The Time Traveler's Almanac (70 page)

The woman grabbed me as soon as I had come within grabbing distance. I let her cling to me for a few seconds while I got my breath back. Then I tried to pull her out of the bush. It was no use.

I said, “Can’t you just sort of back out of there?”

“Not with these clothes on. I can’t
move.
This is the height of mid-nineteenth-century fashion I’ve got on, and it’s like wearing a circus tent. I can’t breathe, either. They made me wear some goddamn piece of armor-plated underwear.”

“They always have been sticklers for accuracy of period detail.”

“Who in eighteen fifty-one’s gonna get to see what I wear under my dress?”

“Well, you just never know, do you?” and I gave her a wryly apologetic grin that absolutely failed to endear me to her, took out my trusty pen-knife again, and got around behind her. Viewed from that side, she rather resembled an enormous blossom. Her legs, sheathed in long, lace-trimmed drawers, were the stamens, and her numerous and varied petticoats, the petals.

I said, “Good God, how many petticoats are you wearing?”

“Eighty or ninety.”

“There’s enough silk here for a parachute battalion.”

“It’s not silk, it’s muslin.”

“Whatever.”

“Just cut, cut! Jesus Christ!”

I began to saw at the material. She began to curse, first somebody named George, whose idea it evidently had been, and then John, whose fault it all was. She stopped in mid-slander as the rippling pops were repeated.

“What’s that noise?” she said.

“Well, I don’t want to alarm you, but—”

“Alarm me?” She glared around at me as best she could. “Gosh, you mean to say something’s
wrong
with this picture? You mean to tell me this
isn’t
the goddamn Crystal Palace? Jesus!
I
never would’ve guessed!”

She was within her rights to be upset, upended in a small tree as she was, and probably lost in time and space as well. Still, her sarcasm stung. I tried not to let her irritation infect me and kept ripping at her layers of petticoats. “I think we’ve landed near a battle or something,” I told her. “I think that sound like popcorn popping is guns being fired. A lot of guns.”

“Oh, that’s great, that’s just great. Look, while you’re trying to cop a feel back there, reach up and cut through this corset.”

“You’re going to have to undo some buttons or something at your end first, so I can get up under your jacket and blouse.”

We fumbled and fussed for several minutes more. At last she was able to slither forward out of both bush and most of her clothes. She did still have on her jacket and blouse, her long drawers, stockings, and boots, and I had made a point of leaving some fabric below the waist, so that she now wore a droopy, uneven, knee-length skirt adorned with a few bedraggled ribbons and bows. I watched as she reached into what remained of her clothing and began to tug at something. She caught me watching and paused to look me straight in the eye.

“A
gentleman
averts his gaze when a lady removes her corset.”

“A thousand pardons.”

I averted my gaze, and she fell to grunting and gasping. After a time, during which I heard two more or less distinct volleys of pops from not so far off as before, there came a final, triumphant exhalation from behind me. A moment later, trailing imprecations and strings or straps or possibly poison-barbed tendrils, an odd rectangular object sailed semi-rigidly over my head and lodged itself in the branches of a scrub pine.

“Okay to look now,” she said crisply, so I looked. Stood right-side-up and free of the undergarment from Hell, she was a rather attractive brunette in her early or middle thirties. I found that I had to admire the way she raked some errant strands of hair out of her face, brushed dirt and leaves from one sleeve of her jacket, adjusted a soiled glove just so, with the air of one who need do no more to restore herself to presentability. She stepped toward me and offered her hand. Not everyone can look terribly, terribly formal in not much more than clothing remnants and a hairdo that has exploded, so I was duly impressed.

“We were introduced before,” she said, “but I’m no good at remembering people’s names. I’m Elizabeth Hazel.”

“Lewis Alisdair. Charmed.” I took her hand and made a little bow over it. I was stuck in character. Amusement flickered at the corners of her mouth, and she made a slight curtsying motion. We had signed on with John to go play-act, and, by God, with or without John, here we were, play-acting.

“Okay,” she said, dropping my hand and her own show of formality as though both suddenly just bored the daylights out of her, “now let’s go find John so I can kill him for dumping me into a damn bush. No, wait, first I’ll sue him for every penny he’s got. The Institute, too.
Then
I’ll kill him.”

“I don’t think you can sue him, or the Institute, either. That waiver you signed—”

“Oh hell, that’s right. Well, I’ll just have to settle for killing him, then.”

“These things have been known to happen. It may not have been John’s fault.”

“Who else’s fault might it be? He is our guide. He
is
supposed to know what he’s doing. He was supposed to deliver us safe and sound to London in eighteen fifty-one.” Fists on hips, she glared around unhappily at the woods. “I don’t know where the hell we are, but I sure don’t expect to run into Queen Vicky and Albert around here. We’ve obviously missed the exposition by God knows how many years or miles – or both, most likely. So kindly stop defending that asshole, okay?” Now she was glaring unhappily at me. “What are you, anyway, the Institute’s liability-law boy, public relations, what?”

“I’m a sightseer, too. Bought a ticket, same as you,” and I gave her what was meant to be a rueful, we’re-in-this-together kind of look, to which she responded with all the warmth of a frozen dinner. Falteringly, I slogged on. “It’s not that I’m – I’m not defending John, but I have known him a long time, and I’ve traveled with him before, and I’m just saying—”

“He is an asshole, you know. He revels in it.”

“The point is—”

“He was coming on to the women in the group before we left.” She feigned a shudder. “Made my skin crawl, he’s such a creep. I think being a creep must go with the job or something. Like whatever it is that makes someone able to time-travel also makes him a creep. Like there aren’t already enough goddamn asshole creeps who
can’t
travel through time.”

I waited before speaking to make sure that she had exhausted the subject of creeps for the time being. “The point
is,
” I said, “John will find us. Wherever we go in time or space, outside our proper matrix, we’re anomalies. We leave a trail John can’t miss in a hundred years.”

That was time-travel humor, but old time-travel humor. She didn’t even bother to smile politely. “I
know
we’re not marooned here forever or anything. At least we better not be. But what do we do until that jerk gets here?”

“We’re supposed to stay put when something like this happens, but that may not be such a good idea under the circumstances. The battle sounds like it’s coming our way.”

After a moment, she said, “Any idea where we are or who’s making all the fuss?”

“Judging from the trees, somewhere in the northern temperate latitudes.”

“That narrows it down.”

“Judging from the gunfire—” I shrugged helplessly. “My specialty is nineteenth-century English literature.”

She looked at me in frank dismay. “How fascinatingly interesting,” she said, in the voice women usually reserve for dealing with lecherous bores. “I don’t suppose you also happen to know any woodcraft, do you? As in how to figure out which way we should go? Or how to start a fire and find food and water, just in case we do get stuck here? No? Great. I need Tarzan, Daniel Boone. I get a prissy English lit specialist.”

Heat was creeping up my neck and face, and in the back of my mind was a bubbling sound like vinegar and baking soda stirred together. Sometimes, the natural product of chemistry between a man and a woman is a stink bomb. I said, “I cannot imagine how you expected to pass yourself off as a well-bred Englishwoman of the nineteenth or any other century.”

“Now what’s that supposed to mean?”

“How in the world did you ever get past screening? Good God, your accent’s bad enough – what
is
that, Dallas? Texarkana? But. Worse by far. Proper nineteenth-century ladies do not use the s-word in conversation, or the f-word, or any other a-to-z word, for that matter. Proper nineteenth-century ladies probably don’t even
think
those words.”

I might as well have insulted her pet cat. She gave me the most belligerent look I had seen on a human face since my first marriage. “You got a problem with the way I talk?”

“I’ve got a problem with you, period. And another thing I’ve got is a strong aversion to getting mobbed. When we do get where we’re going, don’t speak to anyone until I’m clear of you. You’ll probably start a riot by saying fuck in front of the queen.”

“Don’t think I can play the part, huh?” She sat up straight all of a sudden, folded her hands in her lap, drew a breath, fixed me with cold old Pleistocene ice in her eye. She said, perfectly calmly, perfectly veddy-English-thenk-yew-snootily, “I can do anything to which I put my mind, Mister Alisdair, up to and beyond impersonating a well-bred Englishwoman.” By comparison, her earlier show of formality amounted to a hug and a howdy-do from a loose and crazy woman.

“I have degrees in history and linguistics,” she went on, “and I have professional-acting experience. I speak four languages and numerous dialects.” She paused, cleared her throat softly, and another amazing change came over her. Her new voice dripped Canarsie. “On my second excursion, I met Anne of Austria.” Enn ahv
Aws
treeuh. “She was Louis the Thirteenth of France’s girl friend.” Ghil frin. “I hid my recording equipment in my wig.” She had come around again to East Texas for that. “Get the picture,
asshole?
”

“Well, shut my mouth,” and I did.

Probably we could have sat there, not speaking, not looking at each other, until John found us or Hell froze over, whichever occurred first, but another volley of gunfire made us peer nervously into the surrounding woods. It was impossible to see more than twenty yards in any direction, but it seemed to me that the popping noises were coming from directly up the slope. I could hear people yelling now, too, and had a horrible thought. What if they were Apache Indians or Nazis or other barbarians who were notorious for cruelty?

Elizabeth was looking around wonderingly. “Who’d be dumb enough,” she said, “to bring an army into this place?” Obviously, no one as smart as she. “There’re probably snakes in these woods. There’re probably
ticks,
” and I saw her shudder again. This time, the shudder seemed genuine. “Yuck. Ticks.”

“Let’s get out of here.” I pointed downhill. “I think we should go that way.”

“I think so, too. And fast.”

We turned and lumbered down the slope. The growth fought us every step of the way. As though the underbrush were not bad enough, the land here was as choppy as the surface of a gale-swept sea: we had traveled very little distance at all before we found ourselves slogging uphill; then the ground dipped again, more sharply this time. And as though thicket and broken terrain were not a bad enough combination, neither of us was outfitted for a trek through the wild woods. We hadn’t gone ten yards before her stockings were only a memory. Her fashionable boots looked as though they were already beginning to disintegrate. Mine were just starting to pinch my feet.

Yet we pushed on, until we came to a sluggish creek that had cut a shallow, steep-sided ravine through the tangle. There we practically collapsed. We were dripping perspiration and covered with burrs and approximately three hundred fresh scratches apiece.

We had managed to put some distance between the fighting and ourselves, but not much, and certainly not enough. The shooting still sounded close. I couldn’t be sure, because I now discovered that my watch had been torn from its chain, but my guess was that it had taken us the better part of an hour to cover, at most, a quarter of a mile of ground.

Elizabeth knelt in the mud beside the creek, dipped in her handkerchief,
oohed
gratefully as she dabbed it against her face. “I’m so thirsty,” she said.

“Me, too, but not enough to drink this stuff.” I did scoop up some water in my hand and splash it on my face. “Inoculations or no.”

“Where’s your spirit of adventure?”

“Left it on the expressway in rush-hour traffic this morning. I almost missed getting to the jump-off on time.”

“I bet now you wish you had.” She re-wetted her handkerchief and swabbed her face some more. “I wish I had. This is the worst blind date I’ve ever had.”

We were actually grinning at each other. Exhaustion had taken a little of the starch out of both of us.

The shooting sounded very close now.

I said, “We’d better keep moving,” she muttered something heartfelt, and we picked ourselves up and trudged on.

The ravine widened and deepened as we moved downstream, and as the banks drew away from us on both sides, scrub pines and saplings closed in densely. Soon, neither bank was visible. The creek itself broadened and deepened and meandered. The ground became swampy underfoot. We were soon exhausted again and had to take another rest. Maddeningly, the sounds of gunfire seemed no farther behind us than ever.

“John’ll never find us in this place,” Elizabeth said.

“He certainly does have his work cut out.” I reached over and started to give her a reassuring pat on the arm, but she recoiled.

“Look,” she said, “just don’t mess with me, okay?”

Mercurial bitch, I thought.

Not looking at each other, we listened to another volley or two.

I heard her sigh. “Guess we’d better go.”

Still not looking at her, I started to get to my feet and gripped the bole of a dead pine to steady myself. Just about eight inches above the spot where I had placed my hand, a patch of bark as big around as a saucer suddenly exploded with a zing, spraying me with splinters and grit. My hand dropped to my side, very quickly, seemingly of its own volition, for it took me another couple of seconds to decide to drop to the ground. I looked around frantically but could see only trees and creepers and, hanging among the pines, a small puff of bluish smoke. Elizabeth was still on her feet. She looked down at me exasperatedly, as though I were a total stranger who had embarrassed her by willfully falling at her feet in public and having a fit.