Time Shards--Tempus Fury

by Dana Fredsti

  Hypatia, of course, was the soul of poise and dignity, giving a slight bow of her head to the host and to the hearth before taking a long graceful drink, and sighing her contentment before passing them on to Turushno.

  The beer made its way around the group. Once the last of the girls took a drink, the chief and then the rest of the men began to clap in rhythm—except one of the youths who pulled out a tiny wooden frame with a thread attached. He held it in his mouth, harmonica-style, while plucking the thread to create a twanging music like a Jew’s harp.

  As Isonash’s wife croaked out a chant, the three younger girls broke into a shuffling dance, bowing and flapping the hems of their robes like bird wings. The dance showed off the detailed embroidery of their dresses and headdresses to good effect. The designs made Nellie think of the Coastal Indian art motifs she had seen in exhibits back at the natural history museum in New York. Is that where they were now, among some whiter-skinned tribe of the Tlingit or Haida?

  Her musings, the dance, and the music were suddenly cut short by a sound that drowned out all the merriment—the now familiar mocking roar and terrifying laughter, echoing across the mountains. The girls quickly dropped to the floor, prostrating themselves toward the house’s main window. The others did the same, leaving only Nellie and Hypatia still upright.

  They looked at each other in alarm.

  Chief Isonash rubbed his hands together as he had before with Harukor, speaking rapidly while the laughter continued to echo through the evening air. When the unholy sounds outside finally faded away, the room relaxed again. Everyone regained their seats and placed their backs to the window, returning their attention to the fire pit and their chief.

  The headman finished his incantation or prayer, whatever it was, and turned to Nellie and Hypatia. Seeing their alarm, he pointed to the window, and first placed his hands up from his forehead like horns.

  “Kirawe.”

  “Yes, horns,” Nellie said, repeating the gesture. “Horns.”

  He held his pinky fingers up in front of his lips, like tusks. “Esaw poro.”

  “Yes, he had big teeth, too,” Nellie said, mirroring his pantomime. “And his skin was blue. His skin—”She rubbed her cheeks and forearms. “Blue. Like, like…” She touched his sleeve. “Like this. We saw him last night.” She mimed looking up and seeing.

  “Atuy-Siwnin Wenkamuy,” Harukor said grimly.

  “Wenkamuy,” Turushno agreed.

  “Daimon,” Hypatia said.

  “Yes, a demon,” Nellie murmured.

  Isonash waved for his wife and daughters to start the dinner. Impatient to eat, Nellie wrapped her arms around her aching stomach and tried her best to hide how ravenous she was. She felt painfully alone. Other than the brief moment when the thing outside had roared, Hypatia had avoided eye contact with her, and sat gazing into the flames, stoic as a Buddha.

  The old chieftain continued to talk—he seemed to be either praying or giving thanks to everything in sight, from the hearth to the birch-bark serving bowls, to the walls of the house, the row of little sacred willow-wands—there was that word again, inaw—the ceiling, out the open window, and then finally, to the food itself, still simmering over the fire.

  Poor souls, Nellie thought. Do they have to pray to every last thing they see before they can eat? They’re worse than Cam.

  At last she received her own steaming bowl of gruel—a mix of grains, leeks, other wild plants, seaweed, cubes of red meat, little chunks of trilobite and salmon. It looked and smelled absolutely mouthwatering. She started to raise the bowl to her lips, but Hypatia cleared her throat and shot her a quick look of reproach.

  Chagrined, Nellie quickly set it down again and waited until everyone was served. Once the last girl received her food, Isonash raised his bowl to his lips, and the rest followed suit.

  Finally, Nellie thought, lifting her bowl once more. She breathed in the salmon’s rich aroma—nothing had ever smelled so fine in her life.

  Hypatia will hate this, she thought. Hypatia hates me.

  Suddenly the smell of the gruel became overwhelming, and her stomach took a frightful turn. Clapping a hand over her mouth, Nellie dropped her bowl, then stumbled to her feet toward the door. The doorway seemed to reel crazily, and she tumbled outside to the frosty ground and vomited. Even after she had spewed what little she had in her belly, the horrible retching continued.

  * * *

  The villagers froze in shock, stunned at Nellie’s sudden departure and the awful noises she was making. Hypatia sat still for a moment, then took a long, unhurried drink from her bowl before nodding and carefully setting it back down again.

  “Delicious,” she said, with a gentle bow of her head. “I thank you.” Then she placed her hand on her chest. “I am sorry, but please excuse me—I must go check on my friend.”

  No one moved as she rose and slipped out the door.

  Nellie lay sprawled out on her elbows, her head barely raised, sobbing and shaking. Hypatia knelt down beside her and slipped a hand past the parka’s hood to gently stroke the back of her head. Nellie flinched at the touch, then looked up at Hypatia with eyes drenched in sorrow and pain, exhaling heavily, her breath turning to puffs of fog in the cold. She wiped her mouth.

  “I-I’m, I’m so sorry, Hypatia…” Still trembling, she struggled to unload each word.

  “You needn’t apologize,” Hypatia soothed. “You’ve suffered, and now your stomach troubles you. It’s perfectly natural.”

  “No! Not that. I mean before—back… at the pool.” She hid her face against Hypatia’s lap. For once, Hypatia did not know what to say, so she remained silent, continuing to stroke Nellie’s neck and run fingers through her hair.

  “Please don’t hate me,” Nellie whispered.

  “Hate you? Of course I don’t.”

  “But… earlier. You seemed so furious at me.” Nellie reached a hand to grasp the hem of Hypatia’s parka.

  “Furious?” Hypatia shook her head. “No, never. I… It’s merely that you surprised me.”

  “Believe me, I’m not… I mean, I’ve never… It’s just, I don’t know what came over me.”

  “Love, I should think—don’t you?”

  Nellie froze at Hypatia’s words. Then she sat up, looking at her with wide, questioning eyes.

  “Yes,” she finally replied. “I do love you, oh so truly.”

  Hypatia placed a hand on Nellie’s cheek, then moved it further, gently cradling her ear.

  “And I you, Beloved.” She kissed Nellie’s cheek, and pressed their faces together for a long moment, feeling the tickle of a tear run down Nellie’s cheek onto her own. “We’ll talk more tonight,” she said, with another quick kiss to Nellie’s cheek. “But now let’s return to our hosts and see if you can eat a little, shall we?”

  * * *

  The dinner continued long after their awkward return to the fireside. Nellie tried to make her apologies, but with the formidable language gap, it was hard to say if the chieftain forgave her or not.

  One of his daughters brought out another round of the millet beer, and the feast continued without further incident. Nellie ate the rest of her bowl and a second helping, and when she and Hypatia could no longer keep their eyes open, the hunters quietly took their leave. The old chief and his wife went off to one of the side rooms, and the daughters cleaned up and brought out piles of furs and blankets, placing them next to the hearth for their guests.

  As the girls retreated to their own room, Nellie and Hypatia smiled their thanks. It felt decadent to be able to finally doff their arctic parkas and regular clothes and strip down to just their underthings—or in Hypatia’s case, nothing—before slipping under the soft pile of covers.

  They lay looking up at the wooden rafters, their faces lit only by the embers of the fire. Acutely aware of the warmth of Hypatia’s body beside her, Nellie lay perfectly still, afraid if she moved or spoke she might break the fragile peace between them. Finally, though, she thought she wou
ld explode if she didn’t speak.

  “Hypatia?” Her voice came out so quiet it was barely there, but Hypatia heard it.

  “Yes?”

  “You said something earlier. Perhaps I misheard, but I think… you said…” She paused, then finished in a rush. “You said that you love me, too?”

  “I believe I remember that,” Hypatia said. “And it seems to me I owe you an apology.”

  Nellie turned to her. “You? Apologize to me? Whatever for?”

  “For making you believe I was repelled by your kiss.”

  “You—you weren’t?”

  Hypatia rolled onto her side, her eyes serious. “It thrilled me like nothing before in my life,” she said quietly.

  Nellie’s heart began to race again.

  “We Greeks know many kinds of love, and many words for it,” Hypatia continued, “but I always sided with those who divide it into two sorts. First the higher love, that delights only in the intelligent nature of others, true and faithful to the end, without wantonness or lust. The second is only its copy and its shadow, a coarser kind of love, a love of the body rather than of the soul. All my life I have prided myself that I was immune to such temptation.

  “Until you.” She reached out her hand, and the two gently locked fingers.

  “That is what terrified me so. That is what I ran from.”

  Nellie said nothing, but kissed the back of Hypatia’s hand. “Now all too often I find myself thinking of lines from the poet Sappho,” Hypatia continued.

  Nellie raised an eyebrow at the name.

  “Tell me one.”

  Hypatia thought for a moment, and then quietly sang out a few lines in Greek. Nellie blushed as her implant translated it for her.

  “You came and I was mad for you,

  and you cooled my mind that burned with longing…

  In the crooks of your body, I find my religion. Someone will remember us, I say, even in another time.”

  “I like that,” Nellie said, “but… is Sappho’s poetry conducive to a purely platonic friendship?”

  “Of course. I am a Platonist, after all.”

  “Then tell me more.”

  Hypatia smiled. “I will, but kiss me again first.”

  “Nellie?

  “Nellie?”

  Nellie opened her eyes and sat up, startled by the familiar voice.

  “Amber! Are you there?”

  “Nellie, where are you? I need your help! I’m trapped!”

  “Amber! I hear you! We’re here!”

  “Nellie, why did you leave? Now it’s too late…”

  “No! Don’t say that! We’ll come back right now!”

  Hypatia rolled over and peered at her. “Who are you talking to?”

  “It’s Amber! She’s found us!”

  Hypatia stared back at her, expressionless. “No, Amber’s dead. Look.”

  Outside the window, Amber fought to get to her feet, orbited by a patchwork carousel of ghostlights that closed in on her. She screamed Nellie’s name as they converged on her, bisecting her, swallowing her up.

  Nellie screamed, too, but her voice made no sound. Completely nude and untroubled by the cold, Hypatia yawned, her outstretched arms making the movement a seduction.

  “Forget her,” she said. “Come back to me.”

  Nellie bent down to embrace her. The sound of Amber’s screams no longer seemed so important.

  * * *

  Nellie sat up with a start.

  Hypatia lay deep asleep, her back to her.

  The tuffs of the inaw stirred faintly in the open window. Outside, only the moon and stars, and the cold air. How could they stand to not cover up that eastern window?

  She rubbed her face, deeply disturbed by the nightmare, and let out a deep exhalation. Shivering, she ducked back down under the covers and clung to Hypatia’s warm curves. But even as she did, something half-noticed drew her back out. She looked over to their pile of clothing.

  Their parkas and snow boots were gone.

  38

  Blake, Harcourt, and Cam had spent the night in unforgiving chains, locked in the basement of Rockwell’s favorite grog-house and bordello. Their promised dinner had been no more than an old piece of fried cornbread each, so hard it hurt their teeth.

  Unable to sleep, Blake wondered if they had missed their chance to escape, worrying whether Kha-Hotep and Leila were even still alive, second-guessing the decision to go looking for them in the first place. Next to him, Cam and Harcourt seemed to have no trouble sleeping.

  Breakfast the next morning was a barely drinkable cup of what the house called coffee—though when pressed, the serving boy who delivered it admitted the watery concoction consisted mostly of brown bread, barley, acorn mash, and dandelion roots, flavored with a dash of snuff.

  * * *

  Rockwell rushed his crew and captives out to the riverfront early enough to hitch a cheap ride along with the freight and produce on that morning’s northbound steam packet. The steamship was a weathered old sidewheeler, a bulky, deep-draft workhorse of a riverboat christened the Zebulon M. Pike.

  They quickly staked out a pocket of deck space on the bow amid crates, baskets, and bundles of cargo, bid goodbye to the fishing skiffs and flatboats, and the enigmatic silver arch towering above them, and set off upriver.

  * * *

  Once we’re out of this mess, Blake thought, we head back to the Landing and make inquiries at the slave market. With any luck, Kha-Hotep and Leila were sold there, and we’ll find out who bought them. Then we’ll get a boat and a guide to take us downriver to wherever these plantations are.

  He avoided the bigger question.

  How they would get back to Antarctica. “I thought you said we would be crossing the river.” Blake addressed Rockwell as they sat crowded together. “Where are you taking us?”

  Rockwell jerked a thumb toward the far shore. “That look like a landing to you?”

  On closer look, Blake saw that what at first appeared to be a natural bluff was in fact a walled defense. A stranded freight train had been turned into the base of a fortified barrier, the gaps between cars filled in with brick and earthen ramparts. The train looked modern enough to be from the mid-twentieth century or later, maybe part of the same shard as the giant arch across the water.

  The walls of the fort had been built atop the train. Banners hung from tall lances all along their length, and just like the walls of Laclede’s Landing, they boasted field cannon and soldiers armed with Tommy guns and other firearms. These troops, however, were clearly native American.

  “That fort’s just their border,” Rockwell informed him. “We’re going all the way to the big city itself.”

  “What city would that be?”

  Rockwell had either grown used to their stupid questions or was simply tired of slagging them off for it. “Biggest metropolis around nowadays. They call it—what is it they call it, Crows?”

  “Sacred Place Where the Star Woman Came and Touched the Earth, Near the Joining of the Five Great Rivers, in the Year when Three Moons Danced and Sang,” the scout rattled off.

  Rockwell nodded. “Well, the whites just call it Cahokia.”

  * * *

  The Zebulon M. Pike proved to be a sluggish vessel with a primitive steam engine. Even so, it made steady progress, chugging along slowly northward. Except for their circumstances, Blake thought, it would have been an idyllic scenic cruise, right out of a Mark Twain novel, albeit one where Huck Finn shared the wide river with placid brontosauruses foraging in the water. Unimpressed, Harcourt managed to somehow look simultaneously bored and indignant.

  Animal life abounded. Fearless little otters played on the banks, fascinating Cam. They chased the ducks and cormorants, annoyed the turtles, and launched flocks of small white plovers into the air. Overhead, somber lines of pterodactyls sailed across the sky.

  Before long, the steamship took a lazy starboard turn to follow a tributary, and they spotted a mounted Cahokian cavalryman watching
them go by. Bare-chested and long-haired, the native American rider bore a lance twenty feet long and carried a Winchester rifle in his saddle scabbard. He rode high on his mount’s back, saddled well behind the reach of its horns.

  Cam’s eyes widened. He had seen similar creatures before. Larger than a bull rhino, an impressive frill of horns crowned the stocky beast’s massive crested skull, with two more on each cheek, and one long central horn emerging from its bird-beaked face. Its thigh had been painted with a compass or crosshair design, a white circle crossed by double lines, and its crest and horns were accented with fearsome blood-red lines.

  “They say their fort and the mounties are there to keep watch for T-Rexes crossing the river,” Rockwell drawled, “but everybody knows the big fellas don’t much care to swim. They just want to keep us reprobates on the badlands side.”

  The further they traveled, the more they could see where the Event had played havoc, reconnecting old waterways and cutting new ones. Their path wound in drunken twists through oxbows and horseshoes, past miles of outer suburban townships and small fishing villages. Children ran along the riverbank, laughing and waving at the boat. There were also settlements of pioneer cabins, and rancheros of cattle, horses, tapirs, or various sorts of smaller prehistoric livestock, both reptiles and mammals.

  The sun wasn’t yet directly overhead when they finished threading through the maze of waterways to arrive at another landing, and another fort. Smaller watercraft clustered around the docks—flatboats and keelboats, fishing boats and canoes.

  Snatches of English, French, Spanish, and more filled the air as teams of stevedores began to unload cargo from the Zebulon. The mixed crews appeared to be native Cahokians, most wearing little more than high leather sandals, loincloths, and tattoos. Judging from the differences in clothes and languages, Blake guessed there were also other native American tribes working there, as well as whites, blacks, and Creoles in various modes of mostly nineteenth-century dress, several in a mix of native and European styles.

  He tried to listen to their chatter, but his linguistic implant was no help for any of the native languages.