Weave a Circle Round

by Kari Maaren

  Everyone I’ve met so far on this … whatever … is dead in my time. Ling is dead. She was nice to me; she showed me how to sew. We do all these things, and then we’re just gone.

  She turned away from the body. She wanted to go home. She wanted to tell Roland there was no use in them being mad at each other if they were just going to die in the end.

  The other Josiah was not behaving as she’d expected. Usually, the Josiahs were resigned to see them. This one seemed taken aback. He walked up to her Josiah and began demanding to know things. Freddy couldn’t understand the words, but she recognised the general tone. Her Josiah replied in the same language while the girl watched warily from behind her tree.

  Freddy heard something rustle and turned. Cuerva Lachance had moved up behind her. “Hello, curly-haired one,” she said, as she almost always did.

  Freddy nodded again, then cleared her throat and said hoarsely, “Why’d you kill him, Cuerva Lachance?”

  The woman squatted next to Freddy and rested her elbows on her knees. “I’m not Cuerva Lachance yet,” she said. “Call me Ban. He’s Bana at the moment. It pleases me when we match.”

  Freddy just looked at her.

  “I don’t remember. There was a thing.” She waved her hands about. “Oh, all right, you’ve worn me down. He’s the girl’s uncle. He wants to kill her. He thinks we’re evil spirits, and she’s brought us down on him. Of course,” she said judiciously, “he may have a point there.”

  “She’s Three?” said Freddy, wiping her mouth again.

  “What delightful terminology you use,” said Ban. “I think I’m going to enjoy your time. The girl is, as you put it, Three, though that’s a bit of a misnomer, I should say. Her name escapes me at the moment. There’s a monkey in that tree over there.”

  Freddy glanced over at Josiah and Bana. “Is there a problem?”

  “Well, we’ve never seen you before,” said Ban cheerfully. “I’m temporally complicated and don’t mind, but Bana is going to need convincing.”

  Cuerva Lachance—hat, trench coat, and all—stepped out from behind a tree and handed Freddy a glass with something blue in it. “Gargle. You don’t want to travel in time with your mouth tasting like that. Ban, can we talk? Loki’s come to see me.”

  “Obviously.” Ban beamed in a very Cuerva Lachance sort of way. “I’m sure the boys will sort things out soon.”

  They were gone, silently. Freddy doubted anyone else even noticed them go. She did gargle with the blue stuff, which turned out to be ordinary mouthwash. It didn’t really make anything better, but Cuerva Lachance had been right: she hadn’t wanted to travel in time with her mouth tasting like that.

  * * *

  Josiah had eventually convinced Bana they were legitimate. Josiah was quite good at convincing people of things. At any rate, they hadn’t been in the jungle for long.

  That had been the first death she’d witnessed, but not the last. People died a lot, she’d decided, and they died all over history. One of the Threes had almost died while they’d been with him. He had been ninety-two. They hadn’t been in physical danger—no one had been chasing them or shooting at them or trying to drive them off cliffs—but it had still been their tensest visit because Josiah hadn’t remembered it at all, and because if Three had died before the sympathetic resonance happened …

  “He won’t,” Josiah said.

  “But what if he does?” Freddy retorted. The old man seemed to be breathing only about three times a minute. The early doubts she’d had about the whole time-travel thing were all popping up again. Josiah always acted as if there were no danger things would ever go wrong: as if they should just coast along and trust that everything would turn out all right.

  “Well, we may be in trouble at that point,” Josiah said, “but he won’t.” And in the end, he didn’t. Three was thinking something or other, even as he was dying.

  She hated seeing people die, but she had learned she could live with it. It was never something she’d had to learn in her real life. All four of her grandparents were still alive.

  Now Filbert nudged her. “Noontide farce.”

  “You mean truce?” said Freddy.

  “Yes, mayhap,” said Filbert. “Truce. Noontide truce. Grub?”

  She handed Freddy a sandwich. They still had sandwiches here, though they called them “borks.” Unfortunately, they didn’t have butter or much meat. This bork was spread with the futuristic equivalent of Marmite. At least it was food.

  “I’m reasonably certain this stuff is made from bugs,” said Josiah, but he took one, too. “Tell me where the other me is.”

  He had a habit of doing this to future Threes. Presumably, he was trying to catch them off their guard. It never worked. Filbert smiled at him. “English is puzzlefying lingo. You stay here and learn yourselfs real words.”

  “Bah,” said Josiah.

  He would learn them someday, though, thought Freddy. Everybody died, except not Josiah and Cuerva Lachance. They went on and on and on.

  She wondered if that was sometimes maybe a little lonely.

  * * *

  Her watch read “Aug. 17” the day she and Josiah stood with a deliberately anachronistic version of Cuerva Lachance who said he was an Egyptian corporal named Sven outside the mouth of a cave in what would someday be New Zealand.

  Freddy shivered. They were close to the water, at the bottom of a low cliff topped by a lush green landscape, and the sun was going down, taking the day’s faint warmth with it. She peered dubiously into the cave. “Three’s in there?”

  “He doesn’t really come out much,” said Sven. “When we try to go in, he throws rocks at us. I think he lives mostly off raw fish.”

  “I remember.” Josiah rubbed a hand wearily over his forehead. “I’m sulking by the river, am I?”

  “You find this boring,” said Sven. “I don’t. It’s very exciting to try to guess what he might do next.”

  Freddy was still looking into the cave, straining her eyes against the darkness. “Why’s he in there?”

  “He was part of one of the first groups to migrate here,” said Josiah. “It was also one of the smallest. It didn’t do very well. A lot of his people died of illness or injury, until only he and his sister and one of their cousins were left. A few months ago, the sister and the cousin went foraging and never returned.”

  “It happens sometimes,” said Sven.

  Josiah nodded. “There are other settlements on the islands, but he doesn’t know they’re there. He hasn’t seen anyone but us for more than a year, and he doesn’t like us. He says we’re not his people, so we don’t count.”

  “You’d think he would appreciate some company,” said Sven, shaking his head, “but no … it’s all ‘You’re not my people’ and ‘You’re probably here to kill me’ and ‘I don’t need anyone eating all my fish.’”

  Behind them, the sound of the waves was continuous. Freddy knew she was more or less on the other side of the world from home, but this place was not unlike the coast of British Columbia. The wind blowing in from the sea, tossing the waves and tangling itself in Freddy’s hair, had the same feel, even the same smell. One of her rare surges of homesickness rolled through her belly.

  Josiah sighed. “We’ll have to sit this one out. I hope you brought something to read.”

  Freddy was opening her mouth to reply when a man walked past her into the cave.

  He was brown-skinned and cheerful-looking, clad only in a sort of grass skirt but apparently not bothered by the chill in the air. He carried what looked like an enormous fish hook over one shoulder. He was also slightly transparent. Freddy could see the stone of the cave mouth through his skin, though only barely. He vanished into the darkness of the cave more quickly than he should have.

  She said, “Who’s he?”

  She had seen Cuerva Lachance talking to see-through people before, but usually from a distance, and rarely when Josiah was around. Now Josiah was pointedly looking in another direction. “It�
��s going to be cold tonight,” he said.

  Freddy turned to Sven. “That guy who just walked into the cave…”

  “Oh, that’s just Māui,” said Sven. “Don’t worry about him.”

  “But he wasn’t real,” she said, “was he?”

  She peered into the cave. The blackness farther in seemed unbroken, but she could hear someone muttering in an unfamiliar language. The words were almost rhythmic; she felt a beat behind them.

  “The boy tells stories about Māui,” said Sven, “but he has no one to tell them to, since his people are gone. It’s too bad. They’re good stories. They’ll survive through other tellers, but he tells them best.”

  “So he tells stories about Māui, and Māui walks into his cave as he’s doing that?” asked Freddy. She probably, she reflected, would have been more upset about this half a year ago.

  “No,” said Josiah. “That’s ridiculous. Māui’s a culture hero. He’s not real.”

  “But I just saw him,” said Freddy.

  “You need to stop drinking the water without boiling it first,” said Josiah. He turned on his heel and marched away in what seemed to be an entirely random direction.

  Freddy bit down on a stab of irritation—Josiah was just like that sometimes—and looked sidelong at Sven. “Are you going to avoid telling me about Māui, too?”

  “Why would I do that?” said Sven brightly. He took two steps to the right and just wasn’t there any more.

  The see-through people hadn’t really struck Freddy much before this, as they’d just seemed to be a natural by-product of Cuerva Lachance. Maybe she should have been paying more attention. He told a story about Māui, she thought, still staring into the cave, and Māui was there. Did Sven do that? Why would he? What good does it do this kid to have an imaginary culture hero sitting in his cave with him?

  Was Sven being kind? He wasn’t incapable of it, but it still seemed wrong. There was something else happening here.

  Before she could try to figure out what, Three emerged from the cave.

  He was maybe thirteen and much thinner than he should have been. Something else was wrong with him, too. His black hair was falling out in patches, and his eyes had bags so dark they looked almost like bruises. He stopped short when he saw her. For a moment, they locked glances.

  Incongruously, as she stared at a boy who was going to die seven hundred years before she was born, Freddy thought of Roland and Mel. She didn’t mean to. She tried to think of them as little as possible. Remembering hurt too much, and it sometimes brought the anger back, too. This time, it didn’t. This time, the anger just didn’t come. Everybody should have somebody … right? How is it fair that he doesn’t have anyone? Why was I so mad all the time about having all those people?

  Freddy smiled.

  The boy hesitated for a long moment, then smiled back. It wasn’t exactly a happy smile, but something flashed briefly in his eyes.

  He turned and went back into the cave soon after. Freddy was pretty sure he half raised his hand to her just before he was swallowed by darkness.

  * * *

  Josiah didn’t like borks very much. Instead of eating his, he was poking at it experimentally. “It’s basically rubber. It even tastes like rubber. I find this era problematic.”

  Freddy had been delaying eating her own bork as well. She had learned the hard way that the correct choice between caterpillar stew and nothing was always caterpillar stew, but that didn’t make the bork any more appealing. She weighed the food in one hand and the gun in the other and wondered idly what would happen if she shot the former with the latter.

  “Do you like it here?” she asked Filbert, the question coming out of nowhere.

  Filbert cocked her head. “No computement.”

  “You know,” said Freddy. “Do you like it? Do you ever wish you could move to one of the African city-states? They’re supposed to be nice and safe.”

  “That’s simple mythifying,” Filbert replied, shaking her head. “This be the real.”

  “I was rather hoping this bork wasn’t the real,” said Josiah with exaggerated gloom.

  Filbert’s world, thought Freddy, was smaller than she knew. She saw it as huge and nuanced and satisfying, and in the end, it didn’t amount to more than a series of pointless battles in an ancient, crumbling cityscape. How could she possibly be satisfied with it? Didn’t she know how much else was out there?

  Freddy said, “I bet the city-states are real, too. I bet they would be interesting to see.”

  “Just a story,” said Filbert. “I know a better story.”

  It was dark and still and lonely, though not as dark as it could have been; Freddy, looking up, saw a dazzling full moon. The wind rustled the grass. Freddy glanced over at Josiah, who was gazing thoughtfully down at his bork. She expected him to say something sardonic, but for once, he was silent.

  12

  Three was never far away when they jumped. Freddy spotted light glimmering beyond the scrub to what, given the position of the moon, was the north. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait,” said Josiah.

  Freddy watched him. Even in the bright moonlight, she couldn’t be sure of his expression, but she thought he looked oddly apprehensive. “Wait why?”

  “I don’t remember this,” he said. “This is wrong.”

  She shook her head. “You weren’t always there.”

  “No. I can feel the time. This is wrong,” said Josiah. “It’s too early. This is before I ever met … us. Long before. This is … I don’t remember this at all.”

  “We still have to deal with it,” said Freddy. “There are people over there.”

  “I think we should stay here,” said Josiah immediately.

  She stared at him. “We have to find Three.”

  “It’s wrong,” he insisted, but when she tucked the microgun and the bork into her bag and began to move towards the light, he followed.

  His apprehension had affected her. Instead of approaching the light openly and trusting that Three would explain things to whomever else was there, Freddy moved cautiously and as quietly as she could over the plain. Even before she was close enough to see what the light was, she could hear one voice speaking and the occasional murmur of other voices beneath it. The speech patterns were different from anything she had heard before. They seemed … truncated. Guttural. It was a woman speaking. “What’s she saying?” Freddy whispered.

  “Things,” said Josiah, and closed his mouth firmly.

  Freddy eased in behind a dry little bush and peered out towards the voices.

  The light was a campfire. There were perhaps twelve people grouped around it, about half of them children. The moonlight and firelight conspired to show Freddy that these people were dressed roughly in what were probably animal skins. They had more clothes than Ban, but Ban had dressed as she had because of the heat. It wasn’t so hot here. It may have been a warm day, but the air was growing noticeably cooler even now.

  The woman speaking looked very young, no more than fifteen or so, though Freddy found ages weren’t always easy to estimate in certain periods. The other people listened to her raptly. Every once in a while, one of them would say something, and the girl would reply.

  “Three?” said Freddy.

  Josiah said, “I don’t know. How should I know? Why are you badgering me?”

  She turned to him, startled. “You know all the Threes.”

  “It’s too early,” he snapped. “I don’t understand what’s happening!”

  Josiah always understood what was happening. She looked at him properly. He was pale and perspiring, and his eyes had gone huge.

  Freddy glanced back towards the fire. “Can you understand what she’s saying?”

  “Yeeeeeesssss,” said Josiah reluctantly. “Just. But I don’t remember this.”

  “You’ve said,” said Freddy. “Just tell me what she’s saying.”

  He paused for so long that she turned to look at him again. To her amazement, he was tre
mbling. “Josiah, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I … nothing. She’s telling them a story.”

  He hesitated again, then went on. “I don’t think she meant it to be a story at first. They keep asking her questions. They call her ‘Mika.’ It means … it means ‘wise child.’ They think she’s a sort of shaman, born with special knowledge. They’re asking her why the world is the way it is.”

  “Like a creation story.”

  “Yes, exactly, but it’s … new. They haven’t heard it before. She’s … I think she’s…”

  “Making it up,” said Freddy.

  “No!” said Josiah, a bit too loudly. Freddy glanced over at the campfire, but no one had noticed.

  She said, “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. All the Threes are creative, right? They all make up stories.”

  “I don’t know her. She can’t be Three,” said Josiah desperately.

  “Just tell me what she’s saying.”

  Josiah shook his head, but he didn’t protest further. “She’s done this whole bit about how Earth was born from Sea and Sky. But Earth was lonely, floating all by herself in the water, and she cried. The tears became rivers, and on the shores of the rivers, plants grew. And from the plants, seeds fell and grew into new plants, and also into animals. All the animals were sort of round and formless and hairless. But one of them fell into the river and began to swim, and it developed fins and gills and became a fish. And one of them was cold and began to dig, and it developed claws and fur and became a mole. And the same happened with all the other animals. But there were no people yet.”

  Josiah listened for a moment and went on. “That man asked if people grew from plants, too. Mika says they didn’t. She says Earth was happy about the rivers and the plants and animals, but she was still lonely. She asked Sky, her father, for a child. Sky saw how beautiful Earth was, and he … uh…”

  “Impregnated her?” said Freddy, who, thanks to the books on the chair in her kitchen, was not unfamiliar with creation myths.

  “Yes,” said Josiah. “She was pregnant for one year. At the end of it, she gave birth to a girl and a boy. They were dead and as pale as ice. Earth cried again, but Sea, her mother, told her the children simply needed to be baked.”