The Doomsday Code

CHAPTER 58

1194, Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire

It was morning and a mist mingled with the white smoke of a dew-damp cooking fire, drifting up through the canopy of branches above.

Liam watched Locke’s camp slowly stir to life; men in rags turning over under their damp capes, robes and animal-skin covers. He heard the snotty rattle of someone clearing his nose and hawking it out on to the ground, and the distant chup chup of someone already up and cutting firewood.

Locke was trusting him not to run, allowing him the freedom to move around the camp. Liam felt the men’s eyes on him, distrusting eyes, resentful eyes. If he did attempt to run from the camp’s perimeter into the thick undergrowth, he was certain any number of them would gladly take the opportunity to hunt him down and put an arrow in his back. And he wasn’t really going to get far barefooted. Locke had had him remove his leather boots and donate them to one of his men. A gesture of humiliation that had proved popular: a Norman noble reduced to picking his way about the camp as barefooted as a common street beggar. The men clearly liked the idea of that.

Liam watched Locke emerge from his hut, stretch and yawn. The robot emerged behind him, swathed once more in robes, the top half of its metallic head lost in the shadows of its hood, the plastic-skin chin and jaw just barely visible.

‘Listen! There is news!’ announced Locke. All heads turned towards him; the various activities of stirring men came to a halt. ‘Our leader, the Hooded Man, has received news.’ Locke nodded respectfully up at the robot standing beside him, a foot taller. ‘News from Nottingham. It is said King Richard has returned to England! And, as I speak to you now, he is travelling northwards, towards us!’

Voices raised through the camp. Locke’s men unsure how to greet the news.

‘Also … it is said his brother, John, has fled from his castle in Oxford and is on his way to Nottingham! There is talk in the town that a feud exists between the king and his brother! That John may choose to challenge Richard and make a stand at Nottingham!

‘Our Lord Hood is considering this important matter. If there is to be a battle there in the coming days, then both sides will be looking for fighting men like ourselves to fill their ranks. We have a chance to air our grievances, to discuss the unjust taxes that have driven us all into these woods out of hunger. More than that, we have a chance to perhaps seek assurances from either Richard or John — whomever we choose to offer our support to — that we are all to be pardoned and our status as outlaws revoked.’

Several of Locke’s men cheered at that. Liam sensed that it was fear of being arrested and hung as criminals that was keeping the majority of them from returning to their families and homes.

‘We have a chance to make ourselves heard. Our leader will be deciding over the next few days with whom we shall throw in our lot!’ Locke grinned at the men. ‘And we can only pity the army that does not have the Hood fighting for them, eh?’

The men cheered.

‘He is truly unstoppable!’

The men roared.

‘Immortal!’

They roared support again.

‘Because he has been sent by God to free poor Englishmen from being slaves to these Norman lords! We will have God on our side, whichever side we choose … and that makes us formidable! So ready yourselves, lads. There will be a fight coming soon. Sharpen your swords, restring your bows and be ready for it!’

Locke said something quietly to the robot and it raised a sword and held it aloft. The forest filled with a cacophony of raised voices, every last man, young and old, on his feet and punching the air excitedly.

Liam looked around at them. None of them had the faintest idea they were pawns being used by Locke, additional battle-fodder for whichever Plantagenet — presumably Richard — that Locke intended to make a deal with. If it was true, if both John and Richard were converging on Nottingham, then presumably Locke was hoping to get an audience with Richard — and then what? Try to steal Richard’s cardan grille? Or offer to share the Grail’s secrets with him?

It occurred to Liam that that would be the worst possible outcome. Someone as mad and as powerful as Richard … privy to whatever revelations, prophecies might be hidden in the Grail?

I really have to get out of here. I have to get back to Nottingham. More than anything, he wanted to find both Bob and Becks and return home to 2001. All of the things that Locke had told him about the future he needed to share with Maddy and Sal. Particularly Maddy. She would make more sense of it than he ever could. She’d have a far better idea of what they needed to do next.

He wondered what Bob was doing right now. Whether the support unit had yet found out about the ambush and was in the middle of Sherwood Forest already searching for him … or whether he was waiting in Nottingham Castle, still expecting him to return.

What about Becks? Where’s she? With John?

If she was, then presumably she’d also be able to make the rendezvous if John was travelling north to Nottingham. He had a horrible feeling both support units were going to turn up in that field in a week’s time without him and go home, leaving him here as Locke’s prisoner.

Locke nodded at Liam and beckoned him over as the gathered men dispersed to the various morning tasks: foraging for food and firewood, boiling up a meagre pottage for breakfast.

‘Liam,’ said Locke, ‘come inside and have some breakfast with me.’

He ducked down through the entrance and followed Locke and the robot inside, back into the stuffy smoky gloom of Locke’s humble shack. Locke sat down on his bench; the robot hunkered down by his side like a loyal dog.

‘You heard?’

Liam nodded. ‘I heard what you said just now.’

‘Apparently the streets of Nottingham are buzzing with the news. The people favour John. They see Richard for what he is — an absentee ruler who’s ruined the country.’

‘Mr Locke, can I ask … do you have this Grail here? Is it somewhere in this camp?’

Locke eyed him cautiously. ‘That’s for me to know and you to mind your own business.’

‘What do you intend to do with it?’

‘I will do whatever it takes to unlock it.’

‘You’d do a deal with Richard?’

He shrugged. ‘I would … I’d betray all those gullible morons outside if that’s what it takes.’

‘But you have no idea what’s in there. Have you considered the prophecy you’re hoping to find might just be a message from someone like me … another TimeRider?’

Locke frowned. ‘And is it? Do you know?’

‘No … I — no, I don’t know. But that’s my point — it could be anything! Surely it would be dangerous to give someone like King Richard that kind of knowledge? It could completely change the course of history — ’

‘And is that such a bad thing, Liam? From where I’m sitting — the time I come from — maybe giving King Richard a brand-new history, a new destiny, will give us an entirely different timeline and a different … better future. It certainly couldn’t be any worse.’

‘But there could be a worse, so.’

Locke shook his head. ‘What? What’s worse than an overheated, poisoned, dying Earth?’

‘I don’t know! All I do know is what we were told. That to mess with time like this, to change it, weakens the walls between us and … and Chaos.’

‘Chaos?’

Liam didn’t know enough to explain himself any better. Not for the first time he wished Foster had stayed around long enough to talk them through all the things they needed to know. ‘It’s what we travel through when we travel in time. A dimension … a place that is just … chaos. Perhaps even what some people call Hell.’

Locke’s eyes narrowed. ‘I recalled only a falling sensation.’

‘It’s more than that. Look, Mr Locke, I’ve … I think I’ve seen things, so I have … things in there.’ Liam couldn’t find any better way to say it than that. But in that milky nothingness, he’d seen them, entities swimming closer and closer to him each time he travelled. As if they were growing familiar with him. As if they sensed a regular traveller, someone who might offer them a way into the real world.

‘Mr Locke, the only thing I know for certain is you can’t just mess with time. If this Holy Grail of yours was meant to be lost in the woods and end up nothing but a myth, if that’s the history that’s meant to be, then so be it. And maybe what you want to do, and what I came back to do — to find out what’s in there … maybe that’s a big mistake. Maybe it’s best that no one finds out what’s written in there.’

‘Liam, we’ve waited since the discovery of that scroll in Jerusalem, eleven hundred years of waiting to know … I’m not going to walk away from that now.’ He shook his head almost sadly. ‘I can’t walk away from that.’

Liam was about to reply that Locke had no choice, but then the pause in conversation was suddenly filled with a crack of snapping branches and the clatter of an avalanche of dislodged dry mud from the shaking wattle-and-daub wall. Another loud crack and a ragged uneven circle of daylight appeared.

Locke’s jaw dropped. ‘What the — ?’

A round head topped with dark shaggy hair pushed through the hole. ‘Liam O’Connor?’