Daughter of Time: A Time Travel Romance (2 page)

“
Dw i'n dy garu di.”

“I love you too.” I held out a hand to Anna.
She turned over on her stomach, letting her legs dangle over the
edge of the cushion, slid down from the couch, and ran to me. I
bundled her into her coat, put her on my hip, and reached for my
purse again. “We’ll be back.”

“Bye,” Elisa and
Mom
said in unison.

Anna waved as she always did, her little
fist opening and closing. “Bye.”

Once in my little blue Honda, with Anna
buckled into her car seat in the middle of the back seat, I allowed
myself a deep breath. I leaned my head against the seat rest.
We’ll be okay.
I buckled myself in, started the car, and
headed away from my mother’s house.

It was only four miles to the ice cream
parlor. I took the turns carefully, reliving again, as I did in my
dreams, what must have happened to Trev that night. Halfway there,
I realized we were approaching the spot where he died. I’d been
avoiding it the whole week. How could I have forgotten to take a
different route this time? The intersection lay ahead of us. My
stomach clenched.

I come home from my job at the library on
campus. I’d been able to put Anna in bed before I left, but as I
push open the kitchen door at midnight, I can see through the space
between the kitchen counter and the cupboards into the living room,
which is dark except for the flickering light from the television.
There she is, lying on the couch with her eyes open, watching
something that looks like Jaws 17. I set my books on the kitchen
counter and Trev twists in his armchair. He has a beer in one hand
and a lit cigarette in the other.

I just stand there, staring at him, anger,
recriminations, and hatred boiling up inside me. There’s a moment
when I try to stop them, knowing it’s pointless to complain, trying
to make allowances for the crappy upbringing he had that led him to
this moment. But then they spill out. “Trev,” I say, trying to keep
my voice down and reasonable-sounding. “I’ve asked you not to smoke
in the house. It’s bad for Anna.”

“
It’s fucking cold out there!” he said,
hitching himself higher in the chair. He’s lost so much weight, his
body doesn’t have the mass to stay fixed in the seat anymore and
keeps sliding down it. “I’ll fucking die if I go out
there.”

“
Trev,” I say again. “You’re
smoking.”

“
And I’m fucking dying anyway. Shit,” he
says, getting angry between one instant and the next. He reaches
beside him and throws the pillow in his chair across the room like
a frisbee. It hits the television, which fizzles out. We’ve never
been able to afford a better TV and in that moment, I’m glad. But
Trev is mad.

He pushes out of his chair and approaches
me, taking small mincing steps. He changes his voice to something
whiny and high, a supposed imitation of my own. “Trev,” he says.
“Trev don’t smoke. Trev, you’re keeping Anna awake. She needs her
sleep. Trev, you shouldn’t be drinking while you’re on your
meds.”

I back away, glancing at Anna to see how
she’s taking this. Her eyes are closed. I hope that she really is
asleep, now that the glare from the television is gone, but I don’t
see how she could be.

“
Trev,” I say, one more time.
“Don’t.”

“
Don’t fucking say my name!” He backhands
me across the face before I can get out of the way. I fall against
the kitchen table and onto the floor, and then crab-walk backward,
hurrying before he can hit me again. He stumbles forward and leans
down, getting right in my face, his hand fisted. “I’ll do what I
please in my own house!”

Then he straightens. He’s breathing hard;
this has taken more out of him than it used to. He staggers as he
makes his way to the kitchen door and opens it. I don’t say
anything and neither does he as he walks away from me, into the
night.

When the police officer came to the house,
he told me that Trev hadn’t braked at a stop sign where the road
teed. Instead of turning right or left as required, he’d driven
straight ahead into a tree. Facing that same junction, I eased up
on the gas. My eyes blurred as we approached it and I fought back
the tears, wiping at my cheeks with the back of one hand while the
other clenched the steering wheel. I pressed the brake hard, as I
knew he had not—but then . . .
I’m not stopping!

“Anna!” Her name came out a shriek as the
car skidded sideways on the black ice I’d not known was there. I
swung the wheel, struggling to correct our course. I managed to
alter it enough to avoid the tree on which Trev had lost his life,
but slid instead toward the twenty-foot high roadcut to its left
which was fronted by a shallow ditch. Time hung suspended during
that half second before impact, stretching before me. My hands
whitened on the wheel, my throat tightened from unshed tears, and
Anna cried in the back seat, frightened by the panic in my
voice.

Then everything speeded up as the car slid
into the cut
and then through it.

An abyss opened before me—a yawning
blackness that gave me the same hollow rushing in my ears I’d felt
in the morgue. A lifetime later, we were through it or across
it—whatever
it
was. I registered gray-blue sky and sea
before the car bounded headfirst down an incline and skidded into a
marsh. It came to an abrupt halt as the world flipped forward.
Instinctively, I threw up my hands to protect my head but the
steering wheel rushed at my face. I tasted plastic and blood—pain,
and then nothing.

I
n the year of
our Lord, twelve hundred, and sixty-eight.
May God go with
you.
The priest’s parting invocation for the close of evening
mass echoed in my head as I took the steps two at a time up to the
battlements of Castell Criccieth. Darkness was coming on and I was
looking forward to seeing the sun set over the water to the
southwest. They say that we, the Welsh, are always caught between
the mountains and the sea. On a day like today, with the wind
whipping the sea into a froth and the snow-covered peak of Yr
Wyddfa—Mt. Snowdon—towering above the castle, both tugged at
me.

I breathed in the salty air, feeling its
humid scent. In truth, I loved it all. It was as if my boots had
been planted in the soil of Wales and no power in heaven or earth
could move me from this spot.

My small corner of Europe had been
threatened, encircled, and enslaved by kings of many nationalities
since Caesar first crossed the channel into England over a thousand
years before. Throughout it all, we Welsh had, in turn, fought and
run, thrown ourselves upon our enemies, and hidden in our
mountains. Each foreign king had eventually discovered that our
resistance to his rule was as inevitable as the rain, and our place
in Wales as permanent as the rock on which we stood.

And now King Henry of England knew it too.
The triumph of my ascendancy was like a fire in my belly that would
not go out. Every month that passed allowed me to more strongly
grasp each hamlet, each pasture and village in Wales as my own.

As I stood on the battlements, the wind in
my hair, the words my bard had pronounced at the New Year’s feast
rang again in my ears, each stanza crashing over me like the waves
that hit the shore below:
There stands a lion, courageous and
brave . . . Llywelyn, ruler of Wales.
Was I too proud, too full
of hubris, that I heard these words, long past the ending of the
feast?

The sun was reddening as it lowered in the
sky and I turned my back on it to look up at Yr Wyddfa, its snowy
peaks now pink from the reflected light. It had been a sunny day,
unusual for January, and this was a rare treat. I was just turning
to look northeast again, when a—
what is that thing!
—surged
out of the trees that lined the edge of the marsh abutting the
seashore to the west of the castle, beacons shining from the front
of it, and buried itself headfirst in the marsh.

Stunned, I couldn’t move at first, but the
unmistakable wail of a small child, faint at this distance, rose
into the air. Afraid now that the—
thing? chariot?—
would sink
into the marsh before I could reach it, I ran across the
battlements to the stairs, down them, out a side door of the keep,
and into the bailey. I spied Goronwy ap Heilin, my longtime
counselor and friend, just coming into the castle from under the
gatehouse and I strode toward him.

“My lord!” He checked his horse, concern
etched in every line of his squat body. He was dressed in full
armor, his torso made more bulky by its weight. His helmet hid his
prematurely gray hair.

I hesitated for a heartbeat and then threw
myself onto the horse behind him. Goronwy gathered his reins and
chose not to argue, even though he had to know that his horse
couldn’t carry the two of us for long.

“We must hurry,” I said.

Goronwy spurred his horse back the way he’d
come, out the gate and down the causeway that led from the castle
to the village. We trotted through the village and turned left,
trying to reach the point where the vehicle had gone in.

While Castell Criccieth itself was built on
a high rock that could be reached by a narrow passage, the marsh
associated with it was legendary. The pathway fell off dangerously
into a sucking swamp, fed by an unnamed underground stream that
seeped its way to the sea. I’d not lost anyone in it recently and
didn’t want to lose anyone now, but as we came to a sudden halt
along the road as it turned, I wasn’t sure what to do.

The wail of the child was more evident the
closer we got, though it was no longer constant but punctuated
every now and then by silence. Perhaps he was tiring, too exhausted
to maintain his cries. I could imagine him gasping for air between
breaths as a child does, especially when he is unsure if anyone is
coming to help.

“By all that is holy!” Goronwy said, seeing
the vehicle for the first time. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. A chariot of some kind,
carrying two from the looks.” It had four wheels, as wagons do, two
of which spun slowly, high in the air. The vehicle had moved so
fast and without any visible means of propulsion that I couldn’t
imagine what had thrown it out of the forest and into my marsh in
the first place. It was coated in a sturdy material that wasn’t
wood, and was, unaccountably, blue in color.

Goronwy took in the situation in a glance
and gestured to the point where the chariot had driven into the
marsh. “By the trees, my lord,” he said. “It looks as if the ground
is more solid there.”

“Yes. Keep going.”

We continued on the road until it reached
the trees and then along their edge until we stopped only a few
yards from the chariot. The sun was nearly down now and I cursed
myself for forgetting a torch. We dismounted and I took a step
toward the chariot, but my foot immediately stuck a few inches into
the mud. To put my weight down further would ensure the loss of my
boot.

“Careful, my lord,” Goronwy said.

I stepped back. “We’ll find another
way.”

Goronwy spied several fallen logs in the
woods that edged the marsh and we lugged them towards the marsh to
act as a bridge between us and the chariot. Urgency filled both of
us so with me in the lead, we stepped carefully across them to the
chariot. I touched one of the side walls of the vehicle, hesitant,
noting that it curved away from me, smooth as the water in my
washing basin.

“Now what?” Goronwy said. “Do you need my
help to get them out?”

Goronwy was concerned because the narrow
bridge we’d built was sinking into the marsh under our combined
weight. For us to stand together on one end might doom the both of
us. I peered through the clear glass that separated me from the
baby in the rear of the vehicle and from the woman in the front
seat. The light of the setting sun reflected off the glass and I
could see fingerprints smudging the window. The sight struck me as
so
commonplace
that it gave me confidence.

“No. Stay where you are.”

I surveyed the expanse of incredibly worked
metal of which the vehicle was composed. As I studied it, I
realized it was not all one piece as I’d first thought. It had been
put together in sections, and then the pieces of metal attached
together. Still, except for two black elongated objects aligned
with each other half way down the sides, there was nothing to hold
onto. I grasped one of them, hoping it was what it looked like: a
latch.

I pulled on it and miraculously, the door to
the chariot opened. I had to duck into the doorway since the
chariot had a roof that was two feet less than my height. The girl
slumped over a wheel affixed to the wall in front of her. I pulled
her back into her seat and frowned at the line of blood across her
forehead. Except for the one wound, I couldn’t see any other
injuries. Her eyes were closed, however, and she was unconscious.
It surprised me, in that half a second it took to look her over,
that she was an ordinary girl, admittedly dressed strangely and
half my age, but there was nothing about her that told me why she
would be driving this incredible chariot.