Prologue
The city square was utterly silent as the crowd waited in tense, almost reverential anticipation. The only sounds that broke the stillness were the praying of the man atop the wooden platform, the sobbing of his wife at the bottom of the steps, and the squeaking of the pulley as the blade was slowly raised. The man’s prayer was rudely interrupted as he was seized and forced down to his knees, his head jammed into position. The lever was tripped, there was a brief scraping sound as the blade descended swiftly and then a duller sound, not unlike that of an axe sinking into wood. The man’s head fell into the wicker basket and the crowd roared its approval.
Joseph Ignace Guillotin’s device, proposed in the Assembly by the venerable physician as a “merciful” method of execution, had not been in use for more than a few months, but its blade had already been thoroughly tempered in the blood of the victims of the Revolution. The mob had stormed the Tuileries and the Swiss Guards, who had been ordered to cease firing by the king, were massacred. Louis XVI was held prisoner with his family in the old house of the Knights Templars and the provisional government was in the hands of Georges Jacques Danton of the Cordeliers. Marie Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, whose Declaration of the Rights of Man had been hailed and accepted by the National Assembly as the embodiment of the principles of [[“Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite,”]] had been branded a traitor and had fled for his life to Austria. The bloody September Massacres, in which over one thousand aristocrats would be sacrificed on the altar of the new regime, were underway. The rest of Europe would be deeply shocked at the events in Paris, at Versailles, in Lyons, Rheims, Meaux, and Orleans; however, they were just a prelude to the excesses of the Jacobins under Robespierre’s Reign of Terror.
With glazed eyes, Alex Corderro watched the man’s decapitated body being dragged off the guillotine. The executioner paused only long enough to give the blade a quick wipe with a red-stained rag before he motioned for the next victim to be brought up. The dead man’s wife was frogmarched up the steps. She was incapable of standing and had to be held up for the crowd’s inspection. Once again, the mob fell into an eerie silence. A hungry silence. The woman swayed unsteadily and, for a moment, her eyes came into focus. She saw her husband’s head being dumped out of the wicker basket and she doubled over, vomiting upon the wooden platform. It was all Alex could do to keep himself from doing likewise. He had thought that he would be prepared for this, but it was nothing like what he had imagined. This was a far cry from Sidney Carton’s romantic last hurrah in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. This was wholesale slaughter and Alex Corderro could not bear to watch it any longer. The squeaking of the pulley was like fingernails scraping on a blackboard and it made him shiver. It would have been, he thought, a far, far better thing had he stayed home where he belonged, in the 27th century, where such things were only to be read about in books and gleaned from information retrieval systems, where their graphic reality did not intrude upon the senses with all the power of a butcher’s maul.
Alex was a private in the Temporal Corps. This was his first hitch to be served in Minus Time. France’s army, the most efficient and progressive fighting force in all of Europe at the Revolution’s start, was in a sad state of decay. The purchase of commissions had been abolished and most of the officers, members of the now-despised aristocratic class, had fled the country. The Assembly was anxious to rebuild the army, since war seemed imminent, and a nationwide call for volunteers went out, which call would soon be replaced by an order for the conscription of all single men between the ages of 18 and 40. This order was to provide, in a few short years, a mighty army for Napoleon. Alex was a double volunteer. He had volunteered for enlistment in the 27th century and, after training and implant education, he had been clocked out to the late 1700s, to volunteer again for service in the Revolutionary Army. It had been determined by the Referee Corps that this would be the most effective way to infiltrate soldiers of the Temporal Corps into the French Army, for service in the War of the First Coalition.
Alex didn’t know why he was going to be fighting, why he was about to be placed into the front ranks of the war against Austria and Prussia. Soldiers were never told such things. He knew only that two major powers in the 27th century had submitted yet another grievance to the extranational Referee Corps for arbitration and that temporal units from both sides had been clocked out to the past to fight a “war on paper” on a battleground of history. To those who determined the outcome, it would be a “war on paper.” To the Referees, Alex would be just another factor in the point spread. For Alex, it would be a very real war; a war in which the odds of his survival would be very, very low. It was something he had considered when he had enlisted, but at the time he had dismissed the possibility of his being killed as quite unlikely. After all, he was a modern man, demonstrably superior to these primitives. He had thought that it would be a grand adventure. Now he found that he no longer felt that way.
Paris was not the romantic place he had imagined it to be. He had seen the violence in the streets; he had watched aristocrats being wheeled to the guillotine in parades of tumbrels as the citoyens and citoyennes ran alongside the carts, jeering at the condemned and pelting them with refuse. He had seen the blade descend over and over and he had watched the old knitting women, the tricotteuses, trying to clamber up onto the platform to get locks of hair from the decapitated heads as souvenirs. He had seen the children jump up and down and clap their hands with glee as the wicker baskets reaped their grisly harvest. He had seen too much.
Feeling numb, he turned away and began to push through the mob, receiving not a few shoves in return as people angrily repulsed him for blocking their view of the proceedings. Alex heard the dull sound of the blade severing the woman’s head and cringed, redoubling his efforts to fight his way free of the crowd. He fought his way clear, stumbling away from the Place de la Revolution to wander aimlessly through the city streets in a state of shock. War was something he could handle. This callous, systematic killing, on the other hand, this chopping off of heads methodically, like the slicing of so many stalks of celery, was more than he could take. It brought back an image from his survival training, a graphic image of his drill instructor showing the boots how to kill a chicken by biting down upon its neck and giving a slight twist, the head coming off the chicken and still being held in the drill instructor’s teeth as he tossed the wildly flapping, thrashing body of the bird into their midst, spattering them with blood and causing several of the boots to faint. As he swayed through the streets of Paris like a drunkard, Corderro imagined the executioner biting off the heads of the aristocrats and dumping their bodies off the platform and into the crowd until the streets were choked with headless corpses lurching wildly about, knocking into walls and splashing citizens with blood.
He lost track of time. It was growing late and only the increasing flow of people past him told him that the gory festivities had ended for the day and that the mass exodus from the square had begun. The entertainment was not yet finished for the day however. There was still more sport ahead, perhaps not as dramatic, but equally significant for the participants. He was caught up in the current of the crowd and carried to the West Barricade, like a paper ship floating in a river. There, the portly Sergeant Bibot of the Revolutionary Army conducted the evening’s entertainment.
Each afternoon and evening, just before the gates closed for the night, a parade of market carts lined up to leave the city, bound for farms in the outlying districts. Each afternoon and evening, desperate aristocrats who had fled their homes to go into hiding in some corner of the city tried to steal out of Paris in order to escape the wrath of the Republic. Seeking to evade the clutches of the Committee of Public Safety and the blood-thirsty public prosecutor, Citoyen Fouquier-Tinville, they tried to sneak out past alert soldiers such as Sergeant Bibot and flee the country to find safe haven in England, Austria, or Prussia. Their pathetic ruses seldom worked. Though they tried to disguise themselves as beggars, merchants, farmers, men dressing up as women and women dressing up as men, their lack of experience in such subterfuges invariably resulted in their apprehension. They were arrested and marched off to confinement, to await their appearance before the public prosecutor, which without exception was followed by a humiliating ride through the streets of Paris in the two-wheeled tumbrels and a short walk up a flight of wooden steps into the waiting arms of Madame la Guillotine. To the once-proud aristocrats who tried to sneak out through the city gates, it was a final, desperate gamble. To the citizens of the Republic who thronged to the barricades to watch their efforts, it was a delightful game.