Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (3 page)

Best get this over with. She made her step purposeful as she strode past the gift shop, its dark recesses crammed with souvenirs. She clutched her bag with the book in it to her chest. She didn’t have to read the personal instructions to someone named Donnatella in the front pages. She knew the translation by heart. The note said . . . that time was a vortex. That you could think of another time and the machine would . . . would take you there.
Oh, right, and how was that?
And that the machine couldn’t stay in the new time forever. It would slip back to its point of origin. There was the little slip of paper, almost like a bookmark, that gave the sequence of the switches to flip on the power source. There was a dire note from someone named “Frankie” that said you shouldn’t ever meet a former version of yourself because you couldn’t both exist at once. Both of these were recent and in English.

The door loomed before her.
Danger. Keep out.

Danger, all right. She took a breath. Best get it over
with. She glanced back to the entrance. Clancy was nowhere in sight. This door was on the side of the museum next to the Palace of Fine Arts. Maybe something to do with the construction?

She pulled out her key ring and sorted through the keys.
Damn.
Her hands were shaking. She held up her ring by the master key, the rest of the keys clinking for attention. Then she descended on the lock. The book almost hummed with excitement inside her bag. The very air around her seemed to vibrate with expectation.

The door was heavy but silent on its hinges. Diana peered into the dark passage that sloped slightly downward. She flicked on the little LED light attached to her key chain. The corridor was lined with unfinished drywall. The floor turned from cement to rough boards. She stepped inside, her steps echoing. The boards gave way almost immediately to packed earth.

The door behind her slammed shut. She swallowed, trying to push her heart out of her throat and back down where it belonged. That door better have a handle on the inside. But she wasn’t going back to check now. If she stopped now, she might lose her nerve.

Her eyes got used to the illumination cast from her tiny light. A black gap yawned at the end of the corridor. She stood on the edge of that gap and held her light out. Several metal girders set at angles loomed out of the darkness.

Earthquake reinforcements for the Rotunda. She must be directly below it in that basement they’d discovered. She cast her light around. Other struts jutted at crazy angles out of concrete roots. She ducked under one and around another. It was like a maze, smelling of metal and damp from the lake beyond the Rotunda. She was so absorbed in making her way through the forest of metal girders she was surprised when she emerged into an open space.

Something gleamed dully in the darkness. She held her little light above her head.

Her lungs grabbed for air.

The gears were bronze or brass or something, a thousand of them, big and smaller and really tiny. And they were set with jewels. Some were really, really big jewels. Red and blue and green and . . . and diamonds. They coruscated under her tiny light. The machine must be fourteen, sixteen feet tall. It disappeared in the darkness above her. Stabbing out from the center was the control lever she’d seen in the illustrations, ending in a diamond bigger than her fist.

Leonardo’s machine was real.

And she just knew. She
knew
that the Viking-looking guy was really a Viking from long ago and the woman, Lucy, had gone back to get him and changed her life with this machine. You could make these gears and jewels take you through the vortex of time just by thinking about a destination. The book inside her shoulder bag seemed almost jubilant.

Diana put out a hand to the nearest girder to steady herself and took some deep breaths. Then she examined the machine more carefully. A modern steel box about the size of a lunch box sat at the bottom with several switches and lights on it and a big steel button like the kind you pushed with your palm at traffic lights. That hadn’t been in the illustration. But the instructions on the bookmark mentioned switches. She hauled the book out of her bag and took the slip of paper out, shining her light on the spidery handwriting: “Blue, then the two whites from left to right, twice, and then the red. Push the big button. Then pull the lever down.”

This was the moment. She could see Arthur and Guinevere. She could see Gawain, the hero who wouldn’t come
to life in her current work in progress. She could be infused with that “one brief shining moment” and come back with a tale to tell. She might be renewed.

It felt right. Very, frighteningly,
right
.

Her parents were dead. She had no friends. In the end what did she have to lose? Nothing.

She knelt beside the metal lunch box with the lights and switches. Her hand had stopped shaking. She flipped the blue switch and a blue light came on.
In for a penny, in for a pound.
She flipped the switches in sequence and palmed the round metal button. The machine stood silent.

Wait . . . was that a hum from the lunch box? The hum accelerated rapidly. It screamed up the scale until it disappeared. She scrambled over to stand in front of the three-foot brass rod topped by the diamond.

“Okay,” she muttered. “This is it.” She grabbed the diamond and pulled. It moved about a foot. Nothing happened. She put her weight into it. It slowly descended. The big gear in roughly the center of the machine began to turn slowly. Smaller wheels spun into action. The machine came alive. The diamond vibrated under her hands. Power hung in the air like a coiled spring waiting to be released. The tension grew almost unbearable in her chest. Whirring gears assaulted her eardrums.

Don’t faint. Don’t faint. Think of the time you want to go to.
Suddenly the myriad jewels seemed to light from within, sending colored beams careening around the ceiling. The machine leaped into brilliant focus.
Okay. Okay.
She tried to calm herself.
Camelot. Back to the time when everything was possible.

The machine slowed until all was still, as though even time had stopped. Disappointment drenched her. How stupid had she been to believe this was all true?

A scream of power tore through the room. She couldn’t breathe. The gears all spun into action almost instantly and she had a feeling of being flung forward, like a slingshot, as her body tore into a million pieces under the stress.

Or maybe it was her mind. The past was dark . . . black even . . . then nothing.

Diana heard herself choking before she was fully conscious. She waded her way up through eddies of fog, the kind that only came to San Francisco in January. But when she opened her eyes, no fog enveloped her. She was lying in the middle of . . . where? She sat up slowly and her head ached. . . . A ragged circle of standing stones marched around her. The machine loomed above her, quiescent. Stars blinked in the black velvet sky she associated with deserts or mountains, away from city lights. More stars than she had ever seen were dusted across the creamy swaths of organza that were the Milky Way. The only light was a sort of orange glow off to her left.

My God. Where am I?
She surely wasn’t in the basement of the Rotunda anymore. She gasped for air and scrambled to her knees, looking around frantically.

Smoke filled her lungs. Coughing, she turned toward the glow. She and the machine were in the open at the crest of a hill crowned with the huge circle of stones.

What have I done?
How could she have been so rash as to just take a time machine back to God knew where?
Get hold of yourself,
she thought sternly.
Just get back. Start the machine up. . . .
But what if this was actually Camelot? Shouldn’t she just take a look?

She glanced around but didn’t see anybody threatening, so she took a couple of tentative steps toward the edge of the circle of stones in the direction of the glow. The slopes of the hill were covered by woods. In the valley below, across a broad river, buildings surrounded by wooden palisades were burning. Tiny figures clashed in the meadow in front of the gates. Horses reared. Swords gleamed red in the light from the flames. People staggering under packs of their belongings streamed through a cluster of huts toward the river, dodging swords and hooves.

She clapped her hand over her mouth in excitement. This wasn’t a reenactment. This was actually a city from a really long time ago. She was a time traveler! Maybe it wasn’t magic, but it was close. Even as she watched, wind swept showers of sparks like a swarm of hellish insects to the near side of the river. The fire flickered and took hold in the grass. It swept toward the woods on her hill.
Uh-oh.

But this palisade and its few poor wooden turrets couldn’t be the legendary Camelot. She knew not to expect the crenellated towers of the Medieval drawings. But this? Maybe the Camelot that provided the proverbial shining moment was yet to be completed and this was some primitive precursor, long before Arthur and Guinevere were born.

Her visit might be short, no matter where she’d landed. The fire was gaining momentum as it hit the brush of the forest. Flames chewed their way up the hill, leaping from treetop to treetop. She had to get out of here.

She knelt and began to power up the switches again, but before she could complete the sequence a man and a boy ran up through the standing stones.

Diana jerked back, her eyes widening.

They were dressed in jerkins and leather leggings. The man, maybe a little past middle age and clean shaven, was big and rugged, with dark hair. He could be called
handsome, with those cheekbones. She could see little more in the dark. The boy was gangly, all elbows and knees, at the age when his joints still seemed put together with rubber bands. One couldn’t miss the resemblance between the two.

Both had eyes only for the machine. As they came closer, the father held up a hand. Glowing sparkles danced in the air and formed themselves into a ball that cast brilliant light over both people and machine. Diana gasped. The man’s eyes were piercing blue or maybe green, proof that there had already been some Nordic stock intermixed in the local population. Still, light eyes would be really unusual in this time. The color of the older man’s eyes seemed to shift and change as he fixed her with a gaze so powerful, it shook her right down to her ankles. She tried to calm her breathing.
Okay.
Sparkles and changing eye color. Magic
was
possible here.

The boy tore his own light eyes from the machine to ask his father, “Is it magic then?”

“Mayhaps,” his father muttered, studying the machine. “Or it may be the work of men.”

“Not any men we know,” the boy snorted, his eyes still wide with wonder.

Diana understood it, at least pieces of it. And they weren’t speaking Latin. Assuming she had actually come back to Dark Age Britain, it must be . . . Brythonic Proto-Celtic. How could she understand even a word? She blinked at them, her mind frozen.

“Is she a goddess, or a witch?” the boy asked. “Her clothes are not like ours.”

She swallowed and said slowly, “I am neither,” picking the words from her memory. Her breath came fast and shallowly. This was the language she’d spoken after they found her wandering in Chicago, before she’d learned English. Her eyes filled. What did this mean?

“She speaks our language, Father!” the lad said in the same tongue. He was brave in the face of what must look like sorcery to him.

Her brain clicked into gear as she stood there blinking. No surprise the social workers in Chicago hadn’t recognized Proto-Celtic. How had she not known? But it wasn’t a language you just happened on, like the Old English of
Beowulf.
She’d never seen anything written in it, never heard anyone speak it. While it sounded vaguely Welsh or Gaelic or something, it . . . it wasn’t.

She spoke
Proto-Celtic
?

“Who are you?” the father asked her. She hadn’t known what he would say. The boy, either, come to think of it.

“I am Diana Dearborn,” she said carefully. The words came easier now, as if the language had been lurking inside her, waiting to flow. “I come from the future time.”

“And these metal wheels brought you here?” the man said, putting out a reverent hand to touch the nearest gear. He set the sparkling ball of light free and it floated near his shoulder.

“It looks like a mill, Father, only more finely wrought, in metal.”

“I, of anyone, should know that time is not linear. Space, either,” the man murmured, caressing the jewels. She didn’t catch all of that. He glanced back over his shoulder at her. “I have seen you in my scrying pool. Not in the full flower of womanhood, but as an untried girl.”

“You . . . you know me?”

He smiled, and it was as though the clouds that foretold rain raced across his eyes, making them a swirling gray. “I do not. I only know you are important.”

Her? Important? The man was mad.

“Is . . . is this Camelot?”

“Oh, aye. Or was.” Those two words held all the sorrow in the world. He shook himself. “But we must face the
future without it now.” He turned toward the woods and waited.

A crashing sounded in the underbrush and a man stumbled into the clearing between the standing stones. He had a fierce face, with a jutting nose and sharp angles. He was dressed for battle, with linked chain mail over a leather jerkin and greaves of hardened leather on shins and forearms. He carried a sword almost as tall as he was, and he’d been using it, to judge by the blood on it and on him. Some of it was his, leaking from a slash on his upper arm just below the short sleeve of his chain mail. His dark hair was plastered to his head with sweat.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” the man with the strange-colored eyes said.

“You know why I’m here,” the newcomer panted, his palms braced on his thighs. Diana was shocked to find she couldn’t predict what he would say, either. Had her curse entirely disappeared in this time? “With your support I can hold against the Saxon hordes. . . .” He trailed off as he seemed to notice the great machine for the first time. He was too exhausted to react violently, but he fell silent as he tried to understand what it might be.