I tried to suppress my laughter. Their earnestness was too sweet to deny and from the looks in their eyes, too deeply believed to suggest an alternative explanation.
“Keep smiling,” said Simon, looking at me with blue eyes. I stopped. But he hadn’t meant it in a threatening way. “No really, keep smiling,” he said again. It was my teeth he wanted to see.He gazed with wonder. He compared them to dragon teeth. I laughed even louder, smiled wider. Wulfric went and pissed in the yard. A dog barked and was shushed. Smoke stained our clothes and I felt the warmth of the world’s reasonability melting away, leaving me delightfully full and still.
The first time I was taken out of the house was with Simon and Wulfric to hunt deer in the woods—no, in Greenwich Park, not “the woods.” My mind was constantly forgetting, then sprinting back with panic to old terms, old maps. But the parkwasthe woods. It couldn’t be anything else because there were no cars, planes, radio waves, construction, and in this absence was a purity of sound and air I can only describe as pure sensation flooding my bloodstream, the trees my teeming lungs and wind not an external phenomenon confined to objectivity but everywhere, in and out of me. Even the smell of dust and pollen, warmed and blown away—it was so simple but such a manifold betrayal of everything I had ever expected a scent to be. What I mean is that it was better. This world—everything about it—was just better than anything I had experienced in my life before. Sorry.
Simon and Wulfric took me into this open wilderness to serve as their smiling pack mule, happily tasked with foraging and carrying anything they managed to shoot with their bows.
“We’ll make do with a few rabbits, but we need the stag. There’s an eight-pointer I saw the other day past the road to Dover.”
They spoke as if we were at a grocery store, trampling through forest like shoppers trawling supermarket aisles. Grab those berries, pick these leaves, find the stag.
“What for?” I asked. The only meals I had seen or eaten myself so far were bowls of barley porridge and root vegetables. Eating was less a pleasurable activity and more a purposeful fueling, flavor taking a backseat to the simple stacking of calories. Some days I swear I could feel my blood and muscles sucking up basic building block nutrients, shrinking and expanding like eager sponges. I hadn’t had any form of meat in three months save for the hairlike bones of a fish left in a briny broth once. Three whole months of this, my god.
“The lord is coming tonight,” said Wulfric. “We need to get him the eight-pointer.”
“Where’s he been all this time?” I asked.
Wulfric told me—in their manner of speech—to shut up. I was too loud and would scare the animals, he said. I sighed and trudged behind them, scanning everything we passed. And along these shores of silence we stalked, my complacency—this kind of happy idiot I felt myself becoming, this jolly camper—began to give way to other thoughts, to reality, to something serious.
Simon shot a rabbit. I collected the rabbit. I felt it slip away into death in my hands as I fastened it to my belt, and I felt this slippage of mortality like a knock on the door, confirming that my current reality here wasthe reality, the only one—that if I were to die here, I would be dead here, I would not wake up from whatever time-travel reverie I might have tricked myself into thinking I was in. This was real life. This was blood from what had been a living organism and this would somehow, someday, be me, still here.
Panic began to flutter inside me. If I was going to get out of here, this was a chance. Maybe not my one and only chance, buta chance nonetheless, and there was no telling how long it would take for another to come along. I watched Simon and Wulfric, how they walked so lightly over the ground, barely making any noise, their bodies lean and trim, but with rounded, well-worn muscles that could overpower me in a snap. They both carried bows and plenty of arrows. And Simon... Simon watched me closely. His blue eyes looked over his shoulder every so often. He’d find an herb or a mushroom and hand it to me to place in the foraging bag I carried, while making clear, decisive eye contact. It was the eye contact I feared the most, how it communicated that he wasn’t some caricature of history or background foot soldier, but a man of my own, living and breathing exactly like me at the same intervals, a mind working just the same, if not better.
“Look!” said Wulfric.
We arrived at a clearing. On the map in my head of future-London we had walked up the slope of Greenwich Park and beyond Blackheath, past where there would one day be a large stone cathedral, a high street strangled with cars, a train station, then Kidbrooke and all the new builds. There, in the center of the clearing, a family of deer was grazing. Among them was the stag, with his sturdy antlers, all eight points, just as Wulfric had said.
Wulfric drew an arrow from his quiver and readied his bow. Simon also drew an arrow but instead of placing it in his bow, he took both and pushed them into my chest, giving them to me.
“What’s this?” I asked. I looked at Simon—he was unreadable. I looked at Wulfric—his bow was pulled and pointed but not at the deer. It was pointed at me. He was smiling. “Show us your shot, soldier.”
“What the hell?” I said. “I don’t have a shot.”
“Don’t lie,” said Simon, serious and steady. “We know what you are.”
I was rattled. “What do you think I am? I’ve told you what I am—and I can’t shoot a bow and arrow, I’ve never touched one in my life.”
“You’re a soldier.”
“I’m not a soldier.” I couldn’t help but laugh. I sputtered and winced at Wulfric’s raised bow. “That’s what you’ve thought this whole time? That I’m a soldier—for who? From where? I’ve told you what I am and what happened to me—a soldier wouldn’t have any reason to make that up.”
“A Dane would.”
“A Dane! You think I’m Danish?” I couldn’t believe it. I laughed again and tried to back away but they accosted me, Wulfric’s arrow was pointed right at my chest. The two of them were agitated and hyped up on each other the way they had been the day they attacked me. It was strange to imagine how their voices had sounded to me back then, so alien and abrasive. Now they were just two jumpy lads, eager to see me shoot a deer.
“I’m not going to shoot a deer,” I said. “I’m not a soldier, I’m not Danish, and I wouldn’t know the first thing about how to use this thing.”
“You shoot the deer or I shoot you,” said Wulfric. His arm was tensed, and I knew, based off this world’s ease of quickening I had already witnessed, that he was deadly serious. “Look at your arms, your shoulders—those are the arms of an archer.”
I shook my head. “These are the arms of someone who went to the gym a few times a week. This is why you took me along? Because you think I’m a soldier and can help you hunt? Look Idon’t even know—” I fumbled with the bow and arrow. It was a limber, slippery thing. “I don’t even know which way to hold it!”
“You shoot it or I shoot you,” Wulfric repeated.
“Stop—you’re both scaring them away,” said Simon, shushing us. Across the meadow the deer were clued in to our presence. The eight-point stag had tensed up. The fawns seated around him were now standing.
“It’s now or never,” said Simon. He looked at me with a curt, disappointed expression, and at Wulfric with the same chagrin, like he knew this had been a bad idea from the start.
“And we really do mean now or never,” said Wulfric, running his thumb across the back end of the drawn arrow.
