Saint James’ Way #4
“James . . . it’s all right. It’s my friend.
The one I told you I was going to meet?” Touching his elbow, she gently urged him to lower his weapon.
Once he did, she made the introductions.
“Sir James, this is Simon, a freeholder and long-time friend of my family.
Simon, Sir James, the escort hired by my fellow pilgrims.
“As you can see, I’ll be fine from here on. You can rejoin the others with a clear conscience as to my safety,” Anne told James.
“Did I mean nothing to you?” he hissed.
“You meant a lot. But I must go my way for now, and you must go yours. Return to the others. If I can, I’ll come find you in England later.”
“Actually . . . he cannot return to the others,” Simon stated.
The blade came back up, silver-blue moonlight glinting off the beaten metal. “Why not?”
“Simon?” Anne strained to see her superior’s face. He moved closer, ignoring the threat implied in James’s blade. She caught a glimpse of his expression, the pinch of worry between his dark brows. “Am I in trouble for being late, and not alone?”
“No more so than Rachael was,” Simon murmured.
Comprehension dawned, relieving Anne of much of her worry. She hadn’t black-marked herself in the rulebook by making love with the man at her side.
“You both speak in riddles. Make yourselves clear,” James demanded.
“Peace, brother . . . and put your hosen on. Both of you. We have time for you to dress before we must go.”
“Anne?”
“I trust Simon with my life, James. You can, too. More than you yet know.” Stooping, Anne rummaged through the clothing scattered on the ground, separating out which garment belonged to whom by touch, since James’s clothes were of a higher quality than her own.
He hesitated only a moment before accepting his hosen, undershirt and cote-hardie.
Setting down his sword, he dressed as quickly as she did, shaking out his boots and strapping on his belt.
After sheathing the blade at his hip, he waited while she fastened the last of the buttons on her over-gown, then faced the shadowed silhouette of their visitor.
“We are dressed, as requested. Now, tell me what you mean. Why should I not return to the others?”
“If you had been with them, instead of having followed Anne here, you would have suffered the same fate they just did. A short while ago, a group of Castilian bandits came upon the pilgrims’ camp, ambushed the farmer on watch, and slaughtered the rest in their sleep.
Even as we speak, their bodies and belongings are being looted. ”
Anne heard James half-draw his sword and quickly put her hand on his wrist. “We are not what you think. Neither of us is in league with the robbers.”
“How do I know that?” James hissed. “You urged me to go back there, then lured me into staying here! How do I know you didn’t decide they would be more vulnerable and thus easier to kill without my protection?”
“Because I didn’t tell her what the fate of the pilgrims would be. Nor could I interfere to save their lives, even indirectly, without it causing irreparable harm to the future. Which, if you continued to live in this time frame, your own presence would also do.”
James struggled to draw his sword. Anne forced it back into its sheath by pinching one of the nerves in his wrist; from his startled hiss, she guessed he wasn’t expecting so much strength from her, nor the sudden pain shooting up his arm.
“James, Simon and I are scholars of the past. Literally, we come from the far-distant future.
We, and others like us, travel through time by a special means.
We immerse ourselves in a time period, in a culture, in a situation, and observe.
“Just like you do,” she stressed. “You chose to travel as a pilgrimage escort so that you could be a student of humanity, to observe people from all stations of life. We do that, too. But because we do it in the past, which cannot be changed overtly . . . sometimes we cannot stop what happens, because it is vital that it should happen.”
“From the future . . . you’re not actually from northern England, are you?” James accused. “Just how much of what you have told me has been a lie?”
“My place of origin, my inheritance, my brother-in-law . . .”
“Your late husband?” he demanded. “Was even that a lie?”
“Only in part,” Anne confessed. “I was married, and my husband did die. It was in May, in the city of Abbeville in France, not at home in northern England as I claimed. And it was in the Year of Our Lord 1940, in an era when what you know of as the many states of the German kingdom was at war with France. I was an anthropology student – someone who studies societies and cultures and the ways how people live. My husband was also a scholar; he was giving a lecture on mathematics at a school in northern France when there was an unexpected, rapid advance of the German army. He died in the attack. I saw him cut down, and ran. I probably would have perished, too, if I hadn’t seen an exchange student sneaking for the basement of the university building, and followed her instead.