The Crown of Valencia

by Catherine Friend

  “How long ago?” Elena whispered.

  “Thousands and thousands of years,” I murmured, unsure of the paintings’ actual origins. We stood silently, awed to imagine an artist standing right where we were, bringing his era to life with a paintbrush. Now that was something to do with your life, something more than baking bread or fighting wars.

  “Kate.” Elena’s raw voice made me jump. She touched my arm and nodded off to the left. Up a short climb of five feet was a small alcove, lit by faint sunlight.

  “Oh, my god,” I whispered, my heart now pounding so fast I could barely breathe.

  Without hesitation, Elena strode across the room, scrambled up the rocks, and sat down on the ledge, determination and fear struggling on her strong face.

  Thrilled, I ran to join her. “Oh, Elena, would you really come with me?” I hadn’t dared ask. What, after all, could an eleventh century soldier do in the twenty-first century?

  “Let’s see if time will have me,” Elena said, squeezing my hand.

  But my initial joy leaked away as I stood there. Two minutes passed. Then three. My torch burned out, leaving only Elena’s, which sputtered. “How quickly did it happen to you?” she finally asked.

  I grimaced. “Almost instantly.”

  Elena slumped over in a ball of despair. She’d come this far living on the hope that she could come with me into the twenty-first century, but time would not take her.

  I touched her leg. “Time must put markers on people,” I babbled. “Maybe you can’t go forward unless you’ve already gone backward.” Elena slid off the ledge. Light-headed, heart now lodged in my throat, I wrapped my arms around her firm body, running my hands over her leather tunic, through her thick hair. How could I leave this woman? I knew I had a good reason, but at that moment nothing was as important. Speaking was useless as we held each other, inhaling, touching, memorizing heartbeats. My eyes began to blur. Then Elena pulled back and reached into her tunic, drawing out a small black bag.

  With trembling fingers I opened it and discovered a smooth, luminous pearl. Now I truly could not speak as she kissed my tears.

  I swallowed a fierce lump of pain. “Find someone to grow old with,” I said. She pressed her lips together but did not say out loud what I read in her troubled eyes, that she already had found someone, and now I was leaving. I wiped away one of her tears. “Forget me, Elena.”

  She captured my hand and kissed my palm, her breath liquid gold against my skin. “When I cease to breathe, then I will forget you.” She tightened her grip. “No,” she whispered, “not even then.”

  Laughing voices reached us from the entrance, which likely meant the boys had returned with friends to meet the rich strangers. “I have nothing for you,” I choked out.

  “The Lion King,” she said, managing a sad grin. I scrabbled through my fanny pack and pulled out the plastic key chain, the code word we’d jokingly decided to use whenever we needed each other. I pressed it into her hands. “Please be careful at Cordoba, at Toledo, at Zaragoza, at Valencia. Wherever you fight.”

  Despair darkened her eyes as she nodded. “Of course. I have never lost a battle...” Her jaw tightened. “Until now.”

  The rowdy voices grew nearer. Our kiss was slow, gentle, and spoke all we had not yet said. Then, with a strangled moan, Elena grabbed my waist and hoisted me onto the ledge. I tucked the bag with the pearl into my boot and lay back, wincing at the hard rock.

  “I love you,” we said together, touching hands, then a bright light exploded above me.

  I cried out as I started to spin. I thought I heard Elena’s answering cry, but time roaring inside my head shut out all else. I shut my eyes against the blinding white and tried to stop my spinning fall, but there was no ledge beneath me, no rocks above. Time sucked me down, down, and the world went black.

  *

  When I awoke my head throbbed with a monster migraine, and my stomach had twisted into a knot. I pressed the heels of my hands against my burning eyes, inhaling dry, almost antiseptic air.

  “And this, gentlemen, is the main hall of the cave. These days only select scientists such as yourselves are allowed in here, as the carbon monoxide from our breath can damage the paintings.” English, spoken with a thick French accent.

  I broke out in a cold sweat, then tried to open my eyes, but they refused. The world wouldn’t be real if I couldn’t see it.

  “Of course tourists can view an exact replica of this hall in Altamira II, located right down the street.”

  I rolled off the ledge, crying out as my hands and knees dug into rough limestone then gagged as bile rose up in my throat.

  “Hey! Who are you? You can’t be in here!”

  Dry heaves shook my body, but I was empty, barren, unable to vomit away my nausea.

  “I say, she seems to be ill.” Clipped British voice approaching.

  Tremors started coursing through me, violent, teeth-clenching convulsions, and I sank into the ground, my belly flat against the cold.

  “Careful, Dr. Pritchard, she might have one of those African viruses. Ebola’s fatal, you know.” Thick Texas accent.

  I was back. My tremors came not from illness, but from a deep, bone-aching knowledge. Over nine hundred years had passed in a matter of seconds. The woman I loved had died, been buried, and ground to dust by the centuries between us.

  Chapter Seven

  I couldn’t see time, but my face recorded its passing with little crow’s feet in the corners of my eyes. “Character lines,” my best friend Laura called them. I couldn’t smell time, but noticed its passing if I didn’t clean out the refrigerator often enough. I couldn’t hold time in my hands, yet it could still slip through my fingers. Some articulate person once said the only thing that never ended was the present, because time was a never-ending loop that kept us in its grasp, second after second, always keeping us in the present, I tried to forget there was a ledge in a cave in Spain where I had once slipped the bonds of the present.

  Work helped. Today computers crashed, two shipments were late, one was lost, and I fired two packers for consistently screwing up in Order Fulfillment even after three warnings. I hated Mondays, but every moment spent focusing on work, or Arturo, was one less moment I was tempted to slip into impossible daydreams about a woman long dead. I didn’t know how other people dealt with loss, but I didn’t seem to be able to move forward. At least I’d finally gotten the promotion I’d been angling for—more headaches, more staff, but also more money for the college fund I’d started. Managing a small distribution center wasn’t my first career choice, but painting wouldn’t feed a kid or put him through college some day.

  I raced down Washington Avenue then whipped onto Markland, imagining my Prius banking up on two wheels. I checked my watch. Damn, twenty minutes late. Arturo would be spitting nails by now, and since my cell had died, I couldn’t even let him know I was almost there.

  He stood by the curb, arms crossed, fiercely glaring at every car passing on Markland, daring each one to be me. He saw me, narrowed his eyes, then scooped up his black gym bag, every muscle accusing me of incompetence. I had to bite my lip to cut off my smile—no use pissing him off any more.

  Arturo tossed his bag into the back, then folded his lanky body into the passenger seat and slammed the door. “I can’t believe you’re late. Today of all days.”

  “Seat belt.”

  Grumbling, he fastened the belt and I pulled into the street. “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll get there in time.”

  “Mom, Master Kim hates it when people are late. It’s disrespectful. The ceremony starts at five sharp.” He crossed his arms again, practically huffing as he glared out his window to punish me.

  I don’t know why I found his furious indignation so cute today. Usually, this latest stage, that of a fourteen-year-old stubborn know-it-all, drove me crazy. I prayed he’d grow through it, just as he had all the others. Eight years. Amazing how many changes a boy could go through in eight years. At the stop si
gn I reached into the back seat and produced a flat, cardboard box, which I set on his lap. “Pepperoni, sausage, green olives, double cheese.”

  His brown eyes came alive. “God, I am starving.” He hesitated, peeking at me through his lashes, then flung open the box to release the smell of spicy oils and cheese. The sure detour around my son’s anger was through his stomach.

  “Didn’t you eat lunch?” I finally asked after two pieces disappeared in about thirty seconds. Some days my love for this rangy, bullheaded teenager squeezed the air from my lungs.

  “Hamburger, and they only let me buy two extras. That’s like giving Max three little kibbles for a meal.” Our geriatric lab thought he was starving if he didn’t get three bowls a day.

  “You nervous?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I get two gold bars on my belt if I pull this off today.”

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said with a wink, then I ran my fingers through my unruly hair, which I had cut short eight years ago. I could not bear to have it brush my naked shoulders. I would turn around, expecting her to be there, but Elena never was, and never would be.

  Without me asking, Arturo fished out a handful of fast-food napkins from the glove compartment, lay them across my thigh, and gave me two squares of pizza.

  “Got the promotion,” I said.

  “Cool, Mom.” He raised his hand for me to slap. “Can we use the extra money to buy me a car?”

  “No. College.”

  “A fifty-inch high def TV?”

  “No. College.”

  “Hey,” he finally said, his mouth full of pizza. “Let’s use the money to send me to college.”

  We ate in happy silence. I entered the interstate and headed for the Kim Tae Kwon Do Institute, but I refused to speed with my impressionable son in the car, no matter how late we were. Driving while eating pizza was bad enough. I washed down my last bite with a swig of Squirt then concentrated on weaving through the rush hour traffic.

  “Mom, you’re doing it again.” Arturo turned toward me, slender face concerned, voice surprisingly gentle.

  “What?”

  “Your necklace, Mom. You’re playing with it again.”

  With a start, I dropped the round pearl, letting it fall back onto my breastbone. This was another phase he’d entered, a sudden burst of sensitivity. He bobbed his head, then made a face. “Every time you touch that pearl, you look so sad it brings everyone down. People are going to start jumping off bridges.”

  “Ha. Very funny.”

  “Well, it’s true. Mark says your face goes all funny when you touch the pearl.”

  “Come on. You and your friends talk about this?”

  He blushed, a lovely deep peach coloring his already ruddy cheeks. “Me and the guys have been talking about girls. You know, trying to figure them out.”

  “Good luck.”

  “No kidding, but one of the things we don’t get is why you keep touching it even though it makes you sad. Ten minutes, Mom, and we’re gonna be late.”

  I took the Vargly exit. Ever since the jeweler set the pearl and strung it on a 14k gold chain, the pearl had never left my throat. Whenever I touched it, aching waves from my past washed over me. The pain faded in fifteen minutes or so; after that I could usually force myself to move on. Now and then, however, I could not stop myself, and when the pain had subsided, I would touch the pearl again, and again, and again.

  I had never told Arturo about Elena, and certainly not about the time travel. As we sped along the freeway, skyscrapers piercing the horizon, even I found time travel hard to believe. The pearl made it all real, as did the Moorish dagger Elena had given me.

  After I brought Arturo home eight years ago and found a job and got Arturo settled in school and dealt with the shock and anger from Laura and my other friends who’d given me up for dead, I did some research to find out what King Alfonso and his army, which included Elena, had been up to. The history books were succinct: “The Christians and the Almoravides from Morocco met at Sagrajas during late spring of 1086. There, Alfonso VI, the conqueror of Toledo, was resoundingly defeated. Twenty thousand men died in the vicious battle.”

  History only recorded the deaths of significant political players, so I had no way to check, but since Elena Navarro always rode at the head of her army, she would have been in the middle of that violent mess.

  When I pulled up to the low yellow brick building, Arturo heaved a sigh of relief and hopped out. He dashed into the building, purple nylon pants flapping in the breeze. When had his legs gotten so long?

  By the time I parked and found a spot on one of the benches lining the room, Arturo had changed into his white do-bok. He already wore a black belt with his name stitched in yellow. Today, however, he was testing out for the next level of black, something few fourteen-year-olds reached. He padded over in bare feet, nearly bouncing with excitement. “It’s about to start. C’mon, I’ll introduce you to Vanessa.”

  “Vanessa?” A short brunette dressed like Arturo approached.

  “The new girl on my soccer team. I told you about her, Mom. She’s really nice.”

  I tried not to feel all panicky that my little boy seemed to be picking up girlfriends right and left. I shook the girl’s hand and settled back onto my seat along the wall.

  Vanessa and Arturo jogged to their spots in the formation. The lower belts were tested and awarded first, so I leaned against the wall as Arturo and the others waited respectfully as the younger children went through their forms, complete with Korean commands.

  It was fine that Arturo kept falling in love. I’d had a few dates myself the last eight years, so it’s not like I was jealous or anything. But those first few years with Arturo had been too draining for much else, as I learned to be a mother, and he learned to be an American. Not only did he work hard to read, write, and speak English, but I taught him to read and write in Spanish as well, determined he wouldn’t lose his native language.

  This worked until he turned eight and decided Spanish was stupid and refused to speak it. For months we locked horns. I’d speak in Spanish, he’d reply in English. He’d ask a question in English, I’d reply in Spanish. His teachers grew very confused when they heard us together, thinking I was the immigrant.

  Finally when he was nine, someone brought a book to school on bullfighting, complete with wonderfully explicit color photographs, but written in Spanish. When Arturo was able to read and translate all the gory details for the class, he became the hero of every other nine-year- old boy, and suddenly being bilingual was cool. We now slipped so easily between the two languages we could hold entire conversations and later be unable to say which language we’d used.

  When Arturo finally moved to the open space before Master Kim and bowed, I snapped to attention. He was the picture of strength, control, and grace as he executed the memorized forms, complicated kicks that I hadn’t learned in my short Tae Kwon Do experience. At Arturo’s first Tae Kwon Do six years ago, I’d started out sitting on the benches to wait. But when he begged me to spar with him at home, I decided I needed to know what I was doing, so I worked my way up to a blue belt with red stripe before dropping out last year. Arturo had friends he could practice with now, so instead I spent my waiting time reading novels of chivalry from the Middle Ages. Arturo’s friends thought it cool I was so into knights and swords.

  I let out my breath when he finished his forms, then leaned forward as he shrugged on his padded vest for the sparring portion of his test. This was Arturo’s favorite part because he loved the challenge of an opponent. A young man about Arturo’s size donned a matching vest, then they went at it. Arturo wasted no time in faking a block, which so unbalanced his opponent the man failed to block Arturo’s jumping front kick. My son’s bare foot smacked squarely into the round red target over the man’s padded solar plexus. Arturo scored point after point with his lightning speed and powerful kicks.

  Arturo’s face and neck shone with his efforts, but he didn’t
falter once. When Master Kim called the spar, and Arturo bowed to his opponent, applause erupted, unusual for a testing spar. I blinked back happy tears. After eight years, that knobby-kneed, frightened six-year-old I’d brought home to Chicago had grown into a bright, funny, athletic, and stubborn fourteen-year-old with a bottomless appetite.

  Arturo stood solemnly as Master Kim spoke of devotion and hard work and respect, then wrapped a new black belt with two gold bars around Arturo’s waist. My throat tightened as I stood and clapped. Arturo winked at me, and I didn’t touch my necklace once.

  When the ceremony ended, Arturo headed straight for me, even letting me pull him into a hug. “Gracias, Mama,” he whispered, and I knew he thanked me for much more than chauffeuring him to Tae Kwon Do every week. I squeezed him hard, unable to speak. For every moment I missed Elena, I had two moments of joy with Arturo. Somehow my crazy life had reached a balance I could live with.

  *

  “What’s his problem?” Laura asked the next day, nodding toward Arturo, who’d ridden on ahead of us. “I thought he got the lead part in that new play.” Next to Tae Kwon Do, acting was Arturo’s favorite passion.

  I reined in my chestnut mare, exhaling deeply, enjoying these once-a-month Sunday rides because they kept me comfortable in a saddle. “He did. But he hung out with friends yesterday afternoon and came home with this huge cloud hanging over his head. He won’t tell me what happened.” Impatient to follow Arturo on the lead horse, our horses plodded forward again. Laura’s partner Deb had a weekend poetry workshop to teach, so it was just the three of us. “I also think he’s desperate about sex,” I added.

  “I hate that. He’s fourteen. It’s only been a year since he stopped hiding behind your sofa and scaring us with his fart pillow.”