It was a grim night in the Chamber.
Everyone was silent when Gabriel and Silver returned, and Silver guessed that they had made a decision. She felt a strange tight feeling in her head, like before an exam.
Eden came forward and gave the children lentils with stewed apples and onions to eat. As usual there was thick heavy bread with the dish, and milk to drink.
When they had finished, Micah asked Silver to come and sit by him near the fire. He was kind but grave.
‘Silver, all be your friends here. I had thought to keep you here, so that the Timekeeper would be safe from Abel Darkwater, and you be safe too, but Eden has thrown the Oracle, and read the secrets therein, and now we know that you must find the Timekeeper, whether you will or no.’
‘But what will I do with it when I find it?’
‘That we do not know. The journey will unfold. Your destiny will unfold. But first you must begin.’
‘The Oracle speaks true, Silver,’ said Eden. ‘Here, see the runes – look.’
Eden had drawn a circle on the ground and cast into it thick gold coins and beads that formed a pattern through the smoky lights set round it.
As Silver squinted through the smoke she saw a face forming out of the pattern of coins and beads. She drew in her breath. The face was hers, her face. She looked round wildly at the others. Eden was nodding.
‘You be the Child with the Golden Face.’
‘But who is she? I mean, if she’s me, who is she? I mean, who am I?’
‘You be the one who must keep the clock. You be the one who holds Time.’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Silver, very unhappy.
‘You are a Timekeeper.’
‘But that’s the clock!’
‘The clock belongs to you. It must find its rightful place.’ Micah paused, and, with some hesitation and very slowly, he untied a rough jute bag and emptied out two tiny paintings – like the size of something from a locket.
‘These be the last two paintings on the numbers of the Timekeeper,’ said Micah. ‘And this be your face.’
‘Where did you get these?’ asked Silver, turning them over in her hands – one was a road winding through the stars, and the other was a tiny child holding a clock.
‘The night I stowed the clock for safekeeping at thine own house, I carried these two away with me – I know not why. And I hid them down the centuries, even from Abel Darkwater – I know not how. I vowed never to show them to a soul. But show them to you I do, because they are your own.’
He put them back in the bag and gave the bag to Silver.
‘I could stay here. I’d like to stay here,’ said Silver desperately.
Micah shook his head.
‘Shall we go with her?’ said Gabriel.
Again Micah shook his head slowly and sadly. ‘Abel Darkwater shall destroy us if we journey with you. There are great powers at work. Abel Darkwater desires the Timekeeper above all things, yea, above life itself, and Maria Prophetessa will set out to defeat him, as she plotted to do in ages past. We cannot battle with these two by any means we possess. Only we can pray that they be defeated both together. Know you well that if we leave our home for too long, we shall die.’
‘But what about me?’ said Silver.
‘You shall journey to the Sands of Time.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The Oracle points there. It may be that the Timekeeper be hidden there.’
‘But my daddy had it on the train.’
‘It may be that thy father be there also.’
Silver’s heart leapt.
‘The prophecy speaks of the Sands of Time, and a hundred hundred and more years gone, when I won the clock at dice, this map be given to me also, and it is of the Sands of Time.’
‘Where are they?’
‘I know not, but we can feel the trembles in the Earth, as animals do, and this very night there will be a great disturbance. You will go to Tower Bridge above the River Thames and when the moment comes you must trust your fate.’
Micah took out an ancient map in a leather folder. He passed it to Silver.
‘I’m not scared,’ said Silver, who was. Then she said, ‘Do I have to go?’
‘Yea.’
‘Micah …’ said Eden, her voice full of doubt. She was sending Micah a Mind Message, something she didn’t want Silver to hear. Micah nodded reluctantly.
‘Silver,’ he said. ‘The yea or the nay is for you to choose. You need not go. You be free to stay here, free to return to your own place, free to begin the quest that only you can complete. What be your answer?’
Silver looked into his kind troubled eyes. She had a few questions.
‘Do I have to go without Gabriel?’
‘Beyond the bridge, he may not go. At the bridge, you must travel alone.’
‘When must I go?’
‘This very moment. If you will.’
Silver looked down at the map. It was just squiggles. Her eyes were blurred with tears. She had never been any good at geography.
She remembered when she had sat in the high attic room at Tanglewreck, and although she had asked her beloved house to tell her what to do, in her heart she had known the answer herself. It is easier when someone else can give you the answer, but when it comes to the really important things, no one else can.
She looked around the Chamber. Suddenly everyone had gone.
Silver began to pack some food into her bag. Then she put on her own shoes and her duffle coat. She stood up very straight, her little bag packed.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes.’
Suddenly, out of nowhere, Micah was beside her again. He hugged her hard, and then he took her hand. He was pressing something into her palm.
‘You be not learned in telepathy and cannot send Mind Messages as do we, but hold this in thy small hands and say my name and I shall hear.’
It was the medallion he wore around his neck with his name on it. She nodded, too tearful to speak. Micah stepped back.
‘Three things have I given thee; the map, this medallion and the jewelled faces of the clock. The Timekeeper must thou find alone.’
Silver nodded, too upset to speak. Gabriel came out of the shadows leading two bog ponies. He gave Silver a leg up, and Micah slapped the back of her pony with the flat of his hand, and the little animal started forward.
‘Farewell, Child of Time!’
Riding slowly, Silver and Gabriel travelled without speaking through the passages and tunnels, for what might have been an hour, or might have been a day, until Gabriel halted and slid off his pony.
‘Here we be, Silver. I will take thee into the light, though I may not stay.’
Gabriel pushed back a wooden hatch and gave Silver a leg up on to a platform into what looked like a generator shed. She could hear cars whizzing along the road somewhere near.
Gabriel swung himself by her. ‘We must pass through this door into the Tower.’
‘What tower?’
‘The Tower of London. There be a secret passage from the Tower of London to the watchman’s room on the bridge.’
Gabriel led the way through a low oak door into a stone corridor. Dark figures stood in the shadows. Silver hesitated.
‘They be but armour,’ explained Gabriel, urging her on. ‘This be where they keep their armour and their weapons.’
Silver knew that all places like museums and castles keep a lot of their treasures hidden away in the cellars.
‘We must not take anything,’ said Gabriel, ‘that is the rule.’
Silver had stopped by a very small suit of armour that must have been made for a child. She badly wanted to put it on. It might protect her.
‘Make haste,’ said Gabriel, already ahead of her in the gloom.
Quickly Silver snatched up the pair of chain-mail gloves lined in leather and fur, and put them in her duffle coat pocket. There was a small double-headed axe hanging on the wall near the armour, and, glancing guiltily at Gabriel’s retreating form, she shoved it into her duffle bag, and ran on past the maces and the pikestaffs and the balls on their chains, and the crossbows, and the swords, and caught up with Gabriel, who looked at her with a question in his eyes.
Cabbage, thought Silver, cabbage, cabbage cabbage.
The rules were all very well, but she had nothing and no one to look after her, only her own wits and what she could steal.
‘Roger Rover’s grandchild indeed!’
‘What?’ said Silver, who was sure she had heard a voice, and once again, as she had done in the tunnel that had taken her to the Throwbacks, she looked round with the uneasy feeling that she was being followed.
‘Look, there be the Crown jewels,’ said Gabriel, trying to cheer her up, and sure enough, on red plush and ermine, locked in a glass box, was the Crown of England, that had been worn by so many kings and queens throughout history.
How strange, thought Silver, that you can wear Time on your head.
Pearls the size of a baby’s head – that was what Roger Rover had given to Queen Elizabeth the First, and here was one left, in a special case of Elizabethan treasures.
As Silver looked at it through the darkened glass, she was sure she saw a face, yes, a face, a reflection, a man with a neat red beard. She spun round. There was no one behind her. She looked again at the case. The pearl was opaque.
The castle was closed to visitors that day, and so Gabriel and Silver were able to make their journey like mice round the outskirts of the room.
‘Evil eye,’ said Gabriel, pointing upwards at the CCTV cameras. Deftly, he took a cloth weighted with lead at the corners and threw it over the face of the camera as they crossed the floor in front of it to another door.
‘Beefeaters,’ said Gabriel, pointing downwards at the men in red guarding the Tower. ‘And ravens. When the ravens no longer fly to the Tower, England will fall.’
Steadily, Gabriel led them on, dipping underground again, and emerging through a vent shaft to a rusty disused ladder.
‘This leads us unto the bridge,’ he said.
‘How do you know these ways?’ asked Silver.
‘We know all the ways,’ said Gabriel simply.
Tower Bridge stands high above the Thames. It is the only bridge over the Thames that can open to let through tall ships. Each half of the bridge is raised on a great winch, and the tall-masted ships sail on.
Abel Darkwater knew exactly where Silver was because he was following her progress with his Detector. He had a sock left behind by Silver, and he put this sock into the drawer of his Detector, and let the machine track down her imprint of atoms as she moved through the world.
‘We are all made of atoms,’ he said to Mrs Rokabye, ‘and what are atoms but empty space and points of light? The alchemists understood this as fire, and learned that the fiery body can be consumed and made again, like the phoenix from the ashes. Oh yes, we can all be consumed and made again.’
Mrs Rokabye had no idea what Abel Darkwater was talking about and she didn’t care. She had a plan of her own, and now she was in league with Sniveller. They would soon outwit Abel Darkwater with his nonsense about atoms and fiery bodies, and then they would have the Timekeeper themselves, and sell it to the highest bidder.
Regalia Mason, the highest bidder of them all, was sitting quietly in her suite at the Savoy Hotel, overlooking the River Thames. Her white fur coat was on the bed. She wore her white lab coat over her white Armani dress, and she was busy tapping numbers into her computer. She too knew exactly where Silver was, because she was tracking her with GPS satellite.
‘A great improvement on the days of the crystal ball,’ she said, to no one in particular, and to anyone who might be listening.
As Gabriel and Silver climbed out on to the very top of Tower Bridge, Silver was amazed to see the cars zooming underneath her in miniature, and to hear the fierce roar of the city all about her. So many people, so many lives, and the river running through them all, as it always had.
She turned to Gabriel, and saw that he was terrified. He was too high up. There was too much light, and it was too warm for him under the lamps that lit their tower. She had never seen him afraid. Now he was afraid.
‘I must go down quicker than a dropped stone.’
‘Don’t leave me, Gabriel. Please.’
‘I have come too far. I must say goodbye. Take food and blankets for you.’ He dropped his bag on to the platform where they stood. Silver picked it up, or tried to. ‘It’s too heavy for me, Gabriel. You’ll have to take it back.’
‘Time be a cold place.’
‘You don’t care about the cold.’
‘Updwellers care to be warm.’
‘I’ve got my duffle coat. I’ll be all right.’
It was nearly dark. The car lights, yellow at the front, and red at the rear, lit up the road under the bridge. Gabriel put his hands over his eyes. He was squinting.
‘What should I do now, Gabriel? Here on the bridge?’
‘Micah says you must wait.’
‘Please wait with me.’
He was hesitating, his fear fighting with his love for her, for he too had been solitary and lonely and a little different from the others, and then Silver had come, and he felt he knew her.
‘Gabriel …’
She put her arms round him. They stayed like that, very close and very quiet, for what seemed like no time at all, and for ever, when suddenly the whole bridge began to shake like a giant held it in both hands.
Silver fell flat on the floor of the platform. She couldn’t get up. It was as though a weight was pressing on her body. She raised her head and looked down the river.
The sky had gone completely black. The cars were at a standstill. There was a clap like thunder. Then the rain came, rain so wet that she was soaked in seconds, rain so sharp that it punctured her clothes and stung her skin.
Gabriel was clinging to the ladder. She shouted to him, but he couldn’t hear her above the smashing sound of the rain.
Silver was looking upriver, towards Big Ben. She was aware that the clock had stopped, its creamy faces bright and bland and motionless.
She felt seasick in her stomach. She felt like she was lurching, sliding, and then she realised that the bridge underneath her was opening, and that she and Gabriel were rocking high above it.
‘Hold! Hold,’ yelled Gabriel, but Silver’s hands were small and soft, and the machinery that operated the bridge was heavy and blind. If she did not swing out now, she would be crushed.
She remembered the chain-mail gloves. She put them on and clung with all her might. Underneath her, the cars that were tipping off the opening bridge should have fallen into the river, but they didn’t; they hung in Time for a moment and they disappeared. Completely disappeared.
Soon the bridge was empty. The bridge was open.
There! Coming towards her now, pennants flying, sails fat with a following wind, oars rising and falling from the water in time to a drumbeat, men waving from the decks, the prow high and painted, boys hanging from the rigging, and, in the crow’s nest, an old man with a trumpet.
The ship is coming through now, surrounded by a flotilla of small rowing boats. Crowds line the banks of the river. The buildings are low, hugger-mugger, crouched in the mud, leaning over the water, some supported on tree trunks rammed into the river. Washing is strung between the houses, and a man slitting a pig’s throat runs the river red. He looks up when he hears the shouting. Yes, the ship is coming! He leaves the pig on his jetty and yells as hard as he can, slicing the air with his knife, ‘JOLLY ROGER, JOLLY ROGER.’
At the ship’s wheel, dressed in furs and pearls, is the bearded man that Silver knows so well from portraits and from dreams. Roger Rover is sailing up the River Thames, his ship sunk to its portholes with treasure.
As the ship passes directly under the bridge, the very top of the topmost sail is glowing gold. The gold light spills down the sail, like dye, and then the sail is all gold, and then the gold floods across the deck and over the ship, and as the ship sails through, she begins to waver and shimmer.
The shimmering golden ship is spreading like a wave. It is hard to say now exactly where the ship is, or where the ship isn’t, because the ship seems to be everywhere and nowhere. The gold light is intense.
Silver looks at herself. Is she dissolving? She looks at Gabriel, holding his blue coat over his head with one square hand to keep away from the light.
She looks down at the ship, or what is left of it, and one thing she sees: Roger Rover’s eyes fixed on her.
Then she does something she never meant to do. She lets go, simple as that. She lets go into the stream of golden light.
‘SILVER!’ It is Gabriel’s voice, far away. ‘SILVER!’
But now she is definitely dissolving. She has a vague sense of her arms and legs, but not in their usual place. She thinks, I’ll collect them later. She laughs. Ridiculous. Arms are arms and legs are legs. But not here, in this spinning dissolving place. It should be painful, but it isn’t, not painful at all. It’s like drifting off to sleep except that she is wide awake.
‘SILVER!’ Gabriel’s voice again, loud and high. She tries to answer but she doesn’t know where her mouth is and so no words come out.
The Throwbacks can mind-read, I’ll send him a Mind Message, like Micah said. This thought comes to her as though someone has posted it through a slot in her head. Yes, a Mind Message. ‘Here I am, Gabriel. HERE I AM.’
A stout pair of arms wraps round her, like she’s being rescued at sea. Suddenly she can feel her own arms and legs again. She can feel the edges of her body. She’s not dissolving, she’s Silver, and she’s four feet ten inches tall and she weighs forty kilos, and Gabriel is carrying her and their belongings to what looks like a checkpoint on an empty road. There are guards and barriers and coming towards them is a man in a Security Suit toting a gun and walking a doubleheaded dog.
‘Where are we?’ said Silver.
‘I know not,’ said Gabriel. ‘You leapt into the air and you hung there like a bird hovers, like a bird of prey, like a falcon over a field, and I called you, and you turned to me, and I could not leave you alone, so I leapt too, into the swirling air full of voices.’
‘I didn’t hear any voices,’ said Silver.
‘You called to me and I found you.’
‘I thought you wouldn’t come with me!’
‘I am with you.’
Abel Darkwater was packing a small leather bag. He was wearing his old tweed suit as usual, but over the top of the suit, he fastened a fur-lined dark wool cloak. He had some tools, a crystal ball, his Detector, a spherical glass jar called an alembic, a Primus stove, and a sharp knife.
He consulted his gold pocket watch. Yes, it was time to go.
Regalia Mason’s GPS satellite link had jammed the second the Time Tornado struck Tower Bridge. She had closed her computer, stepped out on to her balcony over the river and put on her long-distance surveillance glasses; something her firm had developed for the Pentagon.
She could see Tower Bridge clearly, and she could see Silver and Gabriel on the bar above it. How predictable everyone was! Predictable that the child and her idiot friend would imagine Time as an adventure they could win. Predictable Abel Darkwater, setting out to look for a clock. She could have told you all this would happen without a crystal ball. She laughed. Science had done away with so much magic and mumbo-jumbo. Abel Darkwater invented his quaint devices, like the Age-Gauge, but a carbon-reader could have told him the age of a tree or a slice of limestone. Biometric data meant that anyone, anywhere, could be tracked by using a silicon chip, a satellite and a computer. There was no need for Detectors and Searchers, and the rest of Darkwater’s toybox.
In the old days she too had passed her hands over the crystal ball and stuck pins into poppets, and sweated over a cauldron to cause a bronze head to speak. All unnecessary now. She was the most powerful woman in the world, and not by magic. She was a scientist.
These thoughts were like clouds floating across her mind as she watched the bridge. No doubt the Time Tornado would sweep the child Silver away, and Abel Darkwater would go after her, and torment her and threaten her, and then all that was left was for she, Regalia Mason, to make sure that the Timekeeper was never found. She had a right to lose it. After all, it had belonged to her once …
She smiled.
‘For though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we can make him run.’
Then suddenly she saw the child Silver leap of her own free will from the bridge and into the light ripples.
Regalia Mason was filled with fury. The child must not be allowed to take control. By leaping into Time, the wretched child had already begun to control it. Now she would arrive at the Checkpoint. Well, she must not get any further.
Regalia Mason went into her room and opened her quantum computer. It was the only one in existence. Quantum computing was still decades away, and teleporting was just a science-fiction-movie dream, but Regalia Mason had already gone further than that.
On the screen was the sad face of a woman.
‘Send your twin Castor to me at once,’ said Regalia Mason.
Very soon there was a knock at the door of her room, and a beautiful young man entered, identical in face to his sister on the computer screen.
He was trembling, his head down.
‘Kiss me,’ said Regalia Mason.
The young man Castor kissed her, and Regalia Mason vanished, to appear on the other side of the Universe as an exact copy of herself.
Meanwhile Silver and Gabriel had found themselves somewhere very odd indeed. A very tall policeman with a double-headed dog was walking angrily towards them. Above them, in the sky, were three moons.
‘I don’t think we’re in London any more,’ said Silver.