“None taken, ugly.”
“I’d just gone outside for some fresh air,” Merle began, “when I got the feeling I was being watched.”
He’d just gone outside for a smoke break, actually—arguably the exact opposite of fresh air—but like all former smokers he was ashamed to admit this in the presence of children. He was pacing the strip of sidewalk between the physics building and the tennis courts when a chill raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
Maybe it was because he was an invasion baby—a human born in the year the elves came, when magic swept like hurricanes over the earth—that he could sense something was wrong. Maybe, he’d think later, it was because one of the Fay wanted him to know. Whatever. He tossed his cigarette under his heel and walked swiftly back into the building.
Merle worked in a secure wing—the college had put locks on all the doors after some laptops and a bike had been stolen, years ago—but he cursed these locks now, even as he heard them click behind him. Put a keyed lock on a door, and one of the Fay might still get through it if you’re careless, if you neglect to make certain you’ve shut it tight behind you. But these doors had combination locks. And a fairy’s guesses were nothing if not lucky. Merle still had his hand on the knob when the door’s small window filled with the face of Captain Conor of the Trooping Fairies of Oberon. There were more elves behind him, and Conor looked at Merle, then at the keypad below.
Merle turned, stumbled, raced down the hall shouting, “Archimedes! Octagon!” The mechanical owl met him at the door of his lab with the golden octagon, the time machine, in its claws. They turned the corner toward the wing’s only other entrance and saw that here too was a group of elves, just on the other side of the door, patiently punching lucky guesses into the keypad. They’d get it right, and soon.
“Archie,” Merle gasped, turning to the owl flapping in place beside him. “Calculate a time jump for both of us. For both me and you.” The owl whistled back, and Merle checked his watch. It said DURATION?
Distantly, from around the corner, Merle heard the click of a door.
“One year,” he said. “No! Wait! They might think of that, come wait for me. A hundred years! No, that’s nothing to an elf.”
Archimedes whistled again. The sound of light footfalls tapped down to them from the far door. The nearest door clicked, and the elves pushed through.
“Five hundred years,” he whispered to Archie. “Execute as soon as you’ve done the math,” he added, and grasped the underside of the octagon so that he and the owl were holding it together.
Three elves stopped close on his left; another three turned the corner on his right. Conor was at the front of these.
“Put the device down, Merle,” said Conor in that creepy voice he had. “Oberon himself requests an audience.”
“That’s kinda desperate, isn’t it?” said Merle. “Collecting an audience at sword point? Must be a pretty bad show.”
Five elves cocked their slings, aimed sharp flint missiles at Merle’s head.
“Is Queen Titania gonna let him be the ventriloquist this time, or is he still the—”
Merle and Archimedes winked out of existence.
“—dummy,” Merle finished, five hundred years in the future. Then he commenced falling.
The math of a five-hundred-year jump was, it turned out, tricky. He hadn’t reappeared in his lab or even on solid ground. He found himself, instead, crashing downward through a canopy of leaves, then another, then grasping hold of a lean branch that bowed, snapped, and deposited him roughly on the forest floor. Archimedes fluttered down to meet him.
Mick punched Merle in the arm.
“Ow! Why?”
“Yeh hadn’t said anythin’ for a bit,” said Mick. “Thought yeh needed perkin’ up.”
“I was thinking!”
“So where did you end up?” asked Scott.
“Near as I can tell, Costa Rica somewhere. I don’t know for sure because I discover at this point that there don’t seem to be any satellites for Archie to sync up with. But that’s fine, I think. Five hundred years have passed, technology is probably so different now that Archie can’t recognize it, and vice versa. So I nearly kill myself hiking out of the forest, living off fruit and rainwater, dreaming about my new plan, which is this: I find some future person here who’s invented time travel to the past, and I use it to go back and save my parents and the whole world. I dream about this plan, even though I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with it.”
“What?”
“That if time travel to the past were ever really possible, then the past would be lousy with time travelers. But it wasn’t. Nobody from my time had ever met a time traveler from the future, so what does that say?”
“Maybe …,” said Scott, not yet ready to give up on the possibility. “Maybe all the time travelers were really secret about it,” he said, though he had to admit that didn’t seem very likely.
“Well, whatever, it’s a moot point. Because I spend the next six months traveling the earth, and I never meet another person.”
“Not one?” said Mick. “Not even a fairy?”
“Not even a mouse. Not a creature was stirring. I find canned food, I find a bicycle, but everywhere it’s empty towns, overgrown cities. I’ve jumped too far, and something terrible’s happened.”
“Jeez,” said Scott. Immediately he wished he’d said something a little more profound.
“Yeah. Well. Eventually I can’t take the loneliness anymore, so I ask Archie to jump us again—so far into the future that the earth itself will be dead and gone. Just to be on the safe side I settle on twice the age of the whole universe—twenty-eight billion years—and tell Archie to flip the switch. And he does, and we reappear in a cage in medieval England.”
Again the peasant rattled the wooden cage, which shook the wagon, which prompted the soldier who wasn’t driving to turn and glare.
“Ignore him,” said the driver.
“Please please please let me go,” pleaded the peasant.
“We’re under oath to bring you to King Vortigern,” said the soldier.
The peasant pressed against the wooden slats. “When I said I never had a father, I didn’t mean I never had a father. I meant I never knew my father. He died before I was born.”
“Listen,” said the soldier. “In good sooth? I believe thee. Of course I believe thee. But we’re going to sacrifice thee anyway. We have to look busy.”
“Look, what’s this all about?”
The soldier turned entirely around and addressed the peasant. “King Vortigern has a tower that keeps falling down. His wise men tell him he needs the blood of a boy born without a father, to mix with the mortar. Thou wantest my opinion? I think the wise men just sayeth things like this when they don’t know the answer.”
“Verily,” said the driver.
“Perchance they tellest the king he needs ice in August or a serpent hatched from a cockerel’s egg or some similarly impossible nonsense. And the king tells us to go chase after phantoms. So fine—we get some fresh air and no one can ever check up on the so-called wise men.”
The wagon creaked along the Roman road, in the north of Wales, toward Dinas Emrys, the Castle Ambrosius. Or what would be the Castle Ambrosius, if it didn’t keep falling over.
“So … so let me go,” urged the prisoner, “if it won’t make any difference. You could change your mind and give me my liberty.”
The soldier frowned, clearly confused. “So … thou proposest we take one who hast drawn the lot of sacrificial lamb and … just raise him above his station? Like a promotion?”
“I wasn’t a sacrificial lamb this morning,” argued the prisoner. “I was a peasant.”
“Thou wert always a lamb,” said the soldier as he shook his head and turned his eyes back to the road. “Thou just didst not know it. If Fortuna or … society or what have thee marks thee for death, then thou art a dead man. It’s not our place to argue.”
“Wait
now,” said the driver. “Are you saying there’s no upward mobility? None at all? Does not the babe become a boy? Is not the boy promoted to a man? The squire to a knight? A knight to a … a …”
“Aha!” said the soldier. “You see, you’ve stepped in your own snare. Does the knight become a king? No. The greatest knight will stay a knight, and the king will pass his crown to his own son, worthless though he may be. And is not the babe just a young boy? Is not the boy a young man? There’s no upward mobility here, my friend. Each only comes of age and assumes the role he was born to.”
The prisoner listened, and scratched his bottom. Then there was a kind of popping behind him, and he turned to see another man in the cage, holding an owl.
“Marry!” shouted the peasant. “Look here! Fortuna has sent you another lamb, to bleed in my place! A man with an owl! And is the owl not Fortuna’s favorite?”
The soldiers turned to look. “Thou’rt thinking of Minerva,” one said, but they both seemed pretty impressed with the new mystery prisoner.
The man with the owl staggered, looked around him with wild eyes. “Where am I?” he muttered. “When … when am I? How did I get here?”
“You see?” said the peasant, hurling himself against the front of the cage. “How he questioneth, like unto a child! How he gazeth with the eyes of a newborn babe!”
“This is impossible,” Merle murmured. “Twenty-eight billion years into the future, and I’m standing in a donkey cart.”
“What rubbish he gibbers! Surely he was born just now from the ether, a man without a father! Conjured from nothing to meet King Vortigern’s swift justice!”
“Quiet,” said Merle, remembering his Slumbro Mini. He flicked it at the peasant, who fell snoring in a heap in the straw. “Wait. Did that guy just say King Vortigern?”
The soldier in the front of the wagon was still a little dumbfounded, but he nodded. “That’s where we’re taking thee. To Dinas Emrys. We’ll probably sacrifice both of ye, just to be safe.”
“Dinas Emrys,” repeated Merle, taking a seat. “King Vortigern. I know this story. All right, I got nothing else to do. I’ll meet your king.”
CHAPTER 13
They drove the wagon, and Merle with it, off the Roman road and over a rough path cut through the trees. Then straight through a narrow river and up an embankment that had been cleared of anything growing. Gray stones lay in ragged piles around the barest hints of castle walls.
“Ho there!” called a mason to the soldiers. “You’ve strange chickens in that coop!”
“Not chickens,” answered the driver. “Lambs.”
The mason frowned, then seemed to understand. He dropped his head as they passed. “Lord Vortigern is in the west pavilion,” he said soberly.
Beneath a large peaked tent was Vortigern, a big man with a big red beard, dressed in furs and with an unfussy gold circlet atop his head. He strode out to meet the wagon and looked delighted by its contents.
“Two!” bellowed the king. “I’ faith, that’s good work, lads!”
One of the soldiers bowed and immediately set about managing expectations. “My liege. The sleeping one claims now that he hath a father, but that he didst know him not.”
“Fine, fine, we’ll kill him anyway. And the other?”
“I am Merle Lynn!” announced Merle, standing up in the cage, trying both to look and sound imposing. “And I wish to speak with these wise men who would have my blood!”
“God’s teeth! I doubt they’ll like that. If thou wert the wise men, wouldst thou want to meet the lambs? I wouldn’t.”
“This one just appeared in the cage,” the soldier explained. “We didn’t even have to catch him.”
Vortigern grinned expansively, shot the grin around the hillock for a bit. “Well, that sounds promising! You have to admit! The wise men might have hit the bull’s-eye on this one. And he has a bird! Cute.”
“Lord Vortigern,” Merle said, undeterred. “I know what you must do to make your tower stand.”
“I bet thou dost. I bet thou dost. And I bet—I’m just guessing, now—but I bet thou thinkest it doesn’t require bleeding thou dry and mixing thy blood in the mortar? I’m right, aren’t I. String them up!”
Merle tensed and gripped his Slumbro tight as the cage was set upon by soldiers and laborers. The peasant beside him finally woke.
“Mwuh?” said the peasant as he raised his head.
“Still in the cage,” Merle told him. “Still going to die.”
“AAAH! No!”
“Stay behind me,” said Merle, but the peasant didn’t obey, and when the cage was opened he was grabbed roughly by a half-dozen hands. Merle waved his wand, and the peasant and two soldiers fell asleep.
“That keeps happening,” said the driver.
Vortigern eyed the wand. “He must be a sorcerer.”
“Yes!” said Merle. “A powerful sorcerer! So you’d better—”
“Aha! That’s why his blood’s so good for making buildings out of!” Vortigern concluded. “Magic blood!”
The soldiers and laborers all nodded at one another, saying, “Oh yeah, magic blood.”
“Nuts,” said Merle. He backed away from the door of the cage and was surprised when a pair of arms grabbed him through the bars from behind. Startled, he dropped his Slumbro, and the strong arms of the laborers held him fast.
“Many thanks for putting our lamb to sleep, great sorcerer,” said Vortigern. “So much less thrashing and dolorous lamentation if he sleepeth. Now: we only built the one truss for the sacrificial bleeding, so I’m afraid thou wilt have to wait.”
They were dragging the sleeping peasant toward a wooden frame built over a cauldron. Soon they’d hoist him up on it and cut his throat, Merle supposed, and then his own turn would come.
He promised himself he’d think about it some more when he was no longer under threat of imminent death, but for now Merle figured one of three things had happened: that he’d strained the forces of time and space so considerably during his last jump that he’d gone backward instead of forward somehow; that he’d maybe (and this seemed too fantastic) jumped past the end of the universe and into a virtually identical new one; or that he’d really jumped into oblivion, as expected, and was dying and this was all some crazy dream he was having as his brain ran out of oxygen.
Still—if it was a crazy dream, it was one he’d read about a hundred times.
“Our blood won’t do anything!” he shouted, struggling against the clutches of the king’s men. “Your wise men can’t even tell you why your tower falls! How can they know the solution if they don’t understand the problem?”
“Quit your bleating, lamb,” said one of the men.
“And I suppose thou knowest why my tower falls, sorcerer?” asked the king.
“I do. I do. Set that man free and I’ll tell you, and if I’m wrong you can still sacrifice me.”
They’d tied the peasant’s ankles and were just beginning to hoist him up on the frame. King Vortigern chewed his lip.
“My … blood’s probably really magical right now,” Merle added. “I’ve been eating a lot of unicorn and stuff.”
The king thought this over, then shrugged theatrically and ordered the peasant be released. They cut him free, and he continued to snore beside the cauldron. Then all eyes were on Merle, and the men let him go. He snatched up his Slumbro and crammed it into his jeans pocket before speaking.
“Beneath this hill lies a hidden pool. And in that pool two dragons fight—one dragon’s red, the other’s white.” He hadn’t meant to rhyme just then, but he figured it was all to the good. He stepped down from the cage to lead them to the secret tunnel beneath the hill, then realized he hadn’t a clue where it was.
“Archie,” he whispered. “Assume this hill is Dinas Emrys in Wales, United Kingdom. Do any geological records mention a cave entrance?”
Archie sent a map to Merle’s watch face, and he led the king and his men to a gap in the rocks, shrouded by moss
. The others lit torches; Merle lit the flashlight on his key chain.
“What rare light that burns without heat!” Vortigern said of the flashlight.
“Thanks,” said Merle. “I got it free for opening a checking account.”
They descended into the hillside, through a narrow passage, each hunched and a little fearful beneath the suffocating patience of the earth. There was a breeze against their faces, rising from below, and here and there thin roots breached the rock walls like hairs, like they were plunging into the cavernous nostril of some sleeping giant. The nostril rumbled, as if snoring.
“There,” said Merle, worried he’d lose his audience. “See? The dragons fight, and their fighting shakes the earth. The red dragon represents—”
Merle stopped short, realizing he’d just stepped into a large open chamber. It should have been dark, but the space was lit dimly by some source he couldn’t identify. It was a huge, damp vault, enclosing a dark pool. And that pool was turbid and foaming with the struggle of two magnificent dragons.
Merle had known what to expect, and still he could only stare, stupid and gaping, at the creatures. Dragons. One white, one red. Each the size of an elephant, slick as a fish, tightly built with coiled, ropy muscles and a whiplashing neck, like lightning made flesh. He’d never seen a dragon. He’d heard of the colossal pink one that had terrorized the world before he was born, of course, but it spent most of its time in Ireland or someplace.
The dragons, mercifully, couldn’t seem to care less about Merle and King Vortigern and his men. The men had all fallen silent, watching. The white dragon was dominant, trying to bite the red on its nape and hold it down. They crashed together into the deep of the pool, and again the earth rumbled.
“Um … so. The red dragon represents the Britons,” said Merle to whoever might be listening. “The white one represents the Saxons. The Saxons have the upper hand now, but one day soon, the red dragon will rise up and prevail.”