“You’ll be getting treatment over the course of the next few days,” says the physician, “and you’ll be quarantined in this room for two weeks.”
“And I’ll have to bring Blevins in to see you,” says Tristan, as if aggrieved he were, although of course secretly Blevins was exactly the man I wanted. “Gráinne, I’m shocked you did this without consulting me first.”
“Sure you haven’t been back to see me in weeks,” says I. “How could I consult you if you weren’t there to consult?”
“There have been plenty of agents back in your time,” says he. “You could have given one of them a message.”
“But then I’d miss seeing that look on your face.” I grin. “’Tis all grand, Tristan, we’ll have a grand time of it.”
Unconvinced he looked, and none too happy, but away he went anyhow. Now I was alone. Or so I thought.
The light, which shone impossibly steady right out of the ceiling, was dimmed so that it was perhaps as bright as a cloudy morn—before that it had been as bright as midsummers at noon—and then it dimmed even more so that it resembled nearly sunset, but without the proper kinds of shadows or color. All wrong and strange it was. It’s quite overwhelmed I was finding myself, Your Grace, and I was not at all sure after all that I was really prepared for my adventure. Wasn’t I certain I would need to be finding someone who had my back.
And suddenly I realized I was not alone. As far as one might spit (well, as far as I might spit anyhow, which is farther than some) was a curtain dividing the room, suspended cleverly from a sort of track attached to the ceiling. A hand reached out from its other side and swept it out of the way, revealing another divan-throne, and upon that didn’t there sit a man now with long brown hair, dressed in the same ungainly togemans I was wearing—white robe and insensibly short stockings. And needles sticking out of his arms, so he had, attached to tubes. A sinewy strength he had, rare amongst the city folk of London, even the soldiers, and honestly even Tristan, who is quite the specimen, looked merely bulky in compare. Every visible inch of skin on this fellow’s body was taut. Handsome he was, but not so handsome as Tristan. There was no way to know his rank as he had nothing about him but what I did, that being what we were given to hide our nakedness. He held himself like a soldier and a leader. Common sense declared he, like myself, had recently arrived from elsewhere. Looking him over, as much as I could be seeing of him, it seemed clear to me that he would offer excellent protection, not to mention an excellent fuck, and so I took it upon myself to make friends with him.
“Good day to you,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
It was a queer look he gave me, and then didn’t he answer not in the Queen’s English but in a peculiar patois of Anglo-Norman French. I’m knowing enough French to get along in a whorehouse, but that is the French of our day. His was of an earlier age. But plenty of time we had, and little else to occupy it, and so as the hours went by we explained ourselves to each other.
He is Magnus, from a village in Normandy. He had spent much of his life a-roaming, fighting for the Emperor’s guard in Constantinople. ’Twas all the way forward from the year 1205 or so Magnus had come (he wasn’t much for calendars, he was more of a map fella), and he had been Sent hither to his great surprise and without his leave, as he had begun to sort out that something peculiar was happening with the world. Lest his understanding trigger lomadh (he had a different word for it, but understood it perfectly, as he’d seen it with his own eyes), Tristan and his company had brought him forward, so they had, for everybody’s safety. He had arrived three days before me.
Now this fella, I thought, was one to have on your side if you were feeling weak as a kitten, which I was, being deprived of all magic. So chat him up I did, and between us didn’t we share nuggets of information. He had little to add to my knowledge, of course, as he was no part of Tristan’s company. He hadn’t a strategy as I did, given he didn’t know he would be coming here until moments before it happened. I kept my counsel but was friendly enough. Surely he’s not so evolved as we, in that it’s obsessed he is with gold and such, like all those accursed Norman-type peoples who have run riot over our fair island . . . but he’s canny, that lad. Straight off I sensed that.
The next day the weakness came over me something terrible and I had fevers and aches. As Magnus and I lay there getting potions pumped into our bodies to balance our humors, another physician-type woman came into the room and went straight to Magnus and let him know, by pantomime gestures, that he should be baring his left shoulder. This he did, and immediately she took exception to something on it. It seemed a simple birthmark to me. He looked askance at her interest, and no wonder, for perhaps here as ever people are eager to see marks of the devil upon a body, and especially upon a stranger. He tensed, but the woman did not seem to notice.
“I see why they called me in . . . that does look a little suspicious,” she said, off-hand as all that.
He tensed more.
From her breast pocket the woman removed an object no larger than a playing card. Colored light shone from one face of it, as if ’twere a stained glass window. She let her fingers play over it for a few moments, then spoke: “I’ll be removing that mole for a biopsy.”
After the briefest of pauses, the object—which I later learned is called a phone—spoke to Magnus in his own dialect. Or tried to, anyway, as “biopsy” ain’t a word to those people, any more than it is to you and me—but as best I could discern, it strung a few words together that approximated the idea, which was that she was going to lop the thing off for a closer look.
I could see well enough that this wasn’t Magnus’s first phone-chat, for he was in no way as astonished as I. He rattled something off, and after a few moments the phone translated: “Going to cut it off me?” Magnus was wary but not worried.
To her gentleman attendant she said something about “lie doe cain” which the phone dutifully attempted to translate, but botched it somehow—forgive me, Your Grace, but I was half delirious, and this bit was a sort of comedy of errors involving the phone and the various dialects. Magnus had a lot of questions—not of a suspicious nature, you’ll understand, but simple hunger to know. It was laboriously explained that “lie doe cain” is a potion, not magical in nature (since magic has no purchase in this time and place) but once injected into his shoulder with a wee needle, deadened the pain so that the woman sliced that birthmark off Magnus’s shoulder without him even needing a swig of whiskey! He watched this in fascination and wonder, like a child seeing a magician at his tricks. The assistant bandaged it neatly enough, and said to him, through the phone, “That might hurt after the lie doe cain wears off.”
Utterly baffled was Magnus, and he reached across to prod the bandage. “No pain?” he said.
“Don’t touch it,” she said with brisk compassion. “No touch.”
“No pain,” he repeated. “No nothing!”
The doctor had been dousing her hands with a sort of ointment they use, scented like bad gin. It is a ritual with them.
“Anesthetic,” she said slowly, and repeated it several times, syllable for syllable. “Makes it numb.”
“But how? Is it magic?”
I shook my head. “There is no magic in this time.” He looked astounded at this news, so now I knew I had some insight to offer him that sure would bind him to me.
The physician now turned her attention to me, and said she’d like to have a look at my skin, all over, as a precaution—for my freckly complexion was of a sort prone to just the sorts of moles she’d lately sliced off of Magnus, and it’s superstitious they are about such things. The assistant shot the curtain across to afford me a bit of privacy, and I pulled up my shift and let the doctor look me over.
“So the lie doe cain is a numbing agent, is it?” I asked the female physician. “Where does it come from? Seems a remarkable ointment.”
She shrugged. “It’s very commonplace in this era. You can buy it at any pharmacy. Do you know what a ph
armacy is? You might know it as an apothecary, or chemist.”
“Aye I know it surely, but I doubt he does,” I say. “I’ll explain.”
No eldritch freckles were to be found on my person and so the lady and her assistant packed up their potions and bandages and absented themselves. This was only one such encounter, for don’t these people have a thousand varieties of doctor, each keen to inspect a different bit of you with a different contraption, and it’s shocked you’d be, my lady, if I told you everywhere they looked.
When they were leaving us alone, I brought Magnus up to date on all I knew (besides my own schemes, of course). His pale blue eyes were round as platters a fair bit of the time.
“But you must know,” I told him when I’d said all I knew, “I’ve never left my own age before. Well, not by more than a year or two, for sport. I’ve nothing left to explain, for all the rest will be as new to me as to you.”
After a few days of this, my fevers broke, and my vigor returned as I was growing accustomed to an existence without magic. When it seemed I was fit for conversation, Tristan returned. He had company: one older gentleman and two women, a bit younger than myself. The younger of the two was very beautiful and wore a dress; the other, plainer, and dressed similarly to the men, and the bearing of a scholar did she have about her, like an abbess.
“This is Gráinne,” said Tristan, looking tense about the mouth.
I smiled my charming smile and held out my hand to the gentleman. He stared at me. He was a dignified-enough looking chap, clearly of higher birth from Tristan by the way he carried himself. He had a short, thick mane of grey, swept back as if posing for a statue he was. He reminded me a bit of that right arse Les Holgate who triggered the lomadh and ruined my life. “This is Dr. Roger Blevins,” Tristan says to me, in a heavy-handed sort of way.
“Well met and God save you, milord,” I say, leaning forward from the divan to clasp his hand gingerly (as the back of my hand had all the needles still).
“It is good to meet you—but you have defied protocol in coming here,” he says sternly, with great anger in his eyes. So as usually is the case, I begin to cast a spell to soften him to me . . . and at once I realize, with a dreadful feeling in my guts, that it will not work! Tristan spoke true, there was no magic here at all. No wonder I felt at once so heavy and dull.
“I cry pardon,” I say, trying not to show my dismay. “Things do work best free and easy-like in London, I did not realize how regular in your habits you are here. Isn’t it good I came and learned that?”
The two men exchanged glances and each sighed, in different keys. Blevins made a gesture with his head, and Tristan nodded as if understanding a secret code he was.
“Mel,” he said, a bit wearily, to the plainer of the women. “Meet Gráinne. Gráinne, here is Doctor Melisande Stokes. And here is Erszebet.” That being the fine-looking one in the skirt, with the painted face.
Melisande, without a smile of greeting but a look of some checked amusement in her eye, held out her hand and shook mine. “It’s an honour to meet you, Gráinne. We are very much in your debt. Welcome to America.”
Much quieter is Melisande than I was anticipating her to be. She must be clever in hidden, subtle ways, not the way of educated women in Elizabeth’s court who are falling all over each other to outshine one another. Her light is a secret that she uses as a tool, and sure there is something tough there underneath it, which I do respect well enough. ’Tis clear enough from watching her and Tristan that there should be fire between them, certainly some congress, but just as clear that admitting to it is something you’ll find neither of them doing. Still the attraction hangs in the air almost visibly. I believe when I go back there—now that I have a plan, which shortly I shall tell you of—I must find a way to use that.
And as for Erszebet, their original witch, she is fair indeed, but she is not a happy lass. Her discontentment fairly radiates from her fiery dark eyes, and her face is fashioned, as if from birth, to have a bit of a pout or sneer. And yet strangely charming (excuse the term) I found her to be at once.
Rather than taking my proffered hand to shake, she took it and kissed my knuckles. “I greet you as a sister,” says she. “As I greet all the witches who dwell in my house, and come under my aegis.”
“Now wait a moment,” says Tristan. “We don’t know we’ll be keeping her on as an employee.”
“And I don’t know I’ll be staying,” says I, “if this is how I’m to be spoken of—like as if I weren’t even in the room.”
“Gráinne, don’t you understand, you can’t leave,” said Tristan with some irritation. “Once an historical agent has come forward, they cannot go back, they have too much knowledge of what is here to safely take back.”
“Then staying’s what I’ll do,” I said agreeably.
Now the Blevins is watching all of this back-and-forth with what I’m sure he imagines to be a canny and knowing mien. Ever so stern he was in the beginning, with his talk of protocols, but now doesn’t he change his tune and become the friend and protector of poor Gráinne.
“Did you have in mind making the poor woman a detainee?” says the Blevins, taking a wee step closer to me, as if he’s going to ward off the others’ wicked assaults. “No, we need her abilities in the ATTO. This has been in the works for months, Tristan. Perhaps you missed it, when you were off becoming a hero and a saint, and watching Diachronic Shear in Pera, and vacationing in France; but Gráinne, though she showed up early, came here to work for me. And once we have matters sorted out, she’ll enjoy the same freedoms and privileges as any other anachronic employee.”
During the ensuing silence, while Tristan and Mel are rolling their eyes at this peroration, Erszebet steps in.
“She’s not an employee,” says Erszebet. “She has not signed your nonsense papers. She has only helped you from the generosity of her heart. You have no hold on her. As I know the story, you are deeply in her debt and have made absolutely no attempt to recompense her.” To me, she says, “This is a terrible world and I would not stay if I could leave, but I have obligations I must honor. You do not. If I were you, I would leave at once. If you want to stay, I will do all in my power to make things less wretched for you than they have been for me.”
More sympathy’s what I’d be feeling, if these words came from an unkempt beggar, but here she is wearing a gown as fine as any at Bess’s court might wear, although scandalously short of length the skirt was. So I do wonder a wee bit about how easily she finds things miserable. But she is offering me a place at her table, and I accept with graciousness.
“I will show you everything you need to know to survive in this strange world,” she says firmly, as if in defiance of the men, whom she does not waste even a flicker of her attention on now. “These people think they have set up an initiation into these times, for Anachrons who come forward. What they offer is feeble. I will give you my own attention, as I do every witch. You will be comfortable and safe, and most important, you will understand things. These men do not think witches need to understand much, as if we were just cogs in a bit of machinery, they have no regard for our human rights.”
“Our what?” asks I, as I see it’s Blevins’s turn to be rolling his eyes a bit.
“I will show you how to order take-out and flush a toilet and use Instagram. Although you are older. Perhaps you would prefer Facebook.” A sly smile of pleasure. “I will take you shopping. For clothing. The other Anachrons are not allowed this, but the witches I take whenever I wish. I think you will enjoy that.”
None of the others disagreed with her, which I took to mean that this was Erszebet’s role in greeting all new witches. She’d made a gesture on the word “clothing,” gracefully smoothing her hands down either side of her bodice, so that her meaning would be obvious even to those with no modern English.
Such as Magnus, who had been watching all of this from his divan silently, as a cat gazing into a garden from an open window.
“Clothi
ng,” he echoed, and they all turned toward him. Clearly he had already been introduced before I arrived, as none of them rushed to shake his hand. “Clothing,” he repeated, imitating Erszebet’s gesture upon his own body.
Tristan nodded, and fluently enough he spoke to him, in Magnus’s native tongue. I could make out a smattering of familiar words—chemise, pantaloons, cap. Magnus frowned and unconvinced he looked. He responded to Tristan with a growling answer and sure didn’t that answer include a word we had just learned from the physician: lidocaine.
Tristan looked taken aback. They spoke briefly and then Tristan turned to the others. “He’s curious about the lidocaine Doctor Andrews gave him. Wonders if we are going foraging or raiding for clothes, if we can obtain some.”
The Blevins made an appalled sound in his throat, which developed into a chuckle. “Foraging or raiding?” Then he laughed out loud.
“He’s a medieval Norman warrior, sir,” Tristan said. “There’s no word for ‘shopping’ in his language.”
“Nonsense,” Blevins said. “He’s from circa 1200 and he lived in the most sophisticated city in the world. Even if he was illiterate.”
“Almost everyone was illiterate,” rejoined Melisande. “That’s why being an historical linguist is such a challenge, Dr. Blevins, or don’t you remember? Oral tradition was—”
“Oral tradition is why he got into trouble in the first place,” says the Blevins, and to Tristan he says it, not to Mel. “By recognizing you from such an old story.”
“He put two and two together, and became suspicious that we were time traveling,” Mel agreed, “and that fired his imagination.”
“I’ll give him that much—he has a vivid imagination,” said the Blevins, “and that he imagines himself a Viking.” And over the lovely face of Tristan don’t I see a look of annoyance flare for a moment, then fade away.
The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. Page 50