Things were so clean, you could smell the cleanliness, cleaner than soap it was, and very cold to the spirit. The needles did not hurt, and were bound to my arms and the backs of my hands with some kind of sticking tape, and I felt a cold drowsy feeling in my veins, as if someone were binding me with a spell of lethargy. These first moments of my arrival, to speak true, were not even the slightest bit resembling what I imagined.
“You’ll be getting treatment over the course of the next few days,” says the physician, “and you’ll be quarantined in this room for two weeks.”
“And I’ll have to bring Blevins in to see you,” says Tristan, as if aggrieved he were, although of course secretly Blevins was exactly the man I wanted. “Gráinne, I’m shocked you did this without consulting me first.”
“Sure you haven’t been back to see me in weeks,” says I. “How could I consult you if you weren’t there to consult?”
“There have been plenty of agents back in your time,” says he. “You could have given one of them a message.”
“But then I’d miss seeing that look on your face.” I grin. “’Tis all grand, Tristan, we’ll have a grand time of it.”
Unconvinced he looked, and none too happy, but away he went anyhow. Now I was alone. Or so I thought.
The light, which shone impossibly steady right out of the ceiling, was dimmed so that it was perhaps as bright as a cloudy morn—before that it had been as bright as midsummers at noon—and then it dimmed even more so that it resembled nearly sunset, but without the proper kinds of shadows or color. All wrong and strange it was. It’s quite overwhelmed I was finding myself, Your Grace, and I was not at all sure after all that I was really prepared for my adventure. Wasn’t I certain I would need to be finding someone who had my back.
And suddenly I realized I was not alone. As far as one might spit (well, as far as I might spit anyhow, which is farther than some) was a curtain dividing the room, suspended cleverly from a sort of track attached to the ceiling. A hand reached out from its other side and swept it out of the way, revealing another divan-throne, and upon that didn’t there sit a man now with long brown hair, dressed in the same ungainly togemans I was wearing—white robe and insensibly short stockings. And needles sticking out of his arms, so he had, attached to tubes. A sinewy strength he had, rare amongst the city folk of London, even the soldiers, and honestly even Tristan, who is quite the specimen, looked merely bulky in compare. Every visible inch of skin on this fellow’s body was taut. Handsome he was, but not so handsome as Tristan. There was no way to know his rank as he had nothing about him but what I did, that being what we were given to hide our nakedness. He held himself like a soldier and a leader. Common sense declared he, like myself, had recently arrived from elsewhere. Looking him over, as much as I could be seeing of him, it seemed clear to me that he would offer excellent protection, not to mention an excellent fuck, and so I took it upon myself to make friends with him.
“Good day to you,” I said. “Do you speak English?”
It was a queer look he gave me, and then didn’t he answer not in the Queen’s English but in a peculiar patois of Anglo-Norman French. I’m knowing enough French to get along in a whorehouse, but that is the French of our day. His was of an earlier age. But plenty of time we had, and little else to occupy it, and so as the hours went by we explained ourselves to each other.
He is Magnus, from a village in Normandy. He had spent much of his life a-roaming, fighting for the Emperor’s guard in Constantinople. ’Twas all the way forward from the year 1205 or so Magnus had come (he wasn’t much for calendars, he was more of a map fella), and he had been Sent hither to his great surprise and without his leave, as he had begun to sort out that something peculiar was happening with the world. Lest his understanding trigger lomadh (he had a different word for it, but understood it perfectly, as he’d seen it with his own eyes), Tristan and his company had brought him forward, so they had, for everybody’s safety. He had arrived three days before me.
Now this fella, I thought, was one to have on your side if you were feeling weak as a kitten, which I was, being deprived of all magic. So chat him up I did, and between us didn’t we share nuggets of information. He had little to add to my knowledge, of course, as he was no part of Tristan’s company. He hadn’t a strategy as I did, given he didn’t know he would be coming here until moments before it happened. I kept my counsel but was friendly enough. Surely he’s not so evolved as we, in that it’s obsessed he is with gold and such, like all those accursed Norman-type peoples who have run riot over our fair island . . . but he’s canny, that lad. Straight off I sensed that.
The next day the weakness came over me something terrible and I had fevers and aches. As Magnus and I lay there getting potions pumped into our bodies to balance our humors, another physician-type woman came into the room and went straight to Magnus and let him know, by pantomime gestures, that he should be baring his left shoulder. This he did, and immediately she took exception to something on it. It seemed a simple birthmark to me. He looked askance at her interest, and no wonder, for perhaps here as ever people are eager to see marks of the devil upon a body, and especially upon a stranger. He tensed, but the woman did not seem to notice.
“I see why they called me in . . . that does look a little suspicious,” she said, off-hand as all that.
He tensed more.
From her breast pocket the woman removed an object no larger than a playing card. Colored light shone from one face of it, as if ’twere a stained glass window. She let her fingers play over it for a few moments, then spoke: “I’ll be removing that mole for a biopsy.”
After the briefest of pauses, the object—which I later learned is called a phone—spoke to Magnus in his own dialect. Or tried to, anyway, as “biopsy” ain’t a word to those people, any more than it is to you and me—but as best I could discern, it strung a few words together that approximated the idea, which was that she was going to lop the thing off for a closer look.
I could see well enough that this wasn’t Magnus’s first phone-chat, for he was in no way as astonished as I. He rattled something off, and after a few moments the phone translated: “Going to cut it off me?” Magnus was wary but not worried.