Ivar: A Time Travel Romance (Mists of Albion Book 3)

by Joanna Bell

  "Yes. Yes, he can go forward as well. He can go either way."

  "I can do that, too. Although so far it seems I can only go back. And only to one other time – to one other place."

  I examined her face, searching her eyes for signs of deceit, her lips for the twitch of a smile – and finding neither. And who was I to think her untruthful when all around me lay a world I did not recognize, and could not understand?

  "Is it so?" I asked warily, eager not to believe foolish stories and make myself foolish in her eyes. "And where is this place you can go to? When is the time that you journey to?"

  She smiled, then, but it was not the smile of a joke well told, and chuckled, as if even she could not believe what she was about to say.

  "It's the 9th century," she said quietly. "Over a thousand winters into the past."

  A thousand winters. Rarely had I ever contemplated a length of time that long. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to tell her to stop being silly. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, or mistaken. But I didn't actually know if any of those accusations could fairly be made.

  "A – a thousand winters?" I asked hesitantly, taking her hand in mine as she reached to me for reassurance. "And how do you, or, what do you see a thousand winters ago? Why do you –"

  "I see you. I see the Kingdom of the East Angles and the beach where you found me and the journey north to Thet–"

  "Enough!" I barked, suddenly angry because she spoke so patiently, and looked at me so hopefully, and waited for me to understand something that just got more and more incomprehensible the more she spoke. "Sophie, my love, I do not wish to shout at you. But I see you waiting for me to understand and I do not. You say you saw the journey north to Thetford – you say you saw me – a thousand winters ago? How can it be?"

  At that moment, the woman who I now recognized as one of the thralls we'd taken from one of the Lords of the East Angles, walked into the room and found me, standing naked and agitated beside the table, and Sophie seated next to me. She grinned when she saw me and held up a shiny sack.

  "I'm just in time, I see! I've brought you some dressings, Ivar. You certainly can't go outside in River Falls like that."

  Sophie got to her feet and greeted the old woman – Heather – and asking after her journey. "Are you alright? Did you manage to get the store to call a taxi for the trip home, like I said? You should have let me come with you, it's –"

  "Don't fuss, girl – I wanted to go on my own. How else am I going to get used to this old-but-new world? And yes, I managed the taxi home just fine – although even the driver asked me if I had one of those – what did you call them – genius phones?"

  Sophie laughed. "Smart phones. And yes, you are going to have to get one."

  "One step at a time. First, let's get the Jarl dressed so my eyes don't pop clean out of my skull."

  The dressings the women bid me to put on were like none I'd ever worn before. Neither fur nor leather, they were so soft as to feel almost as if I imagined clouds would feel, if you could bend them to the shape of your body and wear them like armor. They were gray like clouds, too, with stitching that was, like everything in Sophie's land, eerily uniform.

  When I was covered, and already thinking I was too hot to remain dressed in such a way, the old woman looked me up and down. And as she did I saw that the deference I expected as my due had gone out of her eyes.

  "Don't be offended, Jarl," she said. "Things are different in this place. I am not your servant here – nor is Sophie. And when she speaks of a thousand winters, I tell you myself now with no deception in my heart that it's the truth."

  It was easier for the anger stirring in my chest, borne of confusion, to find an outlet when it was the old woman I addressed, rather than Sophie. "How can it be?!" I demanded, slamming my hand down on the table hard enough to make the women jump. "I am not yet ten and ten and ten years myself – how can the battle in Thetford, and the meeting on the beach, and all that has passed in my life, be a thousand winters ago?"

  Sophie and Heather looked at each other, as if both had an answer and each waited for the other to speak it. Finally it was my love who spoke first.

  "Because here," she said, placing her hand on the table to indicate a specific 'here,' it is a thousand years from Thetford, Jarl. You have traveled through time, like the god you spoke of. Heather and I traveled through time, too, but in a different direction. So did Paige and Emma, your Jarls' wives – both are from this place, this time. We went back to your time, to the Kingdom of the East Angles. And you went forward – to here."

  The surface of my skin tingled, the way it used to as a child when I would look up at the stars and wonder what it felt like for the gods to be able to jump from one to the other, as I did between rocks on the beach. "What –" I started, before falling silent to think. "But I am not a god, and you women not goddesses. How can we move through time as if we were?"

  "We don't know," Heather said. "It was thirty-five – ten and ten and ten and five – winters ago when I traveled to the Kingdom of the East Angles – and for Sophie not even half a moon ago! We –"

  "But HOW?!" I boomed, still half-waiting for the women to burst into laughter at the trick they were playing on me. "How did we travel? On horseback? On foot? I went south to find Sophie, I – I spoke to villagers, I –"

  "And then you were here," Sophie said softly. "And then you were no longer in the Kingdom of the East Angles in the forest, but in a different forest, with the house and the police who shot you and the hospital – the bright room – right? Do you remember the way the forest changed? Do you remember the darkness, the feeling of falling off a cliff into a dark fog?"

  I stumbled backwards then, catching myself with my good arm, because I did remember the way the woods had seemed changed. I did remember the feeling of falling through darkness.

  "Yes," I whispered. "Yes, I remember. It felt as if I was drowning, as if –"

  "As if you couldn't breathe?"

  "Yes."

  I looked up pleadingly, still desperate for one of the women to reassure me now, at this late moment, that it was all a joke.

  "A thousand winters?" I asked. "You say I am a thousand winters forward through time?"

  Sophie mumbled as she counted in her head. "Well, actually it's probably more like one thousand, one hundred and fifty-three years, from what I can tell."

  I sat down heavily and put my head in my hands. I needed to speak to a gothi, but when I asked Sophie to bring me to see one, the old woman told me there were no gothis in the New York State.

  "I'm telling the truth," Sophie said, when she saw that I had trouble believing the things I was being told. It seemed impossible to me, too, when it happened – but what is the explanation if not time travel? All of these things –" here she paused to put her hand on a small nub affixed to the wall and flip it up and down, causing the room to alternate between darkness and light – "are real. They aren't magic, even if they seem to be to you. People built this house, and made these lights, and cars, and the hospital where they operated on your arm. They made the gun that shot you, Ivar. It's not the gods that made any of this – it's us."

  I glanced down at my arm and ran the fingers of my good hand over the bandages. It felt sore, and stiff to move, but already it was more mobile than it had been even a single day before.

  "I don't even know half of the words you speak," I whispered, feeling suddenly quite lonely. "I don't know what a gun is, or a hospital, or a car. And now you tell me my people are a thousand years away from me? How can I protect them, then? How can I continue the work of holding Thetford, of building up the stocks for winter, if I am here?"

  Heather's eyes turned to Sophie, and Sophie's turned down, away from me. "There is a way back," she told me, so quietly I had to lean close to hear her voice. "I can show you how. You should wait for your arm to heal a little more, though, Ivar – if you get an infection after you go back you won't be able to get any antibiotics."

  "If the wou
nd festers," Heather explained, when she saw that I did not understand, "you can have it fixed here – but you cannot have it fixed in Thetford, by the healers. You'll die, Jarl, if you return to your people, and the past, before your arms heals. And now, Sophie, I find myself tired from my shopping trip. I'll nap now, and see you two later. Mind you listen to her, Jarl Ivar, for she knows of dangers in this world that you cannot imagine for yourself."

  Twenty-Two

  Sophie

  To my surprise – or, once I gave it some thought, perhaps not to my surprise at all – Jarl Ivar seemed to come to an acceptance of the time travel explanation quickly. Many of his questions, although they seemed different to the ones I had, were essentially the same. Where he enquired as to how he – a Jarl, yes, but still a man – was able to do things only the gods were known to do, I myself remembered lying on the forest floor, wondering what a physicist would have to say about the fact that I had done something that should have been impossible. We both knew something profoundly strange had happened to us, we just appealed to different authorities for an explanation.

  If anything, Ivar's life in the past, with the mysterious gothis and the open beliefs in other worlds, in life after death and gods and goddesses and all manner of supernatural phenomena, had prepared him to believe in such a thing as time travel much more than my own life had prepared me. In my world, in 2018, there was no magic, nothing supernatural. Even the most religious people I knew would have balked at being told that magic – some very specific, inexplicable kind of magic – was at play in a tree on the Renner property.

  Ivar and Heather stayed at a cabin in the woods about half an hour from River Falls. It was owned by Juanita Gomez, Maria's grandmother, and the family hadn't used it for more than a decade. It therefore made a perfect hideout for the Viking Jarl and the woman who had gone missing 35 years ago, both of whom I knew the police and the FBI would be very anxious to speak to, if they could.

  "Car," I repeated the world to Ivar as we stood next to mine, parked in the driveway of the cabin, out of sight of the road. Jerry Sawchuk made sure to check my alibi for the night the large, fierce, and apparently deeply crazy man they'd been guarding had been spotted escaping the River Falls Hospital with an unknown woman, but Maria and her family had backed me up, reassuring him I'd spent the night at their place after staying up too late playing board games. Still, I knew I had to be careful. My boss clearly suspected something was up, and I didn't want to give him any more reasons to be suspicious.

  "Car," Ivar said. "Car. Carrrr. I thought them beasts, when I saw them from the woods. Wolves. And now you tell me that men built them, and that the growling is nothing but the force that drives them forward?"

  "Yes."

  We had to stop twice on the way to Saratauk, a town about 45 minutes from the cabin, in the opposite direction to River Falls. The car made the Viking sick, and even as I told him to look out the front window, to keep his eyes steady on the road ahead, his eyes kept jumping in other directions and I had to pull over so he could retch and pant and try to catch his breath from the nausea before getting back inside.

  "You'll get used to it," I told him. "Well, you would get used to it, if you had to do it often."

  He nodded and wiped his watering eyes. "I would, I'm sure. I'm like the East Angles on a ship right now – they always get sick like this when we take them on board our ships after a raid. But a few days at sea, if we're traveling a distance, and they become used to the motion and begin keeping their breakfasts down."

  I could not help taking out my phone and snapping a photo of Ivar's face when we walked into the grocery store and his mouth fell open the way mine would if I suddenly happened upon a warehouse full of gold and precious gems. He stood rooted to the spot, looking around at the people pushing their carts and the pyramids of fresh produce piled high in front of us.

  "It can't be," he whispered, approaching a pile of apples, picking one up and examining it, and then taking a large bite.

  "You can't just eat them!" I admonished him, laughing as a few people close to us glanced over at the absurdly huge man casually munching on an apple and looking around like the Super-Mart in Saratauk, New York was the greatest thing he'd ever seen. "We –" I started, but he was already getting started on a container of strawberries, yanking open the lid and popping the largest, reddest one into his mouth. "Ivar! Stop! We have to pay for these things first! You can't just eat them like that."

  "Why?" He asked, as I grabbed an orange out of his hand before he could take a bite out of that, skin and all.

  "You don't just do that where you come from, do you? In the North? You don't just grab food that belongs to other people and –"

  "Sometimes we do."

  "OK, fine," I conceded. "But not with your own people. You don't walk into your neighbor's house and take their bread, do you? You don't steal their pigs?"

  The Viking shrugged and looked at me like he was wondering if I was the stupidest person on earth. "Of course we don't steal our neighbor's pigs, woman. But we steal the East Angle's pigs, and the Frankish pigs. And these people," he gestured with his good arm, "are not my neighbors."

  I couldn't help but grin, thinking of what the store manager would do if Ivar just ran wild up and down the aisles, stuffing his face with potato chips and cookies and guzzling soda. But I was trying not to attract attention so I told him I could explain it later, if he wanted, but for right then he had to refrain from simply eating everything in sight before it had been paid for.

  That shopping trip was the longest of my life. Who knew that getting groceries with a 9th century Viking was worse than doing it with a curious toddler? Although the packaged foods – the chips and cookies and brightly colored fruit snacks I'd imagined him scoffing – didn't seem to interest him at all, he lingered over the meat and dairy and fresh produce aisles.

  "A what?" He asked, when I identified the object he held in his hand at one point.

  "A potato. It's a root vegetable – like a sneep. There were potatoes in the stew last night."

  "There were? We should get some more."

  And without a word, he began lifting twenty pound bags of potatoes into the cart until I put a stop to it.

  "But look at all this!" He responded, pointing to the potato sacks piled high on the display. "Do they keep well? You should take as many as you can now – don't let the bounty of the season fool you into thinking it will last through the winter."

  I grabbed a bag of potatoes and put it back, and then another and another. "But it will," I smiled, because there was something adorable about his clear worry that I might not make it through winter without hundreds of pounds of potatoes. "It's different here. We, uh," I paused, because I realized how absurd what I was about to say was going to sound, "we always have enough potatoes here. We always have enough of everything. Sometimes people might not be able to afford all the food they want, but the food is always here."

  We were standing in front of the meat counter when Ivar, whose eyes were still wide at the sheer variety of meats on display, commented that he knew I was telling the truth.

  "I wouldn't have believed you," he said, examining the whole chickens. "If you told me about this place, your home, when we traveled north to Thetford. I would have thought you dull. Even now I have difficulty understanding how it can be so. But I look around at the people here and I see that none of them are starving – many of them are fatter than Kings! – and I believe the things you say. Is this a chicken?"

  We put two chickens, after Ivar told me that chickens were rare and usually only seen on the tables of the highest Lords and Kings in the 9th century, into the cart. And then we headed down the snack food aisle, where I bought the granola bars for Ashley's lunches – and the secret stash of cookies I kept hidden away from her above the refrigerator so she wouldn't ever have to see her mother stress-eating.

  "What's this?" The Viking enquired, picking up a bag of 'birthday cake' flavored cookies. And then, before I could
explain, he'd torn open the package and taken one out, which he examined with a look of utter confusion on his face. I watched as he lifted it to his nose, sniffing, and then immediately yanked it away.

  "This isn't food. Is this – do you eat this? You feed this to your children?"

  I laughed at being mommy-shamed by a 9th century Jarl, but it would be a lie to say a wave of defensiveness did not roll over me. "No," I said quickly, "I don't let her eat cookies. I mean, not at home. I – uh, I give her these," I passed the box of granola bars to Ivar, "they're healthier."

  But as soon as he'd opened the granola bars and held one of them up in front of his face, examining the multi-colored chocolate chips like a scientist studying a particularly distasteful sample, I sighed. "Yeah, actually those probably aren't very healthy, either."

  "Healthy?" Ivar asked. "Healthy, woman? They're not even food. They don't smell like food. They probably don't even –" he took a bite of the granola bar and immediately spat it out. "Gods, woman! It's nothing but sweetness. How do you –"

  I grabbed the box out of his hands and threw it into the cart, intending to pay for it by then only because it had been opened. "Never mind," I grumbled. "I won't give her any more granola bars, OK?"

  Later, in the car, as I pulled over to let a carsick Viking get out and pace up and down beside the roadside, he took a lock of my hair in his hand and ran it through his fingers.

  "You are unhappy," he said, "because I think the people here have too much? Because they have so much that they can give their children food colored as brightly as the spring bluebells?"

  "No," I replied awkwardly. "It's not that. It's not really that. It's – I don't know how to explain this to you. What we feed our children is a big deal here. People will make negative judgments about other people based on what they feed their kids. Some of the moms at Ashley's school only feed their kids organic food and –"