by Joanna Bell
"What?" She asked, looking up. "Why do you give me that look like I really am a crazy old fool – have I got the year wrong? I don't swear it's 2003, you know, it's not like I've kept track. It could be 2004, or 2005. Just tell me – don't keep me in suspense any longer!"
"It's – Heather, it's 2018."
"What?!"
I stayed quiet, knowing Eltha – Heather – had heard me the first time. She brought her hands to her face and then she laughed and shook her head.
"2018? It can't be! Tell me the truth now, girl. 2018! You should make your lies more believable if you wish to play a trick on –"
"It's 2018," I repeated softly, and then listened as Heather's laughter stopped and a quick, hysterical little sob erupted from her throat.
"2018?!" She exclaimed again, as tears sprang up in her eyes. "You can't mean it, Sophie. It can't be. It can't be so late. If it's 2018, then that would make me – um," she broke off, doing the calculations in her head, and then she turned her wide eyes to me. "57? 58? No. It can't be – it's not possible. 57?!"
I wanted to be able to reassure her. I wanted to be able to laugh, suddenly, and tell her that no, it was in fact 2003. But it wasn't, and something in the look in Heather's eyes almost brought a tear to my own. The day Ashley was born I had found myself suddenly acquainted with a new horror not only of time passing but of how quickly it did so. It was still the quickest way to make myself cry, to look back at the photos of my daughter as a newborn. It felt like yesterday, and the memory of her tiny body sleeping in my arms was still so fresh if I closed my eyes I could swear no time had passed at all.
Sometimes when I looked at my daughter – no longer an infant and now, in certain lights, showing signs of the young woman she would soon be – it was all I could do not to sob with the poignancy of it all, of all that had passed behind us already. It was that same look I saw in Heather Renner's eyes that evening in the woods, the utter human shock at the relentless passing of time.
"I think so," I told her gently. "Yes, I think that would make you 57."
"I was a young woman when I came here," she whispered, more to herself than to me. "Younger than you. And now look at these hands – I dread to think what I would see in a mirror."
"But wouldn't you like to see a mirror again?" I prompted. I liked the woman sitting next to me, whether she was Eltha or Heather or someone else entirely. I didn't want her to keep living the life of squalor and hard labor she was seemingly choosing for herself. "Wouldn't you like to have a bath in a bathtub? To get your hair washed and cut at the salon?"
It had only been a week and I was already discovering new levels of filth I hadn't even thought possible. Dirt stuck under my fingernails – and no matter how many times I removed it with a small stick, it would be back again within a couple of hours. My hair, unwashed, fell thick and greasy against the back of my neck so I had to wear it up, stuck through with one of the carved bones the women used, one of which Ivar had secured for me. The mere thought of a hot bath made my skin tingle with anticipation.
Heather gave me a look, one which said I did not know what I was talking about. Maybe she was right, maybe I didn't. I certainly couldn't pretend to know what it was like to leave society to go live in the woods with my warrior husband for decades, only for him to die and leave me vulnerable to destitution and kidnapping.
"You must go, though," she urged me again, placing one of her hands on top of mine and squeezing. "You must. If you cannot find your way back to the tree that brought you here, it is no exaggeration to say you will not see your family again. I don't mean for a month or two, or a year – I mean forever. You will never see them again."
I turned away, annoyed by what I saw as Heather's attempts to scare me into leaving. She noticed it at once.
"You think I deliberately try to frighten you, girl?"
"Well," I began. "Yes, a little. It's not necessary, you know. I already want to go back. I already want to see my daughter and my mother again. Do you think I don't? We're not in the Arctic here, I'll be able to find my way back, I'll be able to find a road or a town."
"You've found no roads or towns so far."
I nodded. "Right. But I imagine Ivar and his people are avoiding them. It's what I would do, if I wanted nothing to do with civilization. I'd avoid it."
Suddenly, Heather grabbed my shoulders, hard. When I tried to pull away, she held on, and she was stronger than she at first appeared to be.
"Ow!" I cried, trying to wriggle free.
But she didn't let go. She shook me hard enough to scramble my brain for a few seconds and then she moved in very close to my face.
"You haven't listened to a word I've said, have you? You aren't in New York anymore, Sophie. You aren't even in the United States anymore. And the further you get from that tree the more likely it is you'll never find your way back. That tree IS the only way back! I'm telling you, if you want to see your child again you must find your way back there before it's too late."
"But..." I said, after a few seconds of searching for a reaction. "But – it's impossible. You say we're in another world, right? What other world? Where?"
"You're asking the wrong questions. It doesn't matter where. It matters when."
"When?" I repeated dumbly, flummoxed. "What do you mean 'when?' I don't – Heather, I seriously do not understand what you're talking about right now. I don't –"
"What year do you think it is?"
I laughed, at first assuming Heather was joking. I'd just asked her that question. But then I saw the expression on her face and she did not appear to be joking.
"It's 2018," I replied. "I just told you it's 2018."
She shook her head, just slightly. "No, Sophie. No it isn't. It might be 2018 in River Falls, where you come from – but it is not 2018 here."
"OK," I replied, still clueless but willing to play along. "What year is it here then?"
"I don't know."
I threw my hands up, chuckling. "Well then how can you –"
"Do you have eyes, girl?" Heather demanded, starting to lose her patience with me. "Ears? A nose? Do you see how we live? Do you really think it's possible that you're still in the woods in New York in 2018? You've traveled back through time. It's the tree on the Renner property – I don't know how it works, but the first time it happened to me it was an accident."
"This is stupid," I said angrily, even though there was no anger in my heart – only a sudden, bottomless fear. "I came to talk to you about leaving, and you want to make up stories? I haven't traveled back in time, because time travel doesn't exist. It's impossible! And now you say it isn't and I have but you conveniently don't know the year?"
"How would I know the exact year?" She replied, standing up. "These people don't go by years, they go by seasons. If there is a large flood one year or a particularly bountiful harvest they'll remember it that way – 'the year the village was swept away by the river' – but they don't assign numbers the way you – the way we – do. I was 22 when I came here and believe me, history was never my strong subject. But from what I can tell we're not a few hundred years in the past, we're way in the past. A thousand years or more."
A thousand years. The phrase hung in my mind until it was overtaken by something else – an image of a broken piece of jewelry. I stumbled forward a little and grabbed a tree branch to steady myself. The broken piece of Anglo Saxon jewelry that I'd found in the woods on the Renner property. The one encrusted with dirt from over a thousand years ago. The man I'd spotted, looking just like Ivar and his men. My heart pounded double-time in my chest and a great roaring started up in my ears.
"Sit," Heather said, helping me back down onto the log when I proved incapable of following even basic instructions. "Sit down, Sophie, there you go. It's a lot to take in, isn't it? Do you think I believed it myself, when I first came here? It wasn't like a movie. Oh, here I am in the past! No, it took months to fully accept – and even then I would still catch myself imagining – like you've be
en doing – that I was just lost."
"I'm in the past?" I asked robotically, as my soul seemed to slip into a kind of psychological shock or survival mode. "I'm in the past and the only way I can get back is to find the exact spot in the woods where I arrived here? The tree?"
Heather nodded. "Yes. That's what I'm trying to tell you. The longer you stay here, the less likely it is that –"
"I have to go then," I told her, as panic began to set in. "I have to go right now. I have to leave and go back there right now."
I stood up again, before I was even finished, and began to head back towards the path, fully intending to follow it right back to the original camp, from where I would find my way back to the sea, the path along the coast, the tree with the ribbon tied around it and then, finally, back into the woods I had been imagining were still on the Renner land.
"No!" Heather cried, catching up to me and grabbing my wrist before lowering her voice to a whisper. "No, you can't leave right this minute. Sophie, stop! Listen to me!"
I turned around to face her. "But you said I had to go," I told her, still with that strange flatness in my voice. "You said the further I get from –"
"Yes!" She nodded. "Yes, that's true! But it's dusk, girl. You can't be walking the Great Road in the pitch dark! There are wolves in these woods, and worse than wolves. The Jarl probably asks his men where you are already – do you think he will let himself be defied so easily? Do you think he won't set a few of his men and hounds on your trail? Be smart, girl. Wait for a distraction, as I told you already."
I looked south, in the direction I knew I had to travel. The deep blue of twilight had just fallen over the woods, making it difficult to see even the ground a foot or two in front of my feet. I couldn't go at that moment, Heather was right. But how could I stay? How many days would it be before there was another battle, another crisis that would take enough of Ivar and his warriors' attention to allow me to slip away, unnoticed?
It was as I was standing there pondering my options that I heard a rustling in the trees behind us and then saw the pool of light from a torch carried aloft approaching.
"Go!" I whispered to Heather, not wanting her to catch a beating. But she was already gone, slipped back into the darkness to make her bed on the forest floor. I looked up and met the two men who came crashing through the bushes towards me.
"What is it?" I asked when I could finally see their faces, lit with the torchlight. "I got lost, I'm sorry. I'm trying to find my way back Iv – to Jarl Ivar. Can you help m–"
I found myself swept up over one of the men's shoulders, his fingers gripping the back of my thigh uncomfortably hard, and then hauled back towards the front of the temporary camp to Ivar.
"Where have you been?" He asked, in a tone of voice I could not decipher, when I was deposited in front of him.
"Nowhere!" I replied, trying not to look to guilty. "I just went for a walk and then I – it got dark and I couldn't find my way back to you, Jarl. But then your men found me so everything is alright now. If you could –"
Ivar waved his men away and waited until they'd gone to turn his steely gaze towards me. A fire burned in a small, hastily dug fire-pit, and Ivar sat behind, regarding me with open suspicion. A reflection of the flames danced in his blue eyes and I found a tumult of emotions in my heart for the warrior chief.
Fear, for one. He'd taken a liking to me, that was obvious, but nothing I'd seen from Ivar indicated a man with any reservations about the idea of using violence as a tool. But it wasn't just fear of being hurt, or of the whippings he'd threatened me with but never carried out. It was a kind of awe, a respect. The best men don't tell you who they are, they just are. You don't need a written list of their qualities because you see the high esteem in which they are held by others, the respectful obedience not just of women who may or may not have reasons for showing obedience to a strong, intelligent man – but other men, too. Other strong, intelligent men. Ivar's people respected him – it had been a week and I had yet to see anyone openly express anything even resembling resentment or annoyance or any of the other feelings people will express for those in a superior position to them towards their leader. And although it would have been easy to assume they were all simply cowed by fear, it didn't seem that way. You can sense it when people obey and keep their mouths shut out of fear - and when their quiet regard is genuine. With Ivar, it was the latter.
I was impressed with him. More impressed than I had ever been with a man. I tried to laugh it off, to tell myself that I'd just had the bad luck to live a life particularly bereft of good men, and that next to my daughter's father – or my own – almost any man would look preferable.
"What do you think of?" Ivar asked, declining to give me the telling off I'd sensed was on the tip of his tongue. "You always look at the sky when you're thinking, Sophie. It's something I've noticed."
"Aren't you angry?" I asked, flattered that he had noticed such a small detail and eager not to let him know it. "You seemed –"
"You really are a trial, woman. A sweet trial, but a trial all the same."
"A sweet trial? What's that?"
Ivar took a stick from beside the fire-pit and poked at the burning logs, maneuvering a larger one right into the center where the flames burned the hottest. "My mother used to say that to me, you know. I was an unruly child, always getting hurt, always getting yelled at by the old people in the village. After she dressed my wounds or left her cooking to deal with an angry neighbor, she would always say to me that I was her sweetest trial. I never understood it – not really, anyway. Now I think you're starting to make me understand."
"A trial," I repeated. "I get it. Because I don't always do what you want me to do, right? Because I don't always obey you instantly, the way everyone else around here does? You understand that I'm not a child, don't you? I don't even make my daughter obey me the way you want me to obey you."
Ivar sighed. "You understand that there's a reason the people listen to me, don't you, you obstreperous woman?"
"Because you'll whip them if they don't?" I suggested. "Because they see what happens to people who don't obey you?"
Ivar fixed me with a look. "No," he shot back. "No, it isn't that at all. They listen to me because I protect them. Do you think I'm annoyed that you were nowhere to be found at dusk because I'm like Gunnar? Because it wounds my ego? No. It's because it's no good for a woman to be alone in the woods at dusk, especially when the woods are unfamiliar."
I nodded at the mention of Gunnar, taking the point. The younger of the two brothers was almost the opposite of his older sibling. Where Ivar was calm, Gunnar was heated. Where Ivar was serious, Gunnar was unserious. I'd stood aside a couple of days ago when Gunnar snickered at being told off for swinging his sword, freshly sharpened, in the midst of a small group of people – mostly young women I suspected were keen to use him as a stepping stone to his older sibling's heart. Even I, from a place where swordplay was not an everyday thing, knew it was a stupid thing to do. But the whole time Ivar tried to impress upon Gunnar that someone could have been badly hurt, Gunnar just chuckled and rolled his eyes and acted for all the world like a petulant teenager being scolded for neglecting to clean his room.
"OK," I said, accepting that the explanation Ivar offered was at least part of the story. "But you're also annoyed because you want me to listen to you all the time, to do as you say at the snap of your fingers."
I knew what I was doing – Ivar knew it too, although he did not know all the reasons why. I was trying to occupy myself, to pretend that I hadn't just been given an explanation that finally made sense of all the oddness I had lived through for the past week. When he looked at me and reached out to slide his fingers from my ankle, up my calf to the back of my knee, I almost swooned as much with relief as with lust.
"You listen when it matters," he said huskily, pulling me towards him and laying me out on the warm earth, flat on my back. I leaned my head back, giggling softly – because what better thing
was there to take my mind off everything than Ivar's deep, slow kisses and the feeling of his heavily muscled back under my trembling hands, and the way he could play my body like a virtuoso, like I hadn't ever known any man to be able to do?
He knelt between my knees – I could hardly see him except as a darkness blocking the stars overhead – and pushed my tunic up over my legs. And then he bent his head and bit one of my thighs just hard enough to make me take notice.
"Ow!" I chuckled, the word quickly dissolving into a sigh as he kissed a little higher up, and then higher again.
"Your thighs taste like butter," he murmured into my flesh, so I could barely make out the words. "Like fresh spring butter. Voss, woman – I'm going to eat you. In the morning they won't even find your bones."
My body arched up and opened, blooming like a flower for Ivar as he slid his tongue down around my clit, and then again and again, never quite touching the exact spot where I most needed him to. I never understood the phrase 'putty in his hands' until I found myself weak, almost limp with desire on a forest floor underneath the Jarl of Jarls. He made me his object, his territory, and he explored me with such care, such focused attention. He calibrated every tiny flicker of his tongue to draw the pleasure up from my depths and there was no part of me that didn't want it.
In the morning they won't even find your bones. I didn't want them to find my bones. I didn't want them to find anything. All I wanted was to dissolve into Ivar, to merge with him.
I wanted him inside me. As his tongue danced over my clit, as he gorged himself on my womanhood, an ache started up, an emptiness.
"Ivar," I gasped at one point, reaching down and trying to pull him up, opening my legs wide so he would know what I needed.
"No," he whispered. "Not yet."
"Please," I sighed, desperate. "Please, Ivar, pl–"
He chose that moment to close his mouth over my sensitive nub, sucking gently, surrounding me with the wet warmth of his mouth. He'd been dragging me along the edge for so long it took almost nothing to push me over. My orgasm was quick, too quick even to anticipate, I was writhing underneath him, my body seized, pulsing with bliss, only seconds later.
