Once Every Never

by Lesley Livingston

  And she stared right through Clare as if she wasn’t even there.

  The girl’s blue gaze was instead focused sharply on the path and the two charioteers. Her mouth worked silently for a moment and then she whispered the word “Tasca.” Her voice broke on a sob and she raised a hand as if reaching out toward the unmoving girl in the cart.

  Clare jumped back, startled. But she wasn’t fast enough to evade the girl’s reaching hand and, as her fingertips connected with the space Clare was already occupying, there was a sudden crackling in the air like a strong electrical discharge.

  As the girl gasped and flew backward. Clare felt as if she’d been hit by lightning—a much bigger bolt than the one that had sent her there—and the night all around her grew subtly brighter, almost as if she’d turned up the contrast on a TV screen. Sounds suddenly seemed louder, too. She could hear crickets and the scurrying of small animals in the grass—and the laboured, raspy breathing of the blond girl in front of her who was shaking her head back and forth, her eyes squeezed shut. When she opened them again a moment later they went almost perfectly round in shocked surprise.

  And they were focused on Clare’s face.

  “Clare!” she whispered. “Rho ddiolch i Andrasta!”

  Clare! Thank Andrasta!

  The moment froze in time. Clare’s mouth worked sound-lessly as she tried to form some sort of reply to the words she heard in her head—different from the ones she’d heard with her ears.

  Her name. She had said Clare’s name.

  Suddenly the girl turned her head sharply as though hearing a noise from somewhere behind her. When she turned back, her gaze was full of fear.

  “Helpa fi, Clare! Maent yn fy hela …”

  Please help me, Clare! They are chasing me …

  “What?” Clare blurted finally in response, her voice a startled whisper. “Who …”

  The girl opened her mouth to reply but a sudden shadow blotted the moonlight from her face. A large, rugged hand clamped tightly over her mouth and Clare skittered backward as the looming form of a man, dressed in a bronze helmet and armour, rose up behind the girl and grabbed her cloak—yanking her back behind the rock, out of sight of the path.

  The girl whimpered, but the sound was almost completely muffled by the soldier’s calloused palm. The man and woman on the track with the chariots would never hear it. Clare watched helplessly as the girl thrashed about wildly, her hands struggling at a brooch that fastened her cloak around her neck. As the man tried to drag her away she made one wild lunge directly at Clare.

  Clare shook off her paralyzing terror and tried to grab the girl’s flailing limbs. Tried to help somehow. But the soldier cracked the girl sharply on the back of her skull with the butt end of his sword hilt and she went limp, eyes rolling up into her head.

  Clare cried out in protest, but the soldier ignored her as if she didn’t even exist. Or wasn’t even there …

  With a glance in the direction of the redheaded woman and the chariot driver, the soldier threw the girl’s slim body over his shoulder like a sack of grain and loped away, running silently through the long grass toward the dark edge of the forest and away from the river track.

  The girl’s cloak lay upon the ground. Clare plucked at the material as if trying to convince herself that what she’d just seen had really happened. Fear and confusion clutched at her and she stayed crouched down, frozen and unsure of what to do. But the young girl was pretty obviously in a serious heap of trouble and Clare couldn’t help feeling that it was somehow all her fault. If she hadn’t been there—hadn’t distracted the fleeing girl and stopped her in her tracks—she would have made it to the riverbank. To the young warrior and the ferocious-looking woman, either of whom might have been able to help her …

  “Help!” Clare shouted suddenly, leaping up and shouting, waving her arms wildly in a desperate attempt to attract the attention of the pair on the path. But the woman had already leapt back into her own cart and, with a crack of the reins, the pair of chariots thundered off down the path, away from the distant smoke and fire. Clare pounded down the track in their wake, hollering and flailing her arms to absolutely no effect, the dust thrown by the chariot wheels burning in her throat.

  They didn’t hear her. They hadn’t seen her.

  Clare slowed to a jog finally, the sound of her own laboured breathing almost drowning out the sudden harsh call of a raven, startled from its night perch into flight. She bent over, hands on her knees, dizzy. Sparks flared behind her eyes and the world tilted on its axis.

  “WHAT HAVE I DONE?” Clare gasped.

  “You tell me. Then we’ll both know.” Al’s voice still managed to convey tightly wound sarcasm in a fierce whisper.

  Clare blinked.

  Sudden starbursts faded from her vision and Al’s pale, frightened face, framed by the dark fringe of her hair, bent into focus inches from Clare’s own.

  “Oh shit …” Clare shook her head and glanced around the restoration room. The overhead neons seemed painfully bright after the darkness by the riverbank. She was dizzy and felt as though she were still a bit transparent. She was also, she noticed, shaking like a leaf.

  “Clare?” Her aunt’s voice floated over to her from behind a row of metal shelving—that is, if something that stern and prickly could float. “You aren’t touching anything, are you?”

  With an almost audible twang Mall Cop’s steely gaze snapped over to where the two girls stood. Al composed herself enough to give him a bored “as-if-we’d-touch-that-dusty-old-stuff” glare. Satisfied, he went back to his recruiting-poster stance, eyes empty of all emotion except perhaps a wistful longing for mirrored sunglasses to complete the look.

  “Gawd, no, Mags,” Clare replied, trying to clamp down on the warble in her voice. “There’s history cooties all over that stuff.”

  “That’s my darling angel.” Maggie’s voice dripped weary sarcasm.

  Clare heaved a sigh of relief and turned back to Al.

  “‘Oh shit …’?” Al parroted Clare’s sentiment of moments before. “Where did you just go? And how did you do that? And what exactly is going on? Clare?”

  Clare put a hand to her head, feeling shaky.

  “Clare?”

  “Look—can we just shelve the ‘Allie McAllister, Girl Investigative Journalist’ thing for a second?” she hissed.

  Al’s mouth snapped shut, a hurt expression clouding her eyes.

  “Sorry. I’m sorry.” Clare took a deep breath. “Mags?” she called. “Going to the cafeteria …”

  “All right, luv,” Maggie called back. “If you’re not there when I’m done, I will have to murder you.”

  “Deal. Bye.” Clare grabbed Al by the wrist and they bolted from the room.

  “Why are we going to the cafeteria?” Al asked as they ran.

  “To get away from Officer Friendly and the Brainiac Twins,” Clare said over her shoulder without slowing down. For some reason, she found that running just at that moment made her feel better. Her sneakered feet pounded down the echoing corridors, Al following noiselessly in her wake.

  AL BLINKED. For the first time in what was probably five minutes. Give or take. Since Clare had started talking, really. She blinked again. “Okay.” Her voice was quiet. Calm. “I give. Tell me where the hidden camera is. And how you did the disappearing thing. I get it. I’ve been punk’d. Very good. Very funny. Rich.”

  Clare’s tone was just as quiet. Just as calm. “Al? I understand that this a little weird. And more than a little out of character for me.” She leaned forward over the table, clasping her hands in front of her, her stare boring into Al. “I also just experienced what I can only describe as a paranormal phenomenon to which you were the sole witness, and I’m pretty sure that if you don’t stick with me on this one I’m gonna start screaming like a freak any second now. Okay?” Clare smiled tightly and tilted her head, waiting.

  “Um.”

  “Okay?”

  “Okay.”

&
nbsp; “Okay.” It was Clare’s turn to blink. “Seriously?”

  “Yes.” Al nodded solemnly. “Okay. I believe you. Tell me again what happened and we’ll figure this out, Clare. Together.”

  The tension flowed from Clare’s shoulders.

  “You’re a peach, Al,” Clare gasped with relief. “What would I do without you?”

  Al didn’t bother to answer. Of course, neither of them could imagine a situation in which that circumstance would ever arise. Clare and Al had been inseparable almost since the day they’d met, the only two new kids in the entire third grade of an upper-crust private school in Toronto’s swanky Rosedale neighbourhood that didn’t exactly have a tradition of rolling out the welcome mat for misfits and newcomers. After only a week the girls had decided—most solemnly—to pledge eternal loyalty to each other as blood sisters. To that end, they had spent almost an entire afternoon joined at the thumb with an elastic band after they’d pricked their flesh with a safety pin to draw forth drops of blood, which they pressed together to ensure everlasting sisterhood.

  Clare’s mom had been apoplectic when she’d found the girls in the garden, giggling and purple-thumbed, and had shrieked at them about the dangers of “blood-borne pathogens” and “infectious microbes.” Al’s mother, on the other hand, had thought it a “sweetly arcane ritual worthy of the bygone romance of the Byronic age.”

  Al’s mom is certifiable, Clare thought—not for the first time—as the incident flashed through her mind. But as flaky as Mrs. McAllister may have been, her daughter was a font of pure analytical thought and Spock logic. She revelled in math problems and puzzles.

  Well, this is one hell of a puzzle, Clare thought as Al leaned forward, hands clasped, unconsciously mirroring Clare’s posture. Heads bent together over their untouched soft drinks, they picked apart Clare’s experience one more time and in minute detail. Eventually Clare called a halt to Al’s forensic questioning.

  “Maggie’s gonna come looking for us any minute now,” she sighed and checked her watch. “Huh …”

  “What?”

  She turned her wrist so that Al could see the digital display face. It was dark.

  “You need a new battery.”

  “I put in a brand-new one two days before we left.”

  Al frowned. “Didn’t you say that you felt a jolt—like an electrical shock—when you disappeared?”

  “Yeah …”

  “And again when that girl touched you? The blond girl?”

  Clare nodded.

  “I wonder if that had anything to do with it. I mean … maybe you shorted out your watch. At any rate, I’d say it’s tangible proof that something definitely happened to you.”

  “Maybe …” Clare thought about that for a moment. It’s not as though she’d ever paid attention in science class, but it seemed plausible enough.

  “You said she called you by name?”

  Clare nodded. “She called me ‘Clare.’”

  “Right. Unlike the dude, who called you ‘Clarinet.’ Or maybe just said some word that sounded like it. And you said you didn’t think he could see you.”

  Clare shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think he could. But it sure sounded like he said my name. How do these people know my name, Al?”

  Al frowned, concentrating. “Beats me. You said the girl definitely saw you. Talked to you. But in a different language? How could you understand what she said?” Al worried away at the details of the incredible story the same way she approached complex problems in algebra.

  Clare shook her head slowly. “I seriously don’t know. It was like my ears heard one set of sounds but my brain heard another. It doesn’t make any sense!”

  “No—no, it kinda does.” Al held up a hand, thinking. “My Gran speaks Irish Gaelic. Mostly when she’s pissed off at something, so, y’know, a lot. But me? Not so much. Thing is, I know most of the words and stuff and so I totally understand her most of the time and I don’t even register that she’s speaking in another language. It’s like I kind of auto-translate in my head.”

  “Right.” Clare nodded. “Except I don’t know any words in … whatever that was.”

  “Yeah, well, yesterday you didn’t know how to time-travel. But you said you didn’t understand the language when it was just the chariot-people talking. That it wasn’t until the girl spoke that you understood. And that was after she touched you. You said you felt another shock when that happened and that things got brighter. And louder. Maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe you formed some sort of … I dunno … spatial-temporal link with this girl.”

  “Maybe …”

  “There’s obviously some kind of a connection between the two of you.”

  “And chances are we’ll never figure it out.” Clare sighed in frustration. The whole thing was starting to give her a headache. “I wish I knew what happened! I mean—she really seemed like she was in trouble. And then there was the other girl in the chariot … and that woman.”

  “And the tasty charioteer, don’t forget.”

  Clare ignored Al’s salacious grin. Sure—cute guy should’ve trumped. But she frowned, remembering the whole scene. “Jeezus, Al,” she murmured. “You should have seen this chick. I don’t how she even stayed standing. I’ve never seen so much blood …”

  “Do you remember what the other driver called her?” Al was still very keen on info-gathering. “I mean, can you remember what it sounded like?”

  Clare shrugged. “I don’t know. Most of what they said to each other sounded like dogs barking under water.”

  Al rolled her eyes. “Work with me, here, will ya?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Try! Maybe we can find some information on her.”

  “Oh—what?” Clare threw her hands up. “Like we’re gonna just go look her up and she’ll be some famous queen or something? That’s like everyone who thinks they had a past life was Cleopatra or Guinevere. Al, that woman was probably just some peasant who’d had her village attacked. A nobody on the wrong side of some barbarian raid or something.”

  “Not from the way you described her she wasn’t.” Clare had forgotten for a moment that Al was the type who actually read the textbooks on the history-class syllabus. “And you said the guy gave her that gold neck thingy. Do you honestly think your average peasant got to parade around in that kind of swag? She had to be somebody important. You must have heard her name! C’mon, Clarinet. Think!”

  The “Clarinet” goad worked. “Boo-something,” Clare muttered.

  “Boo?”

  “There was this one word he said and it seemed like a name. And it definitely sounded like Boo-something—”

  Al hauled Clare to her feet without another word and dragged her out of the museum’s eatery. At the heart of the British Museum, in the centre of a spectacular glass and iron canopy that spanned the sky above the Great Court, stood the Reading Room. A circular structure, it functioned as a library that had served more great minds throughout history than the girls had had hot dinners. It contained a fabulous wealth of information, both in book form and electronically, and it was to the computer terminals that Al led Clare at a pace just slow enough not to get them harassed by the attendants.

  Al sat down at one of the terminals and started typing furiously into the library’s searchable database. She tried different search terms: chariot, flogging, whipping—those last two brought up a slew of blocked sites, forcing Al to rethink her strategy—red hair, and torc. Then she tried combinations, along with the beginnings of what Clare had thought might have been a name. She experimented with a variety of spellings, hoping to get a hit. “Boo …” she muttered under her breath as her fingers tap-danced away. “B-o-o? … unlikely … B-u maybe? No. B-o-u? … B-o-u—Holy crap!”

  Clare shushed her as the librarian’s head bobbed up and swivelled in their direction.

  “Boudicca!” Al blurted, ignoring the gesture.

  Clare froze. “Boudicca …” she murmured, a whisper of
sound. The sound of the name she’d heard uttered by the chariot driver. Al had played pin-the-name-on-the-raging-redhead and scored a bull’s eye on her very first try.

  Al began scrolling rapidly through the text of an encyclopedic entry. “I was so right,” she muttered excitedly. “That was no freaking peasant you stumbled on.”

  “Almost got run over by …” Clare amended dryly. She waited impatiently. Finally she snapped, “Hell’s bells, Al, who on earth is this ‘Boudicca’ chick?”

  “Was.” Al pointed at the screen, beaming with quiet triumph.

  Clare peered over her shoulder at the webpage. There were a few academic-looking paragraphs of text and a grainy picture that looked like an ink drawing of a long-haired, heavy-set woman with angry eyes wearing a fanciful, Brunhilde-like breastplate. Clare snorted. “That’s totally not who I saw.”

  “Yeah, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t sit for a Sears Family Portrait back in the day.” Al rolled an eye at her. “It’s an artist’s rendition.”

  “I know that … What does it say about her?” Clare wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

  Al’s gaze flicked back and forth as she scanned the information on the screen. “You’re not gonna believe this.”

  “What?”

  “Well, smart-ass …” Al pointed at the screen. “It says right here that your mystery lady was—”

  “No.” Clare had a sudden feeling she knew what Al was going to say.

  “In fact—”

  “No.” She didn’t want to hear it.

  “A famous queen—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Just like Cleopatra.”

  “Or Guinevere …”

  “Just like that.” Al grinned. But as she turned back to the screen and kept reading, the grin faded from her face. “Except with a lot more bloodshed.”

  “Blood …” Clare frowned, remembering the cruel lash marks on the woman’s back and shoulders. “Yeah … what exactly was this chick the queen of?”

  “This.” Al gestured vaguely about the room with one hand while continuing to click away with the other.