The River of No Return by Bee Ridgway (mobi ebook reader .txt) 📗

Guild will provide you with wealth, property, whatever you need to start life anew. The rest is up to you. You can take a job if you like. Many of us end up working for the Guild. Like me.” He straightened his shoulders. “I am a greeter.”

Nick leaned back against the window ledge and looked the man up and down. His mysteriously declarative shirt had short, cuffless sleeves. His hairy forearms were on show, like a laborer’s. GAP. Was that some sort of code? Or was he branded, like a criminal?

“It’s a shock, isn’t it,” the old man said gently. “This city, my clothes, everything. I assure you, you’d think I was exactly as funny-looking if you saw me in the clothes I wore in my old life.”

“Who were you?”

“I am—was . . .” He hesitated. “I still have trouble keeping my tenses straight, and it has been so many years since I jumped. I was a Frank. A butcher by trade. I jumped from Aachen in 810 and landed in 1965. An unusually long leap.” There was a note of pride in his voice. “I was sent to London and I have never returned to Austrasia. Or even to what is now known as Germany. It is forbidden.”

“And you abide by these rules?”

“Yes. You will, too.”

Nick thought he would keep his own counsel on that. “How did you know who I am?”

“We keep a log of people who vanish, and of people who appear.”

“Surely people get lost every day.” Nick turned and looked down again at the teeming city. His eyes followed a tiny person as he—she! The person was wearing trousers, but Nick saw now that it was a woman—strode to a street corner. She stepped with confidence into the path of an enormously tall, perfectly rectangular red carriage that was bearing down on her without any visible means of locomotion. Nick gasped, but somehow the ghastly machine came to a stop mere inches from her. She seemed not to notice it at all, but sauntered boyishly on her way and disappeared behind the blank glass wall of another building. Nick turned slowly to face the white room and the little man who was his only anchor in this strange dreamworld. “Please tell me that I am dreaming, or dead. And this is either heaven or hell.”

“No.” The butcher shook his head. “I will not tell you that, for it isn’t true. This is the same world you left, only it is a little bit older, and a little bit grayer.”

Nick looked at the rectangles on the ceiling emanating light. They were miraculous, but they were neither beautiful nor comforting. Was he in hell? “That dragoon was about to skewer me.”

“You could see you were about to die, and so you jumped. It is the most common prompt. I jumped right before a burning beam crushed me; I was trying to save my donkey from a fire.” The butcher sighed. “I am sure she burned, poor Albia.”

“Do you mean to tell me that what happened to me is commonplace?”

“No. Not at all. But it does happen, and when it does, the Guild tries to be ready. We have a global network of researchers who document such cases. There is an enormous library in Milton Keynes and another in Chongqing. Our records go back many hundreds of years. Your disappearance was witnessed on the battlefield and one of your comrades gained a reputation for being insane by telling everyone about it for years afterwards. Your mother was informed that you were dead, but the Guild listened to the rumor that you had vanished into thin air. Sure enough, you appeared again, last week. Quite dramatically—you were mown down by a car.”

Nick frowned. He had been in the maelstrom of battle. Nothing could be more all-consuming, more purely sensual, than the experience of fighting for your life and against the lives of others in a mass of men and horses, choked and blinded by smoke, deafened by gunfire and screaming . . . there was no disappearing in that moment, none whatsoever . . . except into death.

After a moment the butcher spoke again, softly. “You jumped from the Battle of Salamanca. It was the twenty-second of July, 1812.”

“The Battle of Salamanca.” Nick repeated the words slowly. So it had a name. It had already happened. It was over. “Did we . . . ?” Nick stopped. It felt gauche to ask how the day went. The battle had only just begun when he was unhorsed. Many men were still to fight and die or survive.

“It was a glorious triumph. And in 1815, your armies won not only the battle, but the war.”

The whole war. Over. Folded away into history books like bridal linens into an attic trunk. Salamanca a glorious triumph . . . but what did they say of the siege of Badajoz and its aftermath? Everything? Nothing? Nick shook his head. “This is madness,” he said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry?” Nick scrubbed at his face with the palms of his hands, then ran his fingers up into his hair. Rage boiled up in him. “What am I meant to say to that? ‘No matter, my dear Sir Butcher’? ‘That’s quite all right’? Good God, man, you have told me how my mother came to learn of my own death. Except that I am not dead and my mother is. Two centuries dead.”

The butcher leaned back in his chair and appraised Nick for a moment, much as he might have assessed a leg of pork before chining it. Then he turned to the bedside table and picked up a large, pale envelope filled with papers. He reached in and found a smaller envelope. “The Guild wishes you to have this,” he said. “The location of your jump and your uniform strongly supported the thesis that you were the long-lost Lord Blackdown, but we knew for certain when we saw this.” He dipped his fingers into the envelope and extracted Nick’s signet ring.

Seeing it there in the butcher’s hand made Nick feel for it, irrationally, on his