Love Beyond Time (37 page)

“He has gone mad,” Uland insisted. “I’ve said
it all along. What shall we do now, Guntram?”

“I see no reason to continue to search for a
man who has vanished as if he never existed. We may never learn
what has happened to Michel. But I have a duty to Charles to report
what has occurred here and to send Autichar to him as soon as
possible. We leave for home at dawn.”

“You’ll want a good rider to take the reports
to Deutz and to Aachen,” Uland said.

“No.” Guntram was thoughtful. “No reports
yet. I’ll dictate them when we reach Deutz.”

“But,” Uland began, then stopped at the look
in Guntram’s eyes.

“No one is going to tell Danise about this
except me,” Guntram said. “Nor are we going to Paderborn. It’s out
of our way. We ride northward, directly to Deutz. And when we get
there, I’ll make sure Clothilde is with Danise when I give her the
news. I’m only a rough warrior, but Clothilde will know what to do
and say.”

* * *

“It cannot be,” Danise said. “I will not
believe it.”

“I’m sorry.” Guntram spread his hands in a
helpless gesture. “Danise, you ought to cry. It would relieve your
feelings.”

“I have nothing to cry about,” she said.
“Michel is not dead, for I have not seen his body.”

“I’ve been dealing with a madman for a week,”
Guntram told her. “Don’t you go glassy-eyed and silent, too, like
Autichar.” He looked around Danise’s bedchamber as if he still
searching for Michel.

“I am not mad,” she assured him. “Michel is
out there, lost in the forest. We must find him.”

“Oh, no, Danise.” Clothilde caught her hands
and held them tightly. “You cannot think to go to that place
yourself?”

“The first thing I am going to do is talk to
Autichar,” she said. “And then, Guntram, you are going to repeat
the entire story to me, just in case you forgot something the first
time. I want to know every detail.”

Danise felt as though an iron band had been
wrapped around her chest, constricting her lungs so she could not
breathe properly. But that same band kept her upright instead of
allowing her to fall upon her bed and weep. The iron band kept her
talking and thinking and trying to find a way to discover what had
happened to Michel.

At first Autichar was no help to her. After
consulting with Guntram, Hubert had confined Autichar in a ground
level room and set two men-at-arms to watch him at all times until
he could be sent on to Charles at Aachen. So far as anyone could
tell, Autichar did not know he had been imprisoned. During the
daylight hours he sat upon the side of his bed and stared into
nothingness. When night fell, someone had to order him to lie down
or he would continue to sit on the bed, not knowing he ought to
sleep. He had degenerated into a pitiful creature, but Danise would
not be deterred from trying to get information out of him.

“Please,” she begged him, “tell me what has
happened to my husband. You were kind to me once, Autichar, when I
was your captive. Be kind to me once more and tell me what you
know. Please, Autichar. Do you remember how I spoke in your behalf
to Charles? If you will but talk to me now, I swear I will go with
you to Aachen and I’ll beg Charles to spare your life. Autichar –
please
!”

Whether she coaxed or threatened him,
Autichar gave no indication that he was aware of her presence.
After an hour with him, Danise gave up. Telling the guards to
notify her at once if there was any change in Autichar’s condition,
she left him. Seeing him withdrawn into his own private world had
suggested a possibility to Danise, but it was a possibility she was
not ready to consider. Not yet, not until she had investigated all
other explanations for Michel’s disappearance.

“Find Guntram,” Danise said to Clothilde.
“Ask him to join me in the garden.”

“I believe he is with Hubert,” Clothilde
answered. “Now that Savarec is gone, Guntram will be leaving Deutz
soon for his own estate, and he will have some final duties to
complete before he goes.”

“Yes, I remember he was planning to leave
Deutz soon after my marriage,” Danise remarked.

“Guntram has risen far above his original
position as a simple man-at-arms. It says much for his courage and
intelligence that Charles awarded him those lands.”

At any other time Danise would have noticed
Clothilde’s carefully unemotional voice and seen how downcast she
was, but at the moment Danise was trying to think of a way to
convince Guntram to go along with what she wanted to do. By the
time Clothilde brought Guntram to her in the garden, Danise had
concluded that the best way to deal with him was by being direct.
Guntram was a straightforward warrior, so more subtle methods of
persuasion would be lost on him. He was also an honest and
openhearted man who would do anything for his friends.

“Guntram,” she said to him, “in the name of
the friendship you held for my father and for Michel, I ask for
your aid.”

“You have it,” Guntram said at once. “Tell me
what you want.”

“Your attendance,” she replied, “along with
that of perhaps two or three men who also knew Michel.”

“Since there’s no coffin we can escort to a
gravesite,” Guntram said, “do you want us to stand as an honor
guard instead, during a mass for Michel’s soul? You will have no
difficulty finding men for such a duty. Michel was well liked.”

“It’s not a religious duty I require of you,”
Danise said. “I want you and the men you choose to act as my
escort, and perhaps as my guards, if it proves necessary.”

“On your way to Elhein?” Guntram began to
look a bit wary. “It’s a rough place, Danise, and you know no one
there. I’d far rather see you safe at court under Hildegarde’s
protection. Charles will find you another husband to hold
Elhein.”

“I do not need another husband while my own
husband is still alive,” Danise snapped with unaccustomed
sharpness. “I have no intention of going to Elhein just yet, nor to
court. Guntram, I want you to take me to the place where Michel
vanished.”

“Why?” Guntram asked. “I’ve told you how we
searched the area for three days and found no trace of him. It has
been raining again. All footprints will be washed away. Danise, if
there were a thread of Michel’s clothing, a strand of his hair, any
sign at all of him, we would have found it and continued searching.
But there was nothing. Nothing,” he concluded.

“I believe everything you say,” Danise told
him. “I know you did all anyone could to find Michel. But, Guntram,
I have been thinking that he might have lost his memory again and
simply wandered off into the forest. Perhaps Autichar struck him
hard on the head and thus rattled Michel’s wits.” Danise paused to
let Guntram think over this idea.

“It could be so,” Guntram said, “though we
should still have found some sign of Michel’s passage through the
forest. If you are right and he is wandering lost and unaware of
his own name, how can we hope to find him?”

“I have a small likeness of him, that was in
his purse when first he came to Francia,” Danise said. “Did you
ever see it, Guntram? Michel gave it to me as a keepsake.”

“Now that you mention it, I have seen it.”
Guntram’s worried expression lightened. “Do you mean to show it to
any folk we meet in the area where he was lost? Now, that is a good
idea. Someone may recognize him. But I and my men could take the
likeness with us and do as much as you might. There’s no need for
you to go, Danise.”

“If Michel has lost his memory again, he will
need me by his side as soon as you find him,” Danise said.
“Furthermore, I will not give that likeness of him into anyone
else’s hands. If we do not find him, it will be all I have left of
him. But we
will
find him, Guntram. We
must
find
him.”

Although he expressed continuing doubts about
the probability of locating Michel, Guntram agreed to act as
Danise’s escort.

“But only if you go, too, Clothilde,” Guntram
said. “It’s not right for a young woman to spend days and nights in
the company of warriors without a female companion.”

“I could not let you leave Deutz without me,”
Clothilde responded.

“Then we will go tomorrow,” Guntram said.
“I’ll speak to Hubert about this plan. I’m sure I can convince him
to release Uland from duty temporarily along with two or three of
the other men who were with Michel and me and who know that area
well by now. But, Danise, you must understand that we may not find
him alive. We may find his body, or find nothing at all, as
happened before.”

“If we find his body, at least we will know
what happened to him, and we can bring him home for a Christian
burial,” she replied. “I have considered that possibility.” She did
not add that it was a possibility she refused to accept.

“What would you do then?” Guntram asked.

“If we do not find Michel,” she said, “I will
turn Elhein over to Charles and retire from the world. I will go to
Chelles and die there, for I cannot live without Michel.”

At this, Guntram and Clothilde exchanged a
look of understanding.

“We will do our best to find Michel,” Guntram
promised.

* * *

Danise, Clothilde, Guntram, and four other
men set out early the next day. In her scrip, the small purse she
wore at her belt, Danise carried the stiff little card that bore
Michel’s likeness. Whenever they met other travelers, or passed
peasants farming the land or, as happened twice, encountered king’s
messengers heading toward Aachen with reports for Charles, Danise
pulled out the card and, saying it was painted by a foreign
craftsman, she asked if the man depicted had been seen. The answer
was always negative.

They traveled inland from the Rhine, avoiding
the riverside cliffs and promontories that rose upstream south of
Deutz. Their errand was too urgent to allow them time to view the
scenery. Instead, they took a track Guntram knew through the deep
forest. For the most part they slept under the stars and ate the
food they brought with them. It was three and a half long days
after leaving Deutz before they came to the clearing and the dead
ashes of the site of Autichar’s camp.

This is where we last saw Michel,” Guntram
said. “We’ll stop here again and begin our search from this
spot.”

“I want you to show me where you found
Autichar after he was struck dumb,” Danise told him as soon as she
had dismounted.

“There’s little to see except trees,” Guntram
said. “I’ve looked at that place a dozen times, but perhaps you
will notice something I have missed.

“It’s here,” Guntram said a few minutes
later, having led Danise through a grove of trees. “I marked this
tree with my ax so we could find it again while we were searching
the first time. This is exactly where we discovered Autichar
kneeling on the ground, unable to speak.”

“We must examine every bit of this area,”
Danise said, looking around at tree trunks and heavy
underbrush.

“We already have, many times over, but we’ll
do it again for you,” Guntram said.

The men worked until dark, nor did Danise
spare herself or Clothilde from the effort. They discovered nothing
that might tell them what had become of Michel. When evening came
Danise sat by the campfire, only half listening to the men talking.
She felt a little guilty because she had not told Guntram what she
feared had really happened to Michel, what she hoped and prayed had
not happened.

She was the only one in Francia who knew that
Michel had come to her time from the future. Guntram’s insistence
that all his searching, and his men’s, had produced no sign of
Michel made Danise believe that her husband might have been
returned to his own time. The thought that Michel might be living
more than a thousand years in the future and unable to contact her,
the fear that she would never see him again, was enough to drive
her close to madness. She thought it was possible that Autichar had
seen Michel leave the present time, and the sight had stricken him
dumb with terror.

This was why Danise had been so set upon
making another search for Michel. She had to
know
where he
was. Even if they discovered his mangled body, it would be better –
or would it? Did she want him dead rather than alive and well in a
time and place so far removed from her? Was she that selfish?

“No. Not dead,” she whispered. “Not Michel.”
At once Clothilde’s arm was across her shoulders.

“We should not have come,” Clothilde said.
“This unhappy search is breaking your heart.”

“I could not stay at Deutz. We may still find
him. He might be here yet, injured or without his memory. Whatever
force made Autichar speechless may have sent Michel wandering
through the wilderness. Oh, Clothilde, if we do not discover
something
to tell us where he is, I think I will die! I must
know! I must!”

But the morrow brought no new evidence, and
by nightfall Danise could sense that the men believed all their
efforts were meaningless.

Still, she could not stop searching. Again
and again she returned to the tree Guntram had marked, there to
stand gazing about her as if by sheer longing she could bring
Michel back to her side.

On the fourth morning of their stay at
Autichar’s camp, with the men grumbling that there was no sense in
remaining where they were, with Guntram declaring that this must be
their last day in that place if nothing were found, Danise went
once more to the marked tree. Looking around her, she admitted that
there was little chance that she would ever see Michel again.

“Michel. Oh, my love, where are you?” She
turned slowly around in a complete circle, the skirts of her worn
and stained green woolen gown swirling about her ankles. She was so
tired of holding back tears she did not want to shed, fearing that
weeping would be an admission that Michel was lost to her forever.
She knew that out of respect for her father and affection for her,
Guntram and his men had done far more than any other men would have
cared to do, continuing to look for Michel when all hope of finding
him was gone. She had to let them stop searching. She had to put an
end to her time with Michel.