“But you—” she started.
“Listen,” said Josiah, “this isn’t possible. Do you understand? There is nothing about this situation that makes sense. Everything I do makes sense. This is an amusing little present from Cuerva Lachance. She time travels constantly. She does it because she can’t. Every so often, the insanity spills over into my life, and I find myself doing something I can’t be doing either.”
“She does it,” said Freddy, “because she can’t?”
“It’s her purpose in life.” Josiah’s voice was suffused with gloom. “She’s continually popping back to have tea with herself yesterday. Time travel is completely impossible,” he explained, holding a branch back so Freddy could nip through into a small clearing. “Can’t be done. I’m suspecting you people will spend centuries trying to perfect it, but you’ll fail in the end.”
“How do you know?”
“The general lack of time travellers,” said Josiah. “If it were possible, they would be bouncing around all through history, but they’re not. I’d have noticed.”
“You’d have noticed them bouncing around all through history.”
“I’ve seen most of it,” said Josiah in his best world-weary manner. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”
It was strange how calm she felt. The calmness was rimmed with knives, though. Freddy turned to face him again. “So we’ve travelled in time,” she said.
“We’ve travelled in time,” said Josiah.
“Which is impossible,” said Freddy.
“Which is, in fact, impossible,” said Josiah.
“Except we’ve done it anyway,” said Freddy.
He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “Look … there are some things about Cuerva Lachance and me that we may have neglected to tell you.”
“Are you aliens?” said Freddy.
“What? No.”
“Are you vampires?”
“You seem to be experiencing some bizarre side effect of hysteria,” said Josiah. “We’re not vampires, either. Note that I am standing full in the sun as I say this. Maybe you should calm down a bit before we continue the conversation.”
“Calm?” said Freddy. “I’m calm.”
“You’re shouting.”
“I can be shouting and still calm.”
“We are standing five hundred feet from a Viking raiding party,” said Josiah. “Stop … shouting.”
“Okay,” said Freddy, who thought she might as well. “Why a Viking raiding party? Why are we here?”
Josiah hopped delicately over a snow-covered log. “Sheerest accident, almost. Since I’m involved, there’s a certain logic to where we ended up. Three will be around here somewhere.”
“Three what?”
“Just Three. It’s a person. This particular time around, his name is Bragi Boddason.”
“That’s a name?”
“You don’t even want to know what he would say about ‘Frédérique Duchamp.’”
The yelling and clashing in the distance had died down. Freddy stood in a Scandinavian forest twelve hundred years before the date of her birth and struggled to accept the fact that she was doing that. This couldn’t be real. But it was cold, and she was knee-deep in snow, and the sun was making patterns on the ground as it beat through the branches, and this couldn’t not be real. Josiah was watching her. He didn’t look particularly cold. He was hard to see behind the red and black stains spreading across her vision.
“All right,” said Freddy, and then the black swallowed everything up, and it stopped mattering what was and wasn’t real.
*
Josiah was the first person she saw when she opened her eyes. It was just too bad there were two of him.
Freddy lay still and stared. She was in some kind of building, smoky and dark; she seemed to be covered in furs. Three people were in the room with her. One was a red-bearded man dressed in fur and leather. He was turned partially away from her, so she could see that his hair went down his back in a long braid with a curl at the end. He was sitting beside a sort of fireplace that didn’t really look like any kind she had ever seen before. It extended out into the room. There was some kind of cauldron or kettle hanging over the fire.
The other two people were really the same person. Freddy’s brain was trying to tell her they were twins, but she knew her brain was lying. The second Josiah had longer hair than the first and was dressed along the same dead-animal-skins-themed lines as the red-bearded man, but he was still Josiah.
“We’re making you some willow-bark infusion,” said the Josiah she had come here with. “It should help with the headache.”
Freddy manoeuvred herself up onto one elbow, then slumped back. The room was twirling in slow, sickening circles. “Willow-bark infusion?”
Josiah shrugged. “Basically, aspirin.”
She stared vaguely at the ceiling until the red-bearded man turned up beside her with a rough clay cup full of something hot that smelled vile. The second Josiah helped her prop herself up on some more furs before handing her the cup. She sipped the drink. It tasted vile as well.
“Better drink it,” said Josiah. “You can’t go running around through history with a sore head.”
“I don’t think I have a choice,” said Freddy, but she continued to take tiny sips of the willow bark.
The red-bearded man was beaming at her. Something about his expression was familiar, though she couldn’t think what. He didn’t look like anyone she had ever seen before.
To distract herself from the drink, Freddy said, “Why are there two of you?”
Josiah turned to his doppelg?nger and said something incomprehensible. The boy nodded and replied in the same language. “He doesn’t speak English, obviously,” Josiah explained. “I’ll have to translate. There are two of me because I tend to hang around where Three is. At the moment, Three’s outside trying to explain all this to his people. He’ll be all right; he has a fantastic imagination.”
“He always does,” said the red-bearded man.
There was something not right about that. Freddy’s brain, scrambling to catch up, finally lit on what it was. “How come he can speak English?”
“Because it doesn’t make any sense that he can,” said Josiah.
“Hello, curly-haired one,” said the red-bearded man cheerfully.
Freddy blinked, then kept on blinking. After a long moment, she said, “Cuerva Lachance?”
“He’s called Loki here,” said Josiah. “And that”—as he jerked a thumb at the other Josiah—“is Heimdallr.”
The names were familiar. Bullfinch’s Mythology was, after all, one of the books that lived on the chair in the kitchen, plus there were all those movies about Thor. “Like the Norse gods?”
“Somebody,” said Josiah, glaring at Loki, “may have made some fuss a few centuries ago and got us incorporated into a pantheon. I name no names, of course.”
“It wasn’t on purpose,” said Loki. “There were extenuating circumstances. I could have been drunk at the time.”