Stepping to the side of Theu’s still-open
coffin, she made herself look at the pale, cold face of the man she
loved. He was so still in his white shroud, all the life and
warmth, all the strength and humor gone out of him. Gone out of
her, too. Gently she touched his shoulder as if to comfort him.
“I kept my promise, Theu. I waited for your
return,” she said to him. “Now it’s over, all the loving and the
joy and the sweet promises. Now I think it’s time for me to go
home.”
“What are you saying?” Marcion asked.
“Don’t look so worried. I’m not going to do
anything foolish. It’s just that I have had the strangest feeling
since Theu died, as though I am meant to be somewhere else, and now
I think I’m being summoned.” Quickly she kissed him on the cheek.
“Take good care of Bertille. She will love you all her life if you
will let her. You have been such a good friend, to Theu, and Hugo,
and to me. You have nothing to reproach yourself with, Marcion.”
She kissed him again, but when he tried to hold on to her, she
slipped out of his grasp.
“You are saying good-bye, aren’t you?” he
exclaimed. It wasn’t really a question.
“I think so,” she said. “I am going to miss
you and Bertille.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to my own country, if I can find the
way.”
“But the memorial service,” he protested.
“You ought to be there.”
“Theu will understand.”
She was out of the chapel before he could
stop her, heading for the palace and the women’s quarters, driven
by an inexplicable need for haste. Marcion followed her and stood
by the chapel door watching her as she crossed the courtyard, but
he made no attempt to stop her.
India hurried to the room Bertille’s mother
had so graciously shared with three strangers. There she found
Danise sitting upon one of the beds with Sister Gertrude. When they
had first arrived in Agen, Danise had made space in her small
wooden clothing chest so that India could store her scanty
belongings there. India knelt beside the chest, throwing open the
lid and pulling out her tunic, trousers, and twentieth-century
underwear.
“I hope you are planning to dispose of those
men’s garments,” said Sister Gertrude. “The gown you wear now is
more becoming and much more suitable. India, what are you doing?”
This question was voiced as India lifted the blue gown and drew it
over her head.
“I have to go,” India replied, removing the
rest of the borrowed clothing and donning her own, oblivious to the
stares of Sister Gertrude and Danise. When she was dressed, India
knelt beside Danise and took her hand. “I am going home. I am sorry
to leave you while you are so unhappy, but I believe that I have no
choice.”
“Neither have I,” said Danise in a low, sad
voice. “Not with Hugo gone.”
“Thus did it happen to me when I was young,”
Sister Gertrude told India. “I hope now to convince Danise to
return to Chelles and stay there. The cloister provides a far
happier life for a woman than marriage to a warrior.”
“Don’t force her,” India begged. “She is so
distressed right now that she can’t know what she really
wants.”
“Danise will find peace and gentle comfort at
Chelles,” Sister Gertrude replied. “She will not be forced, but all
of the sisters will rejoice if she freely decides to remain with
us.”
“Thank you. I know you will take good care of
her.” Impulsively, India kissed the nun’s cheek and was surprised
to have the kiss returned. She kissed Danise, too, and smoothed the
pale hair that hung loose down her back. Danise burst into tears
and clung to her until Sister Gertrude took the girl into her own
arms.
“Go at once,” Sister Gertrude said to India.
“I will stay with Danise, and I will make your farewells to Charles
and Hildegarde, and to Lady Remilda.”
India met Bertille at the door of the women’s
quarters.
“Marcion told me,” Bertille said. “Weren’t
you going to say farewell to me?”
“Of course I was. I came here a stranger, and
now I have so many friends. I count you among them. You cannot know
how hard this leave-taking is,” India said to her. “I will never
see any of you again.”
“If we had known each other longer, I feel
certain we would have become like sisters,” Bertille said.
“In another time, and another place, we will
be,” India responded, knowing Bertille would not understand what
she meant, but certain in her heart that she spoke the truth.
“I wish you a safe journey.” Bertille hugged
her. “Don’t forget me.”
“Not in twelve hundred years,” India told
her, laughing to hide her sudden desire to cry. “Will you see to
Danise? She needs a friend near her own age right now.”
There was only one other good-bye left to
say. India found Alcuin in the reception room. Unusually for him,
he was not reading, writing, or engaged in conversation. This most
gregarious of scholars was sitting alone at one of the trestle
tables, an untouched cup of wine before him, staring at his hands.
When he heard her step, the eyes he raised to India’s face were
reddened. He looked tired and drawn, as if he had not slept for
days. He regarded her costume with no hint of surprise.
“I am going home, dear friend,” she said.
“So I gathered, from the manner of your
dress,” he replied.
“I wish I could tell you what I know about
your work and what it will mean to those who come after you. I
think the knowledge would lighten your sorrow today. But I know
better now than to speak of such things, after making the mistake
of revealing too much to Theu and thus costing him and his men
their lives.”
“Do not blame yourself for what has
happened,” Alcuin said. “There is seldom one single cause for any
event. This is an axiom even more true during warfare, when so many
men and innumerable opposing motives are combined. Charles would
take all the blame on himself. Others fault Hrulund. Some call
Roncevaux a defeat more glorious than many a victory and believe
Hrulund was a great hero. Others say he was guilty of dereliction
of duty for neglecting to post scouts to watch his flanks. After
listening to so many conflicting versions of what happened, I doubt
if your remarks to Theu could have made any difference to the
outcome of that ambush. No, not even if you had complete
foreknowledge of the future.”
Startled, she looked directly into his eyes,
seeing there compassion mixed with something more – an
understanding that far transcended the minds of most other men of
his time.
“What happened at Roncevaux was meant to
happen in exactly the way it did happen,” said Alcuin. “It was part
of heaven’s plan, which our earthbound, human minds are too limited
to comprehend. Perhaps we will understand it more fully in the next
world.” Rising, he took her by the shoulders and kissed her on each
cheek.
“Go in peace, India. Remember me in that far
land of yours.”
“Always, dear friend.” She could say nothing
more. Her throat was too constricted to allow speech, but her heart
was a little lighter. Though he was only a deacon and not an
ordained priest, yet she felt as if Alcuin had absolved her of her
aching, heavy guilt.
Leaving the reception room, she made her way
to the stable, where the chestnut mare Theu had given her was kept
since he had gone to Spain. She knew how to saddle it with no help
from anyone. She had learned how to do it in these past months. She
had learned so much in Francia. How to love again. How to rejoice
in life, brief though it might be. And now, thanks to Alcuin, she
had begun to accept both pain and loss, and she could give up her
feeling that Theu’s death was all her fault.
The present encampment outside Agen was
smaller than the one in the spring of that year.
Aside from the absence of those who had died
in battle or from disease, some of the levies had already left for
home, and a few companies had been posted to citadels along the
Spanish March, to keep the border secure against both Saracens and
Basques. No one spoke to India or tried to stop her when she guided
her mount across the field. Her hair had grown to just below her
shoulders, longer than Frankish men wore theirs, but a casual
glance at her would still have shown a young man in the saddle,
without baggage or fine clothing, no one of interest to any
soldier.
She had to search for a while to find the
path she and Theu had taken in the spring. The hillside looked
different with almost five months of growth upon it. The leaves of
the trees had the slightly dry, dusty look that comes toward
summer’s end, and as India’s horse climbed higher along the path,
she saw gleaming red or purple berries on many bushes. When she
reached the place where she and Theu had picnicked and made love on
their last day together, she found it overgrown with weeds and
wildflowers. Here and there a few poppies showed bright red, like
gouts of blood, and at the spot where India and Theu had lain
together, a cluster of blue flowers grew, as if the dye from Theu’s
cloak had stained them.
India dismounted and looked about her. The
scene from the hill was overlaid by a soft golden haze of heat and
dust. Below, the Garonne flowed peacefully toward the sea, its
smooth surface a ribbon of polished brass. High in a pine tree a
bird twittered, but there was no other sound. There was not even a
breeze to make the leaves rustle.
“Good-bye, friend,” India said to her horse,
fastening reins to saddle so they would not snag and thus bind the
animal to some tree or bush along the way. “You go home, too.
Marcion will be looking for you.”
She slapped the horse on its rump and watched
it wander away until it was lost to sight on the downward path.
Then she went to the patch of blue flowers.
“It was right here that Hank found me the
last time,” she said aloud. “I will wait here.”
Sitting down, she put one hand on the
flowers. The unsettled feeling she had experienced ever since
learning of Theu’s death grew stronger. Having lost the one person
who had held her securely in the past, she now felt suspended
somewhere in disconnected time, between the eighth and the
twentieth centuries. If Hank were still searching for her after so
many months had passed, she believed it would be easier for him to
locate and retrieve her while she was in this odd, floating state.
She thought she might make Hank’s task easier still by returning to
a location he had touched once before.
And so she sat upon the long August grass
while the afternoon waned and the sun slipped closer to the
horizon. Around her a peculiar silence slowly grew. The single
noisy bird stopped twittering. The sun sank lower still, and now a
peach-gold ray of light shone full upon India’s face. When she
looked into it, she thought she saw movement, dark shapes forming
and reforming and, finally, the shadows of human figures.
“Hank?” She scrambled to her feet. Raising
her voice, she called, “Hank? Is it you?”
Gradually, the ray of light became a
pulsating globe. India took a step toward it. Inside the globe, in
the very center of the light, appeared a tunnel of darkness that
drew her to it with an inexorable force. She had no desire to
resist that force. She took another step, another….
“Innndiaaa!”
“Willi? Hank?”
The dark tunnel was closer, but its edges had
begun to waver, and the darkness looked somehow fragile to her, as
if it would not last long.
“Innndiaaa!”
She believed this would be her last chance to
return to the time where she belonged, and she sensed that if she
was to go, it had to be then, that moment, for the whole apparition
of peach-gold light and the darkness at its center was changing,
fluctuating, even as she peered into it.
Suddenly India did not care if it was death
she would embrace within that light, or life in her own time.
Opening her arms, she ran through the light and directly into the
central darkness….
… Where nausea assailed her and complicated
mathematical equations flashed before her eyes, where shapes and
patterns formed and reformed…
Where she was falling, falling, through
black, empty space and time…
The blackness enveloping her ended abruptly,
and India found herself standing next to the computer in Hank’s
office.
“Am I glad to see you!” cried a familiar
voice.
“Bertille?” India blinked once, then, seeing
more clearly said, “Willi. Oh, Willi.’
“Hang on, kid. Don’t faint on me now. Here,
sit down.” Willi pushed the chair toward India, who immediately
took advantage of it. “If you feel dizzy, put your head down.”
“I’m all right.” Looking around, India saw
Hank watching her. “I knew you would keep trying to reach me, even
after more than five months, even after failing the first three
times.”
“Five months? Do you mean that much time has
passed for you?” Hank’s serious face was transformed by a huge
smile. “This is wonderful! You’ve confirmed my theory about time
passing at different speeds. India, I want to know exactly when you
were aware of my attempts to get you back. Wait a minute, I have to
find some paper so I can write down everything you say. I wish I
had a tape recorder.”
“You wait a minute,” Willi told him, shoving
him on the chest to push him away from India. “Look at her, she’s
worn out. She’s had a miserable day. Give her a break, Hank.”
“What day is it now?” India was beginning to
absorb the fact that time had passed very differently for her than
for Willi and Hank.
“This is December twenty-second. It’s still
the same day,” Willi answered. “At least, I think it is. It must be
close to midnight by now, so it could be the twenty-third. Hank
says you disappeared at noon, just before I got here. That would
mean you were gone about twelve hours. India, what happened to you?
Why is your hair so long? You just had it cut a couple of days
ago.”