A Glitch in Time

by April Hill

  Five minutes later, we were in a small boat, being rowed ashore.

  "Da Vinci designed such a device, you know," Muldoon explained. Once we were on dry land, a quite comfortable carriage had appeared out of nowhere, which we boarded for the long drive back toward town and to the remote spot in the jungle where we had hidden the Time Machine. "I have seen the drawings. And other scientists, of course, have suggested the feasibility of such things as time travel. How does it affect the body, and the mind? Do you grow younger or older as you traverse the eons? How have you managed to escape capture, or the theft of your machine? What...?"

  The pirate Muldoon's curiosity was endless, and Edward answered each inquiry as fully as he could in the short time we had together, but soon, we came to the approximate spot in the road where we had entered the trees. At this point, Edward and I, accompanied by Tim Muldoon and two trusted members of his crew, exited the carriage and prepared to begin the long, warm walk into the jungle. Black Tim was like a child about to receive a new and wondrous toy, barely able to contain his excitement. Of course, I suspected then, and now, that much of his delight had to do with the fabulous price he anticipated receiving for the sale of the Time Machine, once he had acquired and thoroughly investigated its capabilities.

  We had no sooner set foot on the ground, though, when the driver of the carriage, the pirate I knew as Mr. Peabody, leapt up suddenly, pointed down the long, dusty road from Port Royal and shouted an alarm.

  "Tim! Look there!" He thrust a long brass telescope into Muldoon's hands. "To starboard! That cloud of dust. I make it eight men on horseback, coming fast and hard, like a white squall at sea, and as dangerous, I'll warrant. We'd best cast off for safer waters, Cap'n, or have our necks stretched on a gibbet."

  Muldoon looked at the rapidly approaching cloud of dust, and then into the jungle–the indecision obvious in his every straining muscle. He handed the eyeglass back to Peabody with a look of great sorrow and regret. To see the Time Machine, as he so desperately wanted, he would be forced to risk not only his own capture, but that of his ship and crew. I did feel a certain degree of sadness for Black Tim's dilemma, although at this point, my immediate concern was that Edward and I disappear into the trees with all possible speed. There was little doubt who the riders were coming for, and by now, we could hear the thunder of their horses' hooves on the dirt road.

  Tim swore a mighty oath, and then, before I could see his intention, pulled me close and kissed me–a very long, passionate embrace that quite took my breath away. I could hardly ignore the fact that his hand was exploring my breasts and my bottom at the same time. Edward appeared to be as taken aback by the pirate's kiss as I was, and made no move to intercede. Then, with one final squeeze to my still very sore left buttock, Tim released me, and doffed his hat to Edward.

  "My apologies, sir, but I could not, in good conscience, allow your lovely wife to leave with only that painful spanking to remember me by." He bowed graciously to me. "I hope you found the kiss of a villainous rogue such as myself not unduly unpleasant?"

  "Not unpleasant at all," I murmured. Edward shot me a most annoyed look, but said nothing.

  Then, Muldoon leaped up onto the carriage, took the reins in one hand and the buggy whip in the other and cracked the whip above the team's backs.

  "Stay in the trees until we've gone, and make no sound," he shouted to Edward and myself. "It's us they're after, damned their balls! Be off, then, and Godspeed to you!"

  "Can you make it back to your ship before they get here?" I cried. For reasons I can't explain, I feared for the pirates' welfare, and had no wish to see them captured.

  "We'll not have to, wench. Look there." I looked where he pointed, and saw the great billowing sails of the Prodigal, lying dangerously close to shore, in the shallows. Even from where we stood, we could see men scrambling about in the rigging, preparing to set to sea.

  "Ours is a perilous business," he laughed. "And it never pays to be far from one's own quarterdeck. When necessary, my ship follows me like an obedient puppy. Now, go, and pray do not allow yourselves to be captured. The governor's men are every bit as dishonest as we are, and their methods a good deal less pleasant."

  And then, the carriage pulled away in a swirl of dust, and headed for the beach. The galloping horsemen turned aside, as Muldoon had predicted, and pursued the fleeing coach, though with little chance of apprehending Black Tim and his crew before they reached the safety of their vessel. We crouched in the bushes and watched as long as we felt safe, then Edward grabbed my hand and we dashed off into the trees, back to the Time Machine. If we were very, very lucky, its drained solar energy cells would have been recharged by the hot Caribbean sun that I found so miserable.

  We had no way of knowing whether any of the mounted men in pursuit of Timothy Muldoon would come after us or not, but neither Edward nor I saw any benefit whatever in waiting about to find out. When we finally reached the Time Machine and cleared it of the tropical foliage under which we had buried it, I climbed eagerly inside, hoping silently for a miracle. While Edward went about the tiresome business of checking the machine's solar collection rods, I did what I could to help by squeezing my eyes tightly shut and crossing my fingers. Edward had predicted that it could take up to a week of sunlight to recharge the power in what he called the propulsion terminals, and we had been here for well less than a week.

  "I would like, someday," Edward complained bitterly, "to have the time to attempt several modifications to the Machine's guidance system. Have you noticed that it seems we are always coming and going under emergency conditions?"

  I had noticed. "Please try to hurry a bit, Edward," I said anxiously. "I believe I hear someone, or something, coming this way–some sort of thrashing about in the bushes."

  Edward finished whatever he was doing and got in the machine beside me.

  "I must warn you, darling. It may not start. And if it doesn't, the rods may be damaged in the effort."

  "What does that mean?"

  "I suppose it could mean being suspended in time in some manner–going neither forward nor backward. Not really existing as we know it–our bodies and minds somehow dematerialized into pure energy and light. Floating like infinitesimal specks of cosmic dust in the endless and continuing spectrum of time and motion."

  Trust Edward to make things worse than thy already are. My primary concern until now had been getting stuck in the year 1682 with the disagreeable possibility of being hanged.

  "Will that hurt?" I asked. "Floating about in the… as you said?"

  "I don't really know, darling. What our state of consciousness will be under those conditions, I have no way of knowing."

  "Then, what the hell. Push the lever, Edward."

  Edward pushed the lever, and I held my breath and closed my eyes.

  * * * *

  We landed in what appeared to be a tilled field of dirt, as though we were on a farm. Some distance away, we could make out several low buildings and a number of what appeared to be low-walled corrals for livestock. Edward glanced at the time clock, and gave me the bad news–78 B.C.

  "B.C.?" I cried. "You mean… ?"

  "Yes, darling. Once again, we have gone in entirely the wrong direction. The good news is that you will not have to arise early to attend church services this Sunday."

  "Why don't we simply leave, again?" I asked, quite reasonably. "Nothing about this place seems appealing, and the accommodations are likely to be very primitive, considering the year. In any case, I don't see how we can do worse by trying."

  I thought the idea of leaving seemed very reasonable, and despite his never-ending curiosity, I believe Edward was prepared to agree, but as it happened, the stupid Time Machine had chosen to overheat again, or lose its mind, or whatever. In any case, when we tried to press the lever, the machine only thrummed in a very unhealthy manner and sat there, hissing.

  "What is it doing, now?" I wailed.

  Edward shook his head. "I believe the machine's ene
rgy storage cells are at a dangerously low ebb, perhaps approaching permanent exhaustion. Herbert mentioned that possibility."

  "Do you mean that we may be stranded forever?"

  Edward sighed. "I'm afraid so."

  "Well," I sniffled. "You might have chosen a better spot to strand us for all time than this one."

  I regretted the complaint almost immediately, as well as my tone, and Edward's irritable look made me very nervous. You see, I had made a startling scientific discovery on our travels through time–a discovery that I fully intended to write up for some prestigious journal or other when I arrived safely home. The discovery? When one leaps hundreds of years from one century to another, one for some unfathomable reason always arrives in precisely the same physical condition in which one exited the previous era. Thus, if one had wanted (or needed) a bath in the year 1500, or a W.C., he (or she) would arrive in the year 200 B.C. with exactly the same need. Or, to put it another way: if one's bare bottom were to be very painfully spanked in the year 1682 by a muscular pirate–leaving said bottom stinging badly and covered with livid paddle marks–the ensuing trip of almost two thousand years would do nothing whatever to make that spanked bottom feel even the tiniest bit better. Time, in other words, does not heal all wounds.

  So, rather than risk being spanked in an open field by an irritable husband, on a bottom that still hurt after having been soundly spanked 1800 years earlier, I tried appealing to his masculine instincts–the protective ones.

  "I do hate to complain, Edward darling, when we've just arrived in a new place, and in such trying circumstances, but I'm terribly hungry."

  Edward scowled. "And I am equally loathe to remind you that we are in the middle of nowhere. And even if we were in the middle of bloody Oxford Circle with a restaurant every few bloody feet, we are as poor as church mice. Poorer, actually, as we haven't even got a church."

  "But we do have the gold coins that..." Suddenly, I remembered the glum truth. We had been relieved of our coins by the pirates we had encountered at our last visit. I allowed myself one strong oath.

  "Bloody damned hell."

  Edward looked over at me disapprovingly. "Abigail! Merely because we are in a bit of difficulty is no reason to..."

  "I can't think of a better reason," I grumbled. "Am I expected to starve to death in silence?"

  "No, you are expected to give me a few minutes to assess the situation."

  "Assess the situation?" I cried. "Edward, the situation is horrible. We are penniless, with no idea whatever where we are. The machine is disabled and most probably irreparable, and we're on the verge of starvation. How can the situation possibly get any worse?"

  Why do I even ask these things, I wonder.

  In the distance, walking toward us with impossibly long strides, were several–five, to be exact–of the largest, most muscular men I had ever seen in my life. They were shouting, and in their fists, each hulking creature brandished a pitchfork, a club or a spear.

  "They appear to be upset," I suggested, for lack of anything else to say.

  Edward looked around us. "We've landed in the midst of a planted field, and torn up a good deal of it, I'm afraid. I wouldn't worry, darling. I suspect these men are simple farmers."

  "If so, they are the largest farmers I've ever seen and the angriest."

  Moments later, we learned where we had landed. The men stormed up, still shouting in a foreign tongue that although I couldn't understand, sounded oddly familiar.

  "Abby," Edward cried suddenly. "I think we are somewhere in the Roman Empire–even Rome, itself, perhaps! These men are speaking some sort of vulgar Latin."

  NOTE: In order to make the remainder of my story less confusing, allow me to explain the method in which we communicated in the following days:

  I was educated in the English public school system, which is not public at all, but private. Beginning at age seven, I was forced to study Latin and continued with that language until I was sixteen. Now, I write it well enough to translate poems and the easier sections of Julius Caesar's Gallic Wars. I speak it about as well as I do Swahili, Chinese or Sanskrit–possibly less well. What these men were shouting was only vaguely similar, and mostly–to my poor ear–absolute gibberish.

  Edward, on the other hand, has several advanced degrees. He is the recipient of a superb and extended classical education, and has an excellent grasp of Latin and of classical Greek. Modern Greek is quite different from the Greek of the ancients, but Latin, being a so-called dead language, is another matter. Thus, Edward has the approximate ability of a well-trained Roman Catholic prelate when it comes to reading Latin. He discovered rather quickly, though, that how we think the Romans spoke and how they actually spoke was very different. Nonetheless, after quite a lot of practice and frequent misunderstandings, Edward was able to get along fairly well. I, on the other hand, after the same degree of arduous practice, was able to communicate on what was probably the level of a two-year old, not especially bright Roman child–or a chimpanzee.

  Therefore, in the interest of clarity, I have left out the stumblings, stammerings, misunderstandings and mispronunciations that plagued my ability to converse with people, and have written this narrative as though my Latin was fluent. Please forgive this bit of artistic license, but you do not wish to read the way it really happened, nor do I want Uncle Herbert to know just how badly I did. In Uncle Herbert's house, a poor mark in Latin was usually paid for while bent over the arm of the couch with my navy blue school bloomers puddled around my ankles. While I sobbed and howled and swore on my life to do better, Uncle Herbert calmly set my bottom on fire with a belt or hairbrush, while explaining (in flawless Latin) the lasting value of cognates. I am probably too old for that sort of thing today, but I would just as soon not risk it, thank you.

  While it quickly became obvious that the angry group of men were not intent on killing us, their noisy fascination with the machine made any sort of intelligent discussion impossible. In halting Latin, Edward attempted to explain, leaving out all but the simplest explanations. They finally settled for the rather bizarre story that we had traveled here another country, a very long distance away, in a sort of a sled. Our animals had broken loose and run away.

  Finally, after crawling over every inch of the poor machine, which was half-buried in the loose dirt of the plowed field, the men escorted us back to their farm.

  "This is a very peculiar farm," I remarked to Edward, pointing to the fenced pen-like enclosures and the crude, complicated machines that appeared everywhere we looked.

  "And where is the livestock?"

  "That's because it isn't a farm, Abigail," Edward explained. "The biggest man, the one the others call Maximus? This place belongs to him. It's a kind of school called a ludus."

  "What kind of school? For giants?"

  Edward nodded. "In a way, yes. It's a school for gladiators, and this Maximus person is one of the most famous."

  "Gladiators! Where in the name of God are we, Edward?" I wailed.

  Edward's eyes gleamed with excitement–the half-crazed excitement of a life-long intellectual about to live out his most treasured fantasy.

  "Twenty miles outside Rome, my love. The spectacle, the splendor, the barbarism! The Circus Maximus. Can you imagine anything more wonderful?"

  I could, actually. I was imagining our own green, peaceful little garden, outside London. Sometimes, one simply gets tired of too much travel.

  Chapter Ten

  After we reached the shaded courtyard of the gladiatorial school, the man called Maximus began to question us further. Edward's dimwitted explanation of our sudden appearance had apparently not been completely satisfactory, and our shabby appearance certainly didn't help. I should mention here that this Maximus fellow was the largest and most intimidating man I had ever seen–not a man with which I would wish to trifle. He was dressed in a short-skirted leather garment that covered only one shoulder and half of his broad chest, and the bottom half was barely more than a loin-c
loth. The brevity of this costume left nothing whatever of the gentleman's anatomy to a woman's imagination–were she the sort to be curious about such things, of course. Maximus had been aptly named.

  When Edward tried to thank him, Maximus at first refused to shake hands. "I won't offer my hand in friendship until I have your oath that you've not come here on some traitorous errand."

  "Traitorous?" Edward inquired, obviously confused.

  "Aye," Maximus said, his voice solemn. "All of the men you see here have been thrust by circumstances into the violent profession they follow, but we stay clear of the city's petty wars and political intrigue. We fight in the ring to feed their families, then return here to live as peacefully as we can. But our loyalty is still to Rome, and I'll not harbor traitors under my roof–or thieves. If the two of you are but runaway slaves, you are welcome here. For a few days, at least, we will hide you. But that monstrous machine of yours troubles me. How did you come by it?"

  Edward and I exchanged glances. I hadn't understand everything Maximus said, but I knew–as Edward did–that he would never believe it if we told him the absolute truth.

  But he did–more or less. The final story, as Edward outlined it to me later, was that we were runaway slaves–in a manner of speaking–kidnapped and enslaved by our captors. (Well, I was a simple runaway slave, at any rate. Edward, on the other hand, was to be a renowned and highly respected scholar, spirited away from his own country because of his vast scientific knowledge–and the machine was his newest invention.

  I was astonished. (And a bit irked. At several points in our bizarre travels, Edward had managed to make himself a grand and impressive personage, while I always got to be the impressive personage's frumpy servant. Now I'd been demoted to slave.)

  "And he believed all that kidnapping nonsense?" I asked irritably.

  "Not really. He seems a very decent fellow, but he confessed to me that he can barely read and write, and he appears to be very superstitious, as well. I think he may believe the machine is some type of magical device I've conjured."