by R Magnusholm
At long last the clouds parted, and John angled the heavy lens to focus the sun’s rays onto the tinder.
A crow cawed suddenly, startling him. The bird was flapping its black wings in a beech tree beyond the spot where Liz was picking berries. A portent of doom or a warning? Instinctively, his hand closed around the shaft of his spear.
His gaze slid from the crow, down the gray-barked trunk, and his blood turned to ice. A stocky animal the size of a tiger crouched behind a low bush. Its short stub of a tail swished from side to side impatiently.
With its shaggy camouflage-green pelt blotched by irregular black stripes, the beast looked like something painted by a militaristically inclined preschooler. Its body proportions seemed all wrong for a feline, as if it had a bear among its ancestors. The brute’s most prominent feature was a pair of oversized top incisors that gave it a vaguely comical walrus appearance. But its narrowed eyes and flattened ears made it look deadly serious.
This is the end, my friend, John thought, standing up. Ten feet away, Liz remained oblivious to the danger. She hummed a cheery tune, ate berries, and dropped some into the container.
John opened his mouth to shout a warning, but no sound came. Time stopped and stood still. He might get lucky and impale the animal with his spear as it leaped at them. He’d push the butt of the weapon into the ground to get a solid base. One chance in a million to nail the brute.
The crow cawed again. A harsh, pitiless sound.
The huge cat crawled forward on its belly. Liz saw it and took a startled step back. As she retreated to John’s side, the plastic container in her hand tilted. Blueberries spilled over the rim in a steady stream to bounce and roll like blue waxy beads on the mossy ground.
The animal quivered on its haunches, preparing to leap. John pulled his right arm back and launched the hefty paperweight, aiming for the cat’s head. As he let fly, a strange thought flashed across his mind, like a distorted radio transmission: Want some ketchup with it?
But the sabertooth cat wanted no ketchup with his paperweight. Even before the missile flew a foot, John knew he missed. The trajectory was all wrong. He’d thrown too hard. Too high.
Sparkling in sunlight, John’s Employee of the Year award sailed across the forest glade. In another two heartbeats, it would crash impotently behind the hunkering beast.
John dropped to a crouch, angling his spear toward the sabertooth, and jammed the base of his weapon into the ground. One chance in a million was better than no chance at all.
Chapter 13
The Raven Tribe
Like a steel spring suddenly released, the great cat leaped—right into the path of the flying paperweight.
THWACK!
A spray of blood and broken fangs flew into the air.
The stricken beast twisted in mid-leap. Its massive paw swept John’s spear aside, missing his head by a whisker. Hissing like a boiling teakettle, it fled into the trees. In two or three huge bounds, it was gone.
John jumped to his feet. “You forgot your ketchup, buster!” he hollered into the empty woods.
Buster-uster-uster . . . The forest echoed back.
His knees began knocking together, and he picked up his spear, then leaned against it. His mouth was so parched he could drink the Thames dry.
Liz grabbed his shoulders, her eyes wild and haunted. “Gosh, you got him good. Right in the schnauzer!”
Not daring to speak for fear his voice might come out as a pathetic squeak, he only nodded. To disguise the shaking of his hands, he gripped the spear harder. Gotta man up, he thought fiercely. Gotta. You can’t go through life trembling with fear. This strange new world was no place for sniveling cowards. He took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. Just excess adrenalin dissipating. Yes, that must be it. Only some stupid adrenalin.
“I thought we were dead.” Liz’s voice sounded steady, but her lower lip trembled. “What a throw.”
He shrugged modestly and flashed his best plastic smile. “That’s what playing cricket does for you, babe.” He let go of his spear and pulled her close, wrapping his arms around her shuddering shoulders. Liz seemed to have shrunk under her office jacket that appeared at least one dress size too large for her.
As the sun disappeared behind a cloud, he shivered. A black feather drifting on the wind landed at his feet. He picked it up.
“If not for that bird cawing, we’d be dead for sure,” he said grimly.
“Why did it warn us?”
“Who knows?”
“Calling other crows to dinner?”
He shrugged. “Maybe it doesn’t like big cats.”
Liz stared dejectedly at the scatter of purple berries underfoot, then at her empty container. “Damn.”
“Well, the bird brought us luck.” He stuck the feather in the lapel of his suit and straightened his shoulders. “I hereby name our little team the Raven Tribe.” Surreptitiously, he pulled his pants higher up—they kept sliding down for some reason—and began searching for his Employee of the Year award.
He found a broken off five-inch tooth first. Blood-speckled and wickedly curved, it lay atop emerald green moss, like a museum exhibit mounted on baize. The glass paperweight had vanished. As he started panicking that he’d never find it, and that his plan to use it as a makeshift lens would fail, he spotted it glinting at the heart of a blueberry shrub.
John put the paperweight in his rucksack, tied the lanyard from his old ID badge around the sabertooth cat’s fang, and hung it from his neck.
Together they refilled the container with blueberries, then lingered among the knee-high shrubs, eating juicy berries until they were fit to burst. After defeating the beast, he felt invincible. Everything would be peachy now.
***
A forest stream that might have been the Fleet snaked through the woods, running down the inclines and pooling into reed-lined tarns where its course became blocked by beaver dams. After quenching their raging thirst, John and Liz followed it downstream. The afternoon sun was on their right now, meaning the stream flowed southeast.
With fallen logs blocking their way every few yards, the going was slow, so by the time they arrived at their pool, the sun hung low in the west, and it was too late to try the lens.
They went to the reed bed and brought back three sheaves of rushes.
“The way you folded that bunch of reeds in half is great for crowning the ridgeline,” Liz said. “But first we need to add a second layer everywhere.”
“Everywhere?” he groaned.
“I’m afraid so. But let’s rest for five minutes. How’s your foot?”
“Bearable.”
He unwrapped his injured foot. While it didn’t look all black and blue as Liz had predicted, a large purple bruise bloomed on the inside of his ankle. His whole body ached and screamed for rest. But he’d come to realize that in this new world, any weakness, any self-indulgence, any wrong decision might be punished. Severely.
Liz lifted her gaze from his foot to his face. “I suppose the work can wait until tomorrow.”
“No time like now.”
“You’re sure?”
He began rewrapping his office tie around his ankle. “Positive.”
“We’ll need more reeds,” she said. “Some tussock grass too.”
He pulled his pants up and tightened his belt. It’d been years since he’d been this slim. So far, so good—he had no problem with getting leaner. Up to a point. His old life seemed to be peeling off him in layers as if he were not a person at all but an onion. He recalled reading an Italian fairytale to the kids, something about a city populated by walking-and-talking vegetables. The main hero had an onion for a head, and the wicked money lender (or was that a greedy landlord?) had been a beef tomato.
They trudged back to the reed bed, detouring through a birch grove to fill Liz’s canvas bag with mushrooms. A crisp fall breeze, redolent with the fragrance of freshly fallen leaves, flowed between the white-trunked trees. Slivers of paper-thin bark flutter
ed in the wind, and John plucked a few shavings to try as tinder.
After harvesting three more sheaves of reeds and tearing up some tussock grass, they returned to their building project.
John had wrenched several long, thin shoots from an elderberry tree and tied them with a creeper plant to the outside of the roof to hold the thatch down in the wind. Liz learned how to thread single flexible strands of green rushes between the rigid dry canes to produce a woven mat.
“Hey, we could make a door,” John said, weaving a strand of ivy around the front gable. “Well, a hatch anyway.”
She smiled and propped the mat against the doorway. “There. I’ll add a second layer crossways. With willow sticks for extra strength. And how about some dry moss in between reed layers?”
“Sounds yummy, like a layered cake.”
For a while, they worked in silence. He ignored his raw hands covered in blisters and scratches. So what if he had at least one splinter in every finger? They’d use his nail clippers to pull them out when they had better light tomorrow. Hopefully, they wouldn’t be chased by aurochs for half a day. Or flooded. Ever since arriving four days ago, all they did was blunder into calamities: cold, thirst, flood. Rain and hunger. Vicious animals.
After retrieving their possessions from the original camp, perhaps they could relax a bit. Sleep late. Eat more. They had water and shelter and the glass paperweight.
***
An hour later, they were sitting on the fallen log, eating raw birch and aspen boletes. As the sun set, dusk fell over the forest, and purple shadows thickened under the trees encircling their bramble patch. The strange star they’d seen last night rose in the east. Orange and huge, it blazed between jagged conifer tops, bigger and brighter than any celestial rival. The half-moon floated above and to the right of it, pale and anemic by comparison.
“By Jove, that’s Jupiter,” Liz exclaimed.
“Huh? It’s not a supernova?”
“See the star to the left of it?”
He looked, wincing against the glare. A blue dot twinkled next to the blazing giant. “Yes, a tiny one.” As he strained his eyes, a few more stars became visible, puny and weak.
Liz continued, “Constellations are permanent. But our object has moved. Yesterday, it was level with that star, but today it isn’t. Which means it’s a planet in orbit around the sun.”
Impressed that Liz had noticed such minor details, he said. “Can’t it be a space station in Earth’s orbit? A space mirror?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Our mystery object would’ve moved a lot more than it did,” Liz said smugly.
“Duh.”
“Many years ago, we went on a school trip to Venice, and our teacher pointed out Jupiter rising over the Adriatic.” She sipped some water from the container. “He claimed that Jupiter is a failed star. Had it been more massive to sustain hydrogen fusion, we’d have a second sun. A mini sun, sure, but still . . .”
“Well, it looks like here it hasn’t failed, and we live in a binary star system.
3 Maybe we’re in the far future where Jupiter had hoovered up Saturn and a million comets to gain mass.”
She shook her head slowly. “Unlikely. A boy in my class had asked about it. Even if you smashed every planet, comet, and asteroid into Jupiter, it’d still be too small to ignite hydrogen fusion.”
“Yet here it is, blazing in the sky, like the second sun of Tatooine . . .”
“Yep.”
John stretched his legs and stroked the aching bump on his head. His skinny rump was getting numb from sitting on a hard log. Jupiter had never been a star, and it’d never become one. His brain hurt. He wasn’t sure if that was due to being bashed by a falling bough or from pondering the imponderable.
If the celestial luminary rising in the east wasn’t really Jupiter, they weren’t on Earth. And yet they’d just dined on hazelnuts, blueberries, and birch boletes. All very terrestrial species. And if this weren’t the past, then why had they been attacked by aurochs and the sabertooth? Of course, there was also the small matter of camouflage-patterned green squirrels. He sighed.
In the golden-red light, the treetops swayed in the wind. An owl hooted its eternal who-oo. The air smelled of pine needles and dry grasses.
“That’s more evidence we’re neither in the past nor the future,” he finally said.
“An alternate reality, then. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Let’s drink to that,” John said. He lifted his chipped Arsenal mug and bumped it against Liz’s plastic container. He supposed he should’ve proposed a suitably glib toast, but he was too tired to think of any.
A parallel universe. He suspected as much since their encounter with the green squirrels. But if this world had a more massive Jupiter, how likely was it for the planet to retain the same geographical features? Not likely at all. Still, judging by the tidal surges on the river, a sea lay not far to the east. And there was no one around to stop them naming the big river the Thames and their local stream the Fleet.
Chapter 14
Another Day, Another Failure
Day 5, Fleet Woods
John awoke at the crack of dawn. Golden light filtered around and through the ill-fitting door. Pretty. If only he wasn’t so hungry. Last night, when it became too dark to work, he and Liz had shared the blueberries, ate a mushroom each, and then drank the remaining water. He remembered lying down and piling dry tussock grass over his feet. Then nothing.
Liz stirred next to him but didn’t wake. He listened to the chirping and piping of blackbirds and wondered if he might fall asleep again. He did.
Two or three hours later, he became aware of the familiar stone-on-wood tapping outside. Liz must be cracking hazelnuts. From the sun-warmed walls rose a faint fragrance, sweet and fresh like that of a water hyacinth.
When he crawled out of their shelter, she held up a small reed basket full of blackberries and smiled proudly. “Good morning,” she said.
“And the same to you. What have you got there?”
“I couldn’t sleep, so I tried weaving.”
He examined her handiwork. The rough and uneven basket wouldn’t have won any prizes—even from the most lenient of handicraft judges—but the berries didn’t care.
“Very good.” He touched her shoulder briefly. “Otherwise, all we’ve got for soft fruit is a plastic container and a tea mug, but we need them for water. Speaking of which—”
A dry twig snapped in the woods. A deer herd jostled outside their bramble enclosure, grazing. The animals eyed them without fear. Deer meant no dangerous predators lurked about. He imagined a fresh venison and mushroom kebab roasting over hot coals, and his mouth watered. Sorry, Bambi.
“We drank all the water for supper,” he said.
“Hmm . . . We’ll need to find some way to store it. A clay pot.” She paused, frowning. “But unfired clay’s no good.”
The morning sun blazed in a cloudless sky. John took off his jacket, wondering if this was the start of an Indian summer. A small mercy.
He fetched the glass paperweight. After piling some dry grass on the ground, a safe distance away from their hut, he knelt, angling the glass to the sun. A white ring of focused light played on a clump of tinder. By moving the lens closer, he shrunk the ring into a diffused dot around which prismatic rainbows shimmered and danced. Try as he might, he couldn’t focus it further.
Then he waited.
Ten minutes later, with his back stiff and knees sore, he touched the tinder. Barely warm. Impatiently, he focused the sun onto his hand. Nothing.
And then it dawned on him—the shape of the lens was all wrong. A proper magnifying glass should be convex. But his paperweight had a flat base and a sloping top. Perhaps he’d grind it with a stone, but glass was a tough material, and it might take him years. And didn’t they use industrial diamonds to cut and polish glass?
“Never mind,” Liz said soothingly. “Let’s try again at midday.”
&nb
sp; He fit the paperweight into a forking branch and left it focusing the sun’s rays into a tight spot. A hopeless task for sure, but nothing ventured, nothing gained.
He climbed to his feet, groaning. “Let’s bring some water.”
As John and Liz left the safety of the thorny enclosure, the deer herd parted respectfully to let them pass. He imagined that with a proper sharp spear, he might be able to kill one. But what good is meat without fire? He hadn’t yet descended to that level of savagery where he’d devour raw flesh.
“Wow, they’re not scared of us,” Liz whispered, her eyes wide. “They’ve never seen people before.”
He nodded. That’d change if he and Liz were still alive in a year’s time.
The Fleet Stream ran some hundred and fifty yards east of their clearing. The path descended into a swale crowded with junipers that filled John with unease. The dense shrubbery was the perfect place for an ambush. He carried his throwing rock and spear at the ready, his eyes darting from one bush to another. Liz followed behind, alert and similarly armed. As John reached the stream, a blackbird burst out of the undergrowth at his feet, making his heart jump.
He let out a pent-up breath and caught Liz’s eye.
She smiled, sketchily. “Well, let’s drink.”
They drank from the stream, refilled the container and the mug, then headed back. Again, he bitterly rued forgetting to pack a water bottle when he left for work on day zero. The Tupperware tub held a pint and his red Arsenal mug even less. He cast his mind around for a solution.
“I might carve a trough from a fallen log,” he said uncertainly. “I’d have to sharpen the cutlery knife on a rock first. It’ll take days, though.”
“Hmm. We could dig a well in our clearing.”
“Got no spade,” he said. He’d guzzled so much water that it was now sloshing in his belly and making him mildly nauseous.
