So far, nothing had answered these questions. She hadn’t even found out whether she herself was Three. Surely if she had been, she would have recognised bits and pieces of herself in the various Threes they had encountered. Wouldn’t she? She hadn’t. She hadn’t particularly recognised bits and pieces of Mel or Roland, either. The Threes had less in common than she had thought when she’d had only Bragi Boddason and Ling to compare. They were … just people. They were all different kinds of just people. Some were nice; some she wanted to punch. She was almost certain at least two of them were sociopaths. The only thing that was really there every time was the creativity. It wasn’t just “creativity,” though. Josiah had been vague about that. It was always a creativity that had something to do with words.
In oral societies, Three tended to be some sort of storyteller. In literate societies, Three was often a writer. It could be quite subtle. One of the future Threes was an eccentric mathematician who wrote poetry with numbers rather than words, but the numbers represented and replaced the words. Filbert was her gang’s official Liar, responsible for shoring up the gang’s reputation amongst the other gangs. Oddly, it reminded Freddy of nothing so much as another Three she had met about a month and/or four thousand years ago. It had been in what was, in Freddy’s day, Ethiopia. The Three in question had been a tribal leader whose people had been reduced and weakened by illness. Threatened by another tribe that had been growing rapidly and looking to expand its territory, the smaller tribe had fought back with words, spreading rumours of the exploits of one of its young men. When Freddy had asked Josiah what was being said about the boy—who, as far as she could tell, was a typical gawky sixteen-year-old—Josiah had replied, “The story is that his mother got pregnant last year after she drank from a pool in which a lion had been bathing. The boy sliced himself out of his mother’s womb with his fingernails and sewed her up again perfectly. He grew to adulthood in a month. He has the strength of ten men and once stole the sun for an hour because he needed it to light his mother’s cooking fire.”
“What,” Freddy had said, “you mean the eclipse we had last week?”
“Good, isn’t it?” Josiah had said. “Of course, eventually someone’s going to challenge the boy, at which point there’s going to have to be either quite a lot of trickery or quite a lot of running away.”
Freddy had read Bullfinch’s Mythology, plus several other books from the pile on the kitchen chair. She knew Three had turned the boy into a mythic hero. It was a strangely powerful thing to do with just a story.
Bragi had fought Loki with a story, too, in a way. Ling had told the villagers stories that had stopped them taking revenge on the brothers. Filbert was using stories to protect her gang. The Threes were good with words. Freddy thought they were particularly good with words as stories. It had to mean something.
What she couldn’t for the life of her decide was what the choice was all about or why it bothered her so much. She thought it gave Cuerva Lachance and Josiah a certain amount of power over Three, though she still wasn’t sure how.
*
“This is useless.” Josiah leaned wearily against the barricade. “If we win here, then what? We’ll have defended ten feet of rubble-strewn alleyway from another gang that is almost exactly like this one. If we lose here, we’ll have surrendered ten feet of rubble-strewn alleyway to another gang that is almost exactly like this one. There’s no point.”
“I think it’s the principle of the thing,” said Freddy, peering through the gap again. The other gang wasn’t in sight.
“From what I gather, gang rule is the norm throughout this entire continent,” said Josiah. “Of course, when I say ‘gather,’ I mean ‘extrapolate from nonsense words in various bastardised languages.’”
Freddy sighed. “Look, it’s been more than a thousand years since our time. You’re just feeling displaced.”
“I do not feel displaced,” he snarled. “Isn’t that your job?”
It was, but not when they visited the future. Josiah really hated visiting the future, and not, Freddy suspected, just because he had never seen himself there. “You don’t like uncertainty,” she said, “do you? In the past, you know why things are how they are because you were there when they got to be that way. Here, you don’t know what happened to make this world into this world.”
He glared at her. Josiah glared at her a lot in the future. “Don’t think you know me because you’re tagging after me all through time. You really are a duckling.”
“I’m a duckling with a little gun that shoots lightning bolts,” she reminded him. “Live with it.”
The gang warfare here was complex. Most of the cities were in ruins. As the world population had been vastly reduced by various disasters, the majority of cities had been impossible to sustain. A lot of the rich people lived in small fortified communities in what had once been the countryside. The cities, meanwhile, had been overrun by territorial gangs. The gangs formed an infrastructure of sorts. A person could be born into a particular gang, attend schools run by that gang, grow old, die, and be buried by the gang. That sort of thing was more likely if the person belonged to an old, large gang. The new, small ones aped the big ones by offering education and a certain amount of security, but their territories were constantly shifting and their leadership changing as the small gangs squabbled amongst themselves. Filbert’s gang was a newish one, an offshoot of a larger gang that had experienced a schism. At the moment, it was battling passionately with an even smaller gang for, as Josiah had noted, a few feet of alleyway.
As per unspoken agreement, the gangs fought with their weapons on their lowest settings; the result would be a matter of honourable concession rather than blood. It didn’t mean no one ever got hurt. People cheated all the time. Three days ago, Freddy had seen someone killed. She was a bit worried about the fact that it bothered her so little.
It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was hard to watch someone die, even if the someone was not on your side. It was that she had been travelling through time for nearly a year and a half. She had already seen many people die. She hadn’t got used to it, but she thought she had got a little numb.
The first time had also, temporally speaking, been her first encounter with Josiah and Cuerva Lachance.
*
They had been travelling for about two and a half months. They had visited five places and times since seventeenth-century Paris. Freddy thought she was finally getting used to the whole time-travelling thing.
Gradually, she’d acquired a more useful outfit. Jeans and a T-shirt had not been the way to go; neither had the Chinese tunic and skirt. It was best, she was finding, to wear something that didn’t quite fit anywhere but wasn’t conspicuously out of place. A tunic was a pretty good basic idea, and she had found a nice anonymous brown one in Mesopotamia. Under the tunic went black leggings. It was a boy’s outfit, but with her relatively short hair and lack of shape, she could pass more easily as a boy than she could as a girl. A shoulder bag and a shapeless black hat rounded out the outfit. People wore hats in a lot of places. When she turned up somewhere they didn’t, she could just take it off.
They had been walking beside a Macedonian river when Three had thought whatever Three had thought, and she and Josiah had looked up into a tangle of green. It was her first jungle, though not her last. It was hot and peculiarly claustrophobic, for all it counted as outdoors.