Castaways in Time (The After Cilmeri Series) (6 page)

David was feeling more and more anxious, and
he glanced at Cassie, who sat beside him. He’d thought telling the
truth was a smart move and that if he didn’t tell the truth, he had
nothing to say. He was a kid named David who’d disappeared with his
sister from Pennsylvania almost seven years ago. Was his
reappearance on a medieval cog in the Bristol Channel more
incredible than the fact that he’d time-traveled to the Middle Ages
in the first place?

If his mom and dad hadn’t just come here and
left again, and he wasn’t with Callum and Cassie, maybe he really
could have passed himself off as a hapless kid, thrown about by the
winds of time. But Callum was in the forward section of the
wheelhouse, even now radioing the Cardiff MI-5 office for
instructions. At least none of them looked too out of place, except
for their cloaks and swords. The design of their breeches was
virtually indistinguishable from what modern people might wear,
except that they were made from natural fibers and sewn by hand.
David liked pockets and belt loops in his breeches, and what the
King of England liked, he tended to get.

Self-doubt might be eating David up, but he
didn’t have time for it any more than he had time to be here. He
was just going to have to commit himself to whatever came next, and
deal with it when it went all wrong.

Which it surely would. He had a bad feeling
about this too.

The cutter chugged towards Cardiff’s inner
harbor and had passed through the locks that protected it when
Callum finally came to sit beside Cassie. “My people are going to
meet us at the pier.”

“What do you mean by
your people
?”
David said in Welsh, guessing that for all that they were in Wales,
nobody on this ship but they could speak the language, especially
the medieval version.

“In my absence, my second-in-command,
Natasha Clark, was promoted to the head of Cardiff station,” Callum
said. “Jones and Driscoll, two men from my team, are also still
here.”

“Are you ready for this?” David said.

That got him a laugh from Callum. “No. Are
you?”

September, 1289

Bronwen

I
t had been five
days since David had ridden from Windsor, heading west to
Caerphilly and then Cardiff to take his ship bound for Ireland. In
that time, Bronwen and Anna had spent hours with the scholars,
first explaining the science behind disease and antibiotics, which
many had heard before from David, and then putting them to work in
the lab Bronwen had converted out of one of the lesser receiving
rooms in the lower bailey of Windsor Castle. It might have been a
minor room of uncertain use, but it was still forty feet long and
thirty wide. Plenty of room for everyone to work.

Many of the men had experience with alchemy:
the ‘science’ of turning base metals into gold and/or finding the
elixir of life,
a serum of youth and longevity. Bronwen had
to bite her tongue more than once to keep from making references to
Harry Potter
. Because of this work, and despite its
questionable efficacy, the men did know a great deal about trial
and error, which was a first principle of the scientific method.
Many, Roger Bacon among them, knew how to work systematically and
took copious notes about their work.

Over and over during the last few days,
Bronwen was reminded that to a less advanced people, science was
indistinguishable from magic, and what was basic thinking to a
ten-year-old in the twenty-first century was new, radical, and
potentially sacrilegious to men living here. Thus the careful
explanations, again and again and again, to head off that kind of
thinking. As David had reminded her before he left, transparency
had to be the order of the day.

The women they’d included among the
scientists, mostly midwives and village healers with extensive
experience in herbal remedies, had far less overt education in
philosophy and religion than the men, but far more practical
experience in working with and treating ill people. It had been
Bronwen’s task (only borderline thankless) to take on the scholars
today, so Anna had a chance to work with the women. While only a
handful had the desire to study with the men in the lab, many more
were involved in the actual treatment of patients.

“Anything?” Bronwen said to Anna, who was
bent over a pot they’d left in the warm September sun, following a
recipe David had found on the internet for ‘penicillin tea’. Anna
lifted the heavy cast-iron lid, and together they sniffed the
brew.

“Vile,” Anna said.

“Let me see!” Abandoning the leather ball
he’d been kicking with a friend, four-year-old Cadell came racing
over. He peered inside the pot. “Ew!”

“It does smell nasty, doesn’t it?” Anna said
to her son.

“It would be worth drinking if it would save
your life,” Bronwen said.

Anna settled the lid back on the pot and
shooed Cadell back to his game. “That’s why I gave a test sample to
one of the girls in the infirmary.”

Bronwen raised her eyebrows. They’d set up a
hospital and quarantine zone in a long low building within the city
walls, adjacent to the Windsor parish church. The church was
dedicated to John the Baptist and tended by a small community of
nuns. Only adults who’d already had the many diseases from which
the patients in their hospital suffered were allowed in. Scarlet
fever was their primary concern at present. Bronwen remembered
vividly a doctor laying her across his lap and firing a shot of
penicillin into her rear when she was five years old. She’d
screamed bloody murder and had hated visiting the doctor ever
since. But if the antibiotics they were developing were going to
help these people, they were going to do it without needles.

“Is the girl very ill?” Bronwen said.

Anna’s mouth turned down. “It’s Jenet.”

Bronwen nodded, knowing the girl Anna was
talking about. “Hers is one of the worst cases. Nothing we do
brings down her fever, and she’s very dehydrated.” Up until now—as
with nearly every illness people suffered in the Middle Ages—she
and Anna could do little for Jenet but manage her pain and keep her
comfortable.

“Her parents agreed I could give it to her,”
Anna said. “I explained that the drink was made of moldy bread and
water. It isn’t really that scary, even for people in this
time.”

“She kept it down?” Bronwen said.

“For once,” Anna said. “Like Cadell, she
throws up from the fever, not because she has the stomach flu. She
hasn’t been able to drink anything for two days, so it was this or
she was simply going to die.”

“Then I’m glad you did it.” Bronwen turned
away, but then hesitated and looked back at Anna, who had lifted
the lid again to look at the liquid in the pot, even though there
was nothing to see that was different from before.

“Cadell and Bran are staying far away from
anyone who is ill,” Bronwen said. “They are as safe as we can keep
them.”

“Which isn’t very safe at all. Fear for them
is like a cold fist in my chest,” Anna said.

“For my Catrin too.”

It was the horror of losing a child to a
disease that the twenty-first century had conquered that drove both
women on. Bronwen’s ten-month-old daughter hadn’t suffered through
any illness more serious than a cold so far, and because Catrin was
her first, Bronwen couldn’t understand it the way Anna could. Anna
and Math’s second son had died of measles at six months old. Even
without that practical knowledge, the fear Bronwen felt was enough
to bring her to her knees if she allowed herself to dwell on
it.

“Math tells me time and again that I have to
let the worry go,” Anna said. “I know I do, and yet it keeps me
awake at night.”

“I know.” Bronwen touched Anna’s arm.
“Speaking of sleep, Lili sent word that Bran is awake.”

Anna sighed and abandoned her vigil. “You
should come too, for Catrin.”

“I’ll be along in a minute,” Bronwen
said.

Anna gave one of the young Oxfordians
guardianship over the pot and departed, calling Cadell to her. They
left the lower ward for the upper one where their family was
staying. Meanwhile, Bronwen made her way towards her husband,
Ieuan, whom she’d just spied coming through the village gate into
the lower ward of the castle. Accompanied by Sir Nicholas de Carew,
he’d been heading for the barracks, but changed course at the sight
of Bronwen.

“We’ve got trouble,” he said, as she took
the hand he offered. That was all the public display of affection
that was acceptable between a noble couple at an English court.

“What kind of trouble?” she said.

“Valence kind of trouble.”

Bronwen gasped. “No! How is that possible?
He’s in Ireland!”

“Apparently, he isn’t. One of our riders has
reached Windsor with the news that Valence landed a flotilla of
ships at Southampton yesterday. They started marching north
immediately.”

Bronwen put the back of her hand to her
mouth, appalled and uncertain as to anything she could say that
would properly convey the enormity of this disaster. Valence’s
plots had marred the whole of this last year, and in several
instances it was only through blind luck that David’s forces had
defeated him. They couldn’t count on luck a third time, especially
since Valence appeared to have decided that a straight-forward
fight was in order, rather than mucking about with schemes and
subterfuge.

“You’re awfully calm about this,” Bronwen
said.

“Panicking won’t help.” Ieuan touched her
cheek with one finger. “We’re marshaling our forces but they’re
scattered in and around London to keep the peace and ensure the
safety of the roads. Dafydd always plans ahead, you know that,
though I admit Valence has caught us by surprise.”

“England is at peace with Scotland and
Wales,” Bronwen said. “Who’s left to fight—France?”

Ieuan jeered at the idea too. The King of
France, Phillipe IV, had grand plans for his country, possibly on a
par with David’s, but he was exactly the same age as David and was
still finding his feet in his domains.

“You say that Valence is marching north. Is
he coming here?” Bronwen said.

“My scouts should be tracking him, but only
the one rider has arrived at Windsor. He brought the news I told
you, nothing more.”

Bronwen pictured the map of southern England
that David had stuck on the wall in his office. It wasn’t a modern
map—more a best guess as to places and distances. Many hands,
including her own, had gone into making it as accurate as possible.
Thus, she knew that it was fifty miles as the crow flies from
Portsmouth to the outskirts of London, where Windsor lay.

“To get here, Valence has to pass through
Winchester,” Bronwen said.

“We can’t deploy an army quickly enough to
stop him from taking the city if he wants it,” Ieuan said. “I’ve
sent a message to the bishop, John of Pontoise, expressing my
regrets, but of course it may be days before I hear back.” The
cathedral city was the seat of the Bishop of Winchester, a powerful
man in the English church.

Bronwen nodded. One of the most dramatic
differences between medieval and modern warfare was the lack of
information about the movements of enemy forces, or even one’s own.
“Worse would be to act before you’re ready. Valence is crafty. He
may be hoping that we’ll act rashly, and if we don’t do so on our
own, he’ll try to force us into it.”

Ieuan’s jaw showed nothing but
determination. “I’m glad Math is here. He can help me think like
Dafydd might.”

Bronwen scanned the bailey, accepting
without thinking it strange that everyone looked to David for
leadership. He was all of twenty-years-old, but everyone in Britain
knew by now what an unusual person he was. Everyone but Valence,
that is. She supposed Valence kept himself going by telling himself
that David’s victories over him, and the failures of his various
plots and plans, had been due
only
to luck. While David
admitted that he’d been extremely lucky, the rest of the world
believed he was blessed by God.

In the few minutes Bronwen and Ieuan had
been talking, word of the invasion had spread, as news did within a
castle, in the blink of an eye. Small groups began to congregate in
the noon sun. Bronwen looked back to the pot of penicillin tea,
noting the half-dozen people who’d gathered around the scholar
tending it. Their penicillin was going to get a far greater test
than whether or not it would heal one girl—and far sooner than
either Anna or Bronwen had anticipated or wanted. They weren’t
ready for a full-scale war.

“How many men does Valence have?” Bronwen
said.

“According to the rider’s best guess, some
two thousand,” Ieuan said. “He brought fifty ships and packed his
men into them. What he didn’t bring—and thank God for that—was more
than a handful of horses.”

“He must have been planning this for a
while.” Bronwen gave a laugh, though what she was thinking wasn’t
funny. “In order for him to reach Portsmouth today, he must have
left Ireland shortly after David left Windsor. Do you think Valence
knows that David isn’t here?”

“I couldn’t say,” Ieuan said. “This is a
direct challenge to Dafydd’s authority, however, and we’ll have to
answer, regardless of whether or not Dafydd is here to lead
us.”

“We can take care of this ourselves. Valence
will never get to London.” Edmund Mortimer came to a halt beside
Ieuan, having entered the castle with two dozen soldiers. Bronwen
hadn’t noticed his presence earlier since her eyes had been on her
husband.

“I know we can.” Ieuan gave Edmund a quick
bow in greeting.

Edmund turned to Bronwen. “Valence believes
himself to be a hero and that the people of England and its
barons—” He put a hand to his own chest, “—me among them, will rise
up in support of him to overthrow King David’s oppressive rule. All
he has to do is make the first move.”