Chapter Two
It just wasn’t possible. None of it. David stared into the fire. The kindling popped, and the sparks flew above the trees. In his head, he went over the trip from Aunt Elisa’s house, crossing the black abyss, watching the men go under the wheels. It didn’t look as if Anna had yet absorbed the fact that she’d driven the van into three people and killed them. David glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He wasn’t going to remind her if she hadn’t thought of it. She tended to be rather single-minded, and right now other things were more important.
Can we really be in the Middle Ages? If he and Anna were really in the Middle Ages, everything David had ever thought was true might not be. What about the laws of physics? Mathematics? David could understand Anna’s anger and despair, but didn’t know what to tell her.
He looked up as a lone man rode off the trail to the right, stopping at the edge of the clearing, his horse lathered. Two men-at-arms ran to him as he dismounted. One grabbed the horse’s reins and led it away, towards the trees where the rest of the horses were picketed, but the other walked with him to Llywelyn’s tent and disappeared inside.
Llywelyn ap Gruffydd. David repeated the name, trying to recall everything his mother had ever told him about Wales, or he’d gleaned from the bits of her research he’d paid attention to. It was her specialty after all. His mother should have been there instead of him and Anna. She’d kill to have been there instead of them.
David ran his hand through his hair, and then clenched his fists as if that would help him sort out his thoughts. They’d arrived in Wales smack in the middle of a war between the Welsh and the English. In fact, Llywelyn’s death tonight would have nearly ended it.
Llywelyn had traveled south to Cilmeri to try to bolster support for his cause while his brother, Dafydd, was supposed to continue Llywelyn’s campaign in the north. Instead, in the old world, Llywelyn died when the Mortimers lured him away from the bulk of his army. They ambushed and slaughtered him and eighteen of his men. Edward then killed or imprisoned all of Llywelyn’s family. Once Edward caught Dafydd, he had him hanged, drawn, and quartered before dragging what remained of his body behind a horse through the streets of Shrewsbury.
Edward crushed Wales so completely and successfully, it may not have been possible for Llywelyn to have held it together even if he’d lived. What is going to happen now? David shook his head at the thought that he and Anna were going to have a front row seat in finding out.
“I cannot believe this,” Anna said. After their meal of meat and bread, she and David had curled up facing each other, with the blankets pulled to their chins. “This can’t be real. How can we be in the thirteenth century?”
“It isn’t very warm, is it?” David shifted to find a spot that was slightly less rocky. The woolen blankets were scratchy, and the ground was really hard—that one year in boy scouts when the winter jamboree occurred in the middle of a snowstorm had not prepared David for sleeping outside without even a tent.
“No central heating, no pasteurized milk, no antibiotics! David! We could die out here from a hangnail!”
“It’s worse than that,” David said. “They don’t have a lot of stuff we depend upon, but in addition, nobody here knows anything about the way the world works. The printing press wasn’t invented until the 1430s; we’ve got the Inquisition coming up in another two hundred years; and we are nearly five hundred years from the Age of Enlightenment. Don’t even get me started on the black plague.” David closed his eyes, trying to push these thoughts away.
“But—” Anna said.
David kept his eyes closed, resolutely ignoring her. She grumbled to herself but didn’t bother him again, and eventually they fell asleep. Both of them woke some time later. But where David was merely cold, Anna trembled and gasped for breath. The top blanket had slipped, so he pulled it over their shoulders and shifted to his side.
“You were dreaming.” He watched her through slitted eyes. “Want to tell me about it?”
She didn’t answer at first, and he thought she might be punishing him for his earlier silence, but then she must have decided she didn’t need to keep it from him. “It was a jumble of men on horses, riding fast, and bloody swords swinging my way. It wasn’t really coherent.” Anna tried to hold back sobs, her fist stuffed in her mouth.
At home, whenever they’d had bad dreams they’d always gone to Mom. Since their dad had died before David was born, Mom had slept alone in a big bed next to his. Not that David had gone to her in several years, but whether he was two or ten, she’d roll over and tuck him in beside her for the rest of the night. This time Mom was too far away to help. There was only David, and he was afraid he wasn’t going to do Anna much good.
David turned onto his back, Anna’s head on his shoulder. She fell asleep again, but David lay there, awake and restless. His feet kept twitching; it was strange to go to sleep wearing shoes. At least he wore waterproof brown hiking boots, pulled on because of the snow at the last minute before he left the house. His sneakers would have looked ridiculous in thirteenth century Wales.
David turned his head to study the other men. Every so often he caught the glint of the fire off metal and realized that a sentry had passed by, patrolling the camp near the edge of the woods. At one point, the soldier, who’d been with Llywelyn in the tent, pushed open the flap and came out. He stood, his hands on his hips, helmetless, surveying the sleeping men. For a moment it seemed that his eyes met David’s, but he was too far away, and it was probably just a trick of the light.
A man lying on the ground to David’s right grunted, scratching his chest in his sleep, and another thought occurred to David—one that nearly made him choke: if this was the Middle Ages, then he was responsible for Anna. It was his job to protect her, maybe even from men such as these. In this world, a woman had no rights or status without a man, whether father, husband, or brother. How can that man be me?
David hardly ever talked to her, really. She was three and a half years older and three years ahead of him in school. Their lives almost never intersected in or out of the classroom, not with homework, sports, and totally different friends getting in the way. They took karate together, but that was it. When was the last time we had a real conversation before today? David couldn’t remember.
More scared than he’d been since Anna drove the van into the clearing, David hugged his sister to him. The stars were fully out now. They were beautiful beyond reckoning, and yet unfamiliar. In the end, there were more than David could count, but he tried.