Chapter Three
I walked back to the shelter and was disconcerted to find Plexis sitting alone in front of the fire. As I arrived, he motioned to me to sit next to him and to be quiet. I obeyed. I’d been in the army too long to hesitate an instant.
We sat in silence for an hour. The fire in front of us crackled merrily, and the wind picked up making the tree branches whisper. Then Plexis smiled at me and said softly, ‘We’re on our own now. Alexander has decided to split us up into three groups.’
I just stared at him. Finally, licking dry lips, I asked, ‘Where are the others, and why?’
‘Nearchus and Yovanix are in the first group. They have gone ahead. Paul, Alexander, and Demos are perhaps an hour’s march behind them. You and I will bring up the rear. We’re to wait another hour and then follow. The idea is to separate the people watching us.’
‘But we’ll be separated too!’ I was agitated. The idea didn’t seem to make any sense to me. ‘There’s safety in numbers,’ I said.
‘Hush. Listen. Alexander wants to give us time that’s all. We’re buying more time. Our pursuers know I’m wounded, so they won’t find it strange to see us lagging. He thinks that after a while the people who are watching us will concentrate on Paul and him, leaving you and me alone. If we are not being watched, we can act if need be. Do you understand?’
‘Not really,’ I said nervously. ‘How will we know when we’re left alone?’
‘I think we’ll know within a day or two. Today I’m going to pretend to take a turn for the worse and we’re not going to go further than the stream. Tomorrow we’ll start out as usual, but we’ll go slower and slower, and Alexander will take care to leave marks for us to follow. I think there will come a time when we’ll be left alone. They will assume we’re following.’
‘All right. I suppose it’s as good a plan as any.’ I sighed and then shivered. ‘I’m hungry. Did they leave us some food?’
Plexis shrugged. ‘No, but Nearchus left a fishing spear. You can go get us some lunch.’
‘If you’re going to rely on me, I’m afraid you’ll starve to death,’ I said. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I went back to the stream and stood for an hour on the bank, spear poised, waiting for an unwary trout.
We ate watercress for lunch.
By teatime, my stomach was growling. Plexis and I walked a mile or so into the forest and saw the signs Alexander had left us. He’d carved arrows on trees by peeling the bark off, pointing the way we should go. When he changed tack he left another mark. Plexis could follow the faint marks left on the ground, he didn’t really need the tree carvings, but I couldn’t follow their tracks.
‘Are you sure they went that way?’ I asked, peering at a thicket.
‘I’m sure.’ Plexis was laconic. He didn’t need to pretend to be wounded. His wound was extremely painful; I could tell by the way he walked. He set his feet down carefully and cradled his arm with his good hand, wincing whenever the ground got too rough.
‘Will you be all right?’ I asked, for the hundredth time that day.
‘Fine.’ He sank to the ground. ‘Well, maybe not fine.’ He looked up at me and I swore under my breath. His face was drawn with pain.
‘Can you try and find some arrowroot?’ he asked. ‘We can eat that for dinner. I think I’ll rest here. I’ll try and make a fire later.’ He leaned back against a tree and closed his eyes.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll get us some dinner,’ I said bravely.
I was gone for two hours. The light had faded when I made my way back to the deep thicket. I’d found arrowroot and dandelions, and in a shallow stream I’d managed to capture six crayfish. Plexis had begun to build a fire, so I fetched some firewood and wild cabbage leaves. When I was returned, Plexis fashioned a pot from the leaves and we boiled the crayfish in that. The meal was meagre. Afterwards, we wrapped ourselves in our cloaks and snuggled together. Worn out with pain and hunger, Plexis fell asleep quickly. I stayed awake to feed the fire, then lay down next to Plexis.
I woke up at dawn. Nights were getting shorter; I’d only slept about two hours. The fire had died down to a bed of cold, grey ashes. The air was chill, but my cloak kept me warm. There was not a sound to be heard. The birds hadn’t started singing and the wind had died. Carefully, I eased out of the thicket. There was a stream nearby; hopefully I’d have more luck fishing this morning.
Breakfast for me was clear water. I took a cabbage leaf and made a cup, drinking deeply, then I washed, sitting in the freezing stream just long enough for my legs to get blue in the icy water. I dried with my cloak then dressed. My clothes were getting grubby, but I wanted to wait for a hot day before I washed them. I hung my cloak on a low branch to air and broke a twig from a birch tree. As I cleaned my teeth, I walked slowly upstream looking for a likely spot to fish. When I found a deep pool, I took Nearchus’s spear and tried to gaff some trout. I could see them, swimming lazily in the water, sometimes they would leave the shade of the bank and the sun would speckle them gold and green. My stomach hurt, I was starving. After twenty fruitless stabs into the water I sighed, put the spear down, and started to search for arrowroot. Instead, I found a clump of dogtooth violets. I dug up their roots, rubbing the mud off them with my fingers. Maybe we could boil them and call them lunch?
Plexis joined me sometime later. He still looked peaked, but he managed to spear three large fish. He was an accomplished hunter, and if he’d been feeling better, we would have had more than enough food. Then he sat and watched as I cleaned them and started the fire.
Plexis had your basic fire-making kit in his leather pouch: a piece of pyrite; some flint; and cotton soaked in alcohol. I whacked the stones together trying for a spark. I didn’t do this often, so it took me forever to make the fire. Once, I smashed my thumb and dropped the stones, swearing heartily. Plexis was shocked at all the bad language I’d picked up. I told him it was from Nearchus.
Finally, a spark burst into flame. Plexis carefully fed it pine needles and bits of fluff until the fire was big enough to handle dry sticks. I sat back, sucked my wounded thumb, and wondered when matches would be invented. Probably not for a while.
We grilled the trout and boiled the roots. The meal was delicious, but I think, at that point, I would have happily eaten raw fish and muddy roots.
‘Let me see your arm,’ I said to Plexis when we’d finished eating.
He nodded and carefully shrugged off his tunic. The wound on his forearm was healing well, but the torn biceps was swollen and painful to the touch. I boiled water in a cabbage leaf pot then washed the cut with the hottest water he could stand. Afterwards, I boiled his bandages while he rested in a patch of watery sunlight.
‘We’ll stay here today,’ I said to him. ‘I want to keep putting boiled water on your arm, maybe that will help. I wish Alexander were here. He always has a clove of garlic or two tucked away.’
‘Garlic?’ Plexis smiled. ‘I have garlic. Do you want to use it to clean my wound? Rather a waste, don’t you think?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I said crossly, taking the garlic from him, peeling it and crushing it into the hot water. ‘It will help disinfect your wound.’
‘Disinfect”. Is that another of your words from the future?’ He flinched while I washed his arm. To distract him, I asked if he wanted a story. ‘Yes, please. The one about how you were sent here. You never did explain it to me.’
‘Because it’s too complicated. The mechanisms of the voyage are impossible to explain to a layman.’
‘In other words, you have no idea how it works.’ He grinned, then hissed as I probed a bit too deeply.
‘Sorry.’
‘Am I right?’
‘You’re right.’ I finished bandaging his arm and sat cross-legged in front of him. ‘I have no idea how it works. However, I do know that it works on three levels, atomic, magnetic, and spatial. There’s also a phenomenon related to temperature. When you voyage in time your body is first frozen, the atom
s separated, sent into a magnetic beam, and projected through time and space. When your atoms arrive in their programmed time-location, they first reconstitute themselves, then they thaw, and you wake up in another time.’
‘Aren’t you worried that your atoms will put themselves together in a different arrangement? That you’ll end up as a goat, say, instead of a person?’
I was startled. ‘No,’ I said slowly. ‘Atoms are put together in an immutable pattern. You can pull them apart, but they bounce back to the same position they were in before. That’s why water can freeze, become solid, then thaw out and still be water, and not become oil, for example.’
‘I see.’ Plexis said. ‘So, in your time, can atoms be taken apart and rearranged? Can you create other things besides water with water atoms?’ His questions were always tricky.
‘We can. In my time, scientists have discovered many different ways of using atoms, either in their natural state or in artificial combinations.’ I broke off and frowned. I wasn’t sure just how much to tell him.
‘And one of the ways they use the atoms is for weapons, is it not?’ Plexis peered at my face. His eyes were searching. He could see right into my heart.
‘That’s right.’ I shook my head. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that, please? It’s like, like …’
‘A sacrilege? In this time and place?’ Plexis’s voice was gentle.
‘Yes. That’s what it’s like. It’s worse than a rape. It’s worse than anything you can imagine,’ I said bleakly.
‘Then tell me another story. In the three thousand years that separate your time from mine, there must have been countless storytellers who wove their tales. Are there any you love the best? Can you tell me one that I’ll understand and love the way you do? Do poets still recite adventures like Homer did? Do they still tell stories to entertain, or have all the poets died and the stories vanished?’ His voice wavered.
‘They haven’t vanished. I’ll have to think though; I love so many stories.’ I sighed.
He reached over and touched my cheek lightly. ‘Tell me you love me.’
I looked up at him. His expression was serious. I smiled and tucked a stray curl back behind his ear. ‘Of course I love you,’ I whispered.
He looked at me through long lashes. ‘I love you too, Ashley of the Sacred Sandals, and I have a confession to make.’ He paused. ‘When you were kidnapped, so long ago in Arbeles, it was I who arranged it.’
Arbeles. The word was like a stone thrown into a pool of water. The ripples spread, and I remembered the panic of my abduction, the four days of fear spent in the bottom of a wooden boat heading for an unknown destination. Then the desolation of a year in my temple prison in a silence that no one would break, even when my son was born and stolen from me.
I closed my eyes and found I was trembling. I looked down at my hands. They were gripped together, fingers twisted, knuckles white. Even now, even ten years later, the memory felt like a nightmare.
‘Why?’ I finally asked. I didn’t dare look at him. I was afraid to. My gaze was as frigid as an arctic winter -and that was when I was happy. Right now it would freeze the atoms in his eyeballs.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
‘Please, Plexis, don’t make me …’
He took my chin in his good hand and tipped it back. ‘Look at me, Ashley. I did it because I was afraid. I was afraid that you were a minion of Hades, and …’
‘I mean, why tell me now?’ I kept my eyes squeezed shut.
‘Look at me.’
I opened my eyes. He was staring at me, his face solemn. ‘I’m telling you this because I want you to know. There’s no other reason than that.’
‘Because you think you’re going to die?’
‘A confession?’ He raised one eyebrow. ‘Maybe, who knows.’ His voice had gone so quiet it was as if he were speaking to himself. I had to strain to catch his words. ‘Perhaps I am afraid of dying after all. I suppose it’s not something one gets used to, although I’ve died twice already, haven’t I?’ He turned his gaze to me. ‘I told you because I had to. Because I love you, and I can’t keep it a secret any longer.’
‘Does Alexander know?’
‘No. Nobody except Olympias and me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered.
Now he was surprised. Whatever reaction he expected, it wasn’t that one. ‘Sorry? Why?’
‘Because I know Olympias.’ I reached over and took his face in my hands. My eyes were filling with tears so his face was a blur. ‘I always suspected it was you,’ I said. ‘But I didn’t care after I got to know you.’
He didn’t speak. After a minute he disengaged himself and he got up. When he left the circle of fire I saw that night had fallen. The darkness swallowed him, but I let him go. Privacy is something we all need at one time or another.
I fed the fire, watching as tongues of flame flickered among the branches. Sparks flew off the resinous wood in red showers, and I remembered all the other times I’d sat in front of a fire at night. The memories I had of electric lights were fading. Soon I would be unable to recall the glow of a neon tube or the blinking, coloured lights on a Christmas tree – or the cold, white light in the Institute of Time Travel and Study sending room. I had stared at that light for an hour while my blood slowly froze and my atoms were registered and disunited, their matrix sent spinning through time in a magnetic vacuum.
I could remember that now, but perhaps in a few years it would fade. I closed my eyes, the images sharpening in my mind. I saw the nurse bending over me with the glowing needle and could almost feel the shock as she inserted it into my arm. She looked at me with eyes almost as cold as my own and she said, ‘Soon you won’t feel a thing.’ Someone behind her had laughed and said, ‘That won’t change anything for her.’
At the time it was true. The only thing I was feeling was apprehension. I was going back in time to meet a man I’d been in love with ever since I’d first read about him in my history class. Love? Maybe not love, but certainly infatuation. I was consumed with a burning curiosity about someone who had swept through the known world and irrevocably changed it. He could change people’s lives after meeting them for just a moment, and I wanted to find out why. I needed to understand the emotions that he conjured. I wanted to feel. I wanted to come face to face with a raw passion, because in my time none of that existed. What the nurse had said about me was true. I had no feelings for anyone.
Of course, I said nothing about that on my admission. I stayed well within the clinical, detached scientific approach the Time-Senders required of all their Chrononauts. I’d won the contest and had been sent back in time.
Then I’d been trapped here; kidnapped by Alexander the Great who thought I was Persephone, the terrible Queen of the Dead. He saw me in the freezing, magnetic time-beam and he thought I was being taken back down to Hades’ realm. Every Greek knew that Persephone hated it down there and wanted to be saved. He thought he was doing me a huge favour. He also thought I’d be so grateful, I’d help him conquer Persia, vanquish Darius, and then we’d rule together from his favourite city: Alexandria near Egypt.
Things didn’t quite work out that way. For one thing, I wasn’t the goddess he thought I was. I was far from grateful – I was terrified. And before I could fully explain who I was and where I’d come from, I’d been kidnapped once again and held prisoner in a place called Mazda in the temple of Gulu, the Assyrian goddess of healing. The memories of that time were painful. I’d discovered I was pregnant and had my first child, Paul, surrounded by silence. No one would speak to me. Paul was taken away when he was ten days old, and I nearly lost my mind.
I learned the hard way about emotions. I fell in love with Alexander, but I didn’t dare believe he’d love me in return. I fell in love with my infant son, but he was wrenched from my arms. When my baby was taken from me, all the pain and anger I’d kept bottled up inside burst out. A psychologist could probably explain it better – say I’d been traumatized and suffered s
hort-term memory loss. Whatever it was, I have no recollection of anything until three months later, when an earthquake razed Mazda.
Was Paul really protected by the moon goddess? When his life was in danger, an earthquake destroyed the temple where I’d been imprisoned and I escaped to Babylon, where the priestess told me I’d find my baby. He was meant to be a sacrifice for the hungry god Marduk. However, Darius found out about Paul and took him, and another baby was put in his place. I made it to the temple in time to save the baby from the sacrifice. Marduk’s jaws closed on nothing and they broke, crushing the high priest.
There, in Babylon, I met Alexander again. A year had gone by, a year where he thought I’d been taken back to Hades and that he’d never see me again. Time had changed Alexander as well. He had become colder, harder – and when he found out about Paul, he was even more obsessed with Darius, because Darius had taken our son and had fled to Persepolis.
Why was I torturing myself? All those years spent trekking across Asia, searching for our child while Alexander conquered Persia, were terrible years. Darius had been killed, silly fool that he was, and Paul was taken east, always eastward.
For five years we searched for our son. In the beginning, Alexander had simply wanted to consolidate his hold on Persia and return to Alexandria near Egypt to rule his kingdom. Instead, he dragged his entire army to the Sacred Valley of Nysa in India to find Paul. And then we had to leave him behind.
How can a mother contemplate abandoning her child? Even now the memory was a pain so sharp it brought tears to my eyes. But I had left him there. I thought he would be safe. I would not have been able to protect him from Alexander’s enemies, nor from Roxanne, after Alexander’s death. My son would be safe, I’d thought, in the beautiful valley where I would find him when the adventure was over. It would end when Alexander died. Then I was sure I’d be able to slip away, return to India, and find my son.
The Soul of Time Page 3