Saint James’ Way #5
“I wanted to warn her to get out of there, to follow me in making a run for safety. But instead of being trapped and killed as was happening to the others elsewhere . . . she told me she was going to rescue me. She did it by transporting me even further into the future, offering me sanctuary and a new way of life.” Anne hesitated, then continued.
“I honestly did not know what fate would befall the others tonight. All I knew was that I had to leave the rest by the middle of the night, so that I could be picked up and returned to the future, where my observations could be reported for posterity. I swear, I did not know.”
“Most field agents aren’t told,” Simon confirmed. “Compassion is wonderful, but if it interferes with the path of history, it can cause complications.”
“I don’t understand,” James murmured. “I think I can believe Anne when she says she didn’t know, but . . . how could not saving their lives be the right thing to do?”
“If your grandfather was the sort to beat his serfs and tax them into starvation, if his actions had blackened your family name from long before you were born, would you want to go back in time to kill him when he was young, to stop him from harming so many people over all those years?” Simon countered.
“I know I would . . . but if you went back in time and killed him before he had sired your father . . . you would no longer exist, because your father would not have existed.”
“For another example,” Anne offered, “if he was a good man, one who had intended to marry one woman, who died by, oh, falling off a cliff, and instead married another after her death, a woman who became your grandmother . . . if you went back in time to save the first maiden’s life .
. . wouldn’t your grandfather marry her instead?
Wouldn’t they have different children? Perhaps a daughter instead of a son that year .
. . meaning yet again that you would not have been born? ”
“Time is tricky. We are sent back to observe and learn, not to interfere,” Simon stated.
“Anne has saved your life, and it is not our policy to kill those whose lives are accidentally saved . . . but your life now comes at a cost. You cannot return to your family without irrevocably altering the future . . . or risking circumstances arranging themselves so that you are slaughtered in some other way, and soon. You can, of course, leave us and take your chances . . . but the future is changeable only in tiny degrees, while death versus life is a major change. I do not know the exact pathway to your death, but it is out there waiting for you, and it will come very soon. The pressure of history will ensure it.”
“So . . . what am I to do? I will not end my life willingly; such things are a sin,” James said.
“But even I know that the world has changed greatly over the last thousand years. If I am to go a thousand years into the future, how much more will it have changed? How would I live? Unless you have need for a guard on yet more pilgrimages . . .”
Anne smiled and tucked her hands around his elbow.
“I think I know why Simon is so willing to take you with us . . . and why Rachael was so willing to save me from the Germans, despite what fate might have otherwise decreed. You are as much an anthropologist at heart as I am, James. A true student of humanity. The rest is just catching up on a thousand years of history and all the many advances people have made in the ways that they live.”
“You might not ever come back to this moment in time, of course, but some of our best field agents have come from centuries past,” Simon added.
“You know far better than we how to behave and blend in . . . though as you have seen, some of our anthropologists are more adept at blending than others, even outside their natural time frame.”
James considered their offer. Anne could sense him thinking, in the tensing and relaxing of his muscles, in the quiet, deep way he breathed. After a long, quiet moment, he turned to her.
“If I come with you . . . were your words from earlier true? Would you still be interested in my . . . in my courting you?”
“As you yourself said, we have much in common . . . and I do care for you, James,” Anne admitted. “I would be honoured to know you better.”
“I will go to the future,” he decided. “I am indeed a scholar at heart, and I find that the part of me that longed to explore distant lands is now equally curious about distant times.”
“Good. We should be going – you won’t need the bedroll, or anything else,” Simon added as James started to bend down.
“In the morning, travellers will stumble across the campsite, and your disappearances blamed on the bandits, along with the others’ deaths.
But by then, we’ll be 1,317 years into the future .
. . and, once there, I think I can safely predict your lives will be reasonably long and relatively happy. ”
“Good. You’ll answer to me if things turn out otherwise,” James warned him.
Simon chuckled, and Anne blushed. Holding on to her lover, she braced both of them for the trip to the future.