Magnus_A Time Travel Romance

by Joanna Bell

  "So," I began, looking up. "You're – you're not angry at me?"

  "No. I'm not angry. I see that it could not have been any other way. I admit lately to a sadness in my heart, to see you so unhappy. I wait every day for you to forgive me, and to see that I – like you – only did what I had to do."

  Where had he come from? What had I done to deserve him? What strange forces had brought me to the middle of that field, sometime in the deep past, in front of the best man I had ever known?

  "I don't deserve you," I said, and he tried to pull me to him, to tell me I was wrong. But I put my hands on his chest and held him away, insisting on my point. "No, Magnus. I'm not just saying it. I literally don't deserve you. Before I met you, I don't even think I knew there were men like you. And now I've spent months treating you like –"

  "Shhh," he said. "Girl, I'll not hear any more of this from you. Do not beat yourself in front of me, as if it's a necessary thing – it is not. I said that I understood and I do."

  "I'm sorry," I whispered then, finally allowing my husband to pull me against his chest. "I'm so sorry. I –"

  "Shhh."

  And so the season of our marriage and our lives turned again, the darkness that had fallen after Eidyth's illness lifted and we were happy once more, the three of us. It was a different kind of happiness, then, to the untroubled and youthful kind that had characterized our early relationship. I think Magnus himself always knew the things I was required to learn through experience. He grew up in a land that was not too different to the Kingdom of the East Angles, especially when both were compared to Los Angeles in 1983. He already knew, as I did not in my twenties, that poverty and sickness, that death, stalked everyone, all the time. He knew that youth and health were guarantees of little, that an abundant harvest one year did not guarantee the same in the next.

  I didn't know any of it. Even when I was first in Haesting, and thought that I was getting used to living so close to the cycles of birth and death as seen in the livestock and the people, I was not. Not truly. It took nearly losing Eidyth to learn – and even then, it was not to be my final lesson.

  It made the joy of being with them – with my husband and our daughter – that much sweeter, and that much more poignant. I had seen that they could be taken from me.

  We had almost seven years together, as a family. Eidyth, after that bout of coughing sickness when she small, never fully recovered. She became, as I said, like the Angle children – prone to all manner of illness and fever. And the spring of my first great loss came too soon – although to say too soon makes it sound as if there were a time when it would not have been too soon. A thousand years would have been too soon.

  She came back from the beach one day, our lovely little daughter, with a swelling on her left arm, near the wrist. It was pink and hot to the touch, and she refused to eat dinner. In the night, as Magnus and I hovered over her restless, fevered body, she woke crying, and towards the morning did not quite seem to recognize us anymore.

  The healer was sent for, but Eidyth died anyway, later that same day and wrapped in her mother's arms.

  That was the day I became old. I don't mean old in the wrinkles and gray hair sense of the term, either. I mean old in the sense of finally and truly, deeply understanding that I had absolutely no control over anything. I barely even cried at first. We buried her in the graveyard where the Angles put their dead, and I stood with wide eyes and a feeling like I couldn't breathe throughout the funeral rituals. I maintained that stance – stiff-armed, wide-eyed, shocked – for weeks. She was gone and I knew it. She was not coming back and I knew it.

  "I love you," I said to Magnus, two moons after we put our daughter's body in the ground. "I love you but I'm different now. And I'm always going to be different."

  He looked up at me, his eyes full of tears, and nodded. "As it is, girl. It is the same for me. Bradwin tells tales of coming home from the fields some days and expecting to see his daughter, the one he lost two winters ago, waiting for him at the gate. I don't know why I do not expect to see our Eidyth, but I don't. It seems all I know is that she's gone."

  He broke down and I lifted my body, which was heavy with grief, far enough to take him into my arms so we could cling to each other.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Magnus

  Losing Eidyth was not like losing anyone else. It was not like losing my grandfather, or any of my men. It was not like losing my brother. As I said to Eadwin one day as we sparred with swords, it was sometimes difficult to believe that I had not been dealt a physical blow.

  "I feel as if I've fought a bear," I told him, when we paused to catch our breath from the training. "As if a great bear has knocked me down hard enough to steal the breath from my lungs. Sometimes I look down at my body and am surprised that it is not black and blue. You could run me through with that sword right now and it would not leave the mark that her absence has left."

  Heather and I stumbled around like those I had seen back in the North, who had spent too many nights with the gothi, and drank too many of the dark teas the gothis brewed. We woke in the mornings, as we always had. We ate our breakfast and went about our daily chores. At night we sat together in the cottage and ate our supper. But we did not do any of these things in the way we used to. We did them almost mindlessly, without thinking. And we would catch each other, sometimes, in moments of strange stasis. One night I returned from the fields and came in the door to find her, having not heard me, standing over the bubbling pottage with her hand holding a spoon, but not moving at all. I hung back, watching, and she stayed there, as still as a standing stone, with no expression on her face for many moments. And when finally I spoke her name she simply turned her head to me, as if she did not even realize what she was doing.

  It was the same for me. I would catch myself standing in the woods, leaning on the wooden shepherd's crook I used to herd the unruly pigs back into their sty, and find that the pigs themselves had long disappeared into the undergrowth, searching for chestnuts.

  "Will it be like this forever?" My wife asked me one night, almost a full winter after Eidyth died. "Will this – is this just it for us, my love? Will we never see each other smile again?"

  "I don't know," I replied. "As it is, we probably need to endure our grief for – for a longer time, perhaps."

  "How long? Because I can tell you, I don't feel like I will ever smile again. Even to force my mouth into the shape of a smile seems unnatural. It's like if this goes on for much longer, I'm going to completely forget how to laugh."

  At least we did not attack each other after the loss of our daughter. That was something I'd seen happen to other parents – in the North and in the Kingdom – when they lost a child. I don't know why it was different for Heather and me. We were as broken as it was possible to be, but we did not take it out on each other. Maybe we learned our lesson from Eidyth's earlier sickness? Maybe, with no other children, we understood that each of us had only the other?

  We had the Angles, too. We had Haesting. It was our home by then, as much as the North and the United States of America had ever been to either of us. But it was only Heather who understood why, for example, I sometimes became despairing in the middle of eating my mid-day meal on a sunny, cold winter's day. It was only she who knew that my despair was because I had suddenly remembered eating a similar meal on a sunny, cold winter's day with our daughter, and that to do so then was to conjure a thought of her so painfully real it was as if I could almost hear her giggle in my ear.

  I think, as the seasons passed, that perhaps neither of us truly wanted to feel better. Our child was gone – how could we smile again? Or laugh, or speak of our hopes for the future? How could we do that when she was in the ground?

  But we did smile again. Heather did not forget how to laugh. Her fears that we would live out the rest of our days in mourning did not come true. Time did not heal, and it did not make us forget, but it forced us to live. And in living, in scything the wheat, and beatin
g the grain from the stalks, in drying the grain and grinding the grain and in feeding the pigs and picking oysters and all the other endless tasks one has to do in order to live, we surfaced, somehow, as if from under a great depth of water. We didn't crawl out of it to sun ourselves on the beach – sunning oneself on the beach, we learned, was an activity for the young, for those who did not yet know what it was to suffer loss. But we brought our heads above the waves, so we could see the beach again, at least.

  At some point we even found ourselves able to speak of Eidyth without weeping or falling into a sadness that would last for days. "She would have liked playing at the beach today," Heather would say as we picked oysters on a sun-blessed summer day. "Do you remember the way she used to laugh at the pigs?" I would ask, as we walked in the woods to the estate and one of the creatures darted out of the bushes in front of us. "Do you remember how she used to scold them? 'Silly pigs! Go back to your sty before the wolves eat you!'"

  We remembered her. The Angles remembered her, too, and did not shy away from the mention of her name. A few winters after she was lost, Lord Eldred came to tell us of another orphan born in Haesting, whose aunt and uncle thought we might want to take him as our own.

  But we did not.

  "I can't do it," Heather said as we spoke of it over pottage that night. "If I lose another like I lost Eidyth, I'll die. I don't say it to be dramatic or to exaggerate, I say it because it's true. In my bones, I know it's true. I'll die, Magnus."

  I felt as my wife did, and I told Eldred as much. The orphan baby was sent to live with its aunt and uncle.

  Four winters after Eidyth was buried, Heather asked me one day if I thought we might find the tree – the one that took her from the United States of America to the Kingdom. She just brought it up in the middle of grinding grain in the courtyard, as I stood at her side and we chatted about the Yule to come, and whether or not it would be an especially cold one.

  "Why do you speak of the tree?" I asked. "You haven't mentioned it for many moons now."

  She turned the wheel a few more times, and we both watched the rough-ground flour pile up in the middle. "I speak of it because if it weren't for you, I think I would go back."

  I turned my head sharply towards my wife. She had never expressed such a sentiment before. Quite the opposite. Ever since I'd first met her, she'd been adamant about not going back to her homeland. When she looked up and saw my face, she made a little shrugging gesture.

  "What if you die, Magnus? Do you see how the women here live, that don't have husbands? That are old?"

  "You're not old, girl."

  "That's not the point. The point is if you died, I would eventually be old. An old woman, alone. What would happen to me if –"

  "The Angles care for their old people," I cut her off, alarmed by the subject matter. "Do you not see how Lord Eldred sees that the families with old people in them have enough grain to –"

  "But what if the Northmen return?! Brona's oldest daughter travels regularly to Caistley now, where she has that boy she will probably marry – in Caistley they speak of raids, even further to the North. They speak of the Angles taken as slaves – what do you think your people would do with an old woman? What do you –"

  "Why do we speak of this?!" I demanded. "Girl, we might as well speak of what will happen if the Gods send a sea-wave big enough to wipe out the estate! What is the use in speculating about any of this? All you do is worry yourself."

  "I don't know," she said quietly. "I've never heard anyone talk about a wave washing away an estate. But a lot of women lose their husbands. A widow is not a rare thing here. But they usually have their children to help them if –"

  "Stop," I replied quietly, reaching down to take her hand off the grinding wheel and hold it in my own. "I have no answers for you, girl. And neither do you know what will happen in the future. Only the Gods know these things."

  "I suppose. Do you feel that?"

  I brought her hand to my mouth to kiss it. "What?"

  "The wind. Do you feel there is just a little warmth left in it now? The frost will be here soon. At least the pig is fat – we will have roast pork for Yule."

  I looked over at her as she spoke, trying to imagine her as an old woman. Trying to imagine her dark locks as gray, and her face lined with the passage of time. To me, Heather looked much as she had that first day in the woods, after I challenged Asger. I knew it couldn't be true, and that almost ten and five winters could not have left either of us unchanged, but it was difficult for me to actually pick out the ways. She was leaner, perhaps. Not as full in the cheeks or the limbs as she had been. But still her body responded to me as it always had, and the sight just then of her breasts moving underneath her light tunic as she turned the grinding wheel stirred something in my loins.

  "What is it?" She asked, sensing some change in the air between us. "Why do you look at me like –"

  Before she could finish, I reached into her tunic and took one breast in my hand. Round, soft, warm, and topped with a nipple that grew stiff against my palm. She laughed gently, and tossed her hair back over her shoulder before turning to look at me with a smile.

  "Really? I have almost a whole sack of grain still to grind."

  I brought my fingers together over her nipple, pinching it and then rolling it in the way I knew she preferred. "You're right," I replied. "Perhaps you should finish the grain. The pigs need fresh straw, girl. Yes, I'll go and –"

  I moved to stand up but she grabbed my wrist and turned her face up to me as I did so, not letting me pull my hand away.

  "The pigs can wait for their straw."

  "Can they?" I asked, settling down behind her on the stone step and reaching around her body so I could put my other hand in her tunic, too. Her back arched as I took both her breasts in my grip, the way I knew it would, and she leaned her head back for a kiss.

  "We should go inside," she breathed, her voice soft. "We – Magnus, anyone could just walk –"

  "I don't care," I whispered, pulling her hair out of the way so I could kiss her neck and sliding one of my hands down her belly, under her tunic, until my fingers found her folds, already slick, and the little nub that made her breath catch when I touched it.

  Our physical relationship was one thing that never fell off. Even after I'd stopped her from continuing to search for the tree when Eidyth was sick, and she could barely look at me for many moons afterwards, we couldn't keep ourselves from reaching for each other at night. I used to relish watching the fury in her eyes melt away when I was inside her, and the way, when she was close to her peak, she would sometimes smile at me in spite of herself.

  It fell off for some people, I knew that. Some of the men who worked the fields with me spoke sadly of their wives diminishing lust, or described the lengths they would go to to persuade their reluctant women. Of course I never made it worse for them by describing how, even at our furthest distance from each other, my wife and I could not seem to dampen our fires. Mostly I just felt sorry for them, and grateful that Heather still tilted her head to the side and sighed when I kissed her, or when I put my hand on her waist and slid it down between her legs.

  "Magnus," she whispered, when I slipped two fingers into her wet depths and then pulled them out again and ran them just up beside the spot where she really needed them. Her thighs were open and she was leaned back against my chest, whimpering girlishly as I teased her.

  I was rigid against her back, thrusting my hips forward as her little cries made it harder and harder not to just flip her over onto her back and take her right there in the courtyard.

  When I did finally begin to touch my wife where she wanted it, I went very, very slowly. I let my fingers dawdle, pausing sometimes for a moment or two after a period of quick movements, just at the point where her breath became shallow and fast.

  "No!" She cried, when I brought her almost to the edge and then pulled back before she could tumble over it. "Magnus, no – please – don't stop –"

&n
bsp; But there was always a moment when she was too sweet, and too needy, to torture any longer. It came sooner that afternoon, when for some reason I couldn't listen to her begging me for very long before pushing my finger over her sensitive spot again, and then over and over, faster and faster as she moaned and squirmed and then went suddenly stiff against me as the pleasure peaked right where my finger stroked her.

  She leaned forward a moment later, panting, laughing, and I saw that I'd left a wet spot on the back of her tunic. My cock throbbed to be inside the slipperiness my fingers had just been enjoying, and my balls ached with their fullness. When I pushed her forward, onto her knees, she knew what to do.

  I lifted her tunic up, over her bare thighs, over her rounded ass, and drew myself up between her lips, exhaling heavily at the feeling of her sweet warmth caressing my tip.

  "Magnus," she whispered, smiling back over her shoulder at me. "Magnus..."

  As I said, I was in no mood to hold back that day. Her coy little smile was enough. I eased myself between her lips, just a little, and then put my hands flat on the ground, burying my face in her neck before pushing the rest of the way in.

  Heather braced herself, the heels of her hands digging into the earth as I thrust into her hard, barely pulling out at all because her insides just felt too good – too warm, too slick, too perfect.