Chapter 5 #2
I stared at Wulfric.
He stared back.
“You save cats,” he said.
“What?”
“You said you entered a burning house because people were inside.”
“Yes.”
“Wystan said there was also a beast.”
I looked slowly at Wystan who suddenly found the sky fascinating.
He had me there. “It wasn’t a beast, it was a cat.”
“And now you question the chicken.”
“The cat was trapped.”
“The chicken is trapped.” He crossed his arms.
“The chicken lives here.”
“So did the cat.”
I hated lordly medieval logic.
“Fine. The chicken comes.”
The woman beamed and Wulfric actually smiled. The effect was deeply inconvenient because his whole face changed when he did it. The hard lines eased and he looked younger, warmer, and ridiculously handsome. I turned away before my brain could make the problem worse.
“Don’t look so pleased with yourself.”
“I have won the chicken.”
Behind us, the woman hurried away with the bird tucked beneath one arm as he watched her go.
“Your plans are flexible.”
I shrugged.
“People aren’t sacks of grain. You can’t stack them where you want and expect them to stay there.”
We stood near the edge of the village while people moved around us. The morning’s gray sky had lifted enough to show a thin line of pale blue over the trees. Smoke drifted from the houses. Somewhere bread was baking, rich and warm beneath the sharper smells of livestock and damp earth.
Wulfric folded his arms. “You said you go into burning houses.”
“I do.”
“Why?”
I thought of Milo. Toast. Brian. All the people whose names I’d never known.
“Because I’m a firefighter.”
His brow furrowed. “Someone who fights fire?”
“More or less.”
“With what?”
“Water. Hoses.”
Blank look.
“Long tubes that carry water.”
He looked doubtful.
“Ladders. Axes. Breathing equipment.”
Nothing.
“Big red carts.”
Still nothing.
I sighed.
“Where I come from, when something burns, we have people trained to deal with it. We go inside burning buildings to find anyone trapped. We move people away from danger. We deal with wrecks, collapsed buildings, floods, anything that goes badly enough that ordinary people need someone to make the next decision.”
He watched me closely. “People call for you.”
“Yes.”
“And you go?”
“Yes.”
“Even into fire.”
“That is rather the defining feature of the job.”
His gaze moved over my face.
I fought the urge to check whether I had pottage on my chin.
“You are not a warrior.”
“No.”
“Yet you walk toward danger.”
“Firefighters do.”
“Why?”
The question irritated me because I didn’t have one answer. For the pay? Absolutely not. For courage? Recruitment-poster rubbish. For glory?
Nobody looked glorious at three in the morning smelling of smoke and carrying someone’s incontinent spaniel.
“Because someone has to.”
I looked away.
“Also, we have excellent jackets.”
That pulled at the corner of his mouth.
“Devil’s cloth.”
“Waterproof devil’s cloth.”
He nodded solemnly as I laughed. It slipped out before I could stop it, and for one strange second, I saw Brian beside the engine, grinning over a paper cup of terrible coffee.
The laughter died as I looked at the village, at the thatched roofs, the muddy lane and the smoke rising from open fires.
I’d been avoiding the question since I came out of the sea. Maybe because as long as I didn’t ask, some small part of me could continue pretending there was a reasonable explanation.
A film set, or a head injury. Maybe a breakdown. Anything but the truth.
“What year is it?”
He didn’t answer immediately as his gaze sharpened on my face.
“What year? Why do you ask?”
“Because I need to know.”
The words came out quieter than I intended. Something in my face must have convinced him this wasn’t another of my strange questions.
“The Year of Our Lord one thousand and sixty-six.”
The world didn’t tilt, no thunder cracked, in fact nothing dramatic happened at all. That was the worst part, that the village simply carried on around me.
1066. Even people who slept through history class knew 1066.
William and Harold. Hastings. The Norman Conquest.
I looked south at the faint smear of smoke beyond the trees.
“Oh.”
Wulfric watched me as my palm began to ache.
“How much of September is gone?”
“Not enough.”
Not exactly helpful.
“Early? Middle? Late?”
“Middle.”
My stomach dropped another inch.
The Battle of Hastings was coming and I knew who won.
Wulfric was still watching me.
“What do you know?”
Not enough to save anyone. “I know enough to be frightened.”
His expression hardened.
“Of William?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have sense.”
I almost laughed, but instead, I drew a careful breath.
The answer had changed nothing and everything.
I was still here, stuck in the past. The Normans were still south of us and the village still needed to be ready.
So I did what I always did when something incredible or difficult happened.
I gave it something else to think about.
“The man you spoke of, Brian,” Wulfric said. “Is he your husband?”
“My partner.”
Something hardened in his expression.
“Not that kind of partner. We worked together,” I said. “Firefighters work in pairs and teams. Brian was mine.”
“Was.”
The single word hurt more than it should have. “He died.”
Wulfric’s gaze stayed on mine.
“He died in a fire eight months ago.”
“You were there.”
“Yes.”
The wind moved between us, somewhere nearby, a child laughed, a hammer struck wood, and life carried on.
Wulfric looked toward the distant southern sky. “My wife died two winters past.”
He’d told me yesterday in the council, but grief had a habit of making people repeat facts before they were ready to tell the story beneath them.
“Fever,” he said. “No warning. Just gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded. “I learned then that no preparation covers everything that can kill us.”
There were a hundred comforting things I could have said. I’d heard most of them after Brian died.
Everything happens for a reason.
He’s in a better place.
You did everything you could.
I hated every one so I gave Wulfric the truth.
“No, it doesn’t.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“We prepare for what we can,” I said. “We make a second plan for when the first one fails. Then we hope for a bit of mercy on the things we never saw coming.”
He was quiet for so long I thought I’d said too much, then Anya shouted from across the lane.
“Darcy!”
We both turned to see that old Gilda had somehow acquired a second spinning wheel.
I closed my eyes.
“No.”
Wulfric’s shoulders moved. He was laughing, the traitor.
“You’re enjoying this.”
“A little.”
“Your people are impossible.”
“They are still yours to save.”
That stopped me as I looked at him. He seemed to realize what he’d said a moment after I did.
“Come on,” I said. “Before she finds a loom.”
By evening, we’d learned more from one practice movement than we had from six hours of talking.
The original groups were too large. One of the forest paths became slick where a stream crossed it.
Two elderly men needed help walking and refused to admit it.
Three children would follow anyone carrying food.
The backup signal couldn’t be a horn because too many people mistook it for the warning from the coast.
So we changed it. The council met once more after dark in the meeting house which smelled of onion pottage cooking in a great blackened pot.
A round loaf was torn apart and passed from hand to hand.
Hard cheese followed, then a crock of butter so precious everyone used it sparingly except Leofric, who took enough to prove some character flaws survived every century.
We sat around the central hearth.
I had stopped feeling quite so much like a zoo animal though one of the old women still watched me every time I drank from the ale cup, perhaps checking whether my lips smoked.
Wulfric went through the revised plan. The fighters would watch the roads, scouts would report movement, livestock and supplies had their routes, the vulnerable would leave in smaller groups, each counted twice, and every group had two people who knew both paths.
Signals were set. A rally place had been chosen if anyone was separated and nobody would turn back alone. That last rule caused the most argument.
“What if my child is missing?” one woman demanded.
“Then someone tells me,” Anya said.
“And you will go?”
“No. The hunters will.”
The woman began to protest as I stepped in.
“If everybody goes back for one missing person, we have twenty missing people.”
The meeting ran late. The ale went around the room until the jug grew suspiciously light. Outside, the air had turned bitterly cold.
The village lay beneath a moon half hidden by cloud. Fires glowed through cracks in shutters. Somewhere a cow lowed.
I stood near the meeting house and looked south as Wulfric came beside me.
“You keep looking toward the coast.”
“I keep expecting them to move faster.”
“They will move when they are ready.”
We stood together in the dark as I touched my palm. The mark had faded from an angry red to a dull pink. With the brooch gone there was no way home. I didn’t have an explanation as to why I’d been sent back in time or what I was supposed to do here.
Wulfric stood close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the cold. There was work to do. Work was safe, it was the one thing I’d always understood.
“You should sleep.”
“Yes, my lord.”
His eyes narrowed as I walked away before he could decide whether I was mocking him. I absolutely was.
For the first time since I’d awoken on the beach, I went to sleep without wondering whether I would wake in my own century.