Chapter 2 #4
nothing to them. I could be an oracle, a god, it didn’t matter, I had been their prisoner the past three months, wasting my
time not on reading tea leaves or predicting the weather, but staring with traumatized awe at dirt, wood, insects, people’s
eyes. My personality was only just reawakening with my ability to communicate and engage and I had nothing to show for it,
I had nothing to offer these people. I wasn’t a soldier and had just proven it. Anything else I was didn’t matter.
Wulfric raised his bow again and pointed it directly at my head. Instinctive terror fired and snapped through my body. “Wait! Wait! Please—wait,” I cried with my arms raised. “Just watch.”
Slowly, I made a fist and lowered it. I held it out toward Matilda and jiggled it. I called her name and whistled. And despite
these methods never really serving me well before, her tail wagged, she stood up. Wulfric and Simon gasped at her height.
She trotted over to me, smiling her devilish smile. Her fur was matted and her eyes read a touch more feral than normal, but
otherwise she looked healthy and happy. Three months in the untamed wild had to be a nice escape for a pampered dog like her.
The only thing that gave away her modernity (besides her exotic breed) was the thick designer collar still firmly around her
neck, with a little gold-plated, diamond-encrusted name tag dangling from it.
A silence of calculations ticked between me and the two men. Wulfric and Simon saw the collar, saw my familiar maneuvering
with Matilda, how she licked me, they looked at each other, and I looked at them, their twitching bows, a frenzy of silent,
split-second communication. Before anyone could move, I unclipped Matilda’s collar and jumped away from everyone with my hands
up. Wulfric pointed his bow. Simon violently twitched. Matilda kept wagging her tail and panting.
“Just wait,” I said, arms raised. The collar glittered in the sunlight. “Let’s come to an agreement that works for all of
us.”
“Put your bow down,” Simon muttered to Wulfric, but Wulfric refused.
“Simon, that’s gold!”
It was gold plating at best, I thought. The diamonds had to be cheap if not completely fake, but in the twenty-eighth year of King Edward—whoever the hell that was—surely there was no way of knowing any better. Plastic hadn’t been invented yet.
The boys argued with each other over their next move.
“We’d have more money than the whole parish combined.”
“And a bounty on our heads if you kill him.”
“We were already threatening to kill him—”
“Only to get him to help us with the stag, I wouldn’t have let you actually do it. The lord wants him alive.”
There was more hesitance and murmurs between them, then Wulfric hissed at me. “Give it to me.”
“Help me escape,” I said.
“Give it to me and we’ll let you go.”
“No we can’t,” said Simon. “We can’t go back without him.”
“Put the bow down and let’s talk,” I said.
“Give it to me!”
“Put the bow down!” both Simon and I yelled at the same time.
Wulfric flinched, growled, and with a jerk of his wrist, let the arrow fly once again into the treeline. He threw the bow
on the ground and conceded the floor to Simon, who stepped forward, unsure how to proceed. The childishness of the men was
more apparent than ever and I realized the reason I could communicate with them so easily was because their language and vocabulary
was more stunted than any of the others at the manor. They were working hands, nothing more. Simon had his imaginary talisman
of a promised landholding and that was it. Their eyes could not unwiden after seeing this collar, something that afforded
them an opportunity larger than they would know what to do with.
“Let me go and I’ll give you the collar,” I said. “And the dog. Honestly she’s probably worth more. Just let me go and you’ll never hear from me again.”
“We can’t let you go.” Simon shook his head and looked at the ground, thinking. After a moment, he looked up and spoke methodically.
“The lord arrives today with a caravan. It’ll drop him off, then continue to London this evening.” He looked at Wulfric, then
at me. “We’ll be helping them unload their goods—we can smuggle you on board one of the wagons. But no one can know it was
us that helped you. No one.”
The idea of freedom was so sudden and intimidating with its momentum. Just last night I had been lost in the sounds of my
cell, lulled, really, by my environs. Now I was fully jolted out of the trance. Seeing Matilda, holding her collar—it brought
a semblance of reality—of my reality—to this one. I felt the metal clasp, the tightly wound polyester and leather, the fake diamond studs, all factory
stamped and sealed. It felt like I was dipping my hand back into where I had come from, and a very sentient part of me wanted
to get back there.
I rolled the ragged sleeve of my shirt up to my shoulder, then put my arm through the collar, pushing it all the way up to
my armpit, fastened it tight, then covered it. “You’ll get this once I’m on the wagon. No one will know you helped me, I promise.”
“Give it to us now,” said Wulfric.
“No. When I’m on the wagon.”
“Then swear to God,” said Simon. There was a break of silence after he said this. The way he said it, the way his voice teemed
with expectation, it wasn’t how I had ever heard someone say it before—I swear to God, so flippant and tossed like a coin, not like this. I didn’t know how to react.
“Sure,” I said.
“No, swear it,” he said. Unmoored earnestness blazed behind his eyes.
“OK, I swear it. I swear to God I will give you this collar once I’m on the wagon.”
Simon stared me down. Wulfric watched both of us, wary, but calmed. I was reminded of how much this was a world I simply wasn’t
a part of. Perhaps we shared the same value sets at our core, about honesty and word as bond, but in terms of whatever bedrock
of life experience informed our decision-making, we couldn’t be further divergent. I had the upper hand.
There were more people at the manor than usual, and a buzz was in the air when we returned. Our little hunting party split
up. Wulfric went to chop wood, Simon went to the stables, Matilda had tagged along and was giddily examined by other servants.
But instead of having me help cook or clean to aid with the preparations, I was taken and put back in my cell. For the first
time in two months, the guards locked the door behind me. And I was shackled. That had never happened before.
“Why?”
They wouldn’t answer me.
Something wasn’t right. I stood there in iron shackles, chained to the wall while the house rumbled with activity around me.
For the first time, I smelled the wretchedly sweet stink of my cell.
There had been a sudden change, a decision made, and I was on the outside of it.
I began to panic. I twisted my wrists but the shackles were heavy and tight.
They hadn’t used these back when I was first captured, why did they have me in them now?
I tried to push against the door but I couldn’t reach.
I had been in these people’s good graces, but now things were set further back than they had ever been.
I fought the urge to yell for help. I had no one to call for.
Smells of cooking slipped through cracks in the wall, mixed unpleasantly with my cell. They grew stronger as the afternoon
settled into an evening that lit long lines of orange across the walls. Smoke laced with flavors of meat and herbs slipped
inside, almost tauntingly. I paced. I felt for the reassurance of the dog collar under my shirt with my chin.
“George,” said a voice. It was Simon.
Through a slim gap in the doorframe he pressed his face and saw me in the darkening cell. I showed him my bound hands.
“What’s going on?” I said. I tried to remain calm.
Simon pulled at the door. The lock jiggled. His face reappeared in the gap. “It’s locked,” he said.
“I know. What’s going on? You have to get me out of here.”
“I can’t now if they’ve locked it.”
“Is the caravan here yet?”
“Almost.” The thin strip of Simon’s face was close to mine. I could feel his breath and how it rippled with nerves. I felt
the disquieting swell of empathy, rendering him so eerily modern. “I don’t think we can get you out of here anymore. Not tonight.”
“Simon please. You can’t leave me.” The growing darkness gripped me. Blankets of air were thick and stale. For how much I
had been tenderly swaddled by this isolation, I couldn’t return to it, no I couldn’t. My modern brain had snapped feverishly
back to reality—I needed to get out. I felt my cheeks flush with anger and fear.
Simon said nothing else and disappeared.
I resisted every urge to yell after him, but it wouldn’t make a difference because a swarm of noise was approaching.
The whole house rattled. Doors and windows opened and slammed.
Footsteps ran across the ground outside.
Excited voices. And far away, but growing louder like a sturdy, rolling wave of stones, were horses.
The noise traveled from a mile away, then less than a mile, then less. I could see nothing from my cell as it arrived. Gaps
in the wood slats of my cell looked out on only trees and a storage shed and a cloud of dust that was suddenly kicked up.
The caravan was here. A thunderous team of horses was out front—chains, leather, wheels, boots all clattering together in
a swarm. I questioned, for a second, if I had been transported back to the present day and was hearing a busy high street.
Again I was awed by the voices—men and women disembarking, warm greetings, laughter, dogs barking. I thought of Matilda out
there skipping around. The languages spoken were new slurry mixtures of English and French. But the awe I felt was only in
a minor key this time, giving rise to an anger that was too familiar, too modern: I felt excluded. I was wholly on the outside,