Qui ameraientjadis,'

and it seemed like the whole world, the entire human race, eight centuries of it suddenly realising their mistake and being glad that things were right now, joined in and sang:

'Orseraisesamis

Orpri Deu de la sus.

Qu 'a lor fin soie pris.'

Giovanni blinked and reached for his handkerchief. He was crying for pure joy. He was thinking of the royalties.

Talking of royalties; the castle suddenly deflated and fell to the ground, and out of nowhere stepped a man. A tall man, dazzled by light he hadn't seen for eight hundred years, a man stooping and stiff, nursing his pet rat. A man who had been wronged, and who was going to set things right.

'Blondel, my dear chap,' he said, 'this really is most awfully decent of you, you really shouldn't have bothered, you know, I was getting on splendidly, digging tunnels and so forth. But ...' He stopped, and breathed in the pure, wild air, and soaked up the light until he seemed to glow with it. 'Thank you, my dear fellow,' he said.

'Your Majesty,' Blondel replied. He was kneeling. There were tears streaming down his face, just like the teardrops painted on the side of the rubber castle. 'Your Majesty,' he repeated. 'It was nothing.'

The King reached out a stiff hand and raised him up. The light didn't seem to be troubling him now; indeed, he looked like a man who would never be troubled by anything ever again.

'Right,' he said. 'Now, then.'

Timestorms are, of course, much rarer these days than they used to be in five hundred years' time, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Time Wardens, and as the threat they will pose receded, humanity will forget the almost indescribable chaos they will cause and will have neglected to be about to take even the most elementary precautions, such as having their names and dates of birth tattooed indelibly on their foreheads.

In a timestorm, events which in the usual course of things will have happened or will happen consecutively suddenly happen concurrently. In other words, people are born, live long and purposeful lives, select a pension scheme which will grow with them, marry, spend small fortunes on carpets, have children, age gracefully and die all at the same time. Trees are simultaneously acorns, oaks and HB pencils. All the days of the week take place at once. Endowment policies mature on payment of the first premium, and vintage wines suddenly fall drastically in price. Such concepts as relativity, the laws of thermodynamics and early closing cease to have any meaning. Giving up smoking becomes easy but pointless.

One kind of timestorm has effects that are so devastating as to be almost without exception terminal; and it was with some relief that the Caernarvon Commission was able to report that none of the reported instances of such a catastrophe having taken place could be factually substantiated.

Once someone has become caught up in one, he can never get out again; and n.o.body undergoes the phenomenon without incurring material ruin, irreversible psychological damage and a free digital stereo alarm clock radio.

'Where are we?' Guy shouted.

He didn't want to, but it seemed that his role in life, over the last however-long-it-was-now, was to ask that sort of question; as if some sort of unseen Narrator needed him to establish the mise en scene.

'I don't know,' Giovanni yelled back. 'Do you honestly think it matters?'

Well, no, Guy conceded, probably not. Not particularly likely that anything matters, or will ever do so again. I mean, this is it, isn't it?

A tiny voice in the back of his mind agreed that yes, it probably was.

Time and s.p.a.ce are, of course, connected at a fundamental level. To give a basic example: because of tectonic shift, the various land ma.s.ses are no longer where they used to be, and the people who invested in valuable building plots on the strip of land joining England and France have long since given up trying to get hold of the representatives of Beaumont Street Realty who sold them to them, and died.

In other words, where you are depends to a great extent on when you are. However, when you are in the middle of a timestorm so ma.s.sive in scale that eight centuries of history are being rolled back like the duvet on the bed of Causality, the whole thing becomes academic, and the only really important question to consider is whether or not it's ever going to stop.

'What was that?' Guy screamed dutifully.

'1789,' Giovanni replied, emerging from under a log. 'Didn't you see its markings?'

The huge shadow that had momentarily blotted out the sun receded into the distance, became a small, vividly bright spot on the sun's disc, and exploded like a firework. About fifteen seconds later there was a soft, distant plop.

'Pity,' Giovanni said. 'We did good business in 1789. The French Revolution, you know.'

'Ah,' Guy replied. He listened, and noticed the absence of a sound. It had been going on for some time, getting louder and louder and worrying him very much. If it was worth trying to find something inside his own experience which came within long rifle shot of resembling it, he would suggest that it sounded like enormous reels of film ticking through the gate of a projector backwards.

He lifted his head and looked around. Something very strange had happened to the surface of the earth.

It had happened quite quickly. One moment, there had been King Richard and Blondel and, in the background, the sagging rubber castle and a crowd of bemused villagers. The next moment; well, moments had been pretty plentiful after that. The trick had been not to be hit by them as they ricocheted off each other and sang screaming through the air. As for the landscape, it had sort of faded away. It was as if (and the librarian of Guy's meagre archive of imagery started to giggle hysterically when the request came through for this one) the world was a huge watercolour painting which had just been put under the cold tap. First it had run, and then it had been washed away.

'Giovanni,' Guy asked quietly, 'are you still there?'

'Depends,' Giovanni replied. 'It's all down to criteria really, isn't it?'

'You what?'

By way of ill.u.s.tration, Giovanni stuck his fingers into Guy's eyes.

'Look,' Guy said, 'just stop clowning about and answer me. Are you there or ...

'You didn't feel that, then?'

'What?'

'Or this?'

'What?'

'Or,' Giovanni said, grunting with the effort, 'this?'

'Look,' Guy said, 'will you stop it and ...

Giovanni put the knife down. 'Part of me's here,' he said. 'Part of you, too. The rest ...

They both ducked. There were three large bangs as the main factors leading to the Industrial Revolution were torn up by the roots and flung into the air, or at least flung. Snippets of speech floated down and settled round them, still gibbering faintly. Fortunately for Guy's sanity, they weren't in languages he knew.

'Stuff it,' he said, 'would it make it any easier if I didn't want to know what was happening?'

Giovanni shrugged. 'No,' he said. 'What's happening is that the historical part of you, and me, has been vaporised. All that's left is what ...' Giovanni considered for a moment, during which time a splinter of the American War of Independence floated down like a sycamore seed and lodged in his hair. 'What you're really made up of, I suppose,' he concluded lamely. 'In your case, inquisitiveness, fear and a certain amount of angry disbelief. In my case a strong will to self-preservation coloured by a strong dash of financial ac.u.men. Have you any idea,' he added, 'what this lot's doing to the exchange rate?'

'But...'

'Exactly,' Giovanni replied smugly. 'The first time I met you, I put you down as a but-and-three-dots sort of person. Me, I'm more of a therefore.'

But Guy wasn't listening. He was looking up at what he stubbornly persisted in thinking of as the sky. The greatest motion picture of all time was about to start.

It started far off in the future, and it employed a range of split-screen techniques beyond the wildest dreams of any mortal director. There were billions of them, tiny little images, each showing a tiny segment of an overall image which, taken together, Guy supposed was The World. And each individual film crew was using that rather arty style whereby the camera is supposed to be looking through the hero's eyes. To make it that bit more baffling (although Guy knew several people, most of whom wore scruffy old tweed jackets and smoked pipes, who'd undoubtedly have approved) the whole thing was being shown backwards.