by Joanna Bell
"Berries?" One asked, shaking his head. "It's a better tale than that you'll need to conjure up, girl. It's midwinter and the only berries in these woods will kill you dead if you're fool enough to eat them."
Well, there was that story blown. I nodded, eager to show I wasn't hostile, that I agreed with them about my own foolishness and was not interested in causing them any trouble.
The second man leaned in, then, and took a length of my hair in one gloved hand. "It's her," he said slowly, eying me up and down. "Baldric said she had the finest skin he'd ever seen, smoother than the King's daughters, and hair as thick as a southerner's. Look at her – I've never seen a girl like this in my life. Have you?"
Damnit. I clutched the two cans of pepper spray even tighter, keeping each one out of sight, as the men discussed me.
"Was it you that took on Baldric yesterday?" I was asked, in tones that suggested my questioner might hold a certain degree of admiration for a woman willing to take on such a task. "On the beach – was it you? Are you with the Northmen?"
At that moment, the second and larger of the men reached down to where I was crouched beneath them and grasped my upper arm, intending to haul me to my feet. A tingle of adrenaline coursed through my veins as I suddenly stood before them and they both, at the same time, noticed the shiny metal canisters in each of my hands.
"What that -? What have you got there –"
The men were unable to finish questioning me because I decided, at that moment, to take my chance. Noticing that what wind there was, was low and not blowing against my face, I raised both arms and took a kind of general aim in their direction. And then I pressed down on the dispensers and scrunched my own eyes closed, holding my breath, as two thick, red plumes of liquid capsaicin hit my questioners full in the face. In less than two seconds both were shrieking and cursing, spitting and wiping their hands over their faces as I tried to make my way around them and back to the path. Their hands reached out for me – blindly, because they couldn't open their eyes – and I shoved them away, nearly falling on my face when I got a whiff of the pepper spray and began hacking and coughing along with them.
"Don't let her go!" The larger man shouted, waving his arms around and blundering into the undergrowth in an attempt, I guessed, at pursuit. "Baldric wanted her – don't let her flee!"
But there was nothing the men could do as they flailed and hacked and fell over their own feet trying to diminish their agony. If I hadn't been in such a hurry to get out of there, I might have felt bad for them – maybe they hadn't intended me any harm? But I was in a rush, and they clearly knew the man from the beach the previous day, so if I needed to feel guilty about pepper spraying anyone, it would have to wait until later.
So close to the tree I could almost taste the relief I would feel to be back in 2017, with the familiar sound of traffic in my ears, I suddenly realized I was no longer on my feet.
Wait. I was no longer on my –?
No. "Nooooo!" I screamed the word into the winter afternoon as my feet scrabbled against nothing but air and I grasped the fact that I'd been caught. It didn't seem possible – how had they caught me? I thrashed around, trying to get a look at my captor, but whoever it was had too strong a grip on the back of my jacket. I tried to aim the one can of pepper spray I was still holding behind me but found it knocked out my hand before I could even begin to aim.
"Let me go!" I shouted, slamming an elbow back and finding nothing there to make contact with. "Let me – fucking let me – LET ME GO!"
And then I was being dragged backwards, back towards the path and away from the tree, and my heels were leaving deep, useless grooves in the ground as I tried to slow the progress of whoever it was who had such a grip on me.
A few moments later I was finally allowed to twist around and get a look at him. Baldric. The man with the deep, dark eyes and the cape. The man I had kicked so badly he'd gone mute with agony the day before. And he'd dragged me right back to the spot where the two men I'd just pepper sprayed were still stumbling around and clawing at their own faces, as if trying to physically drag the noxious fumes from their lungs.
Shit.
"I'll say this for you, girl," Baldric said, shoving me. "You know how to seize your moment."
Before I could respond – before I could even think – he drew one of his gloved hands back and hit me, hard, across the left cheek. I stumbled backwards, shocked and afraid, but I didn't fall. He was ready for me this time, though. When I tried to shove him back he stepped neatly aside and delivered a second blow, hard enough to make my head spin briefly.
I'd never been in a fight before, but some instinctive voice piped up just after the second punch, warning me that if I was hit that hard again I was going to lose consciousness.
"OK!" I cried, cowering down and lifting my hands to try to shield my face. "OK! I'll – I won't run! I won't –"
"You're damned right you won't run," Baldric snarled, leaning into the vicious kick he aimed right at my midsection.
I groaned as I fell over onto my side, clutching my stomach as tears leaked out of the corners of my eyes. I was in trouble. I might be about to die. And there was nothing I could do. I curled up into a tight ball and the blows rained down on me. I tried – and usually failed – to refrain from shrieking in pain when each one landed. It stopped only when Baldric tired himself out – 2 minutes later? 5? 10? I didn't know. All I knew was he was so out of breath he doubled over – it would have been a perfect time to run back to the tree, but I found I couldn't really move.
"You're lucky I haven't killed you," he said, as the other two men regained the ability to open their red, swollen eyes and gaze upon the person who had caused them such pain. "The only reason I haven't is that my Lord asked to see you, if we came upon you again."
"Baint!" One of the pepper-sprayed men gasped, before descending into another harsh coughing fit. "A Northwoman to be sure, Baldric, as wild as the wolves! Bring her here, so I can –"
With thick, absolute horror, I saw that the man was loosening his garments. He reached for me briefly, grabbing at one of my breasts before I twisted my body away. It was Baldric who stepped between us, holding a hand up to his eager companion and shaking his head.
"We must bring her to our Lord, first. Once he sees she's a Northwoman, he'll order her killed – we can surely spend some time with her before the sentence is carried out."
With an angry grunt, the man stopped wrestling with his garments and I found my arms yanked behind my back so Baldric could tie my wrists together with rope so rough I couldn't even struggle, for fear of tearing the skin.
I didn't cry as the men shoved me along the path, out into a more open area with what looked like a few little huts or storage sheds, and not when we entered another wood and my arms began to tingle and go numb from the shoulders down. I didn't feel like crying. The main emotion was anger – it was my fault I was in this mess – and for the second time in two days! And it was on me to get out of it. I had to keep my eyes and ears open, look for chances. Surely the fact that I had over a millennium's worth of civilization on these men – and on the Lord they were taking me to – would give me some advantage, some key to escape?
There was also the fact – dangerously unacknowledged by me – that I still didn't quite believe what was happening. Even the conversation in which Baldric had plainly stated the Lord was going to have me killed hadn't sunk in fully. Paige Renner had been visiting the past since she was a small child. I was only on my third of what had so far been very short trips. Part of me still half-expected Baldric to turn around at any moment and break into a smile before pulling out his iPhone to snap a photo of my surprised face.
"Ha ha, Emma! We got you good! Sorry I hit you so hard!"
Part of me was certain that the grubby little children we passed playing near the huts were smeared with make-up, not dirt, and that their ragged clothing had been specially sewn by some costume designer who was in on the whole thing. None of these thoughts w
ere particularly conscious on my part – I'd been hit repeatedly only a few moments before and wasn't exactly thinking straight – and all the signs seemed to indicate that this experience was real, that I had every reason to be deeply afraid. But still, some part of my mind clung to the irrational hope that at any moment the truth – that this was, somehow, all some big joke being played on me in particular – would be revealed.
Why me, though? Who would go to the lengths it must have taken to recreate not just the past but time-travel itself? And why me? Why would I be the target of such a complex and difficult practical joke? I shied away from those questions, because there were no good answers to any of them.
Soon, Baldric and the two men slowed in front of what looked like a crude kind of fence in which each post, pressed tight against the next, was a single tree trunk, the tops of which had been fashioned into points. It was twice as high as me so there so no peering over it, but from inside I could hear the sounds of people and animals. I could smell them, too. I turned my head to the side, suddenly, as a wave of nausea rose over me, and gagged. The sound of my gagging caused all three men to turn and stare at me.
"If the stench of the estate bothers you," Baldric chuckled, "I can only imagine the kind of spotless palaces the Northmen dwell in."
"Palaces!" One of his companions piped up, and I noticed he was still rubbing at his eyes. "The Northmen sleep on their ships, stealing what they need from the decent East Angles – from the King himself! We'll see what they think when they see the body of their woman hanging from the ramparts!"
It took me a few moments, as Baldric shoved me through a kind of wooden gate, guarded on both sides by four men holding spears, to realize they were talking about me – I was the 'Northwoman' whose body they spoke of 'hanging from the ramparts.'
I jerked back from Baldric, panicky again at the sensation of being now inside an enclosed area – the odd wooden fence now surrounded us on all sides, and livestock – pigs like the one I had seen on my very first visit to the past with Paige, when it had all seemed so... unserious, a few chickens and some very large beasts that looked like cows of some sort. Children, too, who stopped what they were doing – and a good number of them seemed to be working – to stare at the woman with her wrists tied securely behind her back.
"Who is it, Baldric?" One particularly bold little one asked, pointing right at me. "Where've you found her? What's she done wrong?"
"A Northwoman," Baldric responded. "We found her down by the sea, where she tried to kill me not a full day ago – and today tried again to kill the Lord's men with poison. We're taking her to the Lord, to decide what shall be done. Run and tell the others there'll be a hanging tonight!"
Well that makes it sound like the decision's already been made, I wanted to say but didn't.
There was a large building or dwelling within the protective barriers of the sturdy wooden palisades. Unlike any of the other structures I'd seen in the past, this one had two floors. It was made of wood, and the roof of thatched straw. Was it the Lord's house? Other than its size, it was scarcely less crude than the peasant huts we'd passed on our way. At the doorway stood a very large man with a nose so misshapen I could only guess at how many times it had been broken. Propped against one of his massive thighs was a sword, its hilt wrapped with braided leather and its pommel inlaid with what looked like small colored rocks. It was the first sword I saw with my own eyes – in the future or in the past – and just the sight of it caused a shiver of fear to run down my back.
"Baldric," the large man said, nodding in greeting at the leader of my captors.
"Esa," Baldric responded, nodding back in a way that gave me the impression that whatever the hierarchy was in that place, Esa was above Baldric. "We've found the Northwoman who attacked me yesterday – the very same went for these two with some kind of poison. The Lord wished to see her before naming her punishment."
Esa looked down at me, then, because he was of a height to be looking down on everyone – almost including the horse that Baldric still led by its reins. "This is her?" He asked, reaching out quickly and taking my lower jaw in one of his meaty, slab-like hands and turning my face this way and that. "The Northwoman? Are you sure? She looks like a higher to me – look at her skin and –" here he poked one foul-tasting finger into my mouth, before I managed to spit it out and turn away – "her teeth! I've never seen such magnificent teeth."
"Aye, her teeth are white," Baldric replied, and there was a little hint of impatience in his voice, "and straight, and there are many of them. But the Lord needs to see her no matter how many teeth she has in her head, Esa, and I wonder – is he inside?"
Esa, taking note of Baldric's tone, just shrugged his shoulders. "He's ridden out today."
"And when will he return?"
Instead of answering, Esa returned to his post and took up staring out past Baldric, his men, his horse and myself, giving every sign of being finished speaking.
Baldric sighed heavily and pulled me away, leading me to a stout wooden post which stuck up out of the ground a few feet from the main entrance to the estate's inner enclosure. He pushed me down to the ground and got to work untying the bindings around my wrists – and then retying them after bringing them together behind the wooden post.
"You heard Esa, we've no thought as to the time of the Lord's return. Until then you can stay here on the washing post."
And with that, Baldric left me where I was, and the children too small to be working began to approach warily, whispering and giggling to each other as they stared at me.
"My name is Emma," I told the 6 or so of them, causing all of them to flee at once, with a great chorus of shrieks.
"Well that didn't work," I muttered to myself, testing the ropes around my wrists and, upon finding them even tighter than they'd been on the journey back to the estate – turning my head up to try to gauge the sun's position in the sky. It was already below the tops of the trees that surrounded the estate, the light of the day already dimming. That, combined with the lack of activity and the fact that I'd lost my jacket – and gloves – in the struggle with Baldric's men, brought the cold swiftly on. Before long my teeth were chattering loudly.
As the light dwindled further, I got colder. At one point, one of the small children appeared with a length of filthy rag clutched in her little hand, moving skittishly towards me as if intending to lay it over my frozen legs. She leapt back, though, with a high-pitched screech, when I tried to speak to her and all that came out of my mouth was a low grunt. My lips were slow with the chill by then, unable to form proper words. The earth under my knuckles slowly went stiff with frost and the possibility that I was never going to learn my fate – and never again going to return to my own time – began to become more and more real as the minutes passed.
Is this it, then? I asked myself, as even the chattering of my teeth and the shivering of my limbs seemed to give way to a strange sensation of warmth – one I knew was a very bad sign. I came all the way back here to die of something I could just as easily have succumbed to in the woods at the bottom of the Renner's garden?
A feeling like drunkenness came over me shortly, my mind spinning the way it does when I've had one too many shots of cheap liquor at some house party or another. When I felt my wrists suddenly fall apart and my arms flop uselessly out onto the frost-hardened ground, I wasn't quite sure if I was imagining it or not. A few seconds later I was in the air – or was I? Someone was laughing, too – a strange kind of laughter that didn't sound mirthful at all.
It was me laughing, stupefied with the winter chill as someone big – Esa – carried me over his shoulder and ducked under the threshold of the main house. Inside it was warmer, although not by much. A fire burned in a large fire-pit, above which a large hole allowed the smoke up and eventually out into the darkness of the night. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the dim light and the awful smell, and soon realized, on my way up stairs to the second level of the house, that the entire first floor
was full of animals. Had my mouth been working, and had I not been in fear for my life, I would have asked what that was all about.
On the second floor, the man carrying me suddenly stopped. I would have looked up, but I was still too weak and clumsy with the cold.
"What weakens her?"
The voice was new. Male, deep, authoritative. It could only be one man – the Lord who was to decide my fate.
"Baldric tied her to the washing post, my Lord. She was without a tunic."
A small commotion, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and then Baldric's voice spoke up. "Her dressings fell off in the fight, Lord. And make no mistake but it was a fight – she came for your men a second time , throwing poison into the eyes of your Eadward and Thurgis. I'm sorry that I didn't think to waste a sheepskin on this North –"
"Enough!" The Lord's voice rang out, silencing Baldric. "Esa put her down in front of me, I'll hear it from her if you bunch of bickering women don't mind?"
Any other circumstance and I would have chuckled at that comment and the similarity it bore to so many I'd heard in the 21st century. These men had no idea what a combustion engine was, but they snickered just as surely as any frat boy at the comparison of their male friends to women.
A second later I felt myself unceremoniously dumped onto a wooden floor. I moved my eyes in the direction of the Lord's voice, because my body was still too stiff from the cold to sit properly.
"Fetch a sheepskin, Baldric. And next time you manage to catch a Northwoman on my land, try not to kill her before I can question her, do you hear?"
But my –"
"NOW, Baldric!"
When he returned, I almost whimpered with gratefulness at the feeling of a sheepskin being laid around my shoulders. The Lord waited patiently for me to regain the ability to move and I sat up on the rough wooden logs that formed the floor as soon as I could, sensing that it wouldn't do me any good to appear as anything other than respectful towards the man who now held my fate in his hands.