The Time Tutor (8 page)

“Hold on, sweet chuck,” he whispered fiercely in her ear.

And then the world melted away, like sugar.

Alva was free-falling through time. Her desperate efforts to push the man away changed into a desperate effort to hold him close; she squeezed her eyes shut and her scream died in her throat and every element of herself was bent simply on clutching hold, keeping him pressed as tightly to her as possible, until suddenly there was air around them again and they were falling not through time but through space. It was a quick drop and they hit the ground hard, the man underneath her now.

He lay perfectly still. Alva opened her eyes slowly and saw him stretched beneath her in gray dawn light, a tall man in a linen smock, his dark hair almost long enough to curl, his lean cheeks shadowed by stubble.

The time tutor.

It was the
djävulen angripna
time tutor again, in another ridiculous costume, and this time he hadn't merely enticed her across the city to some dusty storefront—he had invaded her bedroom and then dragged her across the centuries, only to reemerge when her bedroom wasn't even there to hold them up.

Alva scrambled up, hitching her shift high so that she was sitting astride his prostrate form. “Fan ta dig!” She hauled an arm back and slapped him as hard as she could across the face. His head jerked to one side from the force of the blow, then rolled back again. His eyes stayed resolutely closed.

Oh God, he was dead.

Was he dead?

Alva put her hand to his chest. He wasn't breathing.

“No,” Alva said. “Oh, no. No you don't.” She pushed hard on his chest. “Don't drag me here and then abandon me, you . . . you . . .
skitstövel
!” She pushed hard again, and again, then started beating her fists against him. The tears were flowing now, and she was yelling into his still face as she pushed and pushed again on his chest. “Din jävel!”

After what seemed like an aeon, his eyes flew open. He stared at her for a second, then tossed her roughly off, rolled to one side, and coughed long and hard. “Christ in his heavens!” He fell back again, groaning. “Shit on a shit brick!”

 • • • 

Dar felt like hell. His hand was swollen to the size of a juicy, well-apportioned ham sandwich, and he could see the marks of her teeth coming up purple. It had felt like she was ripping the flesh from his bones, though she hadn't, in fact, broken the skin. And it was a miracle, after that fall with her riding him down through time like a witch, that his head wasn't smashed open. He lifted his non-ham-sandwich hand and explored through his hair on the back of his head. There it was. A goose egg the size of . . . a goose egg. And the baggage must have pummeled him back to life with absolutely no finesse whatsoever. He felt as full of dents as an old Model A Ford. Except old dented Model A Fords—new shiny ones, for that matter—were many centuries away. It was the chilly dawn of a spring morning, in the year of our Lord, 1145.

“Come on.” She was leaning over him now. “Come on. You need to sit up.”

“Why? Am I not allowed to die lying down, like a man?”

“Come now.” She got her hand behind his shoulders and hauled him into a sitting position.

“You're hurting me!”

“Ignatz Vogelstein, you will not complain to me of hurting! If you are wise you will say nothing to me at all. Now, let's see if you can move.”

He dragged himself, with her help, several yards to a pile of enormous cut stones, clearly laid out and waiting to be used for building. It was patently all he could do, and they collapsed, breathless, against the stone. Once he was leaned up against them, things seemed slightly more as if they might resolve into him continuing to live, rather than continuing to die. “Thank you,” he said.

“We are no better off here than we were over there.”

“No, but thank you nevertheless.”

“You're welcome.” From her tone, it really didn't sound as if he were welcome, but at least it was almost companionable, sitting here together in the dawn's light, their legs touching. They were sitting on an enormous Roman mosaic of a man entwined with snakes.

“What year is this?” she asked.

“Eleven forty-five. This is the building site for the guildhall. Today they're starting construction. That's why I jumped us here, to the morning that building begins . . . it was the only way to get you out of that damn Guild stronghold. I had to take you back to before it even existed.” He closed his eyes against the pain in his head. It felt as if three or four mice were gnawing their way out from the inside of his skull.

“Eleven forty-five . . .” She sounded as if she were tasting the numbers, savoring them.

“I love the twelfth century,” Dar whispered. “It's completely mad. I love it almost as much as I love the twentieth century.”

“I've never been to the twentieth century,” Alva said. “Or the twelfth, for that matter.”

He sighed and pressed his leg a little closer to hers. “You're going to adore the 1920s. I shall take you there someday. The 1920s, before the Crash. We'll go to the Savoy and dance, and you'll wear a rope of pearls twice as long as you are yourself. . . .” His voice dwindled away. The mice were winning.

“No, thank you,” she said. “I'd prefer to go back to 1793, if you please.”

“Can't. Have to save you.”

“Save me?
Save me?
” And she was off, cursing a blue streak in Swedish while he peered at her through two slits that he supposed were his eyes, but that really seemed as if the mice had only just now gnawed them from the inside out.

When she paused for breath, he held up a hand. “Please calm down, Alva. It hurts to look at you.”

“Oh, it hurts to look at me? Thank you. Thank you very much. Mr. Vogelstein,
look at me
.”

He hauled his eyelids up. She was a mess, poor kid, sitting in a medieval building site in nothing but her fine linen shift. Where was that dress for her . . . ? Blast. He'd left the goddamn sack full of clothes behind in her eighteenth-century bedroom. No dress for her, no tunic for him.

Well, he'd been in tighter spots, though he really couldn't remember when. “You look gorgeous,” he said. “Let's get going, shall we?” He gathered his strength and tried to heave himself to his feet, but the pain in his head exploded like a fire balloon and he fell back, moaning.

“You have a concussion,” she said. “And it serves you right.”

“Be that as it may, we have to jump again,” he whispered, eyes closed. “If only back a few hours into the darkness. Take my hand.” He lifted it and felt her take it, tenderly enough, bless her. “Here we go,” he said. “Hold on, sweet chuck.” He reached, in his mind, for the River. But there was nothing. He couldn't sense the River at all.

“Well?” she asked after a long time.

“Can't jump. Head hurts too much.”

“Ah.” She dropped his hand.

“You're going to have to go alone,” he said. “Take my boots. Get several streets away, then jump away from here.” He thought about her, in her shift and his big clumpy boots, her hair all jumbled up. “Jump to the 1980s,” he said. “You'll look enough like a punk waif to pass. It's the twentieth century, though, so be careful. The big metal things that charge through the streets? They can kill you. Look for the white paint on the roads and cross there. Red man means don't cross, green man means go ahead. There are catacombs under Soho Square. Yellow house. Corner of Carlisle Street. Ofan hideout. Stay there until I come for you.”

Another long pause.

“Better get going,” he said, opening his eyes a crack and peering up at her.

“I've never jumped alone,” she said. “I don't know how.”

“Oh shit. Of course you don't. Hannelore. Hiding your God-given talent from you . . . the fucking Guild . . .” He subsided, because she was laughing. It was a small, pitiful sound, but it was brave, as well.

“I guess you're going to have to be my time tutor after all,” she said. “Poor Mr. Vogelstein!”

He attempted a chuckle. “I knew you'd come running back to me,” he whispered, and smiled when he heard her laugh gain strength.

At just that moment, the builders arrived.

Alva had to admit, Vogelstein handled the situation with aplomb. Speaking a version of English she could hardly understand, he showed the men his golden ring, said he was some kind of aristocrat, and pointed out the fine lace on her shift. They'd been robbed, he explained, and dumped here, and he was injured and his wife was freezing.

Alva was still contemplating the oddity of being married, without her consent and with no warning, to two men in one day, when she found herself being draped in a builder's warm cloak and lifted in the arms of a strong man. He carried her out of the building site and down the street to a little inn. Vogelstein followed, stretched on a board like a corpse. Soon, the two of them were ensconced in a cozy room up under the rafters. The landlady left them, after a great deal of fussing, with plenty of beer and a cold chicken, and Alva finally had a chance to sit down. Which she did, on a little three-legged stool by the window.

Vogelstein, tucked up under the covers with a bandage on his head, gave her a smile. “Well, wife,” he said. “Come bring your husband that beaker of beer, and stroke his fevered brow.”

She raised her eyebrows, and took a sip of the beer. “It's good,” she said. “And I'm not sure you should have any. Is alcohol good for your poor head?”

“Confound it, bring me that beaker!”

 • • • 

“How are we going to pay for this room?”

Dar opened his eyes to find her standing over him, still in that ridiculous shift.

“Didn't the landlady give you a dress?”

She didn't answer that; just looked at him with those drowned violet eyes of hers. She was holding a copper cup, hopefully of water, hopefully for him.

She held it out, and he drank. He was feeling much better. The mice had finally chewed their way out of his skull, leaving it sore and full of holes, but his own again.

“Thank you,” he said.

She regarded him soberly. “No jokes,” she said.

He shook his head. “I shall be earnestness itself.”

“No remarks about wives or husbands.”

“None.”

“All right, then.” She put the cup on the windowsill and came back over to the bed. To his amazement, she drew the covers back. He was still in his linen smock, but the chill air nipped at him. She must be cold in nothing but her shift. “May I?” It took him a moment to realize that she was asking permission to crawl into bed with him.

“Of course.” He shifted a bit to the side, and she tucked herself into bed, under the coarse linen sheet. She smiled at him before she laid her head against his shoulder, and she put her arm across his chest, just like . . . well, like a wife. “How long are we stuck here?” she asked.

Experimentally, he curled his arm around her back. She didn't object. “I'm not sure,” he said. “I don't know when my talent will return. Or how long it will take to teach you to use yours.”

She was silent for a moment, and he reveled in the feeling of her warm breath against his neck. Then, “Keep still,” she said, and she insinuated her freezing feet in between his calves.

“Oh my God, woman!” he jerked his legs away.

Her feet stalked his warmth. “Keep still, I said.”

“Noah and all the shitting animals! You're going to kill me.”

But wherever he moved, she found him, until finally he gave in and lay still and let her brand him with her icy extremities. “Tsssss,” she said in his ear, imitating the sound of hot irons being doused in water.

“I suppose I deserve it,” he said, when the worst of the suffering had subsided.

“You most certainly do.” She raised herself up on one elbow and grinned at him, while she wiggled her toes to a yet warmer spot on his leg. Her breasts were pressed to his chest, and the evil glint in her eye held a promise of heat. She was really having a good time at his expense, the blasted Swedish witch.

He watched her, knowing he was grinning, too, like a fool, knowing he was falling in love with her.

He hoped it took a long time for his talent to return.

He hoped she was a very slow learner.

 • • • 

Vogelstein was propped up on a pillow and bolster, drinking beef broth and looking, after a night's sleep, quite a lot more like himself. Or at least Alva guessed he looked more like himself. She'd only ever really seen him in a series of terrible costumes. His explanation for why he had flown to her “rescue” was strange—he had awoken in the middle of the night with the conviction that she needed him. And so, for some reason that he couldn't adequately explain, he had broken into the Guild mansion, snuck up to her room, and tried to gently awaken her by whistling his grisly tune. He'd intended to sneak her back down to the sleeping mansion's ground floor, and jump from there.

“Could it not have waited until morning?”

“It felt urgent,” he said.

“But it wasn't urgent. I was sound asleep.”

Vogelstein shrugged. “Maybe I got you out of there mere moments before hell swallowed London. Or a split second before space aliens atomized the Guild mansion.”

Alva paid no attention to his nonsense. The fact was, she had thought of him during the whole horrible episode with Hannelore and Susan in the guildhall. She had thought of him with an intensity that had kept her holding on to Hannelore's hand, kept her from running screaming from the room. That had been about three hours before he turned up, but . . . maybe she had called to him and he had somehow heard. A little late, but nevertheless.

“What are you thinking, sweet chuck?” His voice was gentle.

She snuggled herself close to his side, and he tightened his arm around her. “Last night,” she said, “or . . . that night, that night in the future . . .”