Unbroken in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Again, the issue was finally resolved not by consensus among everyone—or at least not that David could determine—but when a single man stepped forward. He hadn’t distinguished himself from the others up until now but, upon closer inspection, he was cast from a different mold. For starters, he was dressed in completely current clothing, with short hair and a trimmed beard. In age, he was no older than David.

  Isaac introduced him. “This is my grandson, Jacob. He will come with you.”

  Jacob bowed his head briefly, and that appeared to be that. The entire process had taken half an hour at most. A minute later, David found himself walking down the corridor towards the door, this time with Jacob as an additional companion.

  Gerard hadn’t attended the meeting, having been left at the front to keep an eye on the comings and goings from the street. Now he eyed Jacob. “Are you sure about this, my lord?”

  “If your king hadn’t asked for someone to come with him, I would have volunteered myself,” Jacob said in reply, even though Gerard had been talking to David. Jacob’s gaze was steady on Gerard’s face, and there was no defiance in his voice, even though interrupting a conversation between a king and his servant just wasn’t done.

  Instead of taking offense, which wasn’t like him anyway, David found himself amused and curious at the same time.

  “Why choose you?” Gerard asked.

  “I was educated in Constantinople and have returned to find my people impoverished and reviled. Wearing this,” he put his hand over the yellow circle on his chest that marked him as a Jew, “is an anathema to me.”

  David was in a bit of a hurry to leave the synagogue, since the Vincennes mission to rescue Philippe’s family was next on his agenda, but he also knew if he didn’t get it right with the Jewish community, the entire endeavor would be in vain. “If you’re to come with me, you’d better take it off. No Jew can be seen entering the Templar commandery—today of all days. In fact, if you come with me to England, you will never have to wear it again.”

  “If you mean to imply that Jews in England are never blamed for diseases or the weather, I do not believe you.” Jacob’s lip curled in disdain. “My uncle was killed in Oxford the year I was born.”

  “That was the year I was born too,” David said in a mild voice, thinking Jacob wouldn’t be persuaded by the usual arguments, and maybe it wasn’t his place to convince Jacob of anything anyway. “I do not control the behavior of every one of my citizens—or any of them, for that matter. But I do control what happens afterwards, who is punished and who is blamed. If you’d followed what has been happening in England since I became king, you would know that.”

  At the sharp words, Jacob’s spine straightened, and he appeared to be about to retreat. David decided it also wasn’t his job to wait for him. Either he was their liaison or he wasn’t. Either he was going to take off that badge or he wasn’t.

  Henri had been standing at the door, waiting for David’s signal to open it. He would be leading them again, which was good because David didn’t know the way back. Their small party started down the street, Darren at David’s side this time, and Gerard bringing up the rear.

  “I don’t remember the last time I saw you angry,” Darren said.

  “I’m not angry.” David was taking long strides. “I’m fuming.”

  “People believe what they need to believe, sometimes against all evidence. That’s why the Jewish community came back to Paris after the last expulsion, and that’s why they fear leaving. It’s the unknown that’s the problem, not anything you said. Isaac is on board, anyway, even if Jacob is not.”

  David let out a breath and told himself Darren was right. He could do only so much. The rest had to be up to every individual person, all of them making their own choices. That was the promise he’d held out to Henri. Anything else was unacceptable.

  They were within sight of the Paris Temple when hurrying footsteps came from behind them. David didn’t turn around to see who was following, assuming if it was someone who meant him harm, Gerard would tell him. As it turned out, it was Jacob after all, and they went through the gate together, at which point David finally stopped and turned.

  Jacob stood a few paces from the gatehouse, a huge grin on his face and no badge on his chest. He appeared completely uncowed by David’s anger. “I’m with you, my lord. And if they didn’t say it in the synagogue, please know it was because they were overwhelmed by the news you brought, and no offense was intended. But I’ll say it now: thank you for the opportunity to live.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Day Two

  Rachel

  Rachel had managed to doze most of the day, her head on Samuel’s shoulder, and she woke to a growing darkness within the prison, indicating the waning of the day. The basement did have windows, if one could call them that, high up in the wall of every cell, but as they were only four inches wide, they barely deserved the name.

  They did admit some light, augmented by a window double the size of the others, which again wasn’t saying much, located at the end of the corridor. It was the only light allowed them, once the guards removed themselves and the torches they carried. Rachel suspected the windows’ purpose was to allow the guards to go about their duties during the day without torches or lanterns. Waste not, want not, and all that.

  It also told her how far below ground they were. They were in a dungeon, but it was only one story into the earth. The dampness of the stones upon which they sat indicated that even that depth was potentially too deep, near the level of the water table. It wasn’t surprising, given the proximity of the River Seine. From the looks, some of the tunnels and caverns under the prison had been carved by water in the far distant past.

  She shifted to find Samuel awake as well, resting his head against the back of the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him.

  “It won’t be long now,” he said in English.

  That made her sit up a little straighter. “I like the sound of that.”

  Aaron had been crouched beside one of the women, who was ill—whether with an actual contagious disease or simply from malnourishment and dehydration it was hard to tell. Now he straightened too and came closer. His knees creaked as he settled himself cross-legged on the floor. “Whenever you’re ready, I am too, believe me.”

  “These people are worse off than we hoped,” Samuel said. “We’re going to have to expand the number who leave dead.”

  “That won’t be a problem,” Aaron said. “I have enough poppy juice for everyone who needs it.”

  Samuel had been the most threatening of the three of them, so it was he the guards had searched most thoroughly. They had looked Rachel over cursorily without actually touching her, and Aaron they had all but ignored. It was one of the few aspects of the plan not up to them, but they’d hedged their bets the best they could, transporting the poppy juice in modern bladders, held against the skin with wrappings and then hidden by Aaron’s voluminous robes.

  They knew from earlier reconnaissance and questioning of some of the guards (lubricated sufficiently at a nearby tavern), that the prisoners were looked in on only once a day, some time in the afternoon, at which point they were given ‘food’ and ‘water’, if either actually deserved the name. A guard might patrol at another time, but no guard was posted inside the prison keep. Why would there be? The prisoners had nowhere to go.

  At that one time of day, anybody who’d died in the previous twenty-four hours was hauled out of his cell and placed in a room not so affectionately called ‘the dead room’. Every night after the sun set, as part of their service to the community, the Templars sent a wagon to collect those who died without being shriven and buried them outside the city walls. This tradition had been established long before David had conceived his plan, but the fact of its existence had been put to good use.

  The dead room had two doors, one into the prison and one out, each opened by a key. Because the room was located off the courtyard rather than within the main pr
ison building, the guards didn’t see it as a hole in their defenses, and the Templars never entered the prison itself because, from inside the dead room, they couldn’t open the inner door that led to the courtyard.

  Rachel looked around at the two dozen people with them and hoped the Templars who came remembered to bring an extra wagon for all the dead bodies they were to carry away tonight.

  “We should check in with Venny and the others,” Samuel said. “They need to be ready to move.”

  “I don’t trust English,” Rachel said. “Welsh?”

  “Maybe we should find out who else is in here first,” Samuel said. “It would be just our luck to be locked up with a traitorous Welshman.”

  Last night, they had attempted to speak to whoever was in the next cell, but their efforts had produced only moans. Whoever he was, he’d been brought in some time after their arrival, manhandled down the stairs, and thrown into the cell. A second man had followed, equally wretched. They hadn’t known if the cell was empty before their arrival or if there were more ill people inside. Their companions hadn’t known either, not having heard anything from the other side of the wall since the last man had been dragged from the cell two days earlier.

  Rachel went to the door of the cell and called through the bars, “My name is Rachel. Are you able to speak?”

  At first there was no answer, and then Venny said dryly, “Well, you know about us.”

  “I do,” she said kindly. “Any word from the men between us?”

  “One of them has been moaning pretty steadily for the last hour,” Rhys said, equally dryly. It was nice to know David’s guardsmen were holding up well.

  Rachel stuck an arm through the bars and waved it. “Yoo hoo! What’s your name?” She said the latter phrase in three different languages, hoping to elicit a response.

  “Yoo hoo?” Samuel said from behind her.

  She shot him a grin, though a quick look around her cell sobered her instantly. Sometimes gallows humor was the only thing that made survival possible, but many of the prisoners with her were well past that point.

  By her estimate, she was in the largest cell in the row, but even so, the prisoners had been crammed into a space twenty feet wide and ten deep. It didn’t give anyone the room they needed to do anything beyond keep to their few feet—and afforded zero privacy.

  She and Samuel had managed to make themselves comfortable overnight against the exterior wall, squeezed in among many others. Some simply sprawled on the floor in the middle of the cell. Unfortunately, Rachel had really needed to pee all day, and she was holding it rather than face the bucket in the corner that was already full. The smells down here were nauseating enough as it was. She’d lived in Earth Two long enough to know that what they were experiencing was normal for a prison, but that didn’t make her want to escape any less quickly. She told herself not eating and drinking all this time was just another fast such as Yom Kippur, and if she could do it at home, she could do it here.

  The next cell over seemed smaller, and by the shadow of Venny’s arm, he and the others were only fifteen feet away.

  “Hello!” She tried again.

  At long last a voice drawled, “What is it you want?”

  The accent was thick, speaking French but not native to it.

  “I want to know who you are and if anyone else is in there with you,” she said.

  A tsk of disgust came from the other side of the wall. “Why should you care?”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because I’m a complete stranger and have nothing to do with you.”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  The man in the cell scoffed again. “You are a woman. Women can’t be doctors.”

  “They are when they’re English,” she said.

  That prompted a moment of silence. “I still don’t see why I should talk to you. We’re all going to die, and even if you are a doctor, a stone wall separates us.”

  At least he was talking now, and Rachel wasn’t going to give up just because he was despairing. “Do you have anything else to do? Is your day so full that you can’t spend it talking to a total stranger on the other side of a wall?”

  At that, the man actually laughed. “Your voice tells me you are beautiful. For you, I will keep talking.”

  “She is beautiful!” Samuel put his face to the bars. “But she’s my sister, so hands off.”

  The man laughed again, a full sound that filled the corridor and the three cells along it. “As long as we are in here, you need not worry, friend. I am battered, and my servant, Paolo, has not regained consciousness since they put us in here. I fear he doesn’t have long to live.”

  “May we know your name?” Rachel said.

  He heaved a sigh, audible even from this far away. “If you must know, it’s Marco Polo.”

  Chapter Thirty

  Day Two

  Callum

  “Callum!” Cassie flew down the lane and threw herself at him. “That was too close. I almost lost you, and it would have been all my fault! It was my idea to give peace a chance.”

  The words spilled out of her as if rehearsed, or ones she’d repeated to herself many times. Likely she had done exactly that, all the way down from the tower at the center of the castle.

  Callum’s arms came around his wife. “Is that what you said to David?”

  “I didn’t speak to David, only Elisa. He’d gone to meet with the rabbis at the synagogue. She said she would get word to him that you were alive, and that Angoulême is saved.”

  At a cost, though Callum wasn’t quite ready to say those words yet. But he could say something. “You didn’t do the wrong thing. It wouldn’t have been wrong even had I died.”

  She leaned back to look into his face. “How can you say that?”

  She’d met him at the entrance to the Martial Gate, and now he reached for the stones of the wall for support and settled himself on the step into the guardroom. She sat beside him, and he rested his head against hers, exhaustion filling him.

  After the smoke had cleared and the cavalry had finished mopping up the last of the resistance, Callum followed them back into the field. He was covered in blood, none of it his. “How would you feel now if we’d simply started shelling them, like we ended up doing, but without making an attempt to talk to them first? How would you feel then about the thousand dead men out there in the field?”

  Cassie was silent a moment, but he’d known before he’d asked the question what she would say. What she had to say.

  “It would have been awful.”

  “We do the right thing. We stay the course, not regardless of what anyone else does, but despite it. If we don’t have the best interests of this world at heart, who will? That said—” he shifted on the hard stones, too tired to stand, “—Artois thought he was doing the right thing gunning down our little peace envoy, and I just emptied the rest of the LMG’s ammunition into men I would have preferred to befriend.”

  Cassie covered his hand with hers. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “How many of ours are dead?”

  Cassie made a motion with her head, implying she didn’t want to say. But at his steady gaze, she did. “Fifty dead.” She shook her head. “Those bullets ripped through the walls in places. We had to get off the battlement entirely. That’s why it took so long to counter attack. We were literally getting killed up there.” She paused. “Peter’s wounded.”

  He made a motion to get up, but Cassie stopped him. “He’s in surgery. Abraham is doing everything he can for him.”

  “Where?”

  “His whole right side. It chewed up his arm.” She closed her eyes. “His shoulder. There was blood everywhere.”

  Callum scrubbed at his face with his hands, too tired to move. Too tired to cry. “It all comes down to what a person believes is the greater good.”

  Cassie nodded into his shoulder. This wasn’t the first time she’d heard this.

  “Even now we are making little ethical sacrific
es for what we believe is the greater good. Where we come from, officers and agents of MI-5 and MI-6 lie all the time. Certainly, our men and women in Paris are merrily deceiving those around them, particularly and hopefully Nogaret and his minions, because we have a bigger goal in mind, one that we feel serves the world better.” He gestured to the lands beyond the gatehouse. “But we—I—just killed men, possibly good men.” He shook his head.

  “Rather than die ourselves.” Cassie looked down at her hands. “I preferred being safe and righteous.”

  Callum lifted an arm to put around her shoulders so he could pull her even closer. “My PTSD symptoms are back.”

  “I know.” She spoke into the wool of his cloak.

  “I should have known I couldn’t keep it hidden. What we’ve just done isn’t going to help.” He showed her his free hand, trembling as he held it out. Dried blood marred it, including under his nails. “In my head, the blood is never going to come off. I’m loath to pick up Gareth with hands this dirty.”

  “Those men out there died because their commanders put them in the line of fire. It’s a messy imperfect world.” She grasped his hand, turning it over in her own to study his palm. “What did you just say to me? We do the right thing. You did do the right thing. It’s all we can ever do.” She looked up at him. “If you had died I would have been really, really angry.”

  “I didn’t say I wanted to. Only that it still would have been the right thing if I had.” He heaved a sigh. “Do you want to go home?”

  “To Shrewsbury?”

  “Or to Avalon. We could have a nice life there.”

  “Avalon is a mess too and just as morally ambiguous.”

  “We have enough money that we could insulate Gareth from the worst of it.”

  “As if that wouldn’t be morally ambiguous too.” Cassie gazed through the open gateway as another cartful of wounded Frenchmen trundled through the gatehouse, heading to the hospital, which they’d expanded into the quarters of the monastery and the Templar commandery.