A Blink of the Screen

until after the father’s accident. Didn’t know enough about axes, I suppose.
    But Nimue … What a girl. She was only … er …
    ‘How old were you, when we met?’
    She wipes her hands on a bit of rag. We’d had to grease the bearings with pig fat.
    ‘Fifteen,’ she says. ‘I think. Listen, there’s another hour of water above the mill, but I don’t think the gennyrator will last that long. It’s shaking right merrily.’
    She looks speculatively at the nobles.
    ‘What a bunch of by-our-Lady jacks,’ she says.
    ‘Jocks.’
    ‘Yes. Jocks.’
    I shrug. ‘One of them will be your king,’ I tell her.
    ‘Not my king, Mervin. I will never have a king,’ she says, and grins.
    By which you can tell she’s learned a lot in twelve months. Yes, I broke the rules and told her the truth. And why not? I’ve broken all the rules to save this damn country, and it doesn’t look like the universe is turning into this tiny ball .005 Ångstroms across. First, I don’t think this is our timeline. It’s all wrong, like I said. I think I was knocked sideways, into some sort of other history. Maybe a history that’ll never really exist except in people’s heads, because time-travel is a fantasy anyway. You hear mathematicians talk about imaginary numbers which are real, so I reckon this is an imaginary place made up of real things. Or something. How should I know? Perhaps enough people believing something makes it real.
    I’d ended up in Albion, although I didn’t find out until later. Not Britain, not England. A place very much like them, a place that shares a lot of things with them, a place so close to them that maybe ideas and stories leak across – but a place that is its own place.
    Only something went wrong somewhere. There was someone missing. There should have been a great king. You can fill in his name. He’s out there somewhere, in the crowd. It’s lucky for him I turned up.
    You want me to describe this world. You want to hear about the jousts, the pennants, the castles. Right. It’s got all of that. But everything else has this, like, thin film of mud over it. The difference between the average peasant’s hut and a pigsty is that a good farmer will sometimes change the straw in a pigsty. Now, get me right – no one’s doing any repressing, as far as I can see. There’s no slavery as such, except to tradition, but tradition wields a heavy lash. I mean, maybe democracy isn’t perfect, but at least we don’t let ourselves be outvoted by the dead.
    And since there’s no strong man in charge there’s a little would-be king in every valley, and he spends most of his time fighting other would-be kings, so the whole country is in a state of half-hearted war. And everyone goes through life proudly doing things clumsily just because their forefathers did them that way, and no one really enjoys anything, and good fields are filling with weeds …
    I told Nimue I came from another country, which was true enough.
    I talked to her a lot because she was the only one with any sense around the place. She was small, and skinny, and alert in the same way that a bird is alert. I said I broke the rules to save this country but if I’m honest, I’ll have to say I did it all for her. She was the one bright thing in a world of mud, she’s nice to have around, she learns quickly, and – well, I’ve seen what the women here look like by the time they’re thirty. That shouldn’t happen to anyone.
    She talked and she listened to me while she did the housework, if that’s what you can call moving the dirt around until it got lost.
    I told her about the future. Why not? What harm could it do? But she wasn’t very impressed. I guess she didn’t know enough to be impressed. Men on the moon were all one with the fairies and the saints. But piped water caught her interest, because every day she had to go to a spring with a couple of wooden buckets on a yoke thing round her neck.
    ‘Every cottage has this?’ she said, eyeing me carefully over the top of the broom.
    ‘Sure.’
    ‘Not just the rich?’
    ‘The rich have more bathrooms,’ I said. Then I had to explain about bathrooms.
    ‘You people could do it,’ I told her. ‘You just need to dam a spring up in the hills, and find a – a blacksmith or someone to make some copper pipes. Or lead or iron, at a pinch.’
    She looked wistful.
    ‘My father wouldn’t allow it,’ she said.
    ‘Surely he’d see the benefits of having water laid on?’ I