“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 Awstreeuh. “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.
“Elizabeth,” I said.
“What’s the matter with—”
I grabbed her and pulled her down and rolled halfway on top of her, and there was a moment as short as a heartbeat during which she was too surprised to react and the woods were silent except for a subdued, almost featureless sort of background bee swarm murmur, and then, abruptly, the murmur resolved itself into the sounds of men and masses of men thrashing and crashing about in the underbrush, and yells of excitement, and an eruption of reports, quite close this time, and quite emphatic, and now much less like the sound of popcorn popping than like that of pebbles or dried peas being shaken in a large gourd, and there were more zinging explosions among the trees. Some of the yelling turned anguished. The sounds were all around us now; we weren’t near a battle, we were in it. I risked a look but there was nothing to see except a thick haze of gunsmoke drifting among the trees. I pulled my head back in and lay on my belly beside Elizabeth in the mud.
The woods grew gloomier as gunsmoke collected under the branches. There was a bitter smoky stench in the air that stung our eyes and burned our throats, and now, between blasts of gunfire, we could hear men crying out in pain and terror. From just downstream, off to our left, came a blurry bawled command, the rustle and crash of heavy movement through underbrush, then splashing noises. I glimpsed shadowy forms pushing through knee-deep water at the nearest bend of the creek. From upstream came another thunderous rattle of gunfire. Orange flames flickered among the trees, and there were more cries, more sounds of movement.
There were other sounds, too, a rising roar of wind among the treetops, a crackling, a hissing. I couldn’t imagine what they signified. Then came a different sort of smoke smell, and at almost the same moment Elizabeth put her mouth close to my ear and yelled, “The woods are on fire! We’ve got to get out of here!”
As though on cue, flame curled through a tripod of dead pines not twenty feet from where we lay. Elizabeth made to get up. I grabbed her arm roughly.
“You want to get yourself shot?”
She jerked away. “I sure as hell don’t want to burn to death or suffocate!”
“Keep down, or you won’t have to worry!”
“Come on, if you’re coming!” and she slid herself into the water.
Better shot than cooked, I decided, and followed. I found myself wading in knee-deep water, with soft, ankle-deep mud sucking at my boots. Behind us, the fire suddenly roared along the bank, seeming to leap from treetop to treetop, consuming everything immediately combustible, scorching everything else. The air filled with sparks, and the heat was so intense, the smoke so thick, that we were momentarily driven onto the other bank. A cloud of airborne burning bits engulfed us like a swarm of hellish insects, stinging as they alighted on our faces and hands. Breathing was like swallowing heated needles. Our hair and clothing began to smolder, and Elizabeth screamed and started beating at herself. I looped an arm around her waist, forced her back into the water, dunked us both. She pulled free and surfaced several feet away, sputtering and clawing hair out of her eyes.
“Go!” I yelled at her. “Go! Go!”
And we went, blistered, half-blinded, and choking, through Hell.
Everywhere there was fire and smoke and noise and horror.
Once, we heard someone in one of the thickets along the bank cry out that he was burning and beg to be shot. His pleas abruptly broke off in a wail of agony that must have persisted for a full minute. Elizabeth unexpectedly grabbed my hand, and I felt her fingernails bite into my palm; under the mud and the soot, her face was bone white.
Farther downstream, as we skirted a fire that burned all the way down the bank to the water, a flame-swathed figure lurched blindly out of the inferno. It was pawing at itself and moaning hideously, and as it broke through the thicket, burning vines dragged and snatched at it as though to pull it back into the heart of the blaze. It slipped in the mud on the bank opposite us and seemed to dissolve in a boiling cloud of steam.
I covered my eyes with my hands as we plunged past.
In some places there was no fire, only shadows and that infernal, constant pow-pow-pop, now close by, now remote. Once again, we were caught in a cross-fire and lay clutching each other in terror against a reedy bank while bullets clipped small branches and pieces of bark overhead. The shooting quickly rose to a furious crescendo, then died away as abruptly and unexpectedly as it had begun.
When we ha
d heard only distant battle sounds for a long time, Elizabeth leaned close to me and said, “This is it for me. I’m worn out, and I’ve lost a shoe in the mud. This is as far as I go.”
“We aren’t safe here.”
“We aren’t safe anywhere in this goddamn swamp. May as well die here as anywhere else.”
“We’re not going to die. John—”
“Oh, screw John, and screw you, too,” and with that she crawled up the soggy bank and flung herself down on relatively dry ground. There was nothing for me to do but follow her into the thicket. For no reason I could imagine save that I was stuck in character again, I pulled off my ruined jacket and offered it to her. She looked at it and at me with consummate distaste and declined to accept. The whole exchange was leaden pantomime. We were too tired for actual argument any more, though not too tired to disagree. She wadded up her own jacket for a pillow and apparently fell asleep as soon as her head touched it. I was dead tired, too, and hungry and thirsty as well, but I was too worried to fall asleep. Where was John?
And night fell, but the shooting never died away completely, and neither did the brush-fires. I could hear the intermittent crash of gunfire all about, often punctuated by shouts. The smell of burning was everywhere, and its crimson glow was reflected among the trees and against the sky. One blaze flared up not twenty yards from us. I went forward to keep an eye on its progress, and by its light saw dead men lying among a jackstraw pile of pine trunks. The fire had already gone over them, charring them and their garments beyond recognition and leaving a sickening seared-meat smell hanging about the area. As I turned to leave, I was startled by some firecracker-like explosions among the smouldering corpses – lingering flames were setting off the unused cartridges in the dead men’s pouches.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 55