Now the Blevins is watching all of this back-and-forth with what I’m sure he imagines to be a canny and knowing mien. Ever so stern he was in the beginning, with his talk of protocols, but now doesn’t he change his tune and become the friend and protector of poor Gráinne.
“Did you have in mind making the poor woman a detainee?” says the Blevins, taking a wee step closer to me, as if he’s going to ward off the others’ wicked assaults. “No, we need her abilities in the ATTO. This has been in the works for months, Tristan. Perhaps you missed it, when you were off becoming a hero and a saint, and watching Diachronic Shear in Pera, and vacationing in France; but Gráinne, though she showed up early, came here to work for me. And once we have matters sorted out, she’ll enjoy the same freedoms and privileges as any other anachronic employee.”
During the ensuing silence, while Tristan and Mel are rolling their eyes at this peroration, Erszebet steps in.
“She’s not an employee,” says Erszebet. “She has not signed your nonsense papers. She has only helped you from the generosity of her heart. You have no hold on her. As I know the story, you are deeply in her debt and have made absolutely no attempt to recompense her.” To me, she says, “This is a terrible world and I would not stay if I could leave, but I have obligations I must honor. You do not. If I were you, I would leave at once. If you want to stay, I will do all in my power to make things less wretched for you than they have been for me.”
More sympathy’s what I’d be feeling, if these words came from an unkempt beggar, but here she is wearing a gown as fine as any at Bess’s court might wear, although scandalously short of length the skirt was. So I do wonder a wee bit about how easily she finds things miserable. But she is offering me a place at her table, and I accept with graciousness.
“I will show you everything you need to know to survive in this strange world,” she says firmly, as if in defiance of the men, whom she does not waste even a flicker of her attention on now. “These people think they have set up an initiation into these times, for Anachrons who come forward. What they offer is feeble. I will give you my own attention, as I do every witch. You will be comfortable and safe, and most important, you will understand things. These men do not think witches need to understand much, as if we were just cogs in a bit of machinery, they have no regard for our human rights.”
“Our what?” asks I, as I see it’s Blevins’s turn to be rolling his eyes a bit.
“I will show you how to order take-out and flush a toilet and use Instagram. Although you are older. Perhaps you would prefer Facebook.” A sly smile of pleasure. “I will take you shopping. For clothing. The other Anachrons are not allowed this, but the witches I take whenever I wish. I think you will enjoy that.”
None of the others disagreed with her, which I took to mean that this was Erszebet’s role in greeting all new witches. She’d made a gesture on the word “clothing,” gracefully smoothing her hands down either side of her bodice, so that her meaning would be obvious even to those with no modern English.
Such as Magnus, who had been watching all of this from his divan silently, as a cat gazing into a garden from an open window.
“Clothing,” he echoed, and they all turned toward him. Clearly he had already been introduced before I arrived, as none of them rushed to shake his hand. “Clothing,” he repeated, imitating Erszebet’s gesture upon his own body.
Tristan nodded, and fluently enough he spoke to him, in Magnus’s native tongue. I could make out a smattering of familiar words—chemise, pantaloons, cap. Magnus frowned and unconvinced he looked. He responded to Tristan with a growling answer and sure didn’t that answer include a word we had just learned from the physician: lidocaine.
Tristan looked taken aback. They spoke briefly and then Tristan turned to the others. “He’s curious about the lidocaine Doctor Andrews gave him. Wonders if we are going foraging or raiding for clothes, if we can obtain some.”
The Blevins made an appalled sound in his throat, which developed into a chuckle. “Foraging or raiding?” Then he laughed out loud.
“He’s a medieval Norman warrior, sir,” Tristan said. “There’s no word for ‘shopping’ in his language.”
“Nonsense,” Blevins said. “He’s from circa 1200 and he lived in the most sophisticated city in the world. Even if he was illiterate.”
“Almost everyone was illiterate,” rejoined Melisande. “That’s why being an historical linguist is such a challenge, Dr. Blevins, or don’t you remember? Oral tradition was—”
“Oral tradition is why he got into trouble in the first place,” says the Blevins, and to Tristan he says it, not to Mel. “By recognizing you from such an old story.”
“He put two and two together, and became suspicious that we were time traveling,” Mel agreed, “and that fired his imagination.”
“I’ll give him that much—he has a vivid imagination,” said the Blevins, “and that he imagines himself a Viking.” And over the lovely face of Tristan don’t I see a look of annoyance flare for a moment, then fade away.
Magnus knows perfectly well that they’re talking about him. He can’t make out one word in ten, but “viking” he knows. He’s favoring Blevins with an innocent look that I did not for one moment believe was really innocent. I saw at once what Magnus was about: for his own reasons, whatever they be, he was gulling them all into considering him dull-witted. Seeing he now has the Blevins’s attention, he taps his shoulder, and says with deliberately (it seemed to me) child-like delight, “Viking! Viking!” and makes a fist as if he’s holding an axe, and goes into a little pantomime of laying about himself as if in a battle of legendary times. And then doesn’t he laugh like a toddler.
At this, the Blevins smirks, and says to Tristan, “He’s like that Korean guy we brought from the Silla dynasty.”
“Who, Yeon Hyeokgeose?” says Melisande curtly. “He was developmentally challenged. He was simple.”
“This guy’s pretty simple,” says the Blevins with a quick laugh, and gestures to Magnus as if he was a piece of furniture. And then quick as you like, I realize that Magnus has looked round at the rest of us to see our displeasure at whatever Blevins said (and he might, in hindsight, have even recognized the word simple)—and then realizing he’d just been insulted, doesn’t he smile and chuckle at the Blevins as if they were old friends.