‘And I’m sure he thanks you for it.’ The man’s hand slipped down to rest casually on the hilt of his sword. The silent one spat once more, clasped his comrade’s upper arm and pulled him away. As I watched them go I saw there was a line of similarly dressed men, perhaps thirty, working with shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction on a ditch by the side of the road. It looked like a chain gang right down to a large man in beige tights, a russet tunic with sweat stains around the arm holes and a sword at his belt. The only reason he wasn’t wearing sinister mirrored sunglasses was because they hadn’t been invented yet.

My young friend with the sword followed my gaze. ‘Thieves,’ he said.

‘What did they steal?’ I asked.

‘My birthright,’ he said. ‘And they are stealing it still.’

Some of the men were lowering hollowed-out tree trunks into the ditch which, once sealed together with pitch, would form a crude pipeline otherwise known as a conduit.

‘Water,’ I said wishing I had some.

‘Not so burnt by the sun as to be lacking your wits,’ said the man.

I recognised him then, or rather I saw the resemblance to his father and his brother Ash. With an effort I clambered to my feet and turned to look along the road in the other direction. It stretched out, straight and dusty, between big wide fields that had been planted with green stripes of crops. A continuous stream of people, carts, horses and livestock trudged towards a hazy orange horizon from which reared the oversized gothic spike of St Paul’s Cathedral. That was London, this was the Oxford Road and the young man with the sword was the original Tyburn from back when the stream tumbled down from the Hampstead Hills to quench the thirst of the crowds come to watch the executions. Now being diverted, by Royal Charter no less, to slake the forty thousand throats of London.

I hadn’t been moved. I’d been dug up eight hundred years too early.

‘You’re Tyburn,’ I said.

‘Sir Tyburn,’ he said, ‘And you are Peter of the Peckwater Estate, apprentice wizard.’

‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘This is an hallucination.’

‘And you know this for certain?’

‘I’ve heard Chaucer read out,’ I said. ‘I understood one word in five and there’s this thing called the great vowel shift – which means everyone pronounces everything differently anyway. Which means I’m still stuck in the hole.’ And if I start singing David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ someone would just have to shoot me in the head.

I looked down into the ditch from which Tyburn and his merry band had ‘rescued’ me. At the bottom there was a ragged hole a little bigger than a cat flap.