“Oh, This is grand!” Susan said as Uncle Farley knelt in front of the radio dials. “We’re finally going back in time!” Without realizing it, she sucked in a deep breath and held it.
“Latitude… seventy degrees…thirty minutes… north. Longitude… twenty-two degrees… zero minutes… west.”
Susan felt her cheeks burning, but continued holding her breath.
“Temporality …” Uncle Farley flipped the dial. “August …” Another flip. “Second …” Flip. “One …” flip “four …” flip “eight …” flip …
Popping noises in her ears, stars in front of her eyes.
“…three,” Uncle Farley said finally. Flip.
The breath burst from Susan’s mouth so loudly Uncle Farley jumped.
“August 2, 1483! I mean…I mean….” Susan wasn’t sure what she meant, really, besides: “Wow!”
The fifteenth century! It was just…so… before… everything.
Bjarki’s voice came from the radio.
“I’m afraid I can’t get you right on the coast because of the squall. This’ll put you a few miles offshore. Now, before you sluice, I want you to—”
“Sloosh?” Susan interrupted.
“Sluice,” Uncle Farley whispered. “Travel back in time.”
“—fill a few vials with water from the Sea of Time. Once you make land, you can use them to help you communicate. Simply put a drop in each ear and you’ll be able to understand anything that’s said to you, and a drop on your tongue to speak any language.”
Susan was shocked. “But won’t that turn us into Ac-ac-ac—Returners?”
Bjarki’s chuckle had a faintly tinny sound. “Water from the Sea of Time deintensifies the moment it enters the temporal universe. Within a few days, it’s indistinguishable from good ol’ H-two-of-O. Now, bon voyage!”
For vials, Uncle Farley supplied a pair of test tubes from his study. Susan opened the front door and dunked them into the warm water of the Sea of Time. The tiny tubes filled instantly, but Susan lingered a moment, glancing over the wide blue expanse as if Diaphone’s head just might poke above the gently rolling surface. But the sea was empty, and Susan wedged corks in the test tubes and closed the door between her and the loneliness of eternity, and hurried back to the drawing room. Its walls were blank now—a probable effect, Bjarki had said, of the squall’s interference.
“Right then,” Uncle Farley said when he saw her in the doorway. “Let’s be off.” And he reached to push a button on the radio.
“Do I need to sit”—Susan began, even as her uncle’s finger depressed the button—“down or anything?”
Uncle Farley looked at her with a mischievous smile on his face. “Why would you?”
“Well, is it, I don’t know, bumpy?” Susan was recalling her ride to the bottom of the Great Drain in Frejo’s mouth, which had been quite bumpy.
“You tell me. Did it feel bumpy?”
“What? Was that it? Are we there?” But even as she spoke she caught a glimpse of her shadow on the floor, and realized they were indeed back in the temporal world. The rocking of the house had increased as well, indicating a less calm body of water than the Sea of Time.
“I’m afraid it’s not very dramatic, is it? No flashing lights or fading in and out.”
“Well, it’s not the transporter on the Enterprise, that’s for sure.”
Susan wasn’t sure if she was let down or relieved. Before she could decide, Drift House pitched dramatically to the right, and she had to grab on to the back of a chair to keep from falling over, nearly dropping her test tubes. A loud crash emanated from the other side of the room, echoed by several smaller crashes through the house.
“What was—”
Susan was cut off by a squelchy voice from the radio.
“—North Atlantic is famous for its own squalls.” Bjarki’s voice pitched and rolled like the house. “Nothing to worry about but your stomachs.” The transmission was swallowed by a wave of static. “Lose radio contact soon” was the next thing Susan heard. “Interference … temporal squall.” A longer wave of static, and then: “Remember,” Bjarki’s voice said with undeniable urgency, “watch for”—static—“babble.”
And then: nothing.
Uncle Farley was still sitting on the pitching floor. With his soft belly and splayed legs, he looked a bit like a big bearded baby. He leaned close to the radio, speaking directly into the grille. “Bjarki, are you there?”
The house was rocking wildly from prow to stern, but Susan could feel its rhythm in the soles of her feet and her stomach. Anything that has a rhythm has some element of control also, so Susan wasn’t too alarmed. If the house had been shaking erratically, she would have been more scared.
“I think we’ve lost contact,” she said now. “Did you hear him say something about babbling?”
“I think he said Babel.”
“Babel?” Susan glanced at the drawing room walls, which were still blank. “We saw the Tower of Babel there. But that’s not in Greenland? I mean, right?”
Uncle Farley laughed. “No, ancient Mesopotamia. Er, modern Iraq,” he clarified. “About seven or eight thousand miles apart, not to mention a few thousand years.” He frowned now, not in displeasure, but as if he’d suddenly remembered something.
“What is it, Uncle Farley?”
“Oh, nothing, I’m sure. It’s just the ancient Babylonians—”
“I thought we were talking about the, um, Babel people.”
“Babel, Babylon, Babylonians, same people, same place. Anyway, there are legends that they made some extraordinary breakthroughs in temperology.”
Susan’s legs—and her stomach, fortunately—were getting used to the rolling ocean, and she stood up carefully and went to a window. “I’m not sure I understand, Uncle Farley.” She looked out at a wide gray expanse whose dips and swells reminded her of pictures of the moon. “How does this affect us?”
“Well, I don’t know that it does. I just wonder if perhaps some artifact might have made its way from Babel to the New World.”
“All the way to Greenland?” Susan said, still staring at the empty ocean. It was so big and empty that she could hardly imagine getting across it herself, let alone a civilization that had lived before steam engines and motors and airplanes.
Uncle Farley stood up somewhat less steadily than Susan. “Well, take that mask I showed you earlier. It originated in Pompeii, on the Italian peninsula, but I bought it in a market square in Buenos Aires. Things do get around, given enough time, and—oh. Oh, that’s too bad.”
“What is it, Uncle Farley?” Susan said, leaving the chilly window and wobbling in his direction.
“The mask. It’s—”
“Broken!” Susan exclaimed. It was true: the beautiful, eerie, two-thousand-year-old death mask had fallen to the floor and broken into three pieces.
The fractured face sobered Uncle Farley. “No use crying over spilt milk and, um, broken masks. We obviously need to make our vessel shipshape. I’m afraid I’ve let it get much too domestic.” He chuckled ruefully. “Where’s Mr. Zenubian when you need him?”
The first thing he did was pull open a drawer and take out a package of bootstrings—black, Susan saw, and indicated for twenty-hole boots. He used them to make necklaces for each of the test tubes. He worked quickly and efficiently—rather like Charles, Susan thought, who never blinked when he’d set himself a task.
“I hope Charles is okay,” she said as Uncle Farley slipped the vial over her neck.
Uncle Farley’s face tightened as he slipped his own vial on and tucked it inside his shirt as Murray did with his golden locket. It seemed that the gesture reminded him of Murray just as it did Susan, because the next thing Uncle Farley said was, “We’ll get back to Charles and Murray as quickly as we can. Until then, we shall have to trust in President Wilson’s ability to lead your brother safely.”
Susan and Uncle Farley looked at each other for a moment, and then the two of them burst out laughing.
“Can you imagine!” Uncle Farley guffawed. “Charles! Charles! Slow down, Charles!”
“Charles!” Susan echoed, doing her best imitation of President Wilson’s panting. “You wouldn’t happen to have any peanuts in your bag, would you, Charles?”
“I’m willing to bet five American dollars he’s riding on Charles’s shoulder at this very moment—and giving orders every step of the way!”
“Orders that I’m sure Charles is ignoring.”
“Oh dear,” Uncle Farley said, “we’d really better hurry back, hadn’t we? They’re probably a greater threat to each other than anything else.”
Before Susan could answer, a faint “Rak!” echoed throughout the house.
“Was that—?” Susan began. “But I thought he was with Charles!”
Uncle Farley smacked his forehead.
“That wasn’t President Wilson,” he said, heading rapidly, if unsteadily, toward the door.
“What? Who—you mean Marie-Antoinette?”
“She spends most of her time in the solarium,” Uncle Farley said as they made their way through the library. “She hides in here when President Wilson’s wooing gets too much for her.”
“Rak! Rak!” came from the far side of the closed doors, louder now, and distinctly angry.
Uncle Farley threw open the doors. Susan barely had time to register the splendor of the solarium’s great banyan before a red and blue blur flashed into the passage and swooped around the two humans.
“Rak! Rak, rak!”
“She doesn’t sound happy at all,” Susan said, dodging the flashing wings until she realized Marie-Antoinette was actually aiming for her shoulder. The parrot settled on Susan’s upper arm unsteadily, her claws digging into the girl’s skin as she dragged herself upward. “Ow! Marie-Antoinette, please—”
“Rak!”
Uncle Farley smiled weakly at Susan. “We must remember that Marie-Antoinette doesn’t understand us like President Wilson—”
“RAK!”
Between the pitching floorboards and the screeching parrot in her ear, Susan felt ready to fall over. She was looking outside the solarium now, at the gray water and whitecapped waves and bullet-shaped clouds whipping through the air. She had long had her own suspicions about how much Marie-Antoinette understood, but she suddenly thought of something else.
“Uncle Farley? Who’s, um, who’s steering?”
Uncle Farley smiled. “That, at least, is one question I can answer. The house has its own piloting mechanism. Once a course has been plotted, it takes you right there.”
Susan studied her uncle closely. He was staring at the floor, a poorly concealed grin curling up one side of her mouth.
Susan put her hands on her hips.
“Where did you go?” With his toe, Uncle Farley traced a curved line in the carpet. The action threw him off balance on the rocking waves, and he had to catch himself on the wall.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You must have gone somewhere, or you wouldn’t know how the house steers. Or how to program the radio. Or the fact that we wouldn’t feel anything when we sluiced. Or did you find an instruction manual somewhere?”
“Rak,” Marie-Antoinette croaked quietly. “Man-u-al.”
Uncle Farley’s fingers drummed the wall. “When I was a teenager—not much older than you are now—I used to love to go to Renaissance fairs. The jugglers and the bards and the costumes! The richly colored velvets, and the capes, and the hats, and the leggings! They had a real sense of deportment back then, instead of running around in, in Dockers.”
Susan looked her plump uncle up and down, trying hard not to smirk. “You wore tights?”
“Not tights, Susan. Leggings. Cotton, and not at all stretchy.”
“You wore tights! And those funny little elf boots! Oh, I’m going to make Mum show me pictures as soon as we get back!”
Uncle Farley frowned. “Well, let’s concentrate on getting back and worry about pictures later.”
“Never mind that! Where did you go?”
And now a strange smile crept over Uncle Farley’s face. A smile of such rapture and wonder that Susan felt as if she were looking inside her uncle’s soul.
“I went to see Shakespeare.”
Susan clapped a hand over her mouth. Through her fingers she said, “You…met… Shakespeare?”
Uncle Farley shook his head. The faraway look was still on his face, and his voice was equally distant. “Oh, I wanted to, but I thought it would be too risky. What if I spilled the beans about something that happened in the future and he put it in one of his plays? The course of history could literally be changed. Electricity might have been discovered during the reign of James I rather than George III. No, I went to the see The Tempest.”
Susan was dumbfounded. “You traveled five hundred years to see…a play?”
“Not just a play, Susan. The Tempest, as Shakespeare wrote it and Shakespeare staged it. In the Globe Theatre, with the smell of urine rising up from the pit, and stale beer, and the audience catcalling the actors.” Uncle Farley laughed. “The truth is I didn’t understand half of it because of the Elizabethan accent, but it was still magic, I tell you. Just … magic.”
Susan had a hard time imagining how a play performed without any lights or special effects could be particularly “magical,” especially to a man who lived in a house that could sail the Sea of Time. And the smell of urine? Blech! But she could tell from Uncle Farley’s face he wasn’t faking it. He had witnessed something no one else alive had. And suddenly she wanted that too. Maybe she wouldn’t have picked the Greenland Vikings out of all the peoples and places of the past, but still, they were the first Europeans to come to America, and they had almost disappeared from history. It was kind of the opposite of Shakespeare really. Everyone knew about Shakespeare. But hardly anyone knew about the Vikings on Greenland. She would learn things no one else in her time even dreamed of.
As it turned out, she would learn it sooner than she expected.
The eldest Oakenfeld followed her uncle’s pointing finger. There was an odd expression on his face. Nervous yet eager. Awed. Winsome. (Don’t say “winsome,” Susan heard Charles’s teasing voice in her head. It’s affected. She did hope he was okay.)
Uncle Farley nodded at the windows beyond his niece’s head.
“Look.”
Susan turned. Although she knew where they were going, she was still surprised to see that the ocean had an edge now: even a few hours on the open sea can convince you that land is just a trick of memory. But there it was. A wavy ribbon of brown and green stretched between the steel-gray water and the cold northern sky. The deep green hills reminded Susan of nothing so much as the Island of the Past, but even from a distance she could sense the difference. The density. These weren’t hollow vaults housing all manner of creatures. They were dense piles of rock to which a few feet of soil clung desperately, held in by a net of grass that, however green, looked coarser and colder than the grass on the Island of the Past. Even the beaches were rocky and forbidding, and between several hills lay sparkling stripes, water possibly, or maybe ice. The place was eerily treeless as well, and Susan’s mind flashed on her tree, her redwood, growing in New York City thanks to global warming. Would this place ever be that warm? She knew global warming was supposed to be a bad thing, but she thought a little sunshine and a nice forest would do wonders for the barren land before her.
Susan turned back to her uncle. She didn’t know what to say. There it was: the past.
“Let’s go to my study. The spyglass is there. We’ll be able to see better.”
Susan hurried after her uncle, Marie-Antoinette flapping on her shoulder. Once in the study, the parrot flew to a table, and Uncle Farley handed Susan the spyglass.
She stepped close to a floor-to-ceiling window and brought the telescope to her eye. Immediately a second, lower set of hills appeared. Susan twisted the spyglass, focused, and realized with a start that the hills were actually the turf-covered homes she had seen on the walls of the drawing room. Again she thought of the Island of the Past. Had Pierre Marin been inspired by these buildings? Had he come here? But unlike the hollow hills of the Island of the Past, there weren’t windows in these low, long structures. Just the occasional door and even more occasional chimney. A thread of smoke, so thin it seemed as cold as the water in the fjords between the hills. An involuntary shiver ran down Susan’s back.
“It doesn’t look very… inviting,” she said. “Does it?”
Uncle Farley’s voice was quiet when he spoke, serious.
“Well, the colony was founded by Erik the Red around the turn of the first millennium. Erik was a murderer on the run from the law, and he named the place Greenland because it sounded better than Snow-and-Ice-Covered-Land.” Uncle Farley shrugged. “I can’t imagine five hundred years in this climate has done anything for his descendants’ dispositions. We will want to proceed with, um, caution.”
Susan was about to ask Uncle Farley what “caution” meant in such a context, when something thin and dark burst through the window, shattering the glass of a single pane. It knocked against a marble bust of Beethoven and clattered to the floor. Only when it was still could Susan and Uncle Farley get a good look at it.
It was a spear.