Prince of Time (30 page)

Bronwen

“
T
hat was quite a display you put on with your sister the other day.” I picked up speed and shifting into second gear. “She taught me three simple things to do, and I suddenly feel much more confident.”

“Just don’t get cocky,” David said. “You don’t want to have just enough information to be dangerous to yourself, rather than an attacker.”

“I know,” I said.

“Most of the techniques are relatively simple. You just have to be prepared to use them, and not hesitate, because hesitation will cost you whatever advantage you might have had. Believe me, I know. If your opponent has a knife, every second you delay increases your chance of getting cut.”

“That’s why you moved in on that guy back at Penn State,” I said, beginning to understand. “It wasn’t because you were being macho or brave, but because you had chosen to act.”

“Better to act than react,” David said. “Especially since you’re a woman, and like Anna, not a big person. If you have a chance to act, you do it, and you make it count.” We rolled over the Irfon Bridge before David spoke again. “Things are going to start happening pretty quickly now.”

“As if things have been slow up until this point?” I said.

David laughed. “I’ve got Ieuan in pursuit of bat guano—apparently we’ve more than ten different kinds of bats native to Wales—a lucky happenstance—and Math is overseeing the quest for sulfur and charcoal. Before another week passes, we’re going to launch a full scale assault on Painscastle and Brecon. Our black powder is going to bring down the walls and usher in the medieval equivalent of an arms race. The technology exists out there; it’s just not widely used or understood. Don’t think Hereford is going to take our pre-eminence sitting down.”

David’s list of weaponry was daunting. He wanted exploding missiles to fire from trebuchets, whether comprised of my Greek fire compound or black powder, fire arrows, black powder kegs for mining under castle walls, and gasoline bombs. I was in charge of the gasoline and the Greek fire.

Another hundred yards and I turned onto a track to the right. It brought us to the bottom of a slope that led to a meadow. Above that was a tree-covered hill.

“Stop here,” David said, and got out of the car. He spoke to his men who’d followed behind us as we drove, and had them set up a perimeter around the meadow and the trees by which I parked. David leaned into the car. “We’re going through those bushes, just to your left. Follow me.”

He disappeared between two thickets and I got out of the car to follow him, trying not to catch my hair in the brambles. I came out the other side into a small clearing. A thick screen of trees surrounded it on all sides. Aunt Elisa’s minivan sat in the middle of it.
Wow.
Even after all that had happened, there were times when I felt normal, that thirteenth century Wales didn’t seem so different. And then the distance to the twenty-first century would stop me in my tracks.

“So what do you want from me, exactly?”

“Creative uses for gasoline,” David said. He opened the trunk and surveyed the contents with satisfaction.

I stepped to look with him. “Oh,” I said.

Aunt Elisa was a pack rat. I understood now why David had been so nonchalant about siphoning gas out of the vehicles and the containers in which we would put it. Not only did we have the 6 root beer bottles in my car that Aunt Elisa had given Ieuan, but another two dozen lay jumbled in the back of her car, along with a staggering array of twenty-first century garbage.

“You wouldn’t know it by how her house looks,” David said. “Maybe it’s just her cars.” He pulled a six foot length of plastic tubing from the pile of items and held it up for inspection. “I saw this when we drove the van the last time. Poor Aeddan had to contend with all this junk when I stuffed him in the trunk so I could drive the van out of here. I didn’t think anything of the hose at the time, but I remembered it later, during the siege of Bronllys in July, and wished I had more time to come up with a way to use it.”

I joined him and began gathering the glass bottles into a grocery bag. David lifted up the floor of the trunk and took out a two gallon plastic gasoline container.

“Okay,” I said. “We need to start the siphon, and then it’s a piece of cake.”

“This is the part that I was most worried about,” David said. “Is it as easy as it looks on television?”

“I can do it,” I said. “My youth was apparently more misspent than yours.”

Bevyn strode into the clearing. “My lord!” he said. “Tudur and Goronwy have reached the castle and your father requests your presence, as soon as possible.”

“Thanks, Bevyn,” David said. He turned to me. “Can you handle this? Just fill the container and bring all the bottles back to the castle. You can prepare the bottles there.”

“Go,” I said. “I’m fine.”

David nodded at Bevyn, who held the branches open for him to pass.

“My lady,” Bevyn said before he followed David, “I will send Cadwallon to you, and leave you a further ten men for your protection.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

I returned to the task at hand. The key with siphoning gasoline was not to get any in one’s mouth, which I’d watched my father do once when his car was out of gas and our neighbor’s wasn’t. Clear tubing, such as Aunt Elisa had bought, helped. I shoved the tube into the minivan’s tank, stepped into the trunk so I stood higher than the top of the van, and sucked. The gasoline rose up the tube until it was about a foot from my mouth. I stopped it with my tongue, and then my finger, before climbing down and lowering the end of the hose into the plastic carrying container.
Done!

Cadwallon appeared just as it finished filling. He approached me and the vehicle with obvious trepidation.

“Did you ride in it before?” I said.

“Yes, my lady,” he said. “It was an experience of a lifetime.”

“But you wouldn’t like to ride in it again?”

He shook his head vehemently. “I would prefer to leave the Prince’s miracles for him and him alone.”

His words could have been full of fear, but instead he spoke with reverence. I straightened and Cadwallon looked at me, his face shining. “You are a lady of Avalon too,” he said. “I’m honored to assist you.”

Uh oh.

“Then carry this for me,” I said, and pointed to the gas canister.

He hefted it easily. I shut the trunk, we walked back through the bushes to my car, and Cadwallon put the container inside. I tried to figure out what to say to him. I didn’t want to diminish David’s authority, but surely such worship wasn’t healthy.

I’d wondered initially how a high school kid could so easily—not that it was ‘easy,’ granted—make the transition to being a prince of Wales. But really, many Americans behaved routinely just like the sons of the British aristocracy had two hundred years ago: they played lots of games; they cared about fashion; they attended college in great part to go to parties and have a good time; they wore their entitlement like a cloak. They walked the streets as if they owned them—
which in the United States they did!

“You realize, Cadwallon,” I finally said, “Dafydd doesn’t claim to be Arthur.”

“But he wouldn’t, would he?” Cadwallon said. “He already serves Wales in the same fashion as Arthur did. It’s up to us to remind him who he really is. He’s everything Arthur was. You can’t deny it.”

I gazed at Cadwallon. He
believed
it.

* * * * *

The sun was bright for once. On a whim, I climbed to the top of the castle wall and walked all around the top of it, the breeze on my face, and contemplating the green countryside around me. Lili’s parting words passed through my head:
Prince Dafydd has lost control of this. He can’t stop it now. Tell him he shouldn’t try.

I turned to the south, thinking of Lili’s prescience and wishing I shared it. I found the road that would return Ieuan to Buellt, but no dust stirred it. With a sigh, I stepped inside one of the rounded battlements. Anna sat cross-legged on the stones nursing Cadell, her back against the eastern wall. I hesitated, one foot forward.

“Come in,” she said. “You won’t disturb us. Every castle has at least one spot for me to hide, and this is it for Buellt.”

“I thought it was only me who looked for places like that,” I said. “I didn’t know you were shy, too.” I looked west, my back to Anna. The sun shone in my eyes and the breeze pulled at my hair. Someone had told me that this signaled a change in the weather.
Rain then.

“Math has gone off on a quest for David, and Ieuan too, I hear,” Anna said. “Looking for the ingredients for weapons.”

“Bevyn told me when I entered the bailey that David, Prince Llywelyn, and your mother are closeted with Tudur and Goronwy. Apparently three of the English lords chose to side with us.”

“Really?” Anna said. “That’s unexpected.”

“Maybe they like Wales too,” I said. “Or maybe they realize that the crown of England is weak and think this is the better option.”

Anna sighed. “Why can’t the English just leave us alone? Wales is beautiful, but there isn’t much else here, is there?”

I smiled. Below us, the river Irfon wended around the village. The hills rose just beyond, becoming mountains in the distance. It wasn’t even sufficient to say the air was clear. Twenty-first century people have no idea how clean their air used to be—could be again one day, given effort.

I turned back to look at her. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Yes.”

“You married Math. What made you decide that you could make a life here?”

“You’re thinking about you and Ieuan?” Anna said.

“Yes,” I said. “But also about you. You’re younger than I am, and younger still when you came to Wales.”

“I chose to grow up,” Anna said.

I hesitated over my next question. “And Math? Can it really work for Ieuan and me?”

Anna laughed. “Love helps a lot, but it isn’t enough. You have to look at the kind of person they are; figure out whether you can live with their character for the rest of your life. That’s even more important here, where divorce is so rare, though it happens. I didn’t want to follow my heart with Math at first. I tried to persuade him that he wasn’t interested in me. David is the one who encouraged me to look at him more closely, because he and Math had become such good friends. Finally, Papa, David, and I sat him down and told him where we were from, and explained what that might mean for him and me.”

She stopped.

“And then what?”

“It was such a relief for Math to realize that it wasn’t
him
that I was afraid of, but committing to
this
life. After that, I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. We married soon after.”

“And since then?”

“I’m so thankful I didn’t choose differently; that I have Cadell and Math and a complete life here.”

“Your feelings haven’t changed even with the knowledge that you might be able to return to the twenty-first century?” I said. “Like David did?”

“Life is the people you live it with, not the time you’re in,” Anna said. “That life is so far removed from what and who I am now. I can’t imagine trying to fit in as a teenager in Oregon having lived as I have. I’d have to pretend that none of this had happened; that it was all a dream, like my mother had to when she went back before David was born. I have a child now, as she did. How could I choose to go back? Mom wouldn’t have either, had she been given the choice.” Anna stroked Cadell’s head with her free hand.

I stared into the distance.

“Don’t jump,” Anna said.

“Excuse me?”

“In the first weeks I was in Wales, I used to stand at the top of the wall at Castell y Bere, before the English burned it to the ground, and think about jumping. I thought maybe I wouldn’t hit the ground, but be transported home, and perhaps I was right.”

I looked over the battlements. It would be so easy to step off the edge and fall. Could I return that easily, or would it kill me? Either way, the thirteenth century and Ieuan would be lost to me.

“What stopped you?” I said.

“I didn’t want to be a coward, and I didn’t want to abandon David.”

“I don’t want to go back.”
I don’t want to go back!
The realization flooded through me and I felt like someone had lifted off the top of my head and filled me up with emotion. I swung around to face Anna. “It may sound crazy, but despite everything that has happened to me since I came to Wales, I love it here.”

“Do you really?” she said. “When David told me he’d brought you back with him; that you were going to marry Ieuan, I was, quite frankly, shocked. I asked myself,
why would anyone
choose
to come to the thirteenth century?
Even for an historian, the fascination can pale pretty quickly, once the absence of anything resembling a hot shower sinks in.”

“But—” I gestured to the land around us. “Wales is beautiful, and I hardly miss those things. Most are more of a burden than a help anyway. Admittedly, I grew up without much in the way of material possessions, what with the yurts and the shacks my parents called home.”

“I see your point, even if most of the time my inner child doesn’t agree.” Anna lifted Cadell, put him on her shoulder, and kissed his little cheek as she patted his back. “There’s a thirteenth century equivalent for most things that we
need
that are manufactured in the twenty-first century, but that didn’t stop me from crying over the baby fingernail clippers David brought me, or Mom over her cotton socks. I
like
luxury.” She reached out a hand and I helped pull her to her feet.

“Those first hours and days in Wales, totally overwhelmed me.”

“And now?” Anna said.

“Now I wouldn’t even consider jumping,” I said—and meant it.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Ieuan

I
rode towards the western side of Painscastle with my lord Dafydd and Goronwy. It was near the end of the day and the setting sun lit the castle, earlier now that September was only two days away.