Chapter 23
The Lost and the Left Behind
L ucinda still found it hard to believe that Ragnar had been born more than a thousand years ago. He looked like an ordinary man-somebody’s motorcycle-riding dad, maybe. She leaned over the cart. “Are you really all from… from the past?”
“That question again?” He smiled, but only barely. “It is the past to you, child. To me this is the future, although I would never have dreamed it to be so.”
“But how does it work?” asked Tyler. “How did Gideon find you?”
Ragnar shrugged. “He was not looking for me. He was hunting for worms-dragons, you would say-to bring back. He got me instead. As to how it all works, it is magic, whatever Gideon calls it, so I can tell you nothing about it.” He gestured to the bags of feed stacked on the cart. “Now, are you going to help me?”
Lucinda took a bucket and filled it with the damp mash that the sea goats liked. She threw handfuls over the fence and watched them scramble out of their shallow tub of water after it, sliding over the wet floor of their pen, hissing and bobbing their heads. She would miss feeding them and the other animals when they went home. It was hard to believe their time at the farm was almost over.
“But… what was it like?” she asked Ragnar at last.
“I do not know what you mean.”
“When you first came here. Were you scared?”
Now he did laugh, but it wasn’t much happier than the smile. “What I left behind-that was my death, and that was fearful. Coming here I faced nothing worse than an unfamiliar place and a new tongue to learn. Of course, I did not understand that I had left my own time behind as well.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Of course not, child. Not at first.” He heaved a broken cage up onto the cart. “What was I to think? It was strange enough that I had escaped the doom that was upon me. When I came to this place, I saw only a farm at first.”
“Oh, tell me about it.” Lucinda went back for another bucket of mash. “I really want to hear.”
“How did Gideon find his way around?” Tyler asked. “Was it really that Continuascope thing? How did it work?”
“That craft is beyond me-and anyway, the device is gone.” He shook his head. “Sometimes it seems that everything good in this place has been lost.”
“What do you mean?” Lucinda asked. “This place is amazing!”
Ragnar lifted several of the heavy sacks off and dropped them to the ground with a dusty thump. “The friends I’ve met here tell me we Norsemen are a gloomy lot. Still, I cannot help thinking this house and perhaps all the magic of this place is cursed. Certainly it has seemed so since the night Gideon’s wife disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Lucinda thought of the room so full of pictures of the dark-haired woman that it had seemed like a religious shrine. “I thought she died.”
“Nothing so simple.” He frowned. “She was swallowed by the Fault Line.”
For a moment Lucinda couldn’t speak-she felt cold all over. “Swallowed?”
“That is what I call it. I do not speak Gideon’s tongue of science. She went in and she did not come out. It was the most ill-fated night of all.”
“Where?” Tyler demanded. “Where was she when it happened?”
Ragnar gave him a strange look. “I do not know. Some where in the Fault Line. It is the family’s gift-but it is also a curse, I sometimes think.” He looked up suddenly, his face stricken. “I am sorry! Gods, I am a fool.”
“Why are you sorry?” Lucinda asked.
“Because I have called your family cursed.”
Lucinda had to think about it for a moment before she understood. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting that we’re related to Gideon.”
“Not to Gideon, in truth,” Ragnar said. “To his wife. And through her to Octavio himself.”
Now Tyler was the puzzled one. “What does that mean?”
“You are of the Tinker clan. Grace was a Tinker-Octavio’s granddaughter. Gideon and Grace never had children. You are not related by blood to Gideon, but to Octavio.”
“So is that why we’re here?” said Tyler, slowly. “Me and Lucinda? Because we’re old Octavio’s blood relations?”
Ragnar heaved up another bunch of feed sacks. “I do not know why you are here, boy. Gideon has many thoughts he does not share with me. Still, I am glad you two came. It has brought some new life to this place-life that was needed.” He looked almost wistful.
Lucinda felt as though she was suddenly seeing things clearly that she had only glimpsed before through a fog. “So Gideon married into the family.”
“Yes. It was against Octavio’s wishes, at least at first.” Ragnar said. “Gideon came to work with the old man and help him build his device, but he also fell in love with Octavio’s granddaughter, who he had seen grow from a child to a woman. There was much anger, at least at first, when the two of them married.”
“Octavio was angry?”
“So I am told, but he came to accept it at last. And for some years things were good. Then came the bad night when Grace vanished into the Fault Line and was lost. That same night, Octavio Tinker’s heart failed and he died.”
“Oh my God!” Lucinda said. “That’s so terrible! How did it all happen?”
Ragnar shook his head. “I was not there. It is not my story to tell. Already I have talked and talked-talked too much. We have work to do. Besides, what more do you need to know? The whole sad story is in these words-Gideon lost his wife and his thane on the same night.”
“His thane? What’s that mean?” Tyler asked.
“Ah, it is not a word of your time, but mine. The one who held his oath-his lord, you might say.”
“This is America,” Tyler told him. “We don’t have lords.”
Ragnar’s half smile returned. “Words change-men do not. In all ways Octavio was Gideon’s lord. But it was the loss of Grace that crippled him. He searched years for her, until the Continuascope was lost too.” He looked around, then lowered his head a little between his big shoulders and said quietly, “He was already a little mad, I think, when the Continuascope was lost in the laboratory fire and he could not even search for her anymore.” He shook his head.
“So she just disappeared into the Fault Line,” Tyler said slowly. Lucinda could not help noticing the strange expression on her brother’s face-he was lost in thought, staring at nothing, as if he was on the last level of some game and completely absorbed. Why was he zoning out when they were finally getting some answers?
“Why did Gideon bring you and the others here?” she asked.
The big man snorted. “You would rather talk than work, I see. He brought us because he needed workers to keep the farm going… workers who will keep the secrets.”
Tyler abruptly stood up. “I have to go back to the house!” He turned and headed off at a trot.
“What about your chores, boy?” Ragnar called.
“I’ll be back, honest!”
Lucinda stared after him, wondering what was going on. She had a sinking feeling that she was going to wind up doing his share of the work as well as her own.
A hot, sweaty hour or so later Ragnar finally sent her back to the house to get lunch while he went to talk to Mr. Walkwell about some fencing.
Lucinda was rinsing the worst of the dust off her face and hands at the faucet outside the Sick Barn when she felt the hairs at the back of her neck begin to rise. She even looked around to see if someone was standing behind her, but no one was in sight: she was alone with the concrete bulk of the huge barn. Then the weird, powerful sense of someone else’s feelings flooded into her again, bringing a sense of loss as sudden and shocking as being doused with a bucket of cold water.
Lost… lost… lost…!
Her first impulse was to run away-but how could she run away from thoughts in her own head?
