by Andy Gavin
Sword in hand, the Tick-Tock leaps across the room to crouch on the anvil. He was playing with us all along.
We’re trapped.
Yvaine grabs my hair with both hands.
“Charlie, I hope you dinna make me regret this.”
She gives me a quick, fierce kiss, and we’re sucked upwards like a ping-pong ball becoming the lucky number.
Chapter Twelve:
Thistles
France, uptime
IF TIME TRAVELING INVOLVES ANY ACTUAL TRAVELING — the passing of real time in-between sucking out of 1725 and landing wherever we land — it’s not the kind of thing the human mind can grasp all at once. I sense we’re falling upwards through the void, the same empty swirling of minced-up stars that was inside the Tick-Tock’s time-hole. Lights flash around us and I cling to Yvaine as if my life depends on it—
We pop up out of nothing, and the top of my head slams into something hard. Yvaine and I clutch each other, but the space is too cramped to sit all the way up. My forehead knocks into her nose and she grunts. We’re under a table.
Someone shrieks high enough to break glass.
“Shit, woman!” A man says. “Don’t fart lead.”
A dog is barking. Knees and feet ring us in. Some wear leather shoes, some are barefoot, all are muddy.
Ruddy arms pull me out into the room.
“What kind o’devil are you?” The man’s thick and round and red-faced and funny-bearded. And he shakes the sense out of me.
The room is small, showing green trees and blue sky through a hole in the stone wall that only the charitable might call a window. I count four children and a woman as red-faced as the big man.
“Witchcraft!” The woman crosses herself.
I feel a deep bass rumbling, sense it in my bones. The floor vibrates, a silent tremor that grows until I can barely stand upright. I sway and Yvaine grabs my legs.
“Get down!” she yells. “Timequake!”
The earth pitches and heaves as the family becomes transparent, fading with each passing moment.
Yvaine kneels right through the table and tugs me to the ground. Her head looks normal but her body is obscured by a see-through slab of wood. A slab that fades along with the people, the roof, and half the walls.
When the shaking stops, we’re kneeling inside three ruined stone walls, only two reaching full height. A carpet of moss and mud has replaced the straw and dirt floor. Outside, downy green fields stretch into the distance, crisscrossed by thick lines of darker trees and dotted with bright flowers.
“God only knows what we done.” Yvaine’s whisper is loud against the soft chirping of birds and insects. She wears a new dress — new as in different, not as in clean — with a top almost like overalls over a puffy white blouse and a lace thing covering much of her hair.
But evidently, we haven’t gone far enough into the future for her to get shoes.
“What happened to those people?” I say.
She shakes her head. “We changed somethin’. It caught up with us, an’ those folk weren’t here no more.”
I think about the Tick-Tock gloating over the still form of Ben Franklin, fire blazing all around. I definitely didn’t read about that in his autobiography.
The adrenaline rush from the church wears off and exhaustion smacks me like Mike Tyson’s fist. I slump against one of the rough stone walls and reach for Yvaine’s hand, soft against my palm. The air feels humid. While the smell of char and smoke lingers in my nostrils, the weather here is warm and breezy, scented with flowers and herbs and trees and all sorts of things not found in Ben Franklin’s London.
In short, it smells great.
“When and where are we?” I say.
“I couldn’t think what else t’do, so I bringed us to me da’s.” Tears trickle down Yvaine’s cheeks. “It feeled like a long way, too, further than I ever gone in one hop.”
“Scotland?”
She shakes her head. “France. In the last months before they was killt, we fled here t’escape the Tocks.” She’s sobbing now. “I’m not goin’ t’see him never again.”
I scoot closer and put my arm around her.
“Billy?”
She shoves my arm away and stands up.
“You gots what you wanted.” Her voice isn’t loud, but her tone is as cold as the stone wall against my skin.
She staggers out the gap in the walls where the door was five minutes ago, squares her shoulders, and strides across the field.
I drag myself to my feet and follow.
“I didn’t want it this way!” I yell.
“I be doin’ fine before you an’ that there damn Tick-Tock dropped into me life,” she says. “Almost wish you hadn’t.”
At least I rate an almost. I follow her swaying blue skirts through the emerald sea dotted with violet flowers.
I have shoes, but they’re knee-high boots now. Not to mention the high-waisted white trousers, short jacket, and vest. Something not unlike the knife I had in the church is thrust through my belt.
Yvaine seems to know where she’s going. We march across the big swath of high grass. To our left the field rolls upward and at the top of the little hill, perhaps a mile away, is an enormous house, four or five stories tall, with gray conical turrets on top of a white stone facade.
We come to a row of trees and the banks of a sluggish river, perhaps thirty feet wide. Yvaine wades right in.
She pulls her dress, then her underthings, over her head and throws them onto the bank. Then she turns to me, knee deep in the water and stark naked.
“Is this what you want, Charlie?” She claps her hands across her breasts, then between her legs. “Come take your victory prize!”
I’m frozen. Shock, horror, lust — I don’t know which. I feel like two different animals in the same body. The lizard part of me coils underneath my trousers. The monkey in my head chatters senselessly.
“Not this way.” Although I can’t help but notice she has a little peanut-shaped birthmark on her upper right thigh.
She steps backward into the river until it rises to cover the mark. Rises across her hips and navel and—
“Take me here.” Her voice is bitter. “Like a water nymph carried off with heather in her hair.” The tears are back.
I don’t really know what she’s talking about, but I wade in myself, boots, socks, pants and all. The water is warm, but Yvaine is shivering. I pull off my jacket and hold it out to her.
She doesn’t take it but neither does she resist as I drape it over her pale shoulders and walk her toward the shore.
“You’ve freed me an’ binded me both as sure as with tartan an’ ring,” she says between sobs.
When we reach the bank, her jaw is chattering even though the air’s nice enough. I rub her shoulders through the thick wool.
“You should be happy now,” she says.
Then why do I feel like such a shit?
Yvaine’s outspoken insanity is as brief as her nudity and she maintains a sullen silence until the hazy sun drops below the walls of the ruined farmhouse. She hasn’t moved in hours but sits against one stone wall with her skirts wrapped around her knees and her bare toes half buried in the dirt.
“Welcome home.” I’ve had hours to work on this opening.
My pithy remark garners a weak smile, so I follow up with the brilliant, “Will it get cold at night?” Plus my stomach’s growling.
She surprises me by answering.
“I’m guessin’ it be June, maybe July, so we ain’t gonna freeze.”
“How do you know?”
“The cotton thistle be in bloom.” She rolls forward and crawls to a cluster of the violet blossoms. As she does, I can see her legs to just above the knee. My imagination, amply fueled back at the stream, fills in the remaining inches.
“Me mum brought them here t’remind her of home.” She plucks a flower. “Seems they like it.”
She holds one out and I take the spiky green bulb with the feath
ery purple top. It looks like one of those kooky troll dolls.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t never have teased you.”
“Does that mean you aren’t mad at me?”
“I know it ain’t all your fault. But your comin’ changed everythin’, twisted me on me ear.”
“You scared me back at the stream,” I say.
The light is almost gone now, but I still see her scowl.
“You can’t save me, so there’s no use worryin’.”
“Maybe you can save me,” I say.
“I couldn’t even save me own baby.” Her face is wet again. She fumbles inside her dress and takes out the little cloth-wrapped bundle I saw her drop in the London cellar. She sorts through her flowers for a particularly ratty one, just a bit of gray with a lone strand of purple.
“Me mum pressed this for me,” she says, holding it alongside the fresh one I’ve got. “It comed from this very place. Long ago.”
I want to comfort her but sense she’s as skittish as a mouse in the kitchen.
“And you kept it with you all those years, through how many jumps across time?”
“Eight. Maybe ten. Flowers be safe. Time take no issue with ’em.” She puts it away and rewraps the bundle. “She an’ Da always bringed me a lil’ gift whenever they comed back.”
Clueless as I am, I get that she just cracked open a door for me.
“May I put my arm around you?”
“I tupped me share of gentlemen but no one never asked me that.”
I cringe. “Maybe they weren’t gentlemen.”
“Maybe not.”
I sit close with my arm behind her back. The temperature is dropping, but she’s warm against my side. I notice the stars for the first time. Really notice the stars. They speckle the sky like jewels, a hundred times more of them than I remember.
“I love the smell of this place,” she says, and I have to agree.
I’m suddenly aware she’s not speaking English but some alien and prettier tongue — which somehow I understand.
“What language is that?” Listening to my own words, I realize I’m speaking it too.
“French, I suppose,” she says. “Time makes sure we fit in.”
The sunset has left me with a deep sense of sadness. And guilt.
“Do you think Ben Franklin is…” I can’t even say it.
“I’m pretty sure we killt him, if that’s what you askin’,” she whispers.
Wow. She knows how to get to the heart of it. My stomach makes like a fish on the dock.
“I so didn’t want that,” I say. “Not any of it the way it happened.”
Except for her.
She shakes her head. “Not me neither, but it happened.”
“What’s it going to mean if he’s dead?”
“You be the one from the future. But things have changed, that timequake be the universe’s way o’ letting us know. And it be the biggest I ever felt. We mightn’t now find history what you expect.”
I’m still confused. “What’s a timequake?”
She sighs. “If history gets changed — and that ain’t never easy — it makes a quake. Like ripples flowing uptime, bringing the changes. The bigger the change, the bigger the quake. Only travelers notice ’em. And Tick-Tocks, I suppose.”
“And we caused it?”
“Methinks.”
That flopping fish in my gut, I think it’s one of those spiky pufferfish types.
“How do we even find out what year this is?” I say.
She giggles. “Walk up t’someone and ask.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Don’t be in such a hurry. The past an’ the future ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
I guess once you acclimate to the idea of time travel, it’s hard not to think of different times as different places. My mom might be crazy-worried back in Philly, but so long as I pop back the same day I left, she’ll never even know I was gone.
“If we don’t get some food soon,” I say, thinking of the gnawing pain in my belly, “you might start to look like lunch.”
There’s a rustle in the darkness and one of her legs flops into my lap. “Here, have a ham hock.” She tugs her skirt up to her knee.
I feel hot in the face and tight down below. My heart is pounding, but my head is all confused. The situation is so serious, yet here in my little now, it’s hard to focus on the grand sweep of history — even if it may now include an American Revolution without Ben Franklin.
“Are you teasing me again?” I jiggle her legs with mine.
A brief glimmer of teeth. “You’ll just have to find out.”
If she’s testing me, which move is right? I touch my index finger to her shin and draw gentle figure eights. Whenever shaving became popular with the ladies, it was after Yvaine’s time.
She adds her other leg to join the first and lies back.
“That’s nice,” she says. “Travelin’s like bein’ borned anew. Every time, me old life fades like a dream.”
I wish mine could — my recent old life, anyway. Letting the Tick-Tock skewer us or Donnie’s fire burn us wouldn’t have helped anyone, but all the same I know my hands aren’t clean.
But rubbing Yvaine’s legs is a terrific distraction from shame and guilt.
I must’ve dozed off, but a dull boom in the distance wakes me.
Yvaine stirs. She’s still draped across my lap, cuddled against me for warmth.
More of the big sounds echo across the countryside, like distant fireworks. The first hint of dawn edges the sky, and a flash lights the tree line. More booms follow half a minute later.
“What are those noises?” I whisper.
“I dinna ken. But they seems far off.”
She stretches and rolls on top of me. Suddenly her face is in front of mine and her hands are holding my head. Then we’re kissing.
“What are you doing?” I say.
She stops for a second. “Charlie, do you want to talk or do you want to…” She goes back to kissing me.
I don’t complain again. I have to pee, but no way I’m getting up now, and so between the full-bladder feeling and the snuggling I’m… well, I believe the eighteenth-century expression is piss proud.
Yvaine keeps rubbing against me. She nips at me like a puppy. I slide a hand down her soft cheek to her neck.
“That feels nice,” she whispers. “I needs feel somethin’ nice.”
She takes my hand in hers and slides it lower. Things are soft. Real soft. She presses herself against me.
We grind lips and hips. She starts unbuttoning things — a lot of things — then rolls on top of me. She undoes her hair and I feel it on my face, on my chest, everywhere.
Chapter Thirteen:
Lessons
France, uptime
THE EARLY MORNING SUN ILLUMINATES OUR LITTLE RUIN. My head is clear, which feels odd, since I’ve been hungover practically every morning since I met Yvaine.
I’m especially glad I’m sober, otherwise I might think last night was a dream. Given the general disarray of our clothes, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t, and pretty psyched, a sentiment shared by the birds chirping their little hearts out.
Yvaine’s hair covers her face. I try to brush it back behind her ears without waking her. Fail.
She yawns and stretches. “Mornin’.”
I kiss her, hoping she’ll be up for more — I know I am — but she pulls back.
“One tumble an’ the laddie gets all lovey dovey.”
“Shouldn’t I?”
Her grin would put the Wicked Witch of the West to shame. “T’was nice, just a little overeager, quicky sticky.”
This is not how I imagined the conversation going.
“Don’t give me the long face.” She pulls down the blanket, offering a good view of her marginally dressed state. “That ought t’cheer you up.”
“I just thought—”
“We needs go back and help Billy, and save Ben if we can.”
; I try to focus. “For sure.” But going back to change something in our own timeline... “What happens if we meet ourselves?”
She shrugs. “I never gone but one direction. Da tried to explain, somethin’ about ghosts, but I was too young to understand. This much I know, you can’t change your own past.”
“So how do we save Ben — and Billy?”
“We gots to think of something.” She walks to the window and starts untangling her hair.
“What if we go forward in time?” I say. “We’ll find my dad. I told you, he knows everything. He can help us fix this.”
Her hair-combing speeds up, her fingers ripping out knots rather than untying them.
“That be far uptime. Months each way. We goes back now.”
“I don’t even know how,” I say.
“I’ll learn you.”
On that, at least, we agree.
“We almost died in that church. I say we go uptime.”
She stomps her pretty little foot. “Downtime.”
I step forward again. She backs up. I maneuver her into a corner.
“Uptime.” I put my hand on her breast, which is pretty darn cool — and not in a temperature way.
She removes it. “Downtime.”
“Uptime.” I kiss her.
“Downtime.” She whispers into my mouth.
Breakfast a-la-Yvaine is four tiny bird eggs for the two of us and all-you-can-eat blackberries. The eggs come raw.
We picnic in the field. The distant pops that woke us during the night continue in fits and starts.
“Those booms sound like artillery,” I say.
“Cannon?”
“At least they aren’t getting any closer.” I nod at the big house, which in my mind translates as chateau. “What’s that building?”
She snickers. “That center stone tower be part of an abbey when I’s last here.”
“Won’t they notice us camping on their front lawn?” I say.
Yvaine stands. “The first time is the hardest.” She points right at my crotch.
I glance down. Truth be told, I’m pretty sore—
She punches my shoulder. “Openin’ a time-hole, you dolt.”