Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (25 page)

“A lot of money,” Cassie said.

“It would have to be walking-away money,”
David said. “Not impossible, I suppose.”

“We’re talking about time travel,” Cassie
said, “so already you know that we’re in the realm of the
impossible. And Jones did say that the Americans weren’t happy with
MI-5 for not sharing.”

“MI-5 is starting to seem like the lesser of
two evils,” David said.

“Evil is right,” Cassie said, though only to
David and not loud enough for Callum to hear over the engine noise
and the pattering of the rain.

David touched her arm. Given that all of her
suspicions had so far proved right, it was hard to fault her
cynicism. Then he spoke louder so as not to keep Callum out of
their conversation. “Don’t forget that we still have the small
matter of my illness to deal with and perhaps some kind of antidote
to whatever that American gave me.” David checked the IV drip to
make sure it hadn’t spontaneously turned itself on again. “Whatever
they gave me is making me feel even sicker than when I just had
scarlet fever. If I didn’t before, I think now that I really do
need a hospital. And probably one with good security. Maybe some
big bodyguards you can trust, Callum.”

Cassie leaned across David and tried to read
the writing on the IV drip bag. “It says
Rohypnol
and then
in parentheses,
flunitrazepam
, whatever that is.”

“To use the American term, you’ve been
roofied,” Callum said.

“Great.” David rested his head back against
the pillow. “And to think all I got out of it was a headache.
Though …” He shifted uncomfortably. “Does it change anything that I
can’t feel my feet very well?”

“What was that?” Callum swerved the SUV,
almost running it into a parked car on the side of the road before
correcting the steering.

“He said he can’t feel his feet,” Cassie
said. “He doesn’t look good either; he’s a little green around the
gills.”

“Roofies shouldn’t be doing this,” Callum
said. “What else did they give you, David?”

“I don’t remember.” David rubbed his
forehead. He was feeling hot again. “I think back in the ambulance
someone mentioned
Roxanol
.”

“Bloody hell.” Callum executed a U-turn,
causing Cassie to lose her balance and fall on top of David’s
chest. He put up a hand to contain her, but he was weak and could
do little more than push at her arm. She reached for the handle
above the window to right herself. Callum flipped on the vehicle’s
siren and screamed down the road.

Little bits of scenery flew by the windows
above David’s head: trees and the tops of houses and apartment
buildings, lit by streetlights and distorted by the raindrops on
the window. He couldn’t see much out the rear window besides the
headlights of other cars receding into the distance. He didn’t know
in which direction Callum had been driving, and thus didn’t know
where they were going now.

Cassie cupped her hands around her mouth and
called up to Callum: “What’s going on?” The sirens even drowned out
the sound of the rain.

“
Roxanol
is an opiate,” Callum
said.

“And that’s bad?” Cassie said.

David twitched his legs, grateful that he
wasn’t paralyzed from the waist down, and concentrated really hard
on wiggling his toes.

“It’s reacting with the
flunitrazepam
.” Callum swerved through traffic, which was
thinner than before. “Together, they can suppress respiration.”

“So he stops breathing?” Cassie said.

David looked up at the ceiling. As soon as
Cassie spoke, he found he was having trouble filling his lungs. He
wanted to say something, but nothing came out.

Cassie gripped his hand. “Don’t try to talk.
Just keep breathing.”

Several tense minutes passed before a red
‘emergency unit’ sign appeared in the back window, indicating a
hospital entrance. Callum braked with a jerk, scrambled out of his
seat, and darted around to the rear of the SUV, by which time
Cassie had the door open. Medical personnel flocked to them, and a
minute later David was being wheeled into the hospital. He was
really getting tired of this stretcher. It felt like his back had
been glued to it.

“You saved my life,” David said to Callum as
he jogged beside the stretcher down a long corridor.

“I’m just glad we got to you in time,”
Callum said. “Despite the planning involved in your abduction, they
could have killed you.”

September, 1289

Lili

V
alence had been
just as tricky as they should have expected, which was to say, he’d
outdone himself this time. Over the last few months, he’d made a
habit of concocting more and more elaborate plans and ruses; the
most dangerous ones—the ones that they knew about—had ended by
tripping him up badly and tangling him in his own net. Lili prayed
that the same would be true this time, but right now, with five
hundred men racing towards her, she didn’t feel very hopeful.

“Dear God. Here they come.” Carew held his
sword at his side, ready to defend the town. He wasn’t needed yet,
not on the wall-walk. Soon enough, if the defenders were routed,
Valence’s men would be able to bring their ladders to bear on the
walls, and then he would have more than enough to occupy him. Lili
had an arrow resting in her bow, ready for the moment Bevyn told
her to release it.

Valence’s men surged onto the bridge across
the Thames. The town’s defenders had begun by standing at the far
end, but faced with the rush and heavy press of Valence’s men, the
foremost defenders fell back, pushing at those behind them to make
room for their retreat. As the leaders of the enemy force gained
ground, those in the rear of Valence’s army cheered and pushed
forward with more force.

Meanwhile, the defenders screeched at one
another and gave way, at first step-by-step, and then all at once.
The defense of the bridge, and effectively, the north gate,
collapsed completely, and the men came racing back to the Windsor
side of the bridge in a panic. Bevyn’s cries of ‘Steady! Steady!’
fell on deaf ears.

Now that the assault had come, there was no
point in keeping the lights doused; men with torches ran back and
forth below Lili in front of the gate, shouting at each other. Lili
couldn’t make out most of their words, and it seemed that half the
men in their army had lost their senses.

Hardly ten heartbeats later, the last of the
defenders reached the near end of the bridge. At that point, they
calmed, most appearing to return to their right minds. With a few
barked orders, the company regrouped and formed their lines again.
Behind them, the city gate, which had opened to admit a few men as
they retreated, closed and remained closed.

Bevyn exhorted his men, calling to them to
be
men, to uphold their honor and their duty. Honor, as he
well knew, would do none of them any good if they were dead, but
his words seemed to achieve their goal. Before Valence’s men were
halfway across the bridge, the defenders had created a solid wall
of shields in front of the city gate, leaving forty feet of open
space between them and the bridge for Valence’s men to fill.

“That’s more like it,” Rhodri said, under
his breath. “I’ve never seen my men run like that.”

“They are outnumbered,” Lili said, though
she wasn’t sure why she was defending them. She’d been surprised by
their panic too.

Valence’s men slowed as they approached the
end of the bridge, those in the lead showing concern at the sudden
discipline in their opponents and their near total silence. The
press of men behind the leaders was too great, however—and victory
too near—for them to stop. Gathering themselves again, they poured
off the bridge in a rush, swords and axes raised high and faces
contorted as they screamed their war cries to the skies.

Bevyn’s men held their ground. They didn’t
race to meet the oncoming soldiers, even though (as Lili thought
about it) that might have been a better plan. A few men posted at
the end of the bridge could have held it for a while, since
Valence’s men couldn’t outflank them in so small a space. By that
measure, Bevyn’s force outnumbered Valence’s three to one. But that
hadn’t been Bevyn’s choice, and Lili shrugged her criticisms away.
She raised her bow and aimed her first arrow at the foremost of
Valence’s men, determined to take down the leader if she could. She
took in a breath and held it. For a moment, battle—or at least the
idea of it—held the two sides suspended, and then—

Kaboom!

Between one breath and the next, the bridge
across the Thames River disintegrated, along with the two hundred
men who’d been on it. Although Lili wasn’t close enough to the
blast to be knocked flat, it shocked her enough that she might have
fallen off the wall-walk if Carew hadn’t grabbed her around the
waist and spun her back to safety. No wonder Bevyn had looked so
confident, even triumphant, when she’d last looked into his face.
She was annoyed that he hadn’t warned her about what he and Math
had planned. She eyed Carew, who looked self-satisfied himself.
“You knew? Why didn’t anyone tell me!”

Rhodri was standing on the wall-walk with
his mouth open.

Carew glanced at him, and then at Lili. “I
thought Math had told you.”

She would take up her grievance with Math
later, though it may well have been that each of the three
men—Math, Carew, and Bevyn—had assumed that one of the others had
revealed the plan to her. Lili shook her head to stop her ears from
ringing and gazed at the carnage before her. Those of Valence’s men
who’d crossed the bridge now found themselves caught between the
city gate and the Thames, outnumbered, their hearing ruined by the
blast, and pieces of the wooden bridge (and, horrifyingly, their
companions too) falling from the sky.

Bevyn’s men had known what was going to
happen, even if Lili hadn’t, and in retrospect, their acting had
been worthy of Easter mummers. They’d convinced Lili of their fear
and equally of their change of heart, and though they must have
been shocked by the force of the blast, their foreknowledge allowed
them to recover more quickly than their enemy could. With a command
from Bevyn, Windsor’s defenders attacked with a roar to match the
confident one Valence’s men had cried when they’d seen the city
before them and thought it lightly defended.

Lili’s vantage point allowed her to look
right down on the men as they fought She’d seen men and boys spar
with wooden swords in courtyards of castles from here to
Dolwyddelan, she’d fought at Painscastle, and been in skirmishes
since, but she’d never seen hand-to-hand like this. It was a
slaughter. Bevyn called up to her from below, but she was so
focused on what she was seeing that she didn’t hear him until Carew
touched her shoulder. “Lili, it’s time.”

Bevyn waved at her. “Put the men to work,
Lili.”

Shaking her head to clear it, she raised her
bow to draw the attention of the dozen archers along the wall-walk.
“Pick your targets carefully! They’re packed in close down there,
and we don’t want to hit our own men!”

The archers nodded. They had heard Bevyn
too, and were already getting ready. Taking Lili’s warning to
heart, within a few moments they had begun loosing their arrows at
soldiers coming out of the water on the other side of the Thames,
as well as at the remainder of Valence’s army, still some two
hundred at least, milling about on the far bank. Lili herself was
picking her targets carefully on this side of the Thames, trying to
relieve the pressure on the men defending the gate, which still
needed defending.

In order to achieve the maximum effect of
the explosion, Bevyn had allowed fifty enemy soldiers to reach
their side of the bridge before he blew it. Their swords and axes
hadn’t dulled just because they were alone. If anything, they
fought with greater ferocity.

Lili focused on one large man with a thick
beard and black hair. He seemed to have unusual strength and had
cut down three of Bevyn’s men before they had time to raise their
own axes. At the moment, he was fighting a man who’d lost his
helmet. Lili stared at the soldier, recognizing the blonde head and
fine features of Henry Percy. The boy
had
traded his pen for
a sword, though Lili was stunned to find him fighting here and now,
a novice among more experienced men.

Before she could bring her bow to bear, the
enemy fighter drove his axe at Henry with such force that he lost
his sword. As Henry scrambled back, Lili loosed an arrow that
missed the attacker’s head by inches, the arrow flying past him and
landing in the mud of the riverbank.

“No!” Lili hadn’t realized she had shouted
until Carew’s voice came softly in her ear.

“Focus, Lili. You have time.”

She loosed a second arrow that took the man
in the center of his mass. He fell, but as he did so, she caught
sight of Percy on the ground nearby. She couldn’t tell in the
torchlight if the blood on his tunic was his own or another’s. She
leaned far over the edge of the battlement, her eyes searching, but
then Carew hauled her back. “Keep shooting. Lord Rhodri and I will
see to the boy.”

“What? Yes, of course.” Rhodri followed
Carew down the steps.

Lili nodded, knowing—and maybe for the first
time believing—that her place was not in the press of men below.
She forced the death before her out of her mind, along with her
fear for Bevyn and Percy and Carew— and all the men whose wives and
daughters would miss them if they didn’t return tonight—and
returned her attention to picking off the last of Valence’s
fighters. It had been only a quarter of an hour since the bridge
had exploded, and the battle had become a rout. The few remaining
of Valence’s company battling before the gate decided all at once
that retreat was wiser than fighting and chose a quick dive in the
Thames over death. Some of them could even swim.