The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (31 page)

Merritt dragged Sam towards the airlock. The whining noise rose and the soft chime of the warning system told him he was running out of time. He backed into the open door, the white light of the
Godolphin
airlock all around him. Sam struggled and fought, screaming and cursing, and Merritt tightened his hold even as the man threw himself backwards, trying to break Merritt’s nose with the back of his head. Over Sam’s head Merritt could see Edith struggle to her feet.

The airlock whooshed shut. As he waited for the atmosphere to balance, he could see Edith through the tiny airlock window, impossibly far away.

Edith worked steadily at the forge on her land, coaxing the iron into shape with fire and hammer. It was a facsimile of the airlock that had appeared in her cellar weeks before, made out of iron, to match the key and the lock. Crazy, she thought to herself, more than once, but the concentric rings were beautiful. Looking through, you had the impression you could see an infinite distance.

Edith took off her goggles and wiped back her hair with gloved hands that smelled of metal. As far as the police knew, Sam had left town. They found his truck off the side of the mountain, but he had disappeared. They promised Edith they would make sure they caught him if he tried to sneak back into town. They never asked about Merritt. It was as if he had never been there. She had tried the key a couple of times, but the broken door always opened on the dark tunnel leading up the mountain, and never into the airlock. So she decided to build a new one, forged of iron and hope.

It took her all day to haul the pieces of the new door down into her cellar, and almost all night to set it up, under a rig of lights that illuminated the dirt cellar and the remains of an old life. The lights shed plenty of heat and Edith was drenched with sweat. The close cellar smelled of it, along with metal and warm dirt.

Finished, she stepped back and looked at her handiwork. The iron door with its concentric rings fitted in the opening, almost filling the cellar. Merritt said he spent his lifetime looking for Earth. It didn’t seem fair that he should find her, just to lose her again less than a day later. The key brought him here once before. It would just have to do it again. Plus, if she were going to found the clan that built the arks, she couldn’t do it alone.

She took a breath and fitted the key in the new lock. It turned without resistance. There was a pause, and then she heard a rising whine of power gathering behind the door. A chime signalled that the atmosphere stabilized, and the door swung inwards.

Jean Johnson

The merchant was grumbling again. Phinneas grunted and hoisted his bulky girth on to the low stone wall lining one side of the rutted road. Anne nibbled on her lips to hide her smile, watching him check the leather of his left sandal and mutter about wanting a horse to finish the trip home. The monk, Thomas, tutted and reminded his fellow pilgrim that the point of making the journey on foot was to show their Creator how pious and penitent each of them were.

The two nuns, Muriel and Lisette, were plodding along in their brown and cream robes at the same slow but steady pace as always. They passed the merchant and the monk with courteous nods, but otherwise said nothing. Their pilgrimage wasn’t for penance, merely for piety, but they had taken a vow of silence for the trip, allowing themselves to speak only five times each day, save for prayers.

Three of the others were up ahead, two farmers and one of their wives, and two more followed the monk and the merchant, being a miller and a shoemaker. At the head of their little parade of piety strode Sir James Fitz William, hired guard and guide. At the rear strolled Anne, quiet, soft spoken and watchful of everything.

“Can’t you do something about this?” Phinneas demanded as the shoemaker drew close, peeling back the separating layers of his sandal. That wasn’t what he actually said, but the transceiver behind Anne’s ear translated it as such. “I cannae, m’laird, ’til be nightfall. Ye knoun it since mornin,” the shoemaker shot back.

Do not forget to remind Simon to load Middle Scottish next time
, she repeated silently. Even with the transceiver’s help, his accent was thick.
Low Middle Scottish
, she added as the shoemaker said something else – something not so easily translatable, but which she thought might possibly be crude in nature, mainly because one of the farmers overheard it, understood it, and laughed. Guffawed was more like it.

“Hurry up, everyone!” the horseless knight called out from his position at the forefront. “The well of San Vicente Marantes is just up ahead, and we’re late in reaching it. We need to be over the river before nightfall.”

“If my shoes weren’t falling apart, I would hasten in a more seemly manner,” Phinneas countered out loud.

“We were only in Compostela for a week. They will not have fixed the flooded bridge by then, and the raftsman does not ply his trade at night. The choice is either camping out in the woods on this side of the river, or in comfort at the hostel on the other side,” James explained patiently. “I suggest you make what haste you can.”

The merchant hauled himself off the wall and muttered under his breath, “Whatever you say,
Saint
James . . .”

Sir James just waved him off and kept walking. The younger man was as straight-backed and strong as he had been this morning, despite the weight of his chainmail hauberk, his plate shoulder and knee guards, and the sword and dagger slung around his waist. That didn’t include the roll of his cloak and provision bag slung over his back, similar to everyone else. He was the only one armed with anything longer than a dagger, save for the two farmers, who carried the yew bows and capped quivers stuffed with arrows that marked them as Englishmen. Everyone else had a walking stick, some worn with years of use and some new, selected just for this trip.

The flapping of Phinneas’ loose sandal kept distracting Anne, as did the older pilgrim’s constant muttering about his discomforts. Anne reminded herself firmly of her mantra as a temporal anthropologist.
I am here to make accurate observations about pilgrims in the early fourteenth century. Not to perpetuate stereotypes.

Even if I am looking at a fat, greedy, lazy merchant. Thank goodness tonight is my last night among these people.

The one she would actually miss was James. The knight wasn’t particularly wealthy; as the third son of some English nobleman up in the Middle Countries, he hadn’t many prospects, particularly in the lull between French and English territory wars when there was no chance of grabbing a plot of land or bringing home loot or a foreign noble for ransoming. She didn’t even know if he had a horse, but then he wouldn’t be using one while escorting pilgrims down to the Iberian peninsula and back; that wouldn’t be suitably pious.

What he did have was a keen mind, a good wit, and a distinct flair for observing people. A natural social scientist at heart, though he called himself a philosopher-knight. When evening fell and they gathered around the fire, whether it was in a hostel or in a camp, he would regale them with stories of other pilgrimages he had led. The cost of hiring a boat to sail from the southern coast of England to the northern shores of Castile and the Compostela region, depending upon the journey, was considered a reasonable price to pay, given the continuing squabbling between England and France as to who owned what chunk of land.

So far, the troubles, which would eventually lead to the conflicts collectively known as the Hundred Years’ War, were staying up in the French territories. There were other dangers to watch out for, though. Banditry was always a potential problem even on well-travelled roads such as this one. Feral livestock was another. One of James’s previous trips had involved a wild bull. He had been quick to praise the Englishmen on that trip, who had dispatched the beast while he himself had done his best to dodge the bull’s horns. Anne couldn’t help but think of the curly-haired knight as a matador whenever she thought of that tale, though it was hard to picture him in a matador’s “suit of lights” instead of his dusty, tabard-draped armour.

They reached the well, which stood between the road and the little cluster of stone and plaster huts that passed for a village – or maybe a hamlet at best, since there were no more than five houses. Children headed their way, ready to gawk at the return of the foreign pilgrims. Their parents, used to such travellers, kept their attention on their chores.

By the time Anne reached James, everyone else had already drunk from the bucket, emptying it. He lowered it and winched it up again, giving her time to pull her drinking cup from her makeshift pack. He filled her cup, then fetched out his own. Both were simple wooden vessels, the sort which wouldn’t break if dropped on the ground, and which wouldn’t cost much to replace if lost. He satisfied his own thirst, then eyed her with his green eyes and smiled.

“And how fare you, Mistress Anne? Was Compostela everything you imagined?”

“I fare well enough,” she murmured. Field anthropologists weren’t supposed to interact much with their subjects, but James insisted on being friendly. Particularly with her. She was supposedly portraying the part of a freeholder’s widow, undertaking this pilgrimage to commemorate the anniversary of her husband’s death.

“And?” he prompted her.

“And it was all I imagined. And more,” honesty prompted her to add. Her previous assignment had been in Germany, and had involved a similar pilgrimage, but the land and the people of the Black Forest were very different from this corner of Europe. That trip also hadn’t had a Sir James in it.

He leaned in a little closer and murmured, “
I
think you’ll be utterly bored when you return home. Presuming you want to return home. You take to this life on the road with great ease. You’re no milksop maiden. Nor, I think, would you enjoy being under your brother-in-law’s thumb.”

“What makes you think that?” Anne asked, bemused by his claim.

“You told Sister Muriel you couldn’t donate any land to the Church in your late husband’s name, since his brother inherited everything but for a bit of coin and your personal things. And that it was a relief to be away from his family for so long, despite the hardships and dangers of taking a pilgrimage,” he said.

“Your ears are sharp, to have picked up so much,” she countered without directly agreeing with him.

“Anything involving an angel would hold my attention. Doubly so, when that angel is you,” he murmured, leaning in close enough that she could feel his breath against her cheek and ear. Unlike some of the others, he took care daily to freshen his breath, usually with a bit of some herb plucked along the road. Today, it was mint. Yesterday, it had been parsley.

He had also picked up the habit of bathing relatively frequently. Clad in his armour, he did smell of metal, rust, oil, dirt and sweat, but she had seen him carefully washing himself on more than one occasion. He had also brought a second set of clothes, fresh hosen and thigh-length cote-hardie as clean as could be kept while travelling, and a fine, embroidered tabard. James had donned them just before reaching the cathedral, and had taken care to wipe down his armour with an oiled rag before their arrival so that it would gleam. Her own gown, a simple linen cote-hardie which barely touched the ground, suitable for her station, was rather dusty by comparison.

“I am no angel, Sir Knight, nor a creature to be venerated and adored,” she demurred. Protocol demanded she turn down any such offers. Inside, however, she felt very flattered by his attentions. She kept her gaze on the nuns, who along with the others were taking the opportunity to disappear into the bushes across the road from the well, attending to the needs of nature. “You should not say such things on a pilgrimage.”

“We travel on pilgrimage to know and honour the miracles of the Creator. It is well known that God made man in His image, and then made woman to be the companion of man,” James reminded her.

Anne started to roll her eyes. She had been exposed to too much equality between the genders after becoming a temporal anthropologist to put up with such chauvinism. At least not in her personal life.

“And, as any artisan will tell you,” the curly-haired knight continued smoothly, “the first attempt in crafting something is always the worst, while the second is always the better. If I am a good man – and I think I am – why then you as a woman must surely be better. Every evidence of my eyes, ears and mind support this idea . . . so why should I not venerate and adore you? To do otherwise would be a sin of denial against the sheer craftsmanship of God.”

She blushed. The weeks spent in his company had proven him a reasonably pious man; she knew he believed what he was saying. She also knew it was the courtship style of the day, the courtly manners and florid flirting which had tamed and tempered the brutal force of the warrior caste in medieval Europe. “If you seek to place me upon a pedestal, you must know I am not a lady of noble birth.”

“You are a lady in all the ways that matter: courteous, kind and competent. You have an innate nobility that no measure of birth-rank can match.” Shifting so that he could look into her eyes, James touched her hand. “I chose this life because I wanted to study all manner of ranks and births, of educations and crafts. I have seen men and women of the highest birth behave with the poorest of concern for their fellow beings, and the lowliest of ranks sharing what little they have with the compassion of the saints they venerate.

“I have trod this road with women of all ages and persuasions, and no one I have found has felt so much like a . . . like a kindred spirit as you. You understand people. Like I do,” he finished, cupping her fingers beneath his. His skin was calloused from his many daily practices with his blade at dawn and dusk whenever they camped, but his touch was gentle. “I care not that you come with no lands and no name of note – I am a third-born son, myself; my portion is small at best – but I care about
you
.