The Fall

44

Wednesday morning, 22^nd December 1865.

Jud and Sam worked on the king post. This was the vertical pole that protruded through the centre of the bus’s roof. Rigging cables ran down to the stumpy ‘wings’ at either side of the bus that carried the rocket-launcher tubes. Each ‘wing’ was probably around ten feet long, four feet wide and consisted of wooden spars held together with glue and nails. Lashed by cord to the wing spars were the rocket-launcher tubes themselves. They looked like lengths of drainpipe around five feet long, and they pointed forward in line with the body of the bus. If anything, the criss-cross effect of spars resembled what lay beneath the canvas skin of an old-time aeroplane. A skeleton of wood that, to Jud, looked far too fragile.

Sam and Jud slithered across the slippery roof of the bus, tying rigging cables to the king post.

‘Get them good and tight,’ Carswell called from his platform in the hayloft. ‘The rocket tubes must be in alignment when they’re fired.’

Jud gave a kind of salute and smiled.

Then, under his breath, he said, ‘If I keep sweet-talking him much longer it’s going to send me barking mad.’

‘Just keep smiling as you work; it was a miracle we got him back here again… Jud, catch hold of the rope. It’s slipping from the post. Damn.’

The line already tied to the tip of the wing assembly slipped off the bus’s roof and onto the barn floor.

‘I’ll get it,’ Jud sighed. ‘I need a sharper knife to trim these lines anyway.’

Sam watched the others at work for a moment.

His description of the activity he saw would have been that it was a kind of symphony of endeavour. Every one of those accidental time travellers was working. Sometimes there were quieter periods when there was hardly any noise as people attended to small-scale detailed jobs: plaiting string, threading wiring through the wings, fixing small screws, or just talking in whispers. Then, as if they were in some kind of mystical harmony with each other, they turned to work of a larger scale: hammering metal plates, furiously sawing timber while workers whistled and people shouted for more tools. The sounds would rise to a crescendo, becoming the fortissimo movement of that symphony of endeavour. Then the whole barn would be a swarm of movement as a hundred different sounds rose to a near-deafening, teeth-vibrating climax.

And above it all, Carswell worked at his pieces of paper, calculating, sketching, pondering, occasionally breaking off to watch his people labouring.

‘Sam… Sam. Catch the line.’ Jud threw the line back up onto the bus’s roof.

Sam caught it deftly enough and began feeding it through one of the iron rings set into the top of the king post. The post itself ran down through a hole in the bus’s metal roof, down again through into the floor of the passenger compartment, then on down farther into the luggage hold beneath, where it was secured to a hefty baulk of timber bolted to the chassis of the bus.

Good God, at least we’re making progress.

What they didn’t need now was to hit some fundamental flaw in Carswell’s plans. Not for the first time, it occurred to Sam that it would be touch and go whether they could even get the king post under the frame of the barn door, high though it was.

Jud’s brain worked in a similar direction. ‘Not that I want to pour cold water on Carswell’s plans at this stage, but…’

‘Go on.’

‘But he’s been making some basic practical errors.’

‘I know. I still wouldn’t like to bet my life on those light bulb fuses firing the rockets.’

‘And he had me box in the bus driver’s compartment with the wooden doors before he told me I had to cut slots so the driver could see out. It seems obvious now, but at the time he was keeping us in the dark.’

‘That’s deliberate,’ Sam said. ‘He likes to keep us ignorant of his master plan so it shows him up as some kind of genius.’

‘Which will cause problems. It might not seem a major difficulty, but if I could have chiselled those view-slots while I had the doors out there on the ground it would have taken me half the time that it did after they were in place.’ He held up a hand with three fingers bound in sticking plaster. ‘Cost me a drop or two of blood, trying to chop the wood out at a difficult angle. If only he’d explained what he wanted earlier it would have saved time as well as blood and effort.’

‘He sees himself as the grand architect.’ Sam heaved the line tight through the iron ring on the king post. ‘He’s not going to welcome us suggesting we form a committee to oversee his plans.’

‘I know, but I wish he’d have the sense to agree to some kind of consultation before we actually begin the next job. I was a carpenter for 25 years, surely that experience counts for something?’

‘Not in his eyes, Jud. If you grab that end of the line I’ll cut it… There, got it. No, if anything the human element is going to be the weak link. After all, he’s expecting 19^th Century soldiers to man the guns on this bus – a machine they’ve never seen before – and perhaps fire the guns as the damn thing charges across a field at maybe 40 miles an hour. Rather than loading and firing they’re going to be hanging on for dear life.’

‘Then maybe we should be talking our concerns through with Carswell?’

‘Yeah,’ Sam said doubtfully. ‘But who’s going to break it to him that he’s going to have stop playing the dictator and start accepting advice from others?’

‘Well, it certainly won’t be now. Here come the cavalry.’

At that moment troops arrived on horseback. They were dressed in bright red coats and wore brass helmets from which crests of green feathers caught the still-falling snowflakes. A moment later field guns, hauled by sturdy ponies, arrived in the farmyard. The gun barrels were a silvery-gold in colour and perhaps seven inches in diameter and five feet in length.

Sam grinned. ‘It looks as if the Reverend Thomas Hather has a silver tongue after all. He’s persuaded the military to join us.’

‘Hell. Take a look at those cannon. They’re solid-looking brutes, aren’t they? It’s going to take some sweat hauling them on board here.’

‘As Carswell might say, there’s no time like the present.’

Carswell, after gentle persuasion by Jud and Sam, agreed to introduce a shift system of working to allow the exhausted men and women to sleep. Even so, he stipulated that these rest periods would be limited to five hours.

However, with the arrival of the troops the conversion work did become easier – once the men had overcome their surprise at the bizarre machines taking shape there in the barn. Strange devices like the bus, with its mast, rigging lines and stumpy wings. Then there was the Range Rover with its own wing-like rocket launchers sprouting either side at its roof level. And there also were the other motley vehicles, from the ice-cream van (still garishly painted with pictures of comets and lollies) to the domestic cars. The cars would be used as support vehicles for the bus and Range Rover gunships.

Jud called across to Sam as he helped Zita wire the rocket launchers to the Range Rover, ‘Sam, it’s time for your rest break.’

Back muscles aching, his hands still throbbing and painful from unbolting the seats on the bus, Sam headed across the snowy yard to the farmhouse. It was midday; he’d not slept in more than 30 hours.

He did wonder if he would sleep at all, what with the tension of the impending confrontation with the Bluebeards, but the moment his head touched the pillow his eyes closed and he slept without dreaming.

‘These are the grenades,’ Carswell told Sam. He was sitting at the table in the hayloft. ‘I don’t expect you’ll have the opportunity to use them – they’ll be in the hands of the professional soldiers – but you might as well see what they look like and how they work.’

Carswell handed Sam what appeared to be a section of iron piping about the same size as a beer can. It was a discoloured bluey-black and looked pretty roughly made; it was far heavier than Sam had expected, too.

Carswell said, ‘You’ll see that it’s basically a section of iron piping sealed at both ends by welded discs of iron plate. Then it’s filled with blasting powder, and this is the fuse. If you should ever need to use one of these beauties, light the end of the fuse with a match, then throw the grenade at the enemy. The fuse will detonate the powder five seconds later and anyone close enough will be sliced to pieces by the red-hot chunks of iron pipe hurled outwards by the blast. So make sure you throw it far enough away from you. Got that?’

Sam nodded. ‘Have you decided where we – the civilians – will be during the battle?’

‘I have, and I was just coming to that. Most will be stationed at the amphitheatre car park. The plan being that the bus and cars drive close enough to the barbarians as they emerge through the time-gate. They fire a volley of rockets and artillery shells at the enemy, then return to the car park to reload. Of course, the artillery men can keep reloading and firing their guns several times before we need to return.’

‘But you will need some of us to drive the vehicles.’

‘That’s true. Lee Burton will drive the bus… He’s had some experience of it in the past.’

‘He has a PSV licence?’

‘Ah, no, he used to move the bus from the car park to the front of hotels.’

‘So he’s had no real experience driving the bus on roads? Never mind on the kind of open terrain where we’ll be fighting this battle?’

‘No, but he’ll be able to practise before we attack.’

Sam felt his face tighten. A little practice in the road between here and the amphitheatre wouldn’t be nearly enough. It would demand all an experienced driver’s expertise to throw that coach around snow-covered fields as though it was an army tank while the artillery fired broadsides or rockets whistled from their firing tubes.

Carswell moved on crisply. ‘Needless to say, we need a relief driver.’

‘Who, Jud?’

‘No, I’ve chosen Zita.’

‘Zita? Why?’

‘She drove tractors and an assortment of farm vehicles when she was in her teens.’

‘But—’

‘She’ll do a good job, Mr Baker.’

Sam swallowed his doubts. Zita was extremely capable. Indeed, every man and woman there had worked minor miracles, but it seemed as if Carswell was expecting positively superhuman performances from them. All Lee had to do was to catch one of the rocket-tube ‘wings’ on the barn-door frame as he backed the bus out and that would be 20 hours of work down the drain. Again Sam had the nagging suspicion that Carswell’s battle plan was too complex for it to work – especially without the time to practise.

‘You, Sam. You’ll drive the Range Rover. Jud Campbell will be in the passenger seat. He’ll operate the switches that will fire the rockets. You’ll have a couple of soldiers in the rear seats armed with rifles. I suggest you stuff your ears with cotton wool; it’ll get very noisy. Any questions?’

Yes… loads.

The light-bulb igniters haven’t been properly tested. What if the rockets don’t fire?

What if the rocket-tube wings are too flimsy after all and simply drop off when the car goes over a bump?

What if the cars become stuck in snowdrifts?

Can four or five hundred men and women stop three thousand battle-hardened barbarian warriors?

That was just the start of the questions. Sam could think of hundreds more. But it was all too late in the day now.

What he heard next came as something of a shock. He should have anticipated it, but somehow in the white heat of the conversion work he’d pushed the eventuality to the back of his mind.

Carswell said, ‘It’s been four days since the Bluebeards attacked Casterton. I don’t envisage them delaying any longer, on the off chance the town could call on help from outside; therefore, I’m going to have the vehicles moved up to the amphitheatre car park tonight.’

‘Tonight?’

Carswell gave a curt nod. ‘If they come at first light tomorrow we need to be ready.’

Sam forced a smile. ‘So this is it. The eve of battle. Hell of a Christmas present, isn’t it?’