“And aren’t you impressed that I understood?”
“Can you even make a jump like that?” Teresa paused in her digging to look at Gabriel. “A jump between realities with a relic that isn’t really a relic?”
“I don’t know.” Gabriel kept digging to avoid giving any sign of the doubts rapidly filling his mind. “I’m not sure if anyone has ever tried something like what we need to do.”
“Oh good. We get to break new ground in time travel. That’s always exciting.” Teresa wiped the sweat from her chin with her shoulder. “So, here’s a different question. If we’re stuck here for months or years trying to find the right fossil, will we become part of this Continuum, and will it mess things up for us to leave?”
“I don’t think so.” Gabriel had also pondered this. “This world is a reality two branches away from the Primary Continuum. Even if we merge with it, the timeline will adjust to our being gone. And we’re so far back in the past, I doubt it will matter.”
“Unless future archeologists find our bones and think we’re an alien Adam and Eve,” Teresa said.
“You read too many sci-fi books.” Gabriel wanted to laugh at the idea of his and Teresa’s remains becoming fodder for alien conspiracy theorists in a future alternate reality, but the notion seemed less impossible the more he considered it.
They resumed digging, one of them always facing the water and the other constantly turned toward the jungle in the event that something large and hungry thought they might make a quick and easy meal.
Over the days, they had both gotten better at summoning the subtle energy required to produce magic, even if only slender streams of fire or electricity. Gabriel had also begun to master the method of combining Heart-Tree and Soul magics to convince curious creatures that he and Teresa were far less interesting than their tiny brains originally assumed.
Their fossil hunt went on like this day after day after day. While the sun stayed in the sky, they dug and sifted through the silky dirt along the river’s edge, breaking for lunch and returning to camp for dinner. Days when it rained, they huddled in their hut to stay dry. After their first soaked day of rain under a leaky roof of woven leaves, Gabriel spent a few hours using Earth Magic to waterproof their dwelling.
In the evenings, they sat by the fire, eating roasted fish and the occasional large lizard. They talked and took turns trying to imbue a small, flint spearhead that Gabriel had fashioned to be a talisman. Even with their combined efforts, it soon became obvious that imbuing the spearhead with enough imprints to assist Gabriel in making a time jump would require months, at best. Their conversations ranged from the day’s mundane events to what they missed from their lives at the fort to possible strategies for protecting the Great Barrier should they succeed in getting home.
Inevitably, the topic of The Promise arose, but it seemed moot, as guard duty occupied their nights and fossil hunting filled their days. Gabriel sensed they were both ignoring The Promise as it related to their circumstances, postponing the day when, whether bored while waiting for the rain to stop, or simply too curious to care about consequences, they would come to a mutual decision to abandon the pact. Their regular baths in the river and hours spent next to the fire while their clothes dried were the only times when abiding by The Promise felt like a near physical impossibility.
During the night, while taking his shift at guard duty, Gabriel practiced the meditation to increase his inner subtle energy. He found that it helped keep his eyes open and his mind alert to the potential dangers of the jungle. He made slow progress in cultivating the subtle energy available to him, and he knew it would take many, many months to develop his magical strength enough to take Teresa along with him on a time jump, even with the help of the talisman they sought to imbue.
As days turned to weeks, the footprint of their basecamp continued to expand in direct proportion to the amount of wood required to fuel their fire each night. This slow deforestation had the pleasant side effect of giving them a larger back yard, as Gabriel thought of it, putting potential threats that might emerge from the jungle at a greater distance from their hut. Furthermore, it allowed them to dig a sizable latrine within the boundaries of the camp, but still far enough away from the hut and the river to be sanitary.
One morning, after weeks of sunrises and sunsets had begun to blur into one interminable day, Gabriel woke at dawn to find Teresa seated by the remnants of the fire with a small, leaf-wrapped object cupped in her hands.
“Happy sixteenth birthday.” Teresa kissed him as he crawled from the hut and into the pale sunshine.
“Thank you.” Gabriel blinked away the sleep and accepted the delicately wrapped gift. He had forgotten his birthday.
“It’s not the keys to a car, but considering the options, it’s the best I could come up with.” Teresa beamed at him, bouncing with excitement as he began to tease the leaves apart.
“This is extremely well-wrapped.” Gabriel admired Teresa’s handiwork while separating the interwoven leaves.
“Presentation is ninety percent of perception,” Teresa said.
“You sound like an advertising executive.”
“I’ve been thinking about opening a gift shop.” Teresa laughed. “It would be good for the local economy.”
“We could use a lemonade stand.”
“A grocery store would be nice.”
“Oh!” Gabriel untangled the strips of leaves enveloping his present, revealing it to the sunlight. “It’s lovely.”
In his palm sat a small stone, polished smooth by thousands of years on the river bottom. Across the face of the rock, Teresa had carved a simple message:
G+T = Bliss3
Gabriel grinned and kissed Teresa. A long while later, he pulled away to look again at the stone in his hand.
“You’ve reduced our love to a mathematical equation.” Gabriel laughed.
“I’ve expanded our love with a mathematical equation.” Teresa beamed.
“You are such a geek.” Gabriel kissed her again.
They decided, in honor of Gabriel’s birthday, to take a day off from searching for fossils. Their single-mindedness in mining the slender strip of soil along the river’s edge for the past several weeks had rewarded them with at least one fossil every few days, but nothing they could use to travel into the future. Teresa suggested a hike as a birthday celebration, which would also function as a chance to scout the area for a new potential hunting ground for fossils.
After a quick breakfast, they packed a lunch of dried reptile meat wrapped in leaves and a mix of colorful fruits. Teresa carried these in a basket she had made from woven palm fronds as they headed upriver. A large, dried seed pod filled with water hung from Gabriel’s shoulder. Teresa’s suggestion to use magic to make it watertight had turned out to be much easier than using a lizard bladder. And the water tasted clean. As long as they stayed near the river, they wouldn’t need it, but they preferred to be prepared.
They followed the riverbank for several hours, talking quietly and moving as silently as possible, always on the lookout for any possible attack by crocodile-like creatures from the water, or land-based reptiles in the jungle. By the time the sun reached its midpoint in the sky, they had gone farther downriver than ever before. Having found the fossil hunting site on the first day of exploration, they hadn’t had the time, or inclination, to do more scouting.
An hour later, the dense foliage began to thin out. Within another hour, the trees gradually started to give way to grassland. Soon they stood at the edge of a grassy plain stretching for miles, the river winding its way through the flat land like a rivulet of rain water on a window pane. A short hike brought them to a bend in the river where a low hillside had eroded away from flooding, exposing a wide stretch of sandy soil. They stopped to eat their picnic lunch and discuss their options.
“It’s more exposed.” Gabriel gnawed on piece of lizard jerky. “But it gives us a better sightline for any predators approaching.”
“We
can put the hut there on that rise.” Teresa pointed to a nearby hill with the stick of meat in her hand. “But we won’t have the trees to protect us from the wind and rain.”
“We can reinforce the shelter after we move it,” Gabriel suggested.
“We’ll have to carry all the wood for the hut,” Teresa said. “And for the nightly fire.”
“There are a few trees here on the plains,” Gabriel said. “And some dead braches we can salvage.”
“We could build a small raft to haul wood downriver.” Teresa bit into the jerky in her hand, speaking around the chunk in her mouth. “As long as we stay near the shore we should be fine.”
“That’s a great idea,” Gabriel said. “And if we don’t find anything here, we can take the raft farther downriver to hunt for a new place to dig.”
“It’s official then.” Teresa smiled as she scanned the plains. “We have a new home.”
Constructing a raft and moving their basecamp took several days. After establishing the newly reinforced hut atop the small hill near their new fossil quarry, they spent most of two days scavenging dried wood from the nearby plains and ferrying more firewood with the raft. However, returning the small craft back upstream for each load proved more time consuming than they had originally anticipated. The current ran too swiftly to make paddling or poling their way upriver viable methods of transport. Eventually, they fashioned a thick rope from jungle vines and used it to pull the raft from along the riverbank. They each took turns hauling the empty vessel while the other used a long pole to guide it from the river’s edge.
A few days after their decision to relocate, they had reestablished their encampment along with an ample supply of wood for a new fire pit. They felt relieved to find the move more than justified as their first full day of digging exposed twice as many fossils as they had hoped to find. In the two weeks between his birthday and the date that made Teresa once again numerically older than Gabriel, they worked constantly, driven by the hope that a new location might bring them luck.
Gabriel enjoyed these days, mostly because they allowed him to think of himself as the same age as Teresa. It didn’t bother him as much as it had when they first started dating, and he assumed it would matter less and less the older they grew, but being nearly a year younger than her still irked him in indefinable ways. In his mind, at least, it reinforced the impression of him being less mature. He had once mentioned this concern to Marcus, who had assured him that this perception was unlikely to change, no matter how old he became. He usually managed to forget about it. Usually.
The day of Teresa’s seventeenth birthday proved momentous for more than merely the celebration of a milestone. Gabriel woke her with a kiss and present. Knowing he could not manage an intricate weaving of leaves to wrap his gift, he had instead wrapped it in a wide leaf and encased it in a layer of clay from the riverbed, letting it bake dry in the hot sun of the plains.
Teresa stared at what appeared to be a baseball sized clump of dried earth and laughed.
“A ball of dirt. How romantic.”
“The romantic part is on the inside.” Gabriel tapped the dried clay with his finger.
“Ooo. Like a clay chocolate truffle.” Teresa dug her fingers into the clay and began to pull it apart.
“Lots of clay. Not so much chocolate.” Gabriel held his breath as Teresa pulled the earthen crust from around the leaf-wrapped package.
She hesitated a moment and then tore open the inner leaf to reveal a small seashell, a delicate purple and white pattern mottling its ribbed outer curves. Inside the shell, she found the letters G&T etched into a tiny, red-painted heart.
“It’s beautiful.” Teresa threw her arms around Gabriel’s neck and offered her appreciation in the form of a passionate kiss. When she broke away her face looked inquisitive. “Is it a relic?”
“It’s not that nice a birthday present.” Gabriel laid his fingers across the seashell. “It only lasts a few million years before getting pulverized by a rock.”
“How did you find a seashell here?” Teresa asked.
“We must be close to an ocean.” Gabriel had also wondered about that. “This whole area was probably under water at one time. That’s why we’ve been so lucky finding fossils.”
“Lucky?”
“Unsuccessfully fortunate.”
“Now there’s a phrase to rally behind.” Teresa laughed.
“Shall we take the day off?” Gabriel asked as they stepped from their small hut to greet the day.
“Maybe we’ll quit early. I have a good feeling about today.” Teresa looked again at the inscription on the seashell before sliding it into her pocket.
“I thought I was the one who was supposed to have premonitions?” Gabriel said.
“It’s more of a gut feeling,” Teresa answered.
The premonition of Teresa’s gut proved prophetic. Shortly after they returned to digging in the sand after a lunch break, she discovered the fossil of a miniature reptile. Gabriel examined the rock in her hand with his space-time sense and let out a whoop of joy.
“You were right!” Gabriel kissed her. “We found it.”
“Will it get us home?” Teresa asked between joyful kisses.
“Not all the way,” Gabriel said. “It doesn’t link to the Primary Continuum, and it gets destroyed in a fire in someone’s fossil collection in the late 1800s, but that means there are humans and that we can find more relics and make our way home.”
“Humans. That’s good news.” Teresa sighed. They had both worried that the alternate universe they inhabited might evolve in a radically different way, producing another dominant species that achieved civilization, or worse yet, never producing one at all.
They stared at each other a moment, both knowing what finding the fossil meant but hesitating to speak it aloud. Gabriel saw the look in Teresa’s eyes and spoke first.
“It won’t take that long,” he said.
“You said it might take a year or more.” Teresa looked away.
“We’re not going have this argument again.” Gabriel’s stomach began to churn uncomfortably.
“I’m only pointing out the obvious.” Teresa turned away.
“It’s obvious you’re not thinking straight. I told you — I’m not leaving without you.”
“That was before we had a fossil to get you home. You can leave now.”
“You and I leave together.”
“I’m the only thing keeping you here. Everyone else back in the Primary Continuum needs you more than I do.”
“I need you more than they need me.”
“You can find me again.”
“I’m telling you, the variables make it impossible. You know that. This timeline is too unstable. Even travel into the future is unpredictable.”
“I trust you.”
“If I leave you, I can’t get back. I might be able to use the fossil to come back to this time period, but I wouldn’t be able to be accurate about it. I might find you decades later, if at all.”
“I said, I trust you.”
“I don’t trust myself. I’m not leaving you here.”
“You are so…ugh!” Teresa broke away from Gabriel’s embrace and stood facing the river.
Gabriel stepped behind her, staring at her back for a long while before picking up his spear and walking down to the river to catch a few fish for dinner. He sulked and fumed as he stabbed unsuccessfully at the water. With each failed attempt to spear a fish, his ire clouded his concentration making success impossible. Finally he gave up, thrusting the spear into the sand and stomping off along the riverbank. He walked a few hundred feet away and squatted on a slight rise in the land. Even in his anger, he never thought of getting out of sight of Teresa, in the event a prehistoric creature found her appetizing while alone. She stayed near the hut, engaging in seemingly pointless and repetitive tasks, like cleaning out the fire pit three times.
Eventually, she walked downriver to join Gabriel.
“Sorry.
” Teresa sat on the grass beside him.
“Me too.” Gabriel reached out his hand and Teresa took it.
“What are you apologizing for?” She pivoted to get a better look at him.
“For all the things I was thinking about you for the past hour.” Gabriel sheepishly stared at the grass before him.
“Well, I’m only apologizing for the things I say out loud.” Teresa tightened her grip on his hand. “But I am sorry.”
“Let’s catch a fish to celebrate your birthday and finding the fossil.” Gabriel stood up, pulling Teresa to her feet.
“Excellent idea.” She leaned in to kiss him, but he pulled his face back and caught her eyes with his own.
“And no more arguing about getting home together.” Gabriel’s brows furrowed with the seriousness of his emotions.
Teresa took a deep breath and exhaled slowly before making her reply.
“Deal.”
Gabriel kissed her, and they walked hand in hand along the riverbank back to their campsite. While they did not argue again about the idea of Gabriel using the fossil to make the time jump to the future alone, the unspoken notion created an undercurrent of tension between them in the ensuing weeks.
With the possession of a fossil to take them forward in time to human civilization and, presumably, to shadow relics that might exist in the Primary Continuum, they spent the majority of their time focused on cultivating their inner subtle energy and imbuing the spearhead to use as a talisman. The level of concentration required for these two tasks limited their ability to engage in them. They could only focus their minds for so long before the effort brought about lapses in clarity that made the process untenable. Complicating this, they needed to remain on watch from the large reptile life inhabiting the tall grass of the plains. They each managed four meditative sessions a day. While one concentrated on the spear head, or intensifying their subtle energy, the other stayed on guard and prepared meals.
Three weeks after finding a useful fossil, Gabriel tried to assess their progress, as much to calm his fears as to counter Teresa’s silent arguments that he should leave her in the alternate Paleozoic. He estimated that with his gradually increasing inner subtle energy and the imbuing of the spearhead, he might be able to manage a time jump with Teresa in ten to twelve months. If they combined their magical energy, they could potentially reduce that time to eight or nine months. This, of course, assumed that no serious injury befell either of them during that time. Not optimistic news, but he shared it with her, nonetheless, during an evening meal.
The Wizard of Time Trilogy (A Fantasy Time Travel Series) Page 72
