“Red, black, wildebeest, warthog—who cares?”
Kate found a variety of bracelets and necklaces made from colored beads, and tried several on. Some animal pendants, threaded on thin leather cords, caught her eye too. Then she came across one that was unique—a finger-length rectangular frame, with nine vertical rows of beads.
“Here, try this,” she said slipping it over AP’s head.
“Hey, it’s an abacus. A tiny one. But why is it with all this stuff? The abacus came from the east, not Africa.”
“An abacus?”
“You know, an ancient calculator. I used to have one when I was little, remember? Mine was way bigger though. I played with it for hours.”
“You would!”
“This one works the same way mine did, except the rods are vertical instead of horizontal—that’s the ‘traditional’ way of making them.”
“So how does it work?”
“See the beads in this row?” He pointed to the far right. “They each count as one unit.”
“Okay,” said Kate.
“Each row has ten beads. If I move one of these beads to the top, that counts as one.” The beads fitted the rods tightly, so they stayed in place when he moved them. “Now, if I add four more beads, I’ve got five. Each of the beads in the next row counts for ten. So if I move three of them up to the top of their rod, I’ve got thirty. Thirty plus the others makes thirty-five.”
“Brilliant! What would we do without an abacus?”
“It gets harder. The third-row beads are each worth one hundred, then one thousand…”
Kate stifled a yawn.
“With nine rows of beads you can count up to hundreds of millions.”
She sighed.
“Watch this,” he continued, pushing the beads in the two rows on the right back to the bottom again. “Say you wanted to enter 1524—a random number. You start with the fourth row from the right and move one of the beads to the top of its rod. That’s the one thousand.” He then moved five beads to the top of the third rod. “That’s the five hundred.” Next, he moved two beads to the top on the second rod, finishing off by sliding four beads to the top of the right-hand rod. “And that’s the twenty-four. See? It’s easy.”
“If you say so.”
Crowded Planet’s latest hit, “High Water,” blared from the radio.
“What’s that tiny black button at the bottom for?” Leaning on his shoulder, Kate reached down and pushed it with her finger. Suddenly, the room filled with brilliant blue light, silhouetting AP and his sister like shadows.
Then they disappeared.
Chapter 2: Lost in the Forest
AP and Kate found themselves lying on the ground, dazed and in the dark.
“Where are we?” Kate whispered. AP felt the ground—it was hard and bumpy. When he looked up, he saw branches. Beyond them were stars and a magnificent full moon.
“We’re in a forest!” he exclaimed. “This makes no sense. What’s happened?”
AP tried pinching himself. Sure enough, it hurt. Then he pinched Kate. “Stop it!” she snapped. So they were not dreaming. They really were in a forest. But where? And how did they get there?
“This isn’t funny,” said Kate, as if it were all AP’s fault. “I want to go back, right now.”
“We can’t go anywhere until it gets light. We don’t even know where we are.” He shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m feeling so dizzy I don’t think I can stand, let alone walk.”
Kate was groggy too.
“Let’s stay here till morning,” AP suggested. “Maybe we can sleep it off.”
“Right here, on the ground, in the middle of nowhere? You must be joking!”
“Do we have any choice?”
Kate groaned.
“Look, we can make a mattress out of dry leaves.” He began raking up armfuls. “And cover ourselves if we get cold.”
“Great!” Kate muttered, and grudgingly followed his example.
Forests can be scary, especially at night. AP reasoned this was because dangerous animals could sneak up on a person without being seen. Fortunately, Britain’s animals were harmless. Luckily, this wasn’t happening back in North America, where there were bears and wolves to worry about.
Just as they were getting comfortable, a bloodcurdling screech ripped through the silence.
“What’s that?” gasped Kate.
“Only an owl—I think. Let’s forget it and try to sleep. I’m exhausted.”
They both slept fitfully. At one point AP sat bolt upright, convinced he’d just seen a bear ambling through the trees. But bears didn’t exist in England. He lay down again, closed his eyes, and tried blotting out the forest.
When they awoke the following morning and discovered how they were dressed, Kate was horrified.
“What am I doing in this?” she shrieked. A drab blue dress hung shapelessly from her shoulders to her ankles. “It’s so gross.” She wore flat-soled shoes of soft leather, like moccasins. They reached up to her ankles and were tied with leather strips.
“What about me?” AP groaned, sounding equally offended, though he had no interest in clothes.
His long-sleeved tunic was knee-length and made of coarse brown material, like the burlap used to wrap shrubs in the fall. A wide leather belt with a heavy buckle held up his pants.
“You look good for a change,” she quipped, unable to suppress a grin.
Suddenly remembering the African crate, AP put a hand to his chest. The abacus was still there. Surely this all had to do with the pendant. Pulling it out from beneath his tunic, he started turning it over in his hands. He could only see the beads from one side and the back looked like a plain rectangle of wood. Then, for the first time, he noticed a tiny white button. “Hey, look at this! Should I give it a try?”
“Sure. Whatever.”
As soon as AP pressed the button, the abacus lit up with a map of the world, each country outlined in brilliant blue.
Both stared down with gaping mouths.
“How does it do that?” asked Kate incredulously. “And how come the map’s tiny, yet we can see each country in detail, like an enlargement?”
“No idea,” admitted AP, shaking his head.
“And what’s all that?” She pointed to the bottom of the map where the South Pacific was filled with numbers. The first was 2009, the year, but she didn’t recognize the second.
“That’s the number I picked to show how an abacus works.” A red circle in front of the 1524 had a flashing minus sign inside.
Ignoring this for the moment, he pointed to the numbers beneath it: s = 2,551,442.9s.
“Looks like some sort of equation. But I can’t figure it out.” Then AP had an idea. “Look,” he said, tapping the flashing sign in front of the number 1524. Each time he did so it changed from plus to minus. “The map’s a touch-screen.”
Then he noticed a flashing red dot over England, surrounded by a circle. When he tried touching this, nothing happened. But when he slid his finger along the map, the dot followed. He parked the spot on Sweden and it stayed there, but stopped flashing. When he moved it back to its circle over England, it began flashing again.
“I know what’s happened,” AP began. “This is some sort of time machine and we’ve been—”
Suddenly the sound of voices drifted through the forest.
“Quick!” whispered AP, grabbing Kate’s arm. “Get behind that tree.”
Safely hidden from view, they watched in silence as a small procession made its way along a well-worn footpath. Thirty or forty people walked by—men, women and children—dressed in simple clothes like Kate and AP’s. Most carried wicker baskets on their backs, filled with vegetables, apples, loaves of bread, sacks of grain and balls of coarse wool. Two of the men carried a live pig, slung from a pole between its tethered feet.
“Come on,” said AP when the procession was out of sight, “let’s follow them.”
“Follow them?” Kate repeated. “Why wou
ld we do that?”
“Well, we can’t stay here with nothing to eat or drink. It’s a matter of survival!”
In exasperation, Kate agreed and they set off.
Walking through the forest, well out of earshot, they discussed their predicament.
“You can’t seriously think we’ve traveled back in time,” Kate challenged. “Sure, the number on the abacus is 1524, but those people aren’t dressed for the Middle Ages. Henry VIII never looked like that!”
“We haven’t traveled back to the year 1524. I think we’ve traveled back 1524 years. That explains the minus sign in front of the number. And the flashing spot over England shows where we are.”
He held out the abacus and pressed the white button again. “See? We’ve gone back 1524 years from the year 2009. He did a quick calculation. “So this must be the year 485!”
“Oh no!” he exclaimed, in horror. “That was a bear I saw in the forest last night.” Kate looked puzzled. “Bears existed in Britain during medieval times. Wolves and wild boars too.”
“What?” bawled Kate. “Reset that thing and take us back to the present! This place is dangerous.”
AP thought about it for a moment. “Okay, that should be simple. The number on the abacus is still set for 1524.” He changed the minus to a plus. “Then if we press the black button we should be back in Saxton Burleigh in the present. Hold tight, you don’t want to be left behind.”
Grabbing his arm she closed her eyes, expecting everything to return to normal. “What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Press the button!”
“I did,” he shot back. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Oh, great. Perfect! We’re stuck in 485. I have no friends and nothing to wear but this— rag.” She tugged at the formless dress. “We have no phone, no iPod, no computer, no shower, no toilet...there’s NOTHING HERE!”
“Look on the bright side,” said AP grinning. “You’ve got me!”
They walked on for much of the morning, through gently sloping countryside. The forest was far behind now and there were few trees for cover. Keeping to the higher ground, they kept a watchful eye on the travelers below. “How long have we been following them?” she asked, keeping her voice low to avoid being overheard.
“A couple of hours, maybe.”
“Feels more like seven or eight to me,” she grumbled.
Eventually the procession came to a halt beside a large lake. Putting down their loads, the people began preparing a meal. AP and Kate stared longingly from behind a lone willow—starving.
Although feeling safely hidden from sight, something must have given them away and they watched in horror as people began pointing up at the tree. Then some of the strangers started calling and gesturing for them to come down. They seemed friendly enough, so, after much hesitation, Kate and AP left their safe haven and descended to the lake.
Most of the men were clean-shaven, with neatly trimmed hair. Some had beards and shoulder-length locks. All the women had long hair, worn loosely or in braids. Fair hair predominated, with a sprinkling of redheads, including a wild-looking man with a mane like a lion. Kate, with her blond hair, and AP, with his blue eyes, fit right in.
Kate and AP learned that the people lived in a far-off village and had been traveling for two days. As they chatted with the villagers, something remarkable dawned on them—they were both speaking in an ancient form of English they wouldn’t have understood in their modern world. How had the abacus transported them through time and transformed them to blend in so perfectly?
“It’s a bit like a computer,” suggested AP when nobody was listening. “I can hook up a new device to my laptop and the software makes it work properly.”
Kate gave him one of her blank stares.
“The abacus does the same thing,” he continued, “changing the way we look and speak to match our surroundings.”
“How does it do that?”
“Maybe it rearranges the molecules of our clothing and reprograms the speech part of our brain.”
Kate was about to ask him what that all meant when some of the children came to say hello.
The villagers invited them to share their meal. They began with flat bread, which looked like a pancake.
“Chewy,” said AP, taking his first bite. “Like a day-old bagel.”
When pencil-sized sticks were handed around, Kate exchanged puzzled looks with her brother. Taking a cautious nibble, AP rolled it around in his mouth. Salty, like beef jerky, he realized it was dried meat and took some more. Kate tried some too and was surprised at how good it tasted.
Then someone passed Kate a string bag containing a creamy white ball the size of a grapefruit. Some pieces had already been cut off, giving her a clue what to do with it. Most villagers wore a dagger in their belt and, seeing that Kate didn’t have one, a man handed her his. Wanting to fit in, she hacked off a generous slice, put it on a piece of bread, and took a bite. It tasted worse than sour milk, but she pretended to enjoy it. She figured it was some kind of cheese. They offered her more.
“No thank you. It’s so good, but I want to leave some for my brother.” She took one last bite, followed by lots of bread.
“You’ll like this.” Kate smiled. “Here, I’ll cut you a piece.” She speared a hunk on the end of the knife and handed it to him. AP was suspicious—Kate never looked that happy when she was doing him a favor.
All eyes switched from Kate to AP.
AP guessed the stuff would taste terrible so he made a snap decision and rammed the whole thing into his mouth. Without any doubt, this was the most disgusting thing AP had ever eaten. He had to put on a brave face though, partly to convince the villagers, but mostly to fool his sister. So he smiled, patted his stomach and rolled his eyes. Even Kate was taken in by his performance.
Everyone except the youngest children drank beer, served from earthenware bottles into pottery goblets. AP remembered reading that beer was the everyday drink during medieval times. He disliked the bitterness but, after the white stuff, it tasted good. Kate, who had tried beer a few times, didn’t like it, even though she boasted otherwise to her friends. They finished off the meal with freshly picked apples, the first crop of summer.
After packing away the food, the people gathered in small groups, occasionally glancing out across the lake. By piecing together snippets of overheard conversations, Kate and AP realized the people were awaiting the arrival of someone important. And it was for him and his cause that they had brought all the goods. But who was he? Nobody had told Kate and AP because everybody assumed they knew.
They waited beside the lake for most of the day. AP and Kate began wondering whether anyone would ever show up. Many of the villagers were stretched out in the sun, asleep. Some of the men spent their time whittling wood, and one was making a bow. He worked with skilled hands—the kind that develop from years of practice. As AP watched, the craftsman beckoned him over for a closer look.
“Don’t boys know how to make bows where you come from?” he asked.
“Um, no,” replied AP, trying hard to think of a likely explanation. “Only the boys chosen to become master bow-makers are taught.” Feeling pleased with his effort he added, “The rest of us miss the chance.”
“That’s a pity because there are so many interesting things to learn.” The man patted the half-formed bow with an enormous hand. “This is yew,” he continued. “We always use that because of its natural springiness.” He ran his hands along the length of the wood. “The grain’s good and straight from one end to the other. You must choose your wood carefully.”
AP stroked the bow, admiring its gentle curvature.
“The curve will be greater when the bow’s been strung,” the man continued. “See those notches at either end of the bow?”
AP nodded.
“We tie a loop at each end of a string, making sure it’s shorter than the distance between the notches.” He traced an imaginary line between the two ends of the bow. “Next, you lean down on
the bow and slip the loops into the notches.”
AP knew how bows worked: pulling back the string made the bow arch more, storing energy in the wood like a spring. When the string was released, the energy was transferred to the arrow, causing it to fly.
“I made this one for hunting,” said the man, picking up a second bow. “Here, try it.”
AP found it hard to pull the string all the way back, but his instructor said that didn’t matter. “The important thing is your aim.”
AP practiced on a nearby tree. Kate looked on, amused, as he kept missing.
“Anyone could do better than that!” she taunted. “Try an easier target.”
“Such as?” he snapped.
“How about the lake?”
“Funny. Let’s see if you can do better.” He handed her the bow.
Her first arrow stuck into the ground nearby. The second one flew over the tree. The third arrow skimmed the ground, but missed by a long way. Kate, frustrated, returned the bow.
AP continued practicing for about an hour, by which time he was hitting the target with almost every arrow. His instructor told him he had all the makings of a marksman, providing he kept practicing. Meanwhile Kate, who got on well with youngsters, had been having fun with some of the children. They’d shown her their games, involving sticks, wooden balls and pieces of string. Kate, in turn, taught them how to play baseball. They enjoyed themselves so much they would have continued all afternoon. Feeling hot and tired, Kate called a time-out and wandered down to the lake for a drink. AP went along too.
“How’s our being here going to affect the people?” she asked her brother. Kate was especially thinking of the children. “I’ve just shown them how to play baseball, more than a thousand years before the game’s been invented. Will there be major-league baseball in England in the Middle Ages?”
AP shook his head. “Nothing we do here in the past will have any lasting effect. As soon as we’re gone, everything we did will disappear with us.”
“Why?”
“That’s part of the time-travel paradox. I read about it once.”
“So, let’s hear it.”
“Say you’ve got a time machine set up in your house. You’ve just got up. It’s 7:30 on a Saturday morning.”
ABACUS Page 2