“As it is, we may just have to fight them with what we’ve got,” Callum said, “because at this point, I don’t have a better plan.”
William, Martin’s captain, a man in his middle thirties, stepped to Callum’s side. “We only have to hold them off until the Stewarts arrive.” Martin himself was staying to the rear, though Cassie gave him credit for being there at all. He was neither a soldier nor built for war. Even so, he still carried the giant pole arm.
“Here they come,” Callum said. “Get behind me, Cassie.”
Cassie obeyed, as did William. “We need to survive this, Callum,” Cassie said.
“I have every intention of doing so.” Callum spoke softly, but Cassie heard the steel in his voice.
She nodded, more to herself than to him since he couldn’t see her and was focused entirely on the men coming towards him. They bunched together in a tight grouping, gathering in the cleared space between the bottom of the hill and the bridge. Most of the MacDougalls carried round shields, two feet in diameter, which they held in front of them. Even with the shields, Cassie could have taken down half of them before they crossed the space if she’d had arrows to shoot. The rain continued to fall steadily, but it had become the more familiar Scottish rain, a drizzle rather than a deluge.
The MacDougalls slowed and then stopped. The way they huddled together made it hard to get an exact count, but they didn’t have two dozen—more like fifteen—and three injured: two in the rear were hobbling and a third had a blood-soaked pant leg. Either Rod had done some damage before he died, or the traps had done their work. Cassie would need to remove them when this was over before an innocent person got hurt.
The leader pushed between two shields that had protected him and stepped to the front of his men. He swept a hand through his red hair, brushing the wet ends out of his face. He held a sword, but stood with it down, thirty feet from from Callum. The MacDougall leader’s jaw was set and he appeared angry more than concerned at the resistance that faced him. These were MacDougall warriors. Peasants didn’t fight back.
Callum spoke first. “Turn around and go home. You are not wanted here.”
The man’s nostrils flared and he glanced behind him at a taller man who stood half a pace to his right. He held his axe in the middle of the haft and was beating time on his thigh with the end of it.
“Give me the boy and we’ll be on our way,” the leader said.
“What boy?” Callum said.
“John Graham.”
Cassie pursed her lips, wondering why John Graham was more highly prized than James Stewart.
Callum laughed. “I don’t think so.”
“Give way now and nobody gets hurt,” the leader said.
“It is not we who are outnumbered,” Callum said.
The man lifted his chin. “You lead a motley band of farmers and sheepherders. They are good men who will die today if you resist us.”
Callum took three steps backwards. William and Cassie backed up with him until all three of them stood on the bridge. “You have only one way across this river,” Callum said. “Do you think you can take this bridge from us?”
The man grinned. “I won’t have to.”
He waved a hand at the men behind him. They dropped their shields to reveal a girl with her hands bound behind her back. A man held a knife to her throat.
A man behind Cassie, a farmer from an outlying homestead, gave a cry and ran forward. “That’s my daughter!”
William spun around and caught him with a hand pressed flat to his chest before he could cross the bridge. “Don’t.”
“What do you say now?” the leader said.
Callum’s hands fisted. “Let her go.”
“Give me my prisoner,” the leader said. “As I said, I’ll let you keep the big man and the Stewart. All I need is John Graham and I’ll let the girl go.”
“Why do you want him?” Callum said.
“That isn’t your concern. Give me the boy or the girl dies.”
“If you kill her, you will have no leverage against us,” Callum said.
The girl was holding herself very still, but now the man who held her ran the knife blade across her neck, breaking the skin. The girl sobbed.
“In a moment, all you’ll have is a dead girl and a grieving family,” the leader said.
“John is near death himself,” Callum said. “He can’t be moved.”
“Let me take him and I will determine that for myself, or bring me his body.”
“Let her go,” Callum said.
Tears streamed down the girl’s cheeks and she gasped, breathless, while at the same time trying to hold herself stiff and away from the knife. Cassie had thought her captor would have only pricked the skin, but there was a lot of blood on the girl’s neck and dress for a flesh wound.
The leader took a menacing step forward. “You will obey me now!”
Callum’s shoulders went rigid. He held himself still for a count of three, just staring at the man—and then he reached underneath his cloak, drew out the gun, and shot the man holding the girl through the forehead. Then he moved the barrel six inches and double tapped the leader in the chest.
Callum and Cassie sat together on overturned buckets in the middle of Marty’s barn. The smell of farm animal had Cassie wishing they’d found a different place to confer. Callum held his head in his hands. The gun was hidden away again in its holster. “I had to do it, Cassie,” he said.
Cassie knelt in front of him and took one of his hands in hers. She understood that his war had taken its toll on Callum. She’d grown up among veterans, since Indians had a long history of service in the American military. The aching loss, shame, and guilt, punctuated by intervals of pure fear, drained a person. Like some of the other veterans she’d known, Callum was a control freak and sometimes turned inward so far he stopped communicating. Callum also seemed to have this thing about how stuff smelled.
“I know,” Cassie said, worried about the bad memories Callum had awoken in himself. “What were your choices, Callum?”
He just shook his head.
After Callum had killed the two men, the girl had screeched and collapsed to the ground. Her cry had released the men behind Cassie and they had surged onto the bridge and then past her. The MacDougalls found themselves down two men, one of whom was their leader. At the sight of twenty villagers coming at them, screaming that banshee wail that the Highlanders seemed to have perfected, all but a few turned tail and fled. The men who hesitated were cut down where they stood, run over by the anger and fear in the men they’d threatened.
Four MacDougalls had escaped outright but the rest were dead, including the three men who couldn’t run and who’d been killed before they’d taken ten steps. Martin would be dealing with the aftermath of this battle for weeks to come.
Afterwards, Callum, Cassie, and Martin had conferred hurriedly, a conversation in which Martin repeated “My God!” about a dozen times as he absorbed the idea that Cassie and Callum were time travelers too. Then it had taken some time for him to settle his people. By noon, though many remained on the green, some of the shock had passed. A few still stood guard on the bridge. A posse of ten men had followed the remaining MacDougalls up the trail. Callum had tried to stop the villagers from killing whomever they found, but his exhortations had gone unheeded. Even Martin couldn’t control his people in this.
And now they had to deal with what Callum had done. “How bad do you think it is?” Callum said.
“It depends,” Martin said in American English. He came forward from the doorway to his barn, a bemused expression on his face. He still looked the part of headman of his village, but now that he knew Cassie and Callum to be kindred spirits, he came across as more comfortable in his surety and less pompous. Cassie studied him. Perhaps it was Martin, of all of them, who had found—rather than lost—himself in the Middle Ages.
“It depends on what?” Callum said.
“On what we want to say you did,” Marty s
aid.
“I fired a pistol at two men and killed them,” Callum said. “How do we pretend otherwise?”
“The same way we always do,” Marty said. “Surely, you haven’t gotten this far—” Marty gestured to the whole of Callum’s appearance and presence, “—by telling the truth about yourself? It has been all lies and half-truths for me. Until I had enough of a history here, I couldn’t speak of my life without deception.” He chewed on his lower lip, thinking. “I should have known something was up with you two by your reaction to my weapons.”
“They’re not exactly standard medieval issue,” Cassie said.
“My guess is that you salvaged what you could from your airplane,” Callum said.
Marty went very still. “How do you know about that?”
“Because David, the new King of England, is your friend Meg’s son,” Callum said.
Now Cassie knew how Callum had felt when he’d told her that she wasn’t alone in this world. The expression on Marty’s face was, quite frankly, awesome to behold: a mixture of stunned surprise, disbelief, and incipient joy.
“Meg—Meg’s alive?” Marty said.
“Callum knows her well.” Cassie didn’t think it would have been possible for Marty’s eyes to widen, but they did. Cassie nodded. “Yup. You’re standing there thinking it can’t be possible, but it is.”
Marty paced around in a circle, shaking his head. “I just can’t believe it!”
“So tell me this.” Callum leaned forward. “You flew off and left her. How could you do that?”
Callum’s accusation cut through some of Marty’s shock. “I wasn’t in my right mind—as I’m sure you can understand—and I was pretty confident she wasn’t either. I thought I’d give her some time to cool down.” He stopped his pacing and sighed. “By the time I came to my senses, I’d run out of fuel and had to put down.” He tipped his head, pointing to the west. “In the loch, if you must know.”
“And then what?” Cassie said.
Marty snorted. “And then I discovered Meg was right and we were in the fucking Middle Ages. The people in this village took me in.”
“And the plane?” Callum said.
“It’s slowly rusting just below the surface of the loch. The carcass is just enough out of sight to be out of mind for the most part.” Marty paused. “So Meg made it.”
“No thanks to you.” Callum wasn’t ready to forgive him.
“Tell me more … that would make Meg the Queen of Wales?”
Cassie thought Marty was so caught up in the story, he hadn’t noticed Callum’s disapproval. Cassie, who hadn’t even met Meg yet, had to admit that she wasn’t ready to forgive him either.
“I believe Meg told you before you abandoned her that she had come to the Middle Ages and been with King Llywelyn twenty years ago?” Callum said.
“Yeah, she mentioned it,” Marty said, “right before I dumped her off. I knew that she had a kid named David, and that he and his sister had disappeared a few years earlier. You’re telling me the truth—they came here too?”
Callum nodded. “As I said, David is the new King of England.”
The repeat of that bit of information hardly fazed Marty. He lifted his chin. “What about you two?”
Cassie didn’t think trusting Marty was necessarily the best plan, but Callum said, “Cassie was caught in the vortex of the time-space anomaly caused by your airplane and came here when you did. She’s been living twenty miles to the south of this village nearly the whole time.”
That, of all Callum and Cassie’s news, seemed to surprise Marty the most. He jerked away and went back to his pacing, his eyes focused on the floor of the barn. “I’m sorry.”
“My coming here wasn’t your fault,” Cassie said, “and it occurs to me only now that I need to stop blaming Meg for bringing me here. It wasn’t her fault either.”
“What do you mean?” Marty said. “Of course it was.”
“You’d lost your instruments, right?” Cassie said.
Marty nodded. “A storm blew up out of nowhere. Blew us right out of the sky.”
“Right,” Cassie said. “Your airplane was about to crash into a mountainside right on top of me. If Meg hadn’t brought you here—and unintentionally brought me too—all three of us would have been killed.”
Marty rubbed his chin. “I suppose you have a point.” He eyed Callum. “What about you?”
“It’s my own fault I’m here,” Callum said. “Because I didn’t believe time travel was real, I tried to stop Meg from returning to the Middle Ages.”
“What—what was that?” Marty said, freezing in mid-stride. “Stop her?”
“Six months ago, Meg and Llywelyn came to the twenty-first century,” Callum said. “I was with the team that tried to detain them and prevent their return to the Middle Ages.”
“She wanted to come back here?” Marty said. “What—what is she—insane?”
“Her son is the King of England,” Cassie said.
Marty actually laughed. “There is that.” He stretched his arms above his head and bent back and forth at the waist. “So, how many jumpers are there, exactly? Just Meg? Or David too?”
“What—what do you mean by jumpers?” Callum said.
“Jumpers.” Marty snapped his fingers impatiently. “Time jumpers—how many are there compared to how many of us?”
“Meg and her two children, David and Anna, can time jump, as you say,” Cassie said, kind of liking the nickname Marty had concocted. “You, me, Callum, and Bronwen, a friend David brought back with him a few years ago, can’t.”
“So it’s genetic,” Marty said.
“It looks like it,” Callum said.
Marty nodded. “What about their kids?”
“Whose kids?” Callum said.
Marty gave Callum an exasperated look. “Isn’t David’s wife pregnant? Didn’t Meg have twins? I heard about it all the way up here. Are their kids jumpers too?”
Callum gazed at Marty, his mouth open. “I’ve never considered it. I don’t know. I guess we won’t know until somebody tries it, willingly or unwillingly.”
“Hmm. It might be interesting to be there when they find out.” Marty clapped his hands together. “Well … what a day, huh? I suppose it’s time to see to my people.”
“What are you going to tell them about the gun?” Cassie said.
“What they’ll believe: England is experimenting with hand-held cannons, and that as a confidant of the king, David gave you the prototype.”
“That could be dangerous,” Cassie said. “Wouldn’t it be better to say nothing? Callum has put it away. In this case, rumor might be no worse than fact.”
Callum hunched forward on his bucket, his hands gripping his knees. “I agree you have to tell them something, and what you suggest is as good as anything I’ve thought of. I’m going to have to say the same to James and Samuel, who have probably heard about it already. Thank God they didn’t witness the shooting. If they had, I doubt that explanation would suffice.
“It might be best to say that the gun was destroyed in the firing,” Cassie said.
Callum nodded. “Early cannons often broke apart after a few uses.”
Marty pursed his lips. “Maybe you should come too. They’ll take it better if they think you have nothing to hide.” He headed for the door. Thirty seconds later, Cassie could hear him talking to his people and responding to questions he couldn’t possibly answer with the truth.
Cassie held out a hand to Callum, as he had to her earlier in Marty’s hut. “Ready?” she said.
“I suppose.”
Cassie squeezed Callum’s hand and then hauled him forward, leading the way out of the barn. Callum didn’t exactly balk, but he moved slowly. “I feel like I’m headed to the gallows,” he said.
“You’re not. It’s going to be fine,” Cassie said, more to comfort him than because she felt confident herself.
The rain had temporarily ceased, though the clouds hovered twenty feet abo
ve the ground, coating everything in a fine mist. Men, women, and children had gathered on the green to hear Marty speak. At the sight of Callum, everyone hushed. They stood, nearly fifty people, staring at Callum in total silence for a count of ten, and then the girl who had been abducted gave another screech—this time of joy—and launched herself at him.
“Thank you!” She wrapped her arms around his neck, almost choking him. “Thank you!” Her smiles turned to tears and she pressed her face into Callum’s shoulder, sobbing and laughing at the same time. A bandage wound around her neck but she seemed otherwise undamaged from the confrontation. Upon closer inspection, the girl was nearer to sixteen than twelve and knew it, given how tightly she held Callum.
After a moment of hesitation, he put his arms around her and patted her back. “It’s okay,” he said, forgetting to speak Gaelic, but the girl didn’t seem to mind and Cassie had actually heard ‘okay’ twice in the last few hours from two different villagers. Marty’s influence, she guessed. After another twenty seconds, Callum managed to extricate himself from the girl’s embrace, and as he put her to one side, the girl’s father came forward with his hand out.
“I was angry when you brought the Stewart here, but today will be remembered as a good day,” he said.
“Thank you.” Callum clasped the man’s forearm. The motion seemed to remove the villagers’ suspicions completely and they crowded around Callum, offering their thanks. The fight at the bridge would be the talk of the village for many days—maybe years—to come. Cassie was glad that her part in it was over.
Or maybe not. As the crowd was beginning to disperse again, the messenger whom Marty had sent east rode out of the mist. A company of twenty men followed, led by a tall soldier in mail armor.
“I must speak to James Stewart!”
Chapter Fifteen
Callum
The man who spoke sat at attention on his horse. He had a narrow face underneath his helmet, and was so thin that Callum wondered how he could possibly stay in the saddle, much less wield a sword. Though he’d come prepared for war, not for a village full of merry people, he recovered quickly and directed his men to dismount.
Exiles in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) Page 18