Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  The day’s warm sunshine had dried a lot of the mud out of the dale and left it only in occasional little pockets of squelch, which my feet unerringly found, and that splashed up around my legs leaving streaks that looked black in the moonlight. There was almost no sound, apart from my occasional cursing at the puddles, only the odd noise from the camp as someone coughed or shouted out, the rustle of the wind through the heather and bracken and somewhere, a long way off, a rumble which was probably a tractor or lorry up on the road. As I rounded the bend even these sounds died away, until there was nothing but me and the wind in that narrow valley.

  There was a burn of acid in my throat and a hot line of anxiety running down into my stomach that made me hunch my shoulders and shiver despite the relative balminess of the night. Communicate? When all I’d ever done so far was to stumble on the whole time-slippy thing, now I was going to try to use it? What was I, mad? But then I kept coming back to the image of Duncan holding that earring, that expression of half-hope on his face. Even if I could do nothing else, I could try to find him some information, something that would give an element of closure to that awful period in his life. Although trying to work out how we’d explain it to the police didn’t bear thinking about.

  I looked up as I reached the end of the dale to see past the heap of rocks that blocked the way, and saw none of the signs of our recent dig, no propped up ranging poles, no abandoned buckets or spoil heaps … instead the camp was there. I felt myself relax and realised how scared I’d been that I wouldn’t be able to find it any more. As though digging things up might have disturbed whatever it was that gave me the ability to see them, but there the huts were, darker shadows pierced by gleams and flickers of firelight through gaps in the roofs and walls. Somewhere a dog barked, a high, panicky bark and then went quiet as though it was off chasing something over the moors, but otherwise, here the silence was mostly broken by the sounds of the wind through tall grass and the plop and trickle of the river.

  I stood by the stone barrier and tried to calm my stomach. My palms were sweaty as well, now, my entire body coming out in rebellion against what I was about to do, but I literally could not see any other way. The moonlight was illuminating a path across the site and throwing everything else into shadow as if inviting me to do it, although I couldn’t help but turn around to try to fix things in my mind. What if I could go over there but not back? What if Anya had travelled by accident and then been unable to go back? Would I find myself trapped in prehistory, forever worrying about what happened to Duncan after I vanished? And, apart from that, I’d be trapped in an historical era, which was ever so slightly more important, at least from my point of view.

  As I hesitated, there was a bright flash of firelight, which made me look up. Someone had opened a door, I’d guess, but just as quickly closed it. Did that mean they’d come out? I scanned the moonlit scene but there were huge patches of shadow caused by the huts, into which I couldn’t see. Carefully and cautiously, in case something happened, like bursting into flames, I inched my way over the rocks until I stood on the grass on the other side. Like the last time, up by the barrow, there was no obvious sign that anything was different, although I could convince myself that the air felt strange, a little clearer, and there was a powerful smell of wet sheep somewhere about.

  No dogs rushed up, the only thing that marked my passage between worlds was a noise like a pig grunting, but I couldn’t see it, and reasoned that it would probably be behind some kind of fence, if the inhabitants didn’t want their crops snouted up, so I crept a little closer. Still nothing. I had just about relaxed, when a sudden streak of white dropped across my vision, soundlessly marking my retina with something like a silent explosion, and then rose into the air again, leaving me huddled down onto all fours, gasping and only slowly realising that it had been a barn owl swooping on a mouse. I hyperventilated a bit more. I am not cut out for this, I want to go home – but Duncan needs to know.

  I restrained the urge to crawl forwards, and stood up again. These people must be secure in their existence if they had no one guarding their doors, no dogs on watch or even actual doors to guard, my initial reconnaissance revealing that it seemed to be skin curtains that hung over the small, low entrances under the deep eaves. It was all so Game of Thrones that I kept expecting to be challenged by a man with a spear, but there continued to be nobody about.

  I’d seen the woman, Hen, go to the single hut on her own, while the couple had gone to one of the cluster, and I thought one lone woman would be easier to approach, so I began creeping up the slight hill to that solitary building, stepping over the woven hedging that outlined it, to arrive at the curtain. Then, taking a very deep breath, I pushed the curtain aside and walked into the hut, saying, ‘I come in peace,’ for which I could have kicked myself but nothing more apt had presented itself.

  The interior was empty. Well, not empty, it was cluttered with wooden bowls, piles of woven fabric and skeins of wool that smelled even more of wet sheep; there was meat hanging in strips from the rafters and a low-burning fire in a hearth delineated by large rocks and inasmuch as a round hut can be said to have corners, all corners were full of piles of wood, cracking and drying. The air was full of smoke, which made my eyes sting, but even so I could see that there was nobody in there.

  The smoke hit the back of my throat and made me cough, and I had to sit down on a roughly carved piece of wood to get below the fumes and get my breath back, while I took in the smells; something savoury from the pot by the fire, wood sap, peat and mud and wool. While I hacked and hawked a little tiny bit of my mind was yelling, you’re in the Bronze Age! This is what it was really like! But most of the rest of it was concerned with not asphyxiating or coughing up blood. Right. Nobody here. So now what? Go back, wait, wander around shouting until someone turned up? I stood up, caught another lungful of smoke and was just starting to clear my throat when there was a commotion in the doorway, and the large man I’d seen scything the grass was standing there, wearing just a loose tunic, but holding, very visibly, the scythe again. Behind him, and visible over his shoulder, a woman’s face bobbed into view and away again – the woman I’d come to see. Hen.

  ‘Please, don’t do anything rash,’ I said, holding my hands up to indicate surrender, but the man just held the scythe up in a more threatening manner.

  ‘She speaks an unknown tongue,’ he said to the woman behind him.

  ‘No, I don’t. I can understand you perfectly.’ I tried to look unassuming, but whatever form the translation took, it clearly only worked one way, because the more I spoke the more his face contorted. He was dark, hair and eyes a shade off black and his skin looked worn and lined, rough in patches. His hair was chopped short as though he cut it with the scythe that was hovering very visibly between us.

  ‘I saw her as I went to draw water – that is why I fetched you, Tor,’ said the woman, carefully staying behind him. ‘Look. She wears breeches like a man, maybe she is lost from a hunting party.’

  ‘Is she alone?’ The man stared at me and thrust his face into mine, still brandishing that scythe. ‘Are. You. Alone?’ He shouted at me a couple of times and all I could do was nod furiously and kind of crouch as subserviently as I could manage. ‘Where are your people?’

  ‘She does not understand,’ Hen said. ‘We should take her to the boundary and release her, a lone woman is no threat to us and her people will find her when it grows light.’

  I opened my mouth to reply, realised the futility, and my heart began to knock against my chest as another billow of smoke overtook me and the coughing fit bent me double. By the time I stood up again, the man had pulled a length of twine from where a skein of it hung from the roof and was twisting it between his hands as though he meant to garrotte me.

  ‘No, please …’ I held my hands up again, I thought it was a universally recognised symbol for submission, but not back here it wasn’t. The man stepped
forward quickly and dropped the scythe, using his weight to force me against the wall of the hut and, once I was squeezed between him and the rough woven wood, wrapped the twine around my wrists. He smelled powerfully of dung and sweat and my eyes watered again. ‘Please! I’ve just come to ask some questions!’ My heart was beating so hard that it hurt and all I could think was, Is this what happened to Anya? Is this what they did to her?

  ‘Fetch the dogs. We will tie her outside as a message to her tribe. These lands are ours, by right of the ancestors who watch over us, no others should be hunting here. They will see her and know we are awaiting them. Tomorrow we shall kill her and lay her bones at the boundaries as a warning.’ The man jerked the binding around my wrists as he spoke, pulling me towards the doorway of the hut.

  ‘I’m looking for someone – a girl,’ I found enough breath and courage to say. ‘Anya. She might have come through here.’

  He stopped suddenly and I crashed into his shoulder. Thought, for a second, that my words had found their mark, that he’d understood, but then he bent and I realised he was just moving the leather curtain out of the way. There was blood on my wrists from the tightness of the bonds, but I felt no pain. Not yet …

  ‘Can she not be released at dawn?’ The woman held the curtain aside so that we could get through without being flapped in the face and met my eye, very briefly, then dropped her gaze, tipping her head forward until her unkempt hair hid her face. ‘Must she die, Tor?’

  No, no, she’s right, I don’t need to die, I’m no threat to anyone, look at me! I bowed my head and tried to look small and unassuming. A little part of me still couldn’t come to terms with this being real and happening now and I was slowly realising that I’d been treating the past like a theme park, to be looked at and cooed over and ‘oh look, aren’t they clever?’ in a patronising, modern human way. But this was real. This was life-or-death for these people, who existed on an edge most of us would never even understand. The green dampness of the stems that tied me was real, the pain was real. I could die. Really.

  A sudden swirl of sensation, the smell of male sweat, rancid fat, and lanolin combined with the burn of the rope at my wrist and the dizzying effect of being turned quickly with no chance to catch my balance; I nearly fell but he held me upright by dragging on the restraint.‘And have others come? Where there is one there are others, and if we are seen as easily approached then we will be seen as easily raided.’ A little of the harshness left his voice and he lowered the volume a bit too. ‘Winter is coming, Hen. If they take our supplies the children will not survive.’

  Oh God, they’re going to kill me.

  Hen lowered her head still further. ‘You are right, my Lord Tor,’ she said. ‘I shall fetch the dogs.’

  At that point I stopped protesting and shut up, although I couldn’t stop the tears that were streaming down my face or the shudders of pure horror that were jerking at my body as though some kind of electricity was passing through it. I was shoved, dragged and kicked out of the hut and across the site, then stopped with a jerk on my wrists that nearly dislocated my shoulders. Tor drove a stake into the ground, a bent branch with the twine caught under it, and he stamped it right down, pushing me savagely to the turf so I was held by my wrists, my arms out in front of me and my body pressed against the ground.

  In the moonlight I watched the woman return with an enormous dog that looked as though at least one of its parents might have been a bear, and tether it alongside me. She kept her head averted the whole time, wouldn’t meet my eye or even look in my direction. I wondered if she felt guilty, if this was how they always dealt with their enemies.

  Then, bruised, aching and sobbing quietly, I was left pinned against the earth, with a dog that growled and raised the hair along its neck if I so much as moved.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Duncan heard her leave the tent and lay for a moment wondering what to do. He could creep out after her and face near terminal embarrassment if she was only going up to the toilets. But if she’s not? If she’s … whatever it’s called when you can see through time. He struggled up onto his elbows and then, gritting his teeth and deciding to take the consequences if she really was just going for a late night wee, he slid out of his sleeping bag and tied on his boots.

  The clarity of the night sky over his head made him stop for a second, face tipped up to the moon, but the distant shadowy figure of Grace picking her way down the dale made him move again, tiptoeing down the path and trying not to slip and give away his pursuit by sliding past her on a tsunami of mud, flailing limbs and terror.

  She’s prepared to do this for me … what does that say about how she thinks of me? Does she think of me? Or am I just a means to translate what she is seeing into something she can understand? And what is she seeing?

  She looked so slight, so insignificant as she picked her way through the ageless landscape, but then he knew that this place had endured as it was since the last Ice Age had scoured through, gouging the dales and forming the rivers. What was a human lifespan in terms of that geological kind of history? He stopped walking for a moment, suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer weight of time quarried from those ordinary hills, and when he started again, the small moonlit figure had disappeared around the bend and he was alone with the silence.

  Duncan picked up speed, which wasn’t hard on a downhill, mud-slicked surface, and was just in time to see her pause at the scree of boulder and pebble that half-blocked the valley and meant that the dig equipment had all had to be carried in along the slope rather than down the flat basin. Then, as he watched, she scrambled up onto the rock wall, lowered herself to the ground and … disappeared.

  His breath snagged in his throat, as though his lungs lacked the power to drive it out, and then he was running, his feet overtaking his body as he flung himself down, careless of the bushes and stray thorns that tried to stop him. ‘Grace!’ His voice carried on a mild echo. ‘Grace!’

  Nothing. Just the sluice of wind passing through leaves and a far off droning as a plane passed overhead, its lights emphasising that even here in this valley the modern world was never far away. Duncan jumped the stone barrier and found himself up to his ankles in a wet ditch where a trench had begun and been closed down. A stray ranging pole clattered to the ground at his feet, disturbed from its precarious position propped against a rock, and a corner of plastic waved to him as the breeze caught it. But no Grace.

  The full moon glinted off angles and sparked against metal and revealed no sign of her anywhere, not that the dig site was full of places to hide. Despite himself, Duncan found he was peering behind spoil heaps clearly too small to conceal even a child, and into trenches, as though Grace might have taken cover. Still no Grace and he sat suddenly on the turf with the realisation of what this meant.

  She’d travelled, somehow, back to a time he’d spent his life studying. Either that or the earth had swallowed her. There was simply nowhere to hide and he’d seen her drop over the rock wall only moments before he reached the site. She’d gone. Into a past he would have given his doctorate to be able to see. Snatched back into history. How could it happen? Seriously, how? Even the earring … wasn’t proof absolutely positive. Maybe the thing about the magpies was true? But now…

  ‘Sorry.’ He apologised to the rocks, to the scrubby bushes and the waving heads of the bog cotton as though they had somehow colluded with her. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t really believe you.’ He patted the grass beside where he sat and then lay back into the firm turf and whin bushes, letting the wind tug at his hair and the night sky unfold above him.

  Grace … where are you?

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  I don’t know whether I slept, passed out or just entered some kind of fugue state of terror, but I blanked out for a while. The big bear-dog beside me had its head on its paws when I became aware of things again, and, although I couldn’t see its eyes, its eye
brows were twitching in a way that indicated it was still very much awake and watching.

  I was wet, either with dew or a shower of rain, there were diamante beads dotting the dog’s fur, which was brown and extremely thick, and the ground beneath me held pinpricks of moisture. I tried an experimental tug against the stake that held me, but even that movement caused the dog’s intense amber gaze to swing around to me and a deep rumble of growl, accompanied by a dew-shedding raising of hackles, resulted.

  Okay. Okay, think, Grace. You’re a twenty-first century woman, which should give you some advantage here …

  … or not. This wasn’t the twenty-first century. It was some time BC, not my time, not my territory, and these people were defending their camp and their families, whereas all I was doing was blundering around looking for information on a vanished girl who might not ever have encountered this group. Maybe she really was lying in a shallow grave, somewhere in the dale. Maybe she’d tried to leave and got caught in the fog, laid down and died. If the dog hadn’t looked set to bite my head off if I moved, I’d have kicked myself for my stupidity. And then I had another moment of terrified paralysis as the realisation that I could die here hit me hard again, the knowledge that Duncan would have more visits from the police, that there would be more of those ‘no smoke without fire’ rumours … that in attempting to help him I could have made things so so much worse.

  And nobody would ever know what happened to me. Duncan might suspect, but how could he ever tell anyone? The phrase ‘my new girlfriend went back into the past to try to find out what happened to my previous girlfriend, and I think they both died there,’ was so esoteric as to be almost unsayable.