CASTELGARD
'Nothing in the world is as certain as death.'
37:00:00
Gomez hopped lightly out of the machine. Marek and Kate stepped slowly out of their cages, seemingly dazed as they looked around. Chris climbed out, too. His feet touched the mossy ground. It was springy underfoot.
Marek said, 'Fantastic!' and immediately moved away from the machine, crossing the muddy path for a better look at the town. Kate followed behind him. She still seemed to be in shock.
But Chris wanted to stay close to the machine. He turned slowly, looking at the forest. It struck him as dark, dense, primeval. The trees, he noticed, were huge. Some of them had trunks so thick, you could hide three or four people behind them. They rose high into the sky, spreading a leafy canopy above them that darkened most of the ground below.
'Beautiful, isn't it?' Gomez said. She seemed to sense that he was uneasy.
'Yes, beautiful,' he answered. But he didn't feel that way at all; something about this forest struck him as sinister. He turned round and round, trying to understand why he had the distinct feeling that something was wrong with what he was seeing - something was missing, or out of place. Finally, he said, 'What's wrong?'
She laughed. 'Oh, that,' she said. 'Listen.'
Chris stood silently for a moment, listening. There was the chirp of birds, the soft rustle of a faint breeze in the trees. But other than that…
'I don't hear anything.'
'That's right,' Gomez said. 'It upsets some people when they first arrive. There's no ambient noise here: no radio or TV, no airplanes, no machinery, no passing cars. In the twentieth century, we're so accustomed to hearing sound all the time, the silence feels creepy.'
'I guess that's right.' At least, that was exactly how he was feeling. He turned away from the trees and looked at the muddy path, a sunlit track through the forest. In many places, the mud was two feet deep, churned by many hooves.
This was a world of horses, he thought.
No machine sounds. Lots of hoofprints.
He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. Even the air seemed different. Heady, bright-feeling, as if it had more oxygen in it.
He turned, and saw that the machine was gone. Gomez appeared unconcerned. 'Where's the machine?' he said, trying not to sound worried.
'It drifted.'
'It drifted?'
'When the machines are fully charged, they're a little unstable. They tend to slide off the present moment. So we can't see them.'
'Where are they?' Chris said.
She shrugged. 'We don't know, exactly. They must be in another universe. Wherever they are, they're fine. They always come back.'
To demonstrate, she held up her ceramic marker and pressed the button with her thumbnail. In increasingly bright flashes of light, the machine returned: all four cages, standing exactly where they had been a few minutes before.
'Now, it'll stay here like this for maybe a minute, maybe two,' Gomez said. 'But eventually it will drift again. I just let them go. Gets 'em out of the way.'
Chris nodded; she seemed to know what she was talking about. But the thought that the machines drifted made Chris vaguely uneasy; those machines were his ticket back home, and he didn't like to think that they behaved according to their own rules and could disappear at random. He thought, Would anybody fly on an airplane if the pilot said that it was 'unstable'? He felt a coolness on his forehead, and he knew in a moment he would break out in a cold sweat.
To distract himself, Chris picked his way across the path, following the others, trying not to sink into the mud. On solid ground again, he pushed through thick ground cover, some kind of dense waist-high plant, like rhododendron. He glanced back at Gomez: 'Anything to worry about in these woods?'
'Just vipers,' she said. 'They're usually in the lower branches of the trees. They fall down on your shoulders and bite you.'
'Great,' he said. 'Are they poisonous?'
'Very.'
'Fatal?'
'Don't worry, they're very rare,' she said.
Chris decided not to ask any more questions. Anyway, by now he had reached a sunlit opening in the foliage. He looked down and saw the Dordogne River two hundred feet below him, twisting through farmland, and looking, he thought, not very different from the way he was used to seeing it.
But if the river was the same, everything else in this landscape was different. Castelgard was entirely intact, and so was its town. Beyond the walls were farming plots; some of the fields were being plowed now.
But his attention was drawn to the right, where he looked down on the great rectangular complex of the monastery - and the fortified mill bridge. His fortified bridge, he thought. The bridge he had been studying all summer-
And unfortunately, looking very different from the way he had reconstructed it in the computer.
Chris saw four water wheels, not three, churning in the current that ran beneath a bridge. And the bridge above was not a single unified structure. There seemed to be at least two independent structures, like little houses. The larger was made of stone and the other of wood, suggesting the structures had been built at different times. From the stone building, smoke belched in a continuous gray plume. So maybe they really were making steel there, he thought. If you had water-powered bellows, then you could have an actual blast furnace. That would explain the separate structures, too. Because mills that ground grain or corn never permitted any open fire or flame inside - not even a candle. That was why grinding mills operated only during daylight hours.
Absorbed in the details, he felt himself relax. :
On the far side of the muddy path, Marek stared at the village of Castelgard with a slow sense of astonishment.
He was here.
He felt light-headed, almost giddy with excitement as he took in the details. In the fields below, peasants wore patched leggings and tunics in red and blue, orange and rose. The vivid colors stood out against the dark earth. Most of the fields were already planted, their furrows closed over. This was early April, so the spring planting of barley, peas, oats and beans - the so-called Lenten crops - would be nearly finished.
He watched a new field being plowed, the black iron blade hauled by two oxen. The plow itself turned the earth of the furrow neatly on both sides. He was pleased to see a low wooden guard mounted above the blade. That was a moldboard, and it was characteristic of this particular time.
Walking behind the plowman, a peasant sowed seed with rhythmic sweeps of his arm. The sack of seed hung from his shoulder. A short distance behind the sower, birds fluttered down to the furrow, eating the seed. But not for long. In a nearby field, Marek saw the harrower: a man riding a horse that dragged a wooden T-frame weighted down by a large rock. The harrower closed the furrows, protecting the seed.
Everything appeared to move in the same gentle, steady rhythm: the hand throwing seed, the plow turning the furrow, the harrow scraping the ground. And there was almost no sound in the still morning, just the hum of
