"Lumley,.Brian.-.Titus.Crow.2.-.Transition.Of.Titus.Crow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

. . . had known any practical way to get T3RE into the time-clock at that time then possibly he would have come along with me. As it was we said what we could of farewells, and so I took my . . .
... for where I was headed: well . . . list of possible three-dimensional directions which just might take me back to Earth. The route was designed, in any case, to send me close to galaxies and star clusters and nebulae where, with a bit of luck, I might suddenly recognize some constellation or other and thus find my way home.
Such a route-card of interstellar space seems quite ridiculous, I know, but nevertheless that's the way I tried to do it. Not quite 'turn right at the blue dwarf with the tri-planet system and head for the binary with the spiral nebula at its left', but pretty much that sort of thing. Yes, I suppose it must seem ridiculous, until one considers the sort of speeds my craft could accomplish. If you are working with speeds in the region of tens of thousands of miles per hour, then of course you require a very accurate scientific course to get you and your target arriving at the same spot at the same time. Not so with the time-clock! I could simply pick a star in the sky and go there, and at almost that speed!
But of course there is only one Earth, and I soon discovered that the planet of my birth might just as well be the proverbial needle in the haystack as far as instant success was concerned. One thing I did have, however, and that was patience.

4 Roman Britain
... in the end, can wear extremely thin, and I proved to be no exception to this rule. Not that my journey could be said in any way to be boring. On the contrary, for I had my pick of alien worlds to explore, and many of them were beautiful beyond words. Others, 1 must add, were frightening beyond words.
... as close to Venus, and not only in time, for ... . . . wonderful as any that the science-fiction writers ever dreamed of; more, because they were real! But the telling would take so long that it must wait until another time. Perhaps, de Marigny, if ever you decide to join me in Elysia, and I'm sure you will, then we'll be able to swap adventures with each other. And if ...
. . . back on Earth. And I knew it was Earth. Third from the sun, with a moon I knew and loved as every human lover since the beginning of time has loved it; green and beautiful as no other planet except perhaps Elysia, which isn't really a planet anyway, is beautiful. Oh, it was Earth, and not too far removed from my own time at that, for England's shores were sharply etched against the blue of the sea as I fell toward . . . could see that there was a ... fields of the North . . .
. . . boy herding sheep. In my excitement as I brought the clock in to a landing I had not bothered to pay attention to my exact geographic location; I only knew that I was somewhere in Yorkshire. No doubt the lad with the sheep would be able to put me right . . .
... to run away! Perhaps he had seen me land and thought me some sort of flying monster. A minute later I had managed to catch up with him and bring him to a


halt. I held his shoulders and looked him straight in the eyes, letting him see that I was only a man, if a somewhat weirdly dressed man, for I was clad only in a soft leathery loincloth, a leaf torn from an alien palm on a tropical planet.
And yet by then I had discovered that the shepherd boy's own garment was no less surprising. It was formed of little more than a body sheet of rough cloth, with a few stitches to hold the thing in place, like a crude poncho. He kept rolling his eyes longingly toward a far-off huddle of stone towers and outlying huts with smoke rising into the blue summer sky, and trying to pull away from me while crying out in a tongue which at first I did not recognize. Then I caught the fact that he wanted to go home. Home to - to Eboracum!
Eboracum! The name given by the Romans to York! I was home on Earth, in the very land of my birth, but hundreds of years too early, in Roman Britain! You can have no idea . . .
. . . boy further. Once he was used to the idea that I meant him no harm, and hearing my stilted, rather poor Latin, he soon regained his composure. The governor of Britain, I discovered, was Platorius Nepos, and three years earlier work had commenced 'far to the north' on Hadrian's Wall. Roman Britain in the year 125 A.D.! . . . that I was so close to home, the merest hop through time in the clock, and -
Ah, but it was not to be. Close to where I had landed stood a villa, and now that I knew when I was I realized why, when I had flown the clock down close to the place, the building had struck me as being rather Old Mediterranean in style. Later I was to discover that the villa was the retreat of a retired Roman senator, one Felicius Tetricus, and that because of a local uprising some miles to the northwest he had stationed sentries and watchmen

in and around his villa's grounds. These men were of his own household and very loyal to him, which was my downfall. Perhaps if they had . . . course they were on the lookout for just such persons . . .
. . . talking to him. At any rate I saw this fellow in a jerkin and leather skirt, with sandals on his feet and a shortsword at his belt. He seemed friendly enough, despite an evil scar across one cheek, but as he came up to me and started to speak I saw his eyes flicker strangely and, simultaneously, heard the shepherd boy's cry of warning. Someone behind me! I whirled, saw a second man leaping - and then the heavy pommel of his sword crashed down upon my temple and I fell, unconscious, to
the heather.
When I came to I was in a bed of silks and linens, in a room whose balcony overlooked a paved veranda surrounded by a garden of flowers. From my bed I could look out and actually see the garden. I could smell the flowers' heady perfume. There is no other smell in the entire universe as sweet as the flowers of Earth, unless it is that fragrance of my own Tiania's slender neck.
Well, I was eventually attended by a physician in a purple toga, an elderly man who would not talk but simply clucked and bathed my head, applied some cooling liniment and changed my bandage. Finally, before he left me, he told me that I must rest. I had been in Tetricus' villa for three days, and at first the master of the house had despaired of my life.
'You can consider yourself lucky,' he told me obscurely, 'that you resemble Titus Tetricus so well!'
My mind was all foggy, in fact I was in a fever, and so perhaps I didn't entirely know what I said when I answered: 'But I am Titus!'
When he heard this the old physician turned quite gray, then backed away, mumbling to his gods and making a

series of esoteric symbols in the air with a forefinger. Not long after this, before I could drop back off to sleep, Felicius Tetricus himself. . .
. . . was a period when I kept swimming up out of my fever for a few minutes and then sinking slowly back. During one of my semiconscious bouts I heard old Tetricus and someone else - I think it was the gnarled physician - talking about me in lowered tones. Tetricus remarked on my likeness to his own dead son, Titus, killed in a chariot race across the moors and buried these three years. The bereaved father had offered up prayers to all the gods of earth, air, fire and water - particularly the latter, Sul, who seemed to be Tetricus' patron deity - that his son be returned to him. And now? Could it be that his prayers had at last been answered?
Might this stranger not indeed be Titus, returned from the land of the shades to his doting father in the form of this stranger? And was this man really a stranger? Had he not admitted that his name was Titus? True, he was older than Titus Tetricus had been at his death, but that had been three years ago. Did the shades, too, age then? The man had an athlete's body, of that there could be little doubt, and he was no simple Briton. Patently his was a noble ...
. . . more Felicius had looked upon my troubled, feverish face and form, the more sure the old Roman was becoming that I was his son reincarnate, that . . .
. . . came to proper. I found Felicius at my bedside. My fever seemed much abated and my head much clearer, and I remembered what I had overheard of the old man's superstitious half-belief in his son's resurrection in my body. I determined that if it seemed in my favor to do so, I would put Felicius' fancies to my own use. By that I mean that it ...

. . . thing I asked about, therefore, was the clock, which I called a 'shrine' to all the gods of the air. I did this just in case those assailants of mine who had knocked me down and brought me here, nearly caving my skull in with their enthusiasm, had actually seen me land. It seemed to me ...
. . . had it brought into the villa, though he had seen little use for so inordinately heavy a thing. Now, however, he was glad. If it was indeed a shrine, then he would offer up prayers to it that I had been delivered unto him. But what was I really, and where did I hail from?
Well, I obviously could not tell the truth. For one thing I doubted if Tetricus, a very down-to-Earth man for his sort, could even grasp so completely outre a concept as time-travel. Instead I feigned loss of memory: all I could remember was my name, which was Titus.
. . . hear nothing of my moving out of bed. I was to spend a further week in enforced recuperation, until my head was fully healed. In fact my head was already fully healed, and long before the end of the week Feiicius caught me pacing to and fro in my room and asked me what was wrong. I told him I needed to worship, that he must take me to my clock. He skated around the subject, walked me around the villa and its grounds, literally gave me free run of the place, except for certain locked rooms in the ... servants. There, too, I was introduced to Thorpos, a huge Nubian whose . . .
. . . absolutely no way! More and more it seemed that Feiicius was becoming enamored of the idea that I really was his son, and I had to play along with him. That seemed to me the only way I might ever. . .
. . . while they hadn't seen the clock actually arrive, they had seen me step from it! Feiicius was no fool; he certainly did not intend that his son, recently returned to him from beyond the pale, should ever be recalled! He

wasn't going to let me anywhere near that clock, not as long as he could help it. So what was I ...
. . . unwilling to use force against the members of the noble's household, and so I tried at first to bluff my way past the ever watchful Thorpos. I might as well. . . failed, I then attempted to bribe the Nubian. He was very polite - I was his master as much as any man could be - but his orders came direct from Feiicius Tetricus and they were . . .
The big black must have informed Feiicius that I was still trying to get to the clock, for the next day I was called to the old man's chambers and chided over the matter. If I wanted to offer up prayers, I was told, there were temples in Eboracum I could visit, not to mention Feiicius' own private shrine in the grounds of the villa itself.
For a fortnight then I was completely obedient to the old man's whims, simply biding my time and trying to allay his fears that perhaps I desired to leave the hospitality of the villa. This was in no way easy, for . . . and in the end I made the fatal mistake of letting Thorpos find me wandering in the servants' quarters, trying the doors in the middle of the night. I simply wasn't made to be stealthy. And how could I possibly make out after that that I was not trying to get away from the villa, away from Feiicius Tetricus?
Some few days later I heard it whispered among the servants that my clock had been taken out and buried on the moors. I made what worried, discreet inquiries I could, all useless, and it didn't take long for me to understand that Feiicius had put a terrible price on the head of any man who dared even mention the clock to me! That was that, then. Since it seemed I ...
. . . simply continue to bide my time and hope that eventually I could talk the Roman noble into revealing

the clock's whereabouts, I settled to my far from uncomfortable existence in Felicius' household.
And it was that way for the better part of a year. I waited and tried my best to ignore the ever-present anxiety that nagged at my insides, that the dock might be lost beyond redemption, and only . . . good at subterfuge, the type of trick I've never much cared for, but I...