Angels on Crusade

Angels on Crusade is for ages 16 and up

Chapter One

The nurse in charge of freezing my molecules inserted a glowing needle into my arm and had me count backwards from ten. I got to zero and stared at her, perplexed. “Now what?”

“Again.”

I obeyed without question. Ten years of prison had left their mark.

Then a cold wave washed through me. I felt my blood freeze. No one had told me it would be so painful. My teeth chattered and the place where the needle was inserted into my arm ached and ached. The pain grew; frost bloomed in silver flowers on my hands and face.

The pain was so intense I passed out. My last thought before I fainted was wry. The program was going to lose their corrector. I was dying.

~*~

I didn’t die. I woke up lying on my back in the middle of a large mud puddle. Rain pelted my face, and my body convulsed with painful tremors. For several minutes, I felt so awful I wished I had died.

Groaning, I rolled over and propped myself up on my forearms. My clothes were drenched and filthy. I tried to stand up, but my legs wouldn’t hold me. I crawled off the road and collapsed behind a large bush. I had no idea why I’d been beamed into the middle of a road. I could have been killed. I looked closer at the road and sighed. If anything were going to come down it, it would probably be an ox plodding before a heavy farm cart. The farmer would have been able to stop in time.

Unlike me. I hadn’t been able to stop my car in time. I’d killed a child, and I’d been punished with life in a reproduction prison where I spawned one hundred and twenty possible children. Every month an ovule was taken from my body and fertilized, and the egg was implanted into an artificial womb. For ten years, I reproduced. I lay on a metal table once a month and donated an ovule, and in between, I worked at the prison library, copying ancient paper books onto gel matrix for safekeeping.

Then I’d been given a choice. Go back in time and change a mistake, or continue to live in a prison, in solitude, where my only jobs had been to produce eggs and reproduce books.

My mission now lay before me. I closed my eyes and tried to remember exactly what it was I had to do. Unfortunately, there seemed to be an empty space in my brain where all that information was supposed to be. I couldn’t remember the first thing about it. I shivered with panic and cold. If my mission failed, the Time Correction Foundation, the omnipotent TCF, would erase this portion of time and I’d be erased along with it.

I took several deep breaths and calmed my nerves. All right. It was coming back to me. I had to convince a young boy not to join the ill-fated Eighth Crusade and therefore save the future crown of France.

I huddled in the gorse bush and wiped the mud off my dress as best I could with my hands and thought of my mission. It had all happened because of a mistake. Time travel was reserved for a select few—highly trained journalists chosen to go back in time and interview famous people. The journalist who’d caused the error I’d been sent to correct had spoken of the crusade in front of a boy who should never have heard about it.

The careless man had taken holograms, as the regulations instructed, but he hadn’t checked to make sure nobody else listened to his interview with Queen Marguerite. Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre had been near enough to hear. On the hologram, he looked up from his reading as the journalist began to speak. Because of what he’d overheard, the boy had slipped out of his bedroom one night and run away to join a rag-tag gaggle of youngsters on their way to save Jerusalem.

Jean would not do anything of note during his life, but his descendants would eventually rule France. By running away, he changed the course of history dramatically. I was supposed to find him and bring him back. If I succeeded, I’d be allowed to live the rest of my life in the thirteenth century. If not, I’d be erased, along with all the mistakes the journalist had wrought in only two sentences.

Just two little sentences which had been approved for the interview, for the Queen, but not for Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre, visiting with his mother and sister at the court. “My Queen Marguerite, what have you heard of the crusade your husband, the king of France, has embarked upon? What about the group of youths calling themselves crusaders who have nearly reached the sacred Cathedral?”

The words had echoed weirdly around the room, and that evening Jean packed his meager belongings in a leather bag and clambered nimbly down a castle wall in search of adventure and a way to get out of his Latin studies.

~*~
My mission was simple: get time back on track.

Shall I tell you how this system came to be to the best of my limited knowledge? It’s not as if the TCF or the Tempus Program allow their secrets to become common knowledge, but as a corrector, I was privy to some small information.

Time travel was invented in 2300 and used for short trips into the past. At first, trips were only possible with inanimate objects, especially those made of quartz crystal. When it was perfected in 2900, Tempus University, already an elite institution, started their reporting program. Because their time in the past was limited, researchers and historians had to make the most of it. It was decided they should act as journalists and concentrate on interviewing famous people. Some early experiences were resounding successes—Shakespeare, Julius Caesar and Marie Curie gave fascinating interviews. Others were failures—Jesus, for example, remained elusive. Some trips simply didn't work out because the journalist was in the wrong place or the wrong time, but they usually came back alive.

The science of time travel is kept deliberately fuzzy, I think, so that the Tempus Program will never face any competition. Not that they’d allow it. As far as I could gather from my own experience, two enormous magnets are placed above and below a chair made of pure quartz crystal, which is located in a specific place on the earth’s surface. When an electric current is passed through the beam of magnetic pull, the resulting “force field” is able to send whatever is in that chair to another place and time. I gather it has something to do with the particular resonance of the quartz molecules, but that’s just from overheard conversations. Nobody felt they needed to explain it to a mere corrector, especially not one taken out of the prison system.

But I digress.

When I started the mission, I was skeptical. Selected out of thousands of prisoners based on my records, I still didn’t believe I could make a difference. There were other ways of correcting a major mistake. The TCF could have erased a large enough portion of history to accommodate the changes the journalist had wrought. However, the electrical and nuclear energy expended in such an endeavor were enormous and cost an astronomical sum. Erasing history meant going to the point where the change occurred and taking out a chunk of time. It’s the last resort. Don’t ask me how it’s done, it’s used only in dire need. Mostly, they use correctors like me to set time right.

When a journalist is sent back in time, he (or she) is left there for exactly twenty hours and then brought back with the molecular magnetic beam to fame and fortune. When a corrector is sent back in time to correct a mistake, he’s left there to fend for himself forever. The job is not coveted. Usually the “volunteer” is taken out of a prison program, like me.

I’d had one year to learn everything I needed to know to survive in a world two thousand years removed from my own. I had a limited chance of survival. That didn’t bother anyone—besides me, that is. I had no family, I was sentenced to life imprisonment, and if I did my job well, I’d receive full pardon and my name in the roster of Humanitarian Awards. What an honor! From a criminal to a hero in the space of a day. This was how long it would take the TCF to verify my work in the Vacuum History Book, located at the North Pole.

How could anyone know if time had actually been changed, you ask? If you changed the past, you automatically changed the future, right? Wrong. Well, almost wrong. Most of the butterfly theory is correct. Little things can have enormous consequences. However, big things, things you assume would alter history, are usually swallowed up in what scientists call the “Molasses Theory of Time”. Time follows its schedule like inertia, starting slowly and then flowing like a bottle of molasses tipped over on a table. The molasses is thick, torpid, but it flows. To stop it one must be very quick. Otherwise, the sluggish, sticky stuff will ooze all over the table. It follows its own schedule, just as time does.

To make sure time isn’t changed in any irrevocable way, scientists placed a detailed history book in a permanent molecular magnetic beam located in the exact center of the magnetic pole of the earth. The beam doesn’t send the book anywhere, but it does keep it from becoming altered in any way--no matter what happens when someone goes into the past and modifies time from there. A replica of the book is kept in another room, in a normal environment. After each time trip, the books are compared. The differences show up within a day. Any discrepancies are fed into a computer and the results analyzed.

If there is no danger of time moving from its flow, then the book is closed and everything continues blithely on its way. If, however, the changes are major and deviate the flow of time, then something is done to put it right. Within a year, a “volunteer” corrector is found and trained and sent to live and die farther away from home than most people ever imagine. A year to train a corrector and pray the mission is a success. After that, the possibility of correcting time becomes improbable and likely to influence the present in calamitous ways. Or so it’s theorized. It’s never been allowed to go that far. The TCF always erases it.

Because of the high cost, little alterations to the continuum are ignored, and time, like thick molasses, keeps flowing, as it should. Those changes never affect our present because the flow of time tends to glide over flaws without a bubble in its surface. Nor does the history book have the name and date of birth of every human being who ever lived on earth. The faceless mass remains anonymous. A person could go back in time and fade into the background, and no one would ever be the wiser if they did their job well.

~*~

I got to my feet, wrung my skirts, and made my way down the road. I had no idea if I was going in the right direction, but I knew I’d eventually find out. Besides, I had to go somewhere, right? At the first crossroads a sign would likely tell me which way to get to Chartres, where I had to find a certain Jean de Bourbon-Dampierre.

I walked all day. The city of Chartres, a prosperous town of about a thousand souls, was on a flat plain, and the cathedral was visible for miles. Unfortunately I’d started in the wrong direction and it was only three hours later that I discovered my mistake and had to retrace my steps on the rutted dirt road.

Seven hours of walking in perfect freedom after ten years of prison life. Seven hours of walking in a straight line (more or less) after ten years of walking around and around a courtyard. There was grass and blue sky. Although the grass was still dead, it being early March, and the sky was a frosty, gray-blue that promised cold weather, I didn’t mind. I was free. The feeling was intoxicating.

My head spun, and I had to sit down. I gazed ruefully at my feet in their thick leather shoes. They were well broken in because I’d walked with them for six months in the prison. It wasn’t that my shoes, or my feet, hurt. It was the fact my stomach was empty and hunger was making me dizzy. I would have to wait until I found an inn, though; I had nothing to eat with me. I had nothing but the dress I wore, a warm cloak, my shoes, and a small, leather pouch full of coins and a few trifles the historians at the TCF had allowed me to take.

I groped for my purse and nearly had a heart attack when I didn’t find it right away. The relief when I finally grasped it made me even fainter, and I put my head between my legs so I didn’t pass out. My heart pounded and sweat pearled on my upper lip. I was unused to such emotion. In our prisons everyone is in solitary confinement. Only after I’d been chosen for the program had scientists and historians showed up in my cell to give me lessons.

I drew a shaky breath and sat up straight, trying to still my wildly beating heart. Most of my panic came from the thought of meeting people and trying to fit into society. I bit my knuckles and tried to empty my mind. It was easier to bear if I just didn’t think about it.

When I recovered, I dug the purse out of my deep pocket and opened it. The coins inside were supposed to last me a year. There were two heavy gold ones, some silver, and many, many copper and bronze coins. The road stretched empty to my left and to my right for several kilometers. The very tip of the cathedral showed in the distance. I thought perhaps there were ten more kilometers to walk. I took the gold coins out of the purse and weighed them in my hand. They were worth quite a lot, and if I lost them or if anyone stole them, I’d be doomed. I didn’t know how likely theft was, but I didn’t want to take a chance.

I searched in my leather pouch for the sewing kit. It was an antique, probably from a museum. The TCF historians had approved some of the items on the list of things I’d asked for, and this was one of them. I sewed the gold coins into the inside seam of my skirt. Perhaps I should have done it before. It hadn’t occurred to me then, but now the reality of my situation had hit me. I spaced them evenly and made sure that they were secure. Then I did the same with the silver coins, sewing these into the hem of my shift. One silver coin I put it back in my purse.

I didn’t have many belongings. In my leather pouch, worn tied to my belt, I had the sewing kit, a change of undershirts, a deck of cards, a cake of soap, a bottle of perfume, and some make-up—kohl eyeliner, face and hand cream, and powder. I had a few pieces of gold jewelry hidden in my belt, which I could sell if need be. I had nothing else. No passport, nothing with my name or photograph on it, and even my teeth with fillings had been pulled, replaced by an ivory composite that wouldn’t betray my strangeness.

The only thing unchanged was my face. The car accident that had cost the child his life had also cost me my face. A huge scar jagged down one side, from temple to chin, sectioning my lower lip and ending halfway down my throat. It was a fearsome scar, but I had refused all offers to have it erased.

~*~
As I walked towards the city of Chartres, the tip of the cathedral spire grew like a pine tree pushing itself out of the ground. Then the rest of the town’s buildings sprouted around it. Rooftops and chimneys rose out of the gray fields, and stone houses grew like squat mushrooms. Black shrubs and winter gardens appeared. Only a few people were outside that day, hurrying through the gathering dusk.

The road I walked went straight across the flat plain. Chartres crouched in a slight depression upon the banks of a narrow river. The last things that came to my view were the main street, winding around the base of the massive cathedral, and the sullen, black river flowing sluggishly under the bridge.

I wanted to find an inn, eat something hot, and lie down in a soft feather bed. At the entrance of town, the gatekeeper directed me to the only inn, a large, stone building near the church. To my relief, his words were easy for me to understand. The historians had done their job well, and I’d had many holograms and tapes from this period to learn the language and familiarize myself with the environment. The tight knot in my chest eased somewhat as I approached the tavern and peered inside.

A huge caldron simmered inside the great chimney and the scent of roasting meat made my mouth water painfully. I rapped my knuckles on the lead-paned window and waited until a woman opened the door.

“I’d like a room for the night and some food, please,” I said.

“No rooms left here, and the dinner won’t be served until after vespers.” The voice was quiet but firm. Before I could open my mouth again the door was shut, the latch dropped, and I found myself leaning against the wall in order to stand upright. For a moment I wanted to cry. My face screwed up, and I pressed my cheek on the rough stone and closed my eyes.

“Pardon, Mademoiselle?” The voice came from behind me, and I turned wearily. Two blue eyes stared at me from beneath thick, black brows. The boy's face they belonged to was peaked; hunger marked it with deep lines on the cheeks. The crevices made him look ancient, although I doubted the child was more than ten years old.

He stepped closer. “If you’re hungry the Church has food for the crusaders. They’re arriving and they want bread. Come with me; I’ll show you. That’s where I’m headed.” His voice dropped confidentially. “I’m joining the crusade.”

“I see.” I eyed him warily, but he didn’t look like a thief. The fact that he was joining the crusades didn’t amaze me. From what I’d learned, everyone wanted to go. The crusades had been the world’s first publicized event. Recruiters were everywhere.

His face suddenly tightened. “You won’t be saying anything to Madame Latrainée, will you?”

“I don’t know who she is.” I peeled myself off the wall. “I just arrived in the city.”

“I know—I saw you coming down the road. I’ve been watching,” he continued, speaking as we walked. “I’ve been watching since yesterday, waiting for the crusaders.”

“And you’ve seen everyone who’s come into the city?” I asked him, suddenly interested.

“Of course I did. At first I thought you were one of them, but you’re all alone.”

“The crusaders in this group are nothing but poor peasant youths,” I said. It was my memorized speech. “They’re heading straight for their deaths. Listen to me, what’s your name?”

“Charles.” The boy looked at me sideways, his eyes a deep, navy blue.

“Sharl,” I said, pronouncing it as he did, “listen to me. This crusade is ill fated. Most of the crusaders will never make it to the Holy Land. They’ll be sold into slavery by merchants and ships’ captains in Marseilles. They will tell you the boat is heading for Antioch, or Tyre, and they’ll take you straight to the slave markets in Africa.”

His steps faltered, then he shrugged. “What difference will it make? A slave here or a slave there, what difference? Here I sleep in the stables, I have food when the master remembers to feed me, and I have clothes when I can steal them from the washerwomen at the river. Otherwise I am just a slave, ‘do this, do that’, and no hope to do anything else.” His voice broke and he frowned. “I was thinking of running away to Paris, taking a chance there, then I heard of the crusade. Maybe I’ll have a better chance with them. At least they get fed when they come to town.”

I looked at my companion and for the first time noticed how dreadfully filthy he was. His hair was matted, snarled, probably crawling with lice. His face was not only peaked, it was pale and unhealthy. He held himself stiffly. I wouldn’t be surprised to discover old greenstick fractures on his limbs from beatings he’d obviously suffered. When he walked, he limped. I bit my lip again. Children made me cry. Whether they were healthy and happy or miserable, they were all reminders of what I’d done.

My knees trembled and I grabbed a hitching post to stay upright. I took a deep breath. “Sharl, I, I...” I hesitated. What could I do to save him?

What would happen when I saw the doomed children all massed together, their white faces drawn and illuminated with the fervor of their faith and a terrible hope? Hope for a better life, hope that would be completely shattered.

My hand slid down the lamppost as I sank to the ground, and my eyes brimmed with tears. It came to me just what punishment the TCF had devised for me. I turned away from Charles. I could not, simply could not, go to the church and see the children. I hadn’t seen any since the accident. I closed my eyes and tried to shut out the images that haunted me.

“Are you all right? Shall I get help?” Charles sounded anxious. He poked my arm, then, when I failed to respond, pounded me on the back.

“I’m fine, I’ll be fine.” I got to my feet and stared over his head at the huge church spire. It was nearly obscured by darkness.

Suddenly, the bells began to clang, shockingly loud. The air shook with each clang. Each hard ring broke the sky into a puzzle of gray pigeons flapping whitely through the evening. Each thunderous toll shook me from the soles of my feet to my head. My face vibrated with the sound.

Charles’s little face blanched and he swallowed convulsively. “Vespers is starting,” he said. “We won’t get anything now until it’s over.”

“Well, we might as well sit down in the church.” I sniffed and wiped my face with the back of my hand. “Let’s go, shall we? Maybe our souls will be saved.”

“God forbid,” said Charles and crossed himself neatly.

I looked at him askance, surprised by his wry voice, but he just shrugged and took a rather shaky breath before leading me into the great, stone cathedral.