Chapter 2 #2
Twenty-eighth year of King Edward. Handcarts and horses.
Thinking about it only served to rattle me all over again and remind me of my bodyshock: stripped, beat, starved, held in a cell.
Held in a cell until I enjoyed it—not like that was any measure because I had enjoyed dog walking until I had hated it.
I had been walking six dogs. I had lost two of them.
I had lost my job. I had lost my boyfriend.
I had traveled through time. I had to get out of here.
I had to get out! The thought slithered its way through my mind full of panic and rush. That was the simple fact: I had to
get out. I focused my intention on that because what was I doing here anyway? Being some kind of nobly austere stableboy?
Basking in these monkish routines? I couldn’t not be moving, I couldn’t be complacent. I had to at least escape the manor
house, then I could worry about the loftier, metaphysical time-crisis I was trapped inside or whatever this was.
But did I? I felt the knee-jerk itch to flee, but I had always felt that, all the time, not just now. I had felt that on the
tube, on holiday, online, at work. I always wanted to leave. The only thing different now was the assuaging simplicity of
being human in the sense that being human meant waking at dawn, defecating into a pit, performing labor, eating, resting,
retiring with the sun, feeling the earth, feeling my skin tightening, burning, callusing, becoming uncontemplative. There
was a coldness, sure, but there was a warmness—my awakening from shock and maybe the shock wasn’t coming from where I thought
it was. I wanted to flee, I wanted to stay. I also wasn’t sure what either of those things entailed.
Over the next few days, I made a point to bond more with the people I interacted with—the guards and workmen, and all the daily visitors who passed through the house.
Everyone had a purpose beyond my understanding and so I tried to understand.
I carried more heavy sacks. I opened the heavy sacks and scooped out bowlfuls of barley and learned how to soak them, how to sift and strain them, how to cook them.
I carried firewood, emptied latrines, washed floors, swept the courtyard, washed linens, repaired linens, and slowly reeled myself into greater circles of trust and was rewarded for it.
They gave me new clothes—just another worn tunic, but slightly more substantial, and a belt, shoes.
They gave me a bundle of straw to improve my bed.
I smiled more often. There was hard labor to perform at all moments of the day, but I made sure I was smiling. I laughed. I smiled.
“Your teeth are very straight,” said another servant.
“I had braces when I was a teenager,” I said.
“Simon! Don’t talk to him—leave, shoo shoo. Get out!” A woman whipped the man with a wet rag, and with serious force, not
comically, batting him out of the work shed. I was helping her grind wheat grains, being as merry and charitable as I could
be, ignoring the buzzing layer of mistrust that constantly surrounded me.
Through a window I watched this Simon wander off, look back at me and stare, then look at the ground. His hair was dark and
slightly curly. His clothes were shades of tattered brown, but cared for, tucked in; there was intentionality. It was still
unreal how real these people were.
“Where do you think I’m from?” I asked the woman later. The unreality of their realness made it easier to elbow my way into
conversation with them like this, like I was surveying ants.
She said nothing. A fly hovered and bounced against the window. We continued grinding the wheat. Later, we ate it in a porridge. And that was the kind of day I had. Small inroads met with bewildering walls. Pools of otherworldly silences.
Simon was one of the men who had stripped me naked and tied me up. Wulfric was the name of the other one. Together they had
beat me up and pulled off my clothes. One of them had shoved his whole fist inside my mouth, nearly broken my jaw, egged on
by their superior. They both lived in the manor, in quarters close to my cell, but spent their days outside hunting and running
errands. It took two months before I no longer felt a tightness of fear in my chest whenever I saw them—two months of learning,
through observation, that their lot in life was as similarly dire as mine. They were indentured servants and a fist in the
mouth was only what the task at hand had required. Their days hinged on unquantifiable blessings bestowed by an absent lord.
They squabbled with each other like brothers for the last inch of status one could hold over the other—Wulfric’s ancestral
promises, Simon’s northern roots, the sad buoyancy of religious superstition. I felt sorry for them. It didn’t take long for
both of them to earn—only abstractly, never stated out loud—my forgiveness. I couldn’t blame them for what they did.
Simon always mentioned land an uncle had promised his father up north, which was subsequently his, now that the uncle had
died and his father was already long-dead (trampled by three horses when Simon was a child; Simon’s mother had died giving
birth to him). The land there was lush, awash with arable soil, bordered by woods and a brook. His eyes misted when he spoke
of it, even though he had never been there before. He had never left London.
“Why don’t you go there?” I asked one night.
We were huddled around a fire in the yard, too filthy to be let inside the main house.
We drank root water, ate boiled roots, the cold at our backs.
Summer was glancing in another direction—it felt like early September, maybe later—still no one would clearly tell me the date.
“Because I need an apprenticeship in London first,” Simon said. “An apprenticeship in anything—maybe carpentry or engineering,
I want to build things—with someone who’ll give me room and board for a few months, which will buy me out of service here.
Then I can buy back my earnings and pay my way north.”
I struggled to see the math in the nightmare he described—and winced at how it all relied on handshakes and verbal confirmations
more than anything else; maybe there was a scrap of paper somewhere in a registrar far away, but nothing warranted being an
unpaid servant. There was a modern part of me that only saw the potential for anarchy in the way this old world functioned.
Most of the fences these people swore by were all invisible.
“Why not just run away? If you have the land, just go there.”
Simon balked. Wulfric glared at me and said, “Nobody has land. That’s not how people do things in this part of the world.” His tone was pointed and sharp.
“Everything has momentum,” said Simon, trying not to dismiss me, but recognizing a clear division between my logic and his—if it could be called logic at all.
There was genuine surprise in his eyes, like a part of him hadn’t considered escaping outright.
The way he spoke with his hands was measured and smooth.
“But anyway, I’ll need to save enough to hire protection for the journey, once I decide to go.
I’ll need a knight, or a mercenary from London. It’s dragon territory.”
I blinked. “Dragon?” I said.
“They don’t have dragons in the future?” Simon said this with an impressive mix of cloying jest and seriousness. I had tried
and failed to get anyone to believe my story. My being the time traveler was a running joke now and I guess I was happy to
be one, happy to be anything. I was happy—I noted. A scary feeling.
“They don’t have dragons in the past, present, or future,” I said and tried to clarify what he meant. A dragon like a big
lizard? A Komodo dragon? I dared wonder if we were as far back as dinosaur times.
Simon performed the swooshing wings, the fire breath. Wulfric nodded his head. They debated the size—bigger than a cow, bigger
than the manor, a wingspan that can block out the sun.
“And these dragons have a territory?” I asked, incredulous. “They can’t just fly wherever they want?”
“They eat sheep, so they stay in Yorkshire, they’re afraid of humans. They won’t come near a village but they will torch a
single house out in a forest or a moor. The king has a special envoy devoted to tracking them.”
“My cousin saw one,” said Wulfric.
“They say it’s what killed my uncle actually.”
I tried to suppress my laughter. Their earnestness was too sweet to deny and from the looks in their eyes, too deeply believed
to suggest an alternative explanation.
“Keep smiling,” said Simon, looking at me with blue eyes.
I stopped. But he hadn’t meant it in a threatening way.
“No really, keep smiling,” he said again.
It was my teeth he wanted to see. He gazed with wonder.
He compared them to dragon teeth. I laughed even louder, smiled wider.
Wulfric went and pissed in the yard. A dog barked and was shushed.
Smoke stained our clothes and I felt the warmth of the world’s reasonability melting away, leaving me delightfully full and still.
The first time I was taken out of the house was with Simon and Wulfric to hunt deer in the woods—no, in Greenwich Park, not
“the woods.” My mind was constantly forgetting, then sprinting back with panic to old terms, old maps. But the park was the woods. It couldn’t be anything else because there were no cars, planes, radio waves, construction, and in this absence
was a purity of sound and air I can only describe as pure sensation flooding my bloodstream, the trees my teeming lungs and
wind not an external phenomenon confined to objectivity but everywhere, in and out of me. Even the smell of dust and pollen,
warmed and blown away—it was so simple but such a manifold betrayal of everything I had ever expected a scent to be. What
I mean is that it was better. This world—everything about it—was just better than anything I had experienced in my life before.
Sorry.