After the Flood, Chapter One

City lights were sparkling far below a jet-black sky, outside the high arched windows of Nottingham Castle’s ancestral hall. Inside the enormous vaulted space, its shadows dispelled only by a few flickering candles, stood Joe of The Four Heroes and Gala of the Next Four. Both looked just as they always did, he in dark clothing with his black hat upon his long brown hair, and she in a black hat too, though hers had a scarlet plume and the rest of her clothing likewise suggested a pirate, especially the cutlass at her belt. On the polished oaken boards by their feet sat a large silver disc fitted with flight controls and a motor.

“Dinner was delightful, as before, Gala,” said Joe. “But what are we doing here, and why will we be requiring the F.P. Lightspeed?”

“It’s as I told you when I suggested this evening, Joe,” Gala replied. “We need to get to know each other better. There’s been so little time for introductions until now. However, a greater understanding between our respective teams is clearly indicated. You’re as anxious as I am to avoid any further…disputes, as so nearly occurred on the night we lost that robot’s head.”

Joe nodded grimly. Gala would have tortured the Next Four member D’Carthage for his part in the debacle she referred to, had The Four Heroes not intervened, and they were aware too of her history of doing the same to his colleague Steam before they met. The brutal way in which Gala treated those under her command had made Joe and his team-mates extremely wary of any sort of alliance with her, let alone handing over the role of Nottingham’s protectors to the Next Four as Gala insisted it was prophesized they would. Certainly, there was much about Gala that Joe had yet to understand.

“Then by all means, please proceed,” he said to her.

Gala raised her hand with the palm upward, and a sphere of red light flashed into being above it and took on the form of a small square object with rectangular buttons on its face.

“I’ve had The Chancellor destroy all the Time-Shifting Devices but this one,” said she. “They were only ever intended for use on the day we saved the world, and they’re too dangerous to leave lying around – the incidents with Lord Qualtrough and the alternate 2596 are proof enough of that. However, this last one will suffice for what I have to show you. So to answer your question, Joe, tonight we’re going on a journey. It will be the first of many we’ll take together, all of them through time.”

With a smile, Gala stepped onto the Flying Platform Lightspeed. Joe followed her and started the vehicle up, which with a gentle whirr rose from the flooring.

“To answer your second question, this machine of yours flies all but silently,” Gala went on. “That will help keep us observers, rather than participants in the past events we’re about to see. We’ll also have to shield ourselves psychically from that era’s inhabitants, as we did when we last time-travelled, but that won’t be a problem. I’m well used to it. This particular period is one I visit all the time.”

With those enigmatic words, Gala held the Time-Shifter ready. Joe, wondering not only at her plans but also, once again, at the intimate knowledge of The Four Heroes she had somehow gained, which apparently extended even to the difference in engine-noise levels between their various transports, dutifully took the Lightspeed up. As they approached the high ceiling Gala summoned a silver-blue circle of light into their flight-path, and through this time-portal the disc and its two passengers shot. Night-time Nottingham, the shadowy castle hall and the present moment vanished as one.

The place that awaited Gala and Joe on the other side of the portal could not have appeared more different from the one they had just left, and for a moment the sight of it alone was enough to appall Joe’s senses. Then, however, its true horror became clear to him, as he saw that they had travelled only in time and not in distance. The view he was beholding was the still the place he loved above all others, but it was changed almost beyond recognition.

The F.P. Lightspeed was cruising at a great altitude, and though it was daytime, there was something terribly wrong with the sky. A black heaven, more than mere cloud, hung overhead, and on the horizon a strip of sickly pinkish-yellow half-light circled the world. This lurid illumination disclosed to the two observers a bleak ocean, stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction, and at its centre a tiny island that Joe recognised. It was the Nottingham of long ago, a tiny settlement perched atop a rocky hillside, boasting only a church, a cluster of houses and the castle where the Next Four dwelled in the present day. Joe had visited it once before so it was familiar to him now, even though its buildings were far more run-down than he remembered and its environs were different indeed. Nottingham’s founders, the family of his comrade Bendigo, had chosen a towering highland as the location for their home because it was easily defensible from invaders. Now though, the waves lapped the very stones of the hill’s summit, and the ancient town was the only dot of land anywhere in sight. The acres of verdant countryside that had once surrounded it lay rotting fathoms beneath the deep.

Gala anticipated Joe’s question.

“We’re in the first Dark Advent,” said she. “Around two hundred years after the time of your friend Bendigo. Welcome to Nottingham.”

Finally Joe tore his eyes from the grim vista before him, and turned to his companion.

“The Dark Advents,” he repeated. “The Prophecy of the Flame speaks of them, that much I know. Four epochs, spread throughout Nottingham’s past, when suffering and hardship of an unimaginable kind descended on the city. We saw the third on our previous time-travels with Steam, so I can understand well enough that this is another. But Gala…”

Joe rose from the Lightspeed’s controls and gazed about him, opening both his hands.

“The sky, this flood…Gala, what has become of our home? What can possibly have caused this?”

“There’s more,” was Gala’s solemn reply. “Take us down, and you’ll see.”

At Joe’s command the flying platform skimmed towards the island and its paltry rooftops and alleys. At the first sight of figures stirring below, both the visitors to that time-zone summoned up their telepathic powers to conceal their presence from the local residents, and unseen and unheard they sped past dilapidated buildings and run-down shacks to the castle grounds. There, in a paved courtyard before the grand manse’s frontage, an extremely ragged populace was gathering.

“We’re just in time for morning devotions,” Gala remarked to Joe, as they drew to a hover above the crowd.

On the castle balcony a hugely fat man was emerging into the tainted daylight, his blubbery frame resplendent in fine clothing and his brow adorned with laurel wreaths. Accompanying him was an entourage of sorts, the mysterious robed and cowled members of which Joe took to be ministers or curates, while the function of the stony-faced, spear-bearing soldiers was clear enough. The gross man glared down at the huddled masses in the square, and with one accord they knelt.

“Bow! Kneel!” he boomed unnecessarily, in an oily and self-satisfied voice. “Do your duty to your lord, whose benevolence has spared you from the evil that curses our race!”

“That’s the Burghermeister,” Gala explained to Joe. “Keep him in mind. He’ll be significant later.”

“Only through my great and generous leadership, only through the holy work of my high priests, do you stand here today the chosen few of this stricken land,” the Burghermeister went on. “Through us, you alone will live. But the happy position you occupy, a position fortunate beyond the lot of all others, is not some mere gift for the taking. Worship always the high priests who gave you back your humble lives! Serve forever the mighty liege whose orders they obey! And so to your daily labours, people of Nottingham, remembering well the words your Burghermeister has spoken!”

Joe looked on in stunned disbelief as the thin and weary townsfolk shuffled away to their work. “Tyranny? Slavery? One man a self-proclaimed emperor? In Nottingham?” he exclaimed. “Gala, how…?”

“How can this be?” she finished for him. “Why do the people toil in poverty under some despot who claims to be their saviour? Why don’t they rise up against him? Simple. They know what the alternative is. Come along, and I’ll show you.”

END OF CHAPTER ONE