Swept Away (8 page)

Ella nearly ran into Greta when she stopped abruptly. She took the opportunity to look around and found herself mesmerized by the swirling cacophony of color and motion all around her.

“Don't look!” The order from Greta was fierce and whispered in German. Unfortunately, this just made Ella snap her head up to see what she should not—to see what she would never be able to blot out of her memory or her mind's eye for the rest of her days.

A large wooden stage was set in the middle of the bustling marketplace, raised up and visible to all so that they might witness the executions as they shopped. Ella saw a young man and a boy cowering on the stage while a large, beefy man in a black hood strutted and shouted to the crowd. In his hand was a terrible axe. As the man spoke, he stripped to the waist to show his massive chest gleaming with sweat and blood, Ella could see there were women crying and waiting with raised hands at the base of the stage.

“Oh, dear Mother of God,” Ella said. “Please tell me this is not what I think it is.”

“Silence!” Greta whispered hoarsely to her. “You can change nothing of what you see here.”

Ella pushed past Greta to the stage. She was drawn to the horror and to the agony of the pleading women. Greta's fingers bit into Ella's arm as she grabbed her. “Ella, no!” she said. “You can do nothing but endanger us all!”

One of the women screamed and Ella turned her head from Greta to the woman and then back to the stage. It all happened so fast. The bare-chested monster stood in the center of the stage as if congratulating himself on having won some special honor. The axe lay on the stage beside him. He held in his hand something horrible. He lifted it higher and higher and as he did the crowd roared its approval.

Between the hysteria of the screaming women and the thunderous, raucous laughter and applause from the gathered crowd, Ella saw the boy fall to his knees in terror. He could not be ten years old, she thought in amazement. As the executioner threw the decapitated head of the young man into a nearby trough on the stage and began his turn toward the child, Ella shook off Greta's grip and pushed to where the women were standing at the base of the stage.

“
E
lla
, stop!” Greta said. She looked around in desperation, fearful they were attracting attention. The mob, however, was focused on the upcoming execution of the child—a rarity even in the Middle Ages. They cheered the executioner as he hefted his axe and playfully swung it into the air. Ella was close enough now to see that one of the women at the foot of the stage was young enough—and hysterical enough—to be the boy's mother. Her screams were drowned out by the crowd, her face a contortion of indescribable agony as her worst nightmare was being enacted before her in living, brutal color.

Greta reached her seconds before Ella pulled her shotgun Taser out of the pocket of her habit.

“Hide it in your sleeve,” Greta said hoarsely, not missing a beat. She ripped the rosary from her own throat, her eyes darting to the people who surrounded them, and held it in both hands as if it were a weapon. All eyes were on the two figures on stage. No one was interested in the actions of a couple of nuns in the crowd.

Ella lifted her arm toward the headsman. The long sleeve of her habit hid the Taser as she pointed it at him. Her finger twitched on the trigger as she watched him grab the boy by the scruff of the neck and throw him down at the front of the stage. She waited, blocking out the noise from the crowd, the bleating misery of the child's mother beside her and the pounding of her own heart. Sweat crept down her back. At the very moment that the man grabbed his axe with both hands and prepared to swing it over his head, she pulled the trigger and unleashed the untethered cartridge probe, zapping the executioner square in the chest with 30,000 volts in one powerful, bowel-watering charge of electricity. Before the man dropped his axe, before he hit the deck face-first, his limbs jerking with his seizure, the Taser was jammed back in her pocket, and Greta was pushing the rosary into her hands. She grabbed Ella's hands with her own.

“Close your eyes!” she ordered.

Ella squeezed her eyes shut. At this point she wasn't totally sure creating the picture of earnest prayer was just playacting. She heard the crowd quiet as if dazed. She could sense people near her moving as if trying to look around for the source of the mysterious attack. Given the setting, the sight of two nuns huddled in prayer must not have looked all that unusual. In the midst of the confused murmurings from the onlookers she heard the whimpering of the boy and now the sounds of the mother calling to him. The crowd began to get louder but Ella dared not open her eyes to see what was going on.

Later, they left the market without buying anything and trudged the long way back to the convent. Once they were sure no one suspected them and they were safely in the dining hall, Beatrix told how the crowd had lifted the boy from the bloody stage and deposited him into his mother's arms. Satisfied that the executioner had been stopped by God Himself, the mob had acted accordingly. For they could only believe that the boy must be innocent after all.

That night after dinner, as Ella was washing dishes with a young novice, Greta entered the dank kitchen and dismissed the girl. She picked up a wet rag to dry the crockery as Ella handed it to her.

“I'm not used to washing dishes without soap,” Ella said. “Hope I'm doing it right.”

Greta smiled but didn't answer.

“Something on your mind, Greta?”

“Your weapon,” Greta said as she stacked a dry dish on the counter. “It made a loud report but the man you shot lives and does not show any wound. It was not a gun you shot him with?”

“No, it was a Taser. In fact, thank God, it was one of the newer designs. Most Tasers would've shot out a string of wires tracing back to my gun. This one is able to shoot out a slug that does the job without wires. Which is good because someone in the crowd was bound to see where they were coming from.”

“Can this Taser be used again?”

Ella frowned and wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Yes,” she said. “Normally. But I don't have any more cartridges with me.”

“Then it is a liability. I will have Gwen bury it in the garden.”

“I guess that's wise.” Ella paused. “Greta? Did you know what we'd find in the marketplace today?”

The nun sighed. “I feared it but hoped for the best. The square is the main site for executions and witch burnings, I'm afraid.”

“It was horrible,” Ella said. “The most horrible thing I've ever seen.”

“It had a happy ending today,” the nun said, smiling.

“Except for that first guy.”

“Yes, except for him.”

“This is a dangerous place, Greta. It's a miracle you've survived this long.”

“It is a hard time. A brutal time.”

“No kidding it is. Don't they have laws here to protect people?”

“What you saw today with the young man and the child was the law in action.”

Ella said nothing and the two worked silently. She didn't know Greta well yet but she was learning. The nun would tell her in her own time.

“My ward, Hannah,” Greta finally said, “was given to me at the foot of the execution square twelve years ago,” she said.

Ella turned and looked at her. “Her mother was killed?”

Greta nodded. “Burned at the stake.”

“Jesus! Sorry, sorry. But what a hellacious world you choose to live in.”

“I can see why you would think that.” The Mother Superior carefully stacked another clean plate on top of the others. “Hannah would not speak at first. She cried for her mother every night right up to the point where she stopped crying for her and started calling me
mother
.”

Ella looked at her. “She wasn't calling you that as short for
Mother Superior
, I take it.”

“No,” Greta said with a smile. “When she said it she meant
mutti
. She became in all the ways that mattered, my beloved daughter. I insisted she become a novice so that I could keep her safe here at the nunnery, although she had never an interest in the outside world anyway.”

Greta seemed to fight to keep her emotions under control.

“We'll get her back, Greta,” Ella said, touching her friend on the shoulder. “Somehow we will.”

“Oh, Ella,” Greta said, wiping away a tear and smiling bravely at her. “There is no John Wayne in 1620 to rescue the poor damsel. I am afraid real life is nothing like the movies.”

“Well, I wouldn't tell John Wayne that,” Ella said, turning and plunging her hands into the soapless dishwater. “Because honestly? I've heard that that's just the sort of statement that makes him all the more determined.”

The next morning, Ella woke up early by one of the silent novices who smiled shyly and beckoned her from her room. After bathing without soap with a stone bowl of cold water and attempting to dry herself with a rag that had absolutely no absorption or wicking properties, Ella put on the habit she had worn the day before and followed the novice down the steep stone steps to the kitchen. There, she found Greta peeling vegetables and talking with two nuns. When Ella entered, the others left the room in a swish of skirts leaving behind a light fragrance of lemons and flowers.

Where were they getting the soap
? she wondered with irritation.
I'd kill for one squeeze of body wash about now.

“Good morning, Ella,” Greta said, putting down the knife and wiping her hands on a less-than-clean towel. “Will you have breakfast?”

“I'm surprised you still call it that,” Ella said grumpily.
Stale bread and cheap wine does not qualify as breakfast.
In her own time, she was a big believer in a proper breakfast, sometimes pulling in half a day's calories in that meal alone. She loved everything about typical breakfast foods: ham and cheese omelets, bacon, cheese grits, buttered muffins.

Using the same knife she had been using on the potatoes, Greta pulled out a loaf of bread, cut off a large slice, and placed it on top of the cook stove.

“If I remember correctly,” she said, “the English like their toast in the morning.”

Biting her tongue so as not to remind Greta that there were significant differences between the English and the Americans, Ella decided that all in all, a piece of toast would be very nice.

“You don't drink coffee in 1620?” Ella asked as she seated herself at the kitchen table.

Greta laughed. “Well,
we
don't because it is only for the wealthy. Oh, I have not thought about a cup of hot coffee in so long! How nice that would be this morning, yes?”

Ella rubbed her eyes tiredly. She knew there must be a reason the novice had brought her to Greta this early in the morning and surely it was not to be tortured with a medieval breakfast.

“Elise has found a blackberry bush not too far from here,” Greta said as she turned the bread over on the stove. “So you will have a sort of jam with your toast this morning.”

“Awesome,” Ella said, hoping she didn't sound ungrateful.

Oblivious to sarcasm, Greta placed a bowl of twenty blackberries on the table in front of Ella. She beamed as she watched Ella's reaction.

What a wretch I am
, Ella thought.
These berries are a luxury for these women and they want me to have them.
All of a sudden, the berries looked special. Perhaps not as precious as an Egg McMuffin would've been, Ella thought, but still special.

“Thank you,” Ella said, popping one of the sour berries into her mouth. She fought to keep from making a face. “Mmm-mm!”

“Today, Margot will show you how to bake bread,” Greta said. She picked up the toasted bread slice from the stove and handed it to Ella on a chipped stoneware plate. “We must all do our part,” she said.

“Sure, yeah, that'd be great,” Ella said. “I like to bake. That would be cool.”

“When you are a little more familiar with our ways, we will talk again about Herr Krüger.”

I scared her yesterday
, Ella thought, biting into the toast.
She doesn't trust me to behave properly in this world.

“So I should just stay in the convent, you think?”

“I think that would be best. Until you are a little more familiar with everything.”

“Sure, I can see that,” Ella said, smiling. “No problem.”

What felt like hours later, Ella took a break from pounding dough in the cold kitchen and wandered out to the garden. The morning sun felt good on her back as she sat on the low stonewall encasing the little plot and watched Greta pull weeds. Ella realized that just sitting in the sun was something she would never do in her normal life. It felt too indolent. Funny, it didn't feel indolent now. It felt in balance with all the steady physical activity that filled her hours from morning until her head hit the pillow, exhausted, each night.

“You are thinking, yes?”

“Trying not to,” Ella said. “But now that you mention it, I wanted to ask you about the specifics of how we got here?”

“You are not speaking evolutionary now, I think?”

“I like your sense of humor, Greta. It's subtle. But seriously. Got any theories?”

Greta dusted the dirt off her hands and reached into the front bodice of her habit. She pulled out a gold chain. On the end hung a wedding ring.

“Many years ago,” she said. “I met a woman who talked as if she were like us. You know what I mean?”

“She came from another time?”

“Yes. But she had…information. She knew things about why it was so. She told me that I was able to…travel to this time…because I had a special amulet.”

“Your wedding band?”

“It's not just the ring,” Greta said, holding it in the palm of her hand. “It is what the ring means to me.”

“You mean your husband?”

Greta nodded. “Love. Guilt. Strong emotion.”

Without thinking, Ella reached for her own necklace with the opal that had belonged to her mother.

Greta smiled. “It is very special to you, no?”

“It was my mother's,” Ella said, “who died when I was very young.”

“You never knew her.” Greta touched the opal. “For you, this stone is a mother's love. How precious it must be to you.”

“You think this necklace helped me get here.”

“The woman said several things must happen in order for the conditions to be right. They don't all have to happen, but having an amulet, she said, is essential.”

“And the storm?”

Greta shrugged. “It was not storming when the woman came to this time period.”

“Can I talk to her, this woman? Maybe she can tell me how to pinpoint—”

Greta was shaking her head.

“Yeah, okay,” Ella said. “Do I want to know?”

Greta tucked her necklace back into her bodice and turned to the mound of dirt in front of her. “It was Hannah's mother,” she said sadly.