Guardians of Time (4 page)

Mom staggered away from the dash, bringing
Anna with her. They collapsed into their seats, and Anna felt
Math’s arms come around her waist and pull her close to him. She
put her head into his chest, her whole body vibrating.

“We’re going to head right back to the
Middle Ages if we don’t get off this road!” Callum had risen to his
feet to stand by David, who was no longer leaning forward on the
dash but had moved both hands to the metal pole behind Jane’s seat,
which Anna had been holding.

“I’m trying!” An oncoming van forced Jane to
careen the bus to the far right side of the road. Unfortunately, as
was usual in Wales, the shoulder was about three inches wide with a
stone wall buttressing it. On an American highway, they could have
pulled off the road and stopped, even if they were facing the wrong
way. Here, there was nowhere to go.

“As soon as you can.” David’s voice turned
calm. While Callum stooped to look out the windshield, David
stepped closer to Anna so he could bend forward to look out the
side window of the bus above her head. “Hey, sis. Thanks.” He
smiled at Anna and put out a hand to her. “It worked.”

She grasped his hand. “It did, you idiot.
One more time.”

David

D
avid was forced to
admit, in those first moments as they careened the wrong way down
the road, that he’d been criminally arrogant, and he didn’t need
Anna to call him an idiot to realize it. His time traveling had
never hurt anyone before—that he knew of anyway. As he watched a
car, in its attempt to avoid the bus, narrowly miss the series of
orange barrels that ran down the middle of the highway, it
staggered him to realize how much trust the bus passengers had
placed in him, allowing him to risk their lives on the hope that he
could bring them home.

He didn’t know where he’d expected to end
up. Somewhere in the twenty-first century was as far ahead as he’d
thought. If pressed, he’d have guessed that they’d end up in a
field or an empty hillside either in Wales or Pennsylvania—or in a
pinch, Oregon. That’s where they’d always found themselves before.
But then, except for when Anna and Mom had dropped the bus into the
middle of a medieval battle, they’d never gone back to the modern
world in a vehicle capable of causing the kind of havoc the Cardiff
double-decker was currently wreaking on the highway.

A deathly quiet descended upon the bus
itself, even as car after car swerved out of their way. With the
dark and the snow, getting out of this with only a few dings and
some scared drivers would be a miracle. Nobody spoke, not wanting
to disturb Jane’s concentration and muttered cursing as she fought
the wheel, the snow, and the other cars to navigate safely through
them.

Jane split the difference between the two
lanes in order to avoid two cars that veered away by inches, and
then, finally, a gap appeared in the traffic at the same time as a
roundabout. She swung the wheel so as to follow the roundabout to
the left, which enabled her to merge with the traffic on the other
side of the barrels. She ended up not only in the proper lane for
Wales—though now, to David, since they were on the left side of the
road, it was the wrong lane—but also with the ability to exit the
highway entirely.

Unfortunately, the sign telling them what
exit they were taking was obscured by blown snow, which had adhered
to the reflective lettering. David could make out only a C, and an
‘on’, and on the next line maybe a dd and an ll. That meant they
could be anywhere in Wales.

Three minutes later, Jane pulled into the
parking lot of a Tesco store, which was roughly the British
equivalent to Wal-Mart in the United States. As she braked to a
stop, David closed his eyes for a second, feeling his heart ease
into a more normal pattern, and pressed his forehead into the heel
of his hand. He felt the bus settle as the engine slowed to a low
hum.

Jane leaned back in her seat, wiping sweat
off her brow, and then looked over at him. “We didn’t die.”

“Apparently not,” David said, “though not
for lack of trying.”

“That was too bloody close,” Darren said in
an undertone.

David nodded fervently and turned to look at
his family and friends. Nobody was really talking yet, though some
of the bus passengers had risen to their feet to look out the
windows of the bus, and a couple of people had opened other windows
to let in fresh air and snow.

Then Mom let out an unqueenlike guffaw of
laughter, and David found himself smiling at her. They’d done it,
and they hadn’t killed anyone in the process. A major victory. Yes,
he’d been arrogant, but once again, he hadn’t been badly punished
for it.

“What do we do now?” Mark said brightly,
articulating what everyone had to be thinking.

It was on David to come up with the answers,
though now that they were here, he felt completely overwhelmed by
the magnitude of what faced them. It wasn’t enough that he’d
brought all the bus passengers back to the modern world. He
couldn’t just drop them off in a Tesco parking lot and leave
them.

But then his ears tuned into the babble of
voices coming from the seats behind Mark, Rachel, and Darren. Cell
phones had materialized in a dozen hands. Earlier, he’d been too
busy to notice the little outlets—both USB ports and those for
regular plugs—located beside each pair of seats. Most of the
passengers had thought to bring their cell phones and chargers
against the moment they reached the modern world and could use them
again.

From the back of the bus came the sound of
someone sobbing, and David moved toward the voice, afraid the woman
in question was injured.

Callum reached out a hand to stop him.
“She’s just called her family. Leave her be.”

David stopped. Other people had tears in
their eyes too, Cassie among them. She already had her phone to her
ear too, and as he moved back to his post behind Jane’s seat, he
heard her say, “Merry Christmas, Grandad.”

His mother would need to call her sister,
but David himself had no other family in the modern world, and no
reason to feel any emotion about being here other than relief.
Still, he could relate—if he’d had a cell phone to call Lili the
last time he’d returned to the Middle Ages after being shipwrecked
near Cardiff, he would have used it in a heartbeat.

He raised a hand to get everyone’s
attention. “Was anyone injured on the journey?”

Shaken heads showed all around, including
from the woman who’d been crying. David remembered the intercom and
pressed it. “You guys okay up there?”

A chorus of
yes!
sounded from
upstairs, followed by a moment where the only sound was the
murmuring of the bus passengers as they spoke into their phones.
David looked at his friends, not sure what to expect next—and then
the thunder of dozens of feet resounded throughout the bus. David
looked up at the ceiling, amazed at the noise and wondering if the
passengers were bending the metal supports as they pounded down the
aisle and the stairs towards the exit.

Then, as if on cue, the people on the lower
level rose to their feet too, their voices rising in an excited
babble. Someone pushed open the back door and stepped out. And
then, within two minutes, the bus was deserted except for David’s
family and close friends.

David gaped in the direction the passengers
had gone. He’d prepared a speech about how grateful he was for
everyone’s trust in him, and how honored he was to have been part
of their lives, but there was nobody left to hear it.

“What are they doing?” David said.

Callum gave a cough. “Let them go. I’ve seen
it before when a group of people has been in danger and is finally
rescued.”

“What do you mean?” David said.

Callum made an
I don’t know if I can
explain
motion with his head. “It’s as if they’ve lived on a
desert island this past year. While they developed a camaraderie
with their fellow passengers and might promise to keep in touch
forever, the moment they arrive home, it becomes clear that, with a
few exceptions, nobody will.”

“For
desert island
read
the Middle
Ages
, and you’ve got it,” Darren said.

“Huh,” was all David managed to say.

Mom gave him a rueful smile. “They’re home.
You can’t blame them for being happy.”

Cassie pulled her phone down from her ear
for a second and frowned in the direction of the last few
stragglers leaving the bus. “Really? Nobody is even going to say
thank you?”

“We brought them to the Middle Ages against
their will,” David said, “and we returned them to their world, as
was their due. On top of which, I’m not the King of England here.
I’m nobody, and they owe me nothing.”

Cassie shook her head, still disbelieving,
and resumed her conversation with her grandfather.

“You’re not quite nobody,” Anna said.
“Still, I can see how few of them will look back on this year and
see it as anything more than a long, not-very-pleasant vacation
that required them to rough it most of the time.” Anna, in fact,
had talked to many of the bus passengers on David’s behalf, once
he’d become convinced that the time had come to return them to
Avalon.

Callum tapped his fingers on his thigh. “I
don’t think they realize we’re about to be the cause of an
international incident. We just made a busload of people who
vanished off the face of the earth for an entire year
reappear.”

“Not to mention the fact that they
disappeared inside a city bus in the middle of a terrorist attack
on Cardiff to begin with,” Darren said.

“Even if the world has completely fallen
apart in our absence, somebody might just notice our return,”
Callum added.

“It might be worse than that.” David found
that his brain was starting to function again. He gestured to
Cassie, who’d just said her goodbyes with the promise to call again
in a few hours. “Our families might be discreet, but how long is it
going to take for news of where this bus has been for the last year
to make the leap to the internet? With pictures?”

“My granddad knows not to say anything,
David,” Cassie said.

“Thanks for that,” David said, “but this
isn’t his first rodeo. The others aren’t going to be so
circumspect.”

Anna grimaced. “You could have ordered them
not to talk about it.”

“One, they don’t take orders from me
anymore,” David said, “and two, not telling the truth could be
worse than telling it. How else are forty people going to explain
where they’ve been?”

“I hope some of them don’t end up in a
mental institution.” Cassie rose to her feet and crossed the aisle
so she could plug her own charger into an empty outlet and recharge
her phone.

Rachel wrinkled her chin. “That’s not
outside the realm of possibility, you know.”

“I can’t help that,” David said. “The
alternative was not to bring them. That didn’t seem like much of a
choice to me at all.”

“Trying to stay under the radar was part of
the reason why we did this on Christmas Eve in the first place.”
Anna gestured to the bright lights of the Tesco outside the bus.
Red, green, and white Christmas lights wound around lampposts and
were strung across the front of the store, and pictures of red
ribbons and wreaths were painted on the store windows in washable
paint. “The whole point was that it would take longer for the
authorities to notice.”

Callum leaned forward to talk to Jane.
“Douse the lights?” And as Jane did as he asked, he turned back to
the others. “We should be aware that the press might get wind of us
almost as quickly.”

Anna made a dismissive gesture with her
hands. “Maybe the first thing we need to do, now that the others
have ditched us, is to find out where we are.”

Mark was focused on his phone, and he held
up one finger, paging quickly through the screens. “We’re in
Caernarfon.”

Dad, who hadn’t spoken yet at all, expelled
a burst of air. “That’s luck.”

Math spoke in Welsh to his father-in-law.
“This—this—
place
is Caernarfon? What happened to the sleepy
fishing village?”

“King Edward cleared the harbor of Welsh
families and built a great big castle to suppress the populace,”
Mom said tartly. “He brought in a bunch of English settlers to
supplant them too.”

In addition to building the castle and
importing settlers, King Edward had also made sure that his son,
Edward II, was born in Caernarfon in 1284, so that he could call
him
the Prince of Wales
, in order to preclude any native
Welsh prince from claiming the title ever again.

The current Prince of Wales actually had
some Welsh in him, thanks to the Tudor dynasty of the sixteenth
century when Henry VII, the descendant of Dad’s advisor, Tudur,
defeated King Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field and
claimed the throne. Henry Tudor had marched across Wales flying the
red dragon flag, the first to do so since Cadwaladr ap Cadwallon in
the sixth century. He’d done it as a blatant attempt to garner
support in Wales for his bid for the throne, and it had worked.

Math sat back in his seat with a
huh
look on his face. “I bow to your superior wisdom, Mother.” He took
Anna’s hand again. “I can see why you prefer my world to yours,
cariad.”

David was glad to see that Math was unfazed
enough by the
traveling
to muster up some humor, though he
was also pretty sure that Math meant exactly what he said.

Now David bent down to Jane. “How much gas
do we have?”

Jane looked at the gauge. “More than half a
tank.”

It was essentially the same amount they’d
started with. The bus had come to the Middle Ages with a mostly
full tank. Some of the gas had evaporated over the course of the
year that the bus had sat in the barn, and they’d used more in test
runs, occasional starts of the engine, and as an even more
occasional source of electricity. But they’d tried to preserve the
gas as best they could because there was more to running a bus on
biodiesel than simply dumping some used vegetable oil—made in the
Middle Ages from olives or walnuts—into the tank. Oils were
expensive imports, so people in Britain fried in lard or butter
instead.