Sentence The Sixhundredandfiftysecond

Little Levy Balquhidder was nothing if not resourceful; he had managed, even at nine months old, to do so many things which would have been thought impossible for such a young boy, in fact, his abilities, the range of what was quite domable for him, would have made him a sensation and that, more than anything, was why he had to be extremely careful and cautious, so that neither his parents, Rilla and Rary, nor anyone else, found out about him; which was why his Facebook, Twitter and Google+ accounts were in the name of his Teddy Bear, Kim (after one of his heroes, Kim Philby, a replacement for Karla who had been borrowed by Sam and Jasmine to communicate with Tavish in the Middle Ages) a photo of which passed as his Profile Picture; he had found an old pay-as-you-go mobile, complete with a charger and, as he didn't need it as a phone, restricting himself to the internet, he never had to top it up; it had been a doddle to crack his parents wi-fi password which was the unimaginative p455w0rd and he now had no need to struggle with newspapers, he read The Huffington Post, New York Times and Washington Post and watched the BBC News Channel so knew exactly what Sir Parlane MacFarlane was doing in Washington, enjoying the sanctuary afforded him by his descendant, POTUS Donald Duck Trumpet-Trousers; Levy had managed to contact Duck's former Speech-Writer, Hyman Kaplan and his investigative journalist friends, Sadie

Moskowitz and Rose Mitnick, and befriended them on Facebook and Twitter; and through the good offices of The Economic Migrant (the only person he had confided his true identity to) he had gained access to the Scottish Secret Service's data-base and was closely following in real-time, the investigations concerning The Ring of Gold; but it was slow stuff, for he was still a baby and had to go through the interruptions of nappy-changes, baths, regular feeds enforced afternoon naps, playing on the floor with his mummy or daddy and watching Peppa Pig on TV, but today, wondering if there was any possibility of there still being a Wormhole in his home, Levy unpicked some of Kim's stitching and looked inside: where before, it was a vast blackness filled with colours that he saw

through the tiny hole, with a faint pulse of energy darting away from his eye, the Wormhole, towards, presumably Tavish's cloak, now he seemed to be looking down a telescope held the wrong way round, and somewhere in the vast distance of space, he saw a light, a beam, and shining through the craquelure the flicker of activity, he knew at once that The Creator had been doing more gerrymandering with the Wormholes, in the same way as with the Earth's tectonic plates, and the Spirit could not yet work out the picture which, undoubtedly, The Creator had in mind (like one of those children's toys where little squares are moved around inside a frame until an image appears complete) and he put his ear to the tiny hole and listened with all his might to the words which came floating back from almost two thousand years ago:

"Umbraticus, Umbraticus,

non unum sicut Umbraticus,

iam frivola puer puero iactantem dormienti felis,

nos felis, nos felis,

a nobis misit dormientes felis nos,

et misit in grabatto nos, nos gerit, vespertilio in nos!

Et nos persecuti sunt, cum usque ad eum gradum, conversus et aropund exspuit in nobis,

Et luteis canis Umbraticus!"

which, by virtue of his Spirit having been fluent with the Latin language over several centuries, in a number of protean identities and at various levels of society, he was able to hear it in simultaneous translation as:

"Umbraticus, Umbraticus,

There's no-one like Umbraticus,

He's the silly little boy who threw the sleeping cat at us,

The cat at us, The cat at us,

He threw the sleeping cat at us,

And then he threw the mat at us, his hat at us, a bat at us!

And when we chased him up the stairs, he turned around and spat at us,

That mucky pup, Umbraticus!"

followed by a slap, a yelp and laughing as two men engaged in mock-wrestling, before a second voice said: "you are a truly lucky fellow, Marcus, that girl, Christiane, is beautiful and funny and smart and quite obviously smitten by you, though why I can't for the life of me imagine," and the first voice, which had spoken the doggerel, laughed again and said: "as I am by her, old friend, I just hope I live up to her impression of me; this is her land, we are the incomers, invaders, and though Trimontium is 'our' garrison, and she the 'visitor' I must think about what I am saying, I don't want to seem over-confident, or arrogant; one 'Priapus' here is one too many, I don't want to seem another!" and his friend said, "well, come let's go and get some wine, leave your satchel here, I dare say she is domable, and you up to the task, Marcus," and their shadows left the place and the Spirit realized that the Wormhole was now connected with a Roman soldier's satchel and, more significantly, Christiane, the young woman missing from Ranulph Ochan'toshan's house, was somehow at Trimontium Camp during the Roman occupation!