“Yes, that,” said Josiah. “We’re riding the resonance. It makes a path we can follow. It sort of pulls us through. Theoretically, this should stop happening if we ever make it back to our own time. Bragi was in the middle of a flyting, and I’m expecting Ling was doing something similar: maybe flinging an especially well-crafted insult at the brothers. It would have been the same insult. It would also have helped that the opportunity for the insult was caused by two families feuding.”
Freddy felt something in the rope give. It was a very small something, no more than one strand. She paused for a moment to flex her fingers. At the same time, she was thinking hard. Josiah’s explanation sounded as if it worked, sort of, but it was a metaphor. Mr. Dillon liked talking about metaphors. “They’re useful but deceptive,” he would say pompously at least four times a year. “No metaphor is ever a perfect representation of anything. If it were, it would be the thing itself, and the metaphor wouldn’t be necessary.” “Sympathetic resonance” was a nice pat little explanation, but time travel wasn’t music.
“It’s an explanation,” said Freddy, “but it doesn’t make sense.”
He glared at her. “Don’t say that. Do you really want to convince me it isn’t logical what we’re doing? Do you want to be stuck here forever?”
“Would we be?” said Freddy.
“Haven’t you been listening?” said Josiah. “I only do things that can be done. If I decide they can’t, I can’t do them any more. I need you to be less logical than I am.”
She would have retorted to this, but she was brought up short by another thought. “Wait a minute. Do you mean we’re going to have to hang around various Threes until they think the same thoughts as various other Threes, then jump around randomly through time until we just happen to hit our own time … if we ever do at all?”
“That sounds about right,” said Josiah.
“It could take forever.”
“If you have a better idea, do enlighten me.”
Another strand parted. The brothers had stopped looking over at them now. Freddy decided the incessant talking had lulled them.
She almost kept pushing. She opened her mouth to do it. But she shut it again before she could get the words out. Again, as with the “sympathetic resonance” explanation, there seemed to be something missing from what Josiah was saying. She needed time to think about it. It could literally take forever, or at least until she died of old age, for her to get back home by just crossing her fingers and hoping somebody’s mystic brainwaves would connect with somebody else’s mystic brainwaves at exactly the right moment. And it wasn’t as if they were just going to coast passively through history, was it? I mean, thought Freddy, we’re about to be murdered right now, and this is only our second jump. Josiah was being way too complacent, and she had no idea why.
She hadn’t really ever trusted him completely. He certainly wasn’t giving her a reason to start now.
“So how long will we be stuck here?” said Freddy.
Josiah hesitated.
She said, “Well?”
“You understand I remember a lot of what happens to us,” he said, “as I’ve already been through it … as the other me, so to speak. I should tell you as little as possible. I’m going to be second-guessing myself all the time; it’s best you don’t as well.”
Another strand. Another doubt. “You mean you’re almost always going to know what’s going to happen, and I never am?” You mean, she added silently, you’re always going to be the one in control?
“Do you think it’s fun to be sitting here going, ‘Last time, Person X did this, and then Person Y did that, and Person Z was me, so I’d better do what he did, even if I’d rather not’?” said Josiah.
“If you’d rather not,” said Freddy, “why did you do it in the first place?”
“Because I was doing what I remembered me doing because I remembered me doing it,” said Josiah gloomily.
Another strand. There couldn’t have been more than two left. Freddy flexed her wrists, then jerked them apart. The rope snapped.
Josiah nodded. “Don’t draw attention to it.”
“I’m not an idiot.” Carefully, she passed the keys to him.
“You could try to change the past,” she said as he palmed the keys and began to saw at his ropes with one of them.
“I told you before,” said Josiah, “we don’t change the past; we act the way we act in the present. I could tell myself I was doing something different this time around, but maybe I’d just be misremembering the first time. Everything happens the way it happens.”
“But then we don’t have any choice,” said Freddy.
“Which is why I’m not telling you how it goes,” said Josiah. “And we do have choice. It’s just that I know how some of our choices are going to turn out. Now shut up a bit, do; you’re making my head go around.”
He sawed in silence. The brothers looked over every once in a while, but they must have had faith in the strength of their knots. They never noticed the keys.
After a bit, Josiah’s bonds parted.
Freddy said, “The others?”
“The others have been taken care of,” said Josiah. “This next bit may be tricky, though. It’s seven to six, and we don’t have many advantages.”
She didn’t understand how the others had been taken care of, but she set that aside for the moment. “We could wait until they go to sleep.”
“I’m not sure they will,” said Josiah. “You were right the first time; they’ve taken us out here to kill us. These brothers have never been big on honour, though they’re not above using it as an excuse. They’re just having a break before the fun part begins.”
She was terrified after all. She’d thought she was calm and collected, but that must have been the shock again. I could die here, she thought, five thousand years before I’m even born. It hadn’t seemed real a moment ago. Now it did. Josiah had talked about their trip through time as if it had lasted a while, but maybe he was wrong about how time travel worked. Maybe the past could be changed. If I just sit back and let things happen because they’re going to happen anyway, will anything happen at all? What if they’re not going to happen anyway? Things can’t be that certain …
Josiah must have seen her expression change, even by the dim firelight. “Don’t do that,” he said, and handed her back the keys. “You’re better off in denial. I expect now’s as good a moment as any.”
As it turned out, Ji had been thinking along the same lines. The two of them stood simultaneously. Ji tossed Josiah the missing knife. It appeared that one of the things Josiah had picked up in his thousands of years of living was a bit of sleight of hand.
Ling and the two old men were rising, too. Freddy was the last to scramble to her feet. One of the old men was holding the long rope to which they had all been bound. Josiah had the knife; Freddy, remembering a TV show about self-defence she had seen once, made a fist around her key ring and let the keys poke out between her fingers. Otherwise, they were unarmed against seven men with knives and spears.
The brothers reacted immediately. They hadn’t been watching closely, but they had been watching. Now they were standing ranged before the fire, spears at the ready. One of the older ones spoke. “What do you think you can do here?” Josiah translated. “Two old men, two boys, a woman, and a little girl.”