Footsteps in Time (3 page)

Eventually, Anna
wiped her tears and straightened to look into his face. He tried to
smile, but his eyes were reddened and his heart wasn’t in it.
Looking at him, Anna resolved not to pretend that all was well.
They needed to talk about what had happened even if David didn’t
want to.
How many books have we all read
where the heroine refuses to face reality? How many times have I
thrown the book across the room in disgust at her
stupidity?

“
What are you thinking?”
she asked him.

He shook his head.

“
We could leave right now,
follow the trail back to the van,” Anna said. “It couldn’t be more
than a few miles from here.”

David cleared his throat.
“No.”

“
Why not?” she
said.

“
What for?”

“
I want to climb to the top
of the hill we came down and see what’s up there,” she said. “I
know the tracks of the van disappeared, but we had to have driven
down that hill from somewhere. We couldn’t have appeared out of
nowhere.”

“
Couldn’t we?” David sat
with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin in his hands.
When Anna didn’t respond, he canted his head to look at her. “Do
you really think we’ll find the road home at the top of that
hill?”

Anna looked away from
him and into the fire.
No ... No more than
you do.
“You’re thinking time travel,
aren’t you?”

“
Time travel is
impossible.”

“
Why do you say
that?”

Anna’s abrupt
question made David hunch. Then he straightened. “Okay. If time
travel is possible, why don’t we have people from the future
stopping by all the time? If time travel is possible, all of
time
itself has to have
already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent
event.”

“
That doesn’t work for
me.”

“
Not for me either,” David
said. “It’s pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as
time has gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, or
else how could we travel back and relive it with them?”

“
So
you’re saying the same argument could hold for people traveling
from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already lived our lives
because
they
are
living theirs.”

“
Exactly,” David
said.

“
Then where are we? Is this
real?”

“
Of
course it’s
real
,”
he said, “but maybe not the same reality we knew at
home.”

“
I’m not following you,”
Anna said.

“
What if the wall of snow
led us to a parallel universe?”

“
A parallel universe that
has gotten only to the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”

“
Sure.”

“
You’ve read too much
science fiction,” she said.

David actually
smiled. “Now,
that’s
not possible.”

Anna put her head in her hands, not
wanting to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in
the dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between
them again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there,
upright. Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and
threw it into the fire in front of them.

“
Hey!” David
said.

Anna turned on him. “Are we
ever going to be able to go home again? How could this have
happened to us? Why has this happened to us? Do you even realize
how appalling this all is?”

David opened his
mouth to speak, perhaps to protest that she shouldn’t be angry
at
him
, but at that
moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead
of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone
behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna
by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man
turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him.
At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David
put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her
forward.

She ducked through the
entrance, worried about what she might find, but it was only the
wounded man from the meadow, reclining among blankets on the
ground. He no longer wore his armor but had on a cream-colored
shirt. A blanket covered him to his waist. Several candles
guttering in shallow dishes lit the tent, and the remains of a meal
sat on a plate beside him. He took a sip from a small cup and
looked at them over the top of it.

The tent held one other man, this one
still in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to
the wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look,
set down his cup, and then pointed to himself.

“
Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd.”

Anna knew she looked blank,
but she simply couldn’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking
that they hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”

“
Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,”
David and Anna said together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if
they belonged to someone else.

Llywelyn nodded. “You
understand who I am?” Again, he spoke in Welsh.

Anna’s neck hurt to bend
forward, but she made her chin bob in acknowledgement. She was
frozen in a nightmare that wouldn’t let her go.

David recovered more
quickly. “You are the Prince of Wales. Thank you, my lord, for
bringing us with you. We would have been lost without your
assistance.”

“
It is I who should be
thanking you,” he said.

Anna had been growing
colder inside with every sentence David and Llywelyn spoke.
Llywelyn’s eyes flicked to her face, and she could read the concern
in them. Finally, she took in a deep breath, accepting for now what
she couldn’t deny.

“
My lord,” she said, in
half-remembered and badly pronounced Welsh, “Could you please tell
us the date?”

“
Certainly. It is the day of Damasus the
Pope
, Friday, the
11
^th
of
December.”

David’s face paled as he
realized the importance of the question.

Anna was determined to get
the whole truth out and wasn’t going to stop pressing because her
brother was finally having the same heart attack she was. “And the
year?”

“
The year of our Lord
twelve hundred and eighty-two,” Llywelyn said.

“
You remember the story
now, don’t you, David?” Anna spoke in English, her voice a whisper,
because to speak her thoughts more loudly would give them greater
credence. David couldn’t have forgotten it any more readily than
she could. Their mother had told them stories about medieval Wales
since before they could walk—and tales of this man in particular.
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was lured into a trap by some English lords
and killed on December 11, 1282 near a place called Cilmeri.
Except—” Anna kept her eyes fixed on Llywelyn’s.

“
Except we just saved his
life,” David said.

Chapter Two

David

I
t just wasn’t possible. None of it. David stared into the
fire. The kindling popped, and the sparks flew above the trees. In
his head, he went over the trip from Aunt Elisa’s house, crossing
the black abyss, watching the men go under the wheels. It didn’t
look as if Anna had yet absorbed the fact that she’d driven the van
into three people and killed them. David glanced at her out of the
corner of his eye. He wasn’t going to remind her if she hadn’t
thought of it. She tended to be rather single-minded, and right now
other things were more important.

Can we really be in
the Middle Ages?
If he and Anna were really
in the Middle Ages, everything David had ever thought was true
might not be.
What about the laws of
physics? Mathematics?
David could
understand Anna’s anger and despair, but didn’t know what to tell
her.

He looked up as a lone man rode off
the trail to the right, stopping at the edge of the clearing, his
horse lathered. Two men-at-arms ran to him as he dismounted. One
grabbed the horse’s reins and led it away, towards the trees where
the rest of the horses were picketed, but the other walked with him
to Llywelyn’s tent and disappeared inside.

Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd
. David repeated the name, trying
to recall everything his mother had ever told him about Wales, or
he’d gleaned from the bits of her research he’d paid attention to.
It
was
her
specialty after all. His mother should have been there instead of
him and Anna. She’d
kill
to have been there instead of
them.

David
ran his hand through his hair, and then clenched
his fists as if that would help him sort out his thoughts. They’d
arrived in Wales smack in the middle of a war between the Welsh and
the English. In fact, Llywelyn’s death tonight would have nearly
ended it.

Llywelyn had traveled south to Cilmeri
to try to bolster support for his cause while his brother, Dafydd,
was supposed to continue Llywelyn’s campaign in the north. Instead,
in the old world, Llywelyn died when the Mortimers lured him away
from the bulk of his army. They ambushed and slaughtered him and
eighteen of his men. Edward then killed or imprisoned all of
Llywelyn’s family. Once Edward caught Dafydd, he had him hanged,
drawn, and quartered before dragging what remained of his body
behind a horse through the streets of Shrewsbury.

Edward crushed Wales
so completely and successfully, it may not have been possible for
Llywelyn to have held it together even if he’d lived.
What is going to happen now?
David shook his head at the thought that he and Anna
were going to have a front row seat in finding
out.

“
I
cannot
believe
this,” Anna said. After their meal of meat and bread, she and
David had curled up facing each other, with the blankets pulled to
their chins. “This can’t be real. How can we be in the thirteenth
century?”

“
It isn’t
very warm, is it?” David shifted to find a spot that was slightly
less rocky. The woolen blankets were scratchy, and the ground
was
really
hard—that one year in boy scouts when the winter jamboree
occurred in the middle of a snowstorm had not prepared David for
sleeping outside without even a tent.

“
No central heating, no
pasteurized milk, no antibiotics! David! We could die out here from
a hangnail!”

“
It’s worse than that,”
David said. “They don’t have a lot of stuff we depend upon, but in
addition, nobody here knows anything about the way the world works.
The printing press wasn’t invented until the 1430s; we’ve got the
Inquisition coming up in another two hundred years; and we are
nearly five hundred years from the Age of Enlightenment. Don’t even
get me started on the black plague.” David closed his eyes, trying
to push these thoughts away.

“
But—” Anna
said.

David kept his eyes closed,
resolutely ignoring her. She grumbled to herself but didn’t bother
him again, and eventually they fell asleep. Both of them woke some
time later. But where David was merely cold, Anna trembled and
gasped for breath. The top blanket had slipped, so he pulled it
over their shoulders and shifted to his side.

“
You were dreaming.” He
watched her through slitted eyes. “Want to tell me about
it?”

She didn’t answer at first,
and he thought she might be punishing him for his earlier silence,
but then she must have decided she didn’t need to keep it from him.
“It was a jumble of men on horses, riding fast, and bloody swords
swinging my way. It wasn’t really coherent.” Anna tried to hold
back sobs, her fist stuffed in her mouth.

At home, whenever they’d
had bad dreams they’d always gone to Mom. Since their dad had died
before David was born, Mom had slept alone in a big bed next to
his. Not that David had gone to her in several years, but whether
he was two or ten, she’d roll over and tuck him in beside her for
the rest of the night. This time Mom was too far away to help.
There was only David, and he was afraid he wasn’t going to do Anna
much good.

David turned onto his back,
Anna’s head on his shoulder. She fell asleep again, but David lay
there, awake and restless. His feet kept twitching; it was strange
to go to sleep wearing shoes. At least he wore waterproof brown
hiking boots, pulled on because of the snow at the last minute
before he left the house. His sneakers would have looked ridiculous
in thirteenth century Wales.

David turned his head to
study the other men. Every so often he caught the glint of the fire
off metal and realized that a sentry had passed by, patrolling the
camp near the edge of the woods. At one point, the soldier, who’d
been with Llywelyn in the tent, pushed open the flap and came out.
He stood, his hands on his hips, helmetless, surveying the sleeping
men. For a moment it seemed that his eyes met David’s, but he was
too far away, and it was probably just a trick of the
light.