Ghosts of Time (9 page)

Jason silently slipped through the bedroom door behind the man. Frazar might still be close enough to hear a shot. With his right hand, he grasped the wrist of the Union cavalryman’s gun arm and twisted it back and up. Simultaneously, before the man could cry out in pain, Jason’s left arm went around his neck, which a sharp, twisting sideways jerk sufficed to break. Jason lowered the limp body to the floor as his men crowded in and the Lake family stared openmouthed.

“Captain Landrieu,” greeted Mosby, weakly but without the pain-choked rasp he had simulated for Frazar’s benefit. “It seems I owe you my life. And I’m glad to see they didn’t get you and your men.”

One of whom is partly to blame for all the blood you’re leaking,
thought Jason.
I guess saving your life was the least I could do.
“May I see your wound, sir? I have some experience with such things.” He knelt beside Mosby and examined him with an eye trained in twenty-fourth-century first aid.

Drunk or not, Major Frazar had correctly located the entry wound. If the bullet had penetrated the peritoneum, the membrane lining the walls of the abdominal and pelvic cavities and investing the viscera, then peritonitis would soon set in and Mosby would indeed have only about twenty-four hours to live. But Mosby’s overall aspect made him think that the colonel must have had a freakish stroke of good fortune. The bullet, after entering the abdomen, must have passed above the fascia, the sheet of fibrous subcutaneous tissue, and been deflected, passing around the abdomen to the right side.

“I think you’re going to live, Colonel.”
Actually,
Jason’s inner voice gibed at him,
you
know
he will. Or at least you’d better
hope
he will. “
But you’ve lost a lot of blood and need medical attention as soon as possible, to get the bullet removed.”

“And in any case, we’ve got to get him out of here,” blurted Ludwell Lake, wattles shaking with agitation. “They’ll burn the house down if they come back and find out who he really is. We’ll bury . . . that,” he added, indicating the dead Union trooper. “Fortunately, there’s no blood.”

“One of my men, George Slater, is boarding at ‘Rockburn,’ Mrs. Aquilla Glascock’s home,” Mosby whispered. “It’s only a mile and a half to the southwest of here.”

“Sarah, go get Daniel,” Ludwell Lake ordered. “Tell him to bring the oxcart around and line it with straw. Ladonia, get some quilts.”

“We’ll help, sir,” said Jason.

“Send one of your men to the wedding, Captain, to tell them where I’m going to be,” said Mosby in an increasingly faint voice.

“Private Aiken, you go,” said Jason. “And . . . tell Dabney we’ll rendezvous at Rectortown. You remember Mary Bowser’s description of the place we’re looking for there?”

“Yes, sir.” The young Service man hurried off. At least, Jason assured himself, he’d be able to keep track of Aiken’s whereabouts as well as Dabney’s.

Sarah Lake presently returned with a young black boy, presumably one of the family’s slaves. They wrapped Mosby in the quilts and carried him carefully out to an oxcart with two calves hitched to it and laid him in the straw. Jason and his three remaining companions mounted up, said their farewells to the Lake family and rode along as the boy led the cart down the farm lane.

“Do you know the way, boy?” Jason asked. He seemed very young.

“Oh, yes, Cap’n.” The boy smiled. “Daniel Strother’s the name. I can get the Cunnel where he’s goin’.”

Jason would never forget that mile-and-a-half trek through the wintery night. He and the other time travelers took turns relieving Daniel Strother of the task of leading the calves that pulled the cart with frustrating slowness. But they dared not put the semiconscious Mosby across a horse. Even the bumps in the road—and it seemed to be mostly bumps—might be too much for his wound.

Finally they arrived at “Rockburn.” As the Ranger George Slater and Mrs. Glascock’s slaves carefully moved Mosby off the cart, the Colonel stirred into consciousness and he spoke to Jason.

“Thank you, Captain Landrieu. You’ve placed me under a debt which I only hope I live to repay.”

“Think nothing of it, Colonel.” Then something occurred to Jason. “But there is one favor I’d like to ask of you.”

“Name it.”

“Remember what I told you about the special mission for General Lee that brought me and my men here? As I intimated, it’s rather confidential. It would be best if my presence here doesn’t become generally known. So when you relate this night’s events, please omit any mention of my part in it.”

“My lips are sealed.” Mosby managed to smile. “Even if I live to write my memoirs, Captain Landrieu will not appear in them.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jason. Behind him, he heard Nesbit’s sigh of relief. Then Mosby was moved inside and Jason swung back into his saddle. As he turned the horse away, he saw Daniel Strother looking up at him. “Are you going to be all right?”

“Ah’m fine, Cap’n. And . . . Cap’n, I think you’ll be wantin’ to head off down the road to Rectortown now.”

Jason jerked on his horse’s reins, bringing his horse to a whinnying halt. “What did you say?”

“Yes, Cap’n, Ah think there’s somebody you want to meet there. An’ he wants to meet you.”

Afterwards, Jason was sure it was the sheer counter-irritant of the sleet that prevented him from being paralyzed by a sense of unreality. “You mean . . . ?”

“That’s right, Cap’n.” Daniel Strother looked up, with an expression very different from the cheerful diffidence it had worn up to now. “You see . . . Ah know Gracchus.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Rectortown was a tiny place, only about twenty houses, a few stores, and what passed for a “hotel,” all in the angle formed by the Manassas Gap Railroad as it turned southward. The most prominent building, and the place’s chief reason for existence, was Alfred Rector’s warehouse alongside the tiny railway station.

It was the hamlet’s smallness that Jason was counting on—along with his implant’s locator function—to enable them to rendezvous with Aiken and Dabney when those two arrived. It was hard to get lost here.

It was almost eleven o’clock when they rode into Rectortown’s main street—really its only one—and there was no one about. The sleet had abated, but it was very cold. They rode up to a small building—little better than a shack—beside the warehouse. No doubt about it, this was the place described by Mary Bowser. Jason was too tired and chilled for caution; he dismounted and knocked on the ramshackle door. It creaked open, and a late-middle-aged black face looked out. Within, a youngish black woman held up a lantern, in whose flickering light shadowy figures—two women and a small boy—could be glimpsed.

Jason had expected to have to deal with abject fear at the sight of a white man in a Confederate uniform at the door. What he saw was more accurately described as mere apprehension, with an undercurrent of expectancy. It puzzled him.

“Yes, Cap’n?”

Now Jason threw even elementary caution to the winds. “Are you Gracchus?”

The man laughed softly. “Oh, lord, Cap’n, what a question! No, no, Ah ain’t Gracchus. Marcus is my name. But,” he added, and in his voice the expectancy trembled on the verge of overcoming the apprehension, “ain’t you got somethin’ to show me?”

This simply isn’t right
, Jason told himself.
Any more than it was right for that boy Daniel Strother to know about me. What’s going on here?

But anything’s better than standing out here freezing.

Without a word, he handed Marcus the note Mary Bowser had written in Elizabeth Van Lew’s cipher code.

Marcus’s eyes grew round. “Ah cain’t read, and Ah definitely cain’t read
this
. But Ah know what it looks like. And Ah know you’re the one Gracchus been expecting.”

It was Jason’s turn to stare, and again he thought of Daniel Strother. “‘Expecting’? What are you talking about? Did Mary Bowser somehow get word up here from Richmond?”

“No, Cap’n, it’s not that. It’s . . . well, Ah don’t rightly understand it. But Gracchus will explain everything.”

“Is he here?”

“No, but he ain’t far. We’ll have to send the boy for him.” Marcus stuck his head out the door and glanced anxiously around. Seeing no one, he motioned to Jason. “Y’all come inside.”

“Can’t you just take us to Gracchus?” asked Jason as they crowded into the tiny room.

Marcus gave him an odd look. “Better not, Cap’n. Even this late at night, there might be
somebody
out an’ about. So Ah cain’t be out after curfew. But the boy, he can sneak around like a ’possum. And even if he is caught, he won’t get in no trouble.”

Nesbit spoke up. “Do you mean you people here are . . . slaves?”

Marcus raised his head and met Nesbit’s eyes squarely. “No, suh. We ain’t no slaves. We be free. But the Black Code . . .” He trailed off as though that should explain everything, and gave muttered instructions to the boy, who looked to be no more than six or so, and handed him Mary Bowser’s note. The boy nodded and slipped out the door.

“What about Gracchus?” Mondrago inquired. “What if
he’s
seen outside?”

Marcus chuckled. “Don’t you worry none ’bout Gracchus. He can
really
sneak around!”

He seemed disinclined to further conversation, and the four time travelers warmed themselves as best they could around a small, crude fireplace. The two women—one about Marcus’s age, the other young—stared at them with the same expression Marcus had at first worn. Jason decided that the apprehension was unavoidable, given their Confederate uniforms. But he couldn’t understand the element of seeing something long anticipated—almost the fulfillment of a prophecy. At any rate, they were as silent as Marcus, and while they waited Jason mused over the seeming incongruity of some of the names. But he remembered Dabney mentioning that those slaveowners who had the advantages of a Classical education sometimes bestowed Roman monikers on their slaves. And he seemed to vaguely recall that “Gracchus” was the name of a Roman family that had been champions of freedom . . .

A scratching at the door interrupted his thoughts. Marcus opened it, admitting a blast of cold air. The boy hurried in, followed by a man who instantly held all of Jason’s attention.

He was medium-tall, well-built and in his thirties, with a thin black beard, tightly curled like his hair. His clothing was of the usual rough sort, made of homespun fabric, but included a warm-looking coat. His skin was a richly deep, dark brown, and his lips were full, but there was a certain quality to his strong, predominantly African face—a straightness of features and lack of prognathism—that suggested European genes. That face wore the enigmatic expression Jason had become used to here, but in his case it held an additional element, a quality Jason could not define, as though this man was seeing something he had longed to see but could scarcely credit his eyes.

“You must be Gracchus,” he said tentatively.

“I am known by that name.” The speech was not that of the local blacks. It sounded educated, and held a lilt that awakened Jason’s memories of Jamaica.

“I’m Captain Landrieu.”

“Yes. We expected that you would use that name.”

“Expected” again!
“Did Mary Bowser—?” Jason began, but then halted awkwardly, unsure of how freely he could talk in the presence of Marcus and his family. “Is there somewhere we can go to talk privately?”

Gracchus shook his head. “I already took a risk, coming here at this time of night. I shouldn’t press my luck.”

“Marcus mentioned something about the ‘Black Code.’”

“Yes. If we were slaves, it would be the Slave Code. But we’re free.” Gracchus laid an ironic stress on the last word. “So we’re subject to the Black Code instead. We have a curfew. And at any time of day, any white man who sees us in the street can tell us to go home and stay there. And we can’t meet in unsupervised groups. Or bear arms. Or testify in court, except as a party to a civil action. Speaking of courts, there’s a different—and harsher—scale of legal penalties for us. And, in general, we can’t act ‘uppity.’” He checked himself. “But you don’t need to hear all that.” He turned to Marcus and had a short, muttered conversation. Marcus nodded, and shepherded the women and the boy through a small door beside the fireplace, which gave access to a tiny shed built against that side of the shack.

As the door closed, Gracchus turned to Jason and smiled.

“I trust Marcus completely. But he doesn’t need to know everything. And we need to be able to talk freely.”

Actually, Jason had been wondering how open he could be even in private. He could hardly say to this man that he was here because a fellow time traveler would, in April, learn of the shadowy organization Gracchus led. But he had to start somewhere. “We do indeed. First of all, I’m very mystified by some things I’ve been hearing tonight, starting even before coming to this house.”

“Feel free to ask me any questions you have, Commander Thanou.”

“Well, to begin with, earlier tonight a slave boy named Daniel Strother—”

Then Gracchus’s last two words registered on Jason with the force of a sledgehammer.

For several seconds, dead silence held the squalid little room, as Jason tried to collect his shattered thoughts.

“I see I’d better start at the beginning,” he finally said.
Whatever
that
means in the time travel business!
he gibed at himself. “By ways which need not concern you at the moment, I learned of an organization which could be contacted through Mary Bowser. I have done so, as is proven by the cypher note the boy showed you. I went to this trouble because I had also learned that your organization and the one to which I belong might be in a position to help each other, because we may have common enemies. By the way, what is your organization called?”

“We go by many names from time to time—or no name at all, when we can manage it—in the interests of secrecy. A name, you see, is a kind of target which can be aimed at. But our real name is the Order of the Three-Legged Horse.”

“Three-Legged Horse?” Nesbit echoed faintly.

“It’s an apparition which Jamaicans believe manifests itself around Christmas.” Gracchus took on a whimsical smile. “It’s considered beneficent—by men. Women have always regarded it with a certain apprehension. So I’ve often wondered about its origin, since our founder was a woman. But . . . she was a very exceptional woman.”

“Speaking of Jamaicans,” Mondrago interjected, “you talk like—”

“Yes, I’m from Jamaica. Some of us have come here from time to time, to establish the Order in this country. I’m the most recent, brought in by a blockade runner.”

“A Confederate blockade runner?” Mondrago looked perplexed. “But . . .” He gave a gesture that vaguely indicated the color of Gracchus’s skin.

“The blockade runners are businessmen. They’ll carry
anything
if they’re paid.” From somewhere in the back of Jason’s mind came the recollection of a fictional character named Rhett Butler. “They’ll even carry free blacks—not that any want to get into this country, least of all now, with this war on.”

“But
you
did,” Jason pointed out.

“I had to,” said Gracchus simply. “I knew it was necessary for me to be here tonight.”

“You and your people seem to know a great many things.”

“Yes. We also know about the Transhumanists.”

Jason took a deep, unsteady breath. “Do you know where I and my men come from?”

“I know
when
you come from,” said Gracchus with a smile. “You come from the future. I don’t understand how a man who won’t be born for hundreds of years can be here talking to me. But I know it’s true.”

Nesbit spoke like a man staring the unthinkable in the face. “Do all the members of your Order know about time travel?”

“No. That’s why I sent Marcus away. Only one of us in each generation is allowed to know. The knowledge had been passed down from one to another, through the successors of our founder, for two hundred years.”

“You mean to say,” said Jason, unable to keep incredulity out of his voice, “that details like the precise night I’d show up here at Rectortown, and the name I’d be using, have been accurately transmitted orally over two hundred years?”

“Oh, no. Most of our Order’s knowledge is, indeed, handed down that way—as it has to be, given that most of our members are illiterate. Thus they learn of the Demons who long ago tricked men into believing they were gods—all dead now, although we are warned that more of them, even more evil than the first ones, may come again.”

Demons seven and a half or eight feet tall, with long narrow faces and sharp, cruel features, and paler flesh than that of the whitest white man, and hair gleaming of silver and gold, and huge eyes
that are all opaque blue
. . .

Demons who call themselves the Teloi.

“Gracchus,” Jason heard himself saying, as though from a great distance, “who was this ‘founder’ you mentioned?”

“She was a woman. Her name was Zenobia.”

A door in Jason’s memory swung open and the seventeenth-century Caribbean sun came flooding in, to reveal a tall, stunningly beautiful black woman in seaman’s garb, with the pistols and cutlass she could use with such deadly effect thrust through her rope belt.

“Then,” he said slowly, “it is from her that you know about the Transhumanists.”
But do you know that she was one herself? Probably not. I doubt if she handed down
that
bit of knowledge.

“Well, well!” said Mondrago softly, with a grin. “So she did it after all!” Then the Corsican’s features went blank and he clamped his mouth shut, lest he reveal information Gracchus might not possess.

Such as the fact that his Order’s founder was a Transhumanist who went renegade, revolted by the foul cult she had been sent back in time to establish among the slaves and runaways of what was to become Haiti,
Jason thought.
And to undo what she had done, she had cut her own TRD out of her flesh so she could remain and establish a counter-cult. And thus we left her when we returned to our own time.

“Yes, she left us with that knowledge.” said Gracchus to Jason, showing no sign of having heard Mondrago. “Again, it is only those of us who are her direct successors who know the evil ones as ‘Transhumanists.’ The others know only that they must ever be on their guard against unnatural men, who cannot be told from true men, who will try to seduce them into unholy rites, even including the eating of human flesh, and promise their worshipers foreknowledge of the future in exchange for serving them. But now we have moved beyond combatting evil cults. We exist to protect the human race, of any and all colors, from the plots of the Transhumanists.”

“But let’s get back to your detailed knowledge of my arrival. You’ve already said this was not an oral tradition created by Zen . . . by your founder.”

“No.” Gracchus’s face went expressionless. “This was
not
handed down by her. Our knowledge of it comes from a letter that was written just after her lifetime, we know not by whom.” He reached inside his coat and brought out a waterproof oilskin envelope, from which he withdrew a sheet of paper. “This is not the original, of course. That exists now only as a tattered scrap of sixteenth-century paper, kept as a holy relic in Jamaica. But it has been painstakingly copied over and over. Its full contents are known only to Zenobia’s successors, for they concern time travel. Others, such as Marcus and the boy Daniel Strother, have been told only the barest facts they need to know. I brought this copy that you might see it.”

Jason kept his hand steady as he took the paper.

“I’ll tell Marcus and his family they can come back in,” said Gracchus. “It doesn’t matter what they see. They can’t read.”