Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (3 page)

He closed his eyes, but found his mind still
churning over his last conversation with Bronwen at Windsor. In the
nine months since he’d become King of England, he’d upended every
aspect of the social order. Bronwen complained about the slow pace
of his policies regarding the role of women in society, but the
idea of establishing village schools to educate all
boys
in
England was terrifying to many noblemen, most of whom couldn’t read
or write themselves.

David’s insistence on educating girls as
well as boys, and including their mothers and grandmothers on
village councils—not to mention Parliament, which was the next
step—had them apoplectic with shock and horror. It was astonishing
to David that medieval men wouldn’t want their wives and daughters
educated, but thousands of years of history couldn’t be undone in a
year. It probably couldn’t be undone in a hundred.

The status of women was just one of a dozen
issues at hand. David’s lecture on the scientific method at the
newly established college of Peterhouse at Cambridge had been given
to a packed house. Much of what had gone into that talk he’d
plotted out with Callum in a marathon study session. Callum had
said openly that he’d survived his first months in the Middle Ages
only because of the help David had given him, but from David’s
perspective, the benefit had gone almost entirely the other way.
Callum had himself gone to university at Cambridge, and while David
felt himself capable of understanding anything once taught, every
day he was reminded of his own lack of education.

When he’d come to the Middle Ages, he’d been
a freshman in high school, taking Algebra II and advanced biology.
It was only through concentrated study with his mother, Aaron,
Bronwen, and now Callum, not to mention the endless pages he’d
printed out that frantic afternoon at his aunt’s house in Radnor,
that he was able to feel like he could hold his own with his
elders. He just plain didn’t know enough.

All the while, he’d had to deal with
numerous sticky political situations. The nobles of England were
growing in their acceptance of him—he hoped—but they would lose
their faith in him and his ability to lead if he allowed Valence
continued freedom to wreak havoc throughout his domains. The man
had to be stopped somehow. David didn’t yet know how he was going
to do it.

He might even have to order the man killed.
Humphrey de Bohun was only the most recent baron to suggest rather
loudly that a beheading was in order. The delegation from the
throne of Scotland he’d spoken in front of had happily concurred.
David had reached a point where he needed to act. When he found
Valence, he would first try to speak to him, but he assumed that by
now, whatever words he used needed to be backed up by an army.

He didn’t want more war. But he’d come to
realize in the six years he’d lived in the Middle Ages that he had
to find it within himself to use force. The key was to understand
the difference between using it as a shortcut to get what he
wanted, and using it for justice.

September, 1289

Callum

C
allum sat upright
with a jerk. Something had woken him, and it wasn’t only that
Cassie wasn’t beside him on the narrow bunk they shared. He threw
off the blanket and got to his feet. Because he could see well
enough without a lantern to find his clothing and weapons, dawn
wasn’t far off. Callum pulled on his boots, wrapped his cloak
around his shoulders, buckled on his sword, and went to find his
wife.

He ducked under the lintel but had to catch
the frame of the door in order to keep himself upright. While the
weather had been fair when they’d gone to bed, clouds had blown in
overnight, and the waves had grown larger. In the murk of the
morning, the only real light came from lanterns that lit up the
deck aft and stern and swung with the motion of the ship.

Callum found his wife standing at the bow,
her hands tucked into her cloak and her hood up against the wind
and the chill of the morning. “Why aren’t you in bed?” he said.

“As it turns out, I don’t get seasick, but
the rocking of the ship was bothering me. I lay awake for hours
before I decided to get up so I wouldn’t disturb you with my
tossing and turning.” Cassie turned her head to look at him. “That
so-called bed was hard, even by medieval standards.”

Callum had slept in far worse circumstances,
as had Cassie, but instead of mentioning this, he put his arm
around her shoulders and looked with her towards Ireland. The
fierce wind whipped the waves ever higher, and other than the
faraway lights from several of the ships that sailed with them, all
he could see were gray clouds and sea.

David had arranged it so that only Callum,
in his station as Earl of Shrewsbury, sailed with him in this
particular ship. Ever since the White Ship had gone down in the
English Channel a hundred and fifty years ago, losing England its
prince and the flower of its nobility who’d sailed all in the same
ship, no English king had sailed with more than a handful of his
retainers in a single craft. To continue that tradition made sense
and, in this case, served David’s purposes.

Back at home, Callum would have been
surprised not to find David up and about by dawn, but here, alone
for once, he could sleep without interruption. Most of the time,
Callum forgot that David was only twenty years old. For all that he
took up more space than the average man, he looked his age—maybe
younger. When Callum was twenty, he’d still been growing and had
been known to sleep for fifteen hours at a stretch.

Callum moved behind Cassie, placing his arms
around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. “The wind is picking
up.”

She leaned against him. “It’s changed
direction again.”

Callum licked his index finger and stuck it
in the air. He’d seen other people do that to gauge the direction
of the wind, but all it did for him was make his finger cold.
Better to look at the sail above their heads. “It’s coming down
from the north.” His brow furrowed. “That’s not usual.”

“It isn’t,” Cassie said. “A north wind is an
ill wind; isn’t that what the old wives in Scotland say?”

Callum laughed. “You would know better than
I. All I know is that we’re in the middle of the Irish Sea with no
radio or GPS.”

“If this turns into a real storm, is it too
late to make for safe harbor at Pembroke?” Cassie said.

Callum looked behind them, in the direction
they’d come. “I can’t see land anywhere.”

“If I had a thermometer, I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that the temperature had dropped twenty degrees
in the last ten minutes,” Cassie said.

Callum held out his hand as the first drops
of rain began to patter onto the deck. “We should get under
cover.”

Cassie moved with him back towards their
tiny cabin, but before they reached it, the captain planted himself
in front of Callum. “I swear to you, I inspected the ship myself
this morning,” he said. “The rudder was whole then.”

Callum’s stomach sank into his boots. “But
it isn’t now?” The rudder was a very important part of the
ship.

“The tiller has jammed. I can’t steer
her.”

Cassie edged closer to the captain. “Can you
rig something up? The way you swing the sail steers us too, doesn’t
it?”

“Normally, yes, but if this squall becomes a
storm, I’ll have to shorten sail, maybe even drop it. We’ll be dead
in the water with no way to control the ship.”

Callum lifted a hand to protect his eyes
from the rain, which fell harder, sweeping across the deck with
each gust of wind. He tugged up his hood, but the wind immediately
blew it off his head again. The ship began to rock uncomfortably
with each swelling wave. “I’ll wake the king. Maybe he’ll have an
idea.”

“He doesn’t and knows far too little about
sailing.” David stood in the doorway of his cabin, clutching the
frame and rocking back and forth as the ship dove into another
trough and came up the other side. “Captain Evan, do you suspect
sabotage?”

The captain bowed low before David. “I
couldn’t say. I can vouch for every one of my sailors.”

“I don’t doubt that, since without a rudder,
they’re in the same predicament as we are,” David said. “Presumably
none of them have a death wish.”

The captain’s eyes crossed as if he wasn’t
entirely sure what David was saying. Callum could have told him
that he wasn’t the only one who didn’t always catch David’s
meaning.

“Can you fix it?” David said, overriding the
captain’s confusion.

“Not without getting into the water, which
would be deadly in this weather,” the captain said.

David took in a deep breath and let it out,
and then stepped out of the doorway to look beyond the rail of the
ship. Looking with him, Callum could make out the lights of only
two of their ships, both at least two hundred yards to the
south.

“What are the odds their captains learned
that SOS code like I instructed and will respond?” David said.

“I spoke with them all before we departed.
They know SOS, if no other Morse code, but—” Callum peered into the
distance. “I do believe one them is signaling to us!”

David turned back to the captain. “Send out
our own signal. We can’t help them and can only hope that they have
contact with another ship further to the south. Perhaps they can
pass on our distress call.”

“Yes, my lord,” said the captain.

“Is there anything else we can do?” Callum
said.

“No, my lord,” the captain said.

“I suggest
pray
,” Cassie said.

The captain genuinely laughed before
returning to the stern of the ship, passing among the horses which
were tied to the deck, heads down. He began shouting orders at his
men.

Callum watched for a moment and then
staggered towards David’s cabin. David and Cassie had already gone
inside. They’d pulled the curtain that acted as a door across the
opening, but right in front of Callum, the wind half tore it off
and whipped it up so it lay in a sodden mass on the roof, the ends
flapping every now and then in a stronger gust. Inside the cabin,
Callum found Cassie sitting on the end of David’s bunk and David
gripping the beam that ran a few inches above his head for the
length of the cabin. His jaw was set.

Callum lunged for an iron ring on the wall
to hold onto as the ship rocked, creaked, and suddenly tipped
sideways such that they all slid along the deck.

“The captain said she was sturdy!” Cassie
said.

“Like he would have told us otherwise,”
David said.

“Man overboard! Man overboard!” Through the
open doorway, Callum could see the first mate slide down the deck
towards the tiller, or what remained of it. “It’s the captain!”
Shouts and calls intermingled with the horses’ whinnies as everyone
on board strived to stay upright and alive. The cog fell down into
a trough that Callum feared they’d never come out of, but then it
struggled upwards once again.

“I suppose we’re a little early in time for
rubberized lifeboats,” Cassie said.

Callum thought she was being remarkably
calm. On the next plunge downward, he released the ring he’d been
holding and slid across the floor to her. He caught a post with one
arm and put the other around her.

David was braced in the doorway, observing
the activity outside the cabin without speaking.

“My lord!” The first mate wove back and
forth like he was drunk, fighting the wind and trying not to knock
into the horses. At the last second, the deck heaved, and he
stumbled into David, who caught him by the arms.

“See to your crew, Captain,” David said.
“Their safety is paramount.”

“That’s what I came to tell you, my lord,”
the first mate-turned-captain said. “The rope that attached the
dinghy to the ship broke in the last wave. It’s already too far
away to haul back.”

David gave a brief shake of his head. “I’m
sorry.”

“My lord!” The man was practically in tears,
wringing his hands. “I wish there was more I could do. I trusted
the captain with my life, but I’ve already lost him and two more
over the side!”

“Tie everyone and everything down,” David
said. “We can ride her out.”

The first mate gave David a wide-eyed look
and turned away, responding to a shout from a crewman near the
tiller. David continued to gaze stoically, though Callum didn’t see
how he could see much of anything through the driving rain. Then
David released his hold on the frame of the door and strode away,
following the first mate.

“My lord, don’t!” Callum shouted as loud as
he could, but the storm whipped away the sound of his voice, and
David didn’t turn back.

“We should go after him!” Cassie said. “We
could lose him overboard as easily as the captain.”

Callum and Cassie let go of their post at
the same time and in two steps were able to clutch the door frame
as David had been doing. The crew had pulled down the sail, since
it would only capsize the boat in a storm like this. The horses
whinnied and tried to rear, though they were tied down so tightly
they couldn’t. Callum was glad only five had been staked to the
deck. If even one worked free, it could maim everyone on the ship
in its panic before escaping into the sea. At the other end of the
cog, the first mate was trying to hold the ship together by sheer
willpower. Callum could see him gesticulating and urging his men
on. Through the rain and the wind, Callum couldn’t hear what he was
saying, but it looked as if they were trying to fix the tiller.

Callum peered through the rain and was about
to set off towards the stern of the ship after David, when he
reappeared, bringing with him a thick rope. Like everything else on
the ship, it was waterlogged, but he managed to tie it around
Cassie’s waist anyway.