Borrowed Time (16 page)

“A little more than that, but, yes,” Kate answered in a low voice. “I realize I may seem a little obsessive, but is it so wrong to wish I could have saved her from being burned? She was such a remarkable person and it was such a horrible fate.”

“Yes, it was.” Cylene sighed. “I guess I’ll have to stay the other woman in your life.”

#

The first thing a graduate student learned was that being a grad student consisted of nine parts drudgery to one part learning. Kate and two other grad students were drudging away evaluating under-graduate papers when Professor Barandila poked his head into the room they were using. “Kate, I need some assistance in my lab. Are you available?”

Kate perked up, aware of the other students casting envious glances at her. Prof Barandila’s lab was off-limits, leading to constant speculation about what he was working on. Now Kate would be in a position to find out. “Can you guys handle the rest of these?” she asked her fellow grad students.

They nodded with different degrees of resignation and Kate followed as Barandila shuffled to his lab with a defeated air. “I need the lab papers collected and archived. It has to be completed this week. Don’t worry about the equipment. That will be dismantled later.”

“Oh.” Kate looked from the professor to the massive gleaming hollow cube formed of wires and tubing. “It didn’t work?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows.” Barandila walked over to the equipment and gazed at it morosely. “There’s no sense in not telling somebody now. This should be a working time travel device, something capable of placing a human being in the past and then recovering that person.”

“Isn’t that impossible?”

“Anything is impossible if you don’t do it right!” Barandila pointed to his device. “Time doesn’t even exist if you do the equations properly. The problem was in repositioning someone to a different place, a place they couldn’t be in. Have you heard of tunneling? Yes? A particle goes from one place to another place it cannot go, yet it does? That’s very simplified, but that’s the principle this device uses. It doesn’t actually move something through time, it just establishes conditions under which that object is actually in another time.”

“But, it doesn’t work?” Kate asked again.

“It seems to work.” His burst of energy gone, Barandila slumped against a desk. “But we can’t use a human test subject unless we know it’s safe. Rules and regulations. Animals aren’t even permitted unless it’s proven safe for robots first. We tried using robots, then just cameras and sound recorders. They were all disabled, none of them brought back samples. Something about the travel device wipes everything on any recording device we’ve tried. It’s just blank. The return device seems to work, but is it really returning them? Are they really going anywhere? The return is the instant after they left. It has to be, so there’s no proof anything went anywhere, no proof it is safe, and without that proof we can do nothing.”

“Why not just send something back in time a couple of hours? A note or something?”

Barandila mustered a smile at the suggestion. “Good thinking. We tried that. Nothing happened. It may be a problem with trying to make an object simultaneously exist twice, which is what would happen if we sent something back a short time, and there are no conditions we can establish in which an object or living thing simultaneously exists twice. As far as we can tell the universe will not accept that.” He shrugged. “One more thing that didn’t work. So the machine will be taken apart next Monday.”

“Next Monday?” That left six days. Kate couldn’t take her eyes off of the device, a wonderful and frightening idea coming to her. “Professor, since they’re taking it apart soon, would you mind showing me how it works?”

#

It felt ridiculous sneaking into the university lab complex after midnight with her armor. Being caught with a weapon on campus, even a sword, would get her into major trouble. But Kate kept on going, wondering if she really was far too obsessive for her own good.

But then she thought of Joan. Thought of her tied to the stake as the flames rose.

Kate kept on going.

She put on her armor, trying to imagine any possible cover story if she got caught by campus security. The contents of the bag tied to her waist were illegal on or off campus, but she needed what was in there even though the cost had made her cringe. Kate had to leave her gauntlets off to set the controls, specifying the date, time and location as precisely as she could, making sure the return device was firmly attached to her wrist.

Taking up position on the platform which Professor Barandila had indicated, Kate closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and then winced in shock as sunlight flared around her.

#

Rouen in May, 1431 AD was crowded, dirty and overrun with English merchants, knights and other soldiers. The city had been controlled by England for more than a decade, so the invaders carried themselves with easy familiarity. Kate, hidden behind her armor, had to talk her way past guards at the city gate who laughed at what seemed to be the spectacle of a knight who was walking because ‘he’ couldn’t afford a horse.

She had an idea for getting a horse, though.

It wasn’t too hard to find where Joan’s public appearance was going to take place. Many people were heading that way, speculating about the Maid, wondering if the devil or God’s angels would appear to save her.

Two elevated platforms had been set up, a small one for Joan and her guards, and a larger one for the inquisitors. The crowd around the platforms seemed a solid mass, but on the outskirts squires stood holding the horses of their masters. Kate walked confidently toward the squires, ignoring their speculative looks.

She stopped in front of two horses which looked very promising, massive war steeds resembling the Belgian draft horses of her own time. The two squires holding them looked at each other nervously, then Kate couched her voice in what she hoped sounded like a man’s tones through her helmet, also hoping that the old English phrases she had wheedled out of a fellow grad student and hastily memorized were accurate enough to be understood. “Your masters need their horses to accompany the Earl of Warwick. Come along.”

The armor concealed her nervousness as Kate turned with the casual arrogance she had seen in alpha girls on campus, and began heading toward the platform where Joan was already being subjected to public trial, humiliation and intimidation under threat of immediate death by burning. Kate could hear the squires leading the horses behind her as Kate shouldered her way through the crowd, making free use of her armor to plow ahead. The citizens of Rouen and English spectators gave way reluctantly and angrily, but in the manner of people everywhere didn’t question someone else who seemed to know what they were doing. Eventually Kate reached a point near the platform holding the Maid of Orleans.

Joan looked awful, weak from illness and maltreatment, worn down by the constant harassment of her inquisitors. In a little while, Kate knew, after holding out against physical and mental torment for a year she would finally bend enough under threat of being burned alive to sign a recantation even though Joan didn’t know what the recantation actually said. A few days later Joan would be declared in violation of recantation, tied to the stake and burned to death.

That had happened, but none of it would happen, if Kate could help it.

Kate faced the squires again, who were looking around for their masters in puzzlement. “I’m to ride one of the horses and lead the other.” She moved to mount the horse which seemed steadier.

“But, sir -!” the squire holding that horse protested as Kate barely managed to hoist herself and the weight of her armor into the saddle.

The English men nearby were eyeing Kate, some of them putting their hands to their sword hilts. A gaudily-dressed English noble trailed by three knights was coming toward her in the same manner Kate had seen police officers use to approach a potential trouble-maker.

Kate reached into the bag at her waist and pulled out two of the flash-bang grenades she’d gotten from a gun-nut acquaintance who had bought them over the internet. Everyone watched, trying to figure out what she was doing, as Kate pulled the pins on the two grenades, counted to three, then tossed them to either side into the crowd and gripped her seat in the saddle as tightly as she could.

The grenades exploded with thunderclaps of noise and intensely bright flashes of light designed to disorient people but not inflict injury. Those nearby fell away with startled cries, rubbing their eyes and falling to the knees in surprise. Kate had already seized the bridle of the other horse, and now converted their panicked bolt into a charge toward Joan.

Everyone in the area was looking at her now, including the band of religious inquisitors on the larger platform. As her horses pulled up short of the small platform, Kate hauled out more grenades, pulling the pins and tossing them toward the guards and other men near Joan, at the large platform with an unspoken wish that the grenade would blow off the nose of the noxious Bishop Cauchon, and out into the crowd again. The crash and flare of the explosions scattered people everywhere the grenades burst, some fleeing in panic and others disoriented and unable to muster resistance.

“Joan!” Kate yelled. “To me!” Joan hesitated only a moment, then leaped forward and down onto the second horse. More English knights were coming, forcing their way through the terrified crowd. Kate tossed more grenades at them, then her mount and Joan’s were stampeding toward and through the fleeing crowd.

It took all but one of Kate’s flash-bang grenades to clear a path and throw off pursuit, then she and Joan’s mounts were thundering toward the main gate of Rouen while arrows and crossbow bolts flew toward them. The last flash-bang broke up a line of pikemen at the gate itself, then Kate hauled out her last weapon, a homemade thermite grenade courtesy of a design a physics major had obligingly drawn up for her under the pretext of researching a story. She dropped the weapon in the center of the gate as they went through, the grenade flaring to life in an intense blaze which would block the gate for a good while.

This would make a great movie
, Kate thought through her relief and elation as the two riders tore away from the city.

They kept going until Rouen could no longer be seen and Joan slowed their exhausted horses to a walk, then the Maid turned her eyes on Kate. “Who are you, sir, who hurls lightning from your hands?”

Kate laughed and pulled off her helmet, dizzy with relief. “I’m Kate.”

Joan stared. “A woman? Such as myself?” Crossing herself, Joan shook her head. “Or are you instead an angel or a witch?”

“Neither, I’m just a woman.”

“That has been my argument,” Joan said. “You saw how well it has served me.”

“Well, yeah.” Kate pulled out the crucifix she wore out of habit and her devotion to Joan. “See? I’m okay.”

“Oh-kay?” Joan studied the crucifix. “Can you make the holy sign?”

“Cross myself, you mean? Sure.” Kate had been raised Catholic, but had stopped believing in the rituals and the male-dominated hierarchy long ago. She still knew the gestures, though. “See? I can recite the Lord’s Prayer, too.”

“Without stumbling?” Joan asked in a self-mocking manner. “I won’t ask that of you, since I wouldn’t yield when they demanded it of me in hopes I would offer them some grounds for their charges. But if you are but a woman, how did you discomfort the English so?”

“The grenades? They’re like petards, just better.”

“Much better! You didn’t have to light them so the English had no warning of their use. Do you have many?”

Kate shook her head. “I used all of them getting us out of Rouen.”

“Then we must fear pursuit, even though your weapons surely delayed the English.” Joan turned her horse off the road, leading the way across country at the best pace the steeds could maintain. “We must move fast and along quiet ways, hidden by tree, hillock and bush. But then you know this.”

“Yes. Yes, I do,” Kate agreed quickly, looking backwards in sudden worry.

For her part, Joan looked ahead, breathing deeply. “St. Catherine told me I would be saved, and a woman named Kate has fulfilled her promise. How can anyone doubt the word of God? Surely now His hand will guide us as our enemies seek us.”

“We can go somewhere safe now,” Kate said eagerly. “Where no enemies can find us. Completely safe.” Joan gave her a questioning glance, amazingly bright eyes under dark hair cut short in the current male fashion, as Kate continued. “I can take us both there.”

“Where is this place?”

“My home. Very far from here, but we can get there instantly.”

Joan’s glance was measuring now. “But you are not a sorceress or a demon sent to tempt me?”

“No!”

“Very far from here,” Joan repeated. “Your French is odd. Your home must be far from France indeed.”

“Yes,” Kate admitted.

“Could we return as quickly?”

“No.”

“Could we return ever?”

As quick thinking as her trial record had revealed, Joan had immediately asked the questions which Kate had hoped wouldn’t come up until much later. Now Kate willed herself to lie, to assure Joan that yes of course they could, but instead the word “no” came from her.

Joan nodded, took another deep breath, then smiled at Kate. “Then I cannot go there, even if you are an angel. I must go south again, find my friends, and serve the kingdom of France and my Lord.”

“Charles? King Charles? Who left you a prisoner and did
nothing
to help you?”

“My Lord is God,” Joan said softly, her eyes forward again. “I serve King Charles, who I would ask you not to disparage, I serve the kingdom of France, I serve the people of France, but I serve my Lord first.”

“Um, excuse me.” Kate hadn’t thought it would be hard to convince Joan, who had been betrayed by her own side, treated horribly by the English, and had just narrowly escaped a painful death. It hurt to look at her, to see the marks of illness and maltreatment. “You’ve already done what you need to do. The English will leave France. It’ll take a while yet, but they’ll lose.”