21st Century
School never did get better. The bullying became less overt as we all got older, but I was never accepted, never anything other than the weird girl. The incident with Kayla Foster got spun, through the combination of rumor and passing time, into something horrific and extravagant. The last version of it I ever heard was that I had lured her into the woods against her will to participate in a Satanic ceremony – one that involved animal sacrifice. Of course, if all the rumors about me were true, and I really was some kind of powerful, dark figure, my fellow students showed remarkably little real fear of me.
All except Kayla herself, anyway. When she was with her friends she was as dismissive and haughty as any of them. When she was alone, though, she would refuse to meet my eye and turn away down another hallway rather than pass me by. I wondered if she ever told anyone the truth of what happened that day but I suppose she didn't understand it herself. To her it probably felt like a hallucination or a dream.
What I'm trying to say is that I was friendless and isolated. Not just at school, either. My father never recovered from the loss of his wife and by the time I was 15 or 16 I was basically his caretaker. He refused to see any doctors, but as far as I could tell whatever his affliction was it wasn't physical. He could still walk, he just chose not to. His world shrank down to the size of his room, which he rarely emerged from, and I was left to find my way into adulthood – into womanhood – entirely alone. I learned to cook a few basic dishes by watching Youtube videos and when I got my first period it was the internet that held my hand, advising me to stock up on Advil and tampons and to forgo the wearing of white pants when my 'aunt flo' was in town.
It was a difficult time. I say that as if it was brief. As if I could pinpoint some specific period in my teens when life was hard. But it wasn't part of it, it was all of it after losing my mother. For a few short years I was happy in another place – in Caistley – but as with all childhood contentment it was fleeting, ungraspable.
Watching my father taught me one thing, and that is that you would be surprised what a human being can endure. You would be surprised how much a person – how much a life – can shrink without ending. It wasn't just my father, either. He got used to existing instead of living, and so did I. Each day became a series of minor tasks to be crossed off an ever-renewing list. Wake up. Make breakfast. Go to school. Eat lunch in the library, alone. Go home. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, meet with Dr. Whittington. Make dinner – for my father and for myself. Do homework. Go to bed. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.
Dr. Whittington suggested anti-depressants but he didn't push them on me because I think even he realized that I was depressed because my life itself was depressing.
At 15, a few years after definitively realizing that Caistley existed in a different time, I got more serious about trying to find out where exactly it was – and when. My total lack of a social life aided my new hobby, and I began to spend almost every lunch hour in the library, reading.
I was pretty sure Caistley was in what was now known as Britain, or the United Kingdom. The weather seemed to support this theory, as did Willa and Eadgar's talk of "Northmen" and "invaders." I was pretty sure they were talking about Vikings.
As I researched and read, a very rough picture began to emerge. Whenever Caistley was, it was a very long time ago. The Vikings were mostly active in Britain pre-1000 A.D. There were other clues, too. No one in Caistley had ever owned a book. When I described them to Willa and Eadgar both of them looked at me like I was mad. They hadn't just never seen a book – they didn't even know what a book was. When they spoke of the King it was the 'King of the East Angles' – and they referred to themselves as Angles. For a long time I thought the 'martians' they talked about were evil spirits but after paying closer attention to our conversations and reading a little further I came to the conclusion that they weren't 'martians' – they were Mercians, and they were simply the citizens of a rival kingdom.
As far as I could tell, the Caistley I had spent my childhood visiting existed sometime in the mid to late 9th century in the Kingdom of the East Angles – known today as East Anglia. If I was right about that, and based on my reading, Willa and Eadgar had good reason to fear the Northmen who they spoke of in hushed tones. I wanted to warn them that the Viking raids they talked about were going to become more frequent and, eventually, more permanent. The invaders were going to move from brief forays into Anglian territory to secure resources to a pattern of settlement which was going to lead to two centuries of rule by the foreigners.
But Caistley itself had never been hit – not at that point – and when Willa and Eadgar spoke of the Vikings it was the same way they spoke of the demons they believed lurked in the woods at night – scary, but avoidable. Not an immediate threat. And perhaps they were right about that, given that I could not pinpoint exactly what year – or even what decade – it was.
I tried, though, one afternoon when I was 17 and visiting Caistley as infrequently as once a month. I hadn't seen Willa for ages, but Eadgar was there that day and, based on my readings, I tried to impress Caistley's vulnerability upon him. I tried to make him understand how welcoming the little bay would be to Viking ships, how short the path to the village, how completely undefended it all was.
Eadgar didn't disagree with anything I was saying but he did display the streak of what I took to be fatalism that I had come to believe was one of the deepest differences between myself, and the people in my time, and Eadgar and Willa and the people in their time. He even shrugged at one point when I reminded him of what he himself had told me about what the Vikings did to the inhabitants of the villages they invaded. I became annoyed.
"Don't you care?" I asked, wanting to see some sign that my friend was taking my words seriously. "What about Willa and your mother? What about Willa's son? Do you want to see them killed by Northmen?"
Eadgar had looked at me sharply then, something he rarely did, and thrown my questions right back at me. "Do you take me for a soldier?" He asked angrily. "Have you ever seen a sword in my hand? It is always this way with you, Paige, there is always this bridge between us, as if you assume me a King, with the powers of a King. You've never seemed to quite understand that however it is on the estate, or with your kin, it is not that way here in Caistley. Here in Caistley we are farmers. We grow food, we tend animals. We don't fight. If someone attacks us who will go hungry? Yes, we will go hungry. But so will the ealdorman – the King's man – and his family and it is their task to protect those who work for his estate. They protect their own interests in protecting ours. Everyone plays their part, and this is what you always fail to understand."
"So you're fine with that?" I asked, exasperated. "You tell me of invaders, of murder and plunder, and your response is to just act like there's nothing you can –"
"But there IS nothing I can do!" Eadgar shouted, losing his patience with me – for the first time ever, as far as I could recall. "Everyone has a role, Paige. I fulfill my role, Willa fulfills hers, all the others in Caistley do the same. The ealdorman has a role, too. And the reeve and the slave. And none shall go outside their role, lest it all fall entirely apart. Why don't you understand that? None of it would work if we all tried to do all the roles at once. Sometimes I question if you are even from the estate. Seems as if you might be from somewhere else, somewhere across the sea."
Somewhere across the sea. 'Across the sea' was the phrase used by Willa and Eadgar to mean 'incomprehensibly foreign.' And I can't say as I blamed him for using it during that conversation. I was being stupid and impatient because I was fearful for my friends, because I wanted them to be safe. And it was as difficult for Eadgar to fathom a different way of life as it was for me. Just as he couldn't wrap his head around people stepping outside their roles, I couldn't wrap my head around having an assigned role at birth, with no chance to improve my lot or follow a different path than the one laid out in front of me by biology and social class.
When I asked him a short while later if anyone in Caistley had thought of building defenses – even a fence of a kind to keep invaders out, rather than livestock in, he shook his head, annoyed again.
"If the ealdorman or the king want to put up fences, Paige, then they will put up fences."
"But surely you and some of the other men of the village could –"
"Could what? Put up fences ourselves? We are forbidden to cut down the trees, Paige! None of this land is our own. It belongs to the King or the King's men. We're not to take trees or animals from the woods or fish from the rivers without permission – to do so would mean losing a hand or even death."
***
A couple of evenings later, Dr. Whittington noticed the edge in my usually flat voice and commented on its presence.
"I'm just frustrated," I told him. It was true – I was frustrated. About the fact that even with a foreknowledge of what was coming there appeared to be very little I could do to help my friends in Caistley. But I was frustrated with Dr. Whittington, too, and the situation between us. I wanted to tell him the whole story but I couldn't. If imaginary friends are frowned upon at 9, there's no telling what could happen if you still have them at 17. And kind and tolerant as Dr. Whittington was, even I knew he wasn't just going to believe me if I told him what was really going on with my friends who lived 'out of town.'
When he asked me what I was frustrated about I frowned. "I don't think they're taking care of themselves," I replied. "I think something bad is going to happen to them but when I tried to warn Eadgar he just shrugged it off. It's not even because he doesn't believe me, either! He just has this whole fatalism thing going on, like there's nothing he can do about any of it!"
"Eadgar is your age, isn't he?"
I nodded. "About a year older."
"Perhaps your annoyance with him and what you perceive as his weakness, or his inability to help himself, has some parallels to your own life?"
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath – but only to keep myself from rolling my eyes and yelling "WELL, DUH!" at my doctor. Yes, my own situation was a seemingly endless grind of days, one the same as any other, but that didn't mean my worries with regards to Eadgar and Willa were wrong, somehow, or that they didn't exist.
Not that any of that mattered in my conversation with Dr. Whittington, because I couldn't really explain any of it.
Over the next year or so, Eadgar's irritation with me grew. The more I read about the Viking invasions the more I worried, the more I was unable to hold back from encouraging him to take his sister and her children (she had two by then) and move further inland. I totally understood his irritation, too. He couldn't move inland, as he repeatedly told me. It wasn't up to him where he lived. His parents were born in Caistley to work the land for an ealdorman, a person much higher on the social scale – and so Eadgar and Willa and their children and grandchildren would also work the same land for the ealdorman and his children and grandchildren.
It got so bad that I cried one day, when Eadgar threw down the branches he'd been weaving together as we talked and started back towards Caistley, so angry at me he didn't even bother to say goodbye.
"Maybe I should just take you to the – to the estate!" I shouted after him, immediately shutting up as I realized I'd just crossed an unspoken-of and generally unacknowledged line. Eadgar stopped walking away, too, and came to a dead stop with his back to me. He waited a few seconds before turning around slowly and peering at me.
"You never talk about the estate, Paige."
"I know," I replied, wiping my eyes and wondering what kind of enormous can of worms I'd just opened.
"So why are you talking about it now?"
I have a very clear memory of Eadgar that day, of the way it was just at the moment, over a period of less than a year, when he turned from boy into man. His face was still rounded near the chin, like a child's, but his voice had deepened and his shoulders broadened. He still would have been considered scrawny in River Forks, and none of the football coaches would have taken a second look at him, but I could see the difference. I remember he was half-obscured by shadows from the woods that crept right up to the edge of the beach where we'd been sitting and just for a second or two it looked like someone else – a grown man – walking towards me.
"Why are you staring at me in the way?" He asked as got back to me and maybe if the conversation hadn't already been about something else, I might have told him.
I didn't, though. I didn't tell my friend he was beginning to look like a man because I didn't want to embarrass him or make him think I was interested in him in a way that I wasn't. Instead I made a scoffing noise and he seemed to forget about it.
"So why now then, Paige?" He asked. "Why do you speak of the estate now, after all these years?"
"It's what I've already told you a thousand times, Eadgar. I'm worried about you – and Willa. I'm worried if the Northmen come to Caistley, you'll be taken or worse. I'm worried that you don't seem to –"
Eadgar stepped forward. He didn't put his hand on me but he drew himself up in a way he had never done before. I'd always been bigger than him, despite our being almost the same age, but he was as tall as me by then, perhaps even an inch or so taller. He leaned in close to me and shook his head."Don't say it again, Paige. I can't hear it again. I can't hear you telling me I don't care about my own kin, my own life."
He was right. I knew it, and he knew I knew it. "Alright," I replied, "I won't say it. But don't expect that to stop me from worrying. I worry about you all the time, you and Willa out here, with no one to call if the Northmen come, no one on hand to defend you."
"Is that why you mention the estate? Is that why you mention bringing us to the estate? You must know it's impossible, Paige. As impossible as me building a fence around the village."
But it wasn't impossible, because there was no estate and what there was – a literal different world – was not subject to the social customs of the 9th century. I'd already successfully brought one person through the tree – admittedly in the opposite direction – but there was no reason to think it couldn't work.
Even as I thought of it, though – and it was not the first time it had entered my mind – I remembered Kayla Foster's reaction. Kayla Foster from the 21st century, who had barely seen more than a few trees when I brought her to the past. I knew, even without having to imagine it explicitly, that neither Willa nor Eadgar could be prepared for the distant future. Not because they were too stupid, but simply because the future was too alien, too much. No one could have been prepared for it. No, bringing people from the past to the future was an impossibility.