Prologue
The bright full moon looked down from the cold sky into the desert, at the majestic dunes in their lonely songs, wonderful oases offering refuge to the tired and the lost, and the great city of Aswan, built in the sand.
It also looked down on dung beetles that did their dirty work under moonlight since time immemorial.
Apart from the guards patrolling the fire lit walls, it seemed the whole city was asleep. But it was not so. The assassins, whores, thieves, and dung beetles, active in the cities, were joined by another man, whose work did not involve the cover of the night. His task tonight was to escape death, which at this point seemed impossible.
From the moon’s point of view, the man ran left and right, through narrow streets of Aswan, jumping over pots and carpets. However cunning and fast he was, though, the horseman was on him, giving chase. Which wasn’t that difficult, as he had an extra pair of legs, and the man running away was neither cunning nor fast.
The fugitive sprinted among short, stocky houses, constantly muttering strange words. The horseman could hear him, but did not pay too much attention to what he assumed to be incoherent rambling before an imminent death.
The running man burst into the square and finally stopped at the city well, breathing hard. The horsemen smiled. There was nowhere to run. He rode slowly to the man and unsheathed his nimcha.
The next moment, a large wooden brigantine appeared in the air and remained there, defying gravity and common sense. A rope ladder came down from it, and the thankful man climbed up them and disappeared inside.
The ship then disappeared with a loud BOOM and a flurry of purple bubbles, dancing around the now muttering horseman.
His horse flinched at the explosion, but remained in place. The man had his eyes wide open for a while, but then he put the nimcha back in the scabbard, turned his mount around and went back to where he came from, never to visit Aswan again.
Later he used his strange encounter to form a new religion.
Willy Woodenhead was extremely pleased with his new line of work. He often thought of old times, when Davy suggested founding a spacetime rent-a-ship company. He wasn’t sure what he was getting into, nor what a rent-a-ship even meant. After a few years, however, he felt much more confident and jovial, which was a big thing for him.
It all began when Vlad Lotron, a French-Romanian scientist, found a complex and genius way of harnessing light to travel through time. The way it worked… will not be described here. It would be too long and tedious. The important thing was it worked.
Vlad tried to change his present, and the future, by traveling into the past. However, he made a tiny mistake in his calculations and ended up hundreds of years further in the past than he had hoped, as well as a few thousand kilometers west.
He couldn’t have known, of course, that there was no way of changing the future.
For three long years he had had incredible adventures in the Caribbean, which will not be described here, as they would be too unbelievable. Yet, he found himself dying in a tavern, with a rapier in his heart, as a consequence of a rowdy fight with the tavern keeper over the innocence of his daughter. His machine lay half-buried in the sands of a desert island, until it was discovered by Iron Davy, Vlad’s guide and friend.
Davy was one of the most famous and successful bounty hunters in the Caribbean at the time, and he wasn’t called Iron for nothing. His real name was David, and he hailed from the Mediterranean, rumored among other things to be the offspring of Alexander the Great. Most of the rumors probably came from Davy himself; but his courageous corsair capers made them sound credible.
One other reason why he was famous was his unmistakable hunch for good business offers. He could smell out a bargain in a bin of Bajan flying fish. So when he saw the machine, on a map his friend and customer had left with his things, he saw an inexhaustible bag of gold.
His glory and riches wouldn’t be easily attainable if it weren’t for his partner and pal, Willy Woodenhead. A small, chubby pirate, he earned his nickname by being the only pirate to have survived head surgery. By his account, after a terrible tussle with a kraken, he was mortally wounded when he foolishly tried to liberate his captain from the jaws of the beast. The fate of the rest of the crew would have befallen him, had it not been for the dexterity of the Jungle Witchdoctor. He replaced a part of his skull with a perfectly carved piece of wood. From that moment on, Willy became surprisingly skillful and talented in technical things. And seeing as how he survived a Witchdoctor surgery, he also became an irredeemable optimist.
Together with Iron Davy he reworked an old brigantine to house Lotron’s time machine. They named her The Bride of Time. As was mentioned, he wasn’t really sure what he was getting into, but he felt good working on the ship, and he trusted Davy and his nose.
The initial crew consisted of drunks and sailor who were different from the common folk only by their slightly lower dose of skepticism. However, after their first few jobs and subsequent stories, more people from all over the time wanted to work for them.
Now, as this story begins, their company did well. Business was good. Life was good.
