The Time Roads

A motor carriage (fetched swiftly and unobtrusively) carried Ó Deághaidh to the embassy near the royal palace. He spent the evening alone in his finely appointed rooms and rose early to dress in his most formal black suit, arrayed with decorations from his service in the Royal Constabulary. Lord Ó Cadhla’s script ensured that he passed smoothly through the many offices, from the king’s gendarmerie, to the foreign minister, and finally to a small audience chamber, deep within the Palais Royal, set with guards at all the doors.

“Vôtre Majesté.”

The Frankish king accepted the silk-wrapped packet Ó Deághaidh offered. “We are grateful to your queen,” he said in unaccented Éireann.

He was an old man, his skin slack, his eyes sunk deep into his skull, and his complexion had an unhealthy pallor. The electors had chosen this man by a bare majority, and only after months of debate. Was that another mark of the discord within the Frankish parliament? A sign of that unrest that so troubled Mac Gioll and Ó Cadhla? Ó Deághaidh let none of these questions show as he knelt and kissed the cool hands, and spoke the familiar formula.

More ritual of diplomacy consumed the morning. He spent the afternoon with colleagues from Éire’s embassy, drinking wine and parrying questions about doings at Court and the queen herself. There were more questions d

esigned to tease out news about Ó Deághaidh as well. They were curious about his long absence, though rumor had supplied certain details, and more curious about his sudden reinstatement. Ó Deághaidh smiled and answered as vaguely as he dared.

In keeping with his role, he attended a supper with Frankish representatives. After that, freed from obligation, he set off on a late-night stroll alone by the moon-silvered Seine, past weathered brick and stone churches of Frankish and Éireann design. It was a pleasant evening. A few dark blue clouds scudded across the star-speckled skies. Hours later, he arrived, as he had known he would, in a district where a man might purchase the company of a woman, clean and smelling sweetly of perfumed soap, her hair running like a dark red river over her milk-white skin.

… once I lived alone within my skin. I was Aidrean Conall Ó Deághaidh, mathematics student turned spy and a member of the Queen’s Constabulary. Doctor Loisg argues that our souls and our selves are seldom known to their possessors, but I would state I knew myself—my self—as well as I knew my body. Now I am not as certain. My name, according to my latest passport, is Dietmar Bergmann, a citizen of Berlin in the Prussian Alliance. Before that, I called myself Jean-René Baptiste of Frankonia, and before that, William Sharpe of the Anglian Dependencies. With each change of papers, I sensed a pang within, as though the once-continuous essence of my self had cracked. But if I wish to be honest—and here in these confessions, at least, I can indulge in that—this sense of division, of a multiplicity of lives, began two years ago, even before the queen ordered me to investigate Maeve Ní Cadhla’s murder. Oh, the signs were few and doubtful—merely bits of memories misremembered, or conversations doubled. Even then, I told myself it was nothing more than overwork. But then came true dissolution. That moment I remember perfectly. It was close upon dawn. The sky wept with rain. I was walking toward a stable on the east side of the city, where I knew Síomón Madóc hid. Just as I laid a hand upon the latch …

Aidrean Ó Deághaidh crumpled the sheet in his fist and glanced out the train window. The conductor had already announced their approach to Praterstern Station, and the few passengers in the carriage had gathered their luggage and were proceeding toward the exit doors. The brakes squealed as the train slowed on its approach to the bridge crossing the Danube. Now the forested countryside vanished as the train plunged between the outer ring of Vienna’s ancient walls.

He waited until the final approach, then struck a match and burned the latest of his diary entries. He had begun these exercises under Doctor Loisg’s supervision—a means for sorting through the false and true memories. The art of recollection, Loisg called it. Now, these writings had to remain an ephemeral record, one he destroyed within moments of its creation, but the act gave him such necessary relief that he had continued the practice.

No more. It didn’t matter that he wrote in code, that few could make sense of his musings, even if they deciphered every word. Anything so personal would only provide hooks and claws to the enemy. Whoever that enemy might be.

Ó Deághaidh swept the ashes into his hand and deposited them in the nearest bin as he passed underneath the grand arches of the exit. In the square outside, he bought a grilled bockwurst and took a seat on a low wall surrounding a statue. Very little had changed since he last visited the city, at least on the surface. There were the usual crowds of blond, blue-eyed schoolboys. The carriages with Russian and Italian nobles. A company of Swiss mercenaries marching in formation. If anything, he counted more Turks and Moroccans, refugees from various civil wars. And pervading everything, a sense of threadbare opulence, of an empire that still dreamed of long-ago glory.

He finished off his wurst and wiped his face on his sleeve. The sun was sinking behind the tallest buildings. He would have to find a pension for the night, and soon. He recalled one from his previous travels, years ago. It was an ancient pile of brick and stone, surely as old as Vienna itself, but its beds were comfortable, and the breakfast generous.

Ó Deághaidh shifted his satchel to a more comfortable position and set off. A troupe of jugglers and magicians had staked out a largish space nearby, and the square had filled within the past ten minutes. He had to thread his way between the tourists and their children, who squealed in delight as two jugglers tossed glass balls into the air, sending showers of brilliantly colored sparks over the crowds.

The attack happened suddenly.

Just as Ó Deághaidh passed by the jugglers, one man snatched up two balls from the pile at his feet and hurled them at Ó Deághaidh. The balls hit the ground at his feet. The glass shattered into a firestorm. Ó Deághaidh leapt backward, but not quickly enough. A third ball struck him in the chest. He staggered and fell, choking from the acrid smoke. More flames, more smoke. A man flung his coat over Ó Deághaidh and pounded at the sparks. All around he heard an outcry, people calling for the police, others shouting to catch the villain before he escaped.

He was still trying to draw a breath when strong hands pulled him to his feet and bundled him away from the square. He tried to shake them off, explain he was not hurt, but his throat burned, and he could not stop coughing.

“Kämpfen Sie nicht so,” they told him. “Wir bringen Sie gleich zur Apotheke.”

His unwanted rescuers propelled him through a pair of doors, into a brightly lit shop. Down he went onto a cot. A pale doughy face, surrounded by an untidy fringe of hair, came into view. The stranger, a young man, muttered in a thick Austrian dialect as he speedily and professionally examined Ó Deághaidh. “Do not worry,” he said. “Those men ran, but we’ve summoned the police. I will tend to your burns.”

He gathered several vials of medicines, and a bowl of soapy water. But before he could attend to Ó Deághaidh, a voice, sharp and imperious, sounded from the next room. The apothecary glanced over his shoulder and scowled, but when the voice called out a second time, he hurried toward the front room. His appearance provoked a lengthy exchange. Ó Deághaidh recognized the young man’s patient drawl, interrupted by a woman’s shriller, more insistent voice as she described a constant ache of the teeth, and could he not prescribe a stronger medicine.

He checked his pockets. Nothing was missing. He still had his money. More important, he still had all the necessary papers to explain his presence in Vienna—passport, letters from a cousin in Wien, properly marked tickets. If they cared to look, the police would find nothing suspicious, and yet, Ó Deághaidh found a growing dislike for keeping to the identity Lord Ó Cadhla had provided him.

He eased to standing and made a cautious circuit of the room. A second door opened onto a short passageway with doors to either side, and one at the far end. There was a whiff of woodsmoke, and the stronger smell of stewing chicken and onions. Ó Deághaidh heard the sounds of splashing water, a child’s laugh, a woman’s reply.

He trod swiftly and softly to the door at the far end. Outside, wooden steps led down to a narrow alleyway lined with trash bins. Just then, the woman called out, “Na, Wilhelm. Kommst du endlich?” Then he was through the door and gliding down the alleyway to the open square beyond.

* * *

Five days later, Aidrean Ó Deághaidh entered the small Byzantine church of Sankt Barbara and dropped a few shilling coins into the offering box. He slid into the front row and bowed his head, taking a surreptitious glance of his surroundings as he did so. Most of the church remained in shadows, but sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows above, bathing the nave and communion rails in a rainbow of color. Two elderly women knelt before the youngish priest. The rest of the church remained empty, as he had expected.

Someone had penetrated Ó Deághaidh’s disguise. Not the woman in Paris—he’d told her nothing. Not the few obvious Frankonian agents who had tracked him from Paris into Catalonia. He knew he had eluded them. It had to be someone in the queen’s confidence. Lord Ó Cadhla, who had so carefully scripted this expedition. Or Lord Ó Breislin, whose experience lay in these regions.

A flicker of light caught his attention. He glanced back to see a tall man in a voluminous coat sidle into the second-to-last row of benches. That would be his contact—a man named Rainer Groer, forty-eight years old, ostensibly a dealer in rare books and curiosities, an occupation that often took him on jaunts through the remnants of the Austrian Empire. Groer was a relatively minor agent, but knowledgeable about the local politics.

Ó Deághaidh waited until he was certain Groer found the note, then sauntered down the aisle and through the church’s front doors. Outside, he hurried down the street and rounded the corner into the Barbaragasse, where he waited.

After the attack outside the train station, Ó Deághaidh had spent five days in a cheap pension, one he had never before visited, reviewing possible steps to take. No, recovering his nerve. Those men had not intended to kill him. Unbalance him, perhaps. Rattle him and make his judgment unreliable. He wanted to say they had failed, but the reoccurrence of his nightmares belied that.

So let us say I am stubborn.