‘ When have the stars ever shone so brightly?’
When have the stars ever shone so brightly? Luisa wondered, looking out of her window. Chill breezes sighing down across the plains from the Alps had swept the sky clean of the summer haze. The Milky Way washed frostily across the sky as she had never seen it before. Below, on the horizon, Luisa thought she could just make out the white of snow glistening on the peaks, far, far out beyond the towers. I must be imagining it, she told herself. I’m not even sure what snow looks like, in starlight.
She shivered.
“Alf,” she called out, “did you find the sweaters?”
“Not yet. Haven’t got a clue where I put them.” Alf’s voice was muffled, his head stuck in some cupboard somewhere. “Incredible! It’s been, what? Five weeks since I put them away? My age is starting to sh- ahah! Found them. Coming.”
A moment later he arrived, pulling a sweater over his head, and carrying another one for Luisa. She took it gratefully.
“Is that snow on the mountains, do you think?” She pointed.
Alf squinted.
“It could be. Hard to tell.” He leaned forward over the balcony, as though it might help to get a few centimetres closer to the Alps, eighty kilometres away. “It’s all so weird,” he said, “we’ve never really seen nighttime like this. So crystal clear…”
Luisa had just pulled the sweater over her head, when the doorbell rang, and she turned to answer.
“Don’t answer! Looters!” Alf stopped her.
Luisa hesitated.
“Looters? Someone who needs help, more likely.”
“Our help? What can we do to help?”
“We have a medicine cabinet, a store of food…”
“For us!”
Luisa stared hard at Alf.
“We’re supposed to be three meals away from barbarity. You’ve got a full stomach, and you’re going barbaric at the mere thought of sharing meals?”
“I’m a realist. This isn’t going to be easy…”
They glared at each other across the intercom. The doorbell rang again and again. Someone on the street really wanted to talk to them. Luisa raised a taut finger.
“My grandfather was fished out of the sea half dead, and down in Lampedusa they didn’t say ‘he’s come for loot’. If I’m alive and you’re married to me, it’s because they took him in.”
Alf softened for a moment, but she could see the fear in his eyes. She tried again.
“You’re a city alderman, for goodness’ sake. You can’t just shut yourself away. What if… What if it’s the mayor down there?”
“Wouldn’t she just call me? Why come here on foot?”
“Ok, ok… But, it doesn’t matter. You have to answer, whoever it is. You took the salary, you took the responsibility. If that’s a citizen down there who needs you, you have a moral obligation to answer, mister alderman.”
Alf didn’t answer, but she could tell she had him cornered.
“It’s alright,” she assured him, “I’ll just turn on the com. I won’t open the door unless we’re both convinced I should.”
The bell rang again.
Alf swallowed.
“Ok.”
Luisa pressed the intercom.
“Hello?”
“Hello?” It was a girl. “Is that Professor Faruq, the curator?”
Luisa’s eyes widened. She had assumed that the person on the street, whoever it was, wanted Alf.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I’m Belinda Portalupi. I came to the museum last week, with my class…. A school trip… Please,” the voice caught, “I need your help. It’s Dad, he’s lost.”
“Lost here in Milan? He doesn’t know his way?”
Luisa and Alf eyed each other. A ruse?
“No. Yes… No. He… He’s from Milan, and he’s here, but he’s lost in time in the Anabranch.”
Luisa could hear her antique clock ticking. Some part of her brain detached itself and started counting the ticks. 1… 2… What did the girl just say? Did I hear right? 4… 5… 6… Alf gave her an ‘I told you so’ look. Albeit a bemused one. Luisa forced a laugh.
“That’s crazy, what are you talking about?”
Belinda’s voice rose.
“I’m not lying, I’m not joking, I mean it. He’s trying to make the Dreamteam. It’s true! He works for the Time Park. Staff have… special bracelets. I have one with me, I can show you! You have to help me find him.”
Luisa didn’t know which confused fragment of sentence to latch onto.
“Special bracelet?”
“You can enter the Time Park at any point in time. It’s how they get around. He took one to form the Dreamteam.”
Luisa looked at Alf. “I…”
Alf shook his head, and reached out to switch off the intercom. Luisa blocked his hand.
“Get the Dreamteam?” She tried again. “From Kinshasa?”
“No! No, the Time Park is geolocal, you can’t use a bracelet to go outside of Milan. Anyway, he said the one in Kinshasa wasn’t good enough. That’s why-“
“Well it’s the best chance we’ve got.” Alf interrupted. The Time Park was hardly his scene, but he’d been avidly following the progress of the Dreamteam. “The richest city in the world is bound to have more of the top professionals in every field than any other city, especially Milan…”
“You’re still not listening! He’s here in Milan, but he’s in the Anabranch. It’s my fault. Your fault too, professor. I visited the museum with you, and you told us about how Einstein was here, and Leonardo da Vinci, and Mozart… and then I told him. And he’s gone to get them! He said a Dreamteam with Leonardo and Einstein and the others is humanity’s best hope. And now he’s gone missing, I thought… I…” She broke off, and then, audibly in the verge of tears, “You might be able to help me find him.”
“Just a moment,” Luisa told her, “I need to talk to my husband about it.”
She switched the intercom off and looked at her husband. He rocognised that look. He spread his hands out as though trying to halt the wind.
“No, Luisa, no! This is madness!”
“Alf, there is some kind of sense in this. The staff members down at the Time Park must have some way of getting around the Anabranch freely, without using the big portals, it’s logical, otherwise how would they get everything ready for the visitors? One of them has a daughter, who comes on a school visit to the museum with me, and goes home and tells her dad about all the brilliant people who were in Milan at some time or another. He realises that those people from history could form the Dreamteam. Think of it! Einstein, Leonardo, Mozart, Chaucer, Petrarch, Josquin de Prez, Paganini, Caravaggio, Giotto… even the Beatles! Can you imagine? No one moment in history has so many brilliant people in it, but if you can pick and choose from all of history… You can even choose Augustus Caesar or Garibaldi as team leader. So this dad decides to steal a bracelet, and go get them, to save humanity. It’s brilliant!”
Alf shook his head.
“Yep, brilliant. And you’ve fallen for it, hook line and sinker.”
“What?”
“Luisa, the looting’s begun, and we just don’t know about it. This girl wants to get us to open the door to the building, and there’s a group of boys with her with, with… wrenches and steel bars and things, just waiting. We open the door, and they ransack the whole building. Nice trick. Who knows how many buildings they’ve broken into so far tonight, with this little trick.”
“But…” Luisa felt dazed. “It’s midday.” She said, almost absently.
“Today, tonight… Exactly.”
She rallied.
“Don’t you think they could come up with a simpler trick than this? I mean… What kind of kid thinks up a story like that?”
“An imaginative one. Whose scared. Hell, aren’t we? What if we were on the streets right now?”
“I can’t believe she just made it up… It’s so… It sounds so true.”
“True?” He shook his head. “You’re crazy!”
Now it was Luisa’s turn to shake her head.
“Alf,” she said patiently, “ten days ago a mysterious alien civilisation somehow blocked all sunlight from reaching the Earth, and communicated to humanity that we are a suspected cancerous growth in the universe, giving us less than one month to create an object of such beauty and significance that it can somehow justify our continued existence, otherwise they will wipe us off the face of the planet. True?”
There was no answer. He was thinking, Alf, she’s going to out-talk you now. Serves you right for marrying an academic.
“True, or not?” Luisa insisted.
“Yes, it is.” He sighed.
“Is it true that snow is falling in the Alps for the first time in generations, and the Antarctic ice-cap is reforming, and if people aren’t already out there looting, they will be soon. Is all of this true?”
Alf nodded.
“And would you ever have believed even one word of that eleven days ago, the day before the aliens arrived?”
“No.” He sighed, wanting to just get it over and done with.
“And yet you say this girl’s story can’t be true?”
Alf shrugged, and looked down.
Luisa reached up and switched on the intercom, and pressed the button to open the door to the building.
“Belinda, you can come in.”
There was no answer.
“Belinda, are you there?”
Nothing.
“Belinda?”
Husband and wife exchanged a bleak look. The building was now open.
“Internet,” Alf rose his voice, “is there anyone at the front door?”
“No, there is no one there.”
Alf began swearing.
“Now I have to go down and close the bloody door again. Fifteen families in the building, and in ten bloody years of bloody condominium meetings they can’t agree on getting a new door with a voice-activated closing system.”
Luisa started towards their apartment door.
“No, Luisa, I’ll go down. You stay here. And keep this door shut.”
“No, we’ll both go.”
“No, you stay here.” He said as firmly as he could.
“You tell your paper-pushers what to do, Alf,” she snapped, “not me.”
He gave up.
“Ok, let’s just be quick. We go down, we close it before anyone notices it’s open, and we come straight back up.”
At street level, the atrium was even darker than the night without. The timers wouldn’t bring the lights on until 8:30 that evening, when the sun was due to set. The broad wooden double-door was ajar. Alf strode forward to pull it to, but Luisa got there first. She pushed it wide open.
“Luisa, stop!”
“That poor girl’s out here!” She stepped out onto round river cobbles of the street, calling out “Belinda!”
It was dark, and deserted. Where was she?
“Belinda!” She called louder. Via dei Chiostri swallowed up the sound of her voice, and gave nothing back.
“Luisa, get back inside!”
“She’s gone because she thought we didn’t believe her! This is our fault. What if she’s in trouble now?”
“I didn’t believe her! And how is our getting into trouble along with her going to help anyone? Let’s get back inside. She was just some crazy ki- ouch!”
He clutched his cheek where Luisa had slapped him.
“Are you the same man who once stopped a mugger from robbing me in the ruins of London?”
“Luisa, I… That was a long time ago… And… And there was only one. And… and it was in the middle of a tourist trap, we both knew there were policemen nearby. I’m convinced there’s a pack of them out there, with God-knows what weapons, and she’s acting as bait, and have you seen so much as the shadow of a policeman in the last two days?”
He grabbed her arm, but she shook him off, and started striding away towards San Sempliciano. He trailed behind.
“Damn, damn, damn…” he was muttering, “haven’t so much as done an hour of Tai Chi in years…”
“Belinda!” She called out again. The silence was frightening. She imagined the people in their houses, all the familiar faces she’d seen about her in the city all her life, listening to a lone voice calling out a name, and wondering what it meant, but not daring go to the window to see. As the street opened out into Piazza San Sempliciano, she threw her voice out with all her strength, imagining they should hear her even at the top of the Duomo.
“BELINDA!”
For a long moment there was only silence. Then there it was, faint, but unmistakable.
“Profess-!”
The cry was cut off. There had been terror in girl’s voice.
“Come on, Alf, this way! She’s in Corso Garibaldi.”
There came another cry, a man’ voice, from somewhere nearby.
“Belinda!” And then, two unfamiliar words, “Mea filia!“
Luisa hesitated, confused, for an instant, then sprinted off over the cobblestones.
“Was that her? Who was that man?” Alf protested, but Luisa was already ten metres away. He started running. She was a lot faster then he thought. Panting heavily, he had just managed to come level with her when they both burst onto Corso Garibaldi.
There they were, the stuff of Alf’s nightmares, a gang of boys in their late teens, clubs and wrenches in hand, gathered around a slightly larger, older looking boy who was forcing Belinda’s legs apart, his own trousers open at the belt. One of his friends held his hand over the girl’s mouth, another two held her arms. They didn’t look hungry. They probably hadn’t missed a single meal, let alone three. They had simply, joyfully, dived headlong into barbarity. And when they saw a girl, they certainly wouldn’t use her to tell clever stories to convince respectable people to open their doors. They would just rape her.
To Alf’s relief, Luisa was stock still. At least she wasn’t hurling herself on the boys. She wasn’t even looking at them… Her eyes were wide with surprise. He followed the look. A man in some kind of medieval fancy-dress was stepping forward from a side street, a long weapon in one hand. It was a long pole with a complicated, cruel-looking metal tip. Calmly, like a normal man would chop wood, perhaps, he sank the metal axe-like thing on the end of it straight into the back of the boy who was raping Belinda. Bones cracked, flesh was rent. Luisa and Alf stared. Oh shit, oh shit…. That’s not a costume.
The rapist screamed in agony, his body writhing on the pike like an insect pinned alive onto cardboard. With easy strength, the man stretched one leg forward in front of him, bent his knee, lent the pike shaft against it, and levered his victim to one side, still howling, jerking, and spurting blood from his mouth. The body fell to the ground, the pike still in it.
In one motion, the man drew a sword and hacked the nearest boy’s head half off. Soon the smartest members of the gang were dropping their crude weapons and running. The stupidest were already gaping down at their fatal wounds in shock. Then they started screaming, too. Next, the man turned toward Alf and Luisa, sword raised. He had beautiful, pale green eyes in a dark, bearded face.
Alf never knew what he did, something inside just took over, something from the long years he’d spent in his youth, learning kung fu. A move, a second, a third… He was holding the bloody sword in his own hand, point down. The murderous man with green eyes was stepping back, gasping, clasping his wrist, those blue eyes wide with surprise. As quickly as he’d come, he disappeared down the side street.
“Alf!” Luisa exclaimed, looking at the sword. Then she looked down. The boys of the gang who’d been too slow get away were still dying, agonizingly, littered around them. There was gore everywhere.
“Drop it, Alf,” she told him, “if the police come they’ll think…”
“I’m not dropping anything,” he was still shocked at his own success in wrenching the sword from the warrior, but not too shocked to think straight. “What if he comes back with more…”
A gasp interrupted them. Belinda was rising painfully, pulling her clothes into place, sobbing. Luisa rushed to her side.
“Belinda, are you ok?” Luisa helped her get up.
“Who…? I don’t under…” She was staring in horror at her would-be rapist. He was near the end of his life, and was himself staring in horror at the blood pouring from his own mouth onto the cobbles. He was still moving, faintly, trying to breathe.
“Look away, don’t look!” Luisa was saying to herself as much as to Belinda. She forced herself to look up at her husband. Alf was poised with the sword for combat, the stance coming to him just as unconsciously as the disarming moves a few moments before. It made his portly belly all the more disproportionate.
“Professor… I heard father! It was him! He called my name!”
“What? Are you sure? So he’s not lost… In time?”
From the side street they heard the clinking of metal on metal. At a jog, the warrior who had wrought so much carnage reappeared, a group of perhaps ten men behind him, wearing similar costumes, each with a pike in hand. Two of them were holding a man in modern clothing tightly by the arms. He had greying hair, and resembled Belinda. The soldiers halted, and the green-eyed one gestured at Alf.
“Histo est guerriero estrano!” Was that Spanish? “Sagittari, paràtevi!”
Two men slipped bows from their necks, and knocked arrows on the strings. They were looking at Alf, who still had the sword in his hand.
From behind the soldiers, two older men came slowly forward, one in scarlet, the other in light blue. The scarlet man’s eyes were dark brown and intense, his grey beard trimmed tightly, and strands of long, wavy grey hair crept loose from a scarlet cap to fall over his scarlet cloak. On one arm, he wore a broad black bracelet, just like Belinda’s. The bracelet that was not on her father’s arm anymore.
The second man, dressed in a light blue robe, bore a fur stole over his shoulders, and a heavy golden chain that hung low. Straight black hair hung down to the chin about a swarthy face, with pudgy cheeks, a nose as short as it was pointed, and a double chin. As he stepped toward Alf, Belinda’s father turned a gaze of loathing on him. The soldiers averted their eyes, as though in terror.
“Qui estis?” The blue man asked. There was silence. He looked to Belinda’s father, and barked, “tradutione!”
The soldiers shook the poor man roughly until he obeyed.
“Who are you?” He asked Luisa and Alf.
Never turning from the soldiers and the strange man, Alf stepped backwards, warily.
“It’s all true.” He murmured slowly to his wife, never taking his eyes off the people from the past. “It’s all true… They’re straight from the Anabranch. On my mark, take the sword and Belinda and go as quick as you can. Hide in time – far from them!”
“But Alf…”
“Qui estis!?” The blue man barked impatiently, taking a step forward.
Belinda’s father, rough-shaken again: “Who are you?”
“Go!” Hissed Alf. “I’ll talk to them, I’ll join them if I can. Belinda, I’ll try to keep your dad alive. Get the Dreamteam. He was right. I don’t know what went wrong. Be more careful than he was!”
Luisa just stared.
The scarlet man had stepped forward, his eyes intent upon Belinda.
“Habe sua figliuola bracciale.” He told the blue man, pointing at Belinda’s wrist.
“They’ve seen her bracelet!” Alf hissed. “You have to go, before they get hold of it!”
Numbly, Luisa looked at Belinda, who was looking at her father, whose gaze was shifting from his daughter’s own time-bracelet to her face. Go! He was pleading with his eyes.
“Professor,” Belinda murmured, trembling all over. “Take the sword, let’s go. Let’s do it.”
“Qui estis? Sagittari, mirate!” The archers raised their bows, half drawn.
Luisa took the sword. It was sticky with blood. As the weapon was passed to a woman, the soldiers and their leader visibly relaxed. The archers instinctively lowered their bows just a little. They had taken it as a gesture of submission.
Alf stepped forward quickly, away from Luisa and Belinda, and towards the soldiers, his hands in the air.
“I am Alfonso Morelli,” he declared with great self importance, “alderman of Milan, and master in the arts of combat. I represent my city…”
Belinda’s father was translating, while the man in blue, the man in scarlet, and the soldiers listened intently.
Luisa and Belinda looked at each other.
“Tell me a year, professor.” Belinda whispered, raising the smooth, broad black bracelet to her mouth. “Please.. a safe year.”
Luisa thought numbly for a moment. A safe year? In the Anabranch? There weren’t many, so it wasn’t hard to choose one.
“The year 2000.” Belinda nodded, then her eyes lost focus for a moment. She looked at the blood drying on the sword in Luisa’s hand, smiled, and said to the bracelet: “The thirty-first of October, 2000.”
Yarnspinning and Storyweaving 