The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (33 page)

His murmured consent was the last coherent thing he said. It didn’t take much to reduce him to gasps and half-bitten oaths, just the application of her tongue, teeth, and lips from his throat to his groin. The lattermost goal made him choke on her name and bow his back, fingers tangling in her hair. From the surprise in his voice, she guessed he had never experienced this before, and applied herself with more enthusiasm and care, wanting to make it as enjoyable for him as possible.

Her attentions invigorated him so much, she found herself flipped on to her back, her head pointed down the modest slope of the bank and her legs hoisted high. Hands clenching in the blanket and the sparse tufts of grass, Anne accepted his enthusiasm for the compliment it was, and for the delights of the inventive position. He growled as he climaxed, trembling and sweating all over again. Shifting a hand to touch her folds, he rubbed as she had shown him, and chuckled when she, too, trembled in bliss. Breathing heavily, James lowered her hips back to the ground, then her legs, before slumping once more at her side.

“I think . . . I know . . . how your husband died,” he muttered between breaths.

“Oh?” she managed, wary of his sudden choice in topic.

“Very,
very
happily.”

Anne laughed. Not because it was the truth – far from it – but because his compliment tickled her. She wanted to tell him the truth about her so-called marriage, but between her orders and this latest bout of passion, she kept her mouth shut. Content, she snuggled against him, reminding herself not to doze for long. She still had to leave by oh-one-hundred hours so that she could be returned to the future. Her weeks of observations needed to be recorded and analysed. Including this interlude, however much she wanted to keep these moments by the moonlit river to herself.

Just a little bit of a nap . . . then I really will leave him . . . I will . . .

The crack of a twig woke both of them. James scrambled for his belt, grabbing and drawing his sword even as he stood. Anne rolled away from him and rose in a defensive crouch of her own, eyes straining to see through the night-shadowed trees.

“Who goes there?” James demanded.

“A friend. I mean you no harm.”

Anne relaxed slightly, recognizing Simon’s voice. Then blushed hotly, mindful of two things: her naked state, and the hour. A mental check of her sub-dermal transceiver showed the hour was half past one. She was late. That was a potential sin in the temporal handbook, a black mark on her record. But her superior didn’t sound upset.

“I do not recognize you,” her lover stated, blade still bared and held between them and the source of that shadowed voice. “Name yourself!”

“James . . . it’s all right. It’s my friend. The one I told you I was going to meet?” Touching his elbow, she gently urged him to lower his weapon. Once he did, she made the introductions. “Sir James, this is Simon, a freeholder and long-time friend of my family. Simon, Sir James, the escort hired by my fellow pilgrims.

“As you can see, I’ll be fine from here on. You can rejoin the others with a clear conscience as to my safety,” Anne told James.

“Did I mean nothing to you?” he hissed.

“You meant a lot. But I must go my way for now, and you must go yours. Return to the others. If I can, I’ll come find you in England later.”

“Actually . . . he cannot return to the others,” Simon stated.

The blade came back up, silver-blue moonlight glinting off the beaten metal. “Why not?”

“Simon?” Anne strained to see her superior’s face. He moved closer, ignoring the threat implied in James’s blade. She caught a glimpse of his expression, the pinch of worry between his dark brows. “Am I in trouble for being late, and not alone?”

“No more so than Rachael was,” Simon murmured.

Comprehension dawned, relieving Anne of much of her worry. She hadn’t black-marked herself in the rulebook by making love with the man at her side.

“You both speak in riddles. Make yourselves clear,” James demanded.

“Peace, brother . . . and put your hosen on. Both of you. We have time for you to dress before we must go.”

“Anne?”

“I trust Simon with my life, James. You can, too. More than you yet know.” Stooping, Anne rummaged through the clothing scattered on the ground, separating out which garment belonged to whom by touch, since James’s clothes were of a higher quality than her own.

He hesitated only a moment before accepting his hosen, undershirt and cote-hardie. Setting down his sword, he dressed as quickly as she did, shaking out his boots and strapping on his belt. After sheathing the blade at his hip, he waited while she fastened the last of the buttons on her over-gown, then faced the shadowed silhouette of their visitor.

“We are dressed, as requested. Now, tell me what you mean. Why should I not return to the others?”

“If you had been with them, instead of having followed Anne here, you would have suffered the same fate they just did. A short while ago, a group of Castilian bandits came upon the pilgrims’ camp, ambushed the farmer on watch, and slaughtered the rest in their sleep. Even as we speak, their bodies and belongings are being looted.”

Anne heard James half-draw his sword and quickly put her hand on his wrist. “We are not what you think. Neither of us is in league with the robbers.”

“How do I know that?” James hissed. “You urged me to go back there, then lured me into staying here! How do I know you didn’t decide they would be more vulnerable and thus easier to kill without my protection?”

“Because I didn’t tell her what the fate of the pilgrims would be. Nor could I interfere to save their lives, even indirectly, without it causing irreparable harm to the future. Which, if you continued to live in this time frame, your own presence would also do.”

James struggled to draw his sword. Anne forced it back into its sheath by pinching one of the nerves in his wrist; from his startled hiss, she guessed he wasn’t expecting so much strength from her, nor the sudden pain shooting up his arm. “James, Simon and I are scholars of the past. Literally, we come from the far-distant future. We, and others like us, travel through time by a special means. We immerse ourselves in a time period, in a culture, in a situation, and observe.

“Just like you do,” she stressed. “You chose to travel as a pilgrimage escort so that you could be a student of humanity, to observe people from all stations of life. We do that, too. But because we do it in the past, which cannot be changed overtly . . . sometimes we cannot stop what happens, because it is vital that it should happen.”

“From the future . . . you’re not actually from northern England, are you?” James accused. “Just how much of what you have told me has been a lie?”

“My place of origin, my inheritance, my brother-in-law . . .”

“Your late husband?” he demanded. “Was even that a lie?”

“Only in part,” Anne confessed. “I was married, and my husband did die. It was in May, in the city of Abbeville in France, not at home in northern England as I claimed. And it was in the Year of Our Lord 1940, in an era when what you know of as the many states of the German kingdom was at war with France. I was an anthropology student – someone who studies societies and cultures and the ways how people live. My husband was also a scholar; he was giving a lecture on mathematics at a school in northern France when there was an unexpected, rapid advance of the German army. He died in the attack. I saw him cut down, and ran. I probably would have perished, too, if I hadn’t seen an exchange student sneaking for the basement of the university building, and followed her instead.

“I wanted to warn her to get out of there, to follow me in making a run for safety. But instead of being trapped and killed as was happening to the others elsewhere . . . she told me she was going to rescue me. She did it by transporting me even further into the future, offering me sanctuary and a new way of life.” Anne hesitated, then continued. “I honestly did not know what fate would befall the others tonight. All I knew was that I had to leave the rest by the middle of the night, so that I could be picked up and returned to the future, where my observations could be reported for posterity. I swear, I did not know.”

“Most field agents aren’t told,” Simon confirmed. “Compassion is wonderful, but if it interferes with the path of history, it can cause complications.”

“I don’t understand,” James murmured. “I think I can believe Anne when she says she didn’t know, but . . . how could not saving their lives be the right thing to do?”

“If your grandfather was the sort to beat his serfs and tax them into starvation, if his actions had blackened your family name from long before you were born, would you want to go back in time to kill him when he was young, to stop him from harming so many people over all those years?” Simon countered. “I know I would . . . but if you went back in time and killed him before he had sired your father . . . you would no longer exist, because your father would not have existed.”

“For another example,” Anne offered, “if he was a good man, one who had intended to marry one woman, who died by, oh, falling off a cliff, and instead married another after her death, a woman who became your grandmother . . . if you went back in time to save the first maiden’s life . . . wouldn’t your grandfather marry
her
instead? Wouldn’t they have different children? Perhaps a daughter instead of a son that year . . . meaning yet again that
you
would not have been born?”

“Time is tricky. We are sent back to observe and learn, not to interfere,” Simon stated. “Anne has saved your life, and it is not our policy to kill those whose lives are accidentally saved . . . but your life now comes at a cost. You cannot return to your family without irrevocably altering the future . . . or risking circumstances arranging themselves so that you are slaughtered in some other way, and soon. You can, of course, leave us and take your chances . . . but the future is changeable only in tiny degrees, while death versus life is a major change. I do not know the exact pathway to your death, but it is out there waiting for you, and it will come very soon. The pressure of history will ensure it.”

“So . . . what am I to do? I will
not
end my life willingly; such things are a sin,” James said. “But even I know that the world has changed greatly over the last thousand years. If I am to go a thousand years into the future, how much more will it have changed? How would I live? Unless you have need for a guard on yet more pilgrimages . . .”

Anne smiled and tucked her hands around his elbow. “I think I know why Simon is so willing to take you with us . . . and why Rachael was so willing to save me from the Germans, despite what fate might have otherwise decreed. You are as much an anthropologist at heart as I am, James. A true student of humanity. The rest is just catching up on a thousand years of history and all the many advances people have made in the ways that they live.”

“You might not ever come back to this moment in time, of course, but some of our best field agents have come from centuries past,” Simon added. “You know far better than we how to behave and blend in . . . though as you have seen, some of our anthropologists are more adept at blending than others, even outside their natural time frame.”

James considered their offer. Anne could sense him thinking, in the tensing and relaxing of his muscles, in the quiet, deep way he breathed. After a long, quiet moment, he turned to her.

“
If
I come with you . . . were your words from earlier true? Would you still be interested in my . . . in my courting you?”

“As you yourself said, we have much in common . . . and I do care for you, James,” Anne admitted. “I would be honoured to know you better.”

“I
will
go to the future,” he decided. “I am indeed a scholar at heart, and I find that the part of me that longed to explore distant lands is now equally curious about distant times.”

“Good. We should be going – you won’t need the bedroll, or anything else,” Simon added as James started to bend down. “In the morning, travellers will stumble across the campsite, and your disappearances blamed on the bandits, along with the others’ deaths. But by then, we’ll be 1,317 years into the future . . . and, once there, I think I can safely predict your lives will be reasonably long and relatively happy.”

“Good. You’ll answer to me if things turn out otherwise,” James warned him.

Simon chuckled, and Anne blushed. Holding on to her lover, she braced both of them for the trip to the future.

Patti O’Shea

Lia glanced around the control room. It looked so ordinary, so boring – industrial grey carpeting, neutral walls, even the windows on the far side of the room were normal. She expected something more at a cutting-edge facility like the particle accelerator. The only things that separated this place from a regular office were the curved desks with two tiers of flat-screen computer monitors lined up side by side.

Even the scientists seemed mundane, dressed in slacks with Oxford or polo shirts. Couldn’t there at least be one guy running around in a white lab coat with his hair going twenty different directions like Albert Einstein?

Everyone around her was busy doing something, but she had no idea what. She’d grown accustomed to interviewing engineers as part of her job in corporate communications for Park International, but this was her first time dealing with physicists. She hoped it was her last.