Now and for Never (15 page)

He felt at his own cheeks and chin and reached for his marching pack. Rolled carefully in a soft rectangle of leather was a curved bronze shaving blade, a whetstone for sharpening it, a handful of dried soapwort leaves wrapped in parchment, and a small ceramic pot with a wooden stopper that contained a pungent herbal mixture, good as a soothing aftershave balm and a salve on minor wounds.

Marcus refused to give in to the sloth of hopelessness. Some of the other soldiers on the wayward ship had begun to adopt hunted, hollow-eyed expressions; slack-jawed with lethargy and twitchy with anxiety at the same time, their strict Legion dress habits had fallen by the wayside. But Marcus had decided that when Allie came for him—and she would—he'd look like a man who had something to live for.

Her.

He picked up the whetstone and razor and began to hone the blade's edge keen. As he scraped it down his cheek he grimaced at the dry, sandpapery noise it made. Normally he'd have used a splash of water on his face, but that was in limited, strictly monitored supply. When the ship's stores of fresh water had begun to turn brackish in the big clay urns,
the sailors had shown the soldiers how to rig sailcloth rain catchers to make good use of the deluges that had drenched the deck with depressing frequency.

Once the Legion rations were all but depleted, the soldiers had relied on the grain stores meant for trade in Rome and fish caught in nets dragged in the bireme's wake. Marcus had always liked seafood but even he was starting to feel a bit like Morholt—who loudly and repeatedly complained about how much he
bloody
damn well
loathed
fish!—and found himself dreaming of a nice curry from that little place on the High Street, or a beef and onion pie from the pub or … oh, the heavenly delight, a steak.

I wonder if Allie likes steak. I could take her to a nice steakhouse. What's a nice steakhouse in London? I have no idea.

Of course, any restaurants Marcus had frequented back in his days as a young linguistics student—and he'd never done all that much frequenting; he'd been so much younger than his classmates that most of his meals had been in the commissary on campus or made on the hotplate in his cramped little dorm room—probably weren't around any longer.

So? I'll find a new steakhouse. An expensive one.

Which you'll pay for with what monies, genius?

“Rich.”

Marcus's head snapped up at the word.

Morholt was right there. Marcus hadn't heard him move from his ropey perch.

“What?”

“Riiiiiich.” Morholt drew the word out to ridiculous proportions. “We're going to be rich beyond our most insane imaginings. You know that, right?”

“I know you're insane, and probably therefore fairly imaginative,” Marcus said dryly. “Beyond that I haven't a clue what you're talking about. And I'd appreciate it if you'd shift a bit more downwind.”

Morholt moved closer. “You think I'm going to stay stuck in this barbaric era? Without so much as a bag of coins to my name—thank you very much Miz Reid for taking even
that
— and no respect from the local whackos? No. No no. No no no …” He waggled one finger back and forth in Marcus's face. “I have a cunning plan, you see.”

“You do.”

“Well, not so much me.
She
has a cunning plan.”

“She?”

“They. Them.” He waved in a vaguely skyward gesture. “Him too, probably. The brainy mapmaker. He won't be happy about it but he'll help those two upstarts anyway. Pesky meddling so-and-sos. You all think you're so smart. Prove it.”

“What in the name of Hades are you talking about?”

“Such a good little soldier you've turned out to be, eh, O'Donnell?” Morholt cackled. “You even talk like one of them now.”

Marcus ground his teeth in frustration. That barb had been sharper than Morholt likely knew. Only because Allie had said something similar after she'd tried to escape the Roman camp at Glastonbury. About just how much a soldier of Rome he'd become. Until she'd called him on it, it was something he'd been proud of. He'd done his damnedest to assimilate into a world that, before Allie McAllister had dropped into his life, looked as if it would be the only one he'd know. He'd shed the socially awkward super-student persona and worked hard to develop his physical prowess. He'd resigned himself to life as a soldier of the Empire. Not so much resigned as accepted. And it hadn't been so bad. Not bad at all, actually. Well, the last couple of months had been something of a challenge, what with the ferocious scathach attacks that had decimated his Legion.
That
had sucked. It still sucked. The feral warrior women were only slightly less terrifying in daylight when they weren't trying to kill him than on a nighttime battlefield when they were.

More than a dozen of the wild-haired, glittering-eyed women stood close by in a loose knot decked out in a dangerous assortment of keen-bladed weaponry. They held their swords and spears with the kind of casual intimacy that only those well versed in the fighting arts could. In their bare feet and with wiry-muscled limbs, they all wore long dark cloaks and short tattered tunics. Each had a broad leather belt hung with feathers and bones and bits of broken jewellery—twisted torcs and arm rings and necklaces—like trophies.

As Marcus stared, their outlines subtly shifted, blurring almost imperceptibly around the edges. It must be that they weren't all there, metaphysically speaking. Or then. The Druid high priestess, Mallora, had summoned the wraithlike spirit warriors from the mists of the distant past.

Even more distant than this,
he thought.

Morholt was snapping his fingers in front of his face.

“Are you listening to me?” he said. “There's a ship's hold full of pure, precious gold beneath our feet.”

“I know,” Marcus said. “I stowed it there. So?”

“You're actually a bit thick, aren't you?”

“Gods. I must be—I'm still talking to you.” Marcus sighed. “Yes. Gold. In the first century. On a ship in the middle of the ocean. All that gold is worthless to you here.”

“Here, yes. Now, certainly.”

“But?”

“But I'm not staying here.” He looked on the verge of giggling with glee. “Or rather, I'm not staying
now
.”

Marcus fought to keep his expression neutral. As certain as he was that Allie would return for him—certain she would try, at least—he'd been careful to keep that certainty from Morholt. Only now it seemed that Morholt might have devised travel plans on his own.

“When we make landfall,” he continued, “you and I, my young friend, are going to steal the gold—again—and we're
going to hide it. Bury it. And then we're going to travel forward in time, and we're going to dig it up. And I shall, in my extreme generosity, let you keep, say, ten percent.”

“Hide it where?” Marcus asked. “Who do you think you are—the Dread Pirate Morholt? Where could we possibly bury that much treasure so that it wouldn't be found for over two thousand years?”

“I haven't the faintest idea.” Morholt waved his hands blithely in the air. “But clearly we did.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because,” he explained as if to a child, “no one has found it yet, have they?”

Marcus could hardly argue with that logic. If they did bury it—if they
had
buried it—then Morholt was right. It had yet to be found. “Maybe we never got around to burying it. Maybe the ship sinks and it all winds up on the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“Not possible.” Morholt sniffed again.

“And why's that?”

“Because at least one of those shiny trinkets has already managed to find its way back to Snettisham and into a hole,” he explained airily. “If it hadn't, I never would have been able to steal it in the first place. So there. Ha. I win.”

Marcus puzzled through Morholt's pretzel logic. “You're talking about the torc, aren't you?” he asked. “The one Mallora cursed and bound around Postumus's neck. It was on display at the museum, I remember.”

Morholt nodded, an irritating gleam of smugness in his gaze.

“Assuming that recent events—and by that I mean recent in this era—haven't drastically altered the timeline as we've known it, then yeah, I agree. The torc somehow finds its way to Norfolk.” He shook his head. “Doesn't mean
we
do.”

“Oh, don't be such a Negative Nelly.”

Marcus gaped at Morholt. Was he really that monumentally thick? “Do you have
any
idea where we're headed?”

“Er, no.” Morholt shrugged. “Not really. Mallora … well, it's not that she
won't
tell me, exactly, it's just that she's not interested in speaking to me at the moment.” He shifted his eyes back to where the Druidess still stood in the bow, statue-still.

“Do you know what direction we're travelling in?” Marcus asked. “Or even how many days it's been since we last saw land?”

“No. I don't. Frankly, I haven't been paying much attention.” Morholt sniffed and waved a hand in a vague circle. “I prefer to spend my time with the hoard.”

“I noticed.”

Marcus's erstwhile fellow student had spent most of the long strange voyage down in the hold, picking through the sacks of pilfered treasure like some kind of greedy fairy-tale miser. A modern-, or perhaps ancient-, day Scrooge.

More like Daffy Duck in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons
.

“Did Mallora tell you
anything
about our destination?”

“Oh, you know,” Morholt said, “a bunch of bardic mumbojumbo about the Something-Something Place of Utter Unpronounceability. The translation escapes me. You know— bloody Celtic dialects.”

Yes, he
did
know bloody Celtic dialects, Marcus thought, grinding his teeth. “What, in your very best approximation, did it sound like?”

Morholt rolled his eyes, but deigned to dribble forth a string of sounds that Marcus managed to parse as
“Ynysoedd Bendigedig.”

“The Blessed Isles …” he murmured. He felt the blood drain from his face. He'd been hoping he was wrong. That the temporal interludes had thrown off his calculations. But Marcus knew now that he'd been right all along. “Oh no …”

“What?” Morholt leaned forward, his gaze sharpening. “The blessed
what
?”

“The Blessed Isles. Also called the Fortunate Isles, and sometimes the Western Lands. The Irish called it Tir Na Nog. Some even call the place Avalon.”

“What?!” Morholt gaped like a landed fish.

Marcus raised a slow eyebrow. In his extreme naïveté, when he'd first fallen in with the Free Peoples of Prydain, Mark O'Donnell had looked upon Morholt as an inspiration. A self-professed Modern-Day Druid, committed to reinvigorating the ancient traditions of a lost culture. But after some years of forced marching, bank and ditch digging, and extreme close encounters with that culture, he'd changed his opinion. Morholt was a poseur and a conman—with a cereal-box version of pseudo-Celtic knowledge.

And he's the reason I'm stuck back here.

“Didn't you even
try
to learn the fundamentals of the belief system you claimed to champion back at Cambridge?”

“Of course I did!” Morholt sat up straighter, clearly affronted. “I am a true believer in the unseen worlds. In the paranormal. The supernatural. The mystical and the—”

“All right. I get it. You're the very soul of a great mystic.” Marcus suppressed another eye roll. “It's just that you don't seem to have a handle on the basic details.”

Morholt snorted. “Ceciley and Magda were always much better than I at that sort of thing. Just because I believe in magic doesn't mean I need to learn all the card tricks, does it now? All I had to do was work the marketing angle. Let the others in the club do the Newy-Agey legwork and pass on the talking points. That's what makes me a leader. You might want to take notes.”

Marcus didn't know whether to laugh or cry. “So you have zero knowledge of what Ynysoedd Bendigedig is,” he said. “Or why the mere mention of it concerns me greatly.”

“I have a feeling you're about to tell me.”

“I am. And I'm also going to tell you that, regardless of your Snettisham Torc hypothesis, and resulting present certainty that we're going to come out of this mess rich as kings and back where we belong, I think you might agree that we're going to have a bit of a tough time getting anywhere
near
Snettisham from the other bloody side of the Atlantic Ocean.”

Morholt blanched. “What …?”

Marcus grabbed him by the front of his jumpsuit and hauled Morholt so close they were nose to nose. “We are headed—you
idiot
—straight for the shores of North America. And
no
one is going to find us there!”

11