The Unlikely Spy (35 page)

The man’s eyes tracked back to Anna, and a
twitch of a smile flickered at the corner of his mouth. “We need to
find safety before night falls,” he said, still all in Welsh. “I
must find my men.”

Now
that
was equally ridiculous and
impossible.

Pause.

Anna was trying to think what to say to him,
anything to say to him, when someone shouted. She swung around. A
dozen men on horses rode out of the trees near the van. David
settled the man back on the ground and stood up. At the sight of
him, the lead rider reined his horse. The others crowded up behind
him.

They all stared at each other, or rather,
the men stared at David. They seemed frozen to their horses, and
Anna looked up at David, trying to see what they saw. He had turned
fourteen in November but his voice hadn’t yet changed. Nor had he
grown as tall as many of his friends. At 5’ 6”, he was still four
inches taller than she, however
.
David had sandy blonde
hair, cut short, and an athletic build thanks to his continuous
efforts in soccer and karate. Anna’s friends at school considered
him cute in a geeky sort of way.

“What is it?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” David said. “Is it our
clothes? Your hair?”

Anna touched her head, feeling the clip that
held her hair back from her face. The bun had come lose and her
hair cascaded down her back in a tangled, curly mass.

“They’re looking at
you
, David, not
me.”

The man they’d helped moaned, and David
crouched again beside him. His movement broke the spell holding the
horsemen. They shouted, something like “move!” and “now!” and their
lead rider climbed the hill and dismounted. He elbowed Anna out of
the way, knocking her on her rear in the snow, and knelt beside the
wounded man. This newcomer was about David’s height but fit the
description Anna had always attributed to the word ‘grizzled.’ Like
all these men, he wore mail and a helmet and bore a sword. He had
bracers on his arms—
where had she learned that word?—
and a
surcoat over his chain mail.

He and the injured man held a conversation
while David and Anna looked at each other across the six feet of
space that separated them. Despite her comprehension earlier, Anna
couldn’t understand a word. Maybe the man had spoken slower for
their benefit or in a different dialect from what he spoke now.

Then the grizzled man shouted something and
other men responded by hurrying up the hill. They surrounded the
downed man and lifted him to his feet. He walked away—actually
walked—men supporting him on either side.

David and Anna sat in the snow, forgotten.
Anna’s jeans were soaking wet, she was stiff from the cold, and her
hands were frozen, even in her winter gloves.

“What do we do now?” David’s eyes tracked
the progress of the soldiers.

“Let’s go back up the hill,” Anna said. “We
didn’t drive that far. There must be a road at the top.”

David gave her a speaking look, which she
ignored. Anna took a few steps, trying not to look at the dead men
whom she’d managed to forget for a few minutes, and then found
herself running away across the meadow. She veered into the wheel
tracks of the van. David pounded along beside her until she had to
slow down. They’d reached the upward slope at the far side of the
meadow. The snow was deeper here because men and horses hadn’t
packed it down; her feet lost their purchase on the steep slope,
and she put out a hand to keep from falling.

Anna looked up the hill. Only a dozen yards
away, the van tracks began. Beyond them, smooth fresh snow
stretched as far as she could see. It was as if they’d dropped out
of the sky.

More shouts interrupted her astonishment,
and Anna turned to find horsemen bearing down on them. She looked
around wildly, but there was nowhere to run. One man leaned down
and, in a smooth movement, caught her around the waist. Before she
could think, he pulled her in front of him. She struggled to free
herself, but the man tightened his grip and growled something she
didn’t catch but could easily have been
sit still,
dammit!

“David!” Anna said, her voice going
high.

“I’m here, Anna.”

The man holding her turned the horse, and
they passed David, just getting comfortable on his own horse.
Dumbstruck, Anna twisted in her seat to look back at him.

All he did was shrug, and Anna faced forward
again. They rode across the meadow and down the hill, reaching the
bottom just as the wounded man got a boost onto a horse. He
gathered the reins while glancing at the van. Anna followed his
gaze. It sat where she’d left it. It was hopeless to think of
driving it, even if they had somewhere to go.

The company followed a trail through the
trees. A litany of complaints—about her wet clothes and hair, about
her aching neck and back from the car crash, and most of all, her
inability to understand what was happening—cycled through Anna’s
head as they rode.

Fortunately, after a mile or two (it was
hard to tell in the growing darkness and her misery) they trotted
off the trail into a camp. Three fire rings burned brightly and the
twenty men who’d ridden in with David and Anna had doubled the
number of people in the small space. The man behind Anna dismounted
and pulled her after him. Although she tried to stand, her knees
buckled, and he scooped her up, carried her to a fallen log near
one of the fires, and set her down on it.

“Thanks,” Anna said automatically,
forgetting he probably couldn’t understand English. Fighting tears,
she pulled her hood up to hide her face, and then David
materialized beside her.

“Tell me you have an explanation for all
this,” Anna said, the moment he sat down.

He crossed his arms and shook his head. “Not
one I’m ready to share, even with you.”

Great.
They sat unspeaking as men
walked back and forth around the fire. Some cooked, some tended the
horses staked near the trees on the edges of the clearing. Three
men emerged from a tent thirty feet away. Their chain mail didn’t
clank like Anna imagined plate mail would, but it creaked a little
as they walked. Someone somewhere roasted meat and, despite her
queasiness, Anna’s stomach growled.

Nobody approached them, and it seemed to
Anna that whenever one of the men looked at them, his gaze
immediately slid away. She wasn’t confused enough to imagine they
couldn’t see her, but maybe they didn’t want to see her or know
what to make of her. Anna pulled her coat over her knees, trying to
make herself as small as possible. The sky grew darker, and still
she and David sat silent.

“Do you think we’ve stumbled upon a Welsh
extremist group that prefers the medieval period to the present
day?” Anna finally said.

“Twenty miles from Philadelphia?” he said.
“Bryn Mawr isn’t that rural. Somehow I just can’t see it.”

“Maybe we aren’t in Pennsylvania anymore,
David.” Anna had been thinking those words for the last half-hour
and couldn’t hold them in any longer.

He sighed. “No, perhaps not.”

“Mom’s going to be worried sick,” she said,
choking on the words. “She was supposed to call us at 8 o’clock. I
can’t imagine what Aunt Elisa is going to tell her.” Then Anna
kicked herself for being so stupid and whipped out her phone.

“It says ‘searching for service’,” David
said. “I already tried it.”

Anna doubled over and put her head into
David’s chest. Her lungs felt squeezed and her throat was tight
with unshed tears. He patted her back in a ‘there, there’ motion,
like he wasn’t really paying attention, but when she tried to pull
away, he tightened his grip and hugged her to him.

Eventually, Anna wiped her face and
straightened to look into his face. He met her eyes and tried to
smile, but his eyes were reddened and his heart wasn’t in it.
Looking at him, Anna resolved not to pretend that all was well.
They needed to talk about what had happened even if David didn’t
want to.
How many books have we all read where the heroine
refuses to face reality? How many times have I thrown the book
across the room in disgust at her stupidity?

“What are you thinking?” she asked him.

He shook his head.

“We could leave right now, follow the trail
back to the van,” Anna said. “It couldn’t be more than a few miles
from here.”

David cleared his throat. “No.”

“Why not?” she said.

“What for?”

“I want to climb to the top of the hill we
came down and see what’s up there,” she said. “I know the tracks of
the van disappeared, but we had to have driven down that hill from
somewhere. We couldn’t have appeared out of nowhere.”

“Couldn’t we?” David sat with his elbows
resting on his knees and his chin in his hands. When Anna didn’t
respond, he canted his head to look at her. “Do you really think
we’ll find the road home at the top of that hill?”

Anna looked away from him and into the fire.
No ... No more than you do.
“You’re thinking time travel,
aren’t you?”

“Time travel is impossible.”

“Why do you say that?”

Anna’s abrupt question made David hunch.
Then he straightened. “Okay,” he said. “If time travel is possible,
why don’t we have people from the future stopping by all the time?
If time travel is possible, all of
time
itself has to have
already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent
event.”

“That doesn’t work for me,” Anna said.

“Not for me either,” said David. “It’s
pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as time has
gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, else how
could we travel back and relive it with them?”

“So you’re saying the same argument could
hold for people traveling from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already
lived our lives because
they
are living theirs.”

“Exactly,” David said.

“Then where are we? Is this real?”

“Of course it’s
real
,” he said, “but
maybe not the same reality we knew at home.”

“I’m not following you,” Anna said.

“What if the wall of snow led us to a
parallel universe?” he said.

“A parallel universe that has gotten only to
the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”

“Sure.”

“You’ve read too much science fiction,” she
said.

David actually smiled. “Now,
that’s
not possible.”

Anna put her head in her hands, not wanting
to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in the
dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between them
again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there, upright.
Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and threw it
into the fire in front of them.

“Hey!” David said.

Anna turned on him. “Are we ever going to be
able to go home again? How could this have happened to us? Why has
this happened to us? Do you even realize how appalling this all
is?”

David opened his mouth to speak, perhaps to
protest that she shouldn’t be angry at
him
, but at that
moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead
of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone
behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna
by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man
turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him.
At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David
put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her forward.

She ducked through the entrance, worried
about what she might find, but it was only the wounded man from the
meadow, reclining among blankets on the ground. He no longer wore
his armor but had on a cream colored shirt. A blanket covered him
to his waist. Several candles guttering in shallow dishes lit the
tent, and the remains of a meal sat on a plate beside him. He took
a sip from a small cup and looked at them over the top of it.

The tent held one other man, this one still
in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to the
wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look, set
down his cup, and then pointed to himself.

“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd.”

Anna knew she looked blank, but she simply
couldn’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking that they
hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”

“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,” David and Anna said
together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if they belonged to
someone else.

Llywelyn nodded. “You understand who I am?”
Again, he spoke in Welsh.

Anna’s neck hurt to bend forward, but she
made her chin bob in acknowledgement. She was frozen in a nightmare
that wouldn’t let her go.

David recovered more quickly. “You are the
Prince of Wales. Thank you, my lord, for bringing us with you. We
would have been lost without your assistance.”

“It is I who should be thanking you,” he
said.

Anna had been growing colder inside with
every sentence David and Llywelyn spoke. Llywelyn’s eyes flicked to
her face, and she could read the concern in them. Finally, she took
in a deep breath, accepting for now what she couldn’t deny.

“My lord,” she said, “Could you please tell
us the date?”

“Certainly,” he said. “It is the day of
Damasus the Pope, Friday, the 11
^th
of December.”

David’s face paled as he realized the
importance of the question.

Anna was determined to get the whole truth
out and wasn’t going to stop pressing because her brother was
finally having the same heart attack she was. “And the year?”

“The year of our Lord twelve hundred and
eighty-two,” Llywelyn said.

Anna nodded. “You remember the story now,
don’t you, David?” She spoke in English, her voice a whisper,
because to speak her thoughts more loudly would give them greater
credence. David couldn’t have forgotten it any more readily than
she could. Their mother had told them stories about medieval Wales
since before they could walk—and tales of this man in particular.
“Llywelyn ap Gruffydd was lured into a trap by some English lords
and killed on December 11, 1282 near a place called Cilmeri.
Except—” Anna kept her eyes fixed on Llywelyn’s.