A BEGINNER'S GUIDE TO TIME TRAVEL
MY NaNoWriMo challenge: Chapter 12
12
I woke up in the morning feeling worn out and tired. I told myself it was from sleeping on the rocks. Even with leaves and fronds underneath me, there was no getting comfortable. And then there were the strange dreams that lasted most of the night. I remembered I hadn’t slept on rocks since we came through the Vandals—but then, I’d been with Jaleen and we were sleeping on the raft, even though it wasn’t fully inflated.
I found it hard to believe that it had been less than a week since then. In that week, I’d lost Jaleen to Slavers, Jarel was dead, and I was with a stranger who claimed to be a Time Guardian who was somehow tied to me.
I looked at her sleeping beside me.
She’d thrown the fur off during the night, leaving herself naked and exposed, and I admit that I looked at her for a moment longer than I had a need to, but it was only because seeing her like that reminded me of Jaleen. I reached over and pulled the fur back up, covering her so that when she woke up she wouldn’t feel embarrassed thinking I’d seen her partially naked.
I picked up my belt and scabbard in one hand, my longbow and quiver in the other, and crept across the floor. The small crossbow banged against the rocks as I pushed the tusker hide aside, stepping out into the fresh, morning air. I looked down at the valley below, squinting into the sun; the river looked distant shimmering in the early light breaking through the trees as I notched the belt around my waist. I stepped through the longbow, restringing it and testing its tension.
“I trust I didn’t wake you?” a voice behind me asked.
I pivoted on my foot, an arrow notched and the bow taut as I turned to face the intruder. He was sitting crosslegged on the rocks, enjoying the morning sun as it rose above the distant peaks. Something about him looked familiar, but I couldn’t place it. He was old. His loose hair was long and white, hanging down the length of his back, and his face was lined with wrinkles. He had deep blue eyes that caught the morning light.
“I’m a friend!” he said, holding his hands out so I could see he was unarmed.
“Who are you?” I asked, not lowering the bow or lessening with any of the tension. With the sun behind me, he was the perfect target.
“Ricky? You don’t remember your own brother?” he said.
I lowered the bow.
“I don’t have a brother,” I said.
“Not in this time,” he nodded.
“Oh, it’s you,” I said, now knowing who he was. He was the friend of Jen’s who came through the Time-whatever-it-was, only to get lost when he refused to get into the raft. He was the man she insisted was my brother in whatever past life they were talking about.
“You’ll want to talk to Jen,” I said.
I walked back to the small opening behind the tusker hide while he climbed down off the rocks. I looked at him over my shoulder, still not letting myself trust him completely. I knew nothing of the man and wasn’t about to let his winning smile and flowing hair fool me into thinking he was my friend.
“Jen,” I called out. “Your friend is here.”
“What friend?” she asked, and I could hear the suspicion in her voice.
“My brother,” I said.
She came rushing out of the little sleeping space, her arms wrapped around the fur jacket, and stood facing him. She looked just as shocked as I’d been when I first saw him. It took her a moment.
“Jimmy?”
“Yeah, sorry it took me so long to get back,” he said.
“What do you mean? You’ve only been gone two days.”
“Two days?” he said. “I’ve been gone a lot longer than that.”
“What did you do?”
“I got old,” he said.
“I can see that. But how?”
“Funny you should ask,” he said. “I guess you could say I got lost in time—or maybe it was space? Lost In Space, get it?”
“Very funny,” she said.
“I went back and forth to a lot of different places, but I could never stop myself from traveling. When I did stop, it was sometime in the future. I don’t even know how long ago it was—thousands of years though—and when I finally stopped, they said I was a legend, of sorts. They had a precise record of all the different time-lines I’d been to, or visited. That’s what they called it, too. Visits. And I did it for years. I mean, just look at me. I traveled thousands of years into the future, and for a thousand years, too, I’ll bet. But you age different when you travel. I’m the living proof of that. If you’ve ever wondered what immortality was, this is it.”
“Did they send you back here, or did you do it yourself?”
“I did it! When it comes to Time Travel, you could say I wrote the book on it! Except, there is no book, is there? Except, maybe this one,” and holding his hand out, a book appeared as if out of nowhere.
“How did you do that!” Jen said. I could see she was excited, but didn’t understand why. As far as I was concerned, it was frightening. Was it magic? I’d heard there were people who could do things like that a long time ago, but nothing like that I was sure.
“I’m now what they call a Time Guide,” he said. “A Time Guardian does what you are doing at this moment. You search various timelines and try to keep things in order with those Traveler’s who have mistakenly arrived at the wrong destination.”
“Like Ricky?”
“And Helen. She’s the one that you have to connect with.”
“Is that the woman you said was inside my wife’s head? Like this Ricky is inside mine?” I said.
“She is.”
“But everyone thinks she’s my wife? They still see her as Jaleen? Just like you see me as myself?”
“She—Helen—comes out when the host body is sleeping.”
“Sleeping? Is that why I’m so tired? Is this ghost inside me using my body to further his own means?”
“No,” Jen said. “He woke me up last night to ask me questions. He’s just as confused about what’s going on, as we are.”
“How do we get him out of my head, then?”
“We have to get him back to his own time,” she said.
“And how do you propose we do that?” I said.
“That would be the part where I come in,” the man said.
“Right. The brother,” I said. “Why do I have the feeling that whatever you’re thinking of, it doesn’t sound like it’s going to end well for me? You want to get your brother back, but the question remains, do you really care how you go about it?”
“There is a process, you’ll be happy to hear. But it requires having your wife with us.”
“I’m liking the way it sounds so far,” I smiled.
“We have to use the bracelet,” he said, and I looked down at my wrist.
“But I don’t have it,” I said. “Whatever it is, it didn’t come through the whatever that thing was.”
“It’s called a Time Portal,” Jen said. “I’ve lost mine as well. I think it was when we went over the falls.”
“Which essentially leaves you stuck here.”
“But now that you’re here,” she said, leaving the statement hang. Maybe she was expecting him to say something. When he didn’t, even I looked at him.
“Are you not going to help her?”
“I want to, but at the moment, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because the woman that has Helen’s conscience, is carrying something more important than all of us.”
“She had nothing with her,” I said.
Jen just looked at me and smiled slowly, shaking her head.
“She’s carrying his child, isn’t she?”
“He is the only chance you will have of getting back to the future. Without him, you will be stuck here in the past.”
“I’m going to have a son?” I said, the realization slowly sinking into me.
*
I climbed the rocks to their highest point, where I could see the endless expanse of land and where it drifted off beyond the horizon. The dust trail was still visible, but it was farther south; they were making better time than I expected. If I was alone, I would’ve set off at a steady, loping trot, and covered the distance in little more than a day. But I wasn’t alone. Jen would never be able to run such a distance. I thought about leaving her behind, but that would almost certainly be a death sentence. All I could do was set a gruelling pace and hope she’d be able to keep up.
“We have one of two choices,” I said, having climbed down from my perch.
“We have a choice?” she said. “Or is it, that I have a choice?”
“That being?” I said.
“I come with you and live, or you leave me, and I starve.”
“That has always been an option,” I said. “But Jaleen would never forgive me if I were to leave you here to die.”
“That’s a relief, I think,” she said.
“We can go overland, and take our chances down there. It has immediate advantages, of course.”
“Those being?”
“There’s sure to be game, readily available, as well as water.”
“And the second choice?”
“We can stay up here in the rocks and take our chances.”
“What’s the risk being up here? What if there are more of those things down there?”
“And what if there are tribes of a different sort up here?”
“Tribes? What kind of tribes?”
“The hills have always been home to various tribes.”
“What’s the fastest way?”
“If we go over the rocks, we’ll save days.”
“You obviously want to go over the rocks,” she said, and I nodded. “Okay, so aside from the possibility of an attack from these different tribes, the lack of food, water, and probably shelter, what else do we have to worry about?”
“There will always be a threat of predators. Up here in the rocks, I won’t be able to hear them if they stalk.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Some of the tribes might be flesh eaters.”
“Well, that’s good to know. I suppose they eat you because there’s not a lot of game up here in the hills? So be honest,” she said. “There never really was a choice, was there? You were planning to go over the rocks the moment you went up there to take a look, weren’t you?”
“I could see a natural trail,” I said.
“That doesn’t sound like something we want to be using,” she said.
“No. But it’s something we can follow,” he said. “From above.”
“Above?” she said, her eyes slowly following the rocks and the climb I’d just made. “You expect me to climb up there?”
“I’ll tie you to me with the rope. If you should slip and fall, I’d be able to pull you up.”
“And if I pull you down with me?”
“Then I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, will it? We’ll both be dead.”
“I wish Jimmy was still here. He’d be able to tell us if we’ll make it or not.”
“I don’t think he’d know, one way or the other,” I said.
“If he can go into the future and say we’re still there, why wouldn’t you believe him.”
“Because I don’t think anybody has a choice when it comes to the future.”
“And suddenly you’re an expert on time travel?”
“If he can travel back and forth through time, why couldn’t he simply go back to that point where he said he wasn’t getting into the raft, take your bracelet from you—as a matter of safe-keeping—and then give it to you after? Because he didn’t do that, did he? If he knows the outcome, he can’t very well change it to suit his own needs, can he?”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“Is it? Maybe it’s not as complicated as you think it is? Maybe you’re overthinking it? Whatever he does, has already been done, because it’s the future. He’s looking at everything as the past. Well, guess what, the past has already happened as well, hasn’t it? You went into the past for a reason, but you probably don’t even know what that reason was anymore.”
“I went to watch over their father. He’s what this is supposed to be all about.”
“Are you sure about that? You hear what he said. And it’s his father. He said the child is the more important than anything else. Why is that?”
“I don’t know, but you probably have an answer.”
“It all has to do with the bracelet.”
“Which bracelet? Mine is gone.”
“Ricky’s bracelet.”
“Why?”
“Because my son’s the one who develops time travel. Don’t you see? It’s why he has to live; without him, none of this can happen. And the fact that it’s happening, proves that he does live. So going over top of the rocks is the way we have to go, because that’s the way we went over it in the past—not Jimmy’s past, and not ours, but my son’s.”