“Does nothing for me either.” He jerked the cart loose and pulled it through the open gate, slamming the doors behind him. I was left alone in the courtyard with no further knowledge of where I was.
King Edward?
I knew nothing about history—or well, I knew some things about history, but no more than the average person, not enough to know when the twenty-eighth year of King Edward’s reign was. I had studied the kings and queens of Britain just like everyone else in school, done flimsy presentations about Henry VIII, getting the Roman numerals mixed up, bored out of my mind. There was Victoria, Elizabeth I, Henry VIII, too many Edwards, always getting the Charleses turned around. The mad King George? Boudica? Which Edward? Were we as far back as the Romans? When was any of that? I was terrible at dates.
What I knew was there was no electricity. There were horses, there was money, but no plumbing aside from what gravity could provide. The people spoke a smeary kind of English that I could grapple with, so it wasn’t like we were completely prehistoric. I recognized snippets of French here and there, and stranger languages I couldn’t pinpoint. “When was English invented,” I heard myself googling, with the entirety of British history clouding my brain. It wasn’t like knowing the date would make things any easier, but it would at least anchor me to a timeline, a sense of perspective I could tie to this new batch of humans I had been spat into.
Twenty-eighth year of King Edward. Handcarts and horses. Thinking about it only served to rattle me all over again and remind me of my bodyshock: stripped, beat, starved, held in a cell. Held in a cell until I enjoyed it—not like that was any measure because I had enjoyed dog walking until I had hated it. I had been walking six dogs. I had lost two of them. I had lost my job. I had lost my boyfriend. I had traveled through time. I had to get out of here.
I had to get out! The thought slithered its way through my mind full of panic and rush. That was the simple fact: I had to get out. I focused my intention on that because what was I doing here anyway? Being some kind of nobly austere stableboy? Basking in these monkish routines? I couldn’t not be moving, I couldn’t be complacent. I had to at least escape the manor house, then I could worry about the loftier, metaphysical time-crisis I was trapped inside or whatever this was.
But did I? I felt the knee-jerk itch to flee, but I had always felt that, all the time, not just now. I had felt that on the tube, on holiday, online, at work. I always wanted to leave. The only thing different now was the assuaging simplicity of being human in the sense that being human meant waking at dawn, defecating into a pit, performing labor, eating, resting, retiring with the sun, feeling the earth, feeling my skin tightening, burning, callusing, becoming uncontemplative. There was a coldness, sure, but there was a warmness—my awakening from shock and maybe the shock wasn’t coming from where I thought it was. I wanted to flee, I wanted to stay. I also wasn’t sure what either of those things entailed.
Over the next few days, I made a point to bond more with the people I interacted with—the guards and workmen, and allthe daily visitors who passed through the house. Everyone had a purpose beyond my understanding and so I tried to understand. I carried more heavy sacks. I opened the heavy sacks and scooped out bowlfuls of barley and learned how to soak them, how to sift and strain them, how to cook them. I carried firewood, emptied latrines, washed floors, swept the courtyard, washed linens, repaired linens, and slowly reeled myself into greater circles of trust and was rewarded for it. They gave me new clothes—just another worn tunic, but slightly more substantial, and a belt, shoes. They gave me a bundle of straw to improve my bed. I smiled more often. There was hard labor to perform at all moments of the day, but I made sure I was smiling. I laughed. I smiled.
“Your teeth are very straight,” said another servant.
“I had braces when I was a teenager,” I said.
“Simon! Don’t talk to him—leave, shoo shoo. Get out!” A woman whipped the man with a wet rag, and with serious force, not comically, batting him out of the work shed. I was helping her grind wheat grains, being as merry and charitable as I could be, ignoring the buzzing layer of mistrust that constantly surrounded me.
Through a window I watched this Simon wander off, look back at me and stare, then look at the ground. His hair was dark and slightly curly. His clothes were shades of tattered brown, but cared for, tucked in; there was intentionality. It was still unreal how real these people were.
“Where do you think I’m from?” I asked the woman later. The unreality of their realness made it easier to elbow my way into conversation with them like this, like I was surveying ants.
She said nothing. A fly hovered and bounced against the window. We continued grinding the wheat. Later, we ate it in aporridge. And that was the kind of day I had. Small inroads met with bewildering walls. Pools of otherworldly silences.
Simon was one of the men who had stripped me naked and tied me up. Wulfric was the name of the other one. Together they had beat me up and pulled off my clothes. One of them had shoved his whole fist inside my mouth, nearly broken my jaw, egged on by their superior. They both lived in the manor, in quarters close to my cell, but spent their days outside hunting and running errands. It took two months before I no longer felt a tightness of fear in my chest whenever I saw them—two months of learning, through observation, that their lot in life was as similarly dire as mine. They were indentured servants and a fist in the mouth was only what the task at hand had required. Their days hinged on unquantifiable blessings bestowed by an absent lord. They squabbled with each other like brothers for the last inch of status one could hold over the other—Wulfric’s ancestral promises, Simon’s northern roots, the sad buoyancy of religious superstition. I felt sorry for them. It didn’t take long for both of them to earn—only abstractly, never stated out loud—my forgiveness. I couldn’t blame them for what they did.
Simon always mentioned land an uncle had promised his father up north, which was subsequently his, now that the uncle had died and his father was already long-dead (trampled by three horses when Simon was a child; Simon’s mother had died giving birth to him). The land there was lush, awash with arable soil, bordered by woods and a brook. His eyes misted when he spoke of it, even though he had never been there before. He had never left London.
“Why don’t you go there?” I asked one night. We were huddled around a fire in the yard, too filthy to be let inside the main house. We drank root water, ate boiled roots, the cold at our backs. Summer was glancing in another direction—it felt like early September, maybe later—still no one would clearly tell me the date.
“Because I need an apprenticeship in London first,” Simon said. “An apprenticeship in anything—maybe carpentry or engineering, I want to build things—with someone who’ll give me room and board for a few months, which will buy me out of service here. Then I can buy back my earnings and pay my way north.”
I struggled to see the math in the nightmare he described—and winced at how it all relied on handshakes and verbal confirmations more than anything else; maybe there was a scrap of paper somewhere in a registrar far away, but nothing warranted being an unpaid servant. There was a modern part of me that only saw the potential for anarchy in the way this old world functioned. Most of the fences these people swore by were all invisible.
“Why not just run away? If you have the land, just go there.”
Simon balked. Wulfric glared at me and said, “Nobodyhasland. That’s not how people do things in this part of the world.” His tone was pointed and sharp.
“Everything has momentum,” said Simon, trying not to dismiss me, but recognizing a clear division between my logic and his—if it could be called logic at all. There was genuine surprise in his eyes, like a part of him hadn’t considered escaping outright. The way he spoke with his hands was measured and smooth. “But anyway, I’ll need to save enough to hire protectionfor the journey, once I decide to go. I’ll need a knight, or a mercenary from London. It’s dragon territory.”
I blinked. “Dragon?” I said.
“They don’t have dragons in the future?” Simon said this with an impressive mix of cloying jest and seriousness. I had tried and failed to get anyone to believe my story. My being the time traveler was a running joke now and I guess I was happy to be one, happy to be anything. I washappy—I noted. A scary feeling.
“They don’t have dragons in the past, present, or future,” I said and tried to clarify what he meant. A dragon like a big lizard? A Komodo dragon? I dared wonder if we were as far back as dinosaur times.
Simon performed the swooshing wings, the fire breath. Wulfric nodded his head. They debated the size—bigger than a cow, bigger than the manor, a wingspan that can block out the sun.
“And these dragons have a territory?” I asked, incredulous. “They can’t just fly wherever they want?”
“They eat sheep, so they stay in Yorkshire, they’re afraid of humans. They won’t come near a village but they will torch a single house out in a forest or a moor. The king has a special envoy devoted to tracking them.”
“My cousin saw one,” said Wulfric.
“They say it’s what killed my uncle actually.”
