Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (13 page)

“—dummy,” Merle finished, five hundred years in the future. Then he commenced falling.

The math of a five-hundred-year jump was, it turned out, tricky. He hadn’t reappeared in his lab or even on solid ground. He found himself, instead, crashing downward through a canopy of leaves, then another, then grasping hold of a lean branch that bowed, snapped, and deposited him roughly on the forest floor. Archimedes fluttered down to meet him.

Mick punched Merle in the arm.

“Ow! Why?”

“Yeh hadn’t said anythin’ for a bit,” said Mick. “Thought yeh needed perkin’ up.”

“I was thinking!”

“So where did you end up?” asked Scott.

“Near as I can tell, Costa Rica somewhere. I don’t know for sure because I discover at this point that there don’t seem to be any satellites for Archie to sync up with. But that’s fine, I think. Five hundred years have passed, technology is probably so different now that Archie can’t recognize it, and vice versa. So I nearly kill myself hiking out of the forest, living off fruit and rainwater, dreaming about my new plan, which is this: I find some future person here who’s invented time travel to the past, and I use it to go back and save my parents and the whole world. I dream about this plan, even though I know there’s something fundamentally wrong with it.”

“What?”

“That if time travel to the past were ever really possible, then the past would be lousy with time travelers. But it wasn’t. Nobody from my time had ever met a time traveler from the future, so what does that say?”

“Maybe …,” said Scott, not yet ready to give up on the possibility. “Maybe all the time travelers were really secret about it,” he said, though he had to admit that didn’t seem very likely.

“Well, whatever, it’s a moot point. Because I spend the next six months traveling the earth, and I never meet another person.”

“Not one?” said Mick. “Not even a fairy?”

“Not even a mouse. Not a creature was stirring. I find canned food, I find a bicycle, but everywhere it’s empty towns, overgrown cities. I’ve jumped too far, and something terrible’s happened.”

“Jeez,” said Scott. Immediately he wished he’d said something a little more profound.

“Yeah. Well. Eventually I can’t take the loneliness anymore, so I ask Archie to jump us again—so far into the future that the earth itself will be dead and gone. Just to be on the safe side I settle on twice the age of the whole universe—twenty-eight billion years—and tell Archie to flip the switch. And he does, and we reappear in a cage in medieval England.”

Again the peasant rattled the wooden cage, which shook the wagon, which prompted the soldier who wasn’t driving to turn and glare.

“Ignore him,” said the driver.

“Please please
please
let me go,” pleaded the peasant.

“We’re under oath to bring you to King Vortigern,” said the soldier.

The peasant pressed against the wooden slats. “When I said I never had a father, I didn’t mean I
never
had a father. I meant I never
knew
my father. He died before I was born.”

“Listen,” said the soldier. “In good sooth? I believe thee. Of course I believe thee. But we’re going to sacrifice thee anyway. We have to look busy.”

“Look, what’s this all about?”

The soldier turned entirely around and addressed the peasant. “King Vortigern has a tower that keeps falling down. His wise men tell him he needs the blood of a boy born without a father, to mix with the mortar. Thou wantest my opinion? I think the wise men just sayeth things like this when they don’t know the answer.”

“Verily,” said the driver.

“Perchance they tellest the king he needs ice in August or a serpent hatched from a cockerel’s egg or some similarly impossible nonsense. And the king tells us to go chase after phantoms. So fine—we get some fresh air and no one can ever check up on the so-called wise men.”

The wagon creaked along the Roman road, in the north of Wales, toward Dinas Emrys, the Castle Ambrosius. Or what would be the Castle Ambrosius, if it didn’t keep falling over.

“So … so let me go,” urged the prisoner, “if it won’t make any difference. You could change your mind and give me my liberty.”

The soldier frowned, clearly confused. “So … thou proposest we take one who hast drawn the lot of sacrificial lamb and … just raise him above his station? Like a promotion?”

“I wasn’t a sacrificial lamb this morning,” argued the prisoner. “I was a peasant.”

“Thou wert always a lamb,” said the soldier as he shook his head and turned his eyes back to the road. “Thou just didst not know it. If Fortuna or … society or what have thee marks thee for death, then thou art a dead man. It’s not our place to argue.”

“Wait now,” said the driver. “Are you saying there’s no upward mobility? None at all? Does not the babe become a boy? Is not the boy promoted to a man? The squire to a knight? A knight to a … a …”

“Aha!” said the soldier. “You see, you’ve stepped in your own snare. Does the knight become a king? No. The greatest knight will stay a knight, and the king will pass his crown to his own son, worthless though he may be. And is not the babe just a young boy? Is not the boy a young man? There’s no upward mobility here, my friend. Each only comes of age and assumes the role he was born to.”

The prisoner listened, and scratched his bottom. Then there was a kind of popping behind him, and he turned to see another man in the cage, holding an owl.

“Marry!” shouted the peasant. “Look here! Fortuna has sent you another lamb, to bleed in my place! A man with an owl! And is the owl not Fortuna’s favorite?”

The soldiers turned to look. “Thou’rt thinking of Minerva,” one said, but they both seemed pretty impressed with the new mystery prisoner.

The man with the owl staggered, looked around him with wild eyes. “Where am I?” he muttered. “When … when am I? How did I get here?”

“You see?” said the peasant, hurling himself against the front of the cage. “How he questioneth, like unto a child! How he gazeth with the eyes of a newborn babe!”

“This is impossible,” Merle murmured. “Twenty-eight billion years into the future, and I’m standing in a donkey cart.”

“What rubbish he gibbers! Surely he was born just now from the ether, a man without a father! Conjured from nothing to meet King Vortigern’s swift justice!”

“Quiet,” said Merle, remembering his Slumbro Mini. He flicked it at the peasant, who fell snoring in a heap in the straw. “Wait. Did that guy just say King Vortigern?”

The soldier in the front of the wagon was still a little dumbfounded, but he nodded. “That’s where we’re taking thee. To Dinas Emrys. We’ll probably sacrifice both of ye, just to be safe.”

“Dinas Emrys,” repeated Merle, taking a seat. “King Vortigern. I know this story. All right, I got nothing else to do. I’ll meet your king.”

CHAPTER 13

They drove the wagon, and Merle with it, off the Roman road and over a rough path cut through the trees. Then straight through a narrow river and up an embankment that had been cleared of anything growing. Gray stones lay in ragged piles around the barest hints of castle walls.

“Ho there!” called a mason to the soldiers. “You’ve strange chickens in that coop!”

“Not chickens,” answered the driver. “Lambs.”

The mason frowned, then seemed to understand. He dropped his head as they passed. “Lord Vortigern is in the west pavilion,” he said soberly.

Beneath a large peaked tent was Vortigern, a big man with a big red beard, dressed in furs and with an unfussy gold circlet atop his head. He strode out to meet the wagon and looked delighted by its contents.

“Two!” bellowed the king. “I’ faith, that’s good work, lads!”

One of the soldiers bowed and immediately set about managing expectations. “My liege. The sleeping one claims now that he hath a father, but that he didst know him not.”

“Fine, fine, we’ll kill him anyway. And the other?”

“I am Merle Lynn!” announced Merle, standing up in the cage, trying both to look and sound imposing. “And I wish to speak with these wise men who would have my blood!”

“God’s teeth! I doubt they’ll like
that
. If thou wert the wise men, wouldst thou want to meet the lambs? I wouldn’t.”

“This one just appeared in the cage,” the soldier explained. “We didn’t even have to catch him.”

Vortigern grinned expansively, shot the grin around the hillock for a bit. “Well, that sounds promising! You have to admit! The wise men might have hit the bull’s-eye on this one. And he has a bird! Cute.”

“Lord Vortigern,” Merle said, undeterred. “I know what you must do to make your tower stand.”

“I bet thou dost. I bet thou dost. And I bet—I’m just guessing, now—but I bet thou thinkest it
doesn’t
require bleeding thou dry and mixing thy blood in the mortar? I’m right, aren’t I. String them up!”

Merle tensed and gripped his Slumbro tight as the cage was set upon by soldiers and laborers. The peasant beside him finally woke.

“Mwuh?” said the peasant as he raised his head.

“Still in the cage,” Merle told him. “Still going to die.”

“AAAH! No!”

“Stay behind me,” said Merle, but the peasant didn’t obey, and when the cage was opened he was grabbed roughly by a half-dozen hands. Merle waved his wand, and the peasant and two soldiers fell asleep.

“That keeps happening,” said the driver.

Vortigern eyed the wand. “He must be a sorcerer.”

“Yes!” said Merle. “A powerful sorcerer! So you’d better—”

“Aha! That’s why his blood’s so good for making buildings out of!” Vortigern concluded. “Magic blood!”

The soldiers and laborers all nodded at one another, saying, “Oh yeah, magic blood.”

“Nuts,” said Merle. He backed away from the door of the cage and was surprised when a pair of arms grabbed him through the bars from behind. Startled, he dropped his Slumbro, and the strong arms of the laborers held him fast.

“Many thanks for putting our lamb to sleep, great sorcerer,” said Vortigern. “So much less thrashing and dolorous lamentation if he sleepeth. Now: we only built the one truss for the sacrificial bleeding, so I’m afraid thou wilt have to wait.”

They were dragging the sleeping peasant toward a wooden frame built over a cauldron. Soon they’d hoist him up on it and cut his throat, Merle supposed, and then his own turn would come.

He promised himself he’d think about it some more when he was no longer under threat of imminent death, but for now Merle figured one of three things had happened: that he’d strained the forces of time and space so considerably during his last jump that he’d gone backward instead of forward somehow; that he’d maybe (and this seemed too fantastic) jumped past the end of the universe and into a virtually identical new one; or that he’d really jumped into oblivion, as expected, and was dying and this was all some crazy dream he was having as his brain ran out of oxygen.

Still—if it was a crazy dream, it was one he’d read about a hundred times.

“Our blood won’t do anything!” he shouted, struggling against the clutches of the king’s men. “Your wise men can’t even tell you why your tower falls! How can they know the solution if they don’t understand the problem?”