“The green isn’t true green; the sky’s too blue; and I can stare at the sun in this machine and not hurt my eyes.”
He flipped silently through the channels. “Click. Click. Click.” I watched him, noting again the solidity of him, how he was so physically there in a way in which I wasn’t accustomed. He held the remote in his left hand, balancing it in his palm, and it too reflected the arduous nature of his upbringing. Thick calluses covered his fingers, and he had a long scar running across the back of his hand between his thumb and forefinger I hadn’t noticed before,.
“What’s that from?” I asked, gesturing in the air above it.
“Oh, that.” He transferred the remote to his right hand and held up his left, flexing his fingers before forming a fist. “I was skinning a rabbit with a dull knife, so I was pressing harder than I should have had to. The knife slipped and left me this. It took nearly a year to get my full motion back.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine.”
“I was ten,” I said, holding out my left hand to show a scar on my forefinger, “except I was scaling fish.”
Ieuan took my hand to inspect it, and then surprised me by ducking his head to give the scar a quick kiss. “You could have lost the end of it,” he said. “You were lucky.”
He went back to his television as if our exchange had been the most normal thing in the world and I slowly pulled my hand back, not knowing what to think. He stopped at a soccer game. “I like this,” he said. “It’s similar to a game I played with my friends as a boy. My sister was always worming her way in, asking to play too.”
“You have a sister?”
“Her name is Lili. She’s fifteen now and will marry soon. It was my hope that after our trip to England, I would take my leave of my Prince for a time and find her a husband.”
He went back to the remote. “Click. Click. Click.”
“Prince Dafydd told me that you’re not married.” Ieuan said.
“No, I’m not,” I said.
“You must be widowed, then.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve never married.”
He looked at me then. “How is that possible? Prince Dafydd says you must be at least twenty-two years old, though I find it hard to believe him. Where’s your father?”
“I’m twenty-three, and my father lives in Belize, at the end of a hundred mile dirt road. He doesn’t think it’s his responsibility to find me a husband. In the twenty-first century, nobody gets married at fifteen and when women do get married, they find their own husbands.”
Ieuan turned back to his television, but his eyes had an unfocused look that told me he wasn’t watching it. “I don’t arrange a marriage for my sister because I want her gone from my house,” Ieuan said, “but because I love her and want what is best for her.”
“Does she want you to find her a husband?” I asked.
“She wants to join me in Prince Dafydd’s service,” he said. “Even you must admit that’s not possible.”
“Not in your time,” I said. “In this time, women can be soldiers.”
Ieuan clicked off the television and gave me his full attention. “Is that what you want?” he asked. “Do you want to fight and kill men?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t. But I support the right of a woman to be a soldier if she wants to be.”
“Aah,” Ieuan said. “You’re talking about choices.”
“I am?” I asked, feeling like I was losing control of the conversation.
“It seems to me that you have many choices in this century. That’s not true in Wales. For my sister, Lili may become a wife or enter a convent. For me, I had no choice at all. I became a soldier.”
“There are other jobs in your world,” I said. “Blacksmith, farmer, merchant. Those are all choices.”
“Not for me,” Ieuan said. “I am my father’s only son. He was a knight, so I am also a knight. I have lands and must care for the people who live on them. I have a steward and housekeeper and Lili, who does much of the work of running my estates when I’m away.”
“So she does do important work,” I said.
“Yes, like mine, but it’s not work that she chooses. When I inherited my estate, it became her job to run the household.”
“And if either of you chose not to do that work?” I asked. “What then?”
“The estate would fall into disarray; we would lose our lands because Prince Llywelyn would object to our lack of husbandry; or worse, the English would see an advantage in our negligence and take our lands by force, harming the people who live on the land and work it. When my uncle died, I swore an oath to Llywelyn, my liege lord, and in turn to the people whom I protect. Doing something different from this, along the lines of what you describe isn’t a possible choice for us. We have a duty to fulfill, for our Prince and our country, and our children to come.”
Duty. I certainly knew the word, but it was a foreign concept to me and I wasn’t sure I’d ever used it. That and obedience.
“Do you never chafe at your restrictions?” I asked. “Do you ever have the urge to just do what you want to do?”
Ieuan turned in his seat so he could see my face better. “These questions are so strange, Bronwen,” he said. “You’re asking if I want to be more selfish than I am? If I want to ignore the needs of my family and those around me?”
I looked away. “It isn’t like that, Ieuan. Nobody ever asked me to take care of my family. I feel responsible to my work as an archaeologist, but I can’t say that the department feels any responsibility to me. In fact, I know it doesn’t because my professor made clear that if I left, nobody would care.”
“Then why do it?”
“Because I love archaeology,” I said. “I feel that it’s my life’s work.”
“And you couldn’t have found fulfillment in something else?” Ieuan asked.
“But I chose archaeology,” I said.
“And that makes the difference?”
I didn’t know what to say. A gulf existed between our two worlds that I didn’t know how to cross.
“Don’t think, Ieuan, that all children in this world are as free as Bronwen.” David said. He walked around the couch to a chair.
“What do you mean?” I said. I’d lived a peripatetic existence as a child, but my life wasn’t much different than any other graduate student in the department.
“Your parents may not demand anything of you—may not even know or care where you are or what you’re doing,” David said, “but I suspect that many of your fellow students are fulfilling the dreams and wishes of their parents or running from them, just as they do in Wales.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s probably true.”
Ieuan turned to me. “Do you think your parents love you, for it doesn’t look like it to me.”
“Yes, of course my parents love me, or . . .well . . .” I hesitated, not knowing if I wanted to say more.
Ieuan jumped all over it. “So, they don’t,” he said.
“Ieuan,” I said, exasperated. “My father does love me, but he and my mother have their own relationship and I’ve always known that they had little room for me in their lives. I’m their only child, not to mention an unexpected and, at the time, unwanted one. They hauled me all over the planet with them because they didn’t have a lot of choice about it.”
“They could’ve left you with an uncle as my father did with Lili and me,” Ieuan said. He glanced at David, and then away again.
“Let me tell you a story,” I said, straightening in my seat. “When I was eleven, we lived briefly on a ranch in Colorado with some of my parents’ friends. On the morning we were to leave, we loaded up the rental car, but as my parents were saying goodbye to their friends, I went into the house because I’d left my book on the kitchen counter. By the time I got back to the front door, my parents had driven off without me. Their friends met me on the front stoop and we stared at each other, horrified.”
“What did you do?” Ieuan
asked.
“We leapt into their car and chased after my parents. It took us half an hour to catch them, and we managed it only because they pulled off the highway into a gas station.”
“Surely they noticed your absence?” Ieuan said.
“Well, that’s the question isn’t it?” I said. “Did they not notice, or did they actually not care, and see it as an opportunity to leave me behind?”
“You didn’t ask them?” Ieuan said.
“No,” I said. “Does it matter? Neither answer would have made me happy.”
Ieuan was silent beside me, and I crossed my arms across my chest, feeling sullen and cross at the memory.
“As many sons in this world disappoint their fathers with their choices as in ours, Ieuan, even when those choices are the right ones.”
Glancing from Ieuan to David, I realized I was missing something. Ieuan stared across the space that separated him from David, but again, he wasn’t really seeing him.
“So you know already,” Ieuan said.
“Of course, Ieuan. Did you fear I wouldn’t trust you if I knew the truth?”
Ieuan got to his feet and paced over to the window, the same one Elisa had looked out that morning. The tree branches behind the house swayed in the breeze, and clouds had formed in what had been a deep blue sky.
“What truth?” I asked. Ieuan stood, his legs spread wide and his fists clenched at his side.
Ieuan answered, his back to us. “That it seems our lot in life to disappoint our fathers.” He sighed. “From the moment Prince Llywelyn claimed the throne of Wales, his brother Dafydd plotted against him, with my father at his side. For nearly thirty years, my father served Dafydd faithfully, whether in rebellion or in favor, and then through all the years of exile in England until his eventual return and recent death. My father hated Prince Llywelyn, with the same passion he directed at Hereford. Until I was thirteen, I thought the two men were one and the same. That son-of-a-bitch Llywelyn; that bastard Bohun; Hereford that lying cretin. They were all one to me.”
“What happened when you were thirteen?”
“Dafydd tried to assassinate Llywelyn. When the plot was discovered, Dafydd escaped to England. My father went with him, forfeiting his lands in Powys. My mother had died the year before, leaving only Lili and me. My father sent us to live with my uncle near Aberedw.”
“And your uncle supported Llywelyn?” I said.
“Yes.”
“So when you came of age, you joined Llywelyn’s men instead of Dafydd’s?”
“Yes. At first, my father thought I intended to serve as a spy in his camp,” Ieuan said. “When I refused, he cursed me, told me I disappointed him—that I’d always disappointed him.”
“You learned something then, though, didn’t you?” said David.
Ieuan swung around. “I learned that my choices were my own.” Then he smiled at me. “See, I do have choices, just not the same ones you have.”
“What haunts you now?” I asked. “Obviously, Llywelyn doesn’t mistrust you, or feel that your father’s sins should reflect on you, or he wouldn’t have assigned you to his son.”
Ieuan hesitated, and David answered instead. “I understand, Ieuan,” he said. He steepled his fingers in front of his mouth, looking thoughtful. “You feel the shame of your father’s betrayal, while at the same time you cannot help feel ashamed at your betrayal of him.”
“Yes,” Ieuan said.
“We are quite a pair, Ieuan,” David said, “though perhaps I was luckier. My father was worthless, but died before I was born so I never knew him. You still have to live with the man who fathered you.”
“Now I’m lost,” I said. “I thought you said Prince Llywelyn was your father, David?”
“I didn’t discover that until we came to Wales, remember?” he said. “Until I was fourteen, the only father I knew was Trevor Lloyd, and he was no prize, let me tell you. He was a couple of years older than my mother when she married him right out of high school. She was only nineteen when she had Anna, but was already fed up with him—he was lazy, a drinker, and treated her badly.”
“Your mother told you this?” I asked, surprised that Marged would disparage David’s father in front of him.
“Of course not,” David said. “Over the years I’d picked up that he wasn’t a super guy, but when I was about twelve I overheard Aunt Elisa and Uncle Ted talking about him. They were worried that Mom didn’t trust herself to fall in love with someone new, since she’d been burned so badly by my father—or rather, Anna’s father.”
“Didn’t hearing that bother you?” I asked.
David sat still, unusually so for him. We let him think, and as I watched him I thought that this was not a casual conversation to him—that this conversation was one he’d been wanting to have with Ieuan for a very long time, and hadn’t known how to begin it.
“It’s hard to remember exactly when it all came together for me,” David finally said, “but knowing the truth about Trevor Lloyd changed my life. Because of him, I realized that not having him as a father was as much a gift as my facility in math. It was my responsibility to use those gifts to the fullest of my ability.”
For the hundredth time, I found myself staring at David, not knowing what to make of him. “And now you’re the Prince of Wales,” I said softly. It was a legacy that left him shouldering the weight of so many responsibilities he couldn’t even count them. No wonder he was a little arrogant sometimes.
I didn’t tell him that though. Instead, I said, “And you both found new fathers in the Prince and in Ieuan’s uncle.” I turned to Ieuan. “Is he proud of you?”
Ieuan’s face softened. “My uncle died at the battle of the Menai Straits, only a few weeks before Prince Dafydd and his sister returned to Wales. And yes, he was proud of me.”
“If I have learned anything about you in the last two days,” I said, “I’ve learned that the word ‘honorable’ has meaning in your world. I can’t believe you were any different as a boy. Admittedly, I’m no expert as far as men are concerned, but what father couldn’t want you as his son? Your uncle must have been very thankful when you came to him.”
David leaned back in his chair and rested his feet one at a time on the coffee table, clasping his hands behind his head. “I dare you to refute that, my friend. She sees the truth. It’s time you admitted it to yourself.”
Ieuan looked at me. “And what about you, Bronwen?” he said. “What about your father? Who have you found to fill the void he’s left in you?”
I gazed back at him, startled by the sudden change in the direction of the conversation, yet knowing the painful truth. No one.
Chapter Eleven
David
“What are you doing?”
I looked up from some papers that I’d printed out on Aunt Elisa’s printer. Bronwen stood in the office doorway.
“I’m trying to think of everything that I might need to augment our knowledge base. It’s overwhelming how much I don’t know. I don’t even know the right questions to ask, so it’s making this difficult.”
I handed her the sheaf of papers and she thumbed through it. There was information about antibiotics, steam engines, lenses, map-making, navigation, the Black Plague, weapons. It went on and on through several hundred pages. She eyed me over the top of them.
“Are you planning to take these back with you?”
“I’m going to try,” I said, typing on the computer again.
She watched me work for another minute. “Why do you want to go back?” she said. “I would think you’d be happier here.”
I spun the chair so that I was looking at her, no longer distracted. “How can you even ask that?” he said. “My family’s there.” And then I swallowed hard because our conversation with Ieuan had revealed that her family was no reason to do anything. I tried again. “I’m needed there, Bronwen. It isn’t so much that I, as an individual born David Lloyd, am important, though as the Prince of Wales, I am. It’s more that w
hen Anna and I drove into Wales and saved my father’s life, we saved Wales. This is so much bigger than I am; so much more important than I am. I would be a blind man not to see it. There, if I live, I can do great things. Here, maybe not so much.”
I turned back to my internet searches. Bronwen found a seat on the couch near the door, the papers in her lap. She read quietly for a time, and then spoke again. “With six billion people on the planet, does any one person ever matter that much?” she asked.
“There aren’t six billion people on the planet in the thirteenth century, Bronwen,” I said, still focused on the computer. “There are only 300,000 in all of Wales.”
“In 1285,” she said.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “In 1285.”
Bronwen rubbed her eyes with her hands. The papers I’d given her represented so much more than it seemed at first glance. Seven hundred and twenty-eight years of knowledge. I kept working, and eventually Bronwen wandered out again. I was grateful that she was here. I wanted her to believe Ieuan and me. To believe in us. She had told Aunt Elisa she did, but I wasn’t so sure.
Restless now, I walked downstairs. Ieuan and Bronwen were still in the television room, and, choosing not to disturb them, I wandered into the kitchen for some food. I opened the refrigerator and inspected the contents. Okay, I miss twenty-first century food. A lot. Figuring I would clog my arteries while I had the chance, I dug out the ingredients for a ham and cheese sandwich, put it together, and brought it back upstairs. I sat at the computer again and studied the screen. What next? Ah, I know. ‘How to make mayonnaise.’
* * * * *
Aunt Elisa came home around two o’clock, ready to talk. Her face was composed as she entered, and I tried to imagine what she’d been doing all this time by herself. She walked straight to me and reached up to take my face in her hands. “I love you,” she said. “I’m sorry I ran away. I’m not going to explain myself to you, but I’m ready, now, to listen.”
I kissed her cheek, and then Ieuan, Bronwen, and I sat in the living room together in awkward silence for about five minutes, while she bustled around, straightening cushions and getting us drinks. Ieuan was completely at ease. I was glad we’d had our conversation about our fathers. I’d never known before how to bring it up.
Prince of Time (Book Two in the After Cilmeri series) Page 10
