A Bride Worth Billions (8 page)

Do you want to know what a highlander does when he sees a young woman crying in the mud like a crazy person? Well, first off, he horribly beats the man responsible for making the young woman cry like a crazy person. Second, he picks you up out of the mud and carries you off someplace safe and quiet so that said crazed woman can weep without five or six hundred people staring at her. Third, because said crazy woman won’t stop crying, he promises to help find the thing that is making the woman cry no longer how long it takes.

When Shaun said this, I did indeed stop crying, but I’m quite positive that he regretted making the promise the minute the words tumbled out of his mouth. Because the fact was, we were traveling down a blind road in a war torn country, chasing after a group of people who were part of a clan considered to be enemies of the state. And no, Scotland isn’t a big country, but its people know how to hide, they know how to disappear. The fact was, what we’re going to attempt to do was near impossible. But we did, indeed, do it, and our search went on for close to two years and would change us both.   

                                                                                             ***

The first year of the search for my transponder was the most dangerous year I have ever lived. What was most dangerous about it wasn’t the roving bands of English soldiers or the Comyn-Balliol. It was so dangerous because I am truly a creature of the 21st century. Although I’ve studied various histories and cultures my entire life and felt that I had a real understanding of how these ancient peoples lived. But mind you, I learned all of these “facts” while sitting in my 1500 square foot apartment complete with central air and heating.

I lived in an environment where food was always available to me and never had to hunt it, and in most cases I didn’t have to even cook it. All I needed to do was stick it in a microwave or in the oven and wait. If my clothes ripped, I would throw out the garment instead of trying to repair it and simply go and buy a new one. If I got sick, all I would need to do was visit a doctor and he would fix whatever ailed me. I never had to worry about dying from diseases like mumps or measles or chicken pox, or even the common cold.

But in 12th century Scotland, all of these things weren’t just a concern, these things were a matter of life and death, and even though in my old life I studied and worried over these ancient techniques and ways of life because I was concerned about the grade I was receiving on a test, but I never truly understood the effort it took to simply remain alive on a day-to-day basis. But this was my life in the first year of our search for the transponder, and it was hellish.

Shaun basically had to teach me to do everything, and I had to come up with convincing lies on why I couldn’t even do the most basic things like thread the eye of a needle or start a fire with rock and flint. Also, my body was not conditioned to withstand the constant weather shifts of Scotland. The first winter basically lasted for six months, and while it never snowed in the areas we searched, but we were under a near-constant freezing drizzle that chilled you to the bone and left you shivering and feverish night after night. And even when the spring came and the days were warmer and blooming, you could still expect at least one hour of rain a day. But the most frightening moment was the day Shaun was injured and the long weeks following his recovery.

I wish I could tell you that Shaun’s injury happened in battle defending my honor. But that didn’t happen. He was injured because he was trying to milk a goat, and one of the male billies rammed him and left a deep puncture on the left-hand side of his stomach. At first, he tried to laugh the wound off and make light of the fact that he’d been attacked by a goat. But after several days, he could barely walk and he had a high fever. The wound had become infected and he was in severe need of rest and shelter. Thankfully we had set up camp in a shallow cave, so at the very least we had shelter and place he could rest. But what he truly needed was antibiotic to kill the infection; an antibiotic I had an abundance of hidden in my pack.

Despite the fact it had been a year since I had lost my transponder, I still clung to the hope that we would one day find it and I could return home. I also still held to the belief that I shouldn’t corrupt the past with future science. I still felt that I needed to let nature take its course. But night-after-night as I sat with Shaun’s fevered head in my lap, wiping the sweat from his brow and forcing him to drink water, I came to the realization that chances were that I would never be returning to my own time and that this lovely, humble man was the only thing I had in this new world, and if he dies, I would be completely lost and alone.

So I did the unthinkable and I started giving him antibiotic and small amounts of pain reliever so that he could sleep and hopefully recover. The antibiotic worked almost immediately and his fever broke, and the pain reliever allowed him some much-needed rest. But he still needed weeks to recover afterward. During those weeks as I cared for him, at first feeding him by hand, dressing and redressing his wounds, I realized that I’d never cared for anyone as much as I did for Shaun. In my own time, I always felt I never had enough time to pursue a relationship of any sort. I was too busy with my education and then I was too busy with my job. And yes, there was sex. Meaningless encounters with utterly forgettable men who only satisfied my most base needs. But there never was any love.

It was entirely different with Shaun. This was a man I needed not just for his body, but for his soul as well. He was my protector and I was his. Several weeks after he was fully recovered, we sat next to our cook fire quietly watching the orange-yellow flames when he reached over and took my hand in his. He kissed the now rough skin of my knuckles and then gently leaned forward and shyly kissed me. When he broke away, he seemed almost embarrassed for being so forward, but then I pulled him hard into my arms slightly giggling at how his cheeks colored. But then his kiss became deeper, and I knew at that moment, no matter what the future held, I would never leave his arms.

                                                                                ***

So I suppose you want to know if we ever found my transponder? The answer is yes, we did, and we found it at almost the exact same spot where we had begun our journey two years earlier in Glasgow. The fact is we had given up on ever finding it and we had returned to Glasgow because the fighting between the English and the forces of Robert The Bruce had become too fierce for us to remain in the highlands and we sought out the safety of the city.

On the very day we arrived, we walked the muddy, crowded streets with all of the other refugees and we passed a wagon which had a large amount of various kinds of jewelry laid out on a blanket. We were so tired from our journey that most likely we would’ve passed right by it. But as we passed, something caught Shaun’s eyes and he pulled me to a stop and pointed at the transponder sitting at the very center of the blanket. We looked at each other, shock and surprise spreading across our faces, and then we both began to laugh. We laughed so hard that tears sprang from our eyes and we had to hold one another up. When we finally calmed down, Shaun kissed me and asked:

“Would you like me to buy it back for you?”

All I did was shake my head and pull him back into the throng of people milling about on the streets and forgot about the past.

THE END

My father always said I was never meant to be a girl. My mother had already given birth to three healthy and happy baby girls when she became pregnant with me, and everyone in our village—including the mid-wife—thought for certain I would come out of my Ma screaming bloody murder with a full set of teeth and a sword and shield in my hand ready to fight the English right alongside my Da. All of the signs were there. Ma barely gained an ounce of weight other than the typical baby bulge and she was never once sick, unlike how she’d been with all my sisters, all of who left her bedridden and constantly throwing up her last meal the second after she finished eating it.

But when I popped out, there was no denying what was between—or what wasn’t—my legs. I was a girl through and through, and I would be Ma’s last child because when she pushed me out, I really didn’t want to come into the world and I grabbed a bunch of her innards to stop myself from sliding out. And it’s not that Da was disappointed that he had another girl, but you know how men are, they get lonely without a little male companionship, particularly in their own house. At the time of my birth, if you didn’t count the dogs, Da was outnumbered 4-to-1; with the dogs it was 8-to-2. So he’d been hoping that with me, I would even the tide a bit, and he could pass down the highlander ways, which none of my sisters had a bit of interest in learning.

And who could really blame them? Ma had convinced all of them that a woman’s place was in the home. That when a highlander returned from the battlefield, he needed to come home to a clean and cozy house and a hot supper. But when she tried passing these things along to me, I was all thumbs. Well, not so much all thumbs, it was more like every time I picked up a plate or a broom, I would want to do battle with them. Da would see me and fall out of his chair laughing, but I drove Ma to her wits end, particularly when I would whip plates at my sister’s heads and giggle madly when they’d scramble.

Da took this as a sign that even though I wasn’t a boy, I was definitely a warrior born and he took it upon himself to teach me the way of the sword. I’ll tell ya, you’ve never seen a man prouder or happier, and to be blunt, I couldn’t have been happier either. I understood that a woman’s work was vital to the community, without them there wouldn’t be a community, it would just be a bunch of men in nay a stitch of clothing and living in caves or up in the trees smelling like their leavings with beards down to their belly buttons. Highlanders needed their women just like they needed men to protect what they made (Not that most highlander women needed protecting. My Ma was just as handy with a sword as any man I’ve ever met, which is the reason why I think Da fell in love with her.).

But women’s work just didn’t come naturally to me and no matter how much time and effort Ma put into training me was going to change that. But when it came to the sword, I was an absolute natural. Da put my first blade in my hand at the age of five—a real blade, not just a wooden one like my friends trained and played with—and by the time I was eight, I could match most men twice my age at swordplay. Next Da but me to work with a bow and arrow, I wasn’t quite as skilled with it. Its weight and feel were awkward in my grip. Plus, a bow felt like a coward’s way of killing or injuring a man. I needed to have the man I was fighting right there in front of me; I needed to see his face as I sank my blade into his flesh. I needed to see the pain and anguish. Aye, I know that sounds a bit harsh, but it’s how I felt. Of course, at this young point in my life, the only things I’d killed were horseflies and a squirrel or two.

It took me a long time to master the bow, nearly five years’ time all told. And I wouldn’t exactly say I mastered it, it was more like I’d become efficient enough to bring down a deer with a single arrow as opposed to shooting my entire quiver at it. It would do just as well against a man as well, but probably not so good against something larger like a bear. Of course, I’d have to be daft to shoot at something like a bear. If I saw one of those giant beasts come charging at me, you can betcha that I would be running as fast as I could in the other direction.

When I turned sixteen just as other girls are beginning to receive suitors, Da decided to have me join my first war party and go and hunt some English.

It’s a bit of an understatement to say that my clan doesn’t play well with others. It’s a sad state of affairs, but the fact is we just can’t get in bed with England like the rest of the nobles have. My clan’s thinking is that if you’re not Scottish, ya don’t have a bit of a right to step foot on our lands. So when it comes to the English, well, we think of ‘em as nothing more than the dirty invading and pillaging hoard that they are. The rest of the clans don’t exactly agree with our point of view and would rather keep the peace at any cost, including colluding with the English and accepting their titles and lands as bribes. As far as we’re concerned, the other clans is just as English as the Englishmen, the only difference being that their mothers plopped them out on Scottish soil.

So for as long as I’ve been alive, we’ve been at war with one clan or another who try to keep us in line, or we’ve been at war with the English. Alright, then, we’ve always been at war with the English long before I was even in a glimmer in my Ma’s eyes, or even when my Da was but a glimmer in his Ma’s eye. And I suspect that we’ll always be at war with them in one way or another. The only way to stop us from killing the English is if they burn us all to a crisp and then bury the ashes. But even then, almighty God would probably resurrect us so that we could haunt them as ghosts and hunt them in their dreams.

With my first war party, we were not at odds with any clan, so I’d be only hunting English, but my father warned me that if another clan raised their banner against us, I’d have to be prepared to raise my sword against my fellow countrymen. I didn’t exactly know how I felt about that? I mean, we were all one people, one race. But I understood Scottish who made the pledge to the English were English, so I’d have to put any personal feelings about my race aside if we were threatened.

In case, you’re wondering what a war party is you’re probably daft and need to be spoon fed by your granny and have your soiled knickers changed by your Ma. But I know that some folks are sheltered and have no real knowledge of the world at large, so here’s what it is. A war party is a group of fifteen heavily armed highlanders who go far afield for sometimes months at a time either guarding the clan’s holdings or openly hunting the English. No, a war party isn’t large enough to take on a whole army, but at the very least it would put a serious hurting on an army before they wiped the war party off the face of existence.

My first war party was to be gone for an entire month. A whole month sleeping out of doors and killing or foraging our food every day. And moist of the time fires would only be used for cooking and then extinguished so our enemies wouldn’t be able to track us by the light of our fires or by the smell of them. It was going to be a month if hard living, but I had waited my entire life for this moment, so I wanted to take full advantage of it and treasure each and every waking moment. But here’s the thing with being on a war party, there aren't a lot of wars involved and it isn’t much of a party either.

Mostly it involved running all day long and hiding in caves and occasionally sleeping in trees because my Da thought it would do us a bit of good to learn how to do so just in case were caught somewhere where there were no mountains or caves to hide in. But this was the issue with going on a war party with Da. Da is the very definition of a Scotsman, and that goes doubly so as a highlander. Da is practical and pragmatic, he doesn’t make decisions rashly. And he absolutely loves repetition and mastering your chosen craft.

When I was but a girl of seven, my oldest sister was in a fit about something or other—most likely some boy as she was fourteen years old at the time—and as she paced and shouted at Ma, I put my foot out in front of her and watched her tumble to the ground. She got more than a little upset with me because of my little joke and she came at me with her teeth bared and trying to scratch me like a cat. Well, I wasn’t about to let her claw my eyes out or nothing like that, so I wrestled her to the ground and pulled her arm up behind her back. I had her squealing like a pig and crying her eyes out by the time Ma got me off of her.

Ma insisted that Da punish me for tripping my sister, so as he decided my punishment, he had me haul load after a load of wood out of the barn into Ma’s wood shed. All morning long, Da sat smoking his pipe and scratching his chin wondering about how to go about punishing me. After an hour or so hauling the logs, I started yelling out to him:

“Have ya figured it out yet?”

And he would just stare at me, his eyebrows knitted in concentration and say back:

“Not yet. Just keep hauling that wood.”

After two hours, I started making suggestions to him on how I should be punished because I was so sick and tired of stacking wood.

“Maybe you can just cut a switch?”

“How about I get no treats after supper?”

“How about you send me to bed with no supper?”

“How about you just throw me down in the root cellar for a week or two?”

With all of them, he would just shake his head and tell me to keep hauling.

Finally, I’d cleared the entire barn of wood and was now fit to overflow out of the woodshed. Then I finally asked:

“So now what? I’m out of wood to stack.”

“Alright then, I guess you can go on inside,” He said as he stood up stretch his back. “And by the way, I kind of like that have you go to bed without any supper idea you came up with. Let’s go with that for your punishment.”

And this was exactly what it was like to be on a war party with my Da. He was slow to make up his mind and appreciated when you offered him a suggestion on how to do something. Now mind you, he didn’t want the idea pushed down his throat, but he’d consider it and take it serious all the same. And my Da loved to make us drill why he sat making up his mind about things like which direction to into or whether or not we should sneak up on a small band of English or just attack ‘em full bore. It was a bit bothersome, but he rarely made a false move or endangered his people unnecessarily. Besides, he was the head of the entire clan so it wasn’t like you could tell him to bugger off without committing treason, and that went doubly for me.

It was two weeks into my first war party that Da had to make this kind of decision that made him sit and ponder all day. But it was an important one. Our runners had spotted a small band of English traveling through the far corner of the clan’s holdings. Ten soldiers plus mounts and they were no more than 3 miles away. Because they were on the far southern border, there was a better chance than not that they were moving onto somewhere else, or they could be heading north right into the heart of our lands. Whatever the case was, they both made Da nervous. Ten soldiers all on horses was a bit of a challenge. Well, not a bit exactly, downright impossible when it comes right down to it.

When you encounter a riding party of any size, it's best that you have the men to also match the horses. So if you’re fighting a party of twenty mounted soldiers, you needed to attack with at least forty men if not more. A horse enhanced a warrior’s height, weight, speed, and striking ability. You basically had to kill the horse along with its rider. But what else Da had to consider was the fact that the clan could use all of the things the soldiers were carrying. Their weapons, they’re armor, their clothing, their food, the horses themselves. The clans could and would reuse all of these things, and because of this wealth, it made a bit of sense to attack them.

After the sighting was reported to him, Da had us sit around for half the day as he decided what our course of action should be. As the sun began to set, turning the day into night, Da announced:

“Alright, then, we’ll find them in a little bit. We’ll take care of them at night while they’re not expecting us.”

It didn’t take us long to spot ‘em because they had a massive bonfire burning as bright as day and were roasting some kind of fresh meat while singing songs. There was even a better chance than not they were drinking as well. As we watched them stumble about, Da leaned into my ear.

“They’ll be sleeping well tonight, that’s when we’ll take them.”

Attacking men in their sleep, I didn’t know how I felt about that? I know now that if the roles had been reversed, the Englishmen wouldn’t hesitate to kill a highlander in their sleep. It was the path of least resistance. But back during my first war party, I was only sixteen, I was young and idealistic and always believed that the best course of action was to face a man on the battlefield, one-on-one, blade-to-blade. But I followed Da’s orders and we snuck down to the English camp a couple of hours after they all went to sleep. The English were so overconfident that they didn’t even bother to post a sentry.

We tiptoed between the sleeping bodies and that’s when Da showed me what he wanted me to do. He held a long dagger up to my face in the moonlight and then he plunged into the sleeping man’s neck and he died not making a sound and perhaps not even knowing he was dying. He then put the knife into my hand and pointed at the man sleeping a few feet away from the one he’d just done in. I’d never killed a man before and this wasn’t exactly how I pictured myself taking a man to his maker. I took the knife and we snuck over to where the man was snoring as peaceful as he could be. I stared at his face for a moment, trying to memorize the look of him so that I’d never forget it and would recognize him even in my dreams, and then I brought the dagger down and it caught in his neck.

The Englishman sat straight up, my father’s blade sticking out of his neck, spurting blood, and he’s screaming at the top of his lungs. Our party had already killed most of the men, but those who were still living had been rousted from their sleep by my man’s caterwauling and the party had to act quickly before the soldiers could arm themselves. At that moment, the man stared over at me, his eyes locking with mine, and I saw all of the pain welling up in them. I saw the shock and surprise that dying brings on; it was like he was stuck between this world and the next, and it was my job to usher him the rest of the way there. But in that long, painful moment, I froze up and felt like I wanted to scream in fear, too. But my fear was because of the thing I had done and how the good lord would punish me for this later on.

It seemed like hours, but I know it was mere seconds, my father finally pulled his dagger from the screaming soldier’s neck and then properly cut his throat. Da held the knife under my nose, making me smell the copper tang of the blood. He then made me hold out my shaking hand and he gently placed the blade in it.

“His life is yours now. You always carry the blade as a reminder that he was once alive and to also remind you never to hesitate like that again. That could have just easily been your blood on that knife, you know?”

I stared at the knife, my eyes welling with tears, but I sniffed them back. This was the life I’d chosen and for as long as I’ve lived, I’ve never forgotten that screaming soldier. In fact, he comes to visit me every night along with all the others that I’ve taken.