A Sword in Time Read online

  But now, if all had gone well, she realized that when she tried to tell them about saving her house, they would have no idea what she was talking about. For them, the house would never have been condemned or sold.

  Which was strange to contemplate.

  Closing the door of the Martian Chronicles suite, DaVinci strode down the silent hall. Same old hallway. Same old scent of beeswax polish on the same old dark wood wainscoting. But then she saw something that wasn’t same-old, same-old.

  What was that old thing doing in the hallway of the west wing?

  She paused to stare at one of her precollege paintings. Actually, as she looked farther along the hall, she realized there were three of her old paintings. The ones she’d painted for her UCSB application portfolio. Later, she’d discarded these from her portfolio in favor of a series of plein air oils that had gained her a prestigious scholarship. A slight shiver passed along her shoulders as she gazed at the discarded paintings. Someone walking over her grave, Grandmother Shaughnessy would have said.

  Well, it wasn’t like she cared about these paintings. She just didn’t remember giving them to Jillian. Of course, there was no way she could keep track of every single canvas she’d given away or discarded in the past few years. Maybe she’d given them to Jillian’s mom, who’d had them framed and hung. Weird that she missed noticing them earlier . . . Well, she had been pretty focused on time travel. That, and not losing her nerve or becoming a mummy.

  She gave the three canvases one last appraising look. They weren’t very good. She’d done much better work since. Obviously. Even her plein air oils, done only a month after these, when she’d started using the roof as a studio, were far superior.

  An image flashed in her mind: the Caterpillar taking a bite out of that same flat-topped roof. She shuddered. No need to think about that. It was the nonexistent past, assuming everything had worked. It better have; she’d brought the freaking nail to the freaking horse, hadn’t she?

  Giving herself a good shake, she raced down the hall and out of the house.

  6

  • DAVINCI •

  California, July

  Her car wasn’t outside. Well, not her car, but the car for which she had permanent borrowing privileges. The car she’d driven to the bank and back. Only now, it was missing. She placed her hands on her hips. Had Branson seen it and put it away in the garage? That couldn’t be right. Branson wasn’t supposed to be here—he had time off when the family were away. Which they were. All of them. Away.

  Something was wrong.

  The garage was the only place DaVinci could imagine the car might be, so she marched over to the building—a massive six-car structure that could have eaten her family’s garage for breakfast and still been hungry.

  There it was in the second bay: the blue Smart car. Shrugging, DaVinci climbed in. It took her most of the two-mile drive from the Applegates’ estate to her house to figure out what must have happened—why the car hadn’t been where she’d left it. In this time line, this just-tweaked-by-DaVinci time line, the car had never been borrowed and left outside in the driveway.

  It hadn’t been borrowed because DaVinci hadn’t needed it to go watch the demolition of her home. She hadn’t driven it to the bank or back to Jillian’s, either. In some sense, she hadn’t even used the time machine. Or had she? Obviously she had, but . . .

  Trying to make sense of it made her head hurt. But the bottom line was this: in this tweaked—fixed—time line, the car had never left the garage in the first place.

  It made sense; you just had to think about it a little. In a way, it was reassuring. If she hadn’t spent the night at the Applegates’, that meant she must have spent it in her own bed. Laughter burbled up inside her. Her own bed! Her very own ancient, squeaky, sagging-in-the-middle twin bed! In her very own shared-with-Klee-and-Kahlo bedroom!

  How was she ever going to keep this secret from her family? At least she could tell Jillian and Halley. And Edmund and Everett. Well, technically she could tell Dr. Arthur Littlewood, too, although she didn’t see that happening. Outside this tight group of time travelers, DaVinci was sworn to secrecy. Which was fine by her. If people found out time travel was possible, it would be complete chaos. Countries-at-war, destroy-the-fabric-of-society type chaos. And even if it were next to impossible to make large-scale changes to the time line—and according to Dr. Littlewood, it was—history would get super weird, super fast if hundreds of people were constantly altering the past.

  Turning onto East Mountain Drive, she slowed for the stretch of road that crossed right through the flow of Cold Springs Creek. The road was a little flooded thanks to a rainy week. Not a lot of water, but she slowed anyway, just to be safe.

  As she crept through the three or four inches of creek flowing over the road, she glanced uphill at the large boulders dividing the creek into tiny spillways. Jillian had explained that history was a lot like a creek. If you dropped a big old boulder in the creek, the water would part around it temporarily, but the division would disappear on the downhill side of the boulder where the creek would continue, whole again. In the same way, if someone went back in time, say, to prevent James W. Marshall from finding gold at Sutter’s Mill, the California Gold Rush would still have happened, but someone else would have been the first to discover gold.

  DaVinci had never been entirely comfortable with the way Jillian dismissed the imagined alteration to the California Gold Rush. It might not have mattered to history in a generalized sense, but it sure as heck would have mattered to James W. Marshall.

  The car cleared the creek and began the climb back out of the gully. DaVinci was almost home. Just one more horseshoe bend in the road and she would get her first glimpse of her beloved aqua-blue eyesore. A few curves after that and she’d be pulling into the driveway. Her heart began to beat faster. What if she hadn’t done enough? What if the plumber hadn’t been competent? DaVinci banished the thought. The plumber had been Applegate-vetted. The Applegates hired only the best. The plumber would have known her stuff. But what if something else had gone wrong? What if DaVinci came around the corner and saw the Caterpillar still at work?

  She swallowed hard.

  “Then you figure out what happened, and you go back and fix that problem, too, until everything is normal.”

  She rounded a curve and the ocean came into view. The sight eased something inside her, slowing her heart to a more normal pace. One more curve. She took it slowly—the Van Sant kids liked to play in the road no matter how many times they were told not to.

  And then, as her house came into view, DaVinci gasped. It was there, but it was the wrong color! Someone had painted her aqua-blue house a rosy terra-cotta. Her heart raced, skipping beats. This was all wrong. Her family would never have painted over the aqua blue. It was iconic, according to her father. Too ridiculous to change, according to her mother. So who had done it? More to the point, who was living in the house now?

  Five Months Earlier

  February–March

  7

  • FATHER JOE•

  Florida, February

  Father Joe, properly Father Josef Novotny, was worried about his latest stray, a young man with seemingly no past. Through the years, Father Joe had nursed kittens, cats, dogs, and one time a crow back to health, finding homes for those that seemed likely to enjoy a home. But he had never, perhaps oddly for one whose life was dedicated to human souls, taken in a stray human. Or never for more than a night or two. Quintus, however, had been with him for more than four weeks.

  Long enough for Father Joe to have ascertained Quintus wasn’t a missing person, wasn’t a fugitive, wasn’t a felon. Wasn’t exactly crazy, but was not, perhaps, entirely in his right mind, either.

  Their friendship had not begun in a promising manner, but then, many people approached Catholic priests with suspicion. Father Joe could agree this wasn’t entirely unwarranted. However, Father Joe had never been approached before by someone tickling his ribs with the busi
ness end of a sword and asking if he could speak Latin. (He could, a little.) Not a promising beginning at all, even if the sword had long since been dispensed with.

  The Latin, however, had not been dispensed with. In the weeks since that memorable night, Father Joe’s stray had continued to communicate only in Latin. Very good Latin. Father Joe continued to address the young man (who called himself Quintus Valerius, a very good Latin name) in English, but Quintus gave no indication he spoke English, much less understood it. Father Joe had tried Spanish, but Spanish had been met with only marginally more success than English. The young man sometimes seemed to catch a phrase or two but never attempted to reply in Spanish, sticking as resolutely as ever to Latin.

  Quintus’s attire that memorable night before Christmas had suggested he might be in the employ of a local amusement concession. The Holy Land Experience, maybe, or Medieval Times. Father Joe couldn’t recall Roman legionnaire costumes being used in the Disney or Universal parks.

  For reasons best known to himself, Quintus had disposed of most of his costume that first night of his stay. On seeing Quintus in the predawn darkness the following morning, Father Joe had thought the young man must have grabbed a white cassock from the vestry, belted it, and torn a good eighteen inches off the bottom. Upon closer examination, however, Father Joe realized Quintus hadn’t stolen a cassock. The young man was merely wearing his own tunic, which had previously been hidden by the layers of protective outer gear. It had taken over a week for the priest to persuade Quintus to wear something besides the tunic.

  Father Joe had sent an email to his friend Arthur Littlewood asking if the University of South Central Florida had a Latin program hidden somewhere in the classics or history departments (it did not), so that had been one more possibility crossed off.

  Father Joe’s sister Ivca, a Prague psychiatrist visiting America with her new husband, had stopped by for a brief visit. After observing Quintus, she was perplexed. In most ways he presented normally. She guessed it was a stress disorder, likely the result of trauma the young man wasn’t yet ready to revisit.

  “But he won’t get better until he does,” Ivca cautioned.

  Ivca further surmised the young man, twenty by his own account, was raised a Catholic or he wouldn’t have sought shelter with Father Joe, now would he? Ivca advised Father Joe to continue conversing in Latin until the young man indicated a preference for English or Spanish. (Ivca was sure it would be Spanish—the young man radiated machismo, and his bronze complexion, dark eyes, and dark hair hinted at a childhood in the islands nearby: Cuba perhaps?) Having Googled “Cuban goodbyes,” Ivca kissed Quintus on the cheek when she departed, but if Quintus was familiar with this style of embrace, he gave no indication.

  In spite of Ivca’s conviction concerning Quintus’s Catholicism, Father Joe believed the young man was not a Christian of any stripe. Case in point: Quintus had at first indicated a willingness to cross himself like Father Joe did when entering the sanctuary. However, after Father Joe explained the ritual was performed as a reminder of Christ’s crucifixion, the young man refused to cross himself—or even to enter the sanctuary at all.

  “Why?” Father Joe asked out of curiosity, in English, which Quintus was gradually acquiring.

  “It is an incautious and unlucky god,” Quintus replied in Latin, “who would allow himself to be executed in such a manner.”

  As to how the young man had come by his excellent Latin, well, Father Joe knew of the example of his parishioner, Mrs. O’Shea, who had taught herself Klingon using online resources. Why shouldn’t Quintus have done the same? When Father Joe inquired as to how Quintus had learned Latin, Quintus had shrugged and asked, “How does a bird learn birdsong?”

  How indeed?

  Quintus was not forthcoming about his presumably troubled past, and Father Joe did not try to force conversation. In spite of his sister’s belief it would help, Father Joe did not believe in forcing confessions of any sort. The young man would speak when he was ready.

  But then things took a slight turn for the worse. Quintus stopped getting up for breakfast. Two days later, he stopped getting up for lunch. With a few gentle questions, Father Joe established that Quintus wasn’t sleeping well. Or at all, some nights.

  “Perhaps you might read yourself to sleep?” asked Father Joe, in his halting Latin.

  Quintus grunted his assent.

  Father Joe procured books in Latin, English, and Spanish for Quintus, setting them in the vestry, where Quintus slept. He noticed the Spanish and English ones remained untouched while the Latin Vulgate Bible showed signs of having been read.

  “Do you like the book?” asked Father Joe one evening, first in English and then, haltingly, in Latin.

  The young man, speaking in his customary, lyrical Latin, replied, “With these . . . sewn pages, you do surely entrust me with treasure.”

  “Treasure, indeed,” replied Father Joe, his smiling gaze resting on the Vulgate. Did his young stray require spiritual counsel at last?

  “Such gathered pages does Gaius Julius Caesar prefer,” said Quintus. “For scrolls, no patience has he.”

  Ah. Merely another of Quintus’s cryptic comments and not an invitation for spiritual counsel. Father Joe said good night, musing as he departed on Quintus’s penchant for odd pronouncements. This one tickled at the priest’s mind. Was it true about Caesar? An internet search revealed that, yes, Caesar had had his correspondence cut into pages and sewn together—a precursor to books in an age of scrolls.

  The following morning, curious, Father Joe asked Quintus where he had learned about Caesar’s preference for books over scrolls.

  Quintus seemed on the point of responding, but then checked himself as if uncertain. Or perhaps as if . . . afraid to reveal a secret?

  Who was this young man? And what was his story?

  8

  • QUINTUS •

  Florida, March

  Quintus had fallen into deeper and deeper despair. How would he ever return home? How would he ever deliver Gaius Julius Caesar’s message? About his location, Quintus was less certain than ever, even though three months had passed.

  He could not sleep for trying to work out what was to be done. But if he did not sleep, he would be unfit to do whatever might be done, should an opportunity present itself. Yet the fear no opportunities would arise kept sleep far off, inviting despair and insomnia. It was a vicious circle.

  When Pater Joe brought books to Quintus as a means of inviting sleep, he read the one in Latin, both to pass the nights and to gain what knowledge he could of the tribe of the Floridae, among whom he now dwelt. Florida was not mentioned in Pater Joe’s book, although there was mention of other lands Quintus knew—Egypt and Judea—but where were the references to the great empire of Roma? He had progressed little through his text, but still, to mention Egypt and leave out Roma?

  Where was he? And from here, where was Roma?

  He asked Pater Joe about the phrase “Roman Catholic” written on the sign before the priest’s temple, but Pater Joe’s response was confusing. His Latin was not of the best sort. Quintus, a natural linguist, was beginning to prefer when the priest spoke in English, the tongue of the Floridae.

  In any case, rather than telling Quintus about a city or land designated “Roman Catholic,” the priest had spoken of gods, whom he called the gods of Catholica Romana, the “holy three.” The greatest god was referred to as Pater to all, so Quintus thought of him as Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Pater Joe, however, chiefly revered the youngest god of the holy three, who seemed to have been murdered by priests and then resurrected, which sounded like an Egyptian tale Quintus had heard in Alexandria. Although in this matter, too, there was confusion. Pater Joe’s god had been crucified, which, so far as Quintus knew, was a uniquely Roman form of execution. It was all very odd. In addition to the holy three, there was a fourth, a divine mother, and to this divine mother was Pater Joe’s temple dedicated. Her image stood out of doors, ringed with blooming flower
s and seats. Quintus thought she might have been Vesta or the Bona Dea, although at times she sounded more like Diana, the ever-virgin.

  Pater Joe invited Quintus to ask these gods for aid, but the gods of the Floridae were not Quintus’s gods, so how could they be expected to act for Quintus’s good? Quintus gave up trying to puzzle out the relationship of Roma to Catholica Romana and asked Pater Joe more directly where Roma was to be found. If he understood the priest correctly, Roma lay across a vast oceanus, which the tribe of the Floridae called Atlantic.

  If, as Quintus feared, this Atlantic was one and the same with the sea Gaius Julius Caesar called mare Oceanum, then he was lost indeed. How was a man to cross such a sea without aid? Without a great ship and slaves to row when the winds were contrary? Pater Joe suggested Quintus should “fly” if he wished to reach Roma, pointing to great winged creatures of the sky that belched fog in their wake. But Quintus could no more compel such a creature to swoop down and carry him than he could grow wings and fly himself.

  Returning to Roma seemed impossible, and when he was not raging against Julius Canis for having stolen him from thence, Quintus’s despair threatened to swallow him, as surely as the Atlantic would swallow him if he sought to cross it.

  9

  • KHAN •

  Missouri, February–March

  In the weeks following his discovery that the thumb drive had disappeared, Khan neither crawled back to Littlewood to ask forgiveness nor broke into Littlewood’s lab to steal the information he needed. He worked on plans for the singularity device, occasionally obsessing over the location of his missing thumb drive. Annoyingly, the missing object made him think of Arthur Littlewood and his penchant for leaving important items lying around. These recollections were infuriating; Khan was not Littlewood. Khan was not forgetful. He was organized and alert and careful with his things.