Adam of Albion

by Kim McMahon

  That seemed strange—although when you thought about it, humans didn’t consciously know how they kept their hearts beating or other body parts working, either—or for that matter, their brains.

  Artemis jumped up and started pacing restlessly through the straw.

  “All right—I’ve been keeping quiet and listening to everyone else,” she began. “Now it’s my turn to offer a few thoughts.”

  Adam’s jaw practically dropped. Keeping quiet? Between her and the blowhard little head, he’d hardly had a chance to shoehorn a word in.

  But she plunged right on. “Orpheus, I’m quick to admit that Adam and I are far from ideal. But you’re so weak you don’t have much time left. What are the odds that someone better’s going to come along?

  “We can try to find Jason’s people, but making inquiries is like throwing a pebble in a pond—there are bound to be ripples, and those thugs are bound to be watching for us. There’s no telling who you can trust—even people who mean well might say something that reaches the wrong ears. But you can trust us.

  “And there’s more. If adults see a couple of kids, they’re not going to pay any attention unless we’re misbehaving. We can get away with lots of things simply by not being noticed, or by acting helpless or too simple to understand what’s going on. We can hide in places where bigger people won’t fit. I may look puny, but I’ve trained in martial arts all my life—while other girls were playing with dolls, I was studying tae kwon do. Plus there’s my sneakiness, and my knowledge of lore and history, and Adam being so—so generally handy . . .” Her voice trailed off—she obviously couldn’t think of any more glowing way to advertise his talents, which stung. Adam slumped a little.

  But then she added, “And, of course, there’s his stellar bravery.”

  He perked back up.

  “Anyway, I think you should strongly consider us,” she finished.

  Orpheus, his head cocked to one side, looked impressed and touched. “Rhetoric to put Demosthenes to shame! If ever I need someone to argue my case in court, Artemis, you’re my first choice. After myself of course. Look, it’s very sweet of you two to offer, and I don’t doubt your sincerity or capabilities. But the answer is still no. I can’t risk your lives—”

  Just then, Pallas the cat—who’d been hunkered down over her mouse, crunching contentedly on its feet—looked up and let out a rrrrrrr sound deep in her throat, somewhere between a growl and a yowl. She dropped the mouse and stared at the stable’s closed doors.

  “There must be another cat out there,” Adam said. That was usually what that kind of sound meant—a fight was brewing.

  Artemis looked puzzled. “There aren’t any others around, unless it’s another stray.”

  He hurried to the doors and peered outside, trying to spot the trespasser. Artemis followed, with Orpheus perched on her shoulder.

  There wasn’t any cat that they could see. But a small delivery-type truck—a lorry, as they were called in England—had pulled into the driveway. The logo on its side read: RELIABLE PEST CONTROL.

  Three men had gotten out and were unloading toolboxes from the rear. They were all wearing overalls, dark stocking caps pulled down low, and big sunglasses in spite of the morning fog.

  Artemis frowned. “Strange—we’ve never had this sort of thing before, and my parents didn’t say anything about workmen coming by,” she murmured.

  Adam kept watching them. He was nervous, maybe just because of the cat acting weird. Then he noticed that while two of the men were big and burly with tough-looking jaws, the third was much smaller and slimmer—and what he could see of the face didn’t look like a man’s.

  Not only that, but there was something vaguely familiar about her sinuous, controlled movements and the taut hard set of her mouth.

  In fact, she looked a lot like the woman he’d seen at the old church last night, who’d been driving the car—and who’d shot the man with her!

  No way! Adam thought desperately. She couldn’t possibly have tracked him here—he was just on edge, feeling spooked in general, and his imagination was working overtime. Still, he couldn’t help the sick feeling that they weren’t really here looking for wasp nests and moles.

  And the imagination theory blew up completely when she opened a toolbox and he got a glimpse of its contents—a wicked-looking parabellum type pistol.

  Electrified by fear, he stared as the three of them started fanning out across the manor grounds, moving slowly and scanning the area carefully—all carrying those toolboxes, and all moving with the same menacing precision as the gunman last night walking through the graveyard, swinging his rifle from side to side.

  Artemis’s eyes widened with concern when she saw Adam’s face.

  “What is it?” she whispered.

  “I—I’m afraid—that’s the woman I saw last night,” he stammered.

  Her gaze turned incredulous. “But how—?”

  “Never mind how! They’ve got guns in those toolboxes—we’ve got to get out of here!” But they couldn’t use these doors—that would put them in plain sight. “Is there another way?”

  She shook her head tensely—but she was keeping her cool, he had to give her that. Adam looked around for a place to hide, but except for the few bales of hay, the stable was barren.

  They were trapped—and the woman was moving in this direction! Not only that, one of the men was heading toward the house, looking like he was going to walk right in—and Barry, who would definitely be plugged into something noisy, would be caught completely by surprise. Adam had to warn him, and calling Barry’s iPhone was the only way he could think of.

  “Behind those bales, come on,” he hissed, hoping against hope that the woman would just glance inside the stable and move on—although with the thugs searching so thoroughly, it was a very faint hope.

  Girl, boy, and head scurried to the screen of hay and dropped down behind it, crouching close together. Adam yanked open his pack, groping for the trak phone he kept in a zippered pocket.

  But his fingers couldn’t find the phone’s hard flat shape. In fact, they couldn’t even find the pocket.

  Then he remembered—this was Jason’s pack, not his.

  And then, the awful, unbelievable truth hit him like a sledge hammer—he hadn’t even thought about it until right this second because there’d been so much going on.

  He’d left the phone in his own pack when he’d traded with Jason, at the church graveyard last night.

  Which meant that the woman had found it—and she must have tracked the numbers programmed in there and made the connection to Blackthorn Manor.

  The blood drained from Adam’s face. This was all—his—fault!—an idiotic mistake that had led the thugs right to their door, just like a burglar leaving his wallet at the robbery scene.

  He would have given anything in the world to just melt away, right then and there. But he remembered another thing his father often said—words that Adam tried to live up to:

  Don’t compound your error. You’re going to make mistakes—everybody does, whether or not they admit it. If you’re smart, you will admit it, and instead of blundering ahead and making it worse, you’ll figure out what you did wrong, go back and fix it, and learn from it. But don’t go to the other extreme, either, and blame yourself so much you just cave in. That doesn’t help anything—it’s just another way of compounding the mistake.

  And with that, a sudden, strange calm came washing over him. He wasn’t scared any more, and he knew exactly what to do.

  “Artemis, I need your phone,” he whispered—but even the whisper had a tone of command that surprised both her and Orpheus. She hurriedly pulled her cell phone from her purse, and he punched Barry’s number.

  Like some evil cosmic joke, it rang with the dark wild tones of Dearth music.

  “What’s the problem, dorko?” Barry answered lazily. “Don’t tell me you’re tired of shoveling poop already.”

  “There are people here with guns—they want t
o kill us!” Adam hissed. “Hide someplace good and don’t make a sound!”

  Barry snorted in derision. “Oh, sure, nice try—is that the best you can do?”

  “Barry, don’t be stupid! Look out a window if you don’t believe me, but do it fast—a guy’s going in the door right now!”

  Adam clicked off the phone and gave it back—he’d done all he could, and it was up to Barry from here.

  “Orpheus, there’s no choice now,” he breathed. “We’ve got to do the time travel.”Artemis nodded vigorously, setting off a chain reaction in her hair.

  “You could just hand me over,” Orpheus pointed out. “Maybe they’d let you go.”

  He was met by two stubborn teenaged glares of refusal.

  “You know they wouldn’t, and we’d never do that anyway,” Artemis declared.

  For a few more seconds, his gaze searched their faces. Mainly, he looked like an elephant trapped in quicksand and depending on a couple of ants to haul him out.

  But there was something else, too—like he was starting to admit that they’d been smart about taking care of him, they’d kept their cool in danger—and maybe, just maybe, they wouldn’t be such a bad choice, after all.

  “Reminds me of when I was with Caesar in the Gallic wars, and we came to the Rubicon river,” Orpheus sighed. “‘This is it, Jules,’ I told him—‘if we cross, there’s no turning back.’ All right—Artemis, open the panel.”

  Her fingers quickly touched his scalp, found the right spot, and the little door slid aside to reveal the triangle of glowing symbols.

  “The code is a musical harmonic,” Orph said. “You have to use those symbols to reproduce it. Listen.” A sound began to emanate from him, quiet but clear—like a vibrant, haunting chord played on an unknown instrument.

  “But how can we tell which symbols stand for which note?” Artemis whispered tensely. “There’s no time to figure it out.”

  Adam was staring at the symbols with the same sense of recognition as he’d felt last night, only stronger. Then, without knowing what he was doing or even that he was going to do it, he reached carefully into the cavity with his forefinger and started touching them, one by one. Each time he did, the emerald glow suddenly brightened and began to blink—and a tone in the chord went silent. A few seconds later, the sound was entirely gone.

  So he was keyed to the mechanism in the same mysterious way as Artemis! But he barely had time even to realize it.

  “That’s it!” Orpheus whispered excitedly. “That opened my access to the time-space matrix. Give me just a second to plot the coordinates.” His eyes went out of focus.

  In the stillness, they could hear the woman’s approaching footsteps, faint rustling sounds as she stepped through the grass. She had to be almost to the door! Pallas let out another low growl, then bolted off into the shadows.

  “Oh, do hurry, Orpheus,” Artemis breathed.

  His gaze clicked back in again. “We’re set! When I open the gateway, dive in—and brace yourselves, because this is going to get dramatic.”

  The stable door hinges started to creak.

  Abruptly, the wall in front of their eyes seemed to explode into a whirling black vortex, like a funnel stretching ahead into infinite distance.

  Adam wasn’t sure whether he grabbed Artemis’s hand or the other way around, but they clutched each other for dear life and plunged headfirst into it. Everything was spinning insanely, dizzying his mind and vibrating his body so hard it felt like he was being shaken apart.

  Then the whole world went totally black.

  FOURTEEN

  When Adam unclenched his eyes again, he was lying on his back. He wasn’t sure if he’d actually been unconscious or just shaken loose of his senses, but it took him a couple of seconds to remember what had happened.

  Had it really happened?

  He was in a different place now, that was for sure—it was warm and filled with light, the walls were made of mud bricks instead of stone, and there was a thatched roof above with gaps that let in glimpses of the brightest sun and bluest sky he’d ever seen. But it had the same kinds of stable smells, and from somewhere nearby came the sounds of big animals snuffling and moving around. He guessed that this was a room for storing feed—there were several bins piled high with grain that looked like barley.

  It wasn’t exactly a luxury landing.

  But it was sheltered, and most important, they were alone—it wasn’t like they’d suddenly appeared in the middle of a street. Maybe Orpheus had planned it that way, or maybe it was just luck.

  He sat up, patting his chest and legs to make sure that he was still the same—what if there’d been a fly or something in the mix, like in that old movie, and he was part bug now? But everything seemed to still be there, and working more or less okay.

  Artemis was lying beside him with her eyelids fluttering. Her hair was standing straight out from her head like she’d stuck her finger in a high voltage socket, fanned out in a radius the size of a tractor wheel. It struck him that with her oval face and outspread arms with the shawl flaring out at the wrists, she had the same ankh shape as Eurydice.

  Orpheus was resting on the straw-covered ground between the two of them, looking pleased with himself.

  “Brought us in right on target,” he murmured. “Welcome to the Holy Land, July 20, 1192 A.D.”

  Whoa! Adam thought. Orpheus deserved to feel cocky about this.

  As Artemis began to stir, Adam helped her sit up. “You okay?” he whispered.

  “As near as I can tell.” She started wrestling with her hair, trying to calm it down into manageable shape. “Did we really do it?”

  “Orph says so—let’s look.” By now, Adam had recovered enough so that excitement was rushing through him. He felt like hugging everybody, but Artemis still looked dazed and Orpheus wasn’t really huggable. Instead, he scooped up Orpheus with one hand and pulled Artemis to her feet with the other, and they climbed up on a grain bin to peer out through the loosely thatched roof.

  What they saw seemed like a spectacular movie set. They were up on a hilltop, with a clear view in all directions. The first sight that caught their gaze was a city a few miles away, with an almost magical sense about it, like the Emerald City of Oz. It was surrounded by high stone walls with great gates, towers, and fortifications—and inside them, dominating everything else, rose a huge dome that shone brilliantly in the sunlight.

  “It’s Jerusalem,” Artemis breathed. “That’s the Dome of the Rock.”

  “It’s lovely, but we’re not here as tourists,” Orpheus pointed out. “Sorry to be a wet blanket, but you’d better get yourselves oriented so you’ll know your way around.”

  They were in a sort of compound of buildings, at the top of a village that spread down the hillside below them. Narrow winding streets lined with low mud-brick houses led to a marketplace of shops and stalls and crowded with people, not to mention goats, sheep, and donkeys pulling carts—and camels. In fact, there were several of them right next door, in a crude corral—huge, gawky, weird-looking beasts placidly chewing cuds or wandering around. Those were the animals he’d heard, Adam realized, not horses or cattle.

  Most of the surrounding countryside was desert-like, with rocky hills and gullies sparsely covered with scrubby vegetation. They could glimpse other villages and a couple of big stone structures that looked like fortresses. Far away to the west, the horizon blended into a deeper azure color that must be the Mediterranean Sea.

  It all seemed peaceful and picturesque—except for one other sight that dominated the panorama, a grim reminder that a bloody war was going on.

  “The Crusader camp,” Orpheus said, as they stared at it silently. “Richard the Lionheart and his army.”

  The camp, situated on another range of hills about a mile away, had the look of a huge slum. There were no actual buildings or streets, but acre after acre of tents and crude shelters thrown up in a haphazard sprawl, which wouldn’t be much protection from the intense hea
t, or from the hot steady wind that blew swirls of dust around

  This was the opposite end of the spectrum from the civilized promise of Jerusalem—just a place for war-hardened soldiers to throw their bedrolls on the ground and rest in between one battle and the next.

  There were plenty of those men moving around, carrying weapons and many riding big warhorses. With a frightened thrill, Adam recognized the legendary red cross on the white tunics that some of them wore—the emblem of the Knights Templar.

  It was a serious wake-up call, and Artemis didn’t waste any more time getting down to business.

  “Fill us in, Orpheus—what’s important for us to know?” she asked.

  “It’s a very complex situation—here’s just a bare bones version,” he said, and even he, for once, didn’t seem inclined to wander off into storyland. “Saladin holds Jerusalem and Richard came here to attack it. But both armies are weakened by years of fighting, disease, and internal strife. It’s a stalemate—the Crusaders can’t take the city but Saladin can’t drive them away.

  “They just went through a siege at Acre that lasted a year and a half—nobody wants to do that again. Richard himself is also badly sick with fever. And on top of it all, his brother John, back in England, is plotting to oust him and take over the throne. He’s weary of this, he’s not going to gain anything more, and he has to get back home and take care of business. So he and Saladin have started truce talks. There’s going to be a meeting very soon, out there on the plains between the camp and the city walls.

  “And that is where it happened,” he finished, with a tremor of excitement in his voice. “A fight broke out, Eurydice was torn away from me—and I’ve never seen her since.”

  “We have to be there, then!” Artemis said.