Overtime (31 page)

A gentleman, Blondel's mother had always insisted, is unfailingly polite at all times, even when being lowered into a pit full of scorpions by black-hearted and incorrectly dressed Infidels. He shrugged slightly.

‘Clever old you, then,' he said. ‘I take it you're going to suggest an exchange of hostages.'

‘That was my idea, yes.'

‘Fair enough,' Blondel replied. ‘Swap me King Richard for the Antichrist, and I'll let you have the two Julians for Guy and Isoud.'

‘Certainly not,' Mountjoy replied with an unpleasant little snicker. ‘That would be grossly unfair to us, given that the Pope and the Anti-Pope are one and the same person.'

‘But wearing different hats,' Blondel replied quickly. ‘Hats make an awful lot of difference. You ask my friend Guy about hats.'

‘Nevertheless,' Mountjoy replied, ‘the terms are unacceptable.'

‘How about if I get my agent to throw in a free radio alarm clock?'

Mountjoy scowled, making the world momentarily dark. ‘If I were you,' he said, ‘I would advise your friend Galeazzo to stay off the topic of free radio alarm clocks, particularly when he's in the presence of My Lord.'

A terrible thought struck Blondel, and he struggled with his muscle control in a desperate attempt not to giggle.

‘You don't mean ...' he said.

‘Shortly before the date scheduled for the Day of Judgement,' Mountjoy intoned, ‘My Lord, on the advice of his legal advisers, took out a public liability policy. Part of the package offered by the insurance broker, it appears, was a free radio alarm clock, which subsequently failed to go off on a rather important occasion. As soon as My Lord has finished with you, Master de Nesle, I rather fancy he means to take the matter up with the broker in question.'

Blondel, who had closed his eyes in the interests of mirth suppression, opened them again and nodded. ‘Fair enough,' he said, ‘we'll scrub round the alarm clock. But don't you think a deal whereby you give me two relatively unimportant civilians in return for two high-ranking clerics and the Antichrist is a bit, well, one-sided. If you'll forgive the pun,' he added.

‘It depends,' Mountjoy replied luminously. ‘Unimportant to us. Unimportant, indeed, to history. But unimportant to you ...'

Blondel frowned, and noticed something out of the corner of his eye. ‘Hello,' he said, ‘is that my old friend Clarenceaux under all that oilcloth? How's things, Clarenceaux?'

Clarenceaux, who had set in a position that was half standing to attention and half frozen rigid by the cold, stared straight in front and replied, ‘Sir.'

‘Bad as that, are they?'

‘Sir.'

‘Oh well,' said Blondel sympathetically. ‘Stiff upper lip and all that.'

‘Sir. Ran out of my size again, sir,' Clarenceaux explained. ‘Quartermaster said it'd soon bed down, sir.'

‘I see.' Blondel shrugged and turned back to Mountjoy. ‘Tell you what I'll do,' he said, ‘and I'm cutting my own throat, I really am. I'll let you have the two Popes and the Antichrist, you give me the King and Guy, and you can keep La Beale Isoud. Now I can't say fairer than that, can I?'

Mountjoy, for all his phosphorescent detachment, was shocked. ‘You'd sacrifice your own sister?' he said.

Blondel tried to look innocent. ‘Absolutely,' he said. ‘A man's first duty is to his king, and next to that, to his fellow knights. Sisters just do the washing.'

Mountjoy's brain turned like the dials of a fruit machine. He remembered what the warder had told him the woman had said when he brought her her rations. They had enough trouble filling the existing staff vacancies without looking for another warder. ‘I wouldn't dream of it,' he said.

‘Pity.' Blondel sighed. ‘Right, then, this is my very last offer, take it or leave it. You release Richard, Guy and Isoud, and you can have your lot back plus me.'

‘You?'

‘Certainly. You can ship me off to the Archive of your choice, and I promise you faithfully that you won't know I'm there.'

Mountjoy shook his head, diffusing second-hand rain. ‘That would be, Messire, because you weren't there. You've been in one Archive already and escaped. We wouldn't be able to sleep at night. No, our terms are quite straightforward. Goodlet and La Beale Isoud in return for My Lord and Their Excellencies. Otherwise ...'

‘Otherwise what?' Blondel asked innocently.

‘Otherwise,' Mountjoy replied, ‘your sister and your friend won't even be fond and fragrant memories. They will never have existed. Do I make myself plain?'

‘Absolutely, my dear fellow,' Blondel replied. ‘After all,' he added, ‘it'll just mean we're back to where we started.'

‘Not quite,' Mountjoy said. ‘If we were back where we started, none of this would be necessary.'

‘Sorry?'

‘I said,' Mountjoy repeated, ‘if we were back where we started, none of this—'

‘No,' Blondel interrupted, ‘you're wrong there. If you were back where
you
started, then I wouldn't be here. We'd all be in the future, surely.'

‘That's not the point,' Mountjoy retorted. ‘If
we
were back where
we
started, then
you
wouldn't be here, but
we
would.'

Blondel shook his head. ‘But surely in that case we wouldn't be we, we'd just be you.'

‘That's what I said.'

‘No, what you said was—'

‘Hold on,' Clarenceaux interrupted. ‘I think I see what's gone wrong. Mountjoy is taking a view of events as they would have occurred in Basic Time, while Blondel is looking at it all from an Overtime-based perspective which would naturally lead him to interpret ...'

He stopped. He had this feeling that everybody in the world was looking at him.

‘Sorry,' he said, and died of embarrassment.

‘Anyway,' Blondel said, ‘I suppose it's a deal, then. Shake on it?'

‘No thank you.'

‘Suit yourself.' He stepped out from under the tree and opened his umbrella. ‘I'll meet you back here, same time, same place, this week. All right?'

‘Agreed.'

‘Ciao, then,' Blondel said, and walked away over the bridge.

Half an hour later, a battered red pick-up came and collected Clarenceaux and took him back to the depot. Because of an acute shortage of embarrassment neurons at Central Dispatching they had to close off the circuits and double-bank the guilt centres to make up; with the result that, in the six weeks until he next died and they had a chance to take him to bits and do the job properly, he had a distressing tendency to burp in mixed company and then feel awful about it for days afterwards.

 

Blondel was driving the cart. It was difficult, because the cart was about seven inches wider than the tunnel, and it was only because of strange distortions caused by anomalies in the temporal field that he was able to get the blasted thing through at all. The key thing was, at all costs, not to meet himself coming the other way.

‘Hold tight, everybody,' he said, ‘this is our turning.'

Giovanni looked up to see a low, narrow doorway the size of a coal chute, with a picture of a cart in a red circle with a diagonal line through it stencilled on its central panel. Although he was used to this sort of thing, he closed his eyes and ducked.

It was already dark when they reached the bridge. It was also raining. Of course.

Under a tree by the side of the road at the other end, Blondel could see Mountjoy, Clarenceaux and, of course, himself, working out the terms of the exchange. At least there would be reliable witnesses in the event of any dispute about the terms. He made a chuck-chuck noise to the horse, pulled his hood down over his face and asked Marco if the lanterns were ready.

Two carts waiting at opposite ends of the bridge, in the pouring rain. For a while they just sat there. Then, on one cart, a lantern flashes three times. Then a lantern flashes three times on the other cart. The first cart flashes back four times. The signal is reciprocated.

There is no known reason for this performance, which is believed to be compulsory on these sorts of occasions. Presumably it's just tradition.

He had kept calm up till now; but the other cart hadn't moved, and Blondel began to worry. In keeping with the rest of his character, on the rare occasions when Blondel went to pieces, he went to very small, very numerous, very fast-moving pieces. In fact, you could use him to shoot clay pigeons with.

‘For God's sake,' he muttered, ‘what do they think they're playing at? Marco, you stupid idiot, don't just sit there, flash 'em some more. Come
on
, for God's sake.'

The other cart remained still. It flashed back; five flashes and then one more for luck. Blondel demanded angrily of the world in general what the hell that was supposed to mean.

Marco coughed politely. ‘Maybe they're trying to remind you it's a one-way street, boss,' he said.

Blondel looked down at him. ‘What do you mean, one-way street?'

‘Well,' Marco said, marshalling his thoughts and hoping he was remembering this right, ‘it means that if it's a north-south-only street, you can go from north to south but not south to north. If it's a south-north-only street, it means you can go from south to north but not north to south. If it's ...'

Marco suddenly found that his cap had somehow left his head and got wedged in his mouth. He took it out again.

‘Is
it a one-way street, Marco?' Blondel asked.

‘Yes,' Marco replied, ‘didn't you see the signs? It's a west-east-only street, that means you can go—'

‘Yes, thank you,' Blondel replied, ‘eat your nice hat now, there's a good lad. Silly of me not to have noticed, wasn't it?'

It made sense, after all. There was a serious risk that going through a No Entry sign in this particular context might result in something rather worse than a fine and two penalty points. He pulled himself together, chirruped softly to the horse, and moved the cart forwards.

‘You're late again,' said Mountjoy. ‘What kept you?'

‘Got held up in traffic,' Blondel improvised. ‘Anyway, I'm here now.'

Mountjoy flickered like a portable television in a thunderstorm. He hated getting wet; the last thing he needed to do at his time of life was to fuse. ‘Can we get on with it, then?'

‘You've come alone, then, like we agreed?'

‘Of course I have,' Mountjoy replied wearily. ‘For a start, nobody else'd be crazy enough to come out in this weather. Are they in the back?'

Blondel nodded. ‘Want to check the merchandise?' he asked. This too was traditional.

‘I trust you,' Mountjoy replied. ‘I mean,' he added, ‘if you can't trust slippery, devious little bastards, who can you trust?'

‘Very true,' Blondel replied. ‘But, since you're none of those things, I'd be grateful if you'd just lift that tarpaulin there.'

Muttering, Mountjoy did so. There was a loud protest in a distinctive female voice as rain came into the back of Mountjoy's cart. They were there all right.

‘Any problems getting here?' Blondel asked.

‘No,' Mountjoy replied suspiciously. ‘Why?'

‘Because every time I drive her anywhere,' Blondel replied, ‘it's
Shouldn't you be in third gear?
and
I'm sure that was the turning back there on the left
all the bloody way. You must tell me how you managed it some time. Ready?'

‘Ready.'

Mountjoy waved his hand. Pursuivant and Mordaunt jumped down and pulled two anthropomorphic bundles out of the cart. There was a bump as they hit the ground.

‘That's fine,' Blondel said quietly. ‘Giovanni, Marco, Iachimo, give me a hand, will you?'

The Galeazzos unloaded their cargo, plus a free simulated calf attaché case and solar calculator each, and laid them on the damp roadway. The two carts moved forward a few paces and took on their new respective cargoes.

‘Right,' Blondel said. ‘That's that, then. Pleasure doing business with—'

Blondel gave Mountjoy a very brief look of utter contempt, and then cracked the reins sharply. A moment later, his cart was surrounded by dark shapes; looming, ominous shapes, all the more disturbing because their visors were down over their ...

‘Look, Guy!' Blondel shouted. ‘Hats! Iron hats! Lots and lots of them!'

There was a loud crack, and the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the crest of a helmet. A dark shape swore loudly and ran for its life. Or at least its five-hundred-year parts and labour warranty. The cart lurched forward and trundled off.

‘After them!' Mountjoy yelled. The dark shapes stayed exactly where they were, all apart from one, who was wandering around bumping into things. Later they explained that you can't hear a damn thing inside those bleeding steel helmets.

From the back of Mountjoy's cart came a loud and authoritative protest. You'd have had no problem hearing it through six inches of plate steel.

‘Good,' it added. ‘Now don't just stand there, get after them.'

 

‘Do you know,' Blondel said, as the cart thundered down the road, ‘I'm getting just the teeniest bit sick and tired of all this running about and being chased by people, aren't you?'

Guy nodded. He was more than the teeniest bit sick at the way the cart was lurching about, too, but it seemed so long since he'd eaten anything that that was probably academic. He found what seemed to be a handrail and clung on to it fiercely.