber John’s clock in it that only strikes once a day, at midday.”

They began to follow the rest of the people towards Endless Hill, but, before they had gone very far a tremendous bell began to toll. BONG. It buzzed the lacy arches and set the streamers of light fluttering. “Bother! Midday already!” Jonathan said and started to run. They were still quite a way from the hill when the second stroke came. BONG. Again the streamers of light wavered. Arms in the crowd pointed. There came murmurs of “There it is!” from all sides.

Vivian saw a person in green clothes, distantly, on the lowest flight of steps up the hill. He was trying to climb them. He seemed
in an awful hurry—she could feel that from here—and he ran and scrambled furiously. But something seemed to be stopping him. BONG! rang the great clock. The man in green staggered and pushed himself upwards. BONG. Vivian could feel the effort it took the man. He was lifting his feet as if they were in lead boots. BONG. He was trying to pull himself up by the balustrade and that was not working either.

“Is it very hard to climb those steps?” she whispered. BONG.

“No. You can run up them,” said Jonathan. “But he’s a time-ghost. A once-ghost. He tries to get up the stairs every day at twelve. Watch.”

BONG, went the clock while Jonathan was speaking. With every stroke, the man in green seemed to find it more difficult to climb. But he did not give up. He laboured upward while the clock struck seven, eight, and nine. By the tenth stroke, he was on his hands and knees, crawling. He seemed quite exhausted and he still had two turns of the steps to go before he reached the tower. As he crawled doggedly up the next-to-last flight, Vivian found she was holding her breath. BONG. Come on, come on! she said inside her head. It seemed the most important thing in the world that the man should reach the top.

And he did not do it. BONG came the twelfth stroke and the green crawling figure was simply not there anymore. “O—oh!” said Vivian, and the crowd all round her said “O—oh!” too, in a long groan. “What a pity! What was he doing?” Vivian said.

“Nobody knows. He hasn’t done it yet,” Jonathan said. “He’s a once-ghost, you see, and those happen when whatever they’re
doing is so important or so emotional that they leave a mark like the habit-ghosts.”

“What? From the future?” said Vivian.

“Yes, but it isn’t really the future here,” Jonathan explained. “I told you how Time City uses the same small piece of time over and over again. Past and future go round and round, so they’re almost the same thing. What did you think of the Endless ghost?” he asked her eagerly. “Did he mean anything to you?”

The only thing Vivian could think of was Robin Hood because of the green clothes. “No,” she said. “Should he?”

Jonathan looked a little disappointed. “Well, a fresh mind from an Unstable Era,” he said. “You might have had a new idea. Let’s have lunch before the tourists fill all the cafés.”

“Butter-pies. You promised,” said Sam.

“I said No,” said Jonathan. “Ordinary food. It’s cheaper.”

“Slant-eyed meanie!” Sam muttered. But he took care to say it when Jonathan was pushing through the crowd some way ahead.

They went up steps between the houses. These steps were called The Decades and there were ten steps between every landing, until they were quite high up near the golden dome of The Years. There was a place to buy food at the top, with a slant of lawn to eat it on, under an old grey tower. They had sweet buns with meat in them, sitting in the sun, which was warm, but not too warm. I’m enjoying this! Vivian thought. I feel like a tourist on holiday! While they ate, Jonathan and Sam told her about other once-ghosts. There was a man who dived daily into the River Time, trying to rescue a drowning girl; the Time Patroller who got shot in the hall of Millennium; and the girl who was a Lee, and therefore a long-
ago ancestress of Sam’s and Jonathan’s, who threw her engagement ring angrily into the fountain in Century Place every day at sunset.

“She was awfully embarrassed about it later,” Jonathan said, getting up. “She nearly left Time City, but she couldn’t face living in history. Get moving, Sam. I want to show V.S. Faber John while the tourists are eating.”

“You mean he’s still
here
!” Vivian said.

“You’ll see,” said Sam, with his largest two-toothed grin.

The way to Faber John was at the bottom of the old tower, below the lawn. There was a dark doorway down there, with a lady in the dimness inside who demanded to see Jonathan’s credit. When Jonathan pressed his belt-stud and held out his hand, the glowing green numbers on his palm changed quite noticeably as the lady punched a machine in front of her. This was expensive. Vivian understood now why Jonathan had been so careful to buy a cheap lunch.

After that, they went down a flight of steps with a rope railing, down and down, under little balls of blue light fixed in the rocky ceiling, until they came to a muddy floor deep under Time City. They could hear laughs and shrieks from a few tourists ahead of them, but those were nearly drowned by a noise of water pouring and dripping. Round a rocky corner, there was a notice.
FABER JOHN’S WELL: A Drink brings Health and Luck
, it said, in letters almost too strange for Vivian to read. Beyond that, water came gushing from a groove in the roof and spilt into a small stone basin that was obviously made naturally from the water wearing the rock. A few coins glittered under its dark ripples.

“You don’t need to pay,” said Sam.

All the same, Vivian dropped a big round penny with 1934 on it into the strange little well. She felt she needed some luck to get her back home. Then she took one of a stack of jewelled goblets from one side and held it under the running water. The goblet was really only papery stuff, but it looked so real Vivian decided to keep it. The water tasted fresh and slightly rusty, both at once.

She followed Sam and Jonathan along the bends of the mud-floored passage, clutching her goblet, hoping it did mean luck. They went past cunningly lighted rock-formations, like folded cloth and like angel’s wings, and one beautiful one that was a dark unmoving pool with a rock growing out of the middle of it that was just like two cupped hands, fingers and all. All the time, there was the sound of water pouring and raining and gushing. At first Vivian thought it was the sound of Faber John’s Well, but it grew steadily louder, until they entered a wider part of the passage with an iron railing down one side. Here it was warmer, and a little steamy, and the sound of water was a thunder with loud pattering in its midst.

“River Time rises here,” Jonathan shouted, pointing to a deep crevice beyond the railing, where much of the thunder seemed to come from. They went round another corner and found the tourists they had heard before were just going on ahead. “Good,” Jonathan said. “We’ve got it to ourselves. Look.”

Beyond the rail and beyond the dark crevice, there was a smooth oval cave many yards long in the wall. Water poured and dripped inside it. But lights had been placed to shine through the sheet of water into the cave. Vivian saw a shape inside. It was long and high
and it reminded her of—she had a sudden vivid memory of sharing a bed with Mum once, on holiday at Bognor Regis, before Dad could get there from work. In the morning she had woken up to find Mum lying on her side, facing away from her, but looking very near and large, so that Vivian saw Mum’s rather thin back and shoulders like a cliff in front of her. What was inside the cave looked just like that. For a moment, Vivian could have sworn she was looking at part of a giant’s back, with the giant’s head hidden inside the rock to the left and the rest of him stretched out to the right under the City. There was a shoulder-blade, and the knobby dent a person has down the middle of his back. But the shape was a shiny clay colour. It looked like rock. Water pattered and poured on it perpetually, showing it must be hard as rock too.

“It
can’t
be a person, can it?” she said. “He’d be huge if he stood up! It must be rock.”

“We don’t know,” said Jonathan.

“But surely somebody’s climbed in there and made sure!” Vivian said.

Jonathan took a quick look up and down the passage to make sure nobody else was there. Then he took hold of the iron handrail and twisted a length of it loose. People had done that often before—Vivian could tell by the easy way the bar came out. He handed her the long piece of iron. “Lean over and poke him,” he said. “Go on.”