Unbroken in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Given the pogroms, Elisa would have thought King Philippe would have been happy to be rid of his Jewish citizens entirely, but in addition to these other decrees, he’d made it illegal for them to move from one town to another without a permit. He’d also forbidden emigration and had begun arresting French ship captains found with Jewish people in their holds. He had not gone so far, as yet, as to arrest English ones.

  Consequently, over the last six months, David had authorized what amounted to an underground railroad to move Jews safely through France, and by that means they’d winnowed down the total number of Jewish residents in Paris to five hundred.

  But having done what they could with smaller missions, it was time for a larger effort. It was this that David’s arrival in Paris was meant to distract from, if not mask.

  “Without someone inside the prison,” Rachel said, “the task might be impossible. With three of us on the inside, I’m thinking Samuel, Aaron, and me, it becomes highly doable.”

  Darren spoke before anyone could protest. “We know it’s a risk, but we scouted it out, and with Templar help, we think it will work.”

  When still nobody replied, Rachel looked directly at her father. “Ten years ago, David pleaded with Llywelyn to welcome Jews into Wales because he saw an injustice and felt the need to do something about it—and because he was the only one who could.”

  Rachel paused. “This time, we are the only ones who can.”

  Abraham looked at his daughter for a moment and then turned to David. “This is madness.”

  David spread his hands wide. “I’d have to hear the complete plan, but each of them, in their own way, is highly capable. If Rachel says they can do it, I believe her.”

  Abraham now turned pleadingly to Aaron. “Let me go instead of you.”

  “It has to be me, Abraham,” Aaron said gently. “We can’t all be from Avalon, not if we want those imprisoned to trust us, not after what they’ve been through. They need to see a familiar face.”

  “Then Rachel should stay behind.”

  “A father traveling with his two children,” Rachel said, “is an arrangement the guards will accept as normal, and my presence may make it less likely either of the men will be abused.”

  Finally Abraham turned to Darren. “You would let your wife do this?”

  Darren laughed out loud. “Let her? She’s your daughter!” But then he sobered. “Those doctor’s hands of hers can pick a lock better than mine, she won’t be alone, and this is something she believes in. We all believe in it. Who am I to tell her no?”

  Abraham sat back in his chair with a laugh, though it was a sound without actual amusement. He gazed at his daughter with a mixture of pain and pride, before turning back to David. “We do this, we change the world forever.”

  David smiled. “Abraham, my friend, you must see that’s entirely the point.”

  Chapter Two

  Day One

  David

  “King Philippe has decreed you will surrender Aquitaine to him now.” Standing with David at the threshold of Philippe’s audience chamber, the palace steward’s smile was as close to gleeful as to make no difference.

  They had arrived at sunset at Philippe’s palace on the Île de la Cité, the island in the middle of the River Seine. Notre Dame Cathedral lay at the other end of the island, and together they formed the heart of Paris.

  Philippe sat on his throne on a dais at the far end of the chamber. Two hundred nobles lined a central aisle, up which David and his family were supposed to progress.

  At David’s arrival, total silence had descended on the room, so everyone had heard the steward’s statement. Now, they waited for David to respond.

  At first, he stared at Philippe and didn’t move. Archbishop Romeyn, David’s ambassador to the French court, had his lips pressed together in a thin line and was standing against a pillar, crowded by onlookers and unable to intervene. David’s guard, consisting of an eclectic multi-national foursome of Venny, Mathew, Rhys, and Matha, were surrounded by a dozen blue-liveried soldiers of the palace guard, and the servants and children were bunched together nearby. They were all corralled, helpless but present, because Philippe intended for them to witness David’s humiliation equally with the French court.

  Good.

  As awful as it felt in this moment, this was good.

  David’s prior experience with meeting foreign leaders in their own castles was limited—for good reason. No ruler was more vulnerable than when he put himself in the hands of an ally. In fact, this was the first time David had done so since meeting Philippe on the border between France and Aquitaine at Château Niort, and look how that had turned out.

  Meetings in person tended to be something rulers avoided in case their counterpart thought a bit of treachery was in order. Even a wedding of their own children might not bring them together. Usually, it was just wars—and then rulers met in a tent on a field with their own armies at their backs.

  Thus, on the surface, the plan they’d made to walk into a trap seemed like the worst idea David could possibly have come up with. But even if David was supposed to have surrendered Aquitaine at a ceremony tomorrow, making this not exactly what he had expected to happen tonight, it was in keeping with the overall idea.

  No plan survives contact with the enemy was first said not by Sun Tsu in the Art of War but by an obscure Prussian in Avalon’s history, whose name escaped David at the moment. But it was probably the most famous thing the man had ever done or said. Every strategist in Avalon knew the aphorism, even if they behaved at times as if they didn’t. Regardless, it was something Callum had pounded into David’s head a long time ago.

  But for the last couple of years, David had been acting as if the intent of the quote was to imply that having a plan didn’t matter.

  He’d been wrong about that, and no matter how daunting it was to be facing a hostile French king, he was done with continually being set back on his heels, defending rather than attacking. It was long past time he acknowledged he had too much at stake not to have a plan, and to plan for everything. Plans, goals, and opportunities, as he’d told his co-conspirators a dozen times.

  For the thirteen years since he’d arrived in Earth Two, David had operated continually on the assumption that everyone and everything depended on him to be decisive and smart and above all strong if he wanted things to go right. And so they did, despite what everyone was continually telling him about not having everything on his shoulders all the time. As the King of England, it really couldn’t not be.

  But this time, he was required to let go and trust his friends, family, and companions. This time, he needed to be the opposite of heroic. This time, for everything to go right, he needed to be cowardly, stupid, and weak.

  So he squared his shoulders and headed down the aisle towards Philippe.

  He was very aware of everyone’s eyes on him as he traversed what felt like an entire football field. He was used to the eyes, of course, but usually they were admiring—or at the very least not hostile. Here and there, he caught a glimpse of something in someone’s face that implied curiosity or sympathy, but mostly David kept his gaze fixed on King Philippe, who was waiting on his throne, and endeavored to ignore everyone else in the room.

  It was a stereotype that the French were interested in fashion, even in the thirteenth century, and it was a stereotype because it had a basis in fact. A thousand candles lit the hall, reflecting light off the wall hangings, rich in their jewel tones, and here and there what appeared to be a gold or marble statue, set in an alcove in the wall. The decorations that weren’t made of gold were elaborately carved—scenes from the Bible mixed with a few from mythology.

  The attire of the French court was nothing if not ornate too. David liked the riot of color, but he could have done without the frills. Men were wearing high-necked tunics that made him itch just looking at them. Lace wasn’t common yet, but embroidery was everywhere. Some of the women’s dresses must have weighed a ton. And every
where he looked was gold. Ostentation was the order of the day.

  And, as if he’d seen the movie, Philippe’s throne was golden too.

  Of course it was. It had to be. Among the French, it was a given that a king’s surroundings needed to be worthy of his magnificence.

  David understood the theory but, in his own life, he had taken the opposite tack, one which Lili had refined, as she had many of David’s ideas. Consequently, the English court was about as plain in style as it had ever been, the idea being that David was inherently magnificent and didn’t need to be surrounded by gold to highlight his power. Besides, while Philippe bankrupted his court practically on a yearly basis on fancy thrones and useless wars, David spent his money on more mundane things like a new port on the Thames, sanitation systems, and windmills.

  That said, David’s boots were polished and his clothes clean, even if his hair and the cloak around his shoulders were wet, thanks to the rain that had drizzled on them during the walk from the dock. He’d spent the day sailing down the Seine on a river boat. It hadn’t been a long day’s work, nor dusty, and he felt reasonably presentable, even in such fancy company.

  It helped too that even if he’d been dressed as foppishly as the man he’d just passed—in a bright blue tunic, boots with a fringe above the knee and dear God was that a codpiece?—nothing he could have worn would have made him belong. Never had he felt more different, more—amazingly enough—English than in this moment.

  Posted on either side of Philippe were two chief advisers, a Richelieu-type character, short and dark, named Guillaume de Nogaret and an older companion, Pierre de Mornay, the Bishop of Auxerre and Orléans.

  In addition to these two, were John, Duke of Brittany; Robert, Duke of Burgundy; and Pierre Flote. A handsome man twenty years older than Philippe, Robert was married to Philippe’s aunt, and Robert’s half-sister was married to the ruler of Angoulême in Aquitaine, which even now Callum was in charge of defending. Families, as always, were complicated.

  Flote, by contrast, was thin and pale, as if he never went in the sun, with blond hair going gray and with what novelists might call ‘a weak chin’. He also wasn’t as young as David had thought at first. Both Nogaret and Flote would become known in Avalon for carrying out some of Philippe’s more questionable strategies against the order of the Templars, the Jewish community of France, and the pope.

  “Do you see their faces?” Ieuan said in an undertone in Welsh. “This can’t be good.”

  Like the steward, the expression of the men on the dais could be described as sinisterly happy. All except Philippe’s, David had to say. The king looked dour and forbidding instead.

  “Hard to imagine how it could be,” David replied. “But bad is good, remember?”

  By now they were close to the throne. David walked the last few paces alone, at which point the steward introduced him formally: “David, Duke of Aquitaine, sire.” He bowed.

  In his capacity as Duke of Aquitaine, David bowed too, even as he ground his teeth in frustration. It was common knowledge that David cared little for the niceties of court or having everybody bow according to their station at just the right angle, such that you could measure it with a protractor. Even more, he detested being put at a disadvantage, which the steward was doing by neglecting to mention David’s title as King of England (not to mention the High King of the Confederated States of Britain, an entity Philippe hadn’t yet recognized). Still, it was depressingly expected, since the French court had done it to Edward.

  David told himself he was prepared for it—and it was, in fact, what he’d come to see.

  When David raised his head, however, he found Philippe looking at him with as intense an expression as he had ever seen on any man’s face, and that was saying something, considering the various tests and trials which had beset David over the years.

  He really wanted to trust Philippe. He liked him, in a perverse sort of way. Certainly they’d developed a camaraderie two years ago over the course of their journey across France—and each had saved the other’s life.

  David had hoped too—in his more naïve moments, as Ieuan would call them—their shared past would count for something. David understood, however, that Philippe’s upbringing bent him towards a certain approach to rulership, and even a life and death experience with David, along with a certain amount of gratefulness, couldn’t undo generations and centuries—even millennia—of tradition. It seemed likely Philippe had agreed two years ago to the expanded borders of David’s Duchy of Aquitaine only because he’d felt he had little choice—and almost immediately had begun plotting how to take it back.

  Philippe motioned for David to come all the way forward, while he himself remained sitting. He held out his hands, between which David was to put his, in the classic mode of obeisance, practiced throughout Europe in this era. More men than David could count had put their hands between his own. Before now, David himself had done it for only one man, his father, that very first day at Castell y Bere thirteen years ago.

  The golden throne was set on a dais, but back far enough from the steps up to it for there to be room for David to kneel in front of Philippe on a scarlet footstool.

  David knew what to say. He’d rehearsed it, even as it set his teeth on edge. “As your vassal, I give to you, wholly and freely, your Duchy of Aquitaine.”

  He held his breath, waiting for Philippe’s answer.

  “And I accept Aquitaine as my kingly right.”

  It was as if everyone in the entire hall was holding their breaths too. David was still on his knees, but it was as if he was suspended in front of Philippe, floating even. He was acutely aware of the brightness of the room, the red carpet, the golden throne, and Philippe’s hands, which were dry and cold. Though all his nails were smoothed and polished, they were very short, as if he’d cut them that way because he’d been chewing on them.

  Then Philippe gave one sharp nod and withdrew his hands. “You are dismissed.”

  Chapter Three

  Day One

  David

  For a moment, David remained as he was. It was unbelievable. What they thought might happen really had.

  David was aware that his reluctance to battle it out with his neighbors sometimes resulted in those neighbors viewing him as weak. It didn’t seem to matter that Philippe should know better. They’d had conversations on this very topic two years ago! They’d also signed an agreement shortly after that, confirming David in his holdings.

  But Philippe himself was ambitious and surrounded by equally ambitious advisors—and anyway, that agreement hadn’t satisfied both parties. David would have preferred a truly independent Aquitaine—not to mention the return of Brittany and Normandy to his control—and Philippe was intent on gaining Aquitaine for himself. In truth, Philippe should have taken it a year ago when David was preoccupied with the rebellion led by John Balliol. That said, Philippe might not have known about the uprising at the time. Unlike in Avalon’s history, Balliol hadn’t gone to France for support, viewing Philippe as David’s ally, erroneously as it turned out.

  David clunked back to earth and managed not to snort in disgust as he rose to his feet. His presumption from the start had been that Philippe would retain Aquitaine for himself. The only change in the proceedings so far was that he’d asked for the duchy on David’s first night in Paris rather than tomorrow night at the formal ceremony they’d agreed upon. Never mind that the arrangement had actually been for Philippe to return Aquitaine to David, not keep it for himself.

  If David had arranged to stab an ally in the back like Philippe had just done, he would have wanted to get it over with too.

  And yet, it wasn’t actually all that comforting to be right.

  Facing David were the self-satisfied expressions of all four of Philippe’s advisers, who were arranged around Philippe’s throne like an awkward family Christmas picture. David tried to read something in Philippe’s face that could tell him what was going on, other than the obvious, but Philipp
e’s countenance resembled a block of ice and gave nothing away.

  What Philippe perhaps hadn’t thought through in his effort to steal Aquitaine and humiliate David, was that if David was no longer the Duke of Aquitaine, then he was ‘just’ the King of England, and that was a far mightier and powerful position to be in. For a heartbeat, David thought about saying so, but a pinching around Philippe’s eyes, the first indication that the French king was feeling anything other than disdain, had him reconsidering.

  Then Philippe looked away, his nose in the air. It was abrupt and rude—but so had been the entire sequence of events. Preparing for the worst hadn’t just been about whether or not David and his family ended up in captivity. The outcome of this meeting would change England and France—and thus the lives of real living, breathing citizens of both countries—forever.

  When David thought about it, which he made himself do quite often, it was terrifying to have so much power over other human beings’ lives, and the knowledge that he did have that power drove him every day.

  He could hear his mother saying, as it should.

  Such considerations did not appear to be driving Philippe.

  In the seconds that followed, guards wearing the white and blue surcoat of the French court hemmed David in on all sides. They weren’t quite holding his arms, but their intent was clear.

  Bishop Mornay took the opportunity to step to the fore. “Please escort the former duke to his chambers.”

  Again, he didn’t say the King of England, and David wondered if they’d momentarily forgotten who he really was, or—and this caused him another moment of real concern—they knew of yet another plot to usurp his throne, some nefarious scheme going on at home while he was busy in France. Or they themselves were in the midst of perpetrating one.

  Well, his people had planned for that too. It was why David’s father had stayed behind, along with Nicholas de Carew, Edmund Mortimer, and Humphrey de Bohun. If any of them decided to betray David in an attempt to usurp his throne, he truly was in a pickle.