I was still standing outside the blacksmith’s workshop. It was now raining heavily, but I was too occupied by my thoughts to care.
If Martin hadn’t gone back, how had he lost his foot? And how did he know all that stuff about Mithras? About the masks and the clicking and grunting?
I thought of my advice to Dinu when I first discovered he’d followed me into the past. ‘Just stay here. Wait until I get back.’
Then I got it.
That’s what Martin had done. He had gone back in time. But he had been too scared to venture outside. He had stayed in the Mithraeum for three days without ever coming out.
That was how he knew so much about the rites of Mithras but nothing about Londinium in 260 AD.
Then I had another terrible thought.
If Martin had stayed hidden in the Mithraeum on both his trips, then he hadn’t interacted with any ancient Roman Londoners. He probably hadn’t even been seen by one. Which meant that Solomon Daisy’s theory about how we probably can’t affect our present world might be wrong.
Maybe we could change the future by interacting with people in the past.
Maybe I had already changed the future.
The rain was pelting down, but I was paralysed by dread.
Maybe when I went home my gran wouldn’t be living in the third-floor flat of 54 Victoria Gardens. Maybe when I went home I wouldn’t even be born. Maybe when I stepped back through the portal I would vanish in a puff of air.
Or maybe when I went home my parents would still be alive and I wouldn’t have to live in that tiny flat with my gran but could just visit her from time to time.
All I knew was that I had to abort my mission right away. Some random girl with an ivory knife wasn’t worth the risk of an altered future. I had to get home with as little interaction as possible. I had to get back to the time portal in the Mithraeum.
I had been standing in the rain for all this time and I was soaked. By the time I came to my senses, the rain had almost stopped.
Up ahead I saw a grey-haired man in a long tunic and burgundy cloak emerge from the shelter of a shop’s awning. I realised with a jolt that he was the first person with grey hair I had seen here. He had a walking stick as tall as himself and was followed by two slaves or maybe bodyguards in pale grey-green tunics.
I hurried through the mud to reach him. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, ‘where is the Mithraeum?’
He looked at me suspiciously and said, ‘Ain?’ which I knew from my Latin podcast meant, ‘Huh?’
‘Mithraeum!’ I repeated, wiping my rain-drenched face.
He still looked blank so I pulled my knife from my belt and made a downward stabbing motion. ‘Taurus mortus!’ I said. Dead bull.
At this he jumped back and brandished his walking stick like a ninja bo-staff. His two slaves cowered behind him. I guessed they weren’t bodyguards.
I quickly put my knife back into my belt and held up my hands. Then I tried to think of some other terms associated with Mithras. ‘Sol Invictus?’ I said.
‘Ah!’ He lowered his bo-staff and glanced around. Then he leaned forward and said in a low voice, ‘Antrum perseum?’
I had no idea what antrum was, but I knew Mithras wore a Persian cap and that one of the levels was Persis, the Persian.
Again I caught myself about to nod, but remembered just in time and said ‘Ita!’ Yes!
Bo-Staff pointed and said something else. I understood the words pons, dexter, sinister and recte – bridge, right, left and straight on – but not much else.
I thanked him – ‘Gratias ago’ – but he was already moving on, tapping his head with his forefinger and saying something to one of his slaves.
I followed at a discrete distance, because he was heading the same way as me.
‘Pons,’ I repeated to myself. And I tried out a phrase under my breath: ‘Where is the bridge?’
In fact we were coming up to a bridge now, but it was only another small one.
The rainstorm had passed and the sun peeped out from between clouds. It made everything look brighter and cleaner. Roman, even. It was almost a shame I had to go back now.
But if there was a risk of my changing the future, then the less interaction I had, the better.
Then I remembered Dinu and stopped in my muddy tracks. Behind me some girls bumped into me and started giggling, but I was too busy thinking about Dinu to take any notice.
If he had drowned, then his body would have floated out to sea, never to be found.
But what if he had managed to crawl ashore? In that case he would surely try to find his way back to the Mithraeum.
Hopefully without interacting with too many people.
I definitely had to get there.
The giggling girls were still behind me and now I felt a tap on my damp shoulder. I turned to see a girl a little older and a lot taller than me. She had a sapphire blue cloak with a hood. My jaw dropped as I gazed into the most amazing eyes I had ever seen in my life. They were the same colour as her cloak and stood out even more because of the smoky black eyeliner she had painted around them.
I was frozen. Like those people in the Greek myth who looked at Medusa and got turned to stone.
Suddenly she covered her mouth and giggled, and the spell was broken. For the first time I noticed another shorter girl behind her, staring at me wide-eyed.
‘What do you want?’ I said cautiously to the blue-eyed girl.
She said something that sounded like ‘Eros?’
Eros is the Greek god of love, but also a boy’s name. She must have mistaken me for someone else. Forgetting about gestures, I shook my head and turned to go, but she grabbed my hand. I was so surprised that I turned back. She said something else that I didn’t understand. Her cloak slipped off her head and I saw that she had honey blonde hair in complicated braids pinned to her head.
I put up my hand to show polite refusal.
‘I heard your song,’ she said in Latin. ‘What do YOU want from me?’
I didn’t have a clue what she was talking about so I frowned. ‘Non comprehendo.’
That was when she pushed her cloak aside to show me something dangling from her belt by a short copper chain. It was a folding knife with an ivory handle carved in the shape of a leopard.
I looked back up into those eyes, then back down at the object dangling from her belt.
It was the blue-eyed girl with the ivory leopard knife.
I hadn’t found her.
She had found me.