Living in the Past

by Jane Lovering

  ‘Hello,’ I said. There was a moment of scuffling and the sound of receding terror. I cursed myself. These children probably rarely came into contact with anyone they didn’t already know; this strange woman in her strange clothes who spoke words they couldn’t understand must be about as terrifying for them as it would be for me if a T-Rex turned up in assembly.

  I stood for a moment, feeling the side of my face nearest to the bonfire start to tighten and sting from the heat; my brain started a weird kind of duality thinking, where it tried to separate what was happening to me now and in the now I had just left, and thoughts kept falling into the three millennia gap that lay in between. I shook my head. This was the now that could kill me if I didn’t keep my wits about me, and this now held answers I needed.

  A shadow moved between me and the fire. The Lady Hen, her cheeks streaked with purple-red from berry juice by the looks of it, or wine, and her hands cupped around what looked like hazelnuts in their shells. She wore a long tunic belted with leather, which crossed somewhere behind her and came back over her shoulders to tie again at her waist like braces, and secured a cloak. Her red hair looked like the ‘before’ in a shampoo commercial, her eyes were deep and watchful, and she kept a distance between us as though she expected me to have a weapon. Bearing in mind what had happened to me the last time, it wasn’t an unreasonable supposition. We stared at one another as the light flicked behind her.

  ‘Anya,’ I said at last. Basically it summed up everything.

  She just stared.

  ‘I know you are Anya. I’ve come from Duncan.’ I spoke slowly. English, my English, would be a second language to her now, after years of speaking that Breton/Cornish/Welsh sounding tongue. Maybe she wouldn’t even understand me?

  ‘Dun-can,’ she said the name slowly, as though the sounds were lumps in her mouth, then her eyes widened as though she’d been shot.

  ‘Look.’ I went to rummage in my rucksack, which was humped at my feet, and she started, taking some rapid steps backwards, eyes searching behind the bonfire for rescue. ‘No, please, don’t go.’ I held my hands up to show I meant no harm. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’

  One of the things I’d put in my rucksack was one of the series of pictures of Duncan and Anya. A little thumbnail-sized slice of history. Or the future, depending on how you looked at it. I’d been a bit worried that no modern items would have made the trip, but reasoned that I’d always had all my clothes on when I’d found myself in the past, so it was a fair bet that other things could come with me, and I’d taken the chance.

  She took a step closer, but remained out of striking range, so I put the picture down on the grassy slope between us and moved back until she picked it up, flinching slightly at the feel of the card square. She ran a finger over the image, then tilted it to the firelight to see. ‘Dun-can,’ she said again, as though tasting the name. ‘An-ya.’

  ‘Yes.’ I let her look a moment longer, then said, ‘Can you understand me?’

  A glance, a look over her shoulder, and then a short, curt nod. ‘Yes.’

  Behind us there was a shout, a noise like a wailing, which died down to a cough. ‘Lady Airwen is unwell,’ Hen said in her own language, then glanced at my face and said slowly, ‘Tor. His woman is ill,’ in English.

  ‘It’s all right, I understand your language. I mean, I don’t know how the hell it works or anything but …’ I looked at her and saw she knew what I meant. She gave another curt nod.

  ‘I think the language grows on from what we speak. So we understood, yet they have not our speech.’

  This was good. She was linking herself to me, because we both spoke modern English. But could she understand my dilemma? ‘I need your help.’

  I could see her brain working, her mouth moved as though it was framing the words before she’d even thought of them. ‘You are from …?’ She pointed back, across the dale, outstretched arm attempting to indicate centuries.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It’s twenty seventeen.’

  She moved her head sharply and said, ‘So long …’ in a wondering kind of way. ‘Yet I have been here ten summers only.’ She glanced across at one of the children, the boy I’d seen following the man with the scythe. I recognised him from his red-gold hair. ‘Why are you here?’

  I didn’t know if she knew it, but she was speaking a weird kind of hybrid tongue now, half in her own language and half in English, as though it was coming back to her in slices, who she used to be. So, as slowly as I could, because I wanted to gabble the whole story out to get her on-side, I told her about Duncan, about the constant police presence. About me finding I could move between times and then coming back to try to find out what had really happened to her.

  Behind us the fire began to burn lower; the sound of children’s voices grew less, and more sleepy, broken by the occasional sharp sound of a cry that sounded like pain. Hen listened, pleating the rough wool of her dress between her fingers as I talked, raising her head now and again but mostly keeping her eyes down, fixed on the flickering grass at her feet. The barrow humped at her shoulder, huge and silent and looming, the antithesis of the constantly moving brightness of the flames. When I stopped talking, she looked up and met my eye.

  ‘I will not go back.’

  ‘But why did you stay? Why are you staying now?’

  She waved an arm behind her. ‘Tor.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And my son. And …’ She cupped a hand across her lower stomach in the international, and apparently, perennial, sign for pregnancy, and I noticed a slight swell. ‘… if the ancestors will it, another child.’ Then, as though caught in a strange duality of belief systems, she shook her head. ‘If I can deliver safely. The ancestors are not mine, but all here believe we are safe by their will.’ She stepped in suddenly closer, right up against me, and caught my wrist. The chafe of rough fingers against the sore skin made me jump. ‘This is my home.’ She forced the words out, in English, between gritted teeth.

  ‘But you left Duncan—’

  A shout from behind the fire. ‘Lady Hen! Airwen needs your help, something is wrong,’ and she turned to go.

  ‘Duncan,’ she said, again in English, ‘did not understand.’

  And then there was confusion, as two women came forward supporting a third, who was crying and trying to crouch in obvious pain. Tor came alongside them, flicked me a glance, and shouted to the children to gather and return to the huts. The dogs started barking, reluctant children did the ‘awwwww, why?’ of children wherever and there seemed to be people and animals and movement everywhere. Everyone stared at me, but the crying woman began shouting and the fact that neither Tor nor Hen seemed bothered about my presence calmed them down, and, in a mass of movement, we all began the walk down the hill away from the firelight towards the huts. Children trailed and were chivvied, dogs circled and were shouted at and I wanted to go home. It reminded me, weirdly, of a holiday that Jamie and I had been on to Spain, where he’d understood the language and I hadn’t, and had spent the whole time sitting in the background in a bar, while Jamie had had a whale of a time playing backgammon with the local men. It had provoked one of our worst arguments.

  I’d got so lost in memories that I’d trailed down behind everyone and reached the village almost without realising. Hen was helping the crying woman into her own hut; Tor and the other women were rounding up children, ushering them away from the doorway, where they kept peering curiously inside. I couldn’t work out which children belonged to which adults, it seemed three were with the rounder woman and two with the younger, slighter one. It was a melee of shrieking, toddling, hand-grabbing, with the older boy trying to help. It was like watching sheep being rounded up by cats.

  Well. Whatever Hen/Anya thought of Duncan, I was here to talk to her, so I slipped under the hide curtain into her hut, to find her helping Airwen to
lie down on the bed. The poor woman was so far gone with pain that she didn’t even seem to notice my presence, although I did try to lurk on the far side of the hut so as not to alarm her. Hen was speaking softly to her and feeling her stomach as she did so, which caused a cry of pain and a moment of retching and heavy breathing, during which I felt uncomfortable and out of place.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, quietly, when Hen turned away from the bed to throw a handful of powder into a wooden beaker of liquid over the low burning fire.

  Hen gave me a sideways look. ‘Her stomach pains her. She has complained for several days, but it has become worse.’

  I glanced at the yellowish pale face of the woman. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and she had crouched her knees up to her chest. ‘Appendicitis? Do you even get that?’

  Another look. ‘Yes.’ In English now. ‘And we die.’

  ‘Can you operate?’

  ‘I have no tools. Some flint, which I cannot sterilise, but no blade. Tor holds the metal, but it is for men only, he would never allow me to use it to cut his woman. And I have no way of cleaning the wound. She will die, either way.’

  Then, gently, she took the beaker of now bubbling liquid to the bed and held Airwen’s head so she could try to swallow a little. ‘This may help the pain.’

  I watched her tenderly supporting the other woman. A tightness around her eyes made her look older and I wondered how many people she’d had to watch die, despite knowing with the twenty-first century part of her brain what was wrong. Lacking the tools and medicines she knew would cure or help. It must have been like losing a limb. When Airwen seemed to relax a little, Hen lowered her back to the bed and turned to the fire to mix more powder and I moved closer to her.

  ‘What are you giving her?’

  ‘Henbane. A little will help the pain.’ Anya shot me a quick look. ‘And more will end it.’ She was speaking English now, the language seeming to come back to her more and more fluently.

  ‘Is that what you do?’ I was slightly shocked. She didn’t answer, just bent back to her mixing, but there was a set to her shoulders that told me she’d made this choice before – end a misery before it ended itself in more pain. And then I remembered. ‘There’s a knife in my rucksack, would that help? Could you operate with that?’

  Again she didn’t look up. ‘Is it sharp?’

  I thought of Tabitha and her somewhat savage methods of food preparation. ‘I’m going to say yes.’

  ‘Metal …’ She almost whispered the word.

  ‘Yes. You could sterilise it over the fire. And …’ I half-trailed off, remembering what I’d put in my bag this morning. ‘I brought some anti-bacterial spray stuff. You must have needles you could use to sew up the wound. Surely, even trying is better than this?’ I waved a hand at the woman, almost unconscious now, on the bed, moaning half under her breath, as though her dreams were hurting too. Then I tore open the top of my bag and rummaged inside, coming up with the knife I’d brought to defend myself. It had a blade about three inches long and a very pointy tip. I waved it, then pulled out the bottle of spray that we used for cleaning cuts and grazes on site and which I’d been carrying around with me to clean the wounds on my wrists after sieving mud.

  Anya left the fire and came over, her skirts sweeping a whisper trail across the dusty floor. She took the knife, almost wonderingly from me and turned it. I stayed crouched over my bag, watching her face as she ran a finger over the cold metal as though touching the surface of a star. ‘Steel,’ she said. And then, in one movement so fast that I had no time for defence, she was behind me, holding my hair with one hand, the cold razor of the knife blade held to my throat just in front of my ear. I could smell her now, an ammoniac, lanolin smell, of old ladies who live with sheep and never wash, and feel the rough burn of her wool shift pressed against my cheek as she gripped me into the mass of her body to prevent me wriggling. I froze completely.

  Hen held the woman still, bundled against her body, as she would hold a sheep to pluck its wool, the sharp knife, familiar yet so strange, weighting her hand. Kill her. End this. There is no help for Airwen, no blame attached to letting her slip away, free from the pain.

  ‘You don’t understand.’ She bent to drop the words in the woman’s ear. ‘If she dies, I get my man, my son. The others will not protest our pairing this time, I have proved my suitability, my usefulness here. I can live with Tor, sleep, eat with him. And Drustan, I can be with him until he leaves us to make his own family, rather than live this detached life where I must pretend to be nothing to either of them.’

  The woman moved, just a little. Hen saw one hand tighten around the strap of her bag, readying her muscles, poising herself. Preparing to risk her life. To risk that the knife at her throat would not be wielded – and why? To help?

  Despite herself, Hen felt her hand begin to shake. Knew, deep in her heart, that this was one of the Turning Points – she should go to the water’s edge, ask the ancestors for advice where the river met the shore, that sacred space between two states, two lives. But there was no time for that; she must act here, alone. End this woman, end Airwen. Walk out alone into her new life at Tor’s side. Her vision blurred and she bit her lip. No time for weakness.

  ‘Anya.’ The woman … what had she said her name was? Something soft. A name that had never had to deal with harshness, blood, slaughter. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’ Hen tightened her hold on the woman’s hair. ‘This life.’

  ‘Then come back with me.’

  She almost laughed at how smoothly those words fell from the woman’s mouth. A woman who had obviously never loved a man as she loved Tor. Never had a child, even a child she could not acknowledge. ‘Again. You don’t understand. My son is here. The man I love is here. What would I go back to?’ The knife was shaking in her hand.

  ‘Family?’

  Hen had a sudden mental image of high ceilings, voices in a hallway, luggage and bustling farewells; softness in an embrace. ‘There is no family. My parents died in a …’ She could not call the word to mind. ‘… things colliding. Duncan did not understand my pain. Here I am needed. I am wanted.’ I am the person called on when there is sickness or pain. I harvest, I grind and bake and care for the beasts. Hen closed her hand around the necklace that hung at her throat. The plastic triangles, their curious warmth unlike the bone or occasional amber that formed the only jewellery the women here knew. The thing that marked her as strange. The magic-weaver. ‘If I help her …’ She inclined her head towards Airwen, who lay in a pain-shaken half sleep, eyelids fluttering. ‘… I lose those I care most about. If I do not help her, I gain a man and child who grieve her loss. My son thinks her his mother.’ The words choked in her throat like ill-baked bread and she felt her eyes sting again. Tears were a luxury, to be shed only in the privacy of the night when she lay alone, not something to be thrown away on situations such as these.

  ‘Oh, Anya.’

  The voice was soft, even though she must be frightened. Here, in a time she did not understand, where life even at its easiest held a harsh edge … Hen remembered that feeling. The ‘not seeing’. The knife in her hand shook again.

  ‘Did they die while you were with Duncan?’

  Gentle words that held something like understanding. How can she understand? How can she know that emptiness, that casting away of everything I knew, the way the future seemed to stretch so featureless before me, holding no comprehension of what I went through? ‘The last spring. I stayed, but I was … changed. He did not know how to deal with it.’

  ‘So you came here? And stayed.’

  ‘This is my life.’

  ‘What about Duncan’s life?’ There was a new strength in this woman’s words. A caring kind of strength, as though she was pushing the knowledge of being at Hen’s mercy aside. ‘You know tha
t he’s suspected of your murder? The police never leave him alone and it’s made him … different. He can’t love anyone, he’s too afraid.’

  Hen had a sudden image of a man – no, little more than a boy. Spiked hair and casual laughter, my first love. ‘Duncan did not understand. I came here and Tor was strong, he took care of me. All I wanted then, all I needed was to be taken care of.’ Hen let her grasp of the woman slip a little.

  ‘Duncan was twenty years old, Anya! He was practically a child, he didn’t know how to help you, he probably didn’t even realise you needed help! Maybe, if you two had actually talked once in a while …’ A shrug and a sigh. ‘No, sorry. You were both young. He didn’t know what you were going through. And you … you’ve no idea what it’s been like for him since you disappeared. However much you hated him, you can’t have wanted that to happen.’

  ‘I do not hate.’ Hen felt the years of memory like the edge of this blade she held. ‘It was the time before. Like a dream. But I did not know he would suffer. I did not think of what would happen, I just walked. In search of my own peace. I found it here.’

  The woman sighed again, wincing a little as her hair tugged against Hen’s fingers. She hurts. Yet she takes time to talk to me. ‘Everything we do, Anya, everything impacts on someone else. I know you were young, you were suffering more than I can know; you’d probably had a bit of a breakdown, but what you did, it hurt Duncan then and it still hurts him now.’

  Over on the bed Airwen moved, a short, pained movement in her drugged sleep. Past, present and future came to Hen, as though the ancestors brought her visions of how it had been and how it would be, and she thought of Tor and Drustan, losing the woman they loved and how they would grieve. Duncan, searching for her, finding her gone and not knowing she had found a better life. This woman, scared and in pain but trying to make her see, not for herself but for others …