Guardians of Time

by Sarah Woodbury

  He paused, releasing the button and studying the faces in front of him. Then he activated the intercom again. “If this doesn’t work, I’m sorry. It’s been an honor.”

  And with that abrupt comment, he turned around and placed both hands on the dash in front of him.

  Anna knew her brother. His voice had been thick with emotion there at the end, and he’d cut off any further speech because he didn’t want anyone else to know how he was feeling. As Jane shifted into first gear and started down the hill, Anna met her mother’s eyes. Mom was clutching Papa’s hand the same way Anna was holding Math’s.

  They didn’t speak as the bus safely navigated the first two switchbacks, and then the bus started down the straight stretch, picking up speed and jostling everyone as it went. The bus wasn’t designed for gravel roads, even one hardened and smoothed as this one had been. Rain pounded on the roof and ran in rivulets down the windows, at a slant because the wind was whipping too and the bus was going fast.

  “Mother of God,” Math said.

  “I can’t let David do this alone.” Abruptly, Anna unbuckled her seatbelt and staggered towards the front of the bus. She steadied herself with one hand on the metal bar that ran from floor to ceiling behind the driver’s seat and grabbed for David’s arm with the other.

  “Anna! What are you doing?” The tears were gone from David’s voice. Now he just sounded horrified.

  “We started this together. We’re going to finish it the same way.” Anna glared at David, daring him to send her back to her seat.

  “All right.” David brought his hand off the dash and clasped her left hand with his right. “Together.”

  They both stared out the front window as the cliff rose up before them.

  “David.” Jane’s voice was all fear and warning.

  “Keep that pedal to the floor,” David ordered.

  A hundred feet. Fifty feet. People in the back of the bus and on the upper level, where they had a better view, were openly screaming now. Some were praying. Anna was screaming on the inside, her breath caught so far up in her throat it was choking her. She glanced down at the speedometer, which was in kilometers per hour. It told her they were going a hundred.

  And then Mom was behind them, wedging herself between her children, her arms wrapped around their waists. “I’m here, you two.” The cliff wall was right in front of them.

  Twenty feet. Ten feet.

  There was no stopping now, even if they wanted to. They were going to hit the wall. An irresistible force colliding with an immovable object.

  “Eyes open!” David’s voice cracked.

  Anna screamed as the front of the bus hit the stones of the cliff with a resounding crash—

  But no, like the miracle it had always been and continued to be, instead of hitting the wall, they went right through it, as if they were on a ghost bus and had become ghosts themselves. Anna could only guess what it looked like from the outside. For the first time, because she was determined to experience the traveling fully, she kept her eyes open wide as David had ordered. But the lights at the front of the bus shone into nothingness.

  She clutched David’s hand, which she was still holding, felt her mom’s tight grip around her waist, and counted through the three seconds of blackness that surrounded the bus.

  Then they were through to the other side—and the bus was screaming down a highway going the wrong way.

  Horns blared from the two lanes of cars coming at them.

  “Iesu Mawr!” Jane said, swearing fluently in Welsh as she swerved the bus to avoid the oncoming cars.

  The bus’s windshield wipers flailed back and forth at high speed. It was snowing here instead of raining, with at least three or four inches already on the ground. Since the road wasn’t a true divided highway, the easiest thing for Jane to do should have been to veer into the far left lane, where cars were going in their direction, but a series of giant orange barrels barred the way. The road was under construction, and it looked to Anna as if it was being expanded into a four-lane divided highway. They were driving on the right side of the road, which of course was the wrong side for Wales.

  Mom staggered away from the dash, bringing Anna with her. They collapsed into their seats, and Anna felt Math’s arms come around her waist and pull her close to him. She put her head into his chest, her whole body vibrating.

  “We’re going to head right back to the Middle Ages if we don’t get off this road!” Callum had risen to his feet to stand by David, who was no longer leaning forward on the dash but had moved both hands to the metal pole behind Jane’s seat, which Anna had been holding.

  “I’m trying!” An oncoming van forced Jane to careen the bus to the far right side of the road. Unfortunately, as was usual in Wales, the shoulder was about three inches wide with a stone wall buttressing it. On an American highway, they could have pulled off the road and stopped, even if they were facing the wrong way. Here, there was nowhere to go.

  “As soon as you can.” David’s voice turned calm. While Callum stooped to look out the windshield, David stepped closer to Anna so he could bend forward to look out the side window of the bus above her head. “Hey, sis. Thanks.” He smiled at Anna and put out a hand to her. “It worked.”

  She grasped his hand. “It did, you idiot. One more time.”

  Chapter Three

  David

  David was forced to admit, in those first moments as they careened the wrong way down the road, that he’d been criminally arrogant, and he didn’t need Anna to call him an idiot to realize it. His time traveling had never hurt anyone before—that he knew of anyway. As he watched a car, in its attempt to avoid the bus, narrowly miss the series of orange barrels that ran down the middle of the highway, it staggered him to realize how much trust the bus passengers had placed in him, allowing him to risk their lives on the hope that he could bring them home.

  He didn’t know where he’d expected to end up. Somewhere in the twenty-first century was as far ahead as he’d thought. If pressed, he’d have guessed that they’d end up in a field or an empty hillside either in Wales or Pennsylvania—or in a pinch, Oregon. That’s where they’d always found themselves before. But then, except for when Anna and Mom had dropped the bus into the middle of a medieval battle, they’d never gone back to the modern world in a vehicle capable of causing the kind of havoc the Cardiff double-decker was currently wreaking on the highway.

  A deathly quiet descended upon the bus itself, even as car after car swerved out of their way. With the dark and the snow, getting out of this with only a few dings and some scared drivers would be a miracle. Nobody spoke, not wanting to disturb Jane’s concentration and muttered cursing as she fought the wheel, the snow, and the other cars to navigate safely through them.

  Jane split the difference between the two lanes in order to avoid two cars that veered away by inches, and then, finally, a gap appeared in the traffic at the same time as a roundabout. She swung the wheel so as to follow the roundabout to the left, which enabled her to merge with the traffic on the other side of the barrels. She ended up not only in the proper lane for Wales—though now, to David, since they were on the left side of the road, it was the wrong lane—but also with the ability to exit the highway entirely.

  Unfortunately, the sign telling them what exit they were taking was obscured by blown snow, which had adhered to the reflective lettering. David could make out only a C, and an ‘on’, and on the next line maybe a dd and an ll. That meant they could be anywhere in Wales.

  Three minutes later, Jane pulled into the parking lot of a Tesco store, which was roughly the British equivalent to Wal-Mart in the United States. As she braked to a stop, David closed his eyes for a second, feeling his heart ease into a more normal pattern, and pressed his forehead into the heel of his hand. He felt the bus settle as the engine slowed to a low hum.

  Jane leaned back in her seat, wiping sweat off her brow, and then looked over at him. “We didn’t die.”

  “Apparentl
y not,” David said, “though not for lack of trying.”

  “That was too bloody close,” Darren said in an undertone.

  David nodded fervently and turned to look at his family and friends. Nobody was really talking yet, though some of the bus passengers had risen to their feet to look out the windows of the bus, and a couple of people had opened other windows to let in fresh air and snow.

  Then Mom let out an unqueenlike guffaw of laughter, and David found himself smiling at her. They’d done it, and they hadn’t killed anyone in the process. A major victory. Yes, he’d been arrogant, but once again, he hadn’t been badly punished for it.

  “What do we do now?” Mark said brightly, articulating what everyone had to be thinking.

  It was on David to come up with the answers, though now that they were here, he felt completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of what faced them. It wasn’t enough that he’d brought all the bus passengers back to the modern world. He couldn’t just drop them off in a Tesco parking lot and leave them.

  But then his ears tuned into the babble of voices coming from the seats behind Mark, Rachel, and Darren. Cell phones had materialized in a dozen hands. Earlier, he’d been too busy to notice the little outlets—both USB ports and those for regular plugs—located beside each pair of seats. Most of the passengers had thought to bring their cell phones and chargers against the moment they reached the modern world and could use them again.

  From the back of the bus came the sound of someone sobbing, and David moved toward the voice, afraid the woman in question was injured.

  Callum reached out a hand to stop him. “She’s just called her family. Leave her be.”

  David stopped. Other people had tears in their eyes too, Cassie among them. She already had her phone to her ear too, and as he moved back to his post behind Jane’s seat, he heard her say, “Merry Christmas, Grandad.”

  His mother would need to call her sister, but David himself had no other family in the modern world, and no reason to feel any emotion about being here other than relief. Still, he could relate—if he’d had a cell phone to call Lili the last time he’d returned to the Middle Ages after being shipwrecked near Cardiff, he would have used it in a heartbeat.

  He raised a hand to get everyone’s attention. “Was anyone injured on the journey?”

  Shaken heads showed all around, including from the woman who’d been crying. David remembered the intercom and pressed it. “You guys okay up there?”

  A chorus of yes! sounded from upstairs, followed by a moment where the only sound was the murmuring of the bus passengers as they spoke into their phones. David looked at his friends, not sure what to expect next—and then the thunder of dozens of feet resounded throughout the bus. David looked up at the ceiling, amazed at the noise and wondering if the passengers were bending the metal supports as they pounded down the aisle and the stairs towards the exit.

  Then, as if on cue, the people on the lower level rose to their feet too, their voices rising in an excited babble. Someone pushed open the back door and stepped out. And then, within two minutes, the bus was deserted except for David’s family and close friends.

  David gaped in the direction the passengers had gone. He’d prepared a speech about how grateful he was for everyone’s trust in him, and how honored he was to have been part of their lives, but there was nobody left to hear it.

  “What are they doing?” David said.

  Callum gave a cough. “Let them go. I’ve seen it before when a group of people has been in danger and is finally rescued.”

  “What do you mean?” David said.

  Callum made an I don’t know if I can explain motion with his head. “It’s as if they’ve lived on a desert island this past year. While they developed a camaraderie with their fellow passengers and might promise to keep in touch forever, the moment they arrive home, it becomes clear that, with a few exceptions, nobody will.”

  “For desert island read the Middle Ages, and you’ve got it,” Darren said.

  “Huh,” was all David managed to say.

  Mom gave him a rueful smile. “They’re home. You can’t blame them for being happy.”

  Cassie pulled her phone down from her ear for a second and frowned in the direction of the last few stragglers leaving the bus. “Really? Nobody is even going to say thank you?”

  “We brought them to the Middle Ages against their will,” David said, “and we returned them to their world, as was their due. On top of which, I’m not the King of England here. I’m nobody, and they owe me nothing.”

  Cassie shook her head, still disbelieving, and resumed her conversation with her grandfather.

  “You’re not quite nobody,” Anna said. “Still, I can see how few of them will look back on this year and see it as anything more than a long, not-very-pleasant vacation that required them to rough it most of the time.” Anna, in fact, had talked to many of the bus passengers on David’s behalf, once he’d become convinced that the time had come to return them to Avalon.

  Callum tapped his fingers on his thigh. “I don’t think they realize we’re about to be the cause of an international incident. We just made a busload of people who vanished off the face of the earth for an entire year reappear.”

  “Not to mention the fact that they disappeared inside a city bus in the middle of a terrorist attack on Cardiff to begin with,” Darren said.

  “Even if the world has completely fallen apart in our absence, somebody might just notice our return,” Callum added.

  “It might be worse than that.” David found that his brain was starting to function again. He gestured to Cassie, who’d just said her goodbyes with the promise to call again in a few hours. “Our families might be discreet, but how long is it going to take for news of where this bus has been for the last year to make the leap to the internet? With pictures?”

  “My granddad knows not to say anything, David,” Cassie said.

  “Thanks for that,” David said, “but this isn’t his first rodeo. The others aren’t going to be so circumspect.”

  Anna grimaced. “You could have ordered them not to talk about it.”

  “One, they don’t take orders from me anymore,” David said, “and two, not telling the truth could be worse than telling it. How else are forty people going to explain where they’ve been?”

  “I hope some of them don’t end up in a mental institution.” Cassie rose to her feet and crossed the aisle so she could plug her own charger into an empty outlet and recharge her phone.

  Rachel wrinkled her chin. “That’s not outside the realm of possibility, you know.”

  “I can’t help that,” David said. “The alternative was not to bring them. That didn’t seem like much of a choice to me at all.”

  “Trying to stay under the radar was part of the reason why we did this on Christmas Eve in the first place.” Anna gestured to the bright lights of the Tesco outside the bus. Red, green, and white Christmas lights wound around lampposts and were strung across the front of the store, and pictures of red ribbons and wreaths were painted on the store windows in washable paint. “The whole point was that it would take longer for the authorities to notice.”

  Callum leaned forward to talk to Jane. “Douse the lights?” And as Jane did as he asked, he turned back to the others. “We should be aware that the press might get wind of us almost as quickly.”

  Anna made a dismissive gesture with her hands. “Maybe the first thing we need to do, now that the others have ditched us, is to find out where we are.”

  Mark was focused on his phone, and he held up one finger, paging quickly through the screens. “We’re in Caernarfon.”

  Dad, who hadn’t spoken yet at all, expelled a burst of air. “That’s luck.”

  Math spoke in Welsh to his father-in-law. “This—this—place is Caernarfon? What happened to the sleepy fishing village?”

  “King Edward cleared the harbor of Welsh families and built a great big castle to suppress the populace,” Mom said tar
tly. “He brought in a bunch of English settlers to supplant them too.”

  In addition to building the castle and importing settlers, King Edward had also made sure that his son, Edward II, was born in Caernarfon in 1284, so that he could call him the Prince of Wales, in order to preclude any native Welsh prince from claiming the title ever again.

  The current Prince of Wales actually had some Welsh in him, thanks to the Tudor dynasty of the sixteenth century when Henry VII, the descendant of Dad’s advisor, Tudur, defeated King Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field and claimed the throne. Henry Tudor had marched across Wales flying the red dragon flag, the first to do so since Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon in the sixth century. He’d done it as a blatant attempt to garner support in Wales for his bid for the throne, and it had worked.

  Math sat back in his seat with a huh look on his face. “I bow to your superior wisdom, Mother.” He took Anna’s hand again. “I can see why you prefer my world to yours, cariad.”

  David was glad to see that Math was unfazed enough by the traveling to muster up some humor, though he was also pretty sure that Math meant exactly what he said.

  Now David bent down to Jane. “How much gas do we have?”

  Jane looked at the gauge. “More than half a tank.”

  It was essentially the same amount they’d started with. The bus had come to the Middle Ages with a mostly full tank. Some of the gas had evaporated over the course of the year that the bus had sat in the barn, and they’d used more in test runs, occasional starts of the engine, and as an even more occasional source of electricity. But they’d tried to preserve the gas as best they could because there was more to running a bus on biodiesel than simply dumping some used vegetable oil—made in the Middle Ages from olives or walnuts—into the tank. Oils were expensive imports, so people in Britain fried in lard or butter instead.