by L. L. Muir
A burst of air reminded him he would never enjoy fine underwear again. But maybe knowing there was one pair of black Icebreakers buried out there by the loch would be a bit of consolation on cold uncomfortable nights.
A low rumble began to build, but it was impossible to tell the direction. Then he heard shouting. And though he refused to believe some dinosaur was chasing cavemen in his direction, he prayed against it just the same.
As the sound grew louder, he spun around to face it, squatted low, and pulled his dagger. A large dark form wobbled into view, then the horses out in front of it. It was a primitive carriage—little more than a built-up wagon—with a young lad seated before it, shouting at the horses in Gaelic, trying to get them to stop.
The horses weren’t listening.
James ran out to block their way and noticed the shallow road beneath his feet. Cavemen didn’t have roads, did they? And they certainly didn’t have horses, praise God.
“Hoah,” he sang to the animals while raising his arms to show he was perfectly capable of blocking their way. Though they danced and stamped in protest, they did stop, but somewhere beyond the rise, the shouting continued along with the clanging of swords.
The boy stood on the driver’s perch, put his hands on his hips, and shouted in Gaelic. “I am the son of Stout Duncan! If ye lay hands on me, yer head will be—”
“Shut it, lad, I’m trying to listen!”
The boy blinked. “Shut what?”
“Yer mouth. Wheesht!”
The lad’s mouth hung open, but at least he was still. The noises from beyond the rise moved no nearer. James had time.
He hurried to the closest horse and cut away the leads attaching the pair. Then he waved at the boy to join him. “Come on, laddie. Ye can flee much faster with just the horse. Ride home, do ye hear? Dinna look back.”
The lad nodded, his eyes wet with unshed tears. Then he lifted a leg and waited for help. Once he was seated on the animal’s back he spoke. “Please, sir. My guards. Help them.”
James smiled and held up his dagger. “With this, ye mean?”
The boy pointed behind them. “In the coach. More weapons. I… I would have stayed to fight, but they ordered me—”
“And I’m ordering ye too. Go! Now! Don’t let those men fight in vain!”
“Ye’ll help them?”
“Aye, now go!”
He rushed to the coach just to get the lad moving. Three broadswords lay together on the floor. Hopefully, the three men to whom they belonged were not too dead to use them again. He slung two baldrics over his head and around his shoulder, then took the third sword from its scabbard, gripped his dagger in his left hand, and ran toward the rise like some foolish movie musketeer, with no idea who the enemy was.
When he came over the hill, however, he was happy to find that the enemy was easy to identify. They were the ones wearing kettle helmets and red tunics trimmed in yellow. English soldiers. Only the tattered state of their clothing suggested they might be deserters—or possibly just renegades cut off from their armies. It all depended on the year.
A surge of ancestral outrage rose within him and he bellowed the Ferguson war cry, “Dulcius Ex Asperis!” “Sweeter after difficulties,” sounded much more ferocious in Latin than in English.
He hurled himself down the road, confident the Scots would know he was on their side, especially since he ran full out toward an English soldier in defense of one of them. Nothing happened the way he expected, however.
Four English soldiers. Four others. Every one of them gawped at him for half a second, then fled in all directions, leaving their horses to trot after them.
Once again, James was left standing alone. If it weren’t for the two lines of vague wagon tracks beneath his feet and a smattering of broken weapons and discarded shields, he might wonder if those combatants were from his imagination.
He draped another baldric over his shoulder, chose the sturdiest shield and a smaller knife for his sock, then he turned back toward the abandoned coach. If he was lucky, there would still be a horse attached to it, grateful enough to be freed that it might not mind carrying a large twenty-first century man into town.
Well, a man and his quickly growing arsenal.
As he trudged back up the rise, a worry snuck up on him—if he woke to find it had all been an hallucination, and he was back in the future with a grinning Wickham Muir standing over him, the man would get worse than just a poke in the nose.
Chapter Twelve
“Auch, James, what have ye done?” He quietly chided himself as he rode into the first village he came across after leaving the coach behind. To keep the people from panicking, he rode with his hands held behind his head like Mel Gibson pretending to surrender to the English in Braveheart. James, however, wasn’t hiding a broadsword down the back of his shirt, nor was he planning to catch anyone by surprise. He just wanted to avoid repeating what had happened the first time the folks of his new century got a good look at him.
It was no wonder, he realized, when he noticed many of the villagers seemed short for Highlanders. A couple of inches shorter than the average man—or maybe something in the area had stunted their growth. Perhaps it was the same mineral that made the heather appear blue.
The flash of a light-colored skirt caught his eye and reminded him that part of the reason he’d left the future in the first place was to find the right woman—someone who would also believe that a pledge meant spending a lifetime together. An entire life, and not just until boredom do we part.
The only women he saw on the pathways, however, were either very old, or very young. But he dared not jump to any conclusions after just seeing a few dozen people.
Since no one seemed interested in stopping him, James gave the horse its head and hoped it would lead him to the laddie. There had been no sign of him on the road, so he was hopeful he would find the boy whole. He also had no intention of being hung for horse theft, which was fairly common practice throughout medieval times.
The beast in question began to trot. They had to be close.
The road veered right and when it straightened again, it led toward a large fort surrounded by a wall of timber—it resembled a schoolboy’s diorama made of sharpened pencils. Only the pencils had no lead at the tips.
A guard stood above the gate with a long pike in his hand. Though he wore a kettle helmet, he was missing the red tunic of the English.
Damn. He’d assumed the red tunics meant English, but maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe he’d come close to fighting for the enemy!
It was a good thing he’d found some semblance of civilization so he could figure out which side to take. Who knew how much trouble he might have caused to his fellow Scots if those buggers hadn’t run off?
“Halt!” The guard, too, spoke Gaelic, but that gave no hint as to the year. Gaelic had been ubiquitous for over a millennium. Where he fit along that timeline was one of the first mysteries he needed to solve.
“Who goes there?” The guard’s mouth never moved. Whoever spoke, James couldn’t see them.
“I am James,” he said carefully, determined to be understood. “Son of Fergus. From Galloway.” He might have grown up in the area, but the residents here might expect a Ferguson to come from the south, as his ancestors had.
“That’s him!” The younger voice also came from nowhere. “That’s my giant!”
The precious voice shouted again and the gates parted. Standing inside the fort was a stout man in chainmail over a blue tunic. His hand rested on the wee laddie’s shoulder, restraining him. The boy struggled to control himself, but his fidgeting and unabashed smile gave away his excitement.
“Yer lairdship,” James said, erring on the side of caution. “I return yer horse. And I am pleased to see the laddie made it home safely.”
The stout man’s eyes narrowed, then he relaxed. “Seize him,” he said calmly.
The boy gasped but said nothing as four guards separated themselves from the walls to eit
her side and moved forward with longswords at the ready.
James held his hands high, hooked a thumb beneath the baldrics, and lifted them off one by one. He shed his sporran and the weapons to either side of the horse, until all that was left was his own dagger and the belt that held his kilt in place. He unhooked the scabbard from his belt and wrapped the ties around it. Holding only the blade, he pointed the handle toward the laddie.
“This is precious to me. Perhaps the lad can hold it for me until such a time as I am trusted with it again?”
The stocky man snorted. “It is a gift, then, for I do not foresee such a day.”
Though the soldiers surrounding him braced for attack, he simply inclined his head, slipped the dagger into its sheath, and tossed it at the laddie’s feet. He lifted his right leg over the horse’s head and slid off its back. Each of the guards was surprised to have to look up so far, and for the first time in a long while, James was glad for the shock factor.
A short time later, when he was ordered to climb down a ladder into a pit, he took a gander at the distance, then chose to jump instead. But even when they removed the ladder and found a metal grate to place over the hole, it was blatantly clear that he could probably climb out again if he had a mind to.
Chapter Thirteen
They left him in the pit for 3 days. He was given water twice. Never complained, never tried to get out, never entreated information from any of the men who guarded over him. All that training and experience as an MI6 agent served him well in those long hours, though his belly didn’t thank him.
Having been retired from the SIS for the two years since his last trip into the past, he hadn’t missed many meals. His warrior-type body hadn’t gone to fat, but he’d never suffered more than a few hours’ delay when he hadn’t found a restaurant to his liking. Heaven help him, he was spoiled.
And while he spent those three days in the pit, his stomach did enough talking for the both of them, demanding he complain to anyone and everyone if it meant he would end up with a bit of bread. He tried to assure his noisy gullet that the bread it craved was not what would be available, even if he won the pity of one of the guards. But it didn’t believe him.
By the end of the second day, his stomach was silent—or at least playing dead.
In the afternoon of the third day, the grate was removed and the stocky laird of the fort stood near the rim and grinned down at him. “No doubt ye expected some rich reward for helping my son.”
“I sought no reward, yer lairdship, but ye’ll believe what ye will.”
“Aye, and so I do. If I release ye, no doubt ye’ll kill us all in our sleep.”
“No doubt,” James replied.
The man laughed and stared, stared and laughed. And after a few minutes, waved at the guards, who slid the ladder into the hole. Though he was hardly feeling himself, James decided a bit of exhibitionism wouldn’t go amiss. So, instead of climbing the ladder, he jumped with all his might to catch the metal rim of the pit and swung his legs up and over the edge. In three quick movements, he was towering over the short leader, waiting patiently for instruction.
The man snorted again. “No one will believe ye did that.” He waved for James to follow, then marched up out of the dungeon that had been cut into the ground.
James stopped in the fresh air and took a few deep pulls, trying to clear his nose of the dank, decaying smells of the pit. A hot bath would be necessary before he got rid of the rest, but it was a start.
The laird must have been thinking the same because he pointed to a large water trough. Even knowing the water would be cold, and hardly fresh, James didn’t need to be told twice. He jumped in, plaid and all. When he surfaced, the young lad was standing close, laughing.
“Look, father! He’s bathing with his blanket on.”
The laird put a hand on the boy’s shoulder and led him toward the longhouse. Four guards stayed behind to make sure James changed into clean clothes before following. He stripped while the men looked on with open interest, no doubt expecting, like most, that every part of him was proportional. And while he did his best not to act like a blushing schoolgirl, he paid far too much attention to his audience and missed the fact that a woman had come up behind him and gathered his wet things.
He turned just as she darted away, leaving him only his wet boots. To his horror, he realized she’d taken his futuristic socks with her!
He took a few steps in her direction but was stopped by the tips of three swords pointing at various valuable parts of his anatomy, one being his neck.
“I simply want my things back,” he reasoned, but they didn’t care.
The sleeveless shirt and dull brown overtunic they provided to him was one size fits most. Though they didn’t reach much past his thighs, they covered the important bits. He was also given a pair of leggings and the same coarse-but-dry stockings he’d stuffed into his sporran three days before.
With his chances improving by the minute that he would be burned at the stake, he almost wished he would have kept his underwear…
At the far end of the longhouse, lengthy tables had been erected and about fifty people stopped eating long enough to watch him pass by. He was led to a dais where the laird sat at a smaller table with a pleasantly plump woman, the lad James knew, and a smaller laddie who clung to his mother. The laird gestured to the open seat at his left, and James was pleased it was a sturdy chair. He didn’t want a broken stool to send him back to the pit.
“Son of Fergus, this is my wife, Lyall. Robert ye’ve met, and this is Patrick. I am Stout Duncan. Perhaps ye’ve heard of me and ye’ve come to win my favor?”
“Nay, laird.”
Revealing no disappointment in James’ answer, Duncan pulled a leg from the pheasant in front of him, then scooted the wooden platter toward James. “Go on, then. Don’t be shy.”
He could eat the entire bird, but he pulled a hunk of greasy meat off the breast and nudged the rest in Lyall’s direction. Robert took the other leg, then passed the platter to his mother. James was slightly uncomfortable with the knowledge he’d asked to return to a time when women were served dead last—even after a recent guest of the pit.
The meat tasted superb considering it had no salt to it. He tried not to act like a starving man as he gathered fruits and cheese to him, and since the only bread on the table were the trenchers that acted as plates, James waited until Duncan tore a chunk off before he followed suit. It didn’t matter that it tasted like flour paste, or that it needed salt as well. He was just grateful to have something substantial with which to stretch his stomach back to its usual size.
Since he’d had only a gulp or two of his erstwhile bathwater to drink that day, he greedily accepted each time they offered more honey mead, which also reminded his stomach what it was like to be full again.
Duncan sat back looking every bit as satisfied as James. “I suppose ye’d like to ken why I finally removed ye from the pit?”
“Aye.”
“It was about to get crowded.” He waited for James to show interest. “My son’s guards. They finally found their way home again, eager to tell a tale of how they were overtaken by an army of English headed by a red-haired giant. Imagine their surprise to see that Robert was alive and hale…and telling an altogether different story.” He sobered. “Who knows what it might take to bring those brigands out of the pit again.”
He demanded to hear James’ version of events. James saw no reason not to tell the truth, though he left out the part about his son getting teared up out of concern for his guards. He could already tell the boy paid close attention each time the others were mentioned. Perhaps the key to getting them out of the pit again would be young Robert.
“Tell me,” Duncan said, “Why did ye go to yer doom so willingly?”
James shrugged. “I am a stranger in a strange land, laird. I was grateful for any hospitality.”
“Ye seek no revenge for the three days I took from ye?”
“I might have do
ne the same, had a man as large as I come knocking on my door. Better safe than sorry, aye?”
“Auch, wise words. Wise words.” He looked James over for a second or two. “My, but ye’re a monster. I cannae say that I would have been able to hold my ground had ye come upon me roaring to the heavens.”
“Perhaps I was a bit frightening. But I am certain yer lairdship would have held his ground just fine. Yer men need a bit of bolstering, I believe. But I see the lad gets his courage from the source. Aye, Robert?”
Duncan snorted. “And I see ye’ve got a talent for kissing a man’s arse.”
“A man of many talents, sir.”
“And ye shall tell me all about them when we break our fast in the morning. I shall be sure to have them slaughter larger beasts.”
Chapter Fourteen
Allowing enough time for water to heat was, apparently, a commodity they could not afford, so the next morning, James had his second cold bath courtesy of Clan Duncan. To wash himself properly, he was given something akin to soft wax and lard. In the end, he used the coarse socks to scrub off the offending layers of skin. There was nothing he could do for his hair but rinse it as many times as he could before it became a question of rinsing more filth into it than out of it.
Disgusting.
As soon as he was given a modicum of luxury, he would ask for an entire barrel of boiling water to dip his head into. But first, he had to win friends and influence people, like Dale Carnegie suggested. He only knew the title of the self-help book because his grandfather had once taken a course from the famous Scot. James hoped the title alone might remind him that the waters of Scottish politics had to be negotiated carefully.
Politics first, wife later.
At breakfast, the inquiry continued. Although he was no longer in the pit, he was not a trusted guest, either. He’d been locked in a small room with a pallet, which was luxury enough after the hard ground of the dungeon, and he figured, until Duncan got used to him, and had his curiosity satisfied, he wouldn’t be wandering around the glen without a guard close by.