Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  It was the second time it had shown that date since she had started travelling through time.

  * * *

  Sometimes, she hated it. She thought she would die if she couldn’t wake up in her bed and see Mel and Roland and go to school and do all the stupid, pointless things she used to do every day. She even missed the constant anger that had dogged her before. It was entirely gone now, and nothing had really replaced it. She wanted to stand in her living room and smoulder at Roland. She wanted to sit in her kitchen and try to remember when she had last spoken to her mother.

  The periods of homesickness didn’t even always happen when she was having a miserable time. The worst had been in Renaissance Italy during the most fantastic birthday party she had ever attended. There had been jugglers and fire-eaters and enough food to sink a boat. Cuerva Lachance’s incarnation, Luzio Ferrante, had begun to play an unexpectedly beautiful piece on the fiddle, and Freddy had just been … lost. She’d thought about where she was and what she was doing, and it hadn’t made sense. She hadn’t fit. And then she’d wondered if she really fit any worse here than she did in her ordinary life, and everything had seemed to turn upside down. I never admitted I was out of place, she’d thought. I made myself fade into the background, and I thought I was unhappy because it was so hard, not because I didn’t really want to do it in the first place …

  And she was homesick for that. There was definitely something wrong with her.

  Most of the time, she managed to keep the homesickness at bay by being Mel and playing at private investigator. She had a lot more puzzle pieces now, though the picture still wasn’t complete.

  She and Josiah had visited hundreds of different places and times. She had tried to keep track of them early on but had lost count around about the March of the Infants, which had happened when they’d ended up jumping into the life of a Three who was only a few days old. She wouldn’t have thought that would be a problem, but babies only thought about a limited number of things, and so any sympathetic resonance was almost inevitably with—

  “Other babies,” said Josiah glumly when they hit the third in a row in the space of about ten minutes. This one was, she thought, somewhere in Africa; Freddy wasn’t sure exactly where or when, since they were there only about long enough for Three’s mother to give them a startled glance. It was in what may have been a Haida longhouse that Josiah added, “We should have expected something like this. We could jump almost anywhere. They’ll all be resonating.” They were in a futuristic airport by the end of the sentence.

  Perhaps fifty babies later, they came upon a baby who happened to be breastfeeding. The next jump took them to a Three who was a teenage boy. Freddy had her theories about that one, but she kept them to herself.

  About seventy percent of the time—if you didn’t count the babies—they would run into the past Josiah and some version of Cuerva Lachance. Freddy preferred it when this happened. Josiah was less jumpy and paranoid when he knew how their visit was going to turn out, even if he wouldn’t tell her. It also gave her a chance to refine her theory about the two of them. Well, calling it a “theory” was premature. But she knew Josiah hadn’t told her the whole story, and she was working towards understanding why.

  What she had seen so far did seem to confirm what he’d told her. She had been quite far back in time—she didn’t know exactly how far back, though she vividly remembered one instance when Josiah had told a gentleman dressed in furs to “move his Upper Paleolithic ass”—and had met Josiah over and over, and he was always, well, Josiah. He didn’t change. He didn’t forget things. Her Josiah could still speak fluently to the man with the Upper Paleolithic ass. More puzzlingly, he didn’t look like any of the people they had met. Freddy had thought him mixed-race when she first saw him, but after they had started travelling, she had wondered if they might eventually end up somewhere he blended in. So far, they hadn’t. On the other hand, he always seemed to find a place where he fit, socially if not visually. Some societies treated him as a god or a demon or some other kind of otherworldly creature. Some accepted him as an ordinary person. He always had a role.

  Choosing Josiah, Freddy thought, meant choosing order. He represented stability and predictability. He didn’t change, but he didn’t grow, either. He was forever fourteen years old.

  Cuerva Lachance had never been the same twice. Josiah changed his name, but he did it to be inconspicuous, and she’d noticed that he liked the name “Josiah,” which he’d used several times over the past few millennia. Cuerva Lachance changed her name, her gender, her appearance, her age, and occasionally her personality. Some things about her were relatively consistent, though it wasn’t safe to assume anything about her. Freddy had banked on her never having an attention span until it had become apparent, during an unfortunate trial in Rome, that she could develop one whenever she needed it. Her character ranged from friendly and helpful to blatantly psychotic. She treated time like a goofy version of space and did everything in the wrong order. She was seen as a god or a demon much more frequently than Josiah was, for good reason. Freddy couldn’t swear she wasn’t a god or a demon. No rules applied to her, from basic rules of common sense such as “Don’t stick your hand in the fire” to fundamental laws of nature such as “If you stick your hand in the fire, you will end up with serious burns.” Freddy was pretty sure she had seen various incarnations of Cuerva Lachance chatting happily with people who didn’t exist. It wasn’t always easy to tell, but the way some of them were see-through was, Freddy thought, a clue.

  If Josiah represented order, Cuerva Lachance had to represent chaos. That was the choice, then: order or chaos. Stability or change, predictability or mystery, the possible or the impossible. Pick one, and the world got a tiny bit more predictable; pick the other, and the world got a tiny bit less.

  That was, at least, what they wanted her to think. She was thinking it at the moment because she had to, but she didn’t trust the thought. As she had sensed when she had been watching Claire make her choice, there was something wrong.

  She hadn’t yet discovered what. She needed more information. She did know she didn’t believe in the categories Josiah and Cuerva Lachance had set out for themselves as firmly as Josiah and Cuerva Lachance seemed to. If Josiah was all about order, why were there things about him that didn’t make logical sense? How could he be an embodiment of reason and still not age or sleep? Why did his hair grow but not the rest of him? Why did Cuerva Lachance consistently forget names she had heard two minutes before but remember epithets over periods spanning multiple thousands of years? Wasn’t someone who never followed rules actually following a rule? Why did Cuerva Lachance and Josiah hang around together if they had nothing in common and even actively opposed each other? And why was Three even necessary? Why didn’t Josiah and Cuerva Lachance just go around ordering and chaosing without guidance?

  So far, nothing had answered these questions. She hadn’t even found out whether she herself was Three. Surely if she had been, she would have recognised bits and pieces of herself in the various Threes they had encountered. Wouldn’t she? She hadn’t. She hadn’t particularly recognised bits and pieces of Mel or Roland, either. The Threes had less in common than she had thought when she’d had only Bragi Boddason and Ling to compare. They were … just people. They were all different kinds of just people. Some were nice; some she wanted to punch. She was almost certain at least two of them were sociopaths. The only thing that was really there every time was the creativity. It wasn’t just “creativity,” though. Josiah had been vague about that. It was always a creativity that had something to do with words.

  In oral societies, Three tended to be some sort of storyteller. In literate societies, Three was often a writer. It could be quite subtle. One of the future Threes was an eccentric mathematician who wrote poetry with numbers rather than words, but the numbers represented and replaced the words. Filbert was her gang’s official Liar, responsible for shoring up the gang’s reputation amongst the other g
angs. Oddly, it reminded Freddy of nothing so much as another Three she had met about a month and/or four thousand years ago. It had been in what was, in Freddy’s day, Ethiopia. The Three in question had been a tribal leader whose people had been reduced and weakened by illness. Threatened by another tribe that had been growing rapidly and looking to expand its territory, the smaller tribe had fought back with words, spreading rumours of the exploits of one of its young men. When Freddy had asked Josiah what was being said about the boy—who, as far as she could tell, was a typical gawky sixteen-year-old—Josiah had replied, “The story is that his mother got pregnant last year after she drank from a pool in which a lion had been bathing. The boy sliced himself out of his mother’s womb with his fingernails and sewed her up again perfectly. He grew to adulthood in a month. He has the strength of ten men and once stole the sun for an hour because he needed it to light his mother’s cooking fire.”

  “What,” Freddy had said, “you mean the eclipse we had last week?”

  “Good, isn’t it?” Josiah had said. “Of course, eventually someone’s going to challenge the boy, at which point there’s going to have to be either quite a lot of trickery or quite a lot of running away.”

  Freddy had read Bullfinch’s Mythology, plus several other books from the pile on the kitchen chair. She knew Three had turned the boy into a mythic hero. It was a strangely powerful thing to do with just a story.

  Bragi had fought Loki with a story, too, in a way. Ling had told the villagers stories that had stopped them taking revenge on the brothers. Filbert was using stories to protect her gang. The Threes were good with words. Freddy thought they were particularly good with words as stories. It had to mean something.

  What she couldn’t for the life of her decide was what the choice was all about or why it bothered her so much. She thought it gave Cuerva Lachance and Josiah a certain amount of power over Three, though she still wasn’t sure how.

  * * *

  “This is useless.” Josiah leaned wearily against the barricade. “If we win here, then what? We’ll have defended ten feet of rubble-strewn alleyway from another gang that is almost exactly like this one. If we lose here, we’ll have surrendered ten feet of rubble-strewn alleyway to another gang that is almost exactly like this one. There’s no point.”

  “I think it’s the principle of the thing,” said Freddy, peering through the gap again. The other gang wasn’t in sight.

  “From what I gather, gang rule is the norm throughout this entire continent,” said Josiah. “Of course, when I say ‘gather,’ I mean ‘extrapolate from nonsense words in various bastardised languages.’”

  Freddy sighed. “Look, it’s been more than a thousand years since our time. You’re just feeling displaced.”

  “I do not feel displaced,” he snarled. “Isn’t that your job?”

  It was, but not when they visited the future. Josiah really hated visiting the future, and not, Freddy suspected, just because he had never seen himself there. “You don’t like uncertainty,” she said, “do you? In the past, you know why things are how they are because you were there when they got to be that way. Here, you don’t know what happened to make this world into this world.”

  He glared at her. Josiah glared at her a lot in the future. “Don’t think you know me because you’re tagging after me all through time. You really are a duckling.”

  “I’m a duckling with a little gun that shoots lightning bolts,” she reminded him. “Live with it.”

  The gang warfare here was complex. Most of the cities were in ruins. As the world population had been vastly reduced by various disasters, the majority of cities had been impossible to sustain. A lot of the rich people lived in small fortified communities in what had once been the countryside. The cities, meanwhile, had been overrun by territorial gangs. The gangs formed an infrastructure of sorts. A person could be born into a particular gang, attend schools run by that gang, grow old, die, and be buried by the gang. That sort of thing was more likely if the person belonged to an old, large gang. The new, small ones aped the big ones by offering education and a certain amount of security, but their territories were constantly shifting and their leadership changing as the small gangs squabbled amongst themselves. Filbert’s gang was a newish one, an offshoot of a larger gang that had experienced a schism. At the moment, it was battling passionately with an even smaller gang for, as Josiah had noted, a few feet of alleyway.

  As per unspoken agreement, the gangs fought with their weapons on their lowest settings; the result would be a matter of honourable concession rather than blood. It didn’t mean no one ever got hurt. People cheated all the time. Three days ago, Freddy had seen someone killed. She was a bit worried about the fact that it bothered her so little.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t care. It was hard to watch someone die, even if the someone was not on your side. It was that she had been travelling through time for nearly a year and a half. She had already seen many people die. She hadn’t got used to it, but she thought she had got a little numb.

  The first time had also, temporally speaking, been her first encounter with Josiah and Cuerva Lachance.

  * * *

  They had been travelling for about two and a half months. They had visited five places and times since seventeenth-century Paris. Freddy thought she was finally getting used to the whole time-travelling thing.

  Gradually, she’d acquired a more useful outfit. Jeans and a T-shirt had not been the way to go; neither had the Chinese tunic and skirt. It was best, she was finding, to wear something that didn’t quite fit anywhere but wasn’t conspicuously out of place. A tunic was a pretty good basic idea, and she had found a nice anonymous brown one in Mesopotamia. Under the tunic went black leggings. It was a boy’s outfit, but with her relatively short hair and lack of shape, she could pass more easily as a boy than she could as a girl. A shoulder bag and a shapeless black hat rounded out the outfit. People wore hats in a lot of places. When she turned up somewhere they didn’t, she could just take it off.

  They had been walking beside a Macedonian river when Three had thought whatever Three had thought, and she and Josiah had looked up into a tangle of green. It was her first jungle, though not her last. It was hot and peculiarly claustrophobic, for all it counted as outdoors.

  “Uh-oh,” said Josiah. “I remember this. Duck.”

  She had learned to trust him implicitly when he gave her inexplicable instructions. She flung herself to the ground.

  It was medieval Sweden all over again, only this time with a bigger pointy thing. The spear stuck, quivering, in the tree in front of her.

  Like the Viking arrow, it hadn’t been meant for her. Unlike the Viking arrow, its origin had been much closer at hand. Even as she turned, she heard someone scream. A mostly naked girl who looked about ten ran past her, eyes wide and skin shiny with sweat. Freddy, still on the ground, let her go. It was Josiah who caught her by the arm and slung her behind a tree. He turned to deal with her pursuer. Freddy saw him look up—and up some more—at a huge, impossibly muscled man wearing nothing but a loincloth. He reached over Freddy’s head and tore the spear loose from the tree. He didn’t even glance down at her while he was doing it. He turned and swept Josiah aside as if he weighed almost nothing. Josiah lost his balance and fell in a puddle, sending spray arcing up into a narrow sunbeam. The air turned briefly into rainbows.

  Someone screamed again, but this time, it sounded more like a shriek of rage than a cry of fear. The big man paused and glanced back over his shoulder. Freddy, following his gaze, saw two more people emerge from the vegetation.

  One was a version of Josiah, albeit a largely unclothed one. The other person was pretty clearly Cuerva Lachance in one of her more dangerous moods. She was a woman this time around, and she looked much more like Josiah than usual, though she was considerably taller than he was. She had wild dark hair and a bare chest. Freddy, sweating in her practical tunic and leggings, was beginning to understand the reason for the general lack of cl
othing in this place.

  Cuerva Lachance crouched and snarled something at the man, who snapped back at her. He held himself upright, his spear at the ready. Freddy thought she saw him gesture with the weapon, as if inviting Cuerva Lachance to fight him.

  The head tilting happened. The other Josiah made a sudden grab for the woman’s arm. He was just too late to stop her throwing the small knife that had materialised in her hand.

  The man swayed on his feet. The knife, Freddy noted in a dazed sort of way, had buried itself in his eye. The man stood where he was for a surprisingly long time before he crashed to the ground, twitching. Eventually, he stopped moving.

  Things went grey for a while.

  She had never seen anyone killed before. It didn’t seem to her it was something that should happen in real life. When the fog cleared from her brain, she was in the middle of throwing up in a bush. She hated throwing up, but in this case, it was called for. She didn’t think she was ever going to forget the sight of the man standing very still in the jungle, the blade of a stone knife buried in his eye.

  It was quiet. When she finally wiped her mouth and glanced around, she saw four people watching her, three curiously and one with a certain amount of embarrassment. “Done?” said Josiah, still wringing out his tunic. Not trusting her voice yet, Freddy nodded.

  The man’s body was sprawled nearby on the jungle floor. Freddy started to look away, then stopped.

  I always look away … don’t I? She’d never thought of it that way before, but it was true. She looked away from things she didn’t want to see or from things she didn’t want to know. Slowly, reluctantly, Freddy’s eyes went back to the corpse. The man had been alive a few minutes ago. He had been alive enough to be running through the jungle, trying to kill someone. He had got this far in his life and abruptly stopped being alive. Someday, that was going to be her.