Children of Time (The After Cilmeri Series Book Four) (6 page)

Dr Raj left the room and I sat on the edge of Llywelyn’s bed, rather than pulling up a chair. Goronwy picked up Llywelyn’s sword in its sheath, which had been leaning against the wall in the corner. I scanned the room, concerned about what had happened to his clothes. I needn’t have worried. Someone had carefully spread his armor over a chair in the corner and left his bracers on the seat to dry. Goronwy and I had even been gone long enough for the staff to clean and dry Llywelyn’s clothes. They’d folded them and placed them neatly in a plastic bag which hung on a hook near the door, next to his cloak. All Llywelyn wore was a blue-striped hospital gown.

Goronwy pulled out Llywelyn’s sword and wiped down the blade with a cloth from the sink.

“Thank you. Wouldn’t want it to rust.” Llywelyn’s voice creaked in the still room.

“My pleasure, my lord.” Goronwy laid both sheath and sword on the counter by the sink and then pulled up a chair at Llywelyn’s bedside. As Goronwy sat down, his eyes widened slightly before he recovered. He cleared his throat. “It’s softer than I thought it would be.”

“I haven’t yet found a comfortable chair in our Wales.” I smiled at Goronwy, who smiled back, and then we both turned to Llywelyn.

“So this is the Land of Madoc,” my husband said.

“We’re calling it Avalon today,” Goronwy said.

I ignored both comments and went to the heart of my concern. “I know you aren’t okay, but are you with me, my love?”

“When I woke up, I thought I had died. Everything around me was white,” Llywelyn said. “And then I saw one of the nurses.”

Goronwy’s lip twitched. “What did you think, then?”

“I knew where I was,” Llywelyn said. “I find it remarkable that you could bear to live in my Wales for as long as you have, Meg. It’s so clean here, and you have such marvelous—” he picked at the edge of his blanket with his free hand and then dropped it “—everything.”

“It looks like heaven here,” I said, “but we merely disguise the dirt better. Wait and see.” I wasn’t going to remind him this instant about the seven hundred years that filled the time between his world and this one, and what had happened to Wales in it.

Llywelyn leaned his head back to gaze at the ceiling, and then his eyes tracked to the IV drip running into his arm and to the machine beyond, with its blinking lights. “Ieuan and I spoke of this.”

“Did you? I didn’t know that.” I glanced at Goronwy. “It seems you both did.”

“I’m not blind. I knew what you two were planning.” Again, Llywelyn lifted his hand and let it fall, as it seemed any gesture beyond that required too much effort. “I can’t decide now if I am angry or grateful that you ignored my wishes.”

“This is the way I see it,” I said, feeling matter-of-fact all of a sudden, “if you died, we would have been left without you—and David would be king. On the other hand, if we took you to my time, he would still be king, but you might be alive and there also remained the possibility of our return.”

“We could have died in the river,” Llywelyn said.

“Goronwy and I were willing to risk it,” I said.

“The baby—” Llywelyn’s throat worked.

“It’s fine.” I pressed his hand that I’d been holding to my belly. “It’s kicking me now.”

“And since you were dying anyway, it hardly seemed something we needed to ask your opinion about,” Goronwy said. “It was our lives we were risking, not yours.”

“How ill am I?” Llywelyn said. “I couldn’t understand anything that brown man said to you.”

“He spoke in English,” I said. “You have an infection around your heart which all that–” I gestured to the IV drips and machines on the other side of the bed, “—is going to fix.”

“That sounds hopeful, my lord,” Goronwy said.

“It is hopeful,” I said, finding myself more upbeat than I’d felt in months. “I’ll need to ask about recovery time and how long you will have to stay here. A few days at least, would be my guess.”

Llywelyn nodded, though he was looking paler than before, despite the overall positive news. I leaned forward and put out my other hand to Goronwy. “By the way, Goronwy, it would be better if you didn’t call him,
my lord
. We may be in Wales, but he is not its king, I’m sorry to say.”

Llywelyn groaned and rested his head back against his pillow. “England won.”

“It did.” A nurse entered the room without knocking, though admittedly, Dr Raj hadn’t closed the door. She spoke in Welsh, as had Llywelyn. “And my father is distraught.”

I stared at her blankly—we all did—while I thought furiously about what else she might have heard us say. I was surprised that the nurse had understood Llywelyn at all, but on further consideration, that two word sentence sounded similar in any century. But what was she talking about? What did she mean by:
England won and my father is distraught?

“His only consolation is that they won by only one goal.”

Relief coursed through me as I finally understood. The nurse wasn’t talking about England’s triumph over Wales militarily, but about soccer (or rather,
football
).

“Is Wales out?” I tried to calculate what event could be taking place in November.
The World Cup? No—too late in the year.

“It was a
friendly
,” the nurse said, “though don’t tell that to my dad. It’s never a
friendly
to him.”

I laughed while Goronwy smiled and nodded, though he couldn’t possibly have understood any of that exchange, whether or not he could piece together the words. I let go of Llywelyn’s hand and moved aside so the nurse could listen to Llywelyn’s heart, take his pulse, draw more blood, and check his machines. With a nod of encouragement, she left again.

After she’d gone, I went to the doorway, looked up and down the hall, and closed the door. “I’m feeling more and more uncomfortable about all the lies I’ve told the people here. We have a room in the–” I fought for the word in Welsh, “—
lodge
, for now, but …”

Goronwy stood up and began to pace at the end of the bed, looking down at his feet. The room was no more than fourteen feet wide and filled with furniture and medical equipment, so at most he got three steps before having to pause and turn.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s bothering you?”

Llywelyn had closed his eyes, but now opened them to study his old friend. “It’s these devices, isn’t it?”

“It is indeed,” Goronwy said. “You read my mind.” He turned to me. “They’re everywhere. Ieuan told me about Dafydd using your sister’s
computer
”—

he rendered the word in English—“and the endless amounts of information stored in it. Whole books, whole histories, knowledge that it would take any one man a lifetime to master.”

I nodded, though I wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “I know. This world depends on electronics for everything.”

Goronwy stopped his pacing and placed his hands on his hips. “You speak of the lies you have told and I ask—why would you feel the need to lie at all? Why can you not simply state who we are and why we’re here?”

My brow furrowed. “Time travel isn’t thought to be real, Goronwy. We wouldn’t be believed. Worse, we’d be thought crazed.”

“But—” Goronwy gestured to the machines at the head of Llywelyn’s bed. “People use these machines every day, for everything. You have lights in your ceilings that turn on with a touch of a finger.” He flicked the light off and on, and then off and on again.

“The lights aren’t magic, Goronwy,” I said. “You’ve seen lightning in the sky. You’ve seen David generate electricity with that little water mill of his. All of this, here, is simply the water mill writ large, and these machines with their lights and their constant processing of information involve the same principle taken to its logical conclusion.”

“So why wouldn’t the people believe that the way you travel between worlds is possible, similar to electricity? You can’t see it, but it’s there.”

“Because nobody has done it yet,” I said.

“We have,” Goronwy said.

“But nobody knows we’ve done it and I don’t want them to find out,” I said.

“Why not?” Goronwy said. “It would mean that you could rest easy with your lies.”

I put a hand to my forehead, trying to think of a way to explain my dilemma to Goronwy so that he would understand. As far as we knew, time travel had never happened before, and deservedly or not, modern people didn’t trust their government to do the right thing when it came to aliens or time travel. We’d read too many books, seen too many movies, embraced too many plotlines that involved rogue spies, secretive government agencies, and military solutions. Besides, Goronwy
was
the government in the Middle Ages. It would be like not trusting himself.

“Let me put it this way,” I said. “Say we discovered that an Englishman had invented a better form of gunpowder. What would we do?”

“Try to find out what it was,” Goronwy said, without hesitation.

“And if it happened that this same Englishman was visiting his cousin in Brecon?” I said.

“We would take him and his family into custody,” Llywelyn said from behind me. His eyes were closed, but he’d been listening. “It would be our duty, for the good of our country. We would feel it was in our best interests to control him.”

Goronwy was finally nodding. “You see the knowledge we have—your ability to travel to and from our time—in the same light.”

“I don’t know that I do,” I said. “But the government, if it knew who you and Llywelyn were? Yes, I believe it would see it that way.”

Goronwy gazed out the window of Llywelyn’s room, though the darkness outside meant he couldn’t see much beyond the bushes that grew underneath the window. Llywelyn had begun to breathe deeply, indicating imminent sleep. “I wish you didn’t have to lie,” Goronwy said softly.

“Me too,” I said.

“This should be a joyous time for you,” he said. “You’ve come home again.”

I reached out a hand and touched his cheek. “I haven’t, Goronwy. Like you, I’m as far from home as it’s possible to be.”

He looked down at his feet. I pulled the credit card from my pocket.

“Do you need to buy something more?” Goronwy said.

I smiled. “How about coffee and a doughnut?”

Chapter Five

15 November 1288

Bronwen

B
eep, beep, b-beep, beep.

I woke with a start, shooting upright in bed. I gasped, unsure at first of where I was. The electronic sound still rang in my ears, but as my surroundings soaked in, I put a hand to my heart, forcing it to calm. I’d had an auditory hallucination, not uncommon for me. I’d gotten out of bed a few months ago, before Catrin was born, and reached the door to the bedroom before I realized I hadn’t heard a phone ringing down the hall.

Thankfully, I hadn’t woken the baby, who lay swaddled in the middle of the bed between Ieuan and me. Except Ieuan wasn’t in bed. He stood before the fireplace, staring into it.

“What is it?” I said. “Why are you awake?” I checked the window. It felt like I’d slept for hours, but no daylight showed in the crack between the window shutters. Ieuan often woke up before Catrin and me, but he usually reappeared later, after we were awake, rather than hovering as he was doing now.

“You fell asleep nursing. It’s late afternoon still.” Ieaun turned to me, a smile on his face, though it didn’t reach his eyes. He came closer and pulled me up from the bed so he could kiss me. When we came up for air, instead of releasing me, he pulled me closer.

I held on for a second and then leaned back to search his face. “What’s wrong?”

“Meg has taken Llywelyn and Goronwy back.”

I gazed at him without speaking. I’d heard him. He didn’t have to repeat what he’d said, but I was so stunned and scared for them I couldn’t feel anything. His words rang hollowly in my head. “Are-are you sure—” I cut myself off. Of course he was sure. He would have made sure before he said anything to me. “When?”

“Just before sunset,” Ieuan said.

I pressed both hands together and put them to my lips. “Where are Anna and David?”

“They’ve gone to the great hall, to put a good face on it. They’re going to tell the people that Meg took Llywelyn to Avalon.”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said.

“Anna asked if you’d be coming to dinner. I think she’d like you to sit with her.”

I could understand that. My heart hurt and Meg had been my substitute mom for only three years, ever since I’d come from the modern world with David and Ieuan. “I’ll be out as soon as I nurse Catrin,” I said.

“I’ll let Anna know.” He moved to leave, but then hesitated in the doorway. “It’s going to be okay. Look what happened when Dafydd took me.”

“The best thing ever,” I said.

Ieuan smiled, as I hoped he would, and clapped a hand on the frame of the door. “Stop in and see Tudur before you go to the hall. He’s flustered, and not just because of Llywelyn’s departure.”

“Okay.” I settled Catrin in my arms, gently stroking her cheek so that she turned her head and latched onto my breast. I leaned back, grateful that the initial soreness and pain had finally passed. I don’t know where I’d gotten the idea that having a baby was all sweetness and light. It was probably because I’d spent exactly zero time around babies since I stopped being one. Catrin was what Meg called
a high maintenance baby
, in that she cried more often than most babies and wanted to be held constantly. And she upchucked. A lot. David had laughed when I’d told him, but I’d narrowed my eyes at him and told him,
just you wait!

I cuddled Catrin closer. I hadn’t ever known such fierce love. Some historians have postulated that medieval people responded to the loss of so many of their children to disease by hardening their hearts and loving the ones they did have less, in order to more easily bear the pain of it.

But that wasn’t what I saw at all, and certainly not what I felt. The losses made mothers love all the more strongly, because they knew they might have far too little time with any child—any person—whom they loved. The modern world, with its cribs and car seats and daycares, all designed to put distance between a child and her mother, was stripped away here. It was only a mom and a nursing baby: a child passed from arm to arm, from one person to another, until she fell asleep.