But what about Core, and the reason Meret had sent her here? Should she fix her life, or fix the world?
The hell with the world, she thought. What had it ever done for her?
SHE SMILED AT SILAS—OR tried to smile, it probably looked like a rictus—and wiped everything she had done on the computer, then unplugged the drive. To her relief he picked up a canvas bag and headed out. She walked as casually as she could toward the launch room.
Once inside she locked the door and hurried over to the computer. Time to meet the monster who was her mother. The woman who had tried to kill her, who had blighted her life.
She remembered how drawn she had been to mother-figures, to Da Silva and Ariadne. She had even started to worship a mother goddess, though only in secret. But mothers weren’t nurturing, or kind. They were killers, devourers.
Ariadne had even said so, or something like it. “She is the mistress of birth and sex, but also of death,” the queen had said. “Our Lady of the Waning Moon.”
They had known all about it, in Kaphtor. In so many ways they had been more sophisticated than the world in which she lived. Didn’t she owe them something? Didn’t she owe Meret, for all the sacrifices she had made?
Didn’t she owe herself, though? No one had ever helped her, but now she had the opportunity to help herself.
Someone rattled the doorknob, then knocked loudly. “We get this room in five minutes,” a man’s voice said. “You need to clear out by then.”
She had to decide. She couldn’t decide; there were too many choices. The company had had no right to change her history. They should deal with their own problems, not foist them off on others. Just because they’d screwed things up in their own time didn’t mean that she, that all the people of her time, had to live under martial law, with a policeman around every corner. She should use the thumb drive as Meret intended, to constrain the company’s reckless meddling.
On the other hand, her last assignment had changed the world of 2327 for the better, Zarifa had said. Maybe she should just keep everything the way it was. Maybe changing things back would mean the failure of the company, even the end of human civilization. And if she didn’t have to worry about that whole mess, about Core and the company, she would be free to travel to her own birth and confront her mother.
Variables cascaded through her mind. She thought of Da Silva again, of Meret. Of goddesses of death, and of life. Help me, Kore, she thought. What should I do?
But Kore had already told her. She had singled her out, had visited her in Kaphtor in the shape of a bee. The Goddess has a task for you, that strange boy had said.
Her end had been foretold in her beginning. The snake of the Kaphtorans, the snake of time, had eaten its own tail.
“Hey, open up!” the man’s voice said. “It’s our turn now— you can check the logs if you don’t believe me.”
She was out of time. She had come up with a way of erasing all her work on the time machine, of overwriting her destination after she had gone, and she programmed that in now. Then, almost without a conscious decision, she set the computer for Toulouse, 1218, with a return to her own time after ten days.
SHE LANDED IN A field. All around her were fallen trees, and old rotting stumps like decayed teeth. She could see no cities or towns, no farms, no roads.
Where was Toulouse? She had misprogrammed, had ended up somewhere unknown. And somewhen? What era was this?
Her nausea cleared. She slung her purse across her chest, then picked a direction and started to walk. Wherever she was, she had come to a land destroyed by war. There was only one reason to cut down trees like that: to destroy the crops before the enemy came.
The devastation stretched on into the distance. She had no way of estimating how far it went; she had never seen a landscape like this, without buildings or people.
It seemed to her that she walked on for hours. The sun moved through the sky, traveling so slowly she couldn’t tell if it was rising or setting. Finally she realized that her shadow was growing longer; night was coming. She had forgotten to program in a time for her arrival, and the computer had given her the default, late afternoon.
What now? Would she have to sleep out here, in this exposed wasteland? And she was growing hungry; her last meal had been that tasteless lunch in the courtyard.
Something loomed up on the horizon. She hurried on, feeling relieved. A city wall, overlooked by towers. It looked enough like Carcassonne that she must have landed in the right timeframe, at least.
Then she saw the army camped outside. She cursed violently. The city was under siege, and she had no way of getting inside.
Why on earth had she thought she could do this correctly? People studied years to learn probability modeling, according to Da Silva. She would have to wait here for ten days, until she was returned home, and meanwhile nothing would have changed.
She couldn’t spend that time out in the open, though. She had to find some new clothes, change out of her bizarre outfit, and then approach the crusaders’ army, pretend to be a washerwoman or a cook. But what if they thought she was a prostitute? If they used her as a prostitute, no matter how strongly she denied it?
She would starve if she didn’t join them, though, and she might as well go to them sooner rather than later. She walked around the army, staying a good distance away from it, looking for clothes. She was a good thief, she knew, had had to be of necessity. There had been times when she would have starved without her ability to steal food. And other times when she had had a different kind of hunger, had been famished for books, and she had stolen them from a bookstore, read them carefully, and then returned them.
Finally she saw a line of laundry spread out on the ground, drying in the sun. She headed toward it cautiously. The sun had nearly set, and at that moment several women left the camp to bring in the clothes before nightfall.
She dropped back quickly, but it was too late. One of the women saw her and started to scream. More women turned toward her, and then they were screaming too, drawing the attention of the soldiers nearby. Several men hurried toward her.
She ran. She was wearing flats, comfortable for her own tace but impossible for moving quickly. She tripped over a rock, stumbled to her feet, and hurried on.
The soldiers came closer. She could not hope to outrun them, she knew. She looked around frantically for somewhere to hide, but everything here was exposed, open, the land scraped bare.
One of them grabbed her arm. Another soldier said something in French, and a third answered him. She knew only the dialect of Languedoc, and she struggled to understand them. She thought one of them was telling the other to be careful, but it was hard to be sure.
The soldier who had hold of her said something she didn’t understand. “Where are you taking me?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. They dragged her toward a tent and threw her inside.
She struggled to sit up. Other men sat nearby on the tent floor, soldiers without the crusaders’ cross sewn to their breasts. Prisoners from Toulouse, she thought, men who had taken part in sallies from the city and been captured, and were now waiting to be ransomed. Two crusaders stood by the front flaps of the tent, guarding them.
“Where are you from?” one of the prisoners asked her. He wore a padded jerkin, and an iron hat shaped like a bowl lay on the dirt beside him.
For a moment her mouth was too dry to speak. By the time she was ready to answer him, though, the conversation had moved on.
“She’s from the east somewhere, I bet,” someone said. “A long way away.”
“They don’t have those outlandish clothes in the east,” another one said.
“How do you know, Gui?” Iron Hat asked. “When did you go traveling?”
“I’ve met men from the east,” Gui said stubbornly. “And none of them wore those colors.”
“Maybe only the nobility are allowed to wear them,” Iron Hat said.
“Really?” the first man said. “And when did the nobi
lity go skulking around a battlefield?”
“Maybe she’s from Toulouse,” Iron Hat said, lowering his voice. “Come to spy out the French weapons.”
Despite her fear, Ann felt relieved to hear that she had arrived near Toulouse after all. “Are you?” Gui asked her. “From Toulouse?”
She had decided not to speak to anyone, not until someone in authority came to interview her. Anything she said in a careless moment to her fellow prisoners could be reported back to her captors.
“Come on, Gui,” the first man said. “When did you ever see those clothes in Toulouse? Be consistent, in the Lady’s name.”
The Lady? Ann thought. Probably he meant Mary, though, and not Kore.
The men continued to argue lazily among themselves. One of the women she had seen earlier came in with a great cauldron of something hot and others poured it out into smaller bowls. “Broth again,” the first man said.
A woman passed around the broth, leaving Ann for last. Finally she set down Ann’s bowl and hurried for the entrance, crossing herself as she went.
The first man laughed raucously. “Never seen a woman from the east before?” he said, and the others laughed with him.
The woman turned back and let loose a series of harsh words in French, like a long string of firecrackers going off. Ann understood none of it until the end, when she heard the name “Simon de Montfort.”
She’d come to the right time, then. Though she was not comforted by the thought; instead, remembering the stories she had heard about the man, she felt a cold terror uncoil within her. Montfort was the commander who had ordered the slaughter of the men and women of Béziers, who had thrown an old woman down a well and hurled rocks on top of her. Who had punished the defenders of the town of Bram by blinding the prisoners and cutting off their noses—all but one man, who had been left a single eye so that he could lead them into the next town as a warning.
What would Montfort do to her, and to these prisoners with her? In the history she had studied, he had died at Toulouse, and so had not had the chance to commit atrocities there. But that history had been changed, and Da Silva said he had survived.
Her hand was shaking as she raised the bowl to her mouth. The broth tasted mostly of water, mixed with a few gristly shreds of meat.
Eventually, several men came through the entrance. The man at the head was short and squat, with thick black hair and a black beard. His face was flat, his nose stubby, as if a giant thumb had pressed against it and squashed it inward.
He headed toward Ann. “So you’re the woman they told me about,” he said. He spoke good Languedoc, though with a strong accent. “With the outlandish clothes. Are you a witch?”
“No.”
He scowled. “Do you know who I am? I’m Lord Simon de Montfort, Count of Toulouse, among other things. What’s your name? Where are you from?”
She wanted to point out that he clearly wasn’t the count of Toulouse, that he couldn’t even get inside the city, but she knew better than to say it. “Ann, my lord. From the Rhineland.”
“And what is an unaccompanied woman from the Rhine-land doing near a dangerous battlefield?”
She had come up with an answer to this while she was waiting to be questioned. “I’m part of a group of trobairitz, my lord,” she said, using the word for female troubadours. “We were separated in the war.”
He scowled again. “I know what a troubadour does—he sings lewd songs to his lord’s wife. Is that what the trobairitz do as well? Sing lustily to men not their husbands?”
“No, my lord. We—”
“And do they all dress as shamelessly as that? What do you call those clothes? Give me that sack you carry, let me see it.”
She lifted her purse over her head reluctantly. Why hadn’t she hidden it somewhere, before she came to the city? But she hadn’t known she would be captured.
Montfort opened the flap and took out her wallet. He ran his fingers over the plastic surface, then lifted it to his nose and sniffed. He fumbled with the snap and took out all the money she had gathered before she left for work.
“What is this?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Playthings.”
“Look how carefully the scribes have worked here,” Montfort said, showing the bills to the other soldiers. “The detail. ‘Twenty dollars,’” he read, stumbling over the words. “Is that like douleur, pain? Is this some witch-work, to cause pain to your enemies?”
“No, my lord. Just a game, like I told you.”
He handed the money to one of the soldiers and rooted through the purse again, this time coming up with her credit cards. “Look at this,” he said, taking a card out of its plastic sleeve and bending it back and forth. It snapped suddenly, and he looked startled. “What material is this made of?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is this some Rhinish game as well?” Before she could answer he said, “Will your friends ransom you, do you think?”
It was an important question, she knew. If she couldn’t be exchanged for money she was of no use to him; he could do whatever he wanted with her.
“Of course,” she said, trying to sound certain.
“Where are they?”
“I—I’m not sure, right now. I could send off a few letters—”
“I’m sure you could.”
He signaled to his men and they left. He was still holding her purse; it looked ludicrous in his huge rough hands.
“Ann, is it?” one of her fellow prisoners asked. “Is that your name?”
She nodded.
“And was he right? Is a woman troubadour as lusty as a man?”
“Shut up, Matfré,” Iron Hat said, sounding tired. “We’re not Frenchmen here. If you want to sleep with her why don’t you just ask her.”
“All right then,” the first man said. “Will you sleep with me?”
She shook her head. All the men except Matfré laughed.
“It’s late,” Iron Hat said. “I’m going to sleep.”
The men jostled for space on the floor and stretched out. Two guards carrying torches came in to relieve the men at the entrance. They set the torches in the ground and turned to look out at the crusaders’ camp.
Flame and shadow washed over her. Noises sounded from outside: horses stamping, armor ringing out, men shouting and singing. The dirt floor felt uncomfortable, but she tried not to move around, to roll up against any of the men. So far they had not threatened her, but she knew that the French would not be nearly as courteous, that if a man wanted her he would take her, with no one to tell him no.
And she had wasted a day, one day out of the ten she had programmed for herself.
SHE WOKE TO HEAR noises at the entrance. Simon de Montfort and his men came inside and headed toward the prisoners. She sat up quickly.
“All right,” Montfort said, lightly kicking the prisoner next to him. He looked fit and well rested, unlike Ann and the rest of the prisoners, and she realized that in this timeline he had not spent the last ten years fighting. “Get up— we’re exchanging prisoners.”
“What about me?” Ann asked.
“I’m sending you along with everyone else,” Montfort said. “I still don’t know if you’re a witch or not, but that’ll be someone else’s problem.”
“Can I—can I have my things back?”
This seemed to rouse him. “Back? Do you take me for an idiot? Who knows what those things are? I’ve burned them, burned them and then got a priest to speak holy words over them.”
Luckily she didn’t need a computer to get back this time. “Well, can I at least have some other clothes?”
“You want a good deal for a prisoner of war. Shall I fetch you some lark’s tongues as well, my lady, and bouillabaisse in saffron? You’ll be silent if you know what’s good for you—I can still change my mind.”
He led them outside and marched them through the camp, moving so quickly they had to struggle to keep up with him. The camp smelled of waste and spoi
led food and unwashed men, with the rot of dead bodies underneath.
A group of men stood waiting for them in front of the walls. Montfort drew up to face them, and one of his soldiers read off the names of the prisoners.
“Ann of the Rhineland?” a man from Toulouse asked when they had finished. “Who’s she, by the Lady?”
“I have no idea,” Montfort said. “She showed up at our camp, just as you see her. Says she’s a she-troubadour.”
The man stared at her, and for a moment she feared they wouldn’t take her with them. Then another man began to read the names of captured crusaders, and Montfort nodded, and the two groups exchanged places.
Cheers and exclamations went up from both groups. Ann and the others marched toward the wall, and a gate opened to receive them.
The men rushed into the city, still shouting. Someone started a song and the others took it up. Ann followed after them, at first tentatively and then, when no one made to stop her, running freely.
After a while she slowed and began to look around her. Houses stood deserted on either side, the doors smashed in or lying open to reveal the rooms beyond, their owners probably dead or gone to fight. Or maybe they were Cathars and had fled to the countryside; Montfort had burned heretics in all the towns he conquered.
She looked around her cautiously, then slipped into one of the houses. There was still furniture here, chairs and tables and rugs and cushions, all covered in drifts of dust. She moved on and came to the bedroom. A bed stood against the wall, with a small chest at the foot. The chest held a pair of neatly folded men’s hose, a jerkin, and—she nearly shouted with relief—a woman’s rough mud-colored gown.
She lifted it out, took off her skirt and blouse, and put it on. She would be able to blend in, finally; people would no longer stare at her, or cross themselves when they saw her.
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