But no. No. He’d come here for a reason. He’d come here because this bus went somewhere beyond anything he knew, and because getting on it would be a sacrifice that was just a tiny way towards what Losley had suffered. He pushed forward instead of back. He’d made use of this knowledge before, hadn’t he? He remembered the bookshop. This wasn’t just his school bus, this was an old London bus too. What did London buses have that his school bus hadn’t?
He kept his eyes open even as things spiked into the corners of them. . made himself see past the pain that left pools of blood in them. . made out a figure amid the purple blotches. There, among the hazy shapes of seats ahead, was the shape of a ticket inspector. Sefton brought him closer, closer again, trying to ignore all the pain. And closer still, until the figure turned and saw him, and paid attention.
A cold shadow fell across the bundle of struggling flesh that was now more clearly defined, but yet somehow all himself. Sefton was a shape made up of fighting children that were pricking and consuming him. Sefton realized that he couldn’t look up at that figure. He could just see what might be a hand thrust demandingly close to his face. He’d been caught out. He was on this bus under an arrogant assumption. Even if he could make it the right sort of bus, he still didn’t have a ticket. He didn’t deserve to be here. He had to be his UC self now, quickly and, bluff his way through-
No, here he had to be honest.
What would his mother have said? What did all the stories say?
He knew. He put a hand into his pocket that he made exist, and took out a pound coin that he made the bodies struggling among him not steal from him.
One coin, not two, not small change. You have to pay the ferryman. He still couldn’t make himself look at what this force amounted to, standing before him. And this was just something arising on the way to wherever he was going to end up. That was what this manifestation was saying to him: This is only the beginning. He reached out and put the coin into something cold and deep.
And then the ‘ticket collector’ was gone. And he was sitting on a frozen seat in something which felt and smelt like a frozen London bus, and it was only him sitting here, and all his tormentors fled in a flapping of flesh into the surrounding structure, and there was just him in here, kept safe from pure hot darkness outside.
Sefton lowered his hands slowly to the seat and felt its protective cold. Again he breathed. Again he was free to do that. The colours outside the window suddenly changed. A real light streamed in over him. The tone of the engine changed, too. The sense of motion slowed. The bus was coming to a stop.
Sefton got unsteadily to his feet. Everything now seemed to be waiting for him. He could simply stay onboard, he realized, rather than go into the frightening unknown yet again. He could return home the same way. Again the choice, but what would be the point of that now, after he had done so much to get this far? He made his way along to the back of the bus. He could see light beyond the step. But nothing more.
He moved quickly and stepped off into nothing.
Sefton landed on his feet on a paved road with a sufficiently high camber to make him stumble towards the mud to one side of it. He turned to look around: with a roar of its engine that too quickly became inaudible, the bus had gone. He glanced at his surroundings. It was the same sort of day he’d come from, morning becoming afternoon. On his left stood the pillared front of a building whose top was obviously open to the sky, because clouds of vapour were rising from it. The pillars looked old, brown, weathered. A row of low wooden buildings, houses and shops, ran down both sides of the street. There was obviously a large town made up of such buildings all around him. The street went off into the distance in both directions until it reached a higher-level city wall. Signs in. . that was Latin? Gaudy daubs of paint brightened everything up: traders’ lures and graffiti. Had he. . gone back in time? It didn’t feel as if he had, somehow. But how could he know that? This didn’t feel like anywhere real. It was like a computer game, only the world around him appeared perfect, every bit as detailed as the world he’d come from. He bent down and felt the soil. It felt like soil. So why that sense of unreality?
He took a few steps in the direction of where he’d got off the bus. Right, there was nobody about. Not a single person. No smells of cooking or fire, just mud and brick and distant agriculture, and clean air above it. Utter silence. Not even the sound of birds or animals. No, wait a sec — from ahead of him there sounded a gentle trickling. A river was running along a cut between the buildings, fording the road, which had a few larger stones placed in it to allow passage. He stepped over. The water looked murky. He walked ahead for a while, looking carefully around him, waiting for the trap but not sensing it. There was a turning into an open square on his left now, and across the square stood a long, low building, again with that weathered stone and the columns. He could hear a noise coming from it, the sound of someone. . singing. That was where he was meant to go, then. He walked up the building’s muddy steps, noticing no other footprints, and pushed open the enormous doors.
It was like being inside a church. The dim interior was lit by candles and torches to enhance the low light filtering through the high, narrow windows. Two rows of pillars defined a central aisle, while the stone floor was covered with dried plants, rushes or grasses that crunched under his feet. At the other end of the hall was a raised area, and there sat a man, and it was he who’d been singing, something sad and passionate in Latin. And now he’d suddenly stopped, and was looking at Sefton with keen interest. He was dressed in a toga, and had his hair brushed down over his forehead, in that Roman way. He slowly smiled.
Sefton felt he should say something, but didn’t know what. The man stepped down from his raised chair, and walked towards him, studying his face intently. Sefton then realized that he recognized the man but, like in a dream, still didn’t know who he was.
‘Are you an actor?’ he said.
The man reached out a hand and laid it on the side of Sefton’s face. Then he leaned forward and kissed him on the mouth. .
Until Sefton took a step back. He wasn’t comfortable with that. He wanted to know what that gesture meant here.
The man chuckled. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose I am.’ And his voice was English and upper class. Of course. ‘I’m Brutus.’
‘Brutus?’ Sefton was thinking how this was absolutely the last person he’d expected to encounter on this journey. ‘As in. .?’
‘Marcus Junius Brutus. Or Brutus of Troy. Or Brutus Greenshield.’
Sefton tried to remember what he’d seen on telly about Roman history. ‘What, you’re the bloke who killed Julius Caesar? Was he-?’
‘From Troy? No. Those three names I gave you are those of three different people.’
‘Do you mean that you aren’t. . real?’
Brutus sighed. ‘You’ve probably realized there’s an element, to all this, of you finding what you set out to find-’
‘I’ve never even heard of Brutus Greenshield!’
‘-and there’s also an element that was chosen by me. I need you to realize that this isn’t entirely an expedition into your own mind. The Romans never had any difficulty in seeing omens. In fact the call from outside themselves was something they welcomed. But people from your time do have this tendency to regard everything as internalized. You think you’re making the world yourselves, at every moment. Sorry, but no.’
‘I didn’t think that at all,’ Sefton said carefully. ‘In fact I came here to find out things I don’t know.’
‘Excellent. So where do you think you are?’
‘London. Roman London?’
‘Correct. Well, to the extent that it’s what this place is pretending to be at the moment: the city I founded in the country I founded. Britain, the country of Brutus! Did you know that was what people once thought? I thought it would be enjoyable to make the place look like that for you. But really, this is one of many. . yes, places — let’s call them that, since there’s some truth to that — places that orbit London. They affect London, they make it the way it is because of their proximity.’ He looked playful all of a sudden. ‘Did you notice that while you’re here you’ve lost the Sight?’