Guardians of Time (31 page)

He had driven no more than a quarter of a
mile when—

“Bloody hell!” Rupert’s words echoed in the
silence of the car as the van and then the Cardiff bus—
the
goddamned Cardiff bus
—blew by him going the other way. His
heart pounding a million miles an hour, he felt almost lightheaded
as he spun the wheel and performed a U-turn for which there was
barely room on the narrow road. He managed it without bottoming out
the undercarriage on the grassy verge of the road.

Hardly worried now about secrecy, he sped
after the bus. That they’d chosen to drive it in broad daylight
told Rupert that something was up, and he wasn’t going to lose them
again—despite the fact that he didn’t actually know who
them
was.

With pound signs flashing before his
eyes—and, dare he even think it, a British Journalism Award—he
coasted to a stop against the curb on the wrong side of the road
just before the entrance to the car park of a car hire firm, which
both the van and the bus had entered. There wasn’t really room for
the bus to park in front of the building, so the driver backed it
up until its tail was parallel with his car, except that it was in
the car park on the other side of the sidewalk while Rupert was
parked in the street.

He sank down low in his seat, hoping the
driver wouldn’t notice him, and as she opened the front door in
order to exit the bus, the back door opened too. It stayed open as
she disappeared around the front of the bus, heading towards where
the van had parked. Maybe she didn’t know to press the button by
the front door that would close both front and back doors.

Spurred by an impulse he didn’t choose to
examine closely, Rupert pushed open his car door and ran at a
crouch across the three feet of sidewalk between his car and the
back door of the bus. He hit the bottom step with a thud and went
up the stair to the interior of the bus, and then up the stairway
to the upper level. Once in the aisle, he bent more than double so
that his head remained below the level of the seats and the
windows, and cat-walked towards the front of the bus. It was in his
head that if he could find a seat at the very front and keep down,
they wouldn’t see him even if someone checked upstairs.

He really had no plan at this point other
than a desire to find out what in the hell was going on. The
Cardiff bombings had haunted him from the first he heard about the
disappearance of the bus. He’d spent more time in this god-forsaken
country in the last year pursuing this story than in his previous
thirty-nine. When his editor had taken him off it for lack of new
information, he’d used his weekends and holidays to return to Wales
in a quest to find one more person to interview, one last piece of
evidence that would make the whole puzzle complete.

Something about what was happening here
wouldn’t let him go.

So when he heard people boarding the bus, he
didn’t move. His thought was that he would cadge a ride to wherever
they were going and decide at that point whether or not to reveal
himself. He had his mobile with him, and this morning he’d made
sure that it was fully charged, so it would be a simple matter to
telephone for a ride if it became necessary.

A murmur of voices reached him, but he
couldn’t make out what they were saying. The driver—probably the
woman with the dark hair who’d driven it earlier—started the bus
again, and he held onto the metal rail that ran across the front of
the bus. He risked putting his head above it so he could see out
the front window. Snow had fallen so thickly on the windscreen in
the few minutes the bus had been stopped that it was building up on
the wipers. Then they activated and flicked the snow away. He’d
noticed when the bus came in that they operated in tandem with the
wipers on the main windscreen downstairs.

He saw now why the driver had parked as she
had, because it was a simple matter to leave the car park by
pulling forward and turning onto the side street they’d come down
initially. On his knees, he watched the road ahead, feeling a bit
like the kid he’d once been when his father had taken him for a
Sunday tour of London on one of the red double-decker buses. The
Cardiff bus entered the main road again, navigating through a
series of turns that took it into Bangor proper, and then headed
towards the Menai Bridge, the easternmost and smaller of the two
bridges across the Menai Strait.

The bus picked up speed, the windscreen
wipers struggling to keep up with the snow, and because he was
watching the wipers instead of the road, Rupert failed to notice at
first not only the speed at which they were driving, but the fact
that they were driving down the center of the road, rather than in
their designated lane. Worse, they were approaching one of the more
hazardous features of this bridge, which was a double archway with
a central pillar centered in the middle of the span.

Rupert had seen buses attempt to navigate
through the archway many times, and the drivers of some of the
larger buses, of which the Cardiff bus was one, had to go so far as
to pull in the bus’s side mirrors in order to get through it.

Nobody on this bus was making any attempt to
pull in the mirrors, to slow down, or in any way to prevent the
catastrophe that was bearing down upon them at a hundred kilometers
an hour. Open-mouthed with horror, Rupert watched the bus careen
down the roadway towards it.

He screamed. “Stop! Stop!”

When his cry made no appreciable difference
to the speed of the bus, he clenched the bar in front of him and
closed his eyes, too frightened and overcome to even make a pledge
about how he was going to change his life—at a minimum to drink and
smoke less—if someone would only get him off this bus in one
piece.

Rupert opened his eyes. The hundred yards
from the barrier had turned into fifty—to twenty. His eyes bugged
out as death rose up to meet him.

And to his surprise, not only was there life
after death, but it turned out to be something other than an
endless black abyss.

Bridget

“I
don’t know if
coming here was, in fact, a good idea,” Bridget said.

They’d left their somewhat cramped quarters
at Chirk at dawn, saying goodbye to the steward and thanking him
for his hospitality, and ridden the five miles to Whittington
castle. It was Christmas Day, so George had thought them odd to be
leaving so early, but he was also a medieval man, so he hadn’t
taken it upon himself to question the decisions of a knight in the
Earl of Shrewsbury’s company.

“Might not have been.” Peter had borrowed
the binoculars that Ieuan had been looking through back at
Llangollen. He was using them to study the ramparts of Whittington
Castle, which lay to the west of their position. They had taken up
a post in the tavern across the road from the castle, and since
there were no other customers in the main room this morning, nobody
had so far objected to the open shutter.

The rain had abated for the time being, but
Bridget couldn’t decide if that was good or bad. December rain made
men miserable and less likely to go out, ask questions, or wonder
about anything other than when they would next be able to put their
feet to a fire. She and Peter had already spent the hour since
they’d arrived watching the castle entrance and the traffic in and
out of the main gate. A hay cart had entered while one hauling
waste from the stable had left. Local men and women, perhaps hired
as extra workers to deal with all the guests, lifted their hands to
the guards as they passed through.

No riders or Scots made themselves known.
James Stewart hadn’t put in an appearance.

“What if we were to walk up to the castle
and ask for hospitality like we talked about last night?” Bridget
said. “You are one of Callum’s men, and it’s Christmas Day.”

“We could,” Peter said.

Bridget pursed her lips. “If we were to do
that, it would probably be better if it appeared as if we’ve just
arrived—except that the gossip from the tavern could reach the
steward’s ears that you and I spent an hour in here before we
showed up over there.”

“Maybe,” Peter said.

“Definitely,” Bridget said. “How do you
think I get my information to pass on to you and Callum in the
first place?”

Peter smiled.

The castle plan bore some resemblance to
Caerphilly Castle, where Bridget had spent just a little bit of
time before finding her feet in Shrewsbury. The keep sat in the
middle of a moat such that water surrounded it on all sides. A
bridge led from the keep’s inner gatehouse over the moat to the
outer bailey, which was also surrounded by water. Its gatehouse, in
turn, protected the entrance and was guarded by two giant D-shaped
towers. A system of dikes and ditches also surrounded the whole
site.

“My lord.” Simon appeared in the doorway
that led to the tavern’s kitchen, which was located in the back of
the main building. “Over here!”

Bridget and Peter left their station by the
window and followed Simon out the back door; across the courtyard
where hens pecked at the ground, looking for bits of grain; and
then out the rear gate into the field beyond.

A few paces further on, to the north of the
tavern, Simon stopped. The short walk in the grass had Bridget’s
dress soaked to mid-calf, a natural consequence of wearing medieval
clothing, but she was warm enough in her leather boots, wool socks,
and leggings. Women might not wear pants as the outer layer in the
Middle Ages, but they weren’t such fools that they couldn’t figure
out a way to keep warm by wearing them underneath.

“What is it?” Peter said as he stopped near
a row of bushes that marked the end of the tavern’s land and behind
which Simon appeared to be hiding.

“Look.” Simon canted his head to indicate a
gap in the vegetation.

A dozen men had gathered on the road to the
north of the castle, in an area Bridget and Peter hadn’t been able
to see from the inn itself. The men seemed to be having a
conference. One man spoke heatedly, and another responded in
kind.

“It looks like a disagreement,” Bridget
said. “Where did they come from?”

“Either they left the castle before dawn, or
they’ve been out all night,” Simon said.

“It would be good to know if they’re coming
from the castle or going,” Bridget said.

“Can you tell if they’re Scottish?” Peter
said.

“It isn’t like anybody’s wearing a kilt,”
Bridget said.

“I know, but—”

“My red hair isn’t some kind of radar for
Scottishness. I don’t even speak Gaelic!” Bridget had been very
disappointed to learn from Callum that the kilt, as popularized by
films and time travel romances, hadn’t come into being by the
thirteenth century. The Scots still wore their kilts as cloaks,
just like the rest of medieval Britons.

Peter reached over and twirled a strand of
her hair around his finger. Coming from him, it was a far more
intimate act than sleeping in the same room with him at Chirk had
been—fully clothed with her on the bed and him on the floor.
Somehow Bridget had never responded to his question regarding how
she felt about pretending to be his wife.

Last night, when he’d confirmed the
steward’s misunderstanding as fact, at first Bridget had been so
surprised, she hadn’t known what to say. Then they’d been
interrupted by the needs of the investigation—and after they’d
talked about other things, it was hard to come back to the topic of
their relationship, especially amidst all the people in the
hall.

Once they reached their room, Peter had
dropped her off to inspect the security of the castle and confer
with Simon. She’d lain awake for a long time waiting for him, but
she’d eventually fallen asleep and then awoken in the darkness with
him lying on the floor a few feet away, breathing as if he was
asleep.

It wasn’t as if she’d planned to sleep with
him—not with the paper thin walls of the room and the narrow lumpy
bed. Even as twenty-firsters, there was something to be said for
not sleeping together straight away, but she would have liked to at
least
talk.
Somehow, she was going to have to say something
about his question, regardless of how inconvenient or weird the
timing was. By now, he probably thought she was having second
thoughts about kissing him, when the opposite couldn’t be more
true.

“From this far away, I can’t hear what
they’re saying,” Simon said, and then set off at a half-crouch to
get closer to the road. Bridget lost sight of him in the shrubbery.
Peter took her hand so they could creep forward together.

“If these men are responsible for the attack
on the emissary, we’d need an army to get into that castle,” she
said. “What are we hoping to accomplish here?”

“I’d like
something
to report back to
Ieaun and Samuel for our efforts,” Peter said. “I’m supposed to be
an investigator, so I’m investigating. Whittington Castle with
Scots in attendance is currently our only clue as to the
whereabouts of James Stewart.”

Then the men in the road seemed to decide
something because as Bridget, Peter, and Simon watched, half led
their horses across the forty-foot drawbridge to the gatehouse, and
the other half pointed their horses north and rode away. Bridget
expected them to take the road that led northwest back to Chirk,
some five miles away, or towards the turnoff a hundred yards north
of the castle, which would take them northeast, back to
Scotland.

Instead, they circled around the moat and
dismounted before the most distant watchtower that lay to the
northwest of the castle. It was reachable only by this external
road, or by boat from the outer bailey, were someone to row across
the moat to a narrow landing at the back.

“I don’t suppose we need to wonder what—or
who—might be in that watchtower,” Simon said.