“Come on!” Katherine said in a panicky voice, pulling on Jonah’s sleeve and reaching back for Alex, too. “We can’t lose him!”
Chip was already rushing after the two men, dodging servants with platters and soldiers with pikes and a stray-looking dog that raised his nose and sniffed suspiciously as Chip dashed past.
Jonah felt some of Katherine’s panic. What if we lose Chip? What if he makes it on the barge and we don’t? What if he does something really stupid? Jonah began almost running.
“Jonah!” Katherine whispered. “You’re kicking up dust!”
“It’s windy,” Jonah whispered back. “Who cares?”
Ahead of them Chip had reached a wharf extending out into a river—the Thames? Jonah wondered. He thought that the social studies teacher he’d had in sixth grade (a much, much nicer woman than Katherine’s Mrs. Hatchett) would be very proud of him for remembering the name of a foreign waterway at a time like this.
And then there was no time to think, because Chip was jumping from the wharf onto the back of a low boat.
“That idiot!” Alex whispered.
“No, no, he’s all right—he’ll catch that pole …,” Jonah said.
Alex shot him a disgusted look.
“What?” Jonah said.
The answer was instantly clear. Chip did indeed grab on to a pole holding up a canopy over the well-dressed people crowding onto the boat. But he had landed on the outer edge of the boat, throwing everything off balance. The canopy wobbled; his corner of the boat dipped low in the water. Women in ridiculously elaborate skirts fell against elegant men, all of them separating from calm, unaffected tracers. It was eerie how the number of people on the boat seemed to instantly double, as Chip’s one action changed everyone’s movements. People laughed and shrieked—and stared. A man holding an oar left his tracer behind to creep toward Chip, a mystified expression on his face.
Katherine peered in distress from Alex to Jonah.
“Well?” she whispered. “Do I have to do everything?”
Jonah just looked at her blankly.
Katherine took off running. She broke through the crowd like a star basketball player determined to score the winning point before the buzzer. Then, at the wharf’s edge, behind the loading area, she eased down into the water and—Jonah craned his neck to watch—disappeared with only a small ripple. Seconds later she resurfaced at the far side of the boat, climbed up, and clutched the pole on the opposite side from Chip.
Instantly the boat righted itself.
The man with the oar shrugged and went back to his position, rejoining his tracer.
“Oh,” Jonah whispered. “I would have figured that out. Eventually,” he told Alex.
Alex grinned.
“When should we tell her that people dump their sewage into the Thames?” he whispered.
“Never,” Jonah whispered back.
One by one, all the tracers vanished from the barge, as everyone settled down. Jonah and Alex waited until the rest of the people had crowded on, and then, just before the barge pulled away, they gingerly stepped down to grab other poles. They were careful to balance their weight, so the barge barely swayed.
And then they were gliding along the river.
FIFTEEN
It wasn’t bad on the barge. Clinging to the pole, balanced on the outer edge of the boat, Jonah was at least certain that he wouldn’t accidentally jostle into someone. And Jonah could hear bits and pieces of the conversation under the canopy.
Mostly people seemed to be talking about the weather.
“What a lovely day …”
“Perfect for the coronation …”
Jonah noticed that, although the people in the boat all had on fancy clothes, a lot of them were missing teeth or had pockmarked skin or bad scars. One man was even missing both an eye and a hand, like he was an extra for one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. Jonah started thinking about how in movies about old times it was only the pirates and the outlaws who ever had any deformities or blemishes, while the heroes and heroines all had perfect teeth and perfect skin and perfect hair and bodies—as if they all had time-traveling plastic surgeons and orthodontists and hair stylists and personal trainers to take care of them. While in real life …
Oh, my gosh, Jonah thought. Some of these people are hideous!
A woman had turned toward him, exposing a cheek eaten up with some sort of infection, with pus oozing copiously from the side of her face. And she hadn’t even bothered to cover it up, hadn’t even bandaged it. Flies hovered above the pus.
Jonah turned his head to see how the others were reacting. Chip and Alex were staring straight ahead, completely unfazed.
Oh, yeah, Jonah thought. They’d be used to it.
Katherine had her jaw clenched and looked like she was trying very hard not to throw up. But really, she’d looked like that ever since they arrived in the fifteenth century, because of the timesickness.
Huh, Jonah thought. As long as I don’t look at Lady Pus Face, I don’t feel sick at all anymore.
Maybe twelve hours of breathing fifteenth-century air had cured him. Maybe eating the fifteenth-century bread had helped. Jonah remembered a little bit of a Greek myth his sixth-grade social studies teacher had told his class—she’d been really into Greek myths. This one was something about someone going to the underworld and being offered food. And the food was really important because …
Suddenly Jonah got chills. He’d remembered the rest of the myth.
Because once you ate the food, you could never leave.
Jonah started practically hyperventilating, breathing much too loudly. A man turned toward him, a puzzled expression on his pockmarked face. Jonah clamped his teeth together, trying to hold his breath instead. But this only made him dizzy.