Outpost in Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  As Carew had described those terrible three days when they’d feared David dead and their own lives forfeit, James had been struck in particular by the element of not only luck but apparent chance that had marked every chapter of this story—and every story Carew told about David.

  Carew had noted it too, but then he’d told James the conclusion he’d come to: when a man surrounds himself with principled people, they tended to find themselves in the right place at the right time. Even the direst circumstances could be turned around on a moment’s notice. And even when they couldn’t—when people died and kingdoms fell—everyone involved knew that they had done the best they could with what they’d been given.

  Listening to the riders mock their captive, James considered the strange set of circumstances that had put him right here, right now. On one hand, James had left his young charges alone, which perhaps he shouldn’t have done. On the other hand, one of those young people was the daughter of the man who was currently riding past as a prisoner. And James was the only one who knew about it.

  James himself had been a captive, and he remembered well the constant anxiety, the certainty that at any moment he was going to die, and the fear. He’d hated every moment of his helplessness, and that memory alone had the power to water his bowels and bring the taste of ash to his mouth.

  Both times he’d been rescued by Callum. After that, regardless of their differences in upbringing, not only did James owe Callum his life, but he and the strange half-Scot/half-Englishman had become fast friends. As the torches faded into the distance, James found acceptance washing over him. He would ride to David to tell him what had happened, but first he could do no less for the captive Irishman than Callum had done for him.

  He followed.

  Chapter Eleven

  Trim Castle

  13 March 1294

  Meg

  The great hall at Trim Castle was an enormous sixty-foot-long stand-alone building by the north gate. All the members of the Irish Parliament, which was still in its early stages compared to England’s, easily fit into it. The only men allowed to be here (and it was only men) were the most noted noblemen in Ireland: forty people at most. The difference this week compared to previous years was that for the first time the justiciars included native Irish lords.

  Needless to say, the tension level at Trim Castle was rather higher at the moment than Meg found comfortable. For that reason, she was glad that more people hadn’t been invited, though Callum had wished that he could have filled the castle with David’s men. It was his unease with the entire situation, in fact, which had spurred Meg and her son to find a hiding place outside the great hall. Besides, it was unseemly for the King of England and the Queen of Wales to hang around while the delegates talked, so she and David had made their way to a remote corner of the castle—in this case, the church, which was entirely empty of worshippers now that morning mass had ended.

  Like the great hall where the delegates were meeting, the church was a stand-alone building and lay on the opposite side of the keep from the great hall. While the keep had a chapel too, it was intended for the lord and his family to worship in, not for the rest of the inhabitants of the little town that was Trim Castle. As royalty, Meg and David would have been well within their rights to hang out there, but it had a fine echo that made any conversation inside the nave not quite private.

  What they wanted to do was speak frankly in American about who was here and what they wanted, and the fast-paced back and forth of strangely accented English could be immensely off-putting to anyone who wasn’t from Avalon, especially if they heard their own names amidst the gobbledy-gook. She and David had already discussed the aspirations of the young Edmund Butler (an Anglo-Irish lord the same age as David). A moment ago, they’d seen him stalking through the bailey with his brother, Theobold, along with two of their allies, John Fitzgerald, a cousin of the Carew clan, and Richard de Burgh, James Stewart’s brother-in-law.

  “We already knew the situation here wasn’t easily fixable, but it’s worse than I thought,” Meg was saying. “Sometimes when people who have been wronged—truly wronged—subsequently achieve some level of power, they find it impossible to be forgiving towards those who wronged them. They think tolerance and acceptance should flow only towards them, and they are unable to have any thought for anyone’s experience but their own.”

  David gave a sharp sigh. “I know it, Mom. It’s like everyone here knows absolutely that they’re right; they are uninterested in anyone else’s point of view, no matter how reasonable; and they would rather start a war than compromise even an inch.”

  This resentment was a consequence of the way the conquest of Ireland had occurred over a period of years but never cohesively or as part of a grand plan. The initial invasion in the twelfth century had been led by yet another Clare (this one named Richard, known more commonly as Strongbow), who’d arrived in Ireland because Diarmait MacMurchada (anglicized to Dermot MacMurrough), the Irish King of Leinster, had been ousted by another clan and had invited Strongbow and his armies to Ireland to help him regain his throne. Dermot had promised Strongbow his daughter and his crown upon his death. Good Norman that he was, Strongbow had agreed. Dermot would have done well to have learned from Vortigern, who’d invited the Saxons into Britain in order to subdue the Picts after the Romans left. Encouraging the aspirations of foreigners across the sea was never a good idea.

  Two years later, the next wave of Normans, headed by King Henry II, showed up to wrest control of the island, not only from the Irish but from Strongbow himself. Henry had convinced the pope, who was looking for a way to curb the independence of the Irish church, to support England’s claim to the island.

  In subsequent years, England’s control had ebbed and flowed. Even with their cavalry, archers, and mail armor, none of which the Irish had much experience with before the Normans came, the newcomers had never succeeded in conquering the whole country. Large swaths remained in Irish hands, particularly (as in Wales) those lands that were less productive and would bring the conquerors less revenue.

  The north was claimed by the O’Neills, who were at constant war both with the Burghs (the Earls of Ulster) and rival Irish clans. The O’Rourkes, O’Reillys, and O’Donnells held much of the middle and west, though they fought each other as much as they fought the English, and the south and far west were ruled by the O’Brien and O’Connor clans.

  The Normans claimed that they’d brought order to Ireland. Before their coming, the Irish chieftains had fought among themselves like cats and dogs. While true, the same could have been said (and had been said) about the Welsh. And it wasn’t as if the English weren’t undermining each other at every turn, just as in the March of Wales, where families such as the Clares, Bohuns, and Mortimers had carved out mini-kingdoms for themselves and were at each other’s throats as often as they fought the Welsh.

  As an added complication, as in the March, after the initial conquest of Ireland, the conquerors had started to assimilate, beginning with Strongbow, who’d married Dermot MacMurrough’s daughter. By now, most of the ruling families, whether originally Irish or Norman, were blended. In fact, by three hundred years from now, none of the original Anglo-Norman families would even speak French or English. They would be more Gaelic than the native Irish, and they would want to be independent of England as much as their Irish counterparts did.

  Eventually, in Avalon, the Church would split into Protestant and Catholic and things would get even messier, but fortunately David didn’t have to worry about that piece right now. Avalon’s brutal history didn’t mean that what was going on now was somehow right, but it put what David’s Anglo-Norman barons were doing into context. The whole purpose of life for them was to gain land and power for themselves and their families. Just as in the Welsh March, the barons who ruled here set themselves up as kings on a par with the Irish kingdoms they conquered. David was Lord of Ireland, but the power he wielded was as flimsy as paper. It was men like Geoffrey de Gene
ville, Hugh O’Connor, and the Geraldine, Butler, and Burgh families who had the real power.

  “What you don’t know about the Middle Ages isn’t worth knowing, Mom.” David was perched on the edge of a table in an isolated corner of the vestry. Possibly, the priest would have looked askance at their current location, but Meg figured that between the two of them, they could brazen out any trespassing infraction.

  She laughed. “I wouldn’t say that. But here’s a fun fact I never told you: Thomas de Clare should have been dead by now. I was really surprised to find him alive when we got here.”

  “How’d he get so lucky?”

  “I don’t know. He was supposed to have been killed by an Irish rival a few years ago. But he wasn’t. Obviously.”

  David grinned. “A butterfly flaps its wings in Armenia.”

  “I think it’s more that your presence in this world has proven to be a disruptive force.”

  “Yours too.”

  Meg shook her head. “I came to Llywelyn and lived here for a year, and it changed nothing except the fact of your existence.”

  David waggled his hand, implying maybe.

  But Meg was pretty sure she was right. David was her son, and a large part of Meg could never be objective about him, but she’d had to learn over the ten years since she’d returned to this world to take a step back from him every now and again to see him in a more analytical light.

  “I even warned Llywelyn of an ambush, but either that ambush didn’t happen in Avalon, or he survived it without my help. He still went to Cilmeri. It’s you and your sister who saved him. Pretty soon everything I know or you printed out from the internet is going to be useless. Too much will be different.”

  “See, what I’m thinking is that it was Edward who was the big cheese,” David said. “It’s his death that changed everything.”

  Squeak! The door to the chapel opened.

  David and Meg frowned at each other. They’d left two men guarding the front of the church, and if one of them had entered, or admitted somebody to the church, he would have called out.

  Meg half rose from her chair, thinking to see who it was, but before she moved farther than that, David put a hand on her arm and a finger to his lips, signaling quiet. Meg sat back down again, and they both listened. Whoever had come in wasn’t saying anything and was barely moving too, though footfalls would be hardly audible over the pounding of the rain on the roof and in the bailey, louder now since the church door was still open.

  David waved a hand to her, signaling that she should move closer to him. As she approached, his arm guided her so she was pressed up against the stone wall of the vestry. A curtain separated the vestry from the chapel itself and, with faint breath, David slowly separated the edge of the curtain from the wall so he could peer through the gap. Meg found that her heart was suddenly pounding.

  He looked for a few seconds at most, but apparently saw enough in that time to ease back the curtain so it was flush with the doorframe. Then he signaled to her as he might have to Callum, in that two-fingered military way of theirs, indicating that she should leave the church by the vestry door.

  She wanted to ask who had come in and why David wanted her to leave silently. Ten years ago when she’d first returned to Wales after her long absence in Avalon, she probably would have—or even argued with him. She certainly would have wanted to see for herself what had caused his concern and decide if she agreed before she obeyed his command. But she’d learned something in the intervening years. Most times, her son knew what he was doing, and she could trust him. In fact, it would be stupid not to trust him. He was only twenty-five, but he’d been the king of England for almost six years now, and at nearly forty-seven-years-old herself, Meg was long past the point of underestimating the villainy that human beings could get up to.

  So if her son said to go, and even if her heart was in her throat about what he knew and she didn’t, she went.

  The church had three entrances: the main door on the west side, through which the people David had seen had just entered the church, and two side doors. These latter two were intended for use by churchmen only. The north entrance, opposite the vestry, was reachable through the transept and was simply a smaller entrance by which the priest could come and go without opening the big double doors at the west entrance. The second side entrance, the southern one Meg was using, allowed direct access to the priest’s house. Like the church, it was built close to, but not up against, the curtain wall.

  Meg breathed a sigh of relief as she pushed open the door and it didn’t squeak. A second later David was behind her closing it, again with a finger to his lips. Together they hustled along a short passage until they reached the main room of the house. The priest wasn’t here, having been called upon to bless the conference in the great hall, so they were still alone. David bent to look out one of the two small windows that overlooked the bailey of the castle.

  A half-dozen men dressed in peasants’ clothes were engaged in a ferocious hand-to-hand battle with an equal number of knights.

  David spun Meg around. “We have to move!” He hustled her across the room, out the back door and along another covered passage, this one leading to the priest’s kitchen.

  Like the house, the kitchen had multiple entrances, and the back door led to a rectangular yard. Long and narrow, it extended behind an adjacent stables and blacksmith works that had been built between the church and the barbican, located in the southeastern area of the castle. The public latrines were here too. Geoffrey de Geneville had cared for his castle, so he’d put down flagstones over portions of the bailey for easy passage from the keep to the gatehouse and the various buildings, including the great hall and the church. The rest he’d graveled, which at least minimized the mud, though after all this rain, mud was unavoidable.

  At the exact moment Meg and David left the priest’s house, two more of David’s men emerged from the stables. They immediately started across the yard towards Meg and David, but only two strides in, five soldiers, who were not David’s, rounded the north side of the house.

  The nearest man waved his arm. “Go! Go! We’ll hold them off!”

  Bang!

  The sound rocketed around the bailey, unmistakably gunfire. David grabbed Meg’s hand and ran flat out with her towards the postern gatehouse, their pre-established rendezvous point should anything go awry at Trim. It would be guarded by two of David’s men, who knew that they weren’t to leave their post no matter what happened inside the castle, including Callum firing off a shot from his gun.

  Even as she ran, and knew running was the right thing to do, every fiber of Meg’s being was telling her to turn back. She wanted to grab David’s shoulders and shake him, scream at him for not going to his father’s aid. But she didn’t. He was right not to. If Callum was firing his weapon, then whatever situation he was in had spiraled totally out of control—and yet was as under control as it could possibly be. She needed to trust Callum to protect Llywelyn as she was trusting David to protect her.

  Callum fired a second time, the sound again somewhat muffled by the walls between them and where he was firing inside the great hall, but still loud enough to make Meg jump. Reflexively, she glanced back—and was extraordinarily relieved to see that the two men from the stables had been joined by four more, and they were holding their own against their attackers.

  She and David reached the postern gate. Releasing her hand, with a muttered, “Wait here!” David flung open the guardroom door and leapt inside.

  When no grunts or sounds of fighting came to her, Meg poked her head around the frame of the door. David stood between two dead guardsmen—she recognized them as Welshmen—who lay slumped on the ground. Both had been unceremoniously skewered through the midsection. “You didn’t—”

  David let out a puff of air. “They were already dead.”

  Meg closed the door behind her, blocking out the sound of the fighting in the bailey. “Now what?” Somewhere along the way, she had pulled her
belt knife from its sheath. While she didn’t have a black belt in karate—and had never been trained as a fighter—she could use the knife if she had to.

  “If I wasn’t worried about Dad and everyone else, I’d suggest that we climb the battlements and jump.”

  “But we can’t.”

  “No.”

  “We need to wait for Callum and Llywelyn.”

  David brought up his head to look at her. “We can’t.”

  She swallowed hard, recognizing that he was right, along with the source of his disconcerting long-eyed stare. “This isn’t your fault, David.”

  “Isn’t it?” He laughed without humor. “As I was just telling Callum yesterday, being the return of Arthur takes me only so far. This is happening because I’m here; because I pressed the issue of Ireland’s governance. Maybe it’s even happening because I didn’t take the country over from the beginning to run it myself.”

  “Whatever the reason, it’s done, and we have to deal with what is before us, as disastrous as that may be.”

  David’s eyes returned to one of the dead men, and he bent to pat him down. “Do you see a key?”

  She looked to the door in the curtain wall. It wasn’t enough, apparently, to bar the postern gate; it had to be locked too. Callum had implemented the most up-to-date security, from a medieval perspective anyway, that he could. And the fact that he had done so was going to save them now. “Over there.” She pointed to a key on a hook on the wall near the table where the guards had sat.