Footsteps in Time (2 page)

All four men held swords.

“
Anna!” David finally
found his voice.

Anna stood on the brakes
but couldn’t get any traction in the snow. All three horses reared,
catapulting their riders out of their saddles. Anna careened into
two of the men who fell under the wheels with a sickening crunching
thud. Still unable to stop the van, she plowed right over them and
the snow-covered grass into the underside of a rearing
horse.

By then, the van was
starting to slide sideways, and its nose slewed under the horse’s
front hooves, which were high in the air, and hit its midsection
full on. The windshield shattered from the impact of the hooves,
the horse fell backwards, pinning its rider beneath it, and the
airbags exploded. By then, the van’s momentum had spun it
completely around, carried it across the clearing to the edge, and
over it.

The van slid another twenty
feet down the hill before it connected with a tree at the bottom of
the slope. Breathless, chained by the seatbelt, Anna sat
stunned.

David fumbled with the door
handle. “Come on.” He shoved at her shoulder. When she didn’t move,
he grasped her chin and turned her head to look at him. “The gas
tank could explode.”

Her heart catching in her
throat, Anna wrenched the door open and tumbled into the snow. She
and David ran toward a small stand of trees thirty feet to their
left and stopped there, breathing hard. The van remained as they’d
left it, sad and crumpled against the tree at the base of the hill.
David had a line of blood on his cheek. Anna put her hand to her
forehead, and it came away with blood, marring her brown
glove.

“
What—” Anna swallowed
hard and tried again. “How did we go from lost to totaled in two
point four seconds?” She found a tissue in her pocket, wiped at the
blood on her glove, and began dabbing at her forehead.

David followed the van tracks with his
eyes. “Can you walk up the hill with me and see what’s up
there?”

“
Shouldn’t we call Mom
first?” Their mother was giving a talk at a medieval history
conference in Philadelphia, which is why she’d parked her children
at her sister’s house in Bryn Mawr in the first place.

“
Let’s find out where we
are before we call her,” David said.

Anna was starting to shake,
whether from cold or shock it didn’t really matter. David saw it
and took her hand for perhaps the first time in ten years. He
tugged her up the hill to the clearing. They came to a stop at the
top, unable to take another step. Two dozen men lay dead on the
ground. They sprawled in every possible position. A man close to
Anna was missing an arm, and his blood stained the snow around him.
Anna’s stomach heaved, and she turned away, but there was no place
to look where a dead man didn’t lie.

But even as she looked
away, her brain registered that the men weren’t dressed normally.
They wore mail and helmets and many still had swords in their
hands. Then David left her at a run, heading along the path the van
had followed. Anna watched him, trying not to see anyone else. He
crouched next to a body.

“
Over here!” He waved an
arm.

Anna followed David’s snowy
footprints, weaving among the dead men. Every one had been
butchered. By the time she came to a halt beside David, tears
streamed down her cheeks.

“
My God, David.” She
choked on the words. “Where are we?” Heedless of the snow, Anna
fell to her knees beside the man David was helping to sit upright.
She was still breathing hard. She’d never been in a car accident
before, much less one that landed her in the middle of a clearing
full of dead men.

“
I don’t know.” David had
gotten his arm under the man’s shoulder and now braced his back.
The man didn’t appear to have any blood on him, although it was
obvious from his quiet moans that he was hurt.

The man grunted and put his
hands to his helmet, struggling to pull it from his head. Anna
leaned forward, helped him remove it, and then set it on the ground
beside him. The man looked old to have been in a battle. He had a
head of dark hair, with touches of white at his temples, but his
mustache was mostly gray and his face was lined. At the moment, it
was also streaked with sweat and dirt—and very pale.

“
Diolch,” he
said.

Anna blinked. That
was
thank you
in
Welsh, which she knew because of her mother’s near-continual
efforts to teach her the language, although Anna had never thought
she’d actually need to know it
.
She met the man’s eyes. They were deep blue but
bloodshot from his exertions. To her surprise, instead of finding
them full of fear and pain, they held amusement. Anna couldn’t
credit it and decided she must be mistaken.

The man turned to
David. “Pwy dach chi?”
Who are
you?

“
Dafydd
dw i,” David said.
My name is David.
David gestured towards Anna and continued in
Welsh. “This is my sister, Anna.”

The man’s eyes tracked back
to Anna, and a twitch of a smile flickered at the corner of his
mouth. “We need to find safety before night falls,” he said, still
all in Welsh. “I must find my men.”

Now
that
was equally
ridiculous and impossible.

Anna was trying to think what to say
to him, anything to say to him, when someone shouted. She swung
around. A dozen men on horses rode out of the trees near the van.
David settled the man back on the ground and stood up. At the sight
of him, the lead rider reined his horse. The others crowded up
behind him.

They all stared at
each other, or rather, the men stared at David. They seemed frozen
to their horses, and Anna looked up at David, trying to see what
they saw. He had turned fourteen in November, but his voice hadn’t
yet changed. Nor had he grown as tall as many of his friends. At 5’
6”, he was still four inches taller than she,
however
.
David had
sandy blonde hair, cut short, and an athletic build thanks to his
continuous efforts in soccer and karate. Anna’s friends at school
considered him cute in a geeky sort of way.

“
What is it?” she
whispered.

“
I don’t know,” David said.
“Is it our clothes? Your hair?”

Anna touched her head,
feeling the clip that held her hair back from her face. The bun had
come lose, and her hair cascaded down her back in a tangled, curly
mass.

“
They’re
looking at
you
,
David, not me.”

The man they’d helped
moaned, and David crouched again beside him. His movement broke the
spell holding the horsemen. They shouted, something like “move!”
and “now!” and their lead rider climbed the hill and dismounted. He
elbowed Anna out of the way, knocking her on her rear in the snow,
and knelt beside the wounded man. This newcomer was about David’s
height but fit the description Anna had always attributed to the
word
grizzled
. Like
all these men, he wore mail and a helmet and bore a sword. He had
bracers on his arms—
where had she learned
that word?—
and a surcoat over his chain
mail.

He and the injured man held
a conversation while David and Anna looked at each other across the
six feet of space that separated them. Despite her comprehension
earlier, Anna couldn’t understand a word. Maybe the man had spoken
slower for their benefit or in a different dialect from what he
spoke now.

Then the grizzled man
shouted something and other men responded by hurrying up the hill.
They surrounded the downed man and lifted him to his feet. He
walked away—actually walked—men supporting him on either
side.

David and Anna sat in the
snow, forgotten. Anna’s jeans were soaking wet, she was stiff from
the cold, and her hands were frozen, even in her winter
gloves.

“
What do we do now?”
David’s eyes tracked the progress of the soldiers.

“
Let’s go back up the
hill,” Anna said. “We didn’t drive that far. There must be a road
at the top.”

David gave her a skeptical
look, which she ignored. Anna took a few steps, trying not to look
at the dead men whom she’d managed to forget for a few minutes, and
then found herself running away across the meadow. She veered into
the wheel tracks of the van. David pounded along beside her until
she had to slow down. They’d reached the upward slope at the far
side of the meadow. The snow was deeper here because men and horses
hadn’t packed it down; her feet lost their purchase on the steep
slope, and she put out a hand to keep from falling.

Anna looked up the hill. Only a dozen
yards away, the van tracks began. Beyond them, smooth fresh snow
stretched as far as she could see. It was as if they’d dropped out
of the sky.

More shouts
interrupted her astonishment, and Anna turned to find horsemen
bearing down on them. She looked around wildly, but there was
nowhere to run. One man leaned down and, in a smooth movement,
caught her around the waist. Before she could think, he pulled her
in front of him. She struggled to free herself, but the man
tightened his grip and growled something she didn’t catch but could
easily have been
sit still,
dammit!

“
David!” Anna’s voice went
high.

“
I’m here,
Anna.”

The man holding her turned
the horse, and they passed David, just getting comfortable on his
own horse. Dumbstruck, Anna twisted in her seat to look back at
him.

All he did was shrug, and
Anna faced forward again. They rode across the meadow and down the
hill, reaching the bottom just as the wounded man got a boost onto
a horse. He gathered the reins while glancing at the van. Anna
followed his gaze. The van sat where she’d left it. It was hopeless
to think of driving it, even if they had somewhere to
go.

The company followed a trail through
the trees. A litany of complaints—about her wet clothes and hair,
about her aching neck and back from the car crash, and most of all,
her inability to understand what was happening—cycled through
Anna’s head as they rode.

Fortunately, after a mile
or two (it was hard to tell in the growing darkness and her misery)
they trotted off the trail into a camp. Three fire rings burned
brightly and the twenty men who’d ridden in with David and Anna had
doubled the number of people in the small space. The man behind
Anna dismounted and pulled her after him. Although she tried to
stand, her knees buckled, and he scooped her up, carried her to a
fallen log near one of the fires, and set her down on
it.

“
Thanks,” Anna said
automatically, forgetting he probably couldn’t understand English.
Fighting tears, she pulled up her hood to hide her face,
and

Then David materialized
beside her.

“
Tell me you have an
explanation for all this,” Anna said, the moment he sat
down.

He crossed his arms and shook his
head. “Not one I’m ready to share, even with you.”

Great.

They sat unspeaking as men
walked back and forth around the fire. Some cooked; some tended the
horses staked near the trees on the edges of the clearing. Three
men emerged from a tent thirty feet away. Their chain mail didn’t
clink like Anna imagined plate mail would, but it creaked a little
as they walked. Someone somewhere roasted meat and, despite her
queasiness, Anna’s stomach growled.

Nobody approached them, and
it seemed to Anna that whenever one of the men looked at them, his
gaze immediately slid away. She wasn’t confused enough to imagine
they couldn’t see her, but maybe they didn’t want to see her or
know what to make of her. Anna pulled her coat over her knees,
trying to make herself as small as possible. The sky grew darker,
and still she and David sat silent.

“
Do you think we’ve
stumbled upon a Welsh extremist group that prefers the medieval
period to the present day?” Anna finally said.

“
Twenty miles from
Philadelphia? Bryn Mawr isn’t that rural. Somehow I just can’t see
it.”

“
Maybe we aren’t in
Pennsylvania anymore, David.” Anna had been thinking those words
for the last half hour and couldn’t hold them in any
longer.

He sighed. “No, perhaps
not.”

“
Mom’s going to be worried
sick.” Anna choked on the words. “She was supposed to call us at 8
o’clock. I can’t imagine what Aunt Elisa is going to tell her.”
Then Anna kicked herself for being so stupid and whipped out her
phone.

“
It
says
searching for
service
,” David said. “I already tried
it.”

Anna doubled over and
put her head into David’s chest. Her lungs felt squeezed, and her
throat was tight with unshed tears. He patted her back in a
there, there
motion, like
he wasn’t really paying attention, but when she tried to pull away,
he tightened his grip and hugged her to him.