by Lynne Jonell
“Er—yes,” said Will, and at the very same time Nan said, “No.”
The druid and the headman looked at each other.
“He’s a messenger of the sun,” Nan said, “but I’m a messenger of the cray-tee. And,” she added with a sudden burst of inspiration, “I’ll give you my cray-tee power if you promise never to sacrifice anyone again.” She slid off Breet’s armband and held out the beautiful coiled iron.
The druid looked at the armband with covetous eyes. “If you truly perform the great sign you spoke of, then—yes. I will vow.”
“I’d rather have your knife,” said the headman, who had picked up the rope and was examining the cut ends with admiration.
“You can have it,” said Nan recklessly. “But you have to promise, too.”
The headman nodded. “You have my sacred vow,” he said, “and all of us here say the same.”
“All right, then,” Will said. “Everyone stand back. Keep still, and watch.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw that two men still held Nurth; the druid had her copper knife ready. There was only a quarter of the sun left above the horizon.
He had perhaps one minute left. Will resolutely turned his back and stared at the cliff face as Nan took hold of his shoulder. He took a deep breath, willing his mind to calm. He didn’t dare take time to search for the precise moment, but he couldn’t just go blindly into any time at all—not after what had happened the last time he’d tried that.
The last gleam of the sun caught the cliff and edged it with pink. Behind him someone rustled; a throat was cleared; there was the rasping sound of a foot scraping on gravel. Will’s breath made frosty clouds in the air. It was hard to relax when he was freezing. It was doubly hard when there were people with knives behind him, who might decide to sacrifice him after all.
No. He couldn’t let his mind go there. He had one chance. In spite of everything that made him want to tense up, he had to calm himself. Maybe if he thought of something happy, something peaceful? He stared vaguely into space, letting his vision blur. An image of Jamie, running through a field with the sun on his hair, entered his thoughts, and suddenly the air before him shimmered. Will realized with excitement that he had stumbled upon the golden thread of Jamie’s track, a little bouncy, almost seeming to fizz.
It didn’t matter if the time wasn’t exact to the minute; if Jamie was there, that was good enough. Will opened the time window quickly, and on the other side it was summer.
“Now,” he said, and Nan stepped forward.
The villagers gasped aloud as she disappeared. Will heard a clatter, as if someone had dropped a knife. And as he went through the window, he thought he heard Nurth laugh for joy.
* * *
Nan, breathing hard, lifted a pale face as Will emerged on the other side. The wreath of leaves, still in her hair, was slightly askew, and her fur cape hung to one side with a bedraggled air. She showed him her quivering hand. “Look, I’m still shaking.”
Will jammed his hands into his pockets. Now that it was all over, he was shaking a bit himself.
Quick, light steps pounded up the path, and Jamie burst into the clearing.
“You’re here!” Jamie cried, his small face elated. “I knew I could find you if I tried! I found your backpack, and the Magic Eyeball book, and—”
Nan grasped Jamie’s hands and began to dance him around in a circle, the hem of her dress swinging. “We’re home again, we’re home again, we’re home!”
Will leaned against a tree and watched them, grinning. He was home and he was not going into the past again if he could possibly help it.
Another boy came running into the clearing in front of Saint David’s Well—a strong-looking, dark-haired boy a little bigger than Jamie, dressed like a reenactor in a belted tunic with a plaid flying over his shoulder. Jamie greeted him with a happy roar. “I beat you, Robert!”
“I gave you a head start,” said the boy, grinning. “Isn’t that right, Grandfather?” he called over his shoulder.
A slower, heavier step sounded on the woodland path, together with the rhythmic thunk of a walking stick. Will caught a glimpse through the trees of a long brown robe and a man’s bald head with a fringe of gray hair.
Will’s heart skipped a beat. He looked at the sturdy dark-haired boy again.
“Race you to the top!” the boy said, laughing as he dashed up the path.
Jamie made a move to follow, but Will grabbed his arm. “Did you say that boy’s name was Robert?” he asked hoarsely.
Jamie’s cheeks bunched in a grin so wide his eyes nearly disappeared. “Yeah! It’s Sir Robert, when he was a little boy! And the old hermit is his grandfather!” He dug in the waistband of his shorts and pulled out a somewhat grubby Magic Eyeball book. “I woke up, and you weren’t in the castle, and Gormly wasn’t anywhere, so I went up the hill to look for you, but I only found Nan’s backpack and the book. And then I wished I could see Sir Robert again, only before the Stewarts came. So I looked at the book the way you showed me, and after a while, the air got all funny, and I knew it was him on the other side so I went through, and we’ve been playing ever since. Now will you let me go?”
Will’s grip had slackened as Jamie talked. The little boy shook off his brother’s arm and tore off after the young Sir Robert.
Nan dropped her heavy fur cape on the ground. “I’ll keep an eye on Jamie,” she said, and sprinted after him, her Copper Age dress flapping around her calves.
The old man came stumping into the clearing. “Well, lad,” said Sir David, his green eyes twinkling, “I see you are still splashing about in the river of time!”
* * *
“So that’s all, sir.” Will let his gaze drift from Sir David’s face to the castle beneath him, with its fields of grain spread out like a green-and-gold plaid. He had told the monk everything; it had taken a long while. He knew he should be anxious to get back to his own time, but now that he had landed here, he was strangely reluctant to leave. There was something deeply comforting about Sir David. And it had been a relief to talk to a grown-up about what had happened.
Of course Will could talk to Cousin Elspeth and Cousin Ewen about all sorts of things. But they would think he was pretending if he told them about traveling through time. The monk actually believed it was true.
More than that, Will was grateful for a sort of pause. The past had been so packed with action and danger that he still felt a little breathless. As for the future, something inside him shied away from going there just yet.
He would only be going back to anxious, endless waiting to hear news of his mother. And a deep part of him feared that the news, whenever it came, might be bad.
He didn’t mind putting off that moment at all. As long as he stayed in this time, nothing could happen to his mother; she hadn’t even been born yet.
His gaze strayed to the cup-marked stone. He put his hand in his pocket and pulled out Nurth’s gift, swinging it lightly.
The monk laughed. “I used to play with those when I was a lad, too. One nut would be the Roman, come to conquer, you see, and the other would be one of us, fighting back. We won in the end,” he added thoughtfully. “We will not see the Romans come again, God willing, though we have other difficulties to conquer now.”
Will set the cobnut in one of the cup marks on the stone and curled the sinewy string around it. Conker—conquer—he hadn’t gotten the connection until this moment. He leaned back on his elbows and let his eyes linger on the far hills. Somewhere above him the laughing voices of Nan, Robert, and Jamie echoed faintly. The monk sat in thoughtful silence, his gnarled hands clasped around his knees.
“There’s one thing I still don’t get, sir,” said Will, turning toward the monk. “Why does time seem to go at different speeds? I mean, okay, at first I was new to it and didn’t know how to locate the exact times. But how could Jamie live through a whole year in the past, when only a couple of hours went by for Nan and me?”
The monk’s eyes crinkled at t
he corners as he smiled. “If time is like a river, as you told me once, it makes perfect sense.”
“What do you mean?” Will asked.
The monk shrugged. “If a riverbed is shallow or narrow, the stream rushes along in a great hurry. If the riverbed widens or deepens, the stream slows. Who is to say that time, like a river, must always move at the same speed no matter where you dip into it?”
Will frowned, thinking this over.
“Have you not noticed this yourself?” the monk went on. “When you are dreading something, does not the time seem to hurry by far too quickly? Or, if you are waiting impatiently for something good to happen, does it not seem that the moments lengthen into hours, and the hours into days?”
Will nodded. The last week of summer vacation always sped by in a heartbeat, but the week before Christmas seemed to last forever.
“For me,” Sir David went on, a shadow crossing his face, “my life went by like a slow trickle of water, the year I was a hostage.”
Will stared at him. “You were a hostage?”
“Indeed, yes.” The monk’s mouth tightened slightly.
“But why?”
“It began because our King James, when he was just a boy, was taken by pirates.”
“Pirates.” Will stared at the distant river. Once, Will had thought of pirates as fun and adventurous, but now he knew what it felt like to have a knife at his throat. “Was that King James the Fourth?” he asked.
Sir David shook his head. “It was our first King James. After his capture, pirates brought him to England, where he was held hostage for many years. To get our king back,” the monk went on, “Scotland had to pay a ransom—and when we could not pay the whole amount, we sent Scottish nobles to be hostages in his place, until the ransom was paid in full. I was one of the nobles who went.”
“You volunteered to go to prison?”
Sir David nodded, a little ruefully. “It was my duty to my king. But when at last I was allowed to come home, little wonder that I soon tired of being the Menzies chief and passed that title on to my son. I have a great need for peace now … and I have a great desire to serve God. So, as you see, I became a monk.”
Will sat up and curled his arms around his knees. He could understand the longing for peace. His eyes moved slowly over the battlements and brave towers of Castle Menzies.
It had been just a few days of his own time since he had first climbed the hill, looked through the time window, and seen the Stewarts murder two men and kidnap a little boy.
They had met the village girl, Morag, down the hill to the right. Not far away, Ranald had tossed him in the mud. Will had been shocked, then, that a grown-up would lay hands on him, actually throw him through the air and laugh when he hurt himself.
But Ranald’s violence had been nothing compared to that of the Stewarts, who had set the castle ablaze and carried off Sir Robert. The same dark-haired boy who was playing now with Jamie and Nan would grow up and be taken hostage someday by brutal men.
There, at the bottom of the hill, the Romans had once made their camp and sharpened their weapons. Will remembered the fist almost coming through the time window, and the way the Romans had beaten an old man who was their slave.
Not far away was the hill fort of the Picts. It was only rubble now, but it had once held real people, people like Breet, people who were ready to die before being enslaved, who knew that they had to either kill or be killed.
Will stood up restlessly. Somewhere in the woods, a bird called low and soft with a repeated coo, hoo, but in his mind he heard the clash of iron weapons, the rattle of chariots, and the screams of horses and humans piercing through the dust and noise of battle.
He moved off, hardly looking where he was going, and bumped his foot against the cup-marked stone. Immediately he saw it aflame with light, heard the druid’s chant rising to the sun, felt the rope on his neck, pulling tight—
Will’s throat contracted with a low, protesting note. The monk looked up.
“I don’t understand,” Will blurted out. “Every place I’ve been, every time, people have been violent. They’ve taken hostages. They’ve fought and killed and set things on fire. You’d think people would have learned something over all those years, but they’re just the same as they’ve always been! Even in my own time, they’re still doing it!”
The monk nodded somberly. “Each human soul must learn these things all over again, for themselves. Love and mercy are gifts of God, but they are gifts that can be discarded.”
Will picked up a fallen twig and broke it. The small snapping sound was loud in the stillness. It seemed to him as if far too many people had discarded love and—what was it? Mercy. “My mother is a doctor,” he said, without knowing why. “A healer. She went to another country to help some kids there who were sick.”
A slow smile spread across Sir David’s face. “Wherever there is healing, and rescue, you can be sure people are using the gifts of God to bring hope to the world. Each one lights their own small candle from the greater light.”
“Yeah, well, I wish she wouldn’t have left us,” Will said before he could help himself.
“Perhaps she felt she had to go,” the monk said gently.
“But why didn’t she let someone else do it?” Will blurted out.
The monk’s brows twitched slightly. “Sometimes,” he said, “you are drawn to do a particular task, in spite of personal hardship. You feel it in your heart and mind, like a strong hand, pulling. We monks say this is a calling.”
Snap. Snap. Snap. Will broke the twig into ever smaller bits. He didn’t understand what the monk was saying, and he didn’t want to.
“Think of it this way,” the monk said, clasping his gnarled fingers together. “You are sitting by a good fire, warm and safe, but all around you it is dark. And you hear someone crying. Would you not pick up a candle, and light it from that fire, and go out into the dark, searching for the one who needed you?”
Will flicked away the twig fragments. WE needed her, he thought with a spurt of rebellion. Aloud he said, “Some of the people where she went didn’t even want her to come. They—” He gulped and went on, his voice harsh with his effort to keep it steady. “They took her hostage. My dad is trying to get them to let her go.”
The monk’s gnarled hands tightened on his walking stick, and the lines in his face deepened. “I shall pray for them,” he said simply.
Will didn’t want to seem ungrateful, but he couldn’t help a small, cynical shrug. “It isn’t even going to happen for hundreds of years. So thanks, but I don’t suppose your prayers now are going to do much good.”
The monk looked thoughtful. “I don’t think time matters much to God. The Maker of time can certainly pick up a prayer from one bank in the river, and apply it to a spot farther downstream, if it is his good pleasure.”
Will stared at him. “Are you serious?”
The monk chuckled. “If I can believe that you can travel through time, why can you not believe me?”
The voices of children grew suddenly louder, and Nan came running across the green turf. The boys followed, laughing and half wrestling as they came.
“Robert says he has to go down to the castle,” Nan said, breathless from running. “He’s got to do sword practice or something.”
“He’ll need it,” Will muttered. “Considering that the Stewarts are going to burn the castle.”
Sir David turned quickly, his eyebrows shooting up. “Burn the castle?”
Robert came quickly to his side, all laughter wiped from his face.
“Not for a long time,” Nan assured him. “Not until Robert’s all grown up and kind of old.”
Jamie caught the tail end of this as he came up. “You’re going to be awfully nice when you’re grown up,” he said earnestly to Robert. “But watch out for those Stewarts!”
Robert looked at him in surprise. “The Stewarts aren’t so bad,” he said. “It’s the Campbells I worry about.”
“The
year?” Sir David said quietly. “The year when it happens, do you know it?”
Will looked at Jamie. “Do you?”
Jamie shook his head.
“I’m sure it’s in all the Menzies history books, at home,” Nan said mournfully. “But I never read them.”
“Grandfather,” broke in Robert impatiently, “this is only a play, a pretend, of theirs. Jamie has been talking silliness all morning. Surely you don’t believe any of it?”
“Oh, I am pretending with them,” said Sir David absently. He folded his hands in his sleeves and stared, frowning, at the castle. Its stone walls looked stark and gray in the morning light, and impossibly strong. “Will they destroy the kirk as well?”
“I don’t know,” said Will uneasily.
Sir David cleared his throat. “Well,” he said huskily, putting his hand on young Robert’s shoulder, “you may have to fight, but you don’t have to hate. And we can always rebuild. Remember that, my boy.”
Robert tossed the dark hair out of his eyes. “Vil God I Sal,” he said.
“Huh?” said Will, but Robert was already vaulting down the path to his sword lesson. Nan and Jamie followed for a few steps and stood, waving.
The monk smiled kindly down at Will. “He said, ‘Will God, I Shall.’ It means that if God wills it, I shall do it. It’s the Menzies motto. Didn’t you say you were a Menzies?”
Will nodded.
“Then it is your motto as well. Now I must go, my son, but take my blessing with you.” Sir David made the sign of the cross on Will’s forehead. “Be strong,” he said, “and very courageous. I am glad to know that the Menzies have such descendants as you!”
Will watched until both Robert and Sir David were out of sight. He was thinking hard. Of course they had to go back to their own time now, but he wanted to be careful. He couldn’t make any more mistakes.
Nan came back, pulling Jamie by the hand. “What are you waiting for? Open a window, why don’t you?”
Will started down the path. “I want to open it at the same spot where you threw the pinecone and Gormlaith jumped through—you know, where the Roman’s helmet fell off. If I open a window to a second after that, and if I’m in the right place, we should see Gormly running away. Then we’ll know it’s the exact right moment, see?” Will started down the path. “Where was that big rock we hid behind?”
