"The lingering effects of the medicine will be gone in a few hours," she murmured.
Artorius glanced worriedly into her eyes. "He must needs make haste with the rest of us, sister. You know the danger from these Saxons as well as I. Do what you can for his illness, along the way."
"Of course."
Stirling tried again, face flaming. He blanked his mind this time and let Ancelotis' muscles do the work—and astonished himself by making it onto the horse's back in one try. The saddle made for an awkward seat. He gripped with both thighs, grateful for even the minimal security offered by those odd, projecting saddle horns, and shoved his feet more securely into the stirrups, doing his utmost not to slide off again. The Dux Bellorum put heels to his horse's gleaming flanks and the entire body of Romanized cavalry broke into a fast canter. The red dragon battle pennon crackled like living flames in the rising light of morning and the burnished golden dragon standard floated high above their heads.
Stirling jerked in the saddle, caught off guard when his horse followed the others without any apparent signal from him. He grabbed at the mane with one hand, nearly unseated by the abrupt start. He ignored stares from the other riders, particularly the men of the cataphracti, who cast worried glances at him every few moments.
Stirling set his teeth and set himself the task of learning how to ride.
Chapter Six
Colonel Hamish Ogilvie stepped out of the helicopter and headed for the laboratory's main entrance. His aide de camp scrambled out in his wake, while a detachment of troopers spread out around the site in a defensive cordon. A chap from Whitehall followed, one of the undersecretaries of the Home Office, a slightly rabbity and officious bureaucrat named Thornton Hargrove who had spent the entire journey up from London delineating the flaws, faults, and morally ambiguous antecedents of the SAS in general and Captain Stirling in particular. Ogilvie, weighing the pros and cons of tossing him out through the cargo doors, had finally snapped, "It's your chaps who vetted this terrorist and cleared her for top secret work. If you haven't the decency to admit your mistake, kindly refrain from blacking the reputation of the man trying to salvage this mess!"
Hargrove sputtered for several seconds, then clamped his lips shut and fell blessedly silent. Dawn had scarcely touched the Highland hills when Ogilvie stepped through the laboratory's main door, held open by a bleary-eyed, worried young man who introduced himself as Marc Blundell. "We haven't telephoned the constables, yet," Blundell said, "Captain Stirling told us not to until you'd arrived."
"Quite right," Ogilvie nodded. "Let's see it, then."
He went through the entire lab, examining everything, and had his aide photograph the entire facility. Hargrove stalked along in his wake, yammering more blithering idiocies about SAS incompetence. Ogilvie was more interested in Brenna McEgan's inert form, hooked into the time-controlling computers, than he was in the admittedly gory office where Terrance Beckett still lay where he'd fallen. And Ogilvie studied that crime scene with intense scrutiny, indeed, reconstructing the desperate fight in his mind, step by step.
The first, faint glimmerings of unease came when Ogilvie was examining Brenna McEgan's face, which was badly bruised and swollen from a terrific blow. Given her slight frame, Ogilvie wondered how in the world she'd been able to keep fighting a man taller and heavier than she after such a blow—and so effectively, she'd been able to kill him. Ogilvie would have laid a wager such a blow would have knocked her cold. The next stirring of worry came when he looked over Cedric Banning and found abrasions on his knuckles. Banning had hit someone or something very hard, and very recently. Brenna McEgan? In which case, how had she been able to fend him off long enough to set the computers, strap herself to the headset, and jump backwards through time?
The clincher came twenty minutes later, when one of Ogilvie's troopers, searching the perimeter of the site, came across a sodden bundle of cloth thrust under a rock at the bottom of a small stream which rushed past one corner of the property. "It's a woman's coat, sir," the man said, snapping out a salute. "No bloodstains on it, but there's a gun in the pocket."
Ogilvie fished the gun out using the barrel of an inkpen, never touching the weapon with his hand. There was, indeed, a gun in the coat, a wicked little Makarov 9 mm. "Now why the devil would Brenna McEgan walk into yon lab to kill a man and use a ruddy great knife—risking substantial injury to herself in the process—when she had this in her pocket?"
Thornton Hargrove had blundered up behind him, slipping in the treacherous mud and cursing in his high and irritating voice. Hargrove said, "A knife is a better weapon to send a message of terror with. I'm surprised you don't know that."
Ogilvie glanced around. "Really? Now the IRA is very good at sending messages with their weapons. Generally, they do so with car bombs and suchlike, trying to blow up the Queen Mother, taking out an entire street of British office buildings, leveling some Orangemen's favorite pub. Car bombs and AR-180s are their hallmarks. The one thing I have not seen them do is hack some man to pieces with a butcher's knife. Not when they've access to a perfectly serviceable firearm."
Hargrove sputtered again, turning red from the hairline down. Ogilvie studied the sopping coat, carefully slipping the Makarov back into its pocket. "And why, for the love of Mary, would she bother to hike out here in a drenching downpour and bury this at the bottom of a streambed? There isn't a sign of blood anywhere on it—and there should be, if she stabbed Beckett to death. Nor can I imagine her taking it off and burying it, with gun in pocket, before killing him with the knife—yet there's no blood on this coat, and a great deal of it on her blouse and skirt, which were under the coat. It makes no sense."
Banning, on the other hand, had been stained in gore from shoulder to ankles. There was the note, of course, the claim that he'd slipped in the puddles of blood trying to reach Beckett, but something about that note and the little pieces of evidence mounting up rang hollow in Ogilvie's ears. He turned to his aide, his voice as full of gravel as the stream where someone had hidden Brenna McEgan's coat and gun.
"I want a background sweep on Cedric Banning, as well as Brenna McEgan. I want to know who pushed them in their prams and what they ate for dinner on their fifth birthdays. And I bloody well want it last week!"
His aide scrambled for the helicopter and its shielded radio equipment.
Ogilvie stalked back toward the lab while a cold fear grew in his heart that Trevor Stirling had gone into the past in pursuit of the wrong terrorist.
It is perhaps a hundred sixty kilometers, straight-line, from Stirling, Scotland, to the site of the Sixth Legion's ancient stronghold at Carlisle, in England's border country, which Trevor Stirling eventually deduced must be the fortress Artorius was heading toward. His use of kilometers confused his host, who had never heard of metrics, of course, and resisted thinking in meters and centimeters and kilometers. Stirling realized it would not only be easier for him, as a twenty-first-century man, to think in terms of miles and feet and inches—he'd at least heard of them and knew approximately what each measurement meant—it would also be far safer if he stopped thinking in metrics, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. One slip-up in Brenna McEgan's presence...