Time Slave

11

Brenda Hamilton knelt, head thrown back, hands pressed to the sides of her head, screaming, in cold, wet grass, in the half darkness.

“No, no, no!” she wept.

She threw herself to her stomach in the cold grass, and clawed at it, and pressed the side of her cheek against it. She felt her fingers dig into the wet mud at the roots of the grass. “No,” she wept. “No!”

A light rain was falling. “Herjellsen,” she wept. “No!” She felt cold. “Please, no!” she wept.

She rose to her knees, shaking her bead. She felt the cold, wet grass, flat and cutting, on her legs and thighs. She was cold. “No,” she wept. The sky was dark, except for a rim of cold, gray light to her left. “No!” she cried.

She rose to her feet, unsteadily, cold, in the half darkness. She felt mud with her right foot.

The rain, slight, cold, drizzling, fell upon her. She cried out with misery.

“Herjellsen!” she cried. “William! Gunther! Take me back! Take me back! Do not send me away! Please!”

She screamed to the dark, gray, raining sky, standing in the wind, the cold rain.

“Take me back!” she cried. “Do not send me away! Please! Please!”

She knelt down and seized the grass with her hands. “I’m here!” she cried. “I’m here! Take me back! Please!” Then suddenly she screamed, and fled stumbling from the place. “It seems retrieval is not possible,” had said Herjellsen. All that had been recovered of the leopard had been crumbled bone, indexed by carbon dating to a remote era, more than twenty-eight thousand years ago.

She looked at the place, in the early, cold light, where she had lain and knelt.

It seemed no different than other places she could make out, except that the grass had bent beneath her weight, wet, crushed.

She crept back to it, and put her band timidly to the grass. Suddenly there was a stroke of lightning, broad and wild, cracking in the sky, and she screamed and fled away, falling and getting up.

In that stroke of lightning she had seen illuminated what seemed to be an open field, of uncomprehended breadth.

Thunder then swept about her, a pounding drum of sound, a stroke, rolling, of great depth and might, and suddenly the rain, wild with wind, following the turbulence in the sky, lashed about her.

She looked up, crying.

Again and again lightning split the darkness. She stood alone. Thunder smashed the world, pounding about her. Rain lashed her body.

“Herjellsen,” she cried, “I am here!”

Then she threw herself down on the grass, naked, terrified of the lightning, whipped by the rain, covered her head with her hands, and wept.

In a few moments the storm had abated, and there was again only a light drizzle of rain. It was lighter now, and there was, all about her, the gentle, cool, gray of dawn. She could see the field extending away from her, on all sides.

The light was substantially to her left, which direction she surmised was East.

She stood up, in the drizzling, cold dawn, and looked about.

She tried to find where she had first knelt, but could not do so.

She was hungry.

She took grass and sucked rain from it. The grass had a sweet taste. The drops of water were cold.

She looked up into the sky. The clouds were vast, the sky was vast. The rain had almost stopped falling now.

“I am here, Herjellsen,” she whispered.

Then she remembered that in the human reality, in time as it could only be understood by humans, Herjellsen, and Gunther and William could not hear her.

They had not yet been born.

She kept the sun on her left and began to walk, generally south.