Footsteps in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  Anna looked up the hill. Only a dozen yards away, the van tracks began. Beyond them, smooth fresh snow stretched as far as she could see. It was as if they’d dropped out of the sky.

  More shouts interrupted her astonishment, and Anna turned to find horsemen bearing down on them. She looked around wildly, but there was nowhere to run. One man leaned down and, in a smooth movement, caught her around the waist. Before she could think, he pulled her in front of him. She struggled to free herself, but the man tightened his grip and growled something she didn’t catch but could easily have been sit still, dammit!

  “David!” Anna’s voice went high.

  “I’m here, Anna.”

  The man holding her turned the horse, and they passed David, just getting comfortable on his own horse. Dumbstruck, Anna twisted in her seat to look back at him.

  All he did was shrug, and Anna faced forward again. They rode across the meadow and down the hill, reaching the bottom just as the wounded man got a boost onto a horse. He gathered the reins while glancing at the van. Anna followed his gaze. The van sat where she’d left it. It was hopeless to think of driving it, even if they had somewhere to go.

  The company followed a trail through the trees. A litany of complaints—about her wet clothes and hair, about her aching neck and back from the car crash, and most of all, her inability to understand what was happening—cycled through Anna’s head as they rode.

  Fortunately, after a mile or two (it was hard to tell in the growing darkness and her misery) they trotted off the trail into a camp. Three fire rings burned brightly and the twenty men who’d ridden in with David and Anna had doubled the number of people in the small space. The man behind Anna dismounted and pulled her after him. Although she tried to stand, her knees buckled, and he scooped her up, carried her to a fallen log near one of the fires, and set her down on it.

  “Thanks,” Anna said automatically, forgetting he probably couldn’t understand English. Fighting tears, she pulled up her hood to hide her face, and

  Then David materialized beside her.

  “Tell me you have an explanation for all this,” Anna said, the moment he sat down.

  He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Not one I’m ready to share, even with you.”

  Great.

  They sat unspeaking as men walked back and forth around the fire. Some cooked; some tended the horses staked near the trees on the edges of the clearing. Three men emerged from a tent thirty feet away. Their chain mail didn’t clink like Anna imagined plate mail would, but it creaked a little as they walked. Someone somewhere roasted meat and, despite her queasiness, Anna’s stomach growled.

  Nobody approached them, and it seemed to Anna that whenever one of the men looked at them, his gaze immediately slid away. She wasn’t confused enough to imagine they couldn’t see her, but maybe they didn’t want to see her or know what to make of her. Anna pulled her coat over her knees, trying to make herself as small as possible. The sky grew darker, and still she and David sat silent.

  “Do you think we’ve stumbled upon a Welsh extremist group that prefers the medieval period to the present day?” Anna finally said.

  “Twenty miles from Philadelphia? Bryn Mawr isn’t that rural. Somehow I just can’t see it.”

  “Maybe we aren’t in Pennsylvania anymore, David.” Anna had been thinking those words for the last half hour and couldn’t hold them in any longer.

  He sighed. “No, perhaps not.”

  “Mom’s going to be worried sick.” Anna choked on the words. “She was supposed to call us at 8 o’clock. I can’t imagine what Aunt Elisa is going to tell her.” Then Anna kicked herself for being so stupid and whipped out her phone.

  “It says searching for service,” David said. “I already tried it.”

  Anna doubled over and put her head into David’s chest. Her lungs felt squeezed, and her throat was tight with unshed tears. He patted her back in a there, there motion, like he wasn’t really paying attention, but when she tried to pull away, he tightened his grip and hugged her to him.

  Eventually, Anna wiped her tears and straightened to look into his face. He tried to smile, but his eyes were reddened and his heart wasn’t in it. Looking at him, Anna resolved not to pretend that all was well. They needed to talk about what had happened even if David didn’t want to. How many books have we all read where the heroine refuses to face reality? How many times have I thrown the book across the room in disgust at her stupidity?

  “What are you thinking?” she asked him.

  He shook his head.

  “We could leave right now, follow the trail back to the van,” Anna said. “It couldn’t be more than a few miles from here.”

  David cleared his throat. “No.”

  “Why not?” she said.

  “What for?”

  “I want to climb to the top of the hill we came down and see what’s up there,” she said. “I know the tracks of the van disappeared, but we had to have driven down that hill from somewhere. We couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere.”

  “Couldn’t we?” David sat with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin in his hands. When Anna didn’t respond, he canted his head to look at her. “Do you really think we’ll find the road home at the top of that hill?”

  Anna looked away from him and into the fire. No ... No more than you do. “You’re thinking time travel, aren’t you?”

  “Time travel is impossible.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Anna’s abrupt question made David hunch. Then he straightened. “Okay. If time travel is possible, why don’t we have people from the future stopping by all the time? If time travel is possible, all of time itself has to have already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent event.”

  “That doesn’t work for me.”

  “Not for me either,” David said. “It’s pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as time has gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, or else how could we travel back and relive it with them?”

  “So you’re saying the same argument could hold for people traveling from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already lived our lives because they are living theirs.”

  “Exactly,” David said.

  “Then where are we? Is this real?”

  “Of course it’s real,” he said, “but maybe not the same reality we knew at home.”

  “I’m not following you,” Anna said.

  “What if the wall of snow led us to a parallel universe?”

  “A parallel universe that has gotten only to the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’ve read too much science fiction,” she said.

  David actually smiled. “Now, that’s not possible.”

  Anna put her head in her hands, not wanting to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in the dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between them again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there, upright. Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and threw it into the fire in front of them.

  “Hey!” David said.

  Anna turned on him. “Are we ever going to be able to go home again? How could this have happened to us? Why has this happened to us? Do you even realize how appalling this all is?”

  David opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to protest that she shouldn’t be angry at him, but at that moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him. At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her forward.

  She ducked through the entrance, worried about what she might find, but it was only the wounded man from the meadow, reclining among blankets on the ground. He no longer wor
e his armor but had on a cream-colored shirt. A blanket covered him to his waist. Several candles guttering in shallow dishes lit the tent, and the remains of a meal sat on a plate beside him. He took a sip from a small cup and looked at them over the top of it.

  The tent held one other man, this one still in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to the wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look, set down his cup, and then pointed to himself.

  “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.”

  Anna knew she looked blank, but she simply couldn’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking that they hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”

  “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,” David and Anna said together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if they belonged to someone else.

  Llywelyn nodded. “You understand who I am?” Again, he spoke in Welsh.

  Anna’s neck hurt to bend forward, but she made her chin bob in acknowledgement. She was frozen in a nightmare that wouldn’t let her go.

  David recovered more quickly. “You are the Prince of Wales. Thank you, my lord, for bringing us with you. We would have been lost without your assistance.”

  “It is I who should be thanking you,” he said.

  Anna had been growing colder inside with every sentence David and Llywelyn spoke. Llywelyn’s eyes flicked to her face, and she could read the concern in them. Finally, she took in a deep breath, accepting for now what she couldn’t deny.

  “My lord,” she said, in half-remembered and badly pronounced Welsh, “Could you please tell us the date?”

  “Certainly. It is the day of Damasus the Pope, Friday, the 11th of December.”

  David’s face paled as he realized the importance of the question.

  Anna was determined to get the whole truth out and wasn’t going to stop pressing because her brother was finally having the same heart attack she was. “And the year?”

  “The year of our Lord twelve hundred and eighty-two,” Llywelyn said.

  “You remember the story now, don’t you, David?” Anna spoke in English, her voice a whisper, because to speak her thoughts more loudly would give them greater credence. David couldn’t have forgotten it any more readily than she could. Their mother had told them stories about medieval Wales since before they could walk—and tales of this man in particular. “Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was lured into a trap by some English lords and killed on December 11, 1282 near a place called Cilmeri. Except—” Anna kept her eyes fixed on Llywelyn’s.

  “Except we just saved his life,” David said.

  Chapter Two

  David

  It just wasn’t possible. None of it. David stared into the fire. The kindling popped, and the sparks flew above the trees. In his head, he went over the trip from Aunt Elisa’s house, crossing the black abyss, watching the men go under the wheels. It didn’t look as if Anna had yet absorbed the fact that she’d driven the van into three people and killed them. David glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t going to remind her if she hadn’t thought of it. She tended to be rather single-minded, and right now other things were more important.

  Can we really be in the Middle Ages? If he and Anna were really in the Middle Ages, everything David had ever thought was true might not be. What about the laws of physics? Mathematics? David could understand Anna’s anger and despair, but didn’t know what to tell her.

  He looked up as a lone man rode off the trail to the right, stopping at the edge of the clearing, his horse lathered. Two men-at-arms ran to him as he dismounted. One grabbed the horse’s reins and led it away, towards the trees where the rest of the horses were picketed, but the other walked with him to Llywelyn’s tent and disappeared inside.

  Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. David repeated the name, trying to recall everything his mother had ever told him about Wales, or he’d gleaned from the bits of her research he’d paid attention to. It was her specialty after all. His mother should have been there instead of him and Anna. She’d kill to have been there instead of them.

  David ran his hand through his hair, and then clenched his fists as if that would help him sort out his thoughts. They’d arrived in Wales smack in the middle of a war between the Welsh and the English. In fact, Llywelyn’s death tonight would have nearly ended it.

  Llywelyn had traveled south to Cilmeri to try to bolster support for his cause while his brother, Dafydd, was supposed to continue Llywelyn’s campaign in the north. Instead, in the old world, Llywelyn died when the Mortimers lured him away from the bulk of his army. They ambushed and slaughtered him and eighteen of his men. Edward then killed or imprisoned all of Llywelyn’s family. Once Edward caught Dafydd, he had him hanged, drawn, and quartered before dragging what remained of his body behind a horse through the streets of Shrewsbury.

  Edward crushed Wales so completely and successfully, it may not have been possible for Llywelyn to have held it together even if he’d lived. What is going to happen now? David shook his head at the thought that he and Anna were going to have a front row seat in finding out.

  “I cannot believe this,” Anna said. After their meal of meat and bread, she and David had curled up facing each other, with the blankets pulled to their chins. “This can’t be real. How can we be in the thirteenth century?”

  “It isn’t very warm, is it?” David shifted to find a spot that was slightly less rocky. The woolen blankets were scratchy, and the ground was really hard—that one year in boy scouts when the winter jamboree occurred in the middle of a snowstorm had not prepared David for sleeping outside without even a tent.

  “No central heating, no pasteurized milk, no antibiotics! David! We could die out here from a hangnail!”

  “It’s worse than that,” David said. “They don’t have a lot of stuff we depend upon, but in addition, nobody here knows anything about the way the world works. The printing press wasn’t invented until the 1430s; we’ve got the Inquisition coming up in another two hundred years; and we are nearly five hundred years from the Age of Enlightenment. Don’t even get me started on the black plague.” David closed his eyes, trying to push these thoughts away.

  “But—” Anna said.

  David kept his eyes closed, resolutely ignoring her. She grumbled to herself but didn’t bother him again, and eventually they fell asleep. Both of them woke some time later. But where David was merely cold, Anna trembled and gasped for breath. The top blanket had slipped, so he pulled it over their shoulders and shifted to his side.

  “You were dreaming.” He watched her through slitted eyes. “Want to tell me about it?”

  She didn’t answer at first, and he thought she might be punishing him for his earlier silence, but then she must have decided she didn’t need to keep it from him. “It was a jumble of men on horses, riding fast, and bloody swords swinging my way. It wasn’t really coherent.” Anna tried to hold back sobs, her fist stuffed in her mouth.

  At home, whenever they’d had bad dreams they’d always gone to Mom. Since their dad had died before David was born, Mom had slept alone in a big bed next to his. Not that David had gone to her in several years, but whether he was two or ten, she’d roll over and tuck him in beside her for the rest of the night. This time Mom was too far away to help. There was only David, and he was afraid he wasn’t going to do Anna much good.

  David turned onto his back, Anna’s head on his shoulder. She fell asleep again, but David lay there, awake and restless. His feet kept twitching; it was strange to go to sleep wearing shoes. At least he wore waterproof brown hiking boots, pulled on because of the snow at the last minute before he left the house. His sneakers would have looked ridiculous in thirteenth century Wales.

  David turned his head to study the other men. Every so often he caught the glint of the fire off metal and realized that a sentry had passed by, patrolling the camp near the edge of the woods. At one point, the soldier, who’d been with Llywelyn in the tent, pushed open the flap and came out. He stood, his hands on his hips, helmetless, surveying the sleeping
men. For a moment it seemed that his eyes met David’s, but he was too far away, and it was probably just a trick of the light.

  A man lying on the ground to David’s right grunted, scratching his chest in his sleep, and another thought occurred to David—one that nearly made him choke: if this was the Middle Ages, then he was responsible for Anna. It was his job to protect her, maybe even from men such as these. In this world, a woman had no rights or status without a man, whether father, husband, or brother. How can that man be me?

  David hardly ever talked to her, really. She was three and a half years older and three years ahead of him in school. Their lives almost never intersected in or out of the classroom, not with homework, sports, and totally different friends getting in the way. They took karate together, but that was it. When was the last time we had a real conversation before today? David couldn’t remember.

  More scared than he’d been since Anna drove the van into the clearing, David hugged his sister to him. The stars were fully out now. They were beautiful beyond reckoning, and yet unfamiliar. In the end, there were more than David could count, but he tried.

  Chapter Three

  Anna

  Anna drifted off to sleep with David’s arm wrapped around her and found herself back in a nightmare, though this time as her mother.

  I enter my hotel room just as my cell phone rings. I think it’s Anna and clear my mind, putting away the talk I’ve just heard on medieval trade. It’s not Anna, though, but Elisa whose voice I hear.

  “Meg!” She sobs into the phone.