Far down the hill the first man fell. Then the second. The third. All across the field before them men were collapsing. Dying.
Jonah noticed that Katherine’s lip was trembling. She’d heard the bloodthirstiness in the cheering too. She saw the blood on the field. She knew they weren’t just watching a football game. She knew they weren’t just watching a movie, where all the blood was fake. She turned her head, looking away from the battle.
“Chip and Alex won’t be near the fighting yet,” Jonah said gently. “Let’s go.”
They skirted the edge of the battle, walking far behind the archers launching arrow after arrow from their bows. Jonah had done archery at Boy Scout camp one year, and it’d seemed so pointless and silly. He and his friends laughed about how rarely any of their arrows ever hit the targets.
These archers were grim and serious. Their muscles flexed, their bowstrings sang … and out on the field more men sank to their death.
Arrows can pierce armor, Jonah thought with a chill.
Right in front of them one of the archers keeled over, an arrow embedded in his side.
Jonah didn’t stop to look for the archer who’d sent his arrow so far across the field. He grabbed Katherine’s hand.
“Run!” he shouted, pulling her along.
It didn’t matter that they were noisy, rushing down the side of the hill. Out on the battlefield men were screaming, men were crying, swords and lances and knives were crashing. The sounds seemed to burrow deep into Jonah’s bones.
Beside Jonah, Katherine fell.
THIRTY-ONE
“Katherine!” Jonah screamed.
He crouched beside her, looking for the arrow. Pull it out or leave it in? he asked himself. Why hadn’t JB foreseen this? Why hadn’t he warned them?
“JB!” he screamed, because surely JB would have to yank them out of 1485 now, surely …
Katherine lifted her head, her nearly transparent face now covered with nearly transparent mud.
“Would you shut up?” she asked. “I just slipped. Don’t you see how muddy it is here? It’s like a swamp or something.”
Jonah hadn’t noticed. It was amazing what you could tune out when you were panicked and scared. He looked down at his feet, caked with mud, and wondered why he hadn’t noticed how hard it was to run. Was he thinking clearly about anything?
Jonah drew in one unsteady breath. Then another. He forced himself to look around. A thin line of trees stood between them and the archers now. And none of the soldiers were venturing in their direction, probably because of the swamp. As long as Jonah and Katherine stayed low, out of the way of arrows, they weren’t in any more danger than they would be at home, standing in their own front yard.
“We’ve got to stay calm,” he told Katherine. “There’s no reason to panic.”
“I wasn’t the one telling you to run,” Katherine complained. “I wasn’t dragging you through the mud.”
She stood up and began brushing off the rapidly drying mud. In another mood Jonah would have laughed to see how the mud was nearly invisible, along with Katherine, until it fell away from her armor. Then it turned brown and clumpy. Jonah felt like he was watching mud flakes rain from thin air.
“We better hope no one sees that,” Jonah said, glancing around. “Anyhow, it doesn’t matter what you look like—no one can see you, remember?”
“Chip and Alex will be able to see me,” Katherine said.
“Ooh, Chip,” Jonah teased her. “Can’t have Chip see you with a hair out of place.”
That wasn’t a fair thing to say, since Chip had already seen Katherine with her hair on fire, in the throes of timesickness nausea, and, back home, all sweaty and gross from biking to the library to try to solve the mystery of where Chip and Jonah had come from. Their adventures with time travel hadn’t really made it possible for Katherine to be the prissy, perfect-hair cheerleader type.
Katherine stopped trying to brush the mud away.
“What if he can’t see us?” she asked. “What if he and Alex are … totally fifteenth century now? What if they don’t even remember us?”
“JB said they’ll remember,” Jonah said.
“But he said they have to choose to come with us,” Katherine said. “We can’t force them. What if we can’t convince them?”
“We’ll figure out the right thing to say when we get there,” Jonah said impatiently.
He stepped forward, straining because it took so much effort now just to pull his feet through the mud. This portion of the swamp was even wetter, the mud even deeper.
What if it’s really quicksand? Jonah wondered. What if we get stuck out here, and we die and nobody discovers our bones for hundreds of years?
He wasn’t sure why this bothered him so much—not just the dying, but the not being found. What did it matter, if it was going to be hundreds of years before anyone he knew was even born?
I’d want Mom and Dad to know what happened to us, he thought. I’d want them to know we were trying to be brave, trying to do something good. …
He felt dizzy and disoriented again. Maybe this was one of those swamps he’d heard about in Boy Scouts where there were swamp gases that could knock you out. Maybe they were doomed no matter what.
“Jonah?” Katherine said beside him. “Are those the right troops?”
She pointed at a cluster of silver helmets in the clearing ahead of them.
Jonah tried to remember the map JB had drawn.
“I think so,” he said.
The cluster of helmets, the bright sunshine, the screams from the battlefield—everything was so much more vivid than it had seemed from the crude pencil drawing JB had shown them. It was hard to get oriented.
“I’m going to climb this tree and look,” Katherine said, bracing her foot against the trunk of a nearby oak with low-hanging branches.
Jonah remembered the arrows whizzing through the air not that far away.
“No! No—I’ll do it,” Jonah said, pushing her out of the way.
He pushed a little too hard, and Katherine landed on her backside in the mud.