Overtime. Part 33

Qui nepuet endurer ...'

Guy's mouth fell open. Blondel! The voice was unmistakable, and the song - well, he'd heard it rather a lot lately. It had to be Blondel.

'I say!' said the voice, quietly. 'A ii sont mipenser Et seront a touz dis; Ja nes en quier oster...'

For a split second, Guy wasn't sure whether or not he could remember how it went on. Then he started to sing himself; loud, hoa.r.s.e and flat.

'Remembrance dou vis Qu 'ii a vermoil et clair A mon cuer a ce mis Que ne l'enpuis oster ...'

'Excuse me,' said the voice. 'May I just...'

Guy hurled the last words of the second verse out of his lungs and waited for a breathless, desperate instant; and then Blondel's voice came back, closer now and loud, clear and joyful.

'Plus bele ne vit nuls

De le nors ne de vis;

Nature ne mist plus

De beaute en nul pris ...'

The voice cleared its throat, with a sort of different urgency, and said something, but Guy wasn't listening. He was singing, very badly:

'Or serai ses amis

Or pri Deu de la sus

Qu'a lor fin soie pris,'

and scrambling on to his hands and knees as the door flew open, letting a dim, pale light - starlight, perhaps, or a very thin moonlight - into the cell. 'Blondel!' he shouted, 'Is that you?'

'Oh,' said Blondel, outside. 'Is that you in there, Guy? Come on, then, we haven't got all day.'

Guy hurled himself at the door, which had already started to close, all of its own accord. He just managed to get through before it closed, with a very a.s.sertive click, and faded away, as suddenly as it had appeared.

In the cell, there was a very long silence. You could plainly hear the sound of a rat, snuffling about, scratching its ear plaintively and making a little, high-pitched whining noise, as if demanding to be fed.

'Oh,' said the voice. 'Oh well, never mind. Here, ratty, nice crusts! Who's a good ratty, then?'

It was a cold morning, that fateful day beside the banks of the Rubicon, the little river which divides the province of Gaul from Italy, and Julius Caesar wrapped his cloak tightly round his neck. He didn't want anybody to see him shivering and think he was afraid.

'Everything ready?' he said, to his commander of cavalry. The soldier nodded in reply; he didn't feel like talking. The whole army was unnaturally quiet, as if they somehow knew that the history of the world was about to be changed.

To be absolutely accurate, they did know that the history of the world was about to be changed; it was only the nature of the change that was going to come as a complete shock to the whole lot of them, Julius Caesar included.

Just before noon, Caesar summoned his most intimate and trusted friends and supporters to meet him. Rain had set in; the cold, wet, malicious rain of Gaul which Caesar was only too familiar with. He pointed to a stunted oak tree that offered some vestige of shelter from the elements, and it was there that the historic council of war was held.

Caesar was, of course, bald; although, as his one concession to vanity, he took great pains to comb his remaining hair forward over the top of his head. The rain, however, threatened to wash his coiffure down over his ears in a long, soggy tress; he borrowed a leather travelling-hat from a trusted freedman and crammed it down over his wide temples. The rain fell off the brim in a steady drip.

'Friends,' Caesar said, 'we've come a long way these last ten years. First, we had to sort out Ariovistus; the man was a menace, more a wild animal than anything else, and it was our duty to deal with him once and for all. That led to a confrontation with' the Bellovaci; and no sooner had we put them in their place but the Nervii rebelled; that involved us with the Veneti, and that meant taking on the Germans, and then the Britons. No sooner had we smashed one lot of them than another mob of the brutes appeared out of nowhere, just when we thought it was safe to go home. Yes, it's been a long haul.'

Caesar paused and wiped the rain out of his eyes with the back of his hand. His face was tired, they noticed; as if ten years' strain was suddenly taking its toll. They leaned forward to catch his words against the dull whistle of the wind and rain.

'But now it's over, thank the G.o.ds; and let me tell you, I've had enough. Now there are a lot of irresponsible idiots in Rome who'll tell you that all along I've been planning to make myself Emperor, and all this fighting and conquering in Gaul has simply been a preparation for a military coup. They say that as soon as Gaul is quiet, I'm going to lead my army across the Rubicon and into Italy, on to Rome itself.'

Caesar grinned. This was the moment he'd been waiting for.

'Well, the reason I've called you all here today is to make it absolutely plain that I have no intention - no intention whatsoever - of making myself Emperor. You know as well as I do that if a single one of my men were to cross that river, it would mean a civil war; and all my life has been devoted to preventing that. I'm going back now, lads; I'm crossing the river, but I'm going alone. You're all to stay here and wait for the Senate to send you a new Governor. That's it. Dismiss.

Caesar's staff stared at each other, unable to believe what they were hearing. For as long as any of them could remember, they had all been convinced that it was only a matter of time before Caesar made his move; and now here he was, throwing it all away. The hardest part of it was that they all knew, in their heart of hearts, that it was the right decision. If Caesar's army crossed the river, the world would never be the same again. Now that the moment had come, however, they were all so thunderstruck that none of them could move. They stood, rooted to the spot, waiting for something to happen.

And happen it did. A tent-flap in the quartermaster's tent was thrown back, and two men walked out. They looked different from all the Roman soldiers milling about in the camp; one of them wore a brown sheepskin jacket, and the other a rather travel-worn scarlet doublet and hose. A number of legionaries turned and stared at them dubiously.

'G.o.d, I'm glad you showed up,' Guy said. 'I was beginning to get worried. Thanks.'

'Think nothing of it,' Blondel replied. 'At least that's one of you found. Pure luck, really.'

'Was it?'

Blondel frowned. 'I don't know,' he said. 'There I was on Aegina, having a rest before pressing on and getting back to my schedule - we're terribly behind, by the way; as soon as we can get back on to the main line we're going to have to put in a bit of overtime, I can tell you - when I saw this bloke I know.

'How do you mean?' Guy said.

'A bloke I used to know,' Blondel repeated, 'at Richard's court. He was dressed as a Greek traffic policeman, but I'd know his face anywhere. Used to be something or other in the kitchens. He just sort of waved at me - you know, the way you acknowledge someone you see in the street - and went on. Well, I followed him, naturally, and the next thing I knew I was standing under this - well, post office. So I started to sing. And then you sang back, and this...'

'Door?'

'... Pillar-box opened, and I went in and found you. And here we are. Where are we, do you know? I just followed the arrows up the tunnel. Looks like an army camp of some sort to me.'

'Could well be,' Guy replied. 'How do we get out of it?'

Blondel looked round. 'Don't be in such a hurry,' he said, 'I don't think I've been here before, not in a long time. In fact,' he added, smiling at a legionary who was giving him a very suspicious look, 'not ever.' The legionary shrugged and went back to polishing his shield with olive oil.

'The odd thing,' Blondel continued, strolling towards the enclosure where the siege engines were parked, 'was that I'd heard someone singing the song before that.'

'Did you?' Guy asked. 'Where ..

'In the Archives,' Blondel replied. 'Now that was peculiar. I must have ended up there when I went back after you into the timequake; all the escaped time from the quake - what you might call the lava - got swept up and dumped in the Archives, and I sort of got swept along with it. I wandered about for a bit until I found an oil rig -'

'Oil rig?'

'They have them in the Archives sometimes,' Blondel explained. 'It's strictly forbidden, of course. I was lucky enough to find a door just before some idiot blew the whole lot sky high. But there was definitely someone down there singing the second verse of the song - you know, L 'Amours Dont... Pity I couldn't stay and find out, really. May have to go back.' He stopped and looked at Guy. 'By the way,' he said, 'you haven't told me how you -Just then, a centurion and two troopers came up behind them and shouted at them. They turned and were about to ask politely if there was anything they could do for anyone when they were accused, in rather intemperate language, of being spies in the pay of Pompey and the Senate, and ordered not to move. Naturally, they ran for it.