Loop

by Brian Caswell

  First, he got me away from the lord’s men. I could see why they called him ‘Mouse’. He moved so quickly and hardly made a sound, and he could squeeze through the smallest spaces. It was lucky I’m so small myself, or I might have had trouble following him. We hid in a small cave a few minutes from where I’d hidden the capsule.

  I hadn’t hidden it as well as I would have liked. I just threw some branches over it, activated the remote force-shield and hoped for the best. I was fortunate that where it was lying it was pretty much out of sight already.

  I could tell he was scared of me without even dipping into his thoughts. Back in those times, anything you couldn’t understand was either magic or witchcraft, and I guess nothing about me would have been easy for him to understand.

  Let’s face it, even in the twenty-first century mind-speech would have been pretty frightening, so back in the Dark Ages it must have been a lot worse.

  I saw him looking at my thermo-suit, so I pulled off one of the gloves and handed it to him. He looked at it, smelled it, then slipped it on.

  ‘It’s not metal at all,’ I told him. ‘It’s made of a type of plastic.’

  That really helped, of course. It would be almost a thousand years before plastic was even invented.

  ‘It makes my hand feel warm.’ I could see him working things out in his mind. He looked at my suit. ‘Do you not feel hot wearing that …’ He didn’t have the words to describe my clothes.

  I took the glove and put it back on.

  ‘Where I come from it is much hotter than here. I would feel cold if I did not wear the suit.’

  I could see he was still confused. ‘But it is summer,’ he said. ‘It does not get any hotter than this.’

  How do you explain the Greenhouse effect and centuries of global warming to someone who doesn’t even know that the world is round?

  I didn’t try.

  ‘I really need your help. Without it, I will not be able to get back home.’

  Home he understood.

  ‘Where is your home?’

  ‘Far away, Aidan,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid I’m very far from home.’ I didn’t bother to give details. What could I say? Sixteen hundred years in the future? The answer would have been meaningless.

  Anyway, ‘Far away’ seemed acceptable, because he just nodded.

  ‘How can I help?’

  The million-dollar question.

  ‘How strong are you?’ I asked.

  Aidan

  Slowly they remove the branches that cover the capsule. When it is revealed, Aidan stands back in wonder. The machine is roughly egg-shaped, but the clear plastic dome which forms its top half shows the complex controls and information screens inside.

  One of the tripod stabilisers has snapped above the central elbow, while another has been badly bent in the tumble down the side of the small gully. But he knows nothing of this.

  Rheika examines the damage again and shakes her head. It is hopeless. Worse than hopeless. There is no way that the iridium alloy stabilisers can be repaired in such a primitive place.

  She looks at Aidan and tries to smile, but her frustration and her tears overflow and she begins to cry.

  If I can’t fix it, I won’t be able to get home …

  Aidan looks down at her. Suddenly she seems less powerful.

  A Faerie with damaged wings. She looks just like his sister, Regan, except for the way her hair curls. And the incredible colour of those eyes.

  He reaches out and wipes away a tear.

  ‘We will need help,’ he says.

  But …

  ‘We cannot lift it alone. Come, try.’

  Together they strain, but the capsule barely moves. Aidan sits down on a rock.

  ‘If we cannot even turn it, how can we carry it to the top of the bank?’ He looks across at the machine. ‘What is it?’

  There is no way to explain. Rheika is silent, then slowly she draws a breath.

  I suppose you could call it magic. White magic. Where I come from we know many things and we travel to many places and … times, to learn about people and where we come from. But we are always careful never to be seen. Until now. You saw me, but no one must know. We cannot ask for help.

  Aidan stands up, a light in his eyes. ‘Brendan the Smith. He was my father’s friend. He will help and ask no questions.’

  How can you be sure? As soon as he sees —

  ‘That is the point! He cannot see. He went blind three years ago. He can no longer shoe a horse or fire a forge, but he is still the strongest man I know. And he will help me. For my father’s sake, if not for mine. Stay here with the egg and I will go for him.’

  And without waiting for a reply, he is gone.

  Rheika’s story

  What could I do? I didn’t have a hope of moving the capsule and I couldn’t leave it there, so I had to trust him. And I’d seen his mind. I was pretty sure he’d do what he’d promised.

  What amazed me about Aidan was the way he just accepted things. He asked a few questions, but he didn’t seem to mind not understanding the answers – or at least not getting a complete explanation.

  I suppose in those days there was so much about the world that no one understood that they had to accept a lot more without too many questions. Things just were. You accepted it and you got on with your life.

  It was after dark when they came back. Aidan was leading the biggest man I’ve ever seen. He was well over two metres tall and looked as strong as an ox.

  I told Aidan that I’d been thinking. We didn’t need to get the ‘egg’ up to the top of the bank. As long as we could stand it upright, I could make it work and I could get home.

  I looked at Brendan’s eyes. There was a white cataract film over them, and I knew there was no hope that he would ever see again. Back home, with photon surgery, they could have fixed him up in half an hour, but here …

  I shook my head and helped Aidan and the big man as they strained to lift the capsule.

  For a moment it seemed as if even Brendan’s strength would not be enough. Then I felt the capsule move. The soft earth sucked a little as the weight pulled free, but then it was standing upright with Brendan holding it there until we wedged it with rocks and pieces of wood so that it wouldn’t fall.

  I checked the instruments. I was ready to go.

  I looked at the two of them standing there. I owed them so much, but there was nothing I could give them.

  Then it struck me. I’d broken so many rules already that one or two more couldn’t make it any worse. I took the locket from around my neck and handed it to Aidan. He looked at it in wonder before closing his hand on it.

  Then I spoke to Brendan. Not in mind-speech but in words.

  ‘You have helped me. If you will trust me now, perhaps I can repay the debt and help you.’

  As I spoke, I looked at Aidan. He placed a hand on the big man’s shoulder and squeezed. Brendan nodded without saying a word.

  ‘Wait here,’ I said to Aidan. Then I led Brendan into the capsule and strapped him into the passenger seat. It was a tight squeeze.

  Aidan

  The moon is full and its light shines onto the egg-like capsule as Rheika closes the hatch. Inside, he can see the two figures: his father’s friend and the strange girl.

  How does he know she can be trusted?

  He just knows.

  Inside the capsule she leans forward and presses a button. For a moment there is nothing but a slight droning sound. Then the capsule simply disappears.

  Barely a heartbeat later it is back, a few metres further down the gully and standing firmly on three spidery legs.

  The hatch flies open and Brendan jumps out.

  ‘Aidan, boy! I can see. I don’t know where she took me, but they fixed my eyes. I can see better than ever. It’s magic, boy. That’s what it is.’

  White magic …

  Aidan remembers the girl’s words.

  Rheika remains inside the capsule. Somehow he knew that she would
.

  I have to go, Aidan. I’m in enough trouble already. Thank you, my friend. Goodbye.

  And then the droning starts and the capsule disappears, this time forever.

  He looks down at the locket she gave him. There is a button on the side, and when he pushes it the two halves spring open.

  Inside is a picture of the girl, the strange golden hair, the incredible blue eyes. And as he looks at it, the picture smiles at him.

  Quickly he snaps it closed.

  ‘What’s that, then?’ Brendan has moved up beside him.

  Slowly he opens his hand.

  ‘Faerie gold. Isn’t it amazing what you find out in these woods?’

  ‘It is, lad.’ The big man smiles and looks up at the moon for the first time in more than three years. ‘Sometimes you can just be lucky.’

  Together they turn and head back through the woods towards the sleeping village.

  TRULY, MADLY, DEEPLY …

  I believe in getting into hot water.

  I think it keeps you clean.

  G. K. Chesterton

  I knew something was wrong when I saw Nicole looking out across the bay towards the lighthouse on McKinley’s Point.

  She had that look in her eye.

  You know … that look. The one I saw just before she rode her bike full-speed down the hill on Swanson Street, to prove that you really could stop before you smashed into the factory fence at the bottom.

  You’d think that a broken arm and a buckled front-wheel would have taught her something.

  And I guess it did.

  ‘You have to plan more carefully if you’re going to try to prove something,’ she told me when I visited her in hospital. ‘That’s the lesson …’

  Unfortunately, it was a lesson she didn’t learn all that well, so I get nervous whenever she gets that look in her eye. Because I know it’s going to mean trouble.

  Usually for me.

  My sister Nicole is a maniac.

  Of course, she just reckons I worry too much.

  ‘It’s not really Ben’s fault,’ she said once. ‘I guess it’s just what comes from having a twin sister who’s four inches taller than you are, and can beat you in running, jumping, arm-wrestling, computer games and just about everything else.’

  She was talking to her friend Emma at the time.

  And I was listening in on the extension in the study.

  I wasn’t trying to spy on her or anything, I’d just picked up the phone to call Terry Simpkins. I needed to get the answers to the Maths homework, and Terry was born knowing the answers to stuff like that.

  Of course, I would have hung up right away, except that she was talking about me, so I figured I had a right to hear what she had to say.

  Especially as the last time I asked Nicole to be honest and tell me the truth about what Celine Hartnett thought of me, she answered – using her best Jack Nicholson impersonation – ‘The truth ? You can’t handle the truth …’

  Which I assumed meant there wasn’t much point in asking Celine to go bowling on Friday night.

  So, I hung on the line just in case she might say something to Emma about me that she didn’t think I could handle.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she went on. ‘He’s not a wimp, not exactly. He just doesn’t believe in taking chances … Hey, who’s there?’

  That was when I hung up.

  No point in taking chances.

  I suppose Nic has a point. I mean, I can’t remember ever getting into trouble for doing something really brave or really stupid. But that is exactly what happens to her all the time.

  It’s no wonder she’s popular with all the kids at school and I’m only popular with the teachers.

  I guess maybe I am a wimp.

  Anyway, there was Nicole looking out over the bay towards the lighthouse. And there was me watching her.

  And I just knew she was planning something stupid.

  I walked up behind her and said, ‘Okay, what is it this time?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much,’ she lied. Then she turned and jogged back to where Mr Walker was trying to organise a volleyball game to keep all the ‘happy campers’ happy.

  School camps. Don’t you just love them?

  Here we all were, out in the middle of nowhere, sleeping in cold, insect-infested huts at night, while during the day a bunch of teachers kept trying to find new ways of keeping us from dying of boredom.

  And failing.

  They didn’t even let us choose who we were going to share our huts with.

  That’s how I got stuck with Andy Boyd, who snores and talks in his sleep, and Pete Maclean, who’s scared of the dark but won’t admit it so he lies there all night with his eyes open and the covers pulled up around his neck listening for footsteps outside.

  Not forgetting Frank ‘the Fink’ Wheatley, who just … smells.

  On top of that, they were painting some of the camp buildings – a sort of olive-green, ‘environmental’ kind of colour – and the suffocating paint smell was drifting in through the dilapidated screens of the windows, along with the mosquitoes, the flying cockroaches and the tsetse flies.

  I didn’t get a lot of sleep.

  I hate camps.

  But not because of the three misfits and assorted flying creatures I had to share my hut with. After all, they were nothing compared with Justin ‘Jay Kay’ Kingston.

  Mr Perfect. Football star, cross-country champion, top student. Legend.

  I can’t stand him.

  Maybe it’s because I can’t do any of the things he’s so good at. But I really don’t think it’s that. You see, I’m not the jealous type.

  I mean, I don’t hate Jamie Francis, Terry Simpkins or Maria Douglas, and they’re all much better than me at just about anything to do with school – especially Maths.

  The difference is, they don’t rub it in.

  Justin does.

  He walks around like he owns the school, and he does pathetic imitations of ‘losers’ – like me – which he thinks are Academy Award performances. The other kids do laugh at them, of course, which just encourages him, except it’s partly through sheer relief that someone else is the one being laughed at, not them. But mainly it’s because they don’t want to get him offside, in case he imitates them.

  He pushes me around, calls me ‘Baby Benjie’ and thinks it’s his divine right to make the other kids laugh at me whenever I happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Which just happens to be most of the time.

  Like on the first day of camp, when we had to run the obstacle course …

  Sometimes, I really worry about teachers. I mean, they are trusted to guide the development of the next generation, when they couldn’t organise a Bar Mitzvah in Tel Aviv.

  Think about it. If you were trying to make a school camp fun and enjoyable for a hundred and fifty assorted students, like they claim, why would you force them to do something that was likely to hurt and embarrass half of them?

  And give the other half a good reason to laugh at them …

  You wouldn’t – unless you were really dumb or you actually enjoyed watching people cry.

  I didn’t cry.

  Not quite.

  Pete Maclean did, of course, but he fell off one of the logs and landed face-first in the mud. Justin had everyone laughing at him, making smart comments and doing ‘Poor Petie’ Maclean imitations – which actually looked uncannily like his ‘Tiny Terry’ Simpkins imitations or his ‘Baby Benjie’ Palmerston imitations.

  None of which the teachers did anything about, naturally.

  If you’re captain of the school football team and a champion cross-country runner – and your father has been president of the P&C for the last two years – you can get away with things that ordinary kids wouldn’t dare to do.

  I managed to make it through the whole obstacle course without falling in anything, so it wasn’t as bad for me as it could have been.

  Of course, I took six minutes longer to fin
ish than Justin did – I’m no cross-country champion – and he let everyone know just how much of a no-hoper I am, so they all laughed.

  But as usual Nicole came thundering to the rescue.

  ‘You can’t talk, frog-face,’ she said to Justin. ‘You can’t even beat a girl.’

  Personally, I don’t think Justin looks anything like a frog, but that wouldn’t matter to Nic. She just uses insults to get your attention.

  She got Justin’s.

  He puffed up his chest, looked around to make sure everyone was watching, and said, ‘What girl?’

  As if the whole idea of anyone – let alone a girl – beating him was totally impossible.

  Which it basically was.

  After all, he was at least a minute faster than anyone else who’d done the course.

  But then, Nicole hadn’t done it yet.

  Nicole didn’t make the cross-country team, but that wasn’t because she wasn’t good enough. She is. And she’d probably have made the regional team too, except that she had a broken arm (from a freak bike accident) when they had the trials, so she couldn’t run.

  ‘What girl?’ she said, managing a pretty reasonable Justin Kingston impersonation, while rolling her eyes with contempt at almost the same time. Not a bad effort, when you think about it, but girls are supposed to be better at multi-tasking than the rest of us.

  Then her eyes went ice-cold, and I almost felt sorry for Jay Kay.

  Almost …

  When you live with the constant threat of Cyclone Nicole making landfall in your vicinity, you learn to close your shutters at the first sign of trouble. And the ice-stare is a dead giveaway.

  But Justin was used to a more ‘temperate’ climate. He just stood there basking in the warm glow of his own publicity, unable to see the dark clouds gathering.

  ‘This girl, gorilla-breath.’

  She stood for a moment eyeball to eyeball with him. Daring him to blink.

  He blinked.

  Then she nodded to Mr Walker who was holding the stopwatch and took off along the course.

  We watched her running along the track, jumping over logs and small puddles, swinging hand-over-hand along the wooden climbing frame and climbing the net ladder over a high log-fence.