The Map of Time (Trilogía Victoriana #1)(74)

With astonishing calm, he allowed himself to be led to the place of execution. Solomon himself was going to shoot him. As he stood in front of the youth and opened the little doors in his chest so that the hidden cannon could take aim, the boy smiled at him and spoke for the first time: “Go ahead and kill me, then I’ll kill you.” Solomon tilted his head, wondering if the youth’s words contained some hidden message he needed to decipher or were simply a meaningless phrase, and decided it did not matter either way.

Without further ado, and feeling an almost jaded disgust, he fired at the insolent boy. The bullet hit him in the stomach, knocking him to the ground.

“I’ve killed you, now kill me,” he challenged.

He waited a few moments, to see if the boy stirred, and when he did not, shrugged his shoulders and ordered his flunkies to get rid of the body before returning to their chores. The guards obeyed, carrying the body outside the palace, then threw it down a slope as if they were throwing away a piece of refuse. The body rolled down the hill and came to rest next to a pile of rubble, where it lay face up, covered in blood. A beautiful pale yellow full moon lit up the night sky. The youth smiled at it as though it were a death’s head. He had succeeded in escaping from the palace, but the boy he had been when he entered it had been left behind. He had emerged from there a man with a clear destiny: to gather together the few survivors, organize them, and train them to fight the automatons. To achieve this he would only have to stop the bullet in his stomach from killing him, but that would be no problem. He knew that his will to live was stronger than the bullet’s desire to kill him, stronger than the piece of metal embedded in his intestines. He had prepared for this moment during his captivity, preparing to endure the searing pain, to understand it, subdue and diminish it until he had worn down the bullet’s patience. It was a long duel, a dramatic struggle that lasted three days and three moonlit nights all alone in the rubble, until finally the bullet surrendered. It had realized it was not dealing with a body like that of the others; the youth’s deep hatred of the automatons made him cling to life.

And yet his hatred was not a result of the automaton uprising, or the horrific murder of his parents and siblings, or the wanton destruction of the planet, not even to Solomon’s sickening indifference when he shot him. No, his hatred was rooted even further in the past. His was an old, unresolved hatred dating back centuries, to the time of his paternal great-grandfather, the first Shackleton to lose his life because of an automaton. You may have heard of the Turk, Mephisto, and other automaton chess players who were in fashion decades ago. Like them, Dr. Phibes was a mechanical doll who understood the secrets of chess as if he had invented the game himself. Dressed in an orange suit, a green bow tie, and a blue top hat, Dr. Phibes invited visitors to come into his fairground tent and challenge him to a game of chess for four shillings. The contemptuous manner in which he inflicted defeat on his male opponents and the chivalry with which he allowed the ladies to beat him made him into a celebrity, and people clamored to challenge him. His creator, the inventor Alan Tirell, boasted that his doll had even beaten the world chess champion, Mikhail Tchigorin.

However, his profitable appearances at traveling fairs ended abruptly when one opponent became incensed when the insolent doll trounced him in less than five moves and then, adding insult to injury, amicably offered him his wooden hand to shake. Seized with rage, the fellow rose from his seat, and before the fairground barker could stop him, pulled a revolver from his pocket and shot the doll straight through the chest, showering orange-colored splinters everywhere. The loud report alarmed the crowd, and the assailant managed to flee during the commotion before the barker had a chance to demand damages. Within minutes he found himself alone with a Dr. Phibes, who was leaning slightly to one side in his seat. The barker was wondering how he would explain all this to Mr. Tirell, when he saw something that startled him. Dr. Phibes was wearing his usual smile, but a trickle of blood was oozing from the bullet hole in his chest. Horrified, the barker hurriedly pulled the curtain across and walked over to the automaton. After examining the doll with some trepidation, he discovered a small bolt on its left side. Drawing it back, he was able to open Dr. Phibes as if he were a sarcophagus. Inside, covered in blood and dead as a doornail was the man with whom, unbeknownst to him, he had been working all these months. His name was Miles Shackleton: a miserable wretch who, having no other means of supporting his family, had accepted the trickery Tirell offered him after discovering his talent for chess. When the inventor arrived at the tent and discovered the calamity, he refrained from informing the police about what had happened, fearing he would be arrested for fraud. He silenced the barker with a generous sum and simply reinforced Dr. Phibes with an iron plate to protect his new occupant from the wrath of future opponents. But Miles’s substitute was nowhere near as skilled at chess as his predecessor, and Dr. Phibes’s reputation began to wane before finally vanishing altogether, rather like Miles Shackleton, who quite simply disappeared off the face of the earth, more than likely buried in a ditch between fairgrounds. When at last his family learned from the fairground man what had become of him, they decided to honor him in the only way they could: by keeping his memory alive, relaying his sad tale through the generations, like a torch whose flame, more than a century later, lit up the pupils of the executed youth who after lifting himself off the ground, glanced back at Solomon’s palace with a look of silent hatred, and murmured to himself, although in reality he was speaking to History: “Now it’s my turn to kill you.” At first with faltering, then resolute steps, he disappeared into the ruins, determined to fulfill his destiny, which was none other than to become Captain Derek Shackleton, the man who would defeat the king of the automatons.