“Uh-oh,” said Josiah. “I remember this. Duck.”
She had learned to trust him implicitly when he gave her inexplicable instructions. She flung herself to the ground.
It was medieval Sweden all over again, only this time with a bigger pointy thing. The spear stuck, quivering, in the tree in front of her.
Like the Viking arrow, it hadn’t been meant for her. Unlike the Viking arrow, its origin had been much closer at hand. Even as she turned, she heard someone scream. A mostly naked girl who looked about ten ran past her, eyes wide and skin shiny with sweat. Freddy, still on the ground, let her go. It was Josiah who caught her by the arm and slung her behind a tree. He turned to deal with her pursuer. Freddy saw him look up—and up some more—at a huge, impossibly muscled man wearing nothing but a loincloth. He reached over Freddy’s head and tore the spear loose from the tree. He didn’t even glance down at her while he was doing it. He turned and swept Josiah aside as if he weighed almost nothing. Josiah lost his balance and fell in a puddle, sending spray arcing up into a narrow sunbeam. The air turned briefly into rainbows.
Someone screamed again, but this time, it sounded more like a shriek of rage than a cry of fear. The big man paused and glanced back over his shoulder. Freddy, following his gaze, saw two more people emerge from the vegetation.
One was a version of Josiah, albeit a largely unclothed one. The other person was pretty clearly Cuerva Lachance in one of her more dangerous moods. She was a woman this time around, and she looked much more like Josiah than usual, though she was considerably taller than he was. She had wild dark hair and a bare chest. Freddy, sweating in her practical tunic and leggings, was beginning to understand the reason for the general lack of clothing in this place.
Cuerva Lachance crouched and snarled something at the man, who snapped back at her. He held himself upright, his spear at the ready. Freddy thought she saw him gesture with the weapon, as if inviting Cuerva Lachance to fight him.
The head tilting happened. The other Josiah made a sudden grab for the woman’s arm. He was just too late to stop her throwing the small knife that had materialised in her hand.
The man swayed on his feet. The knife, Freddy noted in a dazed sort of way, had buried itself in his eye. The man stood where he was for a surprisingly long time before he crashed to the ground, twitching. Eventually, he stopped moving.
Things went grey for a while.
She had never seen anyone killed before. It didn’t seem to her it was something that should happen in real life. When the fog cleared from her brain, she was in the middle of throwing up in a bush. She hated throwing up, but in this case, it was called for. She didn’t think she was ever going to forget the sight of the man standing very still in the jungle, the blade of a stone knife buried in his eye.
It was quiet. When she finally wiped her mouth and glanced around, she saw four people watching her, three curiously and one with a certain amount of embarrassment. “Done?” said Josiah, still wringing out his tunic. Not trusting her voice yet, Freddy nodded.
The man’s body was sprawled nearby on the jungle floor. Freddy started to look away, then stopped.
I always look away … don’t I? She’d never thought of it that way before, but it was true. She looked away from things she didn’t want to see or from things she didn’t want to know. Slowly, reluctantly, Freddy’s eyes went back to the corpse. The man had been alive a few minutes ago. He had been alive enough to be running through the jungle, trying to kill someone. He had got this far in his life and abruptly stopped being alive. Someday, that was going to be her.
Everyone I’ve met so far on this … whatever … is dead in my time. Ling is dead. She was nice to me; she showed me how to sew. We do all these things, and then we’re just gone.
She turned away from the body. She wanted to go home. She wanted to tell Roland there was no use in them being mad at each other if they were just going to die in the end.
The other Josiah was not behaving as she’d expected. Usually, the Josiahs were resigned to see them. This one seemed taken aback. He walked up to her Josiah and began demanding to know things. Freddy couldn’t understand the words, but she recognised the general tone. Her Josiah replied in the same language while the girl watched warily from behind her tree.
Freddy heard something rustle and turned. Cuerva Lachance had moved up behind her. “Hello, curly-haired one,” she said, as she almost always did.
Freddy nodded again, then cleared her throat and said hoarsely, “Why’d you kill him, Cuerva Lachance?”
The woman squatted next to Freddy and rested her elbows on her knees. “I’m not Cuerva Lachance yet,” she said. “Call me Ban. He’s Bana at the moment. It pleases me when we match.”
Freddy just looked at her.
“I don’t remember. There was a thing.” She waved her hands about. “Oh, all right, you’ve worn me down. He’s the girl’s uncle. He wants to kill her. He thinks we’re evil spirits, and she’s brought us down on him. Of course,” she said judiciously, “he may have a point there.”
“She’s Three?” said Freddy, wiping her mouth again.
“What delightful terminology you use,” said Ban. “I think I’m going to enjoy your time. The girl is, as you put it, Three, though that’s a bit of a misnomer, I should say. Her name escapes me at the moment. There’s a monkey in that tree over there.”
Freddy glanced over at Josiah and Bana. “Is there a problem?”
“Well, we’ve never seen you before,” said Ban cheerfully. “I’m temporally complicated and don’t mind, but Bana is going to need convincing.”
Cuerva Lachance—hat, trench coat, and all—stepped out from behind a tree and handed Freddy a glass with something blue in it. “Gargle. You don’t want to travel in time with your mouth tasting like that. Ban, can we talk? Loki’s come to see me.”
“Obviously.” Ban beamed in a very Cuerva Lachance sort of way. “I’m sure the boys will sort things out soon.”
They were gone, silently. Freddy doubted anyone else even noticed them go. She did gargle with the blue stuff, which turned out to be ordinary mouthwash. It didn’t really make anything better, but Cuerva Lachance had been right: she hadn’t wanted to travel in time with her mouth tasting like that.
*
Josiah had eventually convinced Bana they were legitimate. Josiah was quite good at convincing people of things. At any rate, they hadn’t been in the jungle for long.
That had been the first death she’d witnessed, but not the last. People died a lot, she’d decided, and they died all over history. One of the Threes had almost died while they’d been with him. He had been ninety-two. They hadn’t been in physical danger—no one had been chasing them or shooting at them or trying to drive them off cliffs—but it had still been their tensest visit because Josiah hadn’t remembered it at all, and because if Three had died before the sympathetic resonance happened …