[Tempus Fugitives 01.0] Swept Away

by Susan Kiernan-Lewis

  “Sorry, son,” her father said. “That’s not believable. My daughter is very independent. In fact, she has never asked for help in her life. I’m afraid I must assume that you are not who you say you are.”

  Did retired spies just lose every bit of sense they ever had when they were active or was the man senile?

  Before Rowan could insist to the man that he was, indeed, a friend of Ella’s, the line disconnected.

  Son of a bitch! Rowan thought as he looked at the phone. Was the man demented? What news did Ella discover that had her calling him asking for help? He swallowed his frustration and his temptation to drive to Tampa where Ella’s father lived and throttle the information out of him.

  Instead, he punched in the number of Ella’s branch office in Heidelberg.

  On the second day of her life at the convent, Ella dressed in the rough, itchy and very heavy habit of a novice nun. She wore her own freshly laundered panties since, as she was distressed to learn, undergarments in the 1600s were even more uncomfortable and ill fitting than outer garments. After an unsatisfying breakfast of stale bread and sour wine which only succeeded in half filling the hole of hunger in her stomach and left her ready to murder for an egg and bacon biscuit, Ella left the convent with Greta and Sister Beatrix. Ella knew that if it were up to Greta, Ella would stay hidden in the convent forever, but Ella insisted on seeing the town. In reality, the trip was more than anything else to convince herself that she really was when she was.

  After ten minutes, she was convinced.

  In spades.

  The convent sat on the Nekker River less than a mile from the famous Heidelberg Castle. Surrounded trees and rough hewn boulders, Ella wondered if the convent had been placed there by design to hide it. In any event, as soon as they left the narrow lane that led from the nunnery, there was little doubt that she had landed in 1620 Heidelberg.

  A sea of dirty, ragged peasants streamed along the main thoroughfare that led toward the town’s center and marketing hub. When she caught her first glimpse of the castle high above the town, the view took her breath away. No longer the majestic ruin she had seen every day in 2012, this castle was complete, undamaged and imposing.

  She could not stop staring up at it as she walked.

  “You are gawking, Ella,” Greta said.

  “I can’t get over everything,” Ella said. “Is the pedestrian bridge a toll bridge? Has the gateway not been built yet?”

  “It is best if you do not speak, I think, yes?”

  Ella tore her eyes from the towering castle walls to see the curious glances she was getting from people around her.

  Guess I’m not fitting in too well in 1620 Heidelberg, she thought. She dropped her eyes to the road in front of her but was soon staring all about her again. There was so much to see, so much to take in. It was impossible not to look. She tried not to gape in astonishment. In some ways, the bustling streets of medieval Heidelberg reminded her of a movie set. She half expected some irritated director to jump out from behind a bush and redirect all the extras to the canteen until a few more telephone wires could be removed in order to get the period piece just right. Except there were no telephone wires to remove. Or anything else that might indicate that she was anywhere but in the early seventeenth century.

  She looked at Greta, forging purposefully ahead toward the town market, her back straight and determined, the rows of scowling peasants trudging along on either side of her.

  I’m really here. I’m really fucking here.

  There was little similarity to the Altstadt familiar to her. The street was rank with the stench of garbage and raw sewage. As in 2012, the market sat behind the Church of the Holy Spirit. Ella couldn’t get over how filth and fresh produce were so close to each other and nobody seemed to care. She tried to remember when exactly bacteria were discovered. No wonder these people didn’t live to forty! She walked closely behind Greta, who nearly trotted in her blatant urgency to silently yet quickly accomplish the convent’s shopping.

  The narrow cobblestone walkway, so crowded now with animals and people, was lined in 2012 with a mile of quaint shops and homes with Baroque and Renaissance facades. It was a bustling street of tourists and shopping, bratwurst and pretzel stands, panhandlers, musicians and artful street cafés. As she hurried after Greta, Ella couldn’t help but notice a particularly slovenly fishmonger’s table set up precisely where she was sure she had enjoyed a leisurely latté not two weeks earlier. The fishmonger looked up and made a sign as if warding off evil spirits. Ella resolved to try harder not to stare.

  Just ahead, she could see the street opened into the cobblestone courtyard around the Church of the Holy Spirit. Jammed up against the church was row after row of produce and fish stands beside crates of live chickens and pigs. The noise and the smells were almost overpowering.

  Ella nearly ran into Greta when she stopped abruptly. She took the opportunity to look around and found herself mesmerized by the swirling cacophony of color and motion all around her.

  “Don’t look!” The order from Greta was fierce and whispered in German. Unfortunately, this just made Ella snap her head up to see what she should not—to see what she would never be able to blot out of her memory or her mind’s eye for the rest of her days.

  A large wooden stage was set in the middle of the bustling marketplace, raised up and visible to all so that they might witness the executions as they shopped. Ella saw a young man and a boy cowering on the stage while a large, beefy man in a black hood strutted and shouted to the crowd. In his hand was a terrible axe. As the man spoke, he stripped to the waist to show his massive chest gleaming with sweat and blood, Ella could see there were women crying and waiting with raised hands at the base of the stage.

  “Oh, dear Mother of God,” Ella said. “Please tell me this is not what I think it is.”

  “Silence!” Greta whispered hoarsely to her. “You can change nothing of what you see here.”

  Ella pushed past Greta to the stage. She was drawn to the horror and to the agony of the pleading women. Greta’s fingers bit into Ella’s arm as she grabbed her. “Ella, no!” she said. “You can do nothing but endanger us all!”

  One of the women screamed and Ella turned her head from Greta to the woman and then back to the stage. It all happened so fast. The bare-chested monster stood in the center of the stage as if congratulating himself on having won some special honor. The axe lay on the stage beside him. He held in his hand something horrible. He lifted it higher and higher and as he did the crowd roared its approval.

  Between the hysteria of the screaming women and the thunderous, raucous laughter and applause from the gathered crowd, Ella saw the boy fall to his knees in terror. He could not be ten years old, she thought in amazement. As the executioner threw the decapitated head of the young man into a nearby trough on the stage and began his turn toward the child, Ella shook off Greta’s grip and pushed to where the women were standing at the base of the stage.

  7

  “Ella, stop!” Greta said. She looked around in desperation, fearful they were attracting attention. The mob, however, was focused on the upcoming execution of the child—a rarity even in the Middle Ages. They cheered the executioner as he hefted his axe and playfully swung it into the air. Ella was close enough now to see that one of the women at the foot of the stage was young enough—and hysterical enough—to be the boy’s mother. Her screams were drowned out by the crowd, her face a contortion of indescribable agony as her worst nightmare was being enacted before her in living, brutal color.

  Greta reached her seconds before Ella pulled her shotgun Taser out of the pocket of her habit.

  “Hide it in your sleeve,” Greta said hoarsely, not missing a beat. She ripped the rosary from her own throat, her eyes darting to the people who surrounded them, and held it in both hands as if it were a weapon. All eyes were on the two figures on stage. No one was interested in the actions of a couple of nuns in the crowd.

  Ella lifted her arm toward t
he headsman. The long sleeve of her habit hid the Taser as she pointed it at him. Her finger twitched on the trigger as she watched him grab the boy by the scruff of the neck and throw him down at the front of the stage. She waited, blocking out the noise from the crowd, the bleating misery of the child’s mother beside her and the pounding of her own heart. Sweat crept down her back. At the very moment that the man grabbed his axe with both hands and prepared to swing it over his head, she pulled the trigger and unleashed the untethered cartridge probe, zapping the executioner square in the chest with 30,000 volts in one powerful, bowel-watering charge of electricity. Before the man dropped his axe, before he hit the deck face-first, his limbs jerking with his seizure, the Taser was jammed back in her pocket, and Greta was pushing the rosary into her hands. She grabbed Ella’s hands with her own.

  “Close your eyes!” she ordered.

  Ella squeezed her eyes shut. At this point she wasn’t totally sure creating the picture of earnest prayer was just playacting. She heard the crowd quiet as if dazed. She could sense people near her moving as if trying to look around for the source of the mysterious attack. Given the setting, the sight of two nuns huddled in prayer must not have looked all that unusual. In the midst of the confused murmurings from the onlookers she heard the whimpering of the boy and now the sounds of the mother calling to him. The crowd began to get louder but Ella dared not open her eyes to see what was going on.

  Later, they left the market without buying anything and trudged the long way back to the convent. Once they were sure no one suspected them and they were safely in the dining hall, Beatrix told how the crowd had lifted the boy from the bloody stage and deposited him into his mother’s arms. Satisfied that the executioner had been stopped by God Himself, the mob had acted accordingly. For they could only believe that the boy must be innocent after all.

  That night after dinner, as Ella was washing dishes with a young novice, Greta entered the dank kitchen and dismissed the girl. She picked up a wet rag to dry the crockery as Ella handed it to her.

  “I’m not used to washing dishes without soap,” Ella said. “Hope I’m doing it right.”

  Greta smiled but didn’t answer.

  “Something on your mind, Greta?”

  “Your weapon,” Greta said as she stacked a dry dish on the counter. “It made a loud report but the man you shot lives and does not show any wound. It was not a gun you shot him with?”

  “No, it was a Taser. In fact, thank God, it was one of the newer designs. Most Tasers would’ve shot out a string of wires tracing back to my gun. This one is able to shoot out a slug that does the job without wires. Which is good because someone in the crowd was bound to see where they were coming from.”

  “Can this Taser be used again?”

  Ella frowned and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Yes,” she said. “Normally. But I don’t have any more cartridges with me.”

  “Then it is a liability. I will have Gwen bury it in the garden.”

  “I guess that’s wise.” Ella paused. “Greta? Did you know what we’d find in the marketplace today?”

  The nun sighed. “I feared it but hoped for the best. The square is the main site for executions and witch burnings, I’m afraid.”

  “It was horrible,” Ella said. “The most horrible thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “It had a happy ending today,” the nun said, smiling.

  “Except for that first guy.”

  “Yes, except for him.”

  “This is a dangerous place, Greta. It’s a miracle you’ve survived this long.”

  “It is a hard time. A brutal time.”

  “No kidding it is. Don’t they have laws here to protect people?”

  “What you saw today with the young man and the child was the law in action.”

  Ella said nothing and the two worked silently. She didn’t know Greta well yet but she was learning. The nun would tell her in her own time.

  “My ward, Hannah,” Greta finally said, “was given to me at the foot of the execution square twelve years ago,” she said.

  Ella turned and looked at her. “Her mother was killed?”

  Greta nodded. “Burned at the stake.”

  “Jesus! Sorry, sorry. But what a hellacious world you choose to live in.”

  “I can see why you would think that.” The Mother Superior carefully stacked another clean plate on top of the others. “Hannah would not speak at first. She cried for her mother every night right up to the point where she stopped crying for her and started calling me mother.”

  Ella looked at her. “She wasn’t calling you that as short for Mother Superior, I take it.”

  “No,” Greta said with a smile. “When she said it she meant mutti. She became in all the ways that mattered, my beloved daughter. I insisted she become a novice so that I could keep her safe here at the nunnery, although she had never an interest in the outside world anyway.”

  Greta seemed to fight to keep her emotions under control.

  “We’ll get her back, Greta,” Ella said, touching her friend on the shoulder. “Somehow we will.”

  “Oh, Ella,” Greta said, wiping away a tear and smiling bravely at her. “There is no John Wayne in 1620 to rescue the poor damsel. I am afraid real life is nothing like the movies.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t tell John Wayne that,” Ella said, turning and plunging her hands into the soapless dishwater. “Because honestly? I’ve heard that that’s just the sort of statement that makes him all the more determined.”

  The next morning, Ella woke up early by one of the silent novices who smiled shyly and beckoned her from her room. After bathing without soap with a stone bowl of cold water and attempting to dry herself with a rag that had absolutely no absorption or wicking properties, Ella put on the habit she had worn the day before and followed the novice down the steep stone steps to the kitchen. There, she found Greta peeling vegetables and talking with two nuns. When Ella entered, the others left the room in a swish of skirts leaving behind a light fragrance of lemons and flowers.

  Where were they getting the soap? she wondered with irritation. I’d kill for one squeeze of body wash about now.

  “Good morning, Ella,” Greta said, putting down the knife and wiping her hands on a less-than-clean towel. “Will you have breakfast?”

  “I’m surprised you still call it that,” Ella said grumpily. Stale bread and cheap wine does not qualify as breakfast. In her own time, she was a big believer in a proper breakfast, sometimes pulling in half a day’s calories in that meal alone. She loved everything about typical breakfast foods: ham and cheese omelets, bacon, cheese grits, buttered muffins.

  Using the same knife she had been using on the potatoes, Greta pulled out a loaf of bread, cut off a large slice, and placed it on top of the cook stove.

  “If I remember correctly,” she said, “the English like their toast in the morning.”

  Biting her tongue so as not to remind Greta that there were significant differences between the English and the Americans, Ella decided that all in all, a piece of toast would be very nice.

  “You don’t drink coffee in 1620?” Ella asked as she seated herself at the kitchen table.

  Greta laughed. “Well, we don’t because it is only for the wealthy. Oh, I have not thought about a cup of hot coffee in so long! How nice that would be this morning, yes?”

  Ella rubbed her eyes tiredly. She knew there must be a reason the novice had brought her to Greta this early in the morning and surely it was not to be tortured with a medieval breakfast.

  “Elise has found a blackberry bush not too far from here,” Greta said as she turned the bread over on the stove. “So you will have a sort of jam with your toast this morning.”

  “Awesome,” Ella said, hoping she didn’t sound ungrateful.

  Oblivious to sarcasm, Greta placed a bowl of twenty blackberries on the table in front of Ella. She beamed as she watched Ella’s reaction.

  What a wretch I am, Ella thought. These berries
are a luxury for these women and they want me to have them. All of a sudden, the berries looked special. Perhaps not as precious as an Egg McMuffin would’ve been, Ella thought, but still special.

  “Thank you,” Ella said, popping one of the sour berries into her mouth. She fought to keep from making a face. “Mmm-mm!”

  “Today, Margot will show you how to bake bread,” Greta said. She picked up the toasted bread slice from the stove and handed it to Ella on a chipped stoneware plate. “We must all do our part,” she said.

  “Sure, yeah, that’d be great,” Ella said. “I like to bake. That would be cool.”

  “When you are a little more familiar with our ways, we will talk again about Herr Krüger.”

  I scared her yesterday, Ella thought, biting into the toast. She doesn’t trust me to behave properly in this world.

  “So I should just stay in the convent, you think?”

  “I think that would be best. Until you are a little more familiar with everything.”

  “Sure, I can see that,” Ella said, smiling. “No problem.”

  What felt like hours later, Ella took a break from pounding dough in the cold kitchen and wandered out to the garden. The morning sun felt good on her back as she sat on the low stonewall encasing the little plot and watched Greta pull weeds. Ella realized that just sitting in the sun was something she would never do in her normal life. It felt too indolent. Funny, it didn’t feel indolent now. It felt in balance with all the steady physical activity that filled her hours from morning until her head hit the pillow, exhausted, each night.

  “You are thinking, yes?”

  “Trying not to,” Ella said. “But now that you mention it, I wanted to ask you about the specifics of how we got here?”

  “You are not speaking evolutionary now, I think?”

  “I like your sense of humor, Greta. It’s subtle. But seriously. Got any theories?”

  Greta dusted the dirt off her hands and reached into the front bodice of her habit. She pulled out a gold chain. On the end hung a wedding ring.