She was in the jeans she’d worn from the grim world and a flowing yellow blouse they’d given her here. She bent over her books, intent on them, her hair half-concealing her face.
So many times he’d seen her in just that pose. He found that his mouth was dry. It was suddenly impossible to look away from her. Impossible to accept that he couldn’t just walk up to her, take her head in his hands, twining his fingers into the glossy heaviness of her hair, tilting up her chin to kiss him . . .
She brushed her hair back from her face and caught sight of him. She looked up, startled. “Hi.”
“Hi.”
“I haven’t seen much of you lately. What have you been up to?”
“Actually, I was just obsessing about your hair.”
She winced. “Harris.”
“Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t. I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“It’s all right.” He could tell from her expression that it wasn’t. “Jean-Pierre was just looking for you.”
“He found me. He forced a small fortune into my unwilling hands.”
“So you’re all dressed up to go out and spend it?”
He settled into the seat next to her. “Yeah, basically. I’m going to pay off a debt, then find a tailor and commission some blue jeans.”
Her eyes got round. “I never thought of that. What a great idea! If I give you some of my money and my measurements—”
“Sure.”
She tore a page from the back of the notebook she was writing in and began scribbling. Harris saw that she did already know the measurement system the people of Neckerdam used—a standard value called a “pace” broken down into fifty “fingers.”
He glanced over the books she was browsing through. Events of the Reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan in Novimagos, Volume One. The Full History of the World Crisis. “Catching up on history?”
She slid the piece of paper and several of her own coins to him. “Yes, and you should be, too. Noriko told me a little about the recent history of the fair world, and it was too strange—I had to check up on some things.”
“Oh, God, the journalist is running amok again.” He folded the paper and tucked it and the coins away. “Things such as what?”
“Such as . . . about twenty years ago, in the Old World, which is what they usually call Europe, they had this deal called the Conclave of Masallia. A lot of the kings of the Old World swore undying affection for each other. A mutual protection pact. Then one of them flipped out and invaded his neighbor. Everybody was obliged by the treaty to side with both of them, so they sort of split down the middle and everybody attacked everybody. And since they all owned colonies in the New World and in their versions of Africa and Asia, pretty soon half the planet was at war. Sound familiar?”
“Like World War Two?”
“Well, closer to World War One, actually.” She tapped another volume, Mechanics of Systemic Economic Collapse, the first one Harris had seen with a title that wouldn’t have looked strange in one of his own college courses. “And here. About five years ago, the economic alliance of the League of Ardree, most of the nations of what should be North America, had a crash. For the last long while, they’d gone increasingly industrial, whole nations turning to production and importing almost all their food. Then there was a trade glut, a repayment problem at the international level, foreclosings, treasuries folding, an economic collapse affecting pretty much the whole world. The fair world is still recovering from it. You see it?”
“History was never my strong point. But you’re trying to draw a parallel with the Great Depression.”
“I sure am.”
“I think you’re reaching. A war followed by an economy going bust and you’re talking about history repeating itself. That’s pretty thin.”
“Okay, try this. In the grim world, about the time we were having the Depression, Japan was at war with China.”
“So?”
“So Noriko told me yesterday that her people, the Wo, are involved in a pointless war with the nations of Shanga. I looked them up on the map. Any guesses as to what Wo and Shanga correspond to?”
“I already know.” Harris frowned.
“So it sounds like another mystery for Doc to go funny about. Like why English and Low Cretanis are the same language. Between that, and the routine with the guns and pepper gas and my wristwatch being all twisted when they got here when nothing else was, he’s chewing on the furniture in frustration. How about you?”
“You know I don’t chew furniture.”
She gave him an exasperated look.
“Okay, okay, it’s weird.” He rose. “Did you find a Civil War?”
“War of the Schism, eighty years ago. The League of Ardree split into two pieces, basically north against south.”
“American Revolution.”
“The Great Revolt, about a hundred and fifty years back. When the League of Ardree was formed. The people of Cretanis call it the Ingratitude.”
“Jesus.”
“The Carpenter Cult.”
“I meant, ‘Jesus H. Christ, you’re freaking me out.’ Okay?”
“Sorry. I got carried away.”
Harris stood. He did some mental calculations. “I don’t know whether you ought to tell Doc about this.”
“Why not?”
“Because if you’re right, events here are sort of following the history of the grim world, and we have a general idea of things that are going to be happening over the next forty or fifty years.”
“So?”
“So we can predict the fair world’s version of World War Two. Should we?”
She frowned, considering.
“I’ll think about it, too. But first I’m going to order us some jeans.”
Once he was gone, Gaby finished up with the broader histories and returned to another subject: Duncan Blackletter.
Reports of him appeared occasionally in the newspapers, and Doc’s library had scores of bound volumes of crumbling periodicals. Of course, there tended to be a problem figuring out when things happened.
By Novimagos reckoning, the current year was 28 R.B.G.—twenty-eighth year of the reign of Bregon and Gwaeddan, the current king and queen. Before these rulers were Gwaeddan’s parents Dallan and Tangwen, who ruled forty-eight years: 1 R.D.T. to 48 R.D.T. Each royal reign reset the year to one, and each sovereign nation had a different chronology. Acadia, to the north, was in its eighteenth year under Jean-Pierre’s widower father, King Henri IV—abbreviated 18 H.IV.R. It was maddening.
Still, there were a few benchmarks. Years were often translated to a chronology dated from the union of the nation of Cretanis, 1435 years ago. Most historical volumes translated one date from each reign to this dating system, usually referred to as “Scholars’ Years.” But not even Cretanis used that dating system routinely; they were currently in year 248 of the reign of their current queen, Maeve X. Gaby marvelled at her longevity.
Duncan Blackletter first showed up in Scholars’ Year 1368, nearly seventy years ago. A young man then, leader of a gang, he was tried for the train hijacking of a gold shipment from Neckerdam to Nyrax. The gold was not recovered, and Duncan and some of his men escaped the next year. The dim photographs of him showed a lean, handsome, arrogant face; Gaby could recognize him beneath the years of the face Duncan wore today.
Over the years, Duncan’s plans became more ambitious and deadly. He constructed a metal-hulled ship with a ram and used it to pirate shipping routes; it was finally sunk by the navy of Nordland, but he escaped. He exterminated an entire community in Castilia because its rulers would not share their scholarship with him. He used his growing fortune to finance the development of new and bigger explosives, then used them to blackmail entire cities. In Scholars’ Year 1398, he nearly bought the kingship of the southern nation of New Acadia through political corruption in its capital, Lackderry. Two years later, he emerged as one of the forces behind the development of glitter-bright, the narcotic liquor that first appeared in the faraway land of Shanga.