Footsteps in Time Read Free Page A

not?” she
said.
    “ What for?”
    “ I want to climb to the top
of the hill we came down and see what’s up there,” she said. “I
know the tracks of the van disappeared, but we had to have driven
down that hill from somewhere. We couldn’t have appeared out of
nowhere.”
    “ Couldn’t we?” David sat
with his elbows resting on his knees and his chin in his hands.
When Anna didn’t respond, he canted his head to look at her. “Do
you really think we’ll find the road home at the top of that
hill?”
    Anna looked away from
him and into the fire. No ... No more than
you do. “You’re thinking time travel,
aren’t you?”
    “ Time travel is
impossible.”
    “ Why do you say
that?”
    Anna’s abrupt
question made David hunch. Then he straightened. “Okay. If time
travel is possible, why don’t we have people from the future
stopping by all the time? If time travel is possible, all of time itself has to have
already happened. It would need to be one big pre-existent
event.”
    “ That doesn’t work for
me.”
    “ Not for me either,” David
said. “It’s pretty arrogant for us to think that 2010 is as far as
time has gotten, but these people’s lives have already happened, or
else how could we travel back and relive it with them?”
    “ So
you’re saying the same argument could hold for people traveling
from 3010 to 2010. To them, we’ve already lived our lives
because they are
living theirs.”
    “ Exactly,” David
said.
    “ Then where are we? Is this
real?”
    “ Of
course it’s real ,”
he said, “but maybe not the same reality we knew at
home.”
    “ I’m not following you,”
Anna said.
    “ What if the wall of snow
led us to a parallel universe?”
    “ A parallel universe that
has gotten only to the Middle Ages instead of 2010?”
    “ Sure.”
    “ You’ve read too much
science fiction,” she said.
    David actually
smiled. “Now, that’s not possible.”
    Anna put her head in her hands, not
wanting to believe it. David picked up a stick and begin digging in
the dirt at his feet. He stabbed the stick into the ground between
them again and again, twisting it around until it stuck there,
upright. Anna studied it, then reached over, pulled it out, and
threw it into the fire in front of them.
    “ Hey!” David
said.
    Anna turned on him. “Are we
ever going to be able to go home again? How could this have
happened to us? Why has this happened to us? Do you even realize
how appalling this all is?”
    David opened his
mouth to speak, perhaps to protest that she shouldn’t be angry
at him , but at that
moment a man came out of the far tent and approached them. Instead
of addressing them, however, he looked over their heads to someone
behind them and spoke. At his words, two men grasped David and Anna
by their upper arms and lifted them to their feet. The first man
turned back to the tent, and their captors hustled them after him.
At the entrance, the man indicated that they should enter. David
put his hand at the small of Anna’s back and urged her
forward.
    She ducked through the
entrance, worried about what she might find, but it was only the
wounded man from the meadow, reclining among blankets on the
ground. He no longer wore his armor but had on a cream-colored
shirt. A blanket covered him to his waist. Several candles
guttering in shallow dishes lit the tent, and the remains of a meal
sat on a plate beside him. He took a sip from a small cup and
looked at them over the top of it.
    The tent held one other man, this one
still in full armor, and he gestured them closer. They walked to
the wounded man and knelt by his side. He gave them a long look,
set down his cup, and then pointed to himself.
    “ Llywelyn ap
Gruffydd.”
    Anna knew she looked blank,
but she simply couldn’t accept his words. He tried again, thinking
that they hadn’t understood. “Llywelyn—ap—Gruffydd.”
    “ Llywelyn ap Gruffydd,”
David and Anna said together, the words passing Anna’s lips as if
they