Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (31 page)

Gawain marched around the house, looking for vulnerabilities. The trees were too close in the back. They provided cover for intruders. He’d cut down a couple tomorrow for two reasons. He could hear the low voices of the women in the hut but not what they were saying. Diana had found her mother. He hoped that was a solace to her.

Damn her, that she had followed him here. It wasn’t safe for a soft girl from the twenty-first century to be here in the fifth. Especially one as pretty as Diana. He had acted as though winning a fight with Gareth was a given. But they could have all fallen on him at once and killed him. What would happen to Diana then? He shuddered to think. He had to protect her. But what if he couldn’t? Her very presence made him feel cautious and vulnerable. He wasn’t used to that.

He couldn’t deny that he found her presence a solace, too, though. The thought of never seeing her again had made his gut churn in that room beneath the Palace of Fine Arts. He had been willing to sacrifice seeing her again, because that was what was required of him. But it would have broken him. He knew that now. So he knew what was in store for him. Tomorrow he would pay Beth
with enough silver to keep her from having to serve the likes of Gareth, he’d kill Mordred, and he would get Diana home to the time where she belonged.

He forced his mind into planning. Should he find a horse and arrive at the castle with authority, asking to serve Mordred? At the least he could get an audience with him. But what if that audience was in the presence of thirty of his knights? Gawain would never be able to touch him then. Should he find a way into the palisades surreptitiously and try to find Mordred in his rooms alone or with a woman? What if he was caught before he could find Mordred?

And then Gawain couldn’t hold his mind in check any longer. He felt like someone had punched him in the gut more effectively than Gareth ever could. He leaned forward and sagged against the wall of Beth’s hut.

Not only was he about to lose Diana, but also his father was supporting Mordred.

Could he have misjudged his father’s character so completely? Had he been so overawed by Merlin’s power and his own shortcomings that he couldn’t see the man beneath? Merlin knew Mordred was a villain. Gawain pushed himself up and completed another circuit of the hut before he sat on the doorstep.

If Merlin was supporting Mordred and got in the way of Gawain’s mission, then . . . then Gawain would have to kill his father, too, to save the future. To stop Mordred making his own people suffer. The Saxons hadn’t been as bad as this. They took and stole and burned, and then they . . . stayed. And even though he’d fought the ones who transgressed, waging a guerrilla war hundreds of years before that term was coined, still, most Saxons were fair to their people. In the end the country absorbed the Saxons and survived to produce Alfred the Great, who
united at least half the island and held it against the Vikings. Even the Vikings had been absorbed, and together Saxon and Celt and Viking had held the island until it fell to the Normans (Vikings or “Northmen” themselves), and the Normans were absorbed in their turn. The country became strong and vital with all those different peoples. It surged toward the Renaissance and Shakespeare, and a queen who made her island into a naval powerhouse that spread culture and law through a wide swath of the world.

It was the sweep of history he must save. He had to save the British Empire so it could fall and leave its seedlings of self-rule and the hatred of despots in its wake. The British Empire could be cruel, as could the Saxons. The priggish self-confidence of British majors everywhere provoked rebellion. But the rebellion was as necessary as colonization in the first place. It was the path of history and it had to be restored, the canker of Mordred removed.

It was only a personal tragedy that Gawain’s father might stand in the way. Gawain would kill Merlin, if he could. He was setting himself against the most powerful magician in history. But he would find a way. He must. He made another circuit, until one of Lamorak’s men arrived and took over. He lay down on his cloak and dreaded the coming of the day.

Diana watched Beth tuck into the beef with a knife thinned by years of sharpening and a two-pronged fork to hold it. The wonder of the fact that this woman was her mother tied her tongue. What should she ask her? What did she want to know?

“Do . . . do you have family hereabout?” Why was Beth so alone?

Beth shook her head, a sad smile pausing on her face for a moment between bites. “My mother died long ago. My brothers scattered.”

“Your . . . your father?”

“A Saxon,” she said sadly. “I never knew him.”

“Did . . . did he rape your mother?” Diana wondered if she had been a product of generations of rape. Mordred had raped this girl in celebration of his victory over Arthur. Had anyone ever loved a mate in her family? Was love some kind of aberration?

“Oh no. My mother lived in the land that Cerdic first took for the Saxons, south and east of here. There was a blond Saxon warrior sent to start a colony and bring the families of his men from the mainland to settle their conquered land.” Here she smiled, though her look was far away. She was remembering the stories her mother had told her as a child. “They built grand halls in my mother’s village. But he had no wife himself. Though many wanted him, he had eyes only for my dark-eyed Celtic mother. And she . . . she told me when I was but a girl how blue his eyes were and how blond his hair. By the look on her face I knew she had wanted him, too. He took her to wife and had children by her. Our village thrived.” Her face fell.

“What happened?”

“Cerdic wanted to extend his power. He called his warriors to push west, into Arthur’s lands. My father fell in battle. They say he died bravely,” she added, with a small smile. “It broke my mother’s heart, and she no longer had the courage to live among the blue-eyed people. So she returned here, with me.”

So, her Saxon father was the reason for Diana’s light eyes. She had a history, a genetic heritage. “You have a wonderful family history,” she said.

“I belong nowhere,” Beth said, pushing her plate away.

“You are the future.” Diana reached across the rough plank table and took her mother’s hand. Diana swallowed. “I feel I know you. And you are a good woman.”

“You don’t know me,” her mother said. “And yet . . . you look familiar.”

Diana’s eyes filled.
Now or never.
“You, too. Have you . . . have you seen your reflection in a polished metal mirror or a pond?”

Beth’s eyes went round with recognition.

Diana smiled and her tears overflowed. “I look like you. There is a reason for that.”

Beth blinked, thought, registered confusion.

“I used the power I have from my father to come back in time and see you,” Diana said carefully. Beth watched her face, wary. “I am your unborn daughter, grown.”

Beth’s hand went, of its own volition, to her belly.

Diana nodded.

Beth searched her face. And then a delicate hand reached out to touch Diana’s cheek, exploring what should not be, could not be, but was. “My lady?”

“Not your lady. Your daughter. See?” She pointed to her face. “I have your eyes, your skin, your mouth.”

“Do you remember me?” her mother asked. Beth accepted. She accepted that there was magic in the world that could bring a daughter from the future back to visit her mother while the daughter was yet unborn. That simple faith in magic didn’t make Diana respect her mother less. It was a time when magic was still possible, when Merlin made kings and protected a kingdom with powers that were accepted, revered. Magic was just a part of everyday life.

Diana shook her head. She would not tell her mother why she didn’t remember her. “But I am glad to know you. I didn’t want to think that I was made by Mordred alone.”

“You have a kind face. You are a good woman,” Beth whispered. Then her eyes filled as they scanned the ceiling and the few sticks of furniture in the small hut. “And I . . . I am the one who will bear you.” Her eyes came to rest on Diana’s face. “And the knight loves you. You will bear his children, and they will bear children. . . .”

Diana didn’t disabuse her of that notion. “You are part of the future, Mother.”

She hadn’t called anyone that since she was sixteen. It felt good.

“You are even kind enough not to tell me that I will die bearing you.”

Diana was shocked. She bit her lip, wondering what to say. Her mother touched Diana’s lips to quiet her. “Don’t deny. Why else would you come back to see me? Because you couldn’t know me any other way. Don’t mourn. A death is worth bearing you.” Beth drew Diana into her breast, across her bulging belly. “I am so proud. So glad.”

Diana scooted forward and laid her head against her mother’s breasts, swollen with pregnancy. She wouldn’t talk about Mordred and what Gawain was here to do. She wouldn’t mourn the fact that her mother would die in childbirth. She wouldn’t dwell on her misgivings.

“I love you,” she said. There was nothing else to say.

Mordred sloshed more wine into his tankard. It was poor wine, compared to the wine he had enjoyed in the twenty-first century, but it was better than no wine. The feast was ended. The trenchers and platters had been taken away by the servant women. Smoke filled the wooden hall. Men lounged and drank. Women, highborn and low-, consorted with the revelers, some more willingly than others. Boisterous laughter bounced back from the tapestries and furs that hung on the walls.

The stone of his future castle grew out of the dirt not two hundred yards from where Mordred sat, but at this rate it would take years to complete. Only the foundations had been finished, and a single tower. There were no more taxes to be gleaned from the peasants. It took resources to supply the men who kept the Saxons at bay. He’d conscripted every able-bodied man between sixteen and fifty to fight Cerdic’s Saxon forces. The only way they prevailed was with the advance notice of the enemy’s movements provided by the wizard.

This time was forsaken by the gods. Mordred belonged in that shining city by the bay some fifteen hundred years from now. At first when he’d come back, he’d thought about staying here. It was familiar. He easily made himself king, and he’d finally found a way to force Merlin to do his bidding. Things could be worse.

He looked across the room at the great stone that formed part of the fireplace. The hall itself had been built around the stone in Arthur’s day, to commemorate his ascension, unlikely as it was since he, too, was a bastard, to the throne. Arthur had pulled his sword from this stone near a lake in Cornwall and proved he was the rightful ruler of the kingdom. During Arthur’s lifetime, it was just a stone, rough and irregular, but with no holes or markings. But by the time Mordred came back from the twenty-first century and entered Arthur’s hall, the hilt of Arthur’s sword once more protruded from the virgin rock as though the rock had been formed around it. There was no cut slot in the stone, no caulking around the blade. Arthur’s sword, the one that symbolized his power, just . . .
was
. . . in the stone, waiting for the next knight who was destined to rule.

Mordred had tried to pull it out. Gareth and Agravain, his half brothers, had tried. To no avail. The hilt stared at Mordred now, smugly, as if to say he wasn’t fit to rule, or
that he’d never be the man his father was. Mordred had ordered Merlin to get him the sword. But Merlin said he couldn’t pry the sword out by magic. It must yield itself to a new hand. No threats could move Merlin. Mordred pried the jewels out of the hilt. In a fit of rage, he’d hacked at the steel with his own sword. The grip was roughened a bit but that was all. He wanted nothing more than to escape that sword and that stone. But to dine in his private bedchamber on the second story would be admitting weakness.

So within a fortnight, an insidious longing had poisoned his triumph. Was he truly even king here when that sword stubbornly reminded everyone of Arthur? And though he could enforce his will with the might of easily led men and an aging wizard, in the end what mattered a kingdom in some small corner of an island where a king’s lodgings were made of logs and wattle? What was Camelot compared to a kingdom like the one they called America?

So he had decided. He’d go forward into the future once more. But he couldn’t make the machine work. For a whole day, he’d tried different sequences of buttons and switches and knobs. He’d enlisted Merlin to cast a spell over the mechanism. Nothing. Mordred had begun to think the machine was broken. But that night the machine disappeared. It wasn’t there when he returned in the morning. It hadn’t been broken at all. He had been
that
close to having what he wanted and his dreams had run through his hands like sand.

Now he was stuck in this time with no plumbing, no electricity. There would be no computers for fifteen hundred years. And for eight months that damned sword hilt stuck in the stone of the great fireplace stared at him smugly.

He stood and threw his tankard. It splashed wine over
the sword hilt. By the time the tankard clattered to the floor, there was silence in the room. Everyone was staring at him.

Let them stare. I’m the goddamned king.

He stumbled down the long planked table. He was going to bed. He looked around for a serving girl to take with him. Instead, his eyes fell on Agravain, brooding at the far end of the table.
Moody Celts.
Under his eyes, Agravain started up, swearing.

“What is it, man?” Mordred asked irritably.

Agravain looked around wildly, then steadied. “I know who the devil was. Is.”

“Who the hell are you talking about?” Mordred didn’t have time for drunken maunderings.

“A man came into the village, dressed for battle. He had a woman with him whose legs were bare. Gareth thought to take both his fat purse and the woman.” He seemed to see Mordred for the first time. “For your greater glory, of course. But the man fought like a demon and Gareth was vanquished in an instant.”

A woman in a short dress? A man who fought like a demon?
Mordred had a sinking feeling. “Who?” he barked at Agravain.