Chapter 5
The road north was not some fantastical journey into a land that time forgot. It was simply a road. It was difficult—because
walking any long distance at the onset of winter is a stinging, uncomfortable undertaking in any century—but it wasn’t barbaric.
Well, it was barbaric, but it wasn’t ferocious. The road—for all its meandering paths, its grifters, its threats of snow and
mud—was defanged. There weren’t any wolves.
At times the “road” (a muddy line wrought through the dead landscape) felt like a long hallway.
There was traffic. We’d shuffle along with everyone else, all of us fish with our own imperatives and internal compasses, sighing impatiently if we found ourselves stuck behind a group of slower travelers, glaring down those who could afford horses.
We’d try not to waste too much time or money at kitschy roadside bazaars and we’d always avoid the watchful eyes of knights or anyone who seemed in a position of authority.
Or at least Simon would. I was often too busy being agog at something: that child huckster with disturbingly adult facial expressions and mannerisms; that horrifically swaybacked horse, how its belly nearly touched the ground; that nobleman being carried on the back of a stringy, elderly manservant.
“I don’t think we need to hide from him,” I said as the nobleman passed us and Simon ducked his head. The man sat on a wooden
chair under a tattered silk canopy. I thought to myself, How did that get made? How do you make anything out here without
what my cloudlike mind had only ever understood to be: machine, invoice, shipping fee, plastic wrap, google instructions,
commerce, voilà! The chair lay on top of his poor servant’s ketchupy, calloused shoulders. “Surely they’re not looking for us all the way
out here,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to be paying attention anyway.” The nobleman was slumped in the chair, asleep.
“I’d rather not find out the hard way,” said Simon. “You were the prized Danish prisoner of the lord at Greenwich. They’d
have put out a reward for you.”
“But how? Do they send out letters or something about me? How would people even know what I look like?”
“They’d know.”
I chuckled. “They wouldn’t.”
“They would.” Simon was grinning. By now he was used to my rush to interrogate, not annoyed but amused by my ignorance and
happy to explain this wild world.
“Be serious,” I said. “If those policemen back in Peterborough had seen me, how would they have known anything? There’s no
photo of me. There’s no, like, alert system, no criminal database.
How would they know?” (When I said policemen and when I said photo and database, I cushioned these words with several minutes’ worth of translating them to Simon’s realm of understanding, explaining how a policeman was like a constable, but more omniscient, and a photo was just a miniature portrait, but witchy—“You have to believe me”—a one-to-one replica, an instantaneous miracle and a curse.)
“Fo-to is an insane-sounding word,” said Simon.
“It’s short for photography.”
“You two are strange,” said a woman walking behind us with her husband. By now the road had thinned out and it was just our
traveling party, which was only five people. We had split the cost of a wagon with this middle-aged couple when we left Peterborough.
A wagon driver and mule hauled our bags. The four of us trudged along behind it.
Simon turned around and said to the woman, “He’s a time traveler.” He grinned that grin of his and winked at me.
“OK.” I gasped and gave him a playful shove. “You can’t worry about police one minute and then out me in front of everyone.
Your paranoia has to be consistent at least. Are we undercover or not?”
“What’s a police?” asked the woman’s husband.
“It’s nothing,” I said.
“It’s a secret time traveler code word,” said Simon.
“Hey, if you’re a time traveler,” said the woman, “then why can’t you make this journey go any faster?”
“That’s not how it works,” Simon and I both said at the same time.
We caught each other and broke into laughter, a laughter that was so generous I felt myself repressing it a notch, as if to shore up this easiness for a colder day, when the chill of winter wouldn’t be so easily teased.
November was disfiguring itself into December right in front of us and yet we were laughing, mud-stomping, and singing, embroidering cheeky grins across every second of what I can really only call rejuvenating, life-affirming chitchat.
The wagon ahead of us came to a stop. Simon, myself, and the couple caught up to it with all our lazy giggles still going.
The driver held up a hand to silence us.
“What’s going on?” said Simon.
The driver held a finger to his lips.
We were a two days’ journey away from the city of Lincoln, on a route that cut directly through dense woodland, on a less-traveled
road. Misty steam from all our breaths faded up into the white sky. Trees and frost surrounded our party, and through the
white fog, cutting through our echoes of laughter, was a baby’s cry.
The wagoner stood up on his seat and peered off into the woodland. All of us followed his gaze. Frost singed every brown leaf
that dared to still cling to a tree. Nothing moved. I was the only one who had the naivete to ask aloud, “Is that a baby?”
The cry was sharp and distressed, more animal than I had ever heard a baby sound before, really wailing. It was the cry of
an infant. Its pitch was high, its shrieks were breathless. I stepped off the road and tried to focus my vision through the
tangle of trees and brambles. Some distance away, I thought I could see an unnatural bundle of cloth on the ground. I took
another step.
“George, don’t,” said Simon.
“What do you mean?”
“Just don’t. Don’t go any farther.” His face was stoic.
Morose but not shocked. The older couple was the same, they could only shake their heads.
They murmured something to each other, then the driver signaled to the mule.
The wagon’s wheels slid stubbornly in the mud for a second before rolling into their old momentum, moving on. But the baby’s cries continued.
“Come along, dears,” said the woman.
“George,” said Simon.
But all I could say in return was “Simon,” saying his name in periled awe as the most horrific acquiescence washed over me
like the iciest of seawater, aided in part by simple disbelief. Was there really a baby over there? Why? The shock of nonreality
once again rejigged me from the world, made me question my own ears and the screams knifing into them. A baby was crying in
the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t quite move. I was a bystander not knowing where to stand, and Simon, as if sensing this,
came and put his arm around my shoulder.
“Let’s go,” he said. And finally my legs moved.
The driver decided we’d travel all through the night if everyone could manage. No one questioned the decision. At some point
a nonsunset occurred and white afternoon turned to black night and we continued our journey in darkness, the joy of it gone,
our movement powered only by unlit coals in our stomachs.
What was—I couldn’t even think it.
Why would—I told myself it wasn’t what I thought it was.
Maybe I had misheard it and it was nothing. Something was lost in translation and there was an explanation. I’d see this was
just another strange custom I didn’t understand, something that was done on the regular and not a big deal—and it wasn’t what
you thought it was, George. You don’t have babies screaming in the woods where you come from?
We reached the city of Lincoln and paid our tolls, paid our fees for arriving in the middle of the night.
We rolled through the beyond-midnight streets with only one torch guiding us to the massive cathedral where we would be sleeping.
I marveled in silence at the spires that appeared like spider legs, which seemed to travel up until they disappeared into a ceiling of blackness, not a sky.
How could there be a sky in a place like this?
I could still hear the baby’s cries ringing in my ears.
We entered the cathedral and it was still cold.
Clergymen welcomed us but I still felt like I was outside.
I stared at the ceiling, wondering where it was.
“I thought you said you’d been to Lincoln before?” said Simon, seeing my wonderment. I could sense he wanted to ease the eerie
grief that had stung all of us back in the woods.
“I’ve been to Scunthorpe,” I said. “Farther north, but only to visit an aunt once when I was really little, I barely remember
it. We took a train.” Halfheartedly, I explained what a train was.
“You’re saying you once traveled from London to Scunthorpe in just one day?”
“Just a few hours,” I said. I smiled, but it felt sacrilegious. Still, it warmed my body. Simon smiled back, dipping his toe
in too.
“What does it feel like to move so fast?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything for the longest time, then finally, as if opening a trusted drawer only to find it empty, I said, “I
don’t know.” Trains and hallways, waiting in queues, ticket checkers, sandwich boxes—that didn’t feel like the same world
as this. Physics didn’t apply the way they applied here, where the air itself was heavy with damp, an air I felt I had to
scoop with my palms. The silence, the stony cold.
Our traveling companions had all gone ahead to the guest quarters and only Simon and I stood alone in the center of the cathedral’s nave. Only three faint candles were lit at this hour of night, spreading a low mist of dim orange across the empty wooden pews.
“Simon,” I finally said. Once again, I could only say his name. I noticed how freeing it felt to say it, to have a friend.
“What was that back there?”
Thick stone walls created a cocoon. I could hear Simon’s eyes looking, watching, analyzing. “It could have been a couple of