Chapter Thirty-seven:
I frowned, recalling a vague memory of something occupying the downstream end of the log. I had assumed it was just a tangle of branches. Slowly, I turned my upper body around and discovered that Joel was right. Standing behind us at the edge of the log, leaning against a crooked branch that curled upward, stood a young woman no older than me. She wore ragged clothing similar to the Gypsies’, stained with water and debris from the river, but her complexion was alabaster and her long hair a striking blond, shining golden in the brilliant sunlight. Her pale green eyes shone with fear and resolution, her arms brandishing a rather flat stick that she had likely been using as a paddle before we disturbed her. When she saw me looking at her, she barked something at me in a menacing voice, shaking her stick.
Not again, I thought in despair, but I tried the traditional peacemaking tactic once more. Raising both hands, palms out, I stated slowly, “I’m sorry I don’t speak that, but I do speak Teutonica.”
The young woman’s eyes widened, a bit of their fury dissipating. She lowered her stick just a little and said haltingly, “My Teutonica . . . is not very good.”
Relief washed over me. I gathered my courage, smiled at her kindly, and replied with a shrug, “Neither is mine.”
The young blond woman nodded at my words and looked me over, casting her gaze briefly upon the still-crouching Joel, then back to me. At length she sighed, bringing her arms completely down, placing the base of her stick upon the log beneath her. “You are Teutons?” she questioned, sounding curious.
I turned my body a bit more toward her from where I sat on the log, wanting to appear courteous. Though I knew that Joel also had many questions for me, my instincts told me that I ought to finish befriending this young woman first. “I’m a Teuton, yes,” I answered cautiously, wracking my brain for a plausible eleventh-century explanation for Joel. At last, I jerked one finger in his direction and said, “He’s from England and doesn’t speak Teutonica.”
The blond woman seemed to accept this without fuss, sitting down upon the log herself, laying her stick across her lap. “I’m from the Rhineland,” she told me, her words still sounding unsure.
Her strange dialect must be an old form of Rhenisch. “The Rhine is a beautiful river,” I commented, and the young woman smiled at me, an almost wistful smile. I began to wonder how she had gotten here, on a log in the middle of a shallow Alpine river. Her countenance seemed so refined and so innocent. I figured I might as well tell her a portion of the truth about Joel and me, so I said, “We just escaped from some Gypsies. They attacked us further upstream.”
Her green eyes darkened considerably, a frightened frown creasing her pale forehead. She glanced upstream herself, then drove her flattened stick toward the sandy river bottom, pushing our log forward. She met my gaze and murmured in a low voice, “I escaped from them also. I’ve been their prisoner for almost one year.”
“Oh.” That explained a lot. I turned around again to face Joel, who was pawing through the brightly colored robes from the Gypsy leader, retrieving food and the sock of jewels I had placed inside his bag before we had come.
“Hey Joel, this girl here says she just escaped from the Gypsies, too,” I told him, switching back to English. “She was their prisoner for about a year. I bet they were looking for her when they found us in the forest.”
“That makes sense, I guess.” Joel continued searching through the robes, not bothering to look up. “Maybe that’s what these were for,” he added, pulling a pair of iron fetters from the clothing.
The blond woman backed away at the sight of Joel holding the chains. She grasped her paddle tightly once more, likely fearing that we might consider returning her to her former captors. I waved at Joel frantically, indicating that he should cast the fetters into the river. “You don’t want to scare her. Get rid of those.”
“If you say so,” Joel replied, dropping them into the water with great abandonment. A moment later he pulled a shiny knife from beneath the robes. “Hey, this is pretty nice.” He held it up to the sunlight, studying every angle.
I rolled my eyes at him and turned back to the young woman, motioning for her to relax. “Just ignore him,” I admonished her. “We won’t send you back. We killed two of them ourselves.”
Her green eyes widened, shooting from me to Joel and back again. “You fought them?”
“They attacked us first, and they killed my cousin. He was her betrothed.” I gestured at Joel again, then shrank into myself a bit, wrapping my arms around the bag in my lap. Grief clawed at me afresh, and I shook my head and blinked, trying to hold back the tears that threatened to blur my vision further. Beth had paid the worst price possible.
I felt a light touch on my left shoulder. When I looked up, I saw that our female companion had moved much closer to me, sympathy shining in her eyes. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “The Gypsies are a terrible people.”
I did not know whether I agreed with her assessment or not, but I could not spurn the judgment of a former slave. I took several deep breaths as I tried to get my sorrow under control, looking around at the trees lining each bank. Perhaps our companion may have a better idea as to where we were, for she may have heard the Gypsies discussing their location. I gestured back at Joel and said, “We should be in the Bavarian city of Muniche, but we ended up slightly off course.”
“Ah, Muniche?” the young woman repeated, her eyes aglow with recognition, “It’s just a day’s journey downstream. This is the Isar. We will be there soon.”
I sighed, satisfaction pulsing through my veins at long last. Thank goodness we had not ended up in some other European country, even though Joel had not thought of the city itself before we leapt through the gates. We were not far away; soon we would be among my people.
A shiver of nervous anticipation ran up my spine, and I turned partially around to regard Joel. “We’re actually on the River Isar right now,” I informed him happily. “Muniche is just a short journey downstream of here. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Excellent.” Joel did not sound quite as thrilled as I felt, probably because he still had not received a full explanation from me. He was also likely thinking of Beth, for I had heard him sniff a few times as he pawed through the Gypsy’s robes. Now he was in the process of stuffing all that he had found into his bag. “Should I keep these clothes or chuck them in the river?” he inquired, looking up at me with a grin that looked forced.
“I don’t think they’d fit you,” I observed. I recalled the image of the stout, naked Gypsy and failed to repress a snort of laughter. Joel guffawed in response, and I turned back to the young woman. She had moved back to the end of our log, her posture much more at ease now while she stroked her paddle into the water and out again. Favoring her with a friendly smile, I finally made introductions. “My name is Swanhilde, and this is my friend Joel.”
The blond woman smiled back at me, a warm breeze brushing long locks of her sunshine hair across her face. “I am Freia,” she answered.
I smiled and twisted back around to face Joel. His visage appeared unhappy, and he fiddled around with the strap of his bag, his eyes on the trees that bordered our path. “Hey Joel, you really don’t have to worry about Beth,” I assured him even though a corner of my brain had begun to doubt the writings. “When you travel back in time using the Torstein, you return in the same instant that you left. You don’t age at all, and if you die in the past, you return—”
I broke off, a terrible realization coming over me. I looked down at my left hand resting against the red-violet fabric covering my hip, gradually turning my palm upward. It was empty.
The Torstein was gone.
The cold hand of fear clutched my heart, and I closed my eyes, thinking back to everything that had happened since I last remembered holding the Torstein. I had picked it up from the ground when Joel and I had fled from the Gypsies. Somewhere between that clearing and here—a good distance down the Isar—the rock had sprung free. It may have ended up in the river when I conjured the elemental storm upon its waters, and our chances of finding it there were slim to none. I had lost the ability to open the gates of time. I had lost our way out. We were stuck here now.
“Swanie? You’re saying that when Beth died, she went back home? Back to that place by your gazebo?” I opened my eyes to regard Joel again. He favored me with a doubtful look, his hands pressed against the bark beneath him.
“She did, if all of the writings about time travel are true. But we have a new problem. I screwed up. I really, really screwed up.”
“What?” Joel’s eyebrows came together, his tone thick with worry.
“I had the Torstein in this hand.” I opened my left hand, wiggling its fingers at him. “I had it when we ran away from the Gypsies. I don’t remember putting it anywhere else. I haven’t opened my bag once since we got here. Now it’s gone.”
Joel looked even more confused. “The rock?” he asked.
I stared at him, tears welling up in my eyes again. “Yes. The rock is gone. It must have fallen out of my hand somewhere between the clearing and this log. And it was our only way back unless we want to follow Beth’s example.”
I unclasped my bag to comb through its contents even though I knew I had not put the Torstein there. Clothing, socks, jewels, blanket, thermos, contacts, solution, Bible, brush, soap, knife, camera, batteries, toilet paper, food packets. No mystical ruby stone. And Beth’s bag had returned to the future with her. Our vitamins were gone too, along with her sock of jewelry and the raisins and crackers.
“Are you saying,” Joel began, pronouncing each word carefully, “that we can’t get back to our own time without that rock?”
“Yes.” The word barely escaped my lips. My voice trembled, and my tears spilled over as I choked, “I can’t open the gates of time . . . without it. That’s why . . . it was created. We . . . we’re stuck here.” I buried my face in my hands, my self-confidence taking an enormous hit.
Joel simply sat on the log in silence while I cried, apparently in shock himself. As I wiped my tears on the flared sleeves of my dress, working to get my emotions back under control, I heard him comment, “Well, that’s just perfect. Guess I’m going to miss my flight back to Philly tomorrow.”
“Really?” An irrational anger arose inside of me at his remark, so irrelevant to the situation at hand. “Were you even listening to what I said? It doesn’t matter how long we stay here in the grand scheme of things. We’ll still go back to the same moment that we left, even if we’re stuck here until we die of old age. I was planning on staying only until 1066, and now we might be here for the rest of our lives!”
Joel appeared thoughtful now, but all I could think of was the Torstein and how foolish I had been to lose it. I should have heeded the writings of that Black Priest Wolfgang in spite of his curse. He had warned time travelers to not go back further than the creation of the rock due to an escalated probability of losing it. I was an idiot, and now my stupidity had trapped both me and an innocent bystander a thousand years in the past. And my cousin had died an awful death less than an hour after our arrival. Wuotan was probably having a good laugh in hell about our fate.
“Hey, Swanie, look on the bright side,” Joel advised as I dipped my fingers into the light green waters of the Isar, silently begging their chill to reassure me. I met his gaze, and he patted the bag on his lap. “At least you packed all this clothing and food, just what we would need,” he noted, “and the jewels ought to help us out a lot once we get to Muniche. We could probably find some sort of work there . . . medieval work couldn’t be so bad . . . maybe I could become a knight, if I can get a bow and arrows somewhere. I could protect you like a good lord.” He winked.
His silly remarks made me snicker, and I wiped the final tears from my eyes and managed to smirk at him. “Are you going to try to woo some noble maiden by playing a lute outside her window?”
Joel cocked his head, dipping one hand into the river, then dampening his brow with its waters. “Well, I do play guitar, you know,” he pointed out.
“I’m going to have to teach you to speak Teutonica if nothing else, or you’ll never get by in a Teuton city,” I reminded him. “Maybe that’ll help you with your German.” I raised one eyebrow at him.
“Or lack thereof,” he appended, and I snorted. Maybe Joel belonged on this adventure after all. At least he was being a good sport about it.
When the sun sank toward the west that evening, Joel—who had ultimately taken over the duties of paddling the log—steered us toward the bank opposite of the Gypsies’ camp so we could rest until morning. Though I knew that the section of the Isar upstream of the modern München held little or no dangerous rocks or rapids, it would be far safer to continue our journey in the daylight, for the river could have changed quite a bit in a thousand years. We made camp several meters from the water underneath a group of tall evergreen trees.
While Freia walked a wide circle in search of wild fruit, I opened both Joel’s pack and mine, pulling out and unrolling the blankets so that we could sleep a bit more comfortably. Joel spent several minutes securing our log to the riverbank with a length of twine he found amongst the Gypsy’s robes. Then he climbed to where I worked on our campsite and muttered that he probably ought to light a fire. “Good thing I was in the Boy Scouts, or I wouldn’t know how to do this,” he said, sauntering off in search of dry sticks.
I emptied the contents of both of our sacks onto one of the blankets to help me remember what exactly I had brought. I refolded both of our extra outfits and placed them back into the bags, along with the underwear and woolen socks. I laid all three knives onto the blanket, deciding that we might as well be armed at all times in case we encountered more foes human or otherwise. I set aside all of the remaining food—beef jerky, dried fruit, and peanuts—and took a swig from one of the metal thermoses, grateful that I had filled them with mineral water back at home.
I smiled when I found the digital camera at the bottom of my bag along with the extra batteries. After glancing around at our campsite and the riverbank, I decided to hold off on picture-taking until we reached Muniche. If the Gypsies had not attacked us so suddenly, I could have snapped a few shots of them. Though I did not take any photos, I did lift the camera from the bag and push the on button to assure myself that it still worked even though we were almost a thousand years in the past. It beeped its usual beep, and the green light clicked on, followed by the digital screen, which showed the soft pine needles and tree roots of the forest floor. I turned the camera off and stashed it back in my bag, satisfied.
In Joel’s bag I found the few items he had pulled from the Gypsy’s robes. Along with the broad knife and his sock full of jewels, he had retrieved two gold chains, a rabbit’s foot, and what looked like a set of olden Tarot cards. I rolled my eyes at this and determined to toss the cards and the foot into the fire once Joel got it going. We did not need to start messing with necromancy, especially since we had already bothered Wuotan by traveling to the past. The menacing tenor of his laughter haunted me as the landscape grew ever darker.
Joel eventually returned with a pile of branches and sticks, dumping them in a stash beside where I had laid out the blanket. “This ought to do it. Now we just need to dig a pit so we don’t burn the forest down,” he said, taking up one of the larger branches to use as a shovel.
I watched him prepare the fire without speaking, the adrenaline overload from the day’s events having left my system, filling me instead with a bleak emptiness. I had not expected my medieval adventure to start off with my cousin’s death and the loss of the Torstein. Though my body and mind were weary, I knew that it would be a long and torturous night for me. Images of Beth’s mortal wound and her brown eyes growing vacant stalked my subconscious.
Freia returned with a decent stash of wild fruit in her skirt, and I helped her distribute the food for dinner. Each of us had a handful of crab apples and wild cherries along with a bit of the dried beef and some peanuts. We drank only a small portion of the water since we had only two thermoses for all three of us. Freia remarked that the water tasted very fresh, and I made up a tale about filling our bottles at a pristine stream early that morning.
Freia took the first watch since Joel and I were truly exhausted. Joel muttered to me that he felt like he had jet lag, for we had departed our century around ten-thirty and gotten here in the daylight. I agreed to take the final watch, and it took me a while to fall asleep, though I heard Joel start to snore almost instantly. My thoughts drifted from musing about Freia, a former slave, to Beth’s dismal fate, to the looming fall of Muniche, and finally to Hans, the man I loved, the one I had left behind. Now that Joel and I were trapped in the eleventh century, when would I ever see Hans again? Would we still be able to relate to each other so well now that I had become a mad time traveler?
I awoke suddenly while the sky was still dark, panting from a nightmare in which I had taken Beth’s place, feeling the agonizing stab of a spear stifling me, shackling my diaphragm. I sat up on the blanket and pressed a hand against my chest, trying to force my brain back into the present. Yes, I could breathe. No, I had not gotten stabbed in the chest. Yes, Beth was alive, back at home.
My eyes raked over the entirety of our campsite—Freia lay curled into a ball not far from where I sat, her blond eyebrows wrinkled in what looked like pain. I may not be the only one among us who suffered from nightmares. Then I looked to my left, to where the embers of our fire smoldered, and I saw Joel looking back at me, his face appearing concerned in the reddish-orange glow. “You okay?”
I rubbed my chest firmly and shut my eyes, counting slowly to ten in Latin. “Just a nightmare,” I said, keeping my voice down. “I get those a lot.”
“I had a scary one earlier,” he admitted, shifting around where he sat against a larch. “Went to visit Beth’s grave, and the year of her death was listed as 1066.”
A short laugh escaped me, and I shivered all over, standing up to get a good stretch. “She’s not actually dead. If she had actually died, her body wouldn’t have disappeared right in front of me. But it’s gone along with her bag. There were more jewels and vitamins in her bag.” I made a face and headed for where he sat beside the fire, noticing that he held the Gypsy’s knife in his hand, his fingers stroking its blade in an absent-minded fashion.
“This wasn’t really part of the plan, was it?” Joel looked up at me from where he sat, a wry expression crossing his face. A slight growth of facial fuzz had appeared along his chin, and I realized that I had not thought of bringing a razor for his sake. Out of the five Gypsies, four had sported beards, though, so maybe shaving was not the norm for men in this era.
“Plans never seem to go the way we hope,” I said, gesturing for him to take my place on the blanket at Freia’s side. “You might as well get some sleep. I need some time to cool down and think.”
“An iceberg doesn’t need to cool down,” he joked as he climbed to his feet. I snorted quietly and eyed the embers. Now I had two outsiders under my charge, neither of whom could grasp all of the intricacies of our situation. I needed to unload most of the truth to Joel later on, but how much should I reveal to Freia?