Raol had become a leader unable to lead.
In an instant like this, their boat ought to be kept in high preparedness to depart at a moment’s notice.
Instead, and in light of the three men who had already stumbled into their encampment and been killed before being towed far out to sea, the Norsemen had decided that hiding and camouflaging the longboat was imperative.
They’d dragged it in as best they could under a cliff and tipped it over so that its upturned hull looked more like a wreck of planking than the swift killing vessel that it was.
They’d also worked on arranging their encampment within the thicket of the gulley to make them almost invisible to the casual observer.
The growing pile of strange debris that the sea in this place perpetually produced was still lying where they’d piled it. It was felt that it was part of this new environment and would not attract attention if left where it lay.
Now that they had lost their suspicion of the origins of this debris, they were finding good use for the brightly colored sheets of it as a rainproof shelter. The lengths of rope and other tough clear cords they had found were superior to their own hemp and leather strips. Various vessels, some of which had peculiar rotating plugs that sealed them, proved to be excellent containers.
“I’m urging you force her to disclose where she comes from. To tell us who sent her and if others will come,” Ótta agitated.
“What do you suggest I do? Torture her?” Raol asked, his eyes squinting and his jawline hardening. “She us unable to speak intelligibly.”
“How do you know this? You haven’t really tried.”
It was true—Raol had allowed no persuasion to be applied. No discomfort to be visited upon the woman to loosen her tongue.
He just knew. Knew deep in his gut and heart that she was mute to their tongue.
“This is not human,” Ótta found the courage to declare what all the men were fearing. “She eats nothing.”
“She is in fear. Do you have appetite when you are frightened?”
Ótta would never admit to being frightened, so that he ignored the question.
“Yet she shits and pisses like any woman,” Raol observed.
When Tegan had needed to relieve herself, they could not allow her any privacy. That was a confirmation that she was of flesh and bone.
“But she is sick,” Ótta would not relent with serving up reasons to dispose of this dangerous intruder. “Hacking and coughing.”
“Then keep your distance,” Raol advised. It was a suggestion and a threat.
Ótta withdrew and Raol knew it was far from an ideal situation as he became increasingly isolated in the vote to keep or butcher this woman.
She seemed already valuable to him.
***
Tegan had been shocked.
Clearly she was a prisoner of a gang of men who looked worse and, even with a blocked nose, smelled a lot worse than her worst nightmares could conjure.
They’d let her walk untouched between them.
Down the path they’d gone until they’d reached the small cliff face where she’d been lowered down.
Every step felt leaden, like the agonizing trudge toward a gallows where her rape, torture and probable murder would surely begin.
When they looked at her, there was fear in the men’s eyes. The kind of unpredictable terror that can turn even a gentle person savage—and nothing in these people seemed remotely gentile.
Just short of a shale beach, they came into a recently cleared patch with thick surrounding bush, the cuttings woven back into the natural thicket to form a visually and physically impenetrable screen.
It was the most primitive encampment she had ever imagined.
Sheets of plastic of various sizes were woven into a lean-to. These men were living rough and clearly exploiting every tiny advantage they could eke from the land. Discarded soft-drink glass and plastic bottles and cans were strewn about, clearly used as canteens filled from the stream.
A small fire producing next to no smoke smoldered nearby. The carcass of a freshly butchered seal was partially dismembered; her arrival must have interrupted the process underway of hanging strips of its flesh to cure near the fire.
After an interrogation that involved none of the expected violence she had anticipated, she was offered food but had no appetite for it. She tried to hold it as long as she could but eventually had to indicate the need to relieve herself.
Unsurprisingly, this involved an audience, but this seemed the least of her predicament so she got it over with all haste.
The food she was offered looked like dried out rotting fish, and the slight whiff of it that managed to penetrate her newly plugged nose confirmed that it would be all but inedible.
Only one man led her interrogation. He was the one with smile lines. But he wasn’t smiling.
Indeed, he seemed to be under immense pressure from his fellows who were gesticulating impassioned questions at him, that he would then try to ask of her.
“Hver ertu?!”
She shrugged.
“Hví komið þér hingað?”
She shook her head.
“Ég er að fara að missa þolinmæðina með þér ... Segðu okkur hver þú ert og hvers vegna þú hefur komið á þennan stað? Hver sendi þig?”
One of the men added, “Segðu henni að við vitum að þetta er galdur. Sem við vitum að hún er hrikalegt ... andi ... Savage anda. Að við munum finna út. Það Óðinn er með okkur. Að við munum eyðileggja hana og þeir sem sendi hana.”
Tegan shook her head and shrugged, holding her inverted palms out to them in surrender.
“I am sorry,” she mewed in fear and subjugation. “I really, really don’t understand.”
“Hún skilur ekki,” the interrogator told his advisor.
“Segðu henni að við getum gert hana að skilja.”
And so it went on and relentlessly on.
At times, one of the men would lean toward her, looming over her, his hand on one or another of their vicious-looking weapons: axes, pikes, swords and daggers.
Tears ran down Tegan’s face. She let them flow, hoping they would soften hearts.
She was astounded, but she had not been frisked. Indeed, since the man had taken her shoulder with that sudden bolt of shock, she had not been touched by anyone, and confidence was beginning to grow in her that she might not be. That somehow she was an exception.
The mobile phone in the front of jeans near her crotch had vibrated several times with incoming calls.
She’d managed to turn the ring volume down, but not yet had the tiniest gap to turn the phone off altogether and save battery till she needed it. She’d dared not even try.
At every occasion, salvation was just one second’s cry for help away. They would surely know to trace her mobile. She was certain that triangulating it would be possible.
Only when she’d relieved herself did she use that moment of reduced scrutiny to retrieve the mobile and quickly turn it off.
Now the battery was safe for a better opportunity, but her chances of being triangulated were gone.
Night fell and in the shivering pitch-blackness when the fire was allowed to die, she lay sleepless and in terror.
The leader had indicated for her to come lie by him.
This was the moment of truth. The moment the worst might happen, but nothing did. He lay by her side and placed a meaty hand on her hip, laying claim to her. She felt him smelling at her hair, and that was as far as it went.
Somehow she began to feel secure.
Her barking cough throughout the night and the pitch black of the valley under cloud cover and a light drizzle nailed her as firmly in place as if she were in an icy dungeon full of snoring, grunting and reeking men lying close.
Morning brought the realization of her predicament rushing back. The normal circumstances had flipped. In sleep, her dreams had at least been neutral; in wakefulness she found a nightmare.
She’d se
en them attending a stricken member of their party. He seemed to be dead, but they fussed over him as best they could.
Watching carefully, she eventually saw him move and realized from his shock of blond hair that he was only a lad.
With hand gestures, she asked permission to approach.
The leader made way for her.
She knelt alongside Gansi and placed her palm on his forehead; there was an icy layer of sweat covering a raging fever of heat at the skin.
The boy was shivering with it.
Instinctively, she lifted and peeled back the stinking hemp cloth that served as a blanket and was struck by the most wretched stench of rotting flesh.
Then she saw the mangled and infected black stump that the boy was guarding to his belly, and it made her gasp with shock. Jagged flecks of bone still protruded from the decomposing flesh and a network of turgid yellow-grey puss of gangrene bloated the site.
She shook her head theatrically to the audience of men watching her carefully and wracked her brains for how she could communicate that this was deadly serious, that this boy was at death’s doorstep.
Then she realized that they probably needed no reality check on that score. That if they were who she was increasingly thinking they were—travelers from another time—they would be most familiar with death and infection.
What she needed to do was indicate to them what the treatment must be, to win their trust that she had some small idea that was better than theirs. It should start with sterilizing knives or those axes and cutting away the dead flesh, then applying the alcohol swabs she habitually carried, boiling up what rags she could find, and wrapping the wounds.
She started with some powerful painkillers she always carried to treat the severe period cramps that she was experiencing.
It was near impossible to get the tablets past the frightened boy’s parched lips and simultaneously convince his suspicious compatriots that she was not administering either poison or some magic potion.
This was all achieved with sign language, doe eyes and playing a tough, matronly no-nonsense role.
Slowly, she saw realization starting to dawn that she was genuinely trying to help. Her insistence on getting the wound site clean and the instruments of operation sterilized was gaining looks of approval.
The boy growled like a lion, his eyes fierce burning coals that matched the pain he was enduring.
Something within him must have connected with her efforts because at no time did he resist. The dosage of five times the normal amount of pain tablets administered, no doubt, helped.
Eventually the job was done. The parts cut away were thrown ceremonially into the fire and the smell of barbequing meat briefly filled the air before giving way to the smell of burning.
As she had cut, two pellets came away with the flesh.
It made no sense until she recalled that first BREAKING NEWS story about an attack, and then everything fell suddenly into place.
Every last vestige of doubt evaporated. These were the men from that attack. The axes lying close at hand to each man were of the same design as the one exhibited on television. The shot fired had clearly found its mark in this boy.
Her head was spinning with the implications.
Professor Daxton’s allusions to this possibility were borne out. She was sitting among ancestors, among men plucked through a millennium, among living fossils.
If they had come to this time channel, then so had the fish on the reef under them—that is why the reef was suddenly restored to its former glory of a century and more in the past.
This meant that the modern ships and planes had gone sometime else as well.
Tegan was stunned.
Now she desperately needed to get that phone working. Pete would be the right person to call… if only he would answer. He would have the right connections to handle this.
She guessed that the highly secretive circumstances of this time flip would mean that she dare not call the media.
The media splashing it out there could mean the worst outcome for all.
To start with, it would bring the military racing in, and that was unlikely to end well. They would wipe these guys out with a tactical strike, probably taking her with them. But, more than that, she realized—what happens when you kill an ancestor? Will you still exist?
It seemed like a ludicrous idea for her to be contemplating, but the entire situation was so absurd that she could barely believe that she was awake, sane and living through it.
And that is when the shout from a loudhailer came echoing down the river valley.
“Tegan… Tegan Mulholland… Helloooooo, can you hear us?”
The men instinctively knew it was connected to her and every face was turned to see her reaction.
The shout of reply dried in her throat.
Had it not, she knew she would be dead before the ‘s’ of ‘yes’ could leave her lips. Every hand was on a sword, dagger or axe in that instant.
What to do? How to play it?
Her mind crowded with instant and fateful questions.
She could hardly pretend that she had not heard, so she shrugged and smiled, hoping to disarm the men who had already moved into a tight phalanx around her, facing out.
The leader—she had already learned his name was Raol—had moved toward her. She couldn’t quite assess if it was a protective or a threatening gesture, because he had his dagger out, held low in a concrete fist, and she realized that the instant those voices drew closer, she would become an active hostage with a knife to the throat.
“Fuck!” she said under her breath, and Raol nodded. He needn’t need to understand the word to know her meaning.
“TEGAN… Can you hear us…? HELLLLLOOOOOO!”
In the silence where only her heartbeat was a bongo-solo in her ears, she heard the unmistakable treble of a two-way radio hissing its search party jargon.
The sounds of the search retreated and there were audible sighs of relief as hands relaxed on weapons.
Tegan spent the next hour trying to distract them; she went to urinate again, her audience thwarting her ability to get the phone out, on and working. The men saw it and took it from her.
It was off and so not as enormous of a curiosity as it would have been had the screen been lit, colorful, noisy and full of life, as she wanted it to be.
They examined it thoroughly, running fingers over the smoothness of the surface. Turning it over in their hands.
She was praying now, unsure of whether she wanted it to spontaneously come to life with an inadvertent push of the on button—eventually giving her an opportunity to make a call or message, if both she and the mobile survived the experience—or if she wanted it to remain inanimate.
The latter prevailed.
They handed it to Raol who turned it over cautiously in his hands.
“Hvað er þetta?” He was asking a question and she guessed it meant, “What is this?”
How do I tell him I can talk to others around the world with it?
How would he react to that kind of magic?
It was precarious.
She shrugged, trying to buy herself time.
“Hvað er þetta?” he asked again, but much more menacingly.
She put out her hand to get it back.
This was the moment she could perhaps turn it on and have that search party hear its signature start-up tune or get a triangulated fix on her.
And at that precise moment, the distant beating of the air entered the bay and quickly grew to a clattering din.
The men scattered.
Raol grabbed Tegan by the hair and dragged her furiously under cover. He put an arm around her and a knife to her throat.
The helicopter moved steadily on toward them, the thundering rotors obliterating every other sound.
She chose that second of bedlam to push the on button and the mobile ran its gaily twinkling start-up tune under the thrashing downdraft as the chopper hovered in and over their encampment.
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Surely they’ll see the litter pile on the beach? Tegan assumed. Surely they’ll recognize the overturned boat against the cliff face?
Shortly after her capture, through the screen of the bush, she’d seen the impressive boat dragged in under an overhang of cliff and covered in cut bush.
The chopper appeared to have seen the boat, as they hovered close to it for several moments.
Then it tilted and came on away from the beach, slowly up and directly over the encampment full of wild men locked in the terror of a waking nightmare.
These dangerous men had their weapons at the ready and her life at the sharp, icy mercy of a cold blade between the ribs.
The tree canopy thrashed wildly overhead from the helicopter’s downdraft, some of the litter covering plucked out and sent swirling through the encampment.
The chopper went on, tracing the river’s course.
Whites of their eyes stood out and no one made a sound.
Shortly after that, the din returned, but quickly this time.
The chopper came skating fast over the treetops, clattering growling out over the beach and bay.
Tegan heard it slow down, make a turn to the left and proceed to fly southeastward along the coast beyond the bay’s headland.
Calm was restored.
***
“I have spoken with them,” Ótta insisted. “They think you are making a grave error. You have allowed this thing to live and it is bringing the air dragons to us.”
“But they passed over us,” Raol pointed out. “She offers us that protection.”
“Only because they did not find her.”
“If you say she brings them to us, they have sight. If you say they did not see her, they do not. So which is it?”
Raol posed the question with little faith that it made a lot of sense, but it would at least buy him another moment to think about the delicate situation he found himself in.
That immense howling beast was more terrifying close-up than he could have imagined from seeing it at a distance.
It was vast with nearly invisible wings that beat faster than his eye could discern.
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