Storm at the Edge of Time

by Pamela F. Service

  “Mom,” Jamie said awkwardly, pointing first to the red-haired boy, “this is Arni. He’s a local resident. His father’s a … writer. And this is Tyaak. He’s, uh …” For a moment her imagination ran frighteningly dry. Then it burst free. “He’s from Afghanistan. His family are, you know, refugees from that war they have there. They’re thinking of opening a restaurant here.”

  “What a fine idea,” her mother said. “And I’m sure you’ll all have a grand time in Kirkwall. Now, if you boys want an extra breakfast, you can join Jamie. Her father and I ate early so we could get a good start on today’s birding trip. Do you have any money for the bus, Jamie?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’m fine. Say hi to the birds.”

  Jamie was relieved that her parents left before Arni and Tyaak did much at the breakfast table. Neither seemed to know how to deal with the food or utensils. Arni ended up eating the scrambled eggs with his fingers. After a few pokes, Tyaak wouldn’t eat the eggs in any manner, but he did slice the banana lengthwise and roll it and the bacon in a piece of toast.

  The bus proved even more of a challenge. Arni acted as if he’d rather attack the thing than ride in it, and once Jamie had managed to get them all up the steps, Tyaak insisted on standing behind the driver and asking what every control was and how it worked. After a while, the man glared around at him.

  “You pretending you’re a flipping bus inspector or something?”

  Jamie dragged Tyaak and Arni to seats in the back, away from other passengers. Once Arni got over his distrust of the machine, he eagerly joined Tyaak in looking out the window and flooding Jamie with questions.

  “How do you heat these big houses?” Arni asked, and before Jamie could explain about furnaces and fireplaces, Tyaak asked, “Are there still fish in the seas for people to catch and eat? I thought they nearly all died out in the twentieth century. Or maybe that was the twenty-first.”

  Great, Jamie thought. Now I’m a guide for time travelers—a new profession. Trying to keep the other passengers from hearing, she answered questions as well as she could. It surprised her to realize how much she didn’t know about her own time. How did gasoline-driven engines actually work, anyway? And how many different religions were there in the world?

  When they finally got to Kirkwall, Jamie was relieved that both boys were too busy looking even to talk. But once on the street, she had to deal with Arni’s ignorance of traffic and Tyaak’s tirades against primitive, carelessly piloted death traps.

  In the shopping area set off for pedestrians only, she relaxed a little and asked, “Now what? Is this what you mean by a lot of people, Arni?”

  He nodded solemnly. “This is more than a lot. But yes, I think it is right.”

  She turned to Tyaak, who was staring at a window full of puffin souvenirs. “And what about you? Any idea about direction?”

  For a moment, his dark face clouded, and Jamie was afraid he was going to start denying again that he could do anything. Then he shrugged and said, “Up that way, perhaps. But I am not a calibrated homing device. It is just a vague pull, a feeling of rightness somehow. I could as easily be imagining the whole thing.”

  Jamie nodded. “Yeah, I know. I have a picture in my mind of this staff being pale, like sunlight glimmering on fish scales, like when a fish jumps out of the water. Every time I tell myself that’s silly and try to think of it some other way, I keep coming back to a fish, a jumping fish. I just wish Urkar had taken the time to show us how to use this power, but I guess he’s not a time-taking sort.”

  They headed up the shopping street, looking at window displays that were amazingly futuristic or crudely primitive, depending on the point of view. Jamie noticed the same local teens lounging about with the same tank tops and cool expressions, trying to look scornfully superior to the gawking tourists. She’d have liked to shove their smugness in their faces by telling them just how far from home these tourists were, but instead she traded impudent stare for impudent stare and walked on.

  Soon the narrow street opened up, the shops continuing on one side and the plaza with its cathedral and cemetery on the other. “Are we still heading in the right direction?” Jamie asked.

  “Yes,” Tyaak said, then shook his head. “I am not certain. This is like trying to tune myself to a very narrow frequency and picking up many other signals instead. And I do not know how to adjust the scanner—assuming the principle works at all.”

  Arni looked confused, but shrugged and said, “The staff is around people and built things and space.”

  “And it’s upright instead of horizontal like the last one,” Jamie added. “But that still doesn’t get us far. Look, if this power thing’s too slippery, let’s just use our heads. What we’re looking for is a carved wooden staff, an old one. Now, someone who found something like that would probably keep it at home as a curiosity or give it to a museum or a college or something. I think there’s a museum down that way, across from the cathedral, though I don’t know what it has.”

  “What’s a museum?” Arni asked.

  “A place to keep old things that show about the past.”

  “That’s silly,” the Viking boy said. “If old things are any good, people should use them; if not, they should throw them out.”

  “Spoken like a barbarian,” Tyaak said scornfully, heading down the street.

  The museum was indeed full of old things: furniture, glass, and silver from the last few hundred years; jewelry and inscribed stone from Viking times; and bone, pots, and stone tools taken from ancient burial cairns. From the first, however, Jamie felt that the staff was not there. In fact, the place made her uneasy, and it seemed to do the same for the others, too, though they dutifully examined everything.

  Three times, Arni went back to the Viking exhibit only to walk away quickly, looking even paler than usual. “Let’s go,” he said at last. “What should be here isn’t, and a lot of things that shouldn’t be here are.” He hurried down the stairs and headed for the door.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs, Jamie said, “Wait, let’s check out the gift shop.”

  “They sell antiquities?” Tyaak said, surprised.

  “No, but they might sell carvings by local craftspeople or maybe have some guidebooks or something useful.”

  She led them into the little room, but after glancing around, she felt there was nothing there for them. In fact, this was someplace they positively did not want to be.

  She was backing out when a young man stepped from a back room and asked, “May I help you?”

  Jamie wanted to bolt but tried to smile politely. “No, just looking. Taking in the sights, you know.” Then she added awkwardly, “Particularly the old things. Are there other museums around—or other places where there are old things for people to look at?”

  The young man studied her closely, probably trying to place her accent, Jamie decided. He had thin brown hair and glasses, and his chin was wisped with what looked like an attempt at a beard. Maybe he was just nearsighted, but she didn’t like his intense stare.

  “What about the cathedral across the street?” Tyaak asked. “That should have many old things in it.”

  “It does,” the young man said, quickly shifting his gaze. Tyaak just as quickly lowered his. “But you don’t want to go there. That is to say, you can’t. Unfortunately, the cathedral is closed this week for repairs. There are many antiquities on the island, though.”

  “Anything else in town?” Jamie asked.

  “Well, there’s the earl’s palace.”

  “Earl? What earl?” Arni asked eagerly.

  “Earl Patrick Stewart built it in 1607. He was a foreign tyrant and not much loved here, and the whole place fell to ruin after a hundred years. You leave here and turn right, then left at the end of the block. You’ll want to look at the bishop’s palace too; that’s part of the complex. The first part was begun by Bishop William the Old in the twelfth century. Then, if you want farming history, there’s the—”

  “N
o thanks,” Jamie said. “Those places sound fine. We’ll just give them a look and be on our way.”

  She hurried out the door, through the front courtyard, and onto the sidewalk. Leaning against a building to catch her breath, she shook her head. “Definitely the wrong place. And I didn’t like that guy one bit. Come on, those must be the ruined palaces over there.”

  As they started off, Tyaak looked across to the cathedral. “Too bad that place is closed. At least it’s still intact. Those palaces look too ruined to hold an old stick.”

  When they arrived, it was clear he was right. The buildings were roofless, walls holding the stone traceries of empty windows to the sky. Between the ruined buildings, a grove of leafless trees rose up like huge claws. In their branches, a flock of black rooks cawed raucously at one another.

  Discouraged, the three sat on a bench. “This isn’t right,” Arni said. “Plenty of space but no people.”

  Tyaak nodded his head so that another lock of hair slipped from his hood. In this light, Jamie thought, the green cast of his skin wasn’t terribly obvious.

  He scowled up at the trees. “All I pick up here is the racket of those wretched birds. Why would any civilized species allow such creatures to inhabit their towns? And do you realize how much this town smells? Of fuel and garbage and unwashed people as well as animals? It is almost as bad as that Viking place.”

  Jamie bristled but didn’t bother defending Earth cities. They weren’t as bad as all that, though they could be a little smelly at times. Those birds, though—they were obnoxious, and kind of creepy too. The sky had been blue, but now banners of gray were sweeping in from the west. Against that, the skeletal trees and hunched black birds looked like a Halloween card.

  As she gazed up, one of the birds spread its wings and dropped from a branch. It swept down and down, directly toward them. Its cry was like a saw rasping iron.

  As the bird swooped over them, Jamie looked up. Her frightened eyes met the rook’s, eyes like no bird ought to have. Eyes like flaming ice—glinting a bright piercing blue.

  Chapter Twelve

  Crouched on the grass, the three of them watched the bird. Cawing harshly, it glided over the street and the cemetery wall. Then with an abrupt flutter of black wings, it landed on a tombstone.

  “Urkar again,” Tyaak said with a disbelieving shake of his head.

  “Do you think we’re supposed to look at that tomb-stone?” Arni asked. “I’m sure not going to dig up any old graves, if that’s what he wants.”

  Jamie stood up and continued staring toward the cemetery. The rook sat there cawing and occasionally flapping its wings. Just beyond his tombstone, the side wall of the cathedral ended. Around the corner would be the stone arches of the front doorways. People were moving back and forth as if going in and out of a door.

  “Hey,” she said suddenly, “the cathedral’s not closed. People are using the door.”

  “But the man in the museum said …” Tyaak began.

  “He could have been mistaken,” Arni said doubtfully.

  “Or he could have wanted us not to go there,” Jamie said. “Which I think means we’d better—quick.”

  Dodging traffic, she crossed the street, with the others close behind. Marching across the plaza, they easily opened the wooden door set in a stone archway and stepped inside.

  It was like stepping into a different world. Outside was full of busy daytime noises, but in here those were all shut out. There were people about, tourists, but they talked in whispers that rose into the arched spaces overhead, blending with the echoing footfalls from the tiled floor. Outside, the cold had been driven by a fitful wind, but in here the cold was deep and still, like water pooled at the bottom of an ancient well.

  Jamie looked about, trying to stretch her senses and pick up any hint of power. But it was hard to sort out anything from a general feeling of awe. Massive pillars of red stone, like the trunks of huge trees, marched down the nave. At the cathedral’s sides, they stretched into arches that crisscrossed high stone ceilings, but in the middle they supported two tiers of colonnades that rose even higher into the ribs of a great arching vault.

  Jamie glanced at her two companions. Tyaak was looking around with interest, but Arni was standing stock still. No, not still. He was trembling.

  “Arni, are you okay?” she asked.

  “It’s so big,” the boy whispered. “I thought the church Earl Thorfinn built was grand. Who built this, I wonder?”

  Jamie shook her head. “I don’t know. Stuff in the museum said it was named after some old saint called Magnus, but I don’t know who he was or anything. Maybe we should pick up a guidebook. It could help with the search, anyway.”

  She walked over to where a plump woman in a bulky pumpkin-colored sweater was selling guidebooks, postcards, and bookmarks. The woman looked up with a big gap-toothed smile, and the whole effect as so jack-o’-lantern-like that Jamie struggled not to laugh.

  “Could I have a guidebook to the cathedral, please? Something that tells about its history and where things are, maybe.”

  “Certainly, ducks. It’s this one you’ll be wanting. Looking for anything in particular, are you?”

  “No,” Jamie said firmly. She did not like nosy bubbly people who called her “ducks.” “We’re just tourists seeing what there is to see.”

  “Well, there is a great deal to see here. Maybe too much for lively young people like you. You might want to spend your afternoon doing the shops instead.”

  “No, no,” Jamie insisted. “This is very interesting, really. Of course, I’m sure the shops are too. We’ll just take a quick look around here and then maybe try them.”

  With her guidebook purchased, Jamie walked away wondering if she was getting paranoid or if everyone was trying to keep them from looking around this cathedral.

  “So what does it say about who built this place?” Arni asked once they’d settled into a couple of the plain wooden chairs meant for worshipers to sit in when tourists weren’t overrunning the building.

  Jamie flipped through the book looking for the answer to Arni’s question, though he kept wanting to stop and examine each picture. Finally she said, “Looks like it was begun in 1137 by Earl Rogenvald—not the same one your Thorfinn fought. According to the chart, this Rogenvald was Thorfinn’s great-grandson. He named the cathedral after his uncle Magnus, who was killed by some cousin. That’s how he got to be a saint. Anyway, that was about a century after your time. It started out as a smaller church and lots of people have added to it since.”

  Arni reached over and shut the book. “No more. I don’t think I like this magic traveling.”

  Jamie looked at his face, so pale that the freckles stood out like splattered paint. “But you get to …”

  He shook his head. “I’m dead. They’re all dead—Earl Thorfinn, my parents, everybody I’ve ever known. The oddments in a museum and a few sentences in a book—that’s all that’s left. I don’t even know what happened the night of the raid. Did my family survive? Did the Earl?” He slumped down, looking very small in his modern bright jacket. “I want to go back.”

  Jamie gave him an awkward hug. “So let’s go find the staff, and maybe that old wizard will let you go back.”

  She pulled the young Viking to his feet and hurried him over to where Tyaak was studying a stone slab carved with a praying woman and a staring skull. “I do not understand your culture,” he said, “nor do I want to. But some of this is pretty morbid.”

  “It is,” Jamie agreed, “it’s grisly. But don’t blame my culture. This planet has a whole bunch of cultures. Now, let’s start looking for the staff so they don’t all get blown apart and so we can get home.”

  Tyaak nodded, shoving strands of bluish hair back under his hood. Then he pointed vaguely down the nave. “That way.”

  As they walked slowly along, Arni said, “There are people here, and lots of space, and constructions in the space. It feels right. What do you see, Jamie?”

&
nbsp; “Just the same, the leaping fish. But … it’s not alone. Someone is—”

  Her eyes suddenly focused, not on her vision but on the view over Arni’s shoulder. At the guidebook desk, the woman in orange was talking to the man from the museum.

  Grabbing Arni and Tyaak by the shoulders, Jamie hustled them down a side aisle. “Huny! We’ve got to find it now!”

  The cathedral was full of nooks and crannies. Every stretch of reddish stone wall seemed to be carved with zigzags or figures of animals and plants. Carved tombstones were set into the walls, and there was plenty of carved wood as well—intricate screens, altars, doors, and statues. Each choir pew ended in a carved figure of angel or demon or animal. But there was no leaping fish.

  Jamie was looking at things so intently, she was getting a headache. The gray light that had been sifting through the high windows was fading rapidly. Alarmed, she glanced up. Beyond the clear glass, the sky had turned slate gray. In the very back of the building, where stained glass soared to the high ceiling, all the vibrant blues and reds had turned dark and sullen.

  Jamie began to feel urgency building like a storm, and, from the pace of the others, she could tell they felt it too. As she turned a corner, a tall man suddenly loomed over her in the fading light. A statue. A king holding an ax. Jamie wondered if he’d liked to fight with an ax or if he’d been martyred by an ax murderer.

  “That’s Saint Olaf,” a cheery voice said suddenly. Jamie spun around to meet the jack-o’-lantern grin of the woman in orange. “The statue was presented to the cathedral in 1937 as a gift from the church of Norway. Charming, isn’t it?”

  “Uh, yeah. Nice.”

  “Sorry, ducks, it’s nearly closing time. Won’t you please head back this way?” She pointed down the aisle they had just worked their way up.

  Jamie was surprised when Tyaak’s dark hand clasped her shoulder. “Yes, we will go now, but by the way we have not seen yet.”

  Firmly he guided her to a monument-filled far corner where a marble man reclined on his tomb as if it were a living room couch. Urgently the three scanned the area while the orange woman tromped purposefully toward them.