He looked down at me with haughty surprise. “When you’re summoned, you’re summoned. You can bring your squire if you wish, given current wartime mandates. Believe me, if we knew what the summoning was for, there’d be no reason to summon you.”
The men rode away, leaping over our half-built canal. Mud splattered under hoof. It all felt unreal. The richness of the colors in their clothes had made the men look more costume-like than anything I had encountered here. The horses looked like show ponies. I looked back at Simon and he was in a transfixed state of whispered, panicked prayer, eyes closed, head bowed. He was actually jolted by this. “Simon?” Only when the sound of the men was far away did he finally exhale and stop reciting. That old sense of unreality came back to me again—this just didn’t feel real. I looked down at the scroll, the thick red wax seal, the expert penmanship. I realized this had to be just as out-of-this-world for Simon too.
“What wartime mandates? Who are we at war with?” I said.
Simon shook himself from his reverie and stepped outside with me. “I don’t know. Wales, Scotland, France, everyone.” He looked supremely worried. “Let me see that.”
I handed him the scroll. He examined it closely, even though he couldn’t read. He marveled over the royal seal.
“This has to be about me, right?” I said. “How’d they find us out here? Is this for real, like from the actual king?”
“Yes, it’s from the king,” said Simon.
“Well that’s a relief,” I said. I brushed away the indent of a horse hoof on the ground. “I guess... we have to go? Do youthink we’ll actually meet him? How long do you think it will take us to get to Thirsk?”
Simon looked at me perplexed. “Are you not terrified?”
“Well, I’m notterrified,” I said. “I’m surprised maybe. Intrigued. They probably didn’t need to point bows and arrows at us, but it could have been worse. My first thought was they were going to take us back to London or something, so I’m actually feeling quite relieved.” I still knew so little about anything. I knew the king was King Edward—the First, although they didn’t call him the First because how would they know about the next ones. I knew he was old, that he was on his second wife, that he was tall and ruthless, a warrior king—that’s all I had learned about him in my time here. Most people were reverential, almost pious when they spoke of him, but in quieter moments, at pubs, after a long day of work, I had witnessed people joking about him like they would in modern times. Simon was still white in the face, worried and pacing.
I tried to think concretely. “There’s some travel implications. We’ll need someone from the village to come up and feed the animals while we’re away. Other than that I don’t see—I think we should be fine... I mean, I have nothing of value to offer them, so there’s nothing to fear. I’m not afraid of doing something that would upset events in the future or rewrite history or whatever because if I’d have done that, I’d probably have already done it, or something, however that paradox works.” I tried to think of what the modern equivalent to something like this would be. A summons from a king would be, well, a summons from a king. But a scary king, a dictator, or something. I felt completely inadequate.
Simon walked away from me, shaking his head.
“What?” I called after him. “Hey, what?”
“You don’t care.”
“What?”
He turned around. “You think this is a joke.”
“Not at all. Simon—”
“Something like this happens and all you can do is think about it with your time traveler brain. You think this is all beneath you. I’ve seen it in your face before, when we go to Scarborough. You think you’re cleverer than them. You’re doing it now.”
I was completely taken aback. “OK that’s not true at all. I don’t think this is beneath me.” Now I was annoyed. Where was all this coming from? “I’m just saying I’m relieved it wasn’t something worse. I thought they were going to shoot us. And I don’t know—I don’t understand why you’re afraid. We get to meet the king. That’s exciting, isn’t it? Scary a bit, sure, but we’ll be fine? Maybe he’ll know about Greenwich, or maybe he’ll think I’m some foreign whatever, but the second he meets me he’ll understand. We probably won’t even get that far—we’ll meet this Piers Gaveston guy and he’ll call it all off.”
Simon came back to me fast, right in front of my face. “This is a man who kills people, George. Who tortures people—personally. Pulls them apart into pieces. I know you have your nice friendly old king back in future-land, but that’s not what we have here. This is a man who banishes entire races of people—wipes them out. And we’re gay, I’m an escaped slave, you’re an escaped prisoner and a foreigner. He’ll kill me—that I’m certain of. He’ll get what he needs from you, then he’ll kill you. He’ll make his son fuck our corpses.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’rebeing ridiculous!” Simon grabbed me by the shoulders. I tried pulling away, weirded out, but he pulled me closer. “I’m looking in your eyes and I can see it right now—you don’t get it! I know how you think, George, I’ve seen it in how you look at things out here. You’re constantly bewildered by regular people out here, you’re so in your own head, and yet I’m the one overreacting by—”
“Stop.” I put my hands on his arms and held him still. We stood like that for the longest time and stared at each other. Panic and nerves coursed through us. He was right, there was a difference there. His blue eyes were manic and darting all over the place. We shared a common bewilderment at the king’s summoning, but bewilderment translated into terror for Simon; only lostness, maybe even bemusement for me. Searching each other for an opposite reaction only made things worse. As I held him, I’m sure he felt the same crude cap, wanting to pull away from me now. Weirded out.
Simon stayed on edge all night and the next morning. No matter what I said I couldn’t convince him I was taking things seriously enough. I was—really, I was—but I couldn’t summon a fear of death to match whatever he was feeling, I just couldn’t. I had nothing to hide and felt we had no other recourse. What else could we do besides comply?
As the weeks ticked by into June, a buzz began to swell in the nearby hamlets—which we visited more frequently in order to keep track of the date, as our own timekeeping methods were never strictly maintained. The royal caravan was coming and each day there was gossip among the villagers about routes the king might take, manor houses he might stay at, and what thisall meant for the war—a war no one had really known anything about in the first place, except now was a topic they were all experts on. We didn’t tell anyone about our summons.
I began to feel a sense of seriousness—not that I hadn’t felt it earlier, but a new kind of hysteria I couldn’t square myself with. I felt flashes of it, and anytime I mentioned it, I felt Simon close off from me, assuming I was just doing it for his benefit. Our differences seemed magnified now. Those early days we had spent in bed, that love we had unearthed with such emotionality—it felt like a mistranslation—and when I clung to Simon now, I clung to someone I feared I had completely misunderstood. I looked around at the stony shack we lived in with the dusty roof made of straw, the untamed meadows and impenetrable forests, and wondered really, honestly, was this it? Was this—and I hated how much I needed it to be—normal?
Maybe what I had with Simon was an oddity in this world after all. There were no relationship models around to look to. There was a fraction of the number of people on the planet than where I came from, so there was a fraction of the number of gay people here, which was already a tiny fraction. Even in modern times, all the gay couples I knew still seemed so searching and undefined. If any of them were defined, it was always forced—the most confident-seeming gay couples only the product of hijacked heteronormativity, with their Same Sex Weddings and matching classic rings, their GMO-children calling them Daddy and Papa, cosplaying this life as a Lifestyle in the most derogatory sense. It was either that or the hijacking was inverted, the committed roles reverse engineered into a nonbinary gray soup where nothing mattered, where there were no rules, and tradition was blended into a fluid of purposeful blasphemy—thepurpose being so glaring and obvious, the tongue planted firmly in cheek to the point of cringe, and yet it was the whole crux of the union. Prove them right and prove them wrong. I wanted neither. I wanted both. They were nothing and everything. Either way, I felt excluded.
The king’s men in all their finery had flagged all the things I wasn’t. There was no outside validation. Could a life like ours be so unmarked and simple?Simon says yes, I heard in my mind—easy for him to say when all he knew otherwise was slavery. And what about Simon anyway? He had escaped his station in life, but pointedly with me, thanks to me. He had chosen me, someone who could read and write (kind of), who possessed a capitalist instinct and Protestant work ethic this world wouldn’t see for at least a few more centuries, and maybe to him I was this prized oddity he could continue on with to greater things, sex just a surprising new form of nudging me along. He’d be my “squire” just as the messenger had surmised. I hadn’t even thought to correct him.
No—I knew it wasn’t like that, I knew it was love—or not knew, but at least felt. There was love, but also there were his eyes, so wide and open, that sense of him pouring into me. A substance like that has to have an end, doesn’t it? And a reason. I couldn’t help but view it from afar—from London specifically—measure its value, project its quarterly dividends. We had nothing.
“You know you could just stay home,” I suggested one night. The summons was only for me, only my name was on it after all, and if Simon was so worried about torture or death, he should stay home. He looked at me blankly and almost laughed me off. It was as if I had suggested he get on a train to Heathrow, board a plane, and fly somewhere else.
