by Joanna Bell
A moment later a young girl arrived and handed us cups of ale, and then, as I was taking my first sip, Paige Renner – heavily pregnant and as serene-looking as a Renaissance painting – stepped out of the shelter and smiled at Jarl Ivar and myself.
"Welcome," she said. "The accommodations are a little rough but we have ale, and we have buttered bread if you're hungry."
Ivar stood, and so I stood too, my skin tingling with excitement. Eirik introduced us to his wife, and when it came to be my turn to clasp her forearm, as the people there seemed to do instead of shaking hands – I did it with only a small tremble in my grip. Paige noticed.
"Are you nervous?" She asked, smiling sympathetically. "Here, sit, drink some ale. I'll bring you some –"
"Let the serving girls bring ale," Eirik said gently, putting his hand on his wife's shoulder. "You already do too much, love."
I watched, dumbfounded, as the girl whose disappearance had triggered an ongoing national obsession looked up at her husband, who reached down to caress her swollen belly before nodding to Ivar that, the formalities over, they could now speak of the coming invasion of Thetford.
"Are you OK?" Paige asked when the men had wandered off to talk of their plans.
"Uh," I said, realizing that I didn't even have the first idea what to say. "I – um – yes. Yes. I'm fine."
Something changed in Paige's body language. She studied me for a few seconds, cocking her head to the side. "You – you aren't one of the Northmen, are you?"
It occurred to me for a brief second that if time travel was possible then perhaps psychic powers were, too. But then I realized it was just my accent. I shook my head. Paige Renner! It was Paige Renner, standing right in front of me, making small talk! "No. Yeah, no, I'm not with the, uh – the North people. The Northern people."
"The Northmen."
"Yes," I chuckled nervously. "The Northmen. I mean, I'm with them, but I'm not, uh, I'm not one of them."
Before I had a chance to make myself look like an even bigger idiot, another woman arrived. And when I looked up and saw who it was, it was all I could do not to fall right off the log I was sitting on. Emma Wallis.
I sat blinking, looking from one to the other as they both stared at me.
"Are you sure you're OK?" Paige asked again as I opened my mouth and closed it again without managing to get any words out. "Do you need to lie down, maybe? It's a very hot afternoon, we can –"
"No," I said. "No, I – I just. Paige. I mean – Emma, you too. You –"
"How do you know my name?" Emma asked, not unreasonably. We had not yet been introduced.
I did not sense any hostility from either one of them. Curiosity, yes – even a little worry – but no hostility. I don't know if I did the right thing or not, blurting everything out like I did, but there didn't, in my shock, seem to be another way to do it.
"I – I –" I started, before stopping, coughing, and trying again. "I'm Sophie Foster. I'm a police officer with the River Falls Police Department – and I'm not sure you two have any idea how –"
Before I could finish my sentence, someone grabbed me. I couldn't see who it was – Emma or Paige – and I found myself half-dragged, half-led off into the thicker woods, away from camp. When we stopped, the three of us just stood there for a few minutes, staring at each other, each waiting for one of the others to speak.
"The River Falls Police?" Emma asked, her eyes dark with worry. "Did you say you were with –"
"How many are with you?" Paige cut in, looking almost like she might be about to cry. "How did you –"
"None!" I squeaked, before they could get any more carried away. "No one is with me – I'm alone! I don't even know how I got here, OK? I was on the Renner – your father's property, Paige – and then I was at the beach, near the sea and I didn't know how –"
I stopped talking when the two women turned to look at each other, their eyes wide, and then back to me.
"Are you sure you're alone?" Paige asked. "Because if you're lying, and the Jarls find out that you're –"
"I'm alone!" I screeched. "I'm alone! I don't even know how the hell I got here myself! So how could I have brought anyone with me? I promise you I'm alone."
"Where's your gun?" Emma demanded, her eyes searching the contours of my body for tell-tale bulges. "And if you're a cop, why are you dressed like one of the Vikings?"
"The Vikings?" I replied, laughing although I didn't feel particularly amused. "The what? What Vikings? I don't – I –" I stumbled suddenly, as a wave of dizziness came over me. "I don't have a gun," I continued, lurching forward in an attempt to stay on my feet. "I lost it – I left it on the beach in, oh. Oooh. Oh my God..."
I opened my eyes and then squeezed them shut again against the bright sunshine. My head was pounding – as was my heart. And before I could make an attempt to sit up, a pair of hands held me gently down.
"Stay there," said a female voice. "Paige went to get you some day ale. You really are from River Falls, huh? You must be – how would you even know of it otherwise?"
"Yes," I whispered weakly. "Yes, I am. I'm a police officer. I went to the Renner property a week ago, and then..." I trailed off, trying to lift a hand above my head to shield the light.
"Have you spoken to my family?"
"What? Oh, your family? Yes, I have actually. They're back in England."
Emma Wallis, upon hearing that I'd spoken to her family, burst into sudden, noisy tears. I watched as she buried her face in her hands and her shoulders shook with emotion.
"Hey," I said, struggling into a sitting position and reaching for her hand. "Hey, it's OK. They – they know you're here, don't they? They must, it's the only thing that explains the way they've been acting. You told them? You told them you were coming here?"
"Only my sister," Emma cried. "My parents – they wouldn't believe it, would they? All they know is that I'm safe, and that I'm happy, and that one day I – one day I –"
She dissolved into tears again and I squeezed her hand in mine. Paige found us a moment later and handed me a cup of day ale. "Here," she said. "You fainted. Not that I can blame you."
I sipped the ale and the three of us sat looking at each other, trying to take the situation in. It was me who finally broke the silence. "So is this really the past?" I asked, still hoping against hope that there was some rational explanation for everything. "I met someone – a woman with Jarl Ivar's group – she said this place was the past. That I – that I traveled through time to get here."
But instead of explaining where – and when – I was – Emma and Paige demanded to know who the woman was who had told me about time traveling. I explained as best I could, that she was Heather Renner, that she'd gone missing in 1983, all of it.
"What was her last name?" Paige asked, when I mentioned it in the course of telling the story. "Renner?!"
"Yes," I nodded. "She's related to your father somehow, maybe his aunt?"
"Really?" Paige responded, stunned. "My dad never mentioned any of this – I'm going to find her right now. Do you know where she is?"
I tried to go with her, but they both decided it would be best if I stayed where I was, with Emma. Once again, I sensed no ill intent but both of them were obviously nervous, threatened if not by me personally then simply by my presence – by the presence of someone from their old lives.
"I'm not going to force you to come home," I told Emma after Paige left.
"You can't," Emma replied, shrugging. "You don't have your gun. There's one of you and hundreds of us – and we're both married to Jarls."
I nodded. "Exactly."
"Would you?" She continued a moment later, breaking a slender stick off a nearby tree and using a small knife she pulled from her waist to fray one end. "If you had your gun, I mean. Would you try to force us to go back?"
I watched as she began to rub the end of the stick against her teeth, one after the other. "Is that – are you brushing your teeth?" I asked, intrigued, and needing a f
ew more minutes to think about my answer to the question.
She broke off another piece and used the tip of her knife to once again fray the ends. Then she handed it to me. "Go on, try it. It's more effective than a toothbrush."
I hesitated, worried it would taste funny, or that the stick was dirty, somehow. But when I copied Emma's movements and ran my tongue over my tooth a few seconds later, it felt smooth and clean.
"I remember that," Emma said, smiling. "When I first came here, I remember thinking everything was dirty. They don't have soap, or toothpaste, or disinfectant. But we don't live like pigs here, you know. Even the pigs don't live like pigs."
"So you just got used to it?" I asked, thinking back to the water that had made me sick on the journey south, to confront the King of the East Angles.
"Uh-huh. Now answer the question."
I'd almost forgotten the question. But, once prompted, it came back to me. Would I have taken Paige and Emma back to River Falls, if I'd still had my gun – and if one handgun had somehow been enough to subdue not just the two women but their husbands and their husband's men, as well?
"I don't know," I said slowly. "You already know that everyone back home thinks you've been kidnapped, that something horrible has happened to you. So it's in everyone's mind – including mine – that you need rescuing. But you, uh – you don't seem to need rescuing now. So now I don't know what to do, if I'm being honest. I have to go back soon – the next time Jarl Ivar is busy enough not to notice, I'm going to leave. So, yeah – I don't know what to do about you and Paige. And I don't know what I'm going to say to my boss about you, either."
"Why don't you stay? Paige and I are happier than we've ever been – we talk about it all the time, actually, how anyone from 2018 would freak out at the idea of having to live in the past – we would have as well. But now we live here and it is so much better than any life I could have made for myself in your time."
The past. Your time. I still couldn't help hearing those phrases and not quite believing them. I looked out into the woods, still cleaning my teeth with the stick, and smiled faintly.
"You don't believe you're in the past?" Emma asked, flipping the stick around and using the end with the cleaner edges to clean her fingernails.
I laughed and threw up my hands. "How am I supposed to believe that?! Yes, it explains everything. Yes, there doesn't seem to be any other explanation for – this place, these people, for you and Paige – but time travel? Time travel? Vikings? I'm probably going to wake up in my bed in River Falls in a few minutes and wonder how my mind came up with such a crazy story."
"You haven't been here for long," she commented. "I can't explain it either – how it happens, I mean. How it actually works coming through the tree. But all I have to do is look around to see it's true. You said you were at the sea, right? After coming here? How could you walk to the ocean from the Renner land, in less than an hour?"
"I know! I know. It's just – it's easier to believe I passed out or got lost or – anything that isn't time travel, really."
Emma nodded. "I know."
"So are you saying you're never coming back?" I asked a minute or so later, and burning with curiosity. Paige Renner didn't have any family in 2018. Emma Wallis did. What about life in this brutal, filthy time was so attractive that it might keep someone from their family – forever?
She shook her head quickly. "I didn't say that."
"Maybe when things have calmed down a little?" I suggested. "When people are obsessing about something else? Sooner or later they will. All the reporters and FBI agents will leave River Falls and it might be possible to show your face again."
Even as I spoke, I knew I was mostly an effort to comfort Emma, and not that anything I was saying was actually true. She knew it, too.
"I'm never going to be able to show my face again. Not until I've gotten so old and wrinkled I'm unrecognizable, anyway. Do you think people are ever going to forget what I look like? What Paige looks like? Before I left I told my sister that they'll have to come to me – they'll have to come to River Falls and meet me, and we won't be able to leave the country or go anywhere public."
I couldn't imagine making the decision Emma Wallis had made. Not that I blamed her or thought she'd made the wrong one – she stayed in the past for love – and I was going back to the future for the same reason.
Paige returned before I could question Emma any further, and she brought Heather with her. All three women were united in their decision to stay in the past – in 'the Kingdom,' as they called it. The Kingdom of the East Angles. I made a note to myself to Google it when I got home. All three were also united in their firm opposition to me saying anything – to anyone – about where (or when) they were.
"Think about that," Heather implored. "Think about what effect that could have on the future if a bunch of police – and you know it wouldn't just be police for long – figured out they could travel into the past through a specific tree in River Falls."
All three of them watched me closely for signs of agreement – or the opposite. Heather was right, though. Even a few seconds thought made that clear – if anyone back in 2018 found out about the tree, any of the FBI agents or reporters or internet investigators – it wouldn't be long before the curious hordes descended on the past. And then it wouldn't be long before someone in the future decided to restrict access to the tree – maybe even destroy it. Scientists would want to study it, to conduct experiments and take samples. The police – and probably the military – would want to control access. The Renner property would soon turn into a scene from a 1980s sci-fi movie, with barbed wire and armed guards and, probably, a pack of intrepid kids trying to outsmart them all.
"Yes," I said, as the women waited to hear whether or not I planned to tell their story once I got back home. "You're right. I can't tell anyone."
"Not even your family," Paige added. "Not your daughter. It's for their own good as well as ours – you know it would be almost impossible to hear about a magical tree just a few minutes from your house and not go see if it was real, if the story was true."
I nodded. "Yeah. It would probably ruin their lives, too. I watch TV, I read the news – I saw how they treated you girls when you came back. Do you think I want that for myself – for my daughter or my mom? I don't."
Soon, Paige, Emma and Heather seemed content that I understood the gravity – the reality – of the situation, and of the consequences of blabbing, well enough to know it was best for everyone to keep my mouth shut when I went back to 2018.
"So you're going to be missing forever," I said as we relaxed, sharing ale and bread that Heather and Paige had brought with them, and dangled various objects over Paige's belly, trying to divine the sex of the child within. "All of you. None of those FBI agents, none of those internet sleuths, none of those reporters are ever going to get any closure on this case."
"Do you think you can do it?" Paige asked, as she rolled over awkwardly, reminding me briefly of how unwieldy my body had become in the later stages of my own pregnancy.
"Yes," I replied, because the alternative – not keeping the secret – was so obviously a terrible idea. "You don't have anything to worry about, I –"
"I meant do you think you can leave Jarl Ivar?"
"What? I've only been here for a week!"
"You're with him, though – right?" Heather followed up, brushing a silver strand of hair off her face.
"You're sleeping with him?" Emma added, grinning.
"Yes," I shrugged, making a face like I didn't know what the big deal was – even though I kind of did. All three of them had chosen to stay in the past for love – for the specific love between a man and a woman.
"And you're just going to leave?" Paige jumped in. "Just like that? And never see him again?"
"What does it matter?" I replied, feeling a little heated. "What does it matter if I want to see him again? I can't. I have a child – none of you did when you decided to stay here. So it doesn't eve
n matter how I feel about Ivar because there's no way I'm leaving my daughter."
The conversation slowed down after that, as the four of us let reality sink in – I was leaving, and it didn't matter how I felt about the Jarl.
"You should go soon," Emma said quietly a few moments later as she finished her cup of ale. "You should go before you get attached. Not just to Jarl Ivar – although yes, mostly to him – but to this place. You think you hate it now, but this whole place sneaks up on you."
Paige laughed softly. "Yeah. It does. The men do, too. Maybe you think Jarl Ivar too overbearing, or too serious. And it's true, the Jarls are men, like the men at home are men. But they're not really like the men at home, are they? I see it on your face that you've already noticed it."
I nodded. "I have. He is different. But he's not so overbearing with me. Well – maybe he is. But not – not too much. He's kind to me, too. I can tell he feels protective, even if he tries to hide it."
Heather laughed out loud. "Listen to yourself, girl! You better do what Emma says and leave soon, or you're going to spend the rest of your life with half your heart in the past – and that's no way to live."
I don't know why, but Heather's words put me on the defensive. "Half my heart?!" I scoffed. "Again, it's only been a week. I'm fine. My heart is – fine."
Three pairs of eyes looked up when they heard the tone in my voice, and then all three looked down again, as if avoiding some truth only they could see.
"You're right," I continued, feeling awkward and put on the spot. "Not because of Ivar, of course, but you are right that I need to go. I just – I'm waiting for a distraction. He's keeping an eye on me – and so are his men."
"We can help," Paige said. "If needs be. We can tell our husbands that we're taking you for the day to gather berries or to teach you how to weave dried grasses into rope."
"Yes!" Emma added. "Jarl Ivar trusts Ragnar – he took him south, didn't he? To confront the King? If Ragnar and Eirik say you are with us, his mind will be at ease, he won't be suspicious."
I wasn't sure any of that sounded like a good idea. "But what will happen when he finds out you lied?" I asked. "What will your husbands do to you when they find out?"
