“I will cooperate,” said Erszebet. “When it is in the interest of the mission. This is just in the interest of Tristan Lyons throwing his weight around, and I did not sign anything saying I would do that.”
“He’s your superior officer,” I tried tentatively, realizing it was a mistake even as the words came out of my mouth, for she burst out laughing and said, “Him? He’s not my superior anything.” She sobered. “I will Send Tristan back to London in September of 1601, to the Tearsheet Brewery. I will do that as many times as it takes, my guess is four times at least, and only then will we send Melisande back to Cambridge to see if it has worked yet.”
Tristan took a moment to look silently long-suffering, although in truth I think he did this just to humor her desire to discomfit him. “Fine,” he said at last. “That brings me to the lessons learned. I had an opportunity to test my weapons skills, and I’m a little shell-shocked by how poorly prepared I was. Oh, grappling and knife disarms work as well in that age as today. Swordfighting is a different matter altogether.” He delivered this news in his usual clipped and businesslike Tristan manner, but then paused, staring off into space, as if reviewing some action in his mind’s eye.
Frank Oda and I exchanged a look.
“You saw a real swordfight?” Oda-sensei asked, fascinated.
Tristan seemed not to hear the question. He had slightly extended his right arm, fingers curled as if gripping the hilt of a sword, and was moving it this way and that. Meeting my eye, he pulled the towel off of his neck, revealing a long, superficial cut.
“You were in a real swordfight!?” I exclaimed.
This seemed to snap him out of it. He let his hand drop to the table, where he went back to fidgeting with the disembodied fillings. “They have more than one kind of sword,” he announced. “It’s not all just rapiers. There’s an older style too. Bigger, heavier. Kind of like nowadays you might see an older person driving a big old Buick sedan while the younger generation is tooling around in little hybrids. I need to get good at fighting with a Buick. I need a combat historian who can drill me on the nuances of that era. My opponent did something very subtle that I wasn’t expecting.”
“Should I ask Darren to come back in?”
Darren was the fight choreographer from Boston Shakespeare. We had sworn him to secrecy and hired him to teach Tristan what he knew.
“Darren’s wrong for it,” Tristan said. “He’s spot-on with the historical detail, I’ll give him that. But the whole point of stage fighting is that it’s supposed to look as flashy as possible, while being totally safe. And I am here to tell you that real swordfighting is pretty non-flashy and pretty fucking dangerous.”
“I know who to ask,” said Rebecca. She had turned herself into a resourceful Girl Friday, given she had never actually approved of any of this. There wasn’t much we would put past her. Even so, we all turned to see if she was serious. “In the park down the street,” she explained, “in the evenings, when the weather’s good, there’s a group of historical swordfighters who meet to practice.”
“LARPers?” Tristan asked, clearly skeptical. Seeing that no one besides him knew what a LARPer was, he continued, “Guys who fight with foam weapons?”
“Not foam,” Rebecca said. “It is steel on steel, I can hear the din of it from my garden. They should be meeting this evening. I’ll go there and make inquiries as soon as you’re done debriefing us.”
“Great. If we can find one willing to sign the NDA, I want to book him all day tomorrow and the next day, maybe even three days in a row. I need to get back to the Tearsheet as quickly as possible, and I definitely have to be on my game.” His eye fell on the beer bottle in front of him, with its ye olde lettering and its ye olde artist’s conception of the original Tearsheet Brewery. He devoted a few moments to examining this, as if comparing it to the real one he had departed only a few minutes ago.
Then he turned to Erszebet. “Here’s the other thing. When I go back, I need to go back to a different day, the day before I was last there. How will that affect the Strands?”
She shrugged, but this time thoughtfully, not disdainfully. “It depends,” she said. “Nothing is ever certain. If you will not be traveling for a few days, I will spend that time with my számológép and try to determine this. The more different moments you visit, the more Strands there are to contend with, and it is an exponential increase in complications. I will tell you something: in the history of magic it is a general trend that all new rulers wish to use our time-transporting skills to their advantage, but the more seasoned they become, the more they understand the complications, and the less they wish to lean upon it.”
“We’re not in the history of magic,” Tristan replied evenly. “We’re outside of it. That’s sort of the point.”
“Thank you for . . . doing whatever it is you’re going to be doing with your, mmm, számológép,” I said.
“What exactly are you going to be doing with it?” asked Frank Oda.
“I already told you, you cannot touch it,” she said shortly.
“And I won’t,” said Oda-sensei, ever affable. “But I would so very much like to watch as you do the work. I have been playing with an artifact of Rebecca’s ancestress that reminds me of your számológép. Perhaps I could ask questions and you could explain it to me.” A smile. “I would be so extremely grateful to be a beginner at the feet of such an expert.”
“That’s flattery,” said Erszebet, looking pleased about it.
“It is the truth,” said Oda-sensei. “Sometimes the truth is flattering.”
She considered him a moment, and then smiled. It was rare she smiled, and it only further emphasized her beauty. “Very well,” she said. “We start tomorrow.”
And thus began Oda-sensei’s initiation into diachronic calculations.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
JULY 22
Temperature 82F. High clouds, mild breeze. Barometer rising.
All herbs faring nicely. Butterfly weed beginning to bloom. Anise hyssop approaching four feet, very healthy. Scarlet elder: flowers past, berries not yet ripe. Vegetables: kale and lettuce in containers coming nicely (lettuce harvestable as baby greens), but I fear I planted the onions too late in the season.