I Don’t Know

1010 A.D.
The Realm of Wyn Avuqua

There are moments when it is difficult to tell if the sun has indeed risen. Grey, blurry light smears the world to a worn black and white photograph. Far away, lightening spears through the shoulders of slate grained clouds. A single crow caws from a hidden perch in the cedars. Vincale leads the company north, keeping their movement tucked into the trees. Every so often they cross into the open and follow a shallow tributary for a short distance and then climb back along the tree line. Hiding.

If one speaks, the voice is instinctively hushed to a whisper. Every sound is like an alarm: the slosh and clop of the horses, the rush of water over stones, gentle gusts weaving through the comb of the evergreens.

“Loche, do you know where you are?” William asks from a few feet behind.

“We’re on the eastern slope above Upper Priest. We should be approaching the marshes, right?”

“That is what it looks like to me,” Greenhame agrees, “though, I do not think that the marshes have become marshy yet. Perhaps in another two to three hundred years.”

Loche had lost count of how many times he has hiked around his beloved Upper Priest Lake. Even now, a thousand years before his time, he is able to discern familiar sights: the ridge lines of hills and mountains to the South, the steep cliff faces across the valley, and even some massive boulders that were likely deposited here by some primeval glacier scraping its way from Montana to the Palouse three hundred miles westward. The northernmost shore of the upper lake, in Loche’s time, is a gateway to a quagmire of marshland and muddied pools of womb-like nutrients. Loche had once paddled his kayak into the metabolic labyrinth and followed a vein as far as he could until he became tangled in the walls of thick vines and decaying foliage. Later that evening he had written a short burst of verse trying to capture the essence of that fertile, embryonic network that feeds the lower lake:

The ovum skim that drools down the stream vein

Where the lake’s green glistening sac had burst,

Like tears at birth it clings to everything at first.

How heat has flayed its delicate underbelly

And purged the yolk-spine legs to dangle free

Down they glide, spreading wide like limbs in the breeze.

A sudden blink and he can see the handwritten lines behind his closed lids. So long ago—and yet it has not yet been written. Or has it? He tries to trace the circle back to find the beginning. The lake’s birthplace—the seed of an idea for writing —his own beginning, or ending.

As Vincale turns his horse into another clearing, steering the company quickly across, Loche notes that William is correct: the land underfoot is solid. The marshy floods have not yet drowned the land here.

Loche has let Edwin hold the reins of their horse for most of the morning ride. Beside rides Julia. She has not spoken since they left the cave. Ahead, just behind Vincale, is Lornensha. William and Corey follow at the rear.

“Are you all right, Julia?” Loche asks.

After a moment, Julia purses her lips. She answers, “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Loche says, “Wait.” He takes hold of the leather rein and pulls the horse to a stop. Surprise surges through him. He tries to maintain a composed expression, for what is about to happen next is something either out of character to his conservative nature, or simply beyond his ability to imagine himself doing—or both. He is self conscious but earnest and he feels his lips try to restrain a smile. He lowers himself from his horse, lifts Edwin and carries the boy back to William. William happily takes the boy, settles him in the saddle before him and hands the reins over. Only a shadow of the Rathinalya can be seen wrestling in the corners of William’s expression as he watches Loche curiously. Loche returns to his horse, ties it to a loop upon Julia’s saddle and then stands beside her and looks up. After a moment he asks in a whisper, “May I ride with you?”

Julia smiles.

He whispers again, “I think the chance of riding on horseback with you in the year 1010 on the medieval shores of Upper Priest Lake is an opportunity, exquisitely rare.”

Julia’s smile widens. He hears a good natured chuckle from Corey.

“I mean,” Loche says, “I know it may seem to be a little outside of my heroic reach, but I would…”

“Get up here,” Julia orders, sliding forward to make room. Loche pulls himself up and straddles the horse behind her. She leans back into him as he coils one arm around her waist and pulls her close. He can smell salt on her skin. With his other hand he threads back her long hair exposing her neck and he touches his cheek to hers. He gently nudges the horse forward and the company again falls in behind Vincale.

They do not speak. Loche closes his eyes and feels the heat of her skin. She wraps an arm over his and squeezes. A moment later, Loche turns and touches his lips to the slope of her cheek, to her ear, to the corner of her eye. He inhales her. Her fingernails gently dig into the back of his hand.

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know,” she whispers.

“Nor do I,” Loche whispers back. He rests his forehead upon her shoulder. Exhaustion, fear and terrible confusion wrestle. “I am sorry, Julia. Sorry for everything.”

Their bodies sway as the horse climbs onto higher ground.

“Where is Basil?” she asks quietly. “And why did he want me to come here?” Loche does not answer. “If we find him, I’m going to punch him in the gut.” Loche wants to offer a pained laugh. But he cannot. Instead he focuses on the next set of coming heartbeats—the next breath. “I don’t know how much more I can handle…”

“I wish I knew how to answer you,” Loche whispers finally. “I can only assume that his message to you and our encounter within the portrait are linked.” He sighs deeply and gestures to the indigo green surrounding them, “There is something here that will stop what’s begun. He knows that we need his help. That much I shared with him.”

“Loche,” her hushed voice barely audible, “do you think he wanted us to come here to change the past? Change the past to make an alternate future?”

Of course the thought had occurred to Loche. How could it not? Even as Corey has so thoughtfully put forth—We cannot alter what is to come—Loche’s mind has rehearsed and chased down through a few of the potential rabbit holes to where such altering might lead. But he’s found little to ease him. Whether it is the violent and dark conditions of his current place in existence, the brief periods he has had to puzzle over it, or the simple fact that his human brain cannot fathom infinity, his meanderings through cause and effect and the thorny way of fate and self determination have all arrived at yet another opening in the earth where rabbits disappear. A feedback loop. A snake eating its tail. What if, begins each attempt. He then arrives again at what if. He feels certain, however, that he and his companions could change the future. But what is mind-boggling are the varied repercussions of which nothing could be authored or controlled.

Or could it?

Blood throbs achingly against his temples. Too much, he thinks, too much. Chicken or the egg? Did Basil want Loche to come here to seed a future that will prevent The Journal? To remove Loche, the seeming author of all, out of his own story? Or is there some other force at work?

He filters through the time travel stories he knows, books and movies: The Time Machine, Somewhere In Time, Back To The Future, Slaughterhouse-Five—this list goes on. None of them offer any comfort or help. Though their time travel storytelling conventions seem plausible, his gut tells him, as does the cold medieval air, the bloodlust of their enemies seeking to capture and torture, and the terror of not being able to protect his son against any of it, this story is not that simple. This is not a movie. This is not a book.

What if he dies here? Will he be born again nearly a millennia later, or disappear from existence? What if he somehow manages to save the city of Wyn Avuqua from its prophesied destruction? Will the immortals carry on and keep the balance of this Old Law, as it’s called? If he is to share what he knows with the Wyn Avuquains about what Albion Ravistelle will do in the future, will they pursue him, cleave his head from his body to stop the invasion of heaven? Will they succeed in the assassination attempt of Basil Fenn and Loche Newirth? Will they kill Loche’s father William Greenhame as a boy? Will they kill William’s mother Geraldine of Leaves or Lornensha to nip the bud even closer—quicker?

Or will nothing stop the masterwork of Thi’s story? Will what is to happen, happen? Will this little blue world whirl on its spindle in the dark just as it did the moment it was hurled into its gyre—the burning stars looking on? Nothing to stop it arcing along its circle? Nothing to alter its ending where it started? What if there is nothing to stop it from feeding upon its own tail?

What if. What if. What if…

Julia says, “You all right, Loche?”

He turns to catch a glimpse of Edwin. The little boy is leaning back into William. His face stares up into the stony sky.

“I don’t know,” Loche answers.