Love Beyond Time Read online

  A Love Beyond Time

  By

  Flora Speer

  Smashwords Edition

  Copyright © 1994, by Flora Speer

  Cover Design Copyright 2013

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  Chapter 1

  New Mexico

  October, 1992

  “Has anyone ever told you that you are crazy?”

  “All the time. But I never pay any attention, because I know I’m right.” Henry Adelbert Marsh regarded his visitor with cool arrogance. The man facing him was of average height, with dark hair and nondescript features except for the startling blue eyes that lifted his appearance far out of the ordinary. Hank Marsh wasn’t one to be unduly impressed by a person’s looks – he wasn’t all that handsome himself – but he was annoyed with this man, and he was curious. He met the blue gaze with open defiance. “What I want to know is how you found me. I covered my tracks pretty damned well.”

  “You did. I’ll give you that much. I lost you for a long time. It took me months of searching and a lot of trouble to discover just where you were hiding.” Ignoring the woman who was the third person in the room, Bradford Michael Bailey moved a little farther into the back bedroom of the house, his eyes on the computer that filled the better part of the space. There could be absolutely no doubt that he had found his quarry at last, and Hank was up to his old tricks again. “As it happens, I am something of a detective. An historical detective, since I’m an archaeologist. I enjoy the challenge of a difficult search. And I was given a few clues to help me find you. Do you remember Mark Brant? Or India Baldwin?”

  “India sent you after me?” Hank’s arrogant mask slipped a bit. “I never thought she’d talk. She was so adamant about forgetting what happened last Christmastime.”

  “You mean about you accidentally sending her far back in time? How could anyone ever forget living through such an experience? No, India didn’t talk. My friend, Mark, figured out what had happened. He’s the one who sent me after you.”

  “I knew that guy was trouble the first time I saw him,” Hank muttered. “O.K., now you’ve found me. What do you want with me, Bailey?”

  “The name’s Mike. I’ve learned enough about you during the last ten months to put us on a first-name basis. I assume this is your latest machine.” Mike took a couple of steps toward the computer, noting the additional components and the power enhancers. He was no stranger to computers. Archaeologists found them remarkably useful. “You have made some interesting changes to this thing, haven’t you? Are you hoping to prove some wild new theory, or are you still working on the old one?”

  At this point, the young woman who had let Mike into her house when he claimed to be Hank’s friend inserted herself between Mike and the computer. From his investigations into Hank’s whereabouts, Mike knew her name was Alice. She was small and thin, with dark hair scraped back into a tight ponytail. She wore no makeup and her expression was grimly intense. It occurred to Mike that she would be a lot prettier if she would lighten up a little. But perhaps her interest in Hank was more scientific than romantic. It certainly seemed that way.

  “Leave Hank alone,” Alice ordered. “And you stay away from his computer, too. Our theories and what we are doing are none of your business. You don’t have any right to intrude on our privacy.”

  “Did you know your friend here is a thief?” Mike said to her. When Alice glanced toward Hank, Mike took another step in the direction of the computer. “Hank has stolen the property of this India Baldwin we’ve just mentioned. I have been sent to collect and return that property.”

  “Hank is no thief,” Alice protested. “He’s a great and misunderstood scientist.”

  “He broke into India Baldwin’s house and took two floppy disks and a notebook that belonged to her. Then Hank left town with those disks and the notebook. If that’s not stealing, I don’t know what is. But if he’ll return her property, India has promised she won’t press charges against him.”

  “You can’t interfere with important scientific work,” Alice cried, apparently oblivious to the legal implications of what Hank had done. Mike decided he wasn’t going to get anywhere with her. Alice was on Hank’s side, and she probably wouldn’t budge from her position without a good scare.

  “Hand over the disks, Hank. And the notebook.” Mike put out his hand, waiting. “If you give them to me, I won’t call the police. Refuse, and you are going to be prosecuted for possession of stolen property and for trying to recreate a dangerous accident. That is what you are trying to do here, isn’t it? You want to repeat the accident that happened to India. You intend to try to send someone else back to the eighth century. Are you going to use your friend Alice as the guinea pig, or are you planning to go yourself this time?”

  “He knows, Hank.” Suddenly, Alice looked frightened. “I don’t want to go to jail.”

  “Shut up, Alice,” Hank ordered. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s bluffing.”

  “Wrong,” Mike informed him. “I know everything about your theories and your experiments. Now, ask yourself where I got the money to trail you across the country for all these months. Does it begin to dawn on you that I’m not acting solely on my own initiative? There are some very important people who are determined to stop what you are trying to do, Hank. After I leave here, you may have some other visitors, whom I don’t think will be as pleasant as I am, or as patient with you. Now, come on, hand over the evidence and you’ll be in the clear when other people come searching.”

  “Are you saying the federal government is after him?” Alice squeaked, backing away from Hank. “I didn’t ask for this kind of trouble.”

  “Last chance, Hank. Hand over the disks.” Mike paused for a moment, watching Hank, who stood unmoving and glaring at him. “All right, time’s up. If you aren’t going to give me the disks, then I’ll just have to take them. Here’s one. I guess the other’s in the machine, isn’t it? Now, where have you hidden the notebook?” As he spoke, Mike picked up one floppy disk from the shelf beside the computer and pocketed it. He reached toward the computer to remove the second disk.

  “Don’t touch that thing!” Hank yelled. “It’s all set up and ready to go.”

  “Then turn it off and give me the disk,” Mike demanded. “The notebook, too.”

  “No way!” Hank shoved at Mike, trying to get him away from the computer, but Mike caught his arm in a tight grip.

  “Knock it off. Hank. I don’t want to hurt you. Just hand over the disk and I’ll leave.” Knowing he was the stronger man, Mike released the furious scientist. Doing so was a mistake.

  “You aren’t going to stop me,” Hank declared. “Not you or anyone else, including the government. I can just imagine what the Feds would do with my material. Damn it, I’m sick and tired of uninformed idiots trying to interfere with my work!” With that, he clenched his fist and took a wild swing at Mike, who ducked. Hank was not a fighting man. The punch missed Mike’s chin with plenty of room to spare, and Hank’s fist slammed into the computer.

  “Ow!” Hank cried, nursing his aching hand. “Get out of here. Just leave me alone.”

  “I can’t do that.” When Mike did not move, Hank and Alice came at him at the same time, but from different directions. Mike was concent
rating on what Hank might do, so he wasn’t expecting Alice’s attack, and he didn’t want to hit a woman. He tried to sidestep Alice while at the same time fending off Hank. As a result of his misplaced chivalry, he was pushed backward until he was up against the computer. He put out a hand to steady himself.

  His hand went through the computer screen, vanishing into the solid surface. The computer screen appeared to be undamaged, but Mike could no longer see his own hand and arm.

  “Hey! Come back here. You’re not the one who’s supposed to go,” Hank shouted.

  But Bradford Michael Bailey was beyond stopping what was happening. He could not believe what was happening, so at first he did nothing to help himself. Within half a second it was impossible for him to do anything anyway, because his own body would not follow his commands. Incredibly, he was being pulled into the computer. He saw an orange blur first, then an odd blackness with bright-colored numbers whizzing through it. His head ached and his ears popped as if he were falling fast. Which he was.

  He came out of the blackness into empty air. Then he was tumbling downward through tree branches. He grabbed at them to try to stop his precipitous fall, but some of the branches broke and his hands slipped off others as he plummeted toward the ground.

  He knew he was going to die. Oddly, his life did not pass before his eyes. All he saw was tree leaves and branches, a few rocks below awaiting him, and the too-solid earth on which those rocks were resting.

  He hit the ground hard, knocking all the air out of his lungs. His head cracked against one of the waiting rocks. Unable to move or breathe, Mike fell into blackness again, a different kind of blackness this time, a sucking, greedy darkness that engulfed him in an instant, snuffing out his consciousness.

  Chapter 2

  Francia,Spring, A.D. 779

  At first Danise thought the man was dead. He lay perfectly still, prone on a pile of leaves and branches, and when she turned him over she saw that his face was swollen beyond recognition.

  Not that she would have recognized him if he had been in the best of health. She had never seen anyone wearing such strange clothing. His breeches, made of the common dark blue fabric woven in Nimes, had been worn and washed until they were threadbare and faded to near whiteness in places. The knees were torn and bloodstained. She would have thought him a peasant save for the stitching. Danise, no mean needle woman herself, had never encountered stitches so even or so close together – two rows of them at each seam – and there were little pouches set into the garment near the waist, perhaps to hold the man’s personal belongings. His upper body was covered by a short tunic of matching fabric, open down the front. Beneath it he wore a round-necked blue shirt of some soft material. His hair was black and straight. All this she saw in a moment, before her servant Clothilde spoke.

  “Is he breathing?” Clothilde knelt in the leaves beside her mistress and pressed a hand against the man’s chest. “His heart is beating. He is warm.”

  “Poor man.” Danise let her fingers touch his face softly, so as not to hurt him further. She could see that his nose had been bleeding, but the blood had stopped. In addition to his scraped knees he had scratches on his face and hands and a nasty lump on the left side of his head. Danise could find no open wounds to require immediate stanching of blood. If he had any more serious injuries, they must be internal.

  “How could a stranger come so close to the royal camp and not be stopped by Charles’s guards?” asked Clothilde.

  “I don’t know,” Danise said, “but he fell from a tree. Those are fresh spring leaves he’s lying on, on top of the old leaves from last autumn. Look up, Clothilde. You can see from the broken branches up there the path by which he came to this spot.”

  “He was in the treetop, spying on us?” Clothilde gasped. “We must alert the guards at once.”

  “No.” Danise spoke sharply. “We don’t know that he was spying. He may have thought we would do him harm. We can’t call the guards. They would think as you do, and be rough with him. He looks too badly hurt to endure such treatment. Clothilde, I think by the fine seams on his clothing that he must be a nobleman. Look at them. No peasant woman could make stitches so small or so straight. I believe he has been traveling for a long time, if such sturdy fabric is so badly worn. Therefore, until he can tell us who he is, we would be wise to treat him as a visiting noble.

  “I will stay here to watch over him,” Danise went on. “You must find my father or Guntram, who will know where my father is. We will need a litter to take him back to the camp.”

  “Savarec would not want me to leave you alone,” Clothilde protested.

  “One of us must go, for we cannot leave him by himself,” Danise pointed out. “And, Clothilde, be discreet. Don’t talk to anyone but my father or Guntram. Be careful to avoid Sister Gertrude. You know how she loves to make a fuss.”

  “How am I to do that?” Clothilde demanded, standing and planting her hands on her wide hips. “That nun has eyes like an eagle.”

  “You and I together have avoided her eagle eye often enough,” Danise responded. “I know you can do it, Clothilde. Just be quick. I fear he must be badly injured,or he would have wakened by now.”

  Left alone with the stranger, Danise took off her light spring cloak and used it to cover him. Then she sat beside him, gently stroking his hair.

  “Why did you climb so high in the trees?” she murmured to him. “Was it to look over the landscape and thus find your way? Were you intending to come to Duren to meet with Charles?”

  Since the man remained unresponsive, Danise settled herself more comfortably to await the arrival of help. Despite Clothilde’s qualms, she was not the least bit frightened to be alone in the forest. There could be no danger to her there, so close to the Frankish encampment.

  Charles, king of the Franks, had called the Mayfìeld, the great spring assembly of Frankish nobles, to meet at Duren on the River Rur, about two days’ journey east of Aachen. The choice of place was deliberate, to demonstrate just how powerful the Franks were to the ever-restless Saxon tribes who lived on the eastern borders of Francia. Still, Duren and the forests surrounding it were safe. If they were not, Charles would never have allowed his beloved queen to accompany him there, for Hildegarde was seven months gone with her sixth pregnancy in eight years of marriage, and she was not at all well.

  Nor, if Duren were unsafe, would Savarec have summoned his daughter Danise to meet him at the royal court. Danise had made the journey from the convent school at Chelles, near Paris, to Duren in the company of her usual chaperon, Sister Gertrude, her personal maidservant Clothilde, and two men-at-arms whom her father had sent to protect her along the way. She had seen her father only briefly on her arrival the previous night, before retiring to the tent Savarec had provided for his womenfolk next to his own tent.

  Duren was but a small settlement, so the Franks had established a town of tents on a broad space cleared between river and forest. There they would live during the weeks of Mayfield, feasting out-of-doors in the fine spring weather, and enjoying the contests of skill in wrestling, weaponry, and riding put on by the younger warriors. Meanwhile, in the huge royal tent or on the open field, the nobles would meet with Charles to decide whether another campaign was necessary against the Saxons. While the men conferred, the women, too, would meet, renewing old friendships and making new ones.

  The annual assembly was also the time when Frankish nobles traditionally arranged marriages for their children, and Danise very much feared this was why Savarec had called her to Duren. At nearly eighteen, she was almost too old to be wed.

  The man beside her moaned, diverting her thoughts from herself to him. He raised one hand to his face, then moaned again.

  “It will be all right,” she told him, catching his hand. ‘Help is coming soon. We will take good care of you.”

  He grew still at the sound of her voice, and she thought he was trying to frown. It was hard to tell for sure, since his face was so swollen, but his exp
ression seemed to change and he winced.

  “Just lie still,” she advised.

  He muttered a few words in a language she could not understand, then said a word she did know.

  “Angel?”

  “Ange?” she repeated. “Oh, I comprehend. You think you are dead and I am an angel? I’m afraid not. I am far from being an angel.”

  He grew still again – listening to her, she was sure – and then he opened his eyes.

  They were blue, the deepest, purest, most heart-stopping blue she had ever seen. In his sorely damaged face, swollen and bruised and streaked with dirt and scratches, and smeared with blood from his injured nose, those eyes were like torches in a dark forest. Not even the famous piercing blue gaze of Charles, king of the Franks, had ever affected Danise the way this unknown man’s eyes did.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, caught and held by light and color and unmistakable intelligence. When she saw the puzzled expression invading the blue depths, she repeated her question, speaking slowly and carefully, hoping he would understand her.

  He said something and started to shake his head. The movement elicited a groan of pain. The blue eyes closed and he slipped away from her, back into unconsciousness. Only then did Danise realize she was still holding his hand, clutching it in both of hers, pressing it against her bosom. She let it go, laying it upon his chest and stroking the limp and dirty fingers with her own white ones.

  “Don’t die,” she whispered. “Please don’t die. I want to know you. I want to hear you speak again in that strange language.”

  It seemed a long time before Clothilde returned, leading Savarec, his man-at-arms Guntram, and a third man whom Danise did not know. The black-bearded Guntram carried a rolled-up litter made of two wooden poles thrust through the hems of a length of strong fabric.