by Andy Gavin
Oh yeah. That. “How do I do it?”
“If you be ready to travel, you’ll just feel it.” She grabs me and squeezes. There.
I stifle a squeak. I feel it all right. Last night was great, but this seems more like coughing for the family pediatrician.
“I’m ready.” Which, sore or not, is true.
“We’ll see about that. Before you open a hole, you needs learn where t’put the other end.”
“I managed last night.”
She grins. “You’ve still a thing or two t’learn.”
Low blow.
She continues, “But I means where in time and place we be wantin’ to go.”
Now I imagine dumping us out in the middle of the Atlantic or above a lava crater in Hawaii.
“Your hole will open at your feet,” she says. “Downtime holes be underneath.”
“Is an uptime hole different?” I ask.
“It’s above me head — goin’ up, silly.”
“It was so crazy in the church I didn’t even see it,” I say.
She smiles. “That be because I was kissin’ you.”
“Yeah, that too.”
“But anyways, our holes open and close much faster than a Tock’s, so you never sees it when you travel, only when you stays behind. The moment it opens, you’re gone. So dinna ever do it unless we’re holdin’ hands or kissin’ or skin to skin one way or another — or you’ll be gone downtime and me caught in your future with no way t’ever meet.”
I grab her hand. “Skin to skin!”
“You be likin’ that a wee bit much.” But the crooked smile is on her face and she squeezes my hand. “First, you must needs conjure in your head an image of where and when you wants t’go.”
“A place I can understand, but how do I think about a when?”
“Once we start fallin’ there be a sense of time rushin’ backward. The longer you hold the picture in your mind, the further you go until you release an’ pop out.”
“So it’s like staying on the train until you get to your station, then stepping off?” I say.
“What’s a train, Charlie?”
“Forget the train. Riding a carriage in a straight line, then deciding to hop off?”
She nods. “Just like that. But you can’t turn around, an’ each of us can only go so far. It be different from traveler to traveler. I dinna ken how far we come yesterday. My longest be thirty-one years, but travelin’ with you felt queer.”
This makes me chuckle.
“What happens if you don’t get off at the end?”
“You just pop out, can’t go no further. That usually not be the problem. If you pay close mind when you’re in that no place, you feel time pass.”
“The in-between place? The one with the spinning lights?”
She nods. “The light be the sun, not as it spins around the earth each day but as the seasons orbit the year. Once around per annum.”
“Doesn’t that make it hard to arrive at a particular day?” I ask.
“A day, yes, but time be strange in this in-between of ours. The spinnin’ sun speeds an’ slows as you will it. It has a way of workin’ out. At least for me. I heared it telled different by others I met.”
Sounds oh-so-scientific.
“So where and when are we going?” I ask.
“Here.”
I give her a funny look.
“This be deadly business,” she says. “If we go somewheres dangerous we could die. You needs hold a portrait in your head of this here place.” She waves her free arm to indicate the ruined farmhouse and the gentle fields. “We go maybe one orbit of the sun. One year. Best to pass our same selves long by. From the look of things, this place been empty some considerable while.”
I open my mouth but she presses two fingers to my lips.
“Let’s practice.” She grips my hand hard and points at my groin again. “Find the feelin’ inside you and pull down. Like wanking.”
One thing about Yvaine: she isn’t coy.
“What makes you think I wank?” I say.
“All boys wank.”
Got me there.
Two hours later, after countless futile attempts at pulling down, sweat beads my brow and I feel a headache coming on.
“It ain’t so easy the first time.” Yvaine rubs my neck. “But I needs show you somethin’ anyways.”
She leads me across the field, past the cottage and onto a wooded knoll. Halfway up, she stops to pick pink flowers off a shrub growing from the rocky soil. When we reach the top, we find a sloppy ring of mossy gray stones.
“Just after me seventh birthday,” she says, “Da was teachin’ me how to travel. He bided me tiptoe into the future but stay in the same place.”
“What if you’d gone too far by accident?”
“He comed with me just in case, but we only traveled a week or so. Ma was much relieved when we showed up. My reach only be a few decades, but I gots more control than most. Da could go over a hundred, but hearing him talk, he’d be walkin’ as many miles and waitin’ as many days to get where he wanted.”
“What happened after that first trip?”
“Da saw a Tock at market day in Inverness. After that we comed here. Everythin’ be good for some months, then he found us.”
She paws at one of the waist-high rocks. Purple-topped thistles grow about its base.
“The Tock taked Mum first,” she says.
Although the stones bear no markings, now I can see them for what they are: graves.
“He comed out of nowhere with twin dirks of brass.” Yvaine pauses to wipe her eyes. “Held one to her neck. Da went for him but the beast hurlt a second blade into his eye. Killt him so fast his clothes fell to the floor empty. Nothing left even t’bury.”
“And your mom?” I say.
“The Tock sliced her throat, opened her up like a hog, then she too be gone.”
I put my arms around her, holding her tight. “I’m so sorry.”
“I be hidin’ in the loft.” She leans into me. “I never did nothin’ to stop him.”
“What were you, seven?”
“After, I taked their clothes an’ the small things that mattered an’ buried them here in the old circle.”
“What were their names?” They aren’t written anywhere, but names are important to us travelers.
“Phillipe an’ Heather,” she says, patting first one stone, then another.
“Did you have a surname?”
“De Verge. Me da sayed his own da was no traveler — like your mum — so he used me grandmum’s name an’ heraldry.”
“Yvaine de Verge suits you.”
She watches the breeze ripple the wildflowers. “Time’s taken everyone that matters. First me parents, now Billy.”
“I’ll stay with you. Trust me.”
She rests her head on my shoulder, looking me in the eyes.
“Can I? Someday, they’ll take you from me or me from you.”
This makes me mad. Not just Mom-grounded-me-for-something-I-didn’t-do mad, but really mad.
“Not if we stop them first. I know it hurts, but can you remember anything else your parents said that could help us? Anything about this place?”
“This just be where me da was born.”
“In the past?” Which I realize is a useless term for us.
“We was here in Tudor times, but me da, he was born uptime somewheres.”
She scrunches her nose and leans against a stone, thinking. Then her face lights up like a cartoon lightbulb just appeared over her head.
“In the church,” she says. “The Tock, he held that brass thing, the little square!”
“I remember. Same as the day we met, at Ben’s.”
Her lips curl into a wicked smile. “Me da had one of them brass pages too. At night he’d sometimes sit by the fire and read it.”
Like the shiny book on Dad’s desk. Pages from a time traveler manual?
“What happened to your dad’s?” I ask.<
br />
“You be standing on it.”
I look down at the green between the gravestones, then drop to my knees and start pulling up the moss.
“Stop!” Yvaine kneels and grabs my hands.
“You said there aren’t any bodies.”
She shakes her head. “It ain’t right. Their ghosts might come for us. Da said travelers has ghosts.”
She crosses herself.
“But it might help us!” I say.
She chews on her lip again. “It ain’t right.”
We end up by the river, at a place where the water forms a pool by the bank. Our feet dangle in the not-so-cool water. Under the surface, Yvaine tickles my toes with hers.
The thunder-like sound has been going on all morning, but it’s pumping up the volume, which I mention.
She shrugs. “Try travelin’ again when you be ready. One of these years you’ll get the knack for it.”
“You always give me a hard time.”
She snickers. “Me mum warned me that travelin’ couples be bound tighter than regular folk, that no matter how we argue we gots t’stick together.”
I elbow her. “That’s a good reason not to argue.”
“She also sayed I be a most disobedient child, full of piss and vinegar.”
Seeing her impish expression, I want to throw her down on the riverbank and do everything we did last night and then some. But memories of the burning church overpower such thoughts, and anyway Yvaine is lecturing again.
“After we travel, we has t’recover. The period be different for each of us, but until the power returns, no time-hole.”
“If this were a video game,” I say, “that’d be called a cooldown.”
She pats my pants. “Cooldown, that sounds about right.”
“I mean the length of time between using your super power.” My face feels hot.
She scrunches hers.
“How long is yours?”
“Seventeen days,” she says.
“So we have to wait sixteen more before we can go into the future?”
She nods. “When both our… cooldowns are finished, we’ll see about moving on. That way if we lands somewhere dangerous, the other can pull us back t’safety.
I have to admit, she’s pretty clever about this stuff.
After I tug on my shoes and socks, I make sure my knife is secure. It looks different, longer, with a leather-wrapped handle.
Yvaine says, “Try to—”
“Shhhhh.”
Men in colorful uniforms erupt from the tree line across the river and plunge into the shallow water, rifles held high above their heads as they splash across. They’re wearing fuzzy hats, red jackets, and green plaid skirts.
“Those be me countrymen,” Yvaine says, “Highland Dragoons!”
A few carry flagpoles with a Britishy flag, but I don’t waste time asking her what Scottish troops are doing in France. I grab her hand and run back toward the field and the chateau.
The fireworks have gotten all too close. I hear a whistling noise familiar from countless war movies.
Then the world explodes.
Brown geysers erupt all over the lawn. Sod and earth fly everywhere. The air chokes with smoke and the rotten-egg smell of gunpowder.
And the day started out so well!
Through the haze I hear excited yells, then see a red, white, and blue army pour across the field. Little white flashes and continuous popping erupt like Chinatown fireworks.
What the Military Channel calls small arms fire.
I throw Yvaine to the grass.
“Charlie—”
Another artillery barrage ripples across the battlefield to collide with the second army. If the noise weren’t so deafening I’m sure I’d hear screaming. Instead I only see men — and parts of men — hurled every which way.
A nearby soldier clutches the stump where his leg used to be, which spurts red blood onto the yellow flowers.
I never in my life more wanted to be somewhere else.
The weirdest feeling comes over me, sort of like finding an extra arm I can move inside myself, sort of like a switch deep inside my… groin.
The sun goes behind a cloud. I feel Yvaine’s hand pulse hot in mine.
Suddenly we’re falling.
My brain claws toward an understanding of the in-between. Maybe I’m getting used to time traveling, or maybe it’s because I made this trip happen myself.
I clutch Yvaine’s arm as we tumble down through the awful emptiness. The sun hangs in the void, a bright spot on a field of bright. I feel it turn just a bit—
Chapter Fourteen:
Chateau
France, 1807
WE TUMBLE ONTO THE GRASSY FIELD. In front of us, the chateau windows reflect the sunset. The balmy air smells like it did this morning — better, even — and the rich smell of the soil mixes with the perfume of flowers.
I feel totally spent, but I did it! I traveled back in time on my own power!
“Merciful Jesus in heaven,” Yvaine mutters, her head in her hands. She looks exactly like she did before the battle, only more frazzled.
“You aren’t hurt, are you?” I ask.
“I dinna think so. You?”
I pat myself down. My ears are ringing worse than when Dad dragged me to a Pink Floyd concert, but otherwise I seem intact.
“How far did we come?”
She sniffs the air. “A month or two. That was mayhap late June or July, this be spring.”
I sit down, then lean back onto the grass. My eyes almost close themselves. A nap would be—
Yvaine kicks me gently.
“I dinna hear no cannons, but methinks this time we inquire with the neighbors. We dinna ken how long before you be ready t’travel again.”
“What about you?”
“I telled you. Seventeen days, less the one we spent a wee bit uptime. When we both ready, you takes us back to Billy.”
She kicks me again.
Up close the chateau looks a bit decrepit. The bushes need trimming, rust stains drip from the iron railings, and cracks mar the white marble facade.
“Where are you going?” Yvaine asks.
“The front door?”
“Tsk tsk. Our sort dinna never enter that way,” she says. “Follow me.”
The building is big enough that walking around back takes a while. And I’d pity the guy who mows the lawn, except he seems to be on vacation.
Yvaine leads us to what’s obviously the kitchen, a multi-chimney wing protruding from the back of the house. It smells like bread and onions, which reminds me that I’ve eaten only two bird eggs and some berries since leaving London.
Yvaine taps the side of the door, left open in a half-assed attempt at ventilation.
“Madame,” she says, “mighten two orphans beg a wee bit of food?”
Inside a skinny girl in a grubby dress chops onions under the watchful eye of the cook, a short, wide woman who clearly enjoys the fruits of her labors.
“We got no use for beggars,” she says.
I notice a newspaper covering something on a nearby counter. While Yvaine continues her pitch I creep over. Determining the date is difficult — the paper being stained with grease and written in French.
I parse out May 20, 1807, and something about Paris and the war effort before the cook — armed with a knife — takes notice.
“Get your grubby paws off the veal chops,” the mistress of the kitchen says.
“I was just—”
“Madame Fournier?” a male voice says from across the room. “I’m aware the war ministry has left you little in the way of meat, but must you butcher a young man for tonight’s roast?”
“Monsieur!” the cook says, retracting the point of her blade a smidgen. “These two were stealing.”
“Is that so?” The speaker is a balding gentleman of about sixty, dressed in a somber suit with a white cravat.
“Sir,” Yvaine says, holding her hands out, “we be but two hungry orp
hans, driven from our homes by the war.”
The man has an intense stare. He focuses it on Yvaine so long that she squirms.
“What’s your name, girl?”
“Yvaine.”
The way he’s looking at her, I almost expect him to repeat it back. But he scrunches his face, then approaches to take Yvaine’s chin in his hand and tilt her face.
“Do I know you, chérie?”
“I dinna think so.”
“Madame,” he says to the cook, “give them the bread and the cheese, at least. And a spot of the wine. Lord knows it’ll go sour before I finish it all alone.”
“Very well, monsieur.” The fat woman sheathes her weapon and gets some plates for us.
The gentleman plops himself into a wooden chair by a small table, uncorks a bottle, and pours several glasses of wine, filling his own to the brim.
“Sir,” I say, taking a seat, “what are the soldiers in red and green doing here?” Sure, that hasn’t happened yet, but he might know whom I’m talking about.
“British troops? I’m surprised scouts have made it this far.” He takes a sip of wine. “General Bonaparte has them fairly well bottled up.”
“Napoleon Bonaparte?” I say. Not a big surprise. It is 1807 France.
“The king’s first minister.” He sighs. “Popular or not, the man’s petit conflit has dragged on nearly a decade.”
“That king shouldn’t exist,” I whisper to Yvaine. “I remember a revolution, a Republic, then lots of head chopping. Liberté, fraternité, and all that jazz.”
“How far we come from 1725?” she says.
“Eighty-two years.”
“I warned you things would be different,” she says. “An’ that be like thrice as far uptime as I ever go before.”
“What did you say?” the old man asks. “My hearing isn’t what it used to be.”
“Just wishing the king good health.” I tear into the hard bread and pungent cheese the cook sets on the table.
The man raises his glass. “Vive le roi! Vive Louis XVII!”
Louis Seventeenth?
“Pity he takes after his late father,” the man continues, speaking as much to himself as to us. “Queen Marie-Antoinette is the brighter of the two for certain.”