“David!” Anna said, her voice going high.
“I’m here, Anna.”
The man holding her turned the horse, and they passed David, just getting comfortable on his own horse. Dumbstruck, Anna twisted in her seat to look back at him.
All he did was shrug, and Anna faced forward again. They rode across the meadow and down the hill, reaching the bottom just as the wounded man got a boost onto a horse. He gathered the reins while glancing at the van. Anna followed his gaze. It sat where she’d left it. It was hopeless to think of driving it, even if they had somewhere to go.
The company followed a trail through the trees. A litany of complaints—about her wet clothes and hair, about her aching neck and back from the car crash, and most of all, her inability to understand what was happening—cycled through Anna’s head as they rode.
Fortunately, after a mile or two (it was hard to tell in the growing darkness and her misery) they trotted off the trail into a camp. Three fire rings burned brightly and the twenty men who’d ridden in with David and Anna had doubled the number of people in the small space. The man behind Anna dismounted and pulled her after him. Although she tried to stand, her knees buckled, and he scooped her up, carried her to a fallen log near one of the fires, and set her down on it.
“Thanks,” Anna said automatically, forgetting he probably couldn’t understand English. Fighting tears, she pulled her hood up to hide her face, and then David materialized beside her.
“Tell me you have an explanation for all this,” Anna said, the moment he sat down.
He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Not one I’m ready to share, even with you.”
Great. They sat unspeaking as men walked back and forth around the fire. Some cooked, some tended the horses staked near the trees on the edges of the clearing. Three men emerged from a tent thirty feet away. Their chain mail didn’t clank like Anna imagined plate mail would, but it creaked a little as they walked. Someone somewhere roasted meat and, despite her queasiness, Anna’s stomach growled.
Nobody approached them, and it seemed to Anna that whenever one of the men looked at them, his gaze immediately slid away. She wasn’t confused enough to imagine they couldn’t see her, but maybe they didn’t want to see her or know what to make of her. Anna pulled her coat over her knees, trying to make herself as small as possible. The sky grew darker, and still she and David sat silent.
“Do you think we’ve stumbled upon a Welsh extremist group that prefers the medieval period to the present day?” Anna finally said.
“Twenty miles from Philadelphia?” he said. “Bryn Mawr isn’t that rural. Somehow I just can’t see it.”
“Maybe we aren’t in Pennsylvania anymore, David.” Anna had been thinking those words for the last half-hour and couldn’t hold them in any longer.
He sighed. “No, perhaps not.”
“Mom’s going to be worried sick,” she said, choking on the words. “She was supposed to call us at 8 o’clock. I can’t imagine what Aunt Elisa is going to tell her.” Then Anna kicked herself for being so stupid and whipped out her phone.
“It says ‘searching for service’,” David said. “I already tried it.”
Anna doubled over and put her head into David’s chest. Her lungs felt squeezed and her throat was tight with unshed tears. He patted her back in a ‘there, there’ motion, like he wasn’t really paying attention, but when she tried to pull away, he tightened his grip and hugged her to him.
Eventually, Anna wiped her face and straightened to look into his face. He met her eyes and tried to smile, but his eyes were reddened and his heart wasn’t in it. Looking at him, Anna resolved not to pretend that all was well. They needed to talk about what had happened even if David didn’t want to. How many books have we all read where the heroine refuses to face reality? How many times have I thrown the book across the room in disgust at her stupidity?
“What are you thinking?” she asked him.
He shook his head.
“We could leave right now, follow the trail back to the van,” Anna said. “It couldn’t be more than a few miles from here.”
David cleared his throat. “No.”
“Why not?” she said.
“What for?”
“I want to climb to the top of the hill we came down and see what’s up there,” she said. “I know the tracks of the van disappeared, but we had to have driven down that hill from somewhere. We couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere.”
“Couldn’t we?” David sat with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin in his hands. When Anna didn’t respond, he canted his head to look at her. “Do you really think we’ll find the road home at the top of that hill?”
Anna looked away from him and into the fire. No ... No more than you do. “You’re thinking time travel, aren’t you?”
“Time travel is impossible.”
“Why do you say that?”
Anna’s abrupt question made David hunch. Then he straightened. “Okay,” he said. “If time travel is possible, why don’t we have people from the future stopping by all the time? If time travel is possible, all of time itself has to have already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent event.”
“That doesn’t work for me,” Anna said.
“Not for me either,” said David. “It’s pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as time has gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, else how could we travel back and relive it with them?”
“So you’re saying the same argument could hold for people traveling from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already lived our lives because they are living theirs.”
“Exactly,” David said.
“Then where are we? Is this real?”
“Of course it’s real,” he said, “but maybe not the same reality we knew at home.”
“I’m not following you,” Anna said.
“What if the wall of snow led us to a parallel universe?” he said.
“A parallel universe that has gotten only to the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve read too much science fiction,” she said.
David actually smiled. “Now, that’s not possible.”
Anna put her head in her hands, not wanting to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in the dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between them again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there, upright. Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and threw it into the fire in front of them.
“Hey!” David said.
Anna turned on him. “Are we ever going to be able to go home again? How could this have happened to us? Why has this happened to us? Do you even realize how appalling this all is?”
David opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to protest that she shouldn’t be angry at him, but at that moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him. At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her forward.
She ducked through the entrance, worried about what she might find, but it was only the wounded man from the meadow, reclining among blankets on the ground. He no longer wore his armor but had on a cream colored shirt. A blanket covered him to his waist. Several candles guttering in shallow dishes lit the tent, and the remains of a meal sat on a plate beside him. He took a sip from a small cup and looked at them over the top of it.
The tent held one other man, this one still in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to the wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look, set down his cup, and then pointed to himself.
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.”
Anna knew she looked blank, but she simply could
n’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking that they hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,” David and Anna said together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if they belonged to someone else.
Llywelyn nodded. “You understand who I am?” Again, he spoke in Welsh.
Anna’s neck hurt to bend forward, but she made her chin bob in acknowledgement. She was frozen in a nightmare that wouldn’t let her go.
David recovered more quickly. “You are the Prince of Wales. Thank you, my lord, for bringing us with you. We would have been lost without your assistance.”
“It is I who should be thanking you,” he said.
Anna had been growing colder inside with every sentence David and Llywelyn spoke. Llywelyn’s eyes flicked to her face, and she could read the concern in them. Finally, she took in a deep breath, accepting for now what she couldn’t deny.
“My lord,” she said, “Could you please tell us the date?”
“Certainly,” he said. “It is the day of Damasus the Pope, Friday, the 11th of December.”
David’s face paled as he realized the importance of the question.
Anna was determined to get the whole truth out and wasn’t going to stop pressing because her brother was finally having the same heart attack she was. “And the year?”
“The year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty-two,” Llywelyn said.
Anna nodded. “You remember the story now, don’t you, David?” She spoke in English, her voice a whisper, because to speak her thoughts more loudly would give them greater credence. David couldn’t have forgotten it any more readily than she could. Their mother had told them stories about medieval Wales since before they could walk—and tales of this man in particular. “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was lured into a trap by some English lords and killed on December 11, 1282 near a place called Cilmeri. Except—” Anna kept her eyes fixed on Llywelyn’s.
“Except we just saved his life,” David said.
______________
Footsteps in Time is available wherever books are sold.
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The Unlikely Spy Page 27
