Time Meddlers on the Nile Read online

“Go, before he escapes too far into the desert. But beware, we haven’t fed him lately.”

  “Great,” said Matt, swinging Sarah around. “He’s hungry too.” He flicked the reins and booted the mare in her side, encouraging her towards the bounding predator. The lion was camouflaged in the tawny environment, but Matt could just make out the fluffy cloud of his mane and the rippling muscles of his chest as he leaped over some darker rocks.

  “Go, Sarah. Faster.” Matt kicked her a little harder and grabbed an arrow from his quiver. He positioned it on the bow as the gap narrowed between them and the lion. The animal kept dashing forward, leaping from sand drift to lumpy rock-strewn earth, hardly paying any attention to Matt. That was good. If he could properly place the arrow, he could finish this in a second.

  Matt pulled the string back to his ear. He cocked his head, lined up the arrow just ahead of the leaping lion. Zing. He let it go. The arrow arced slightly, just as he’d aimed, and descended right towards the lion. With a thud, it penetrated—not the lion’s chest as he’d hoped, but its flank.

  The creature roared in pain. He whirled around and faced Matt and Sarah, his eyes filled with explosive rage. With the speed of a cheetah, he charged towards them. Matt hauled on the reins and steered Sarah up and over a dune to their side, but as he looked back he saw the lion forging through the sand, his lips curled back in a snarl, gaining on them. Matt grabbed another arrow and unleashed it behind him, but this time his aim was way too wide. He couldn’t shoot backwards, and the lion was closing the distance between them.

  Matt had to make a decision. They couldn’t outrun the lion in this sand, and if it attacked Sarah, he’d lose the advantage of speed and position over the creature, not to mention that he might be thrown and severely injured. He yanked harshly on the reins, making Sarah wheel to the side at the crest of the dune. Raking another arrow from his quiver, Matt flipped it into position, pulled, aimed, fired.

  The lion catapulted into the air. The arrow plunged into his chest. He came down hard on Sarah’s flank, teeth and claws flashing. Sarah screamed and fell. Matt flew from the saddle and crash-landed on the ground, gasping in a mouthful of sand. He raised his head in horror to see the lion chomp down on Sarah’s belly.

  Whiplashes of pain exploded throughout Matt’s chest, head, and arm, but he pushed himself up and scrabbled for his bow—a metre away in the sand—and his arrows, still slung around his shoulder. Fumbling an arrow into the spring-loaded position, he zeroed in on the lion’s chest and released. Before it had even struck the lion, he’d grasped another and released. The two arrows sang through the air and found a home in the lion’s body, one slashing through the ribcage and the other entering his flank. The lion screamed in agony, raking at the arrows with his claws and leaving Sarah to try to heave to her feet and get away.

  Matt nocked another arrow and aimed for the lion’s throat. At the same time, the animal roared and flung himself around, seeking his attacker. Matt let go of the bowstring. The arrow grazed the lion’s neck, infuriating him even more.

  Sarah tried to limp away, but Matt had to give her a mighty shove to get the horse out of the lion’s path. Now there was nothing between the two adversaries. The lion bellowed, his pain-wracked eyes zeroing in on Matt. He crouched down, ready to spring. Matt reached for another arrow, but discovered empty air. He slung his quiver around only to find his entire arsenal exhausted.

  This is it, then. No more time-travelling or rescue missions. No more dodging bullets and fleeing arrows. No more Sarah, with her sunny smile, her half-hearted protests, and her smart solutions, not to mention her bravery.

  Then Matt remembered the sword, tucked at his side. Desperately he searched for it, his hands clutching the leather scabbard, then upward, finding the handle. Now clearly bent on revenge, the lion launched himself into the air, claws extended. Matt clutched the handle and drew out the sword. Snapping it up like a whip, he felt it connect with the lion’s chest, plunging deeply, as jaws and needle-sharp teeth gripped his throat.

  Matt felt blood spurt from his neck. He saw a fountain of red erupt from the lion as he fell backward, crushed to the sand beneath the creature. But the lion’s jaws fell limply to the side, not crunching together to snap Matt’s neck or rip his throat out. Matt gasped and threw the beast off him. He lay back then, shivering, staring up at the clear blue sky. He couldn’t believe it. He was alive.

  He touched his neck, and yes, rivulets of warm fluid were running down it, but not enough to make him think a major artery or vein had been severed. His body throbbed with the after-effects of the adrenaline rush, and he began to feel the stinging, aching, smarting bruises and cuts all over his arms, legs, and chest. Struggling to turn on his side, he levered himself up and dug his feet into the sand. Staggering, he was on his feet, and there, in front of him, lay the lion.

  He stared at it, the sword still protruding from its chest, its jaw cracked wide and its eyes frozen open. Leaning forward, he withdrew the sword. It came out with a slight sucking sound, and he wiped it on the matted fur.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thought you’d won, didn’t you?” But the surge of triumph was short-lived. For a moment he felt a wave of regret that he’d had to kill the lion. Such a beautiful creature. It hadn’t been the lion’s fault he’d been used as a test, but Matt hadn’t had a choice. He’d have been dead if he’d refused, or he’d have been dead if he hadn’t fought back.

  Sarah moaned and Matt turned towards his mare. She was limping in his direction, tiny streams of blood meandering through her coat.

  “We’re a sorry-looking pair, aren’t we, Sarah?” he said, patting her gently and resting his head against her nose. She snorted and nipped at his shoulder. Matt wrapped his arms around her neck and stayed there for several minutes, burying his face in her mane, breathing in her sour sweat-stained hide. How he wished she was the real Sarah and this nightmare was over. He’d really had enough of battles and creatures trying to kill him. He didn’t even bother to lift his head when he heard the rumbling approach of wheels and horses.

  “Well done, Matt. Senneti, our physician, will bind your wounds and the horse’s. I think you’re ready for battle now.”

  Matt looked up at Taharqa and scowled. “Ready for battle? If you didn’t notice, I nearly got my butt kicked. Oh, but you wouldn’t understand that expression. I nearly got my throat ripped open. How’s that? I’ll never be ready for battle. Besides, we may not even−”

  “This time, it’s possible I can prevent it, but not in Jerusalem, not with the Assyrians. You must be prepared. Understand that I didn’t place you in harm’s way lightly. You will die if you don’t learn how to truly fight!”

  Matt flinched at the prince’s tone. This all seemed crazy, but yet, for the day and age, for the coming events . . . The prince was doing what he, as a general, was supposed to do. Train his troops for battle. Men died in battle, even fourteen-year-old boys. He shouldn’t be angry at the prince. After all, he had survived.

  “You’re right,” he said. “How can I even think of rescuing Sarah if I can’t fight?”

  The grim lines on Taharqa’s face faded and his eyes lit up. “You’re learning,” he said.

  “There’s no doubt I’m learning. I just killed a lion,” said Matt, raising the sword, tiredly.

  A cheer sprang up from the troops around him. They all reached into their scabbards and thrust their swords in the air.

  “Lion killer!” they shouted.

  The prince fumbled at his belt, clearly about to join in, then must have realized his own sword was still clutched in Matt’s hand.

  “Here,” said Matt, handing it up to him.

  “No. You keep it. I have another, and you deserve this one.”

  Matt smiled and proudly examined the smooth iron blade and glittering gold-plated handle.

  “Besides, we’ll have to practice more fencing tonight, when we reach the fortress.”

  Matt’s smile dissolved. All the aches and pains spoke to him a
gain, along with his weary muscles and cramping shoulders. Would he really have to practice more after this brutal challenge? But he knew enough not to argue with the prince.

  “All right,” he said, looking away so Taharqa couldn’t see his reluctance. Then he noticed a struggle occurring farther down the line of men. Two soldiers had his father hemmed in, pinning his horse between theirs. Their hands were clamped on his arms and he was trying to break free.

  “Let me go. My son is injured.”

  The prince turned in his chariot. “Perhaps I’m not what you thought I was, Matt,” he said. “A leader must be hard sometimes, not always a friend. But perhaps your father isn’t who you think he is either.”

  Matt stared at his dad in astonishment as the prince yelled, “Release him.”

  Chapter 26

  Paradoxes and Payment

  Matt scratched at the stiff linen bandages around his neck. He tried to keep his head from swivelling to the side and peering at his father, but he just couldn’t help it. They’d been travelling a good hour since the “lion test,” as he called it. Taharqa’s doctor had patched him up as promised, painting his wound with, of all things, goose grease and honey. He told Matt it would stop the bleeding and hasten the healing. Who was he to argue? They might not have world-class hospitals here, but they seemed to know quite a few natural remedies. The man had wrapped his neck in the bandages and moved on to Sarah, tending to her gashes. Once finished they were both ushered back to their position in the column, beside his father and Nadine. The march continued.

  “Are you okay?” his dad asked.

  “Never better,” he muttered, but he sneaked another peek at his father.

  “Well, you’d better ask. Or you’ll be wondering all day.”

  “Ask what?”

  “Whatever’s on your mind.”

  Matt opened his mouth, and then closed it. How could he express his hope and his fear?

  “He’s wondering why you were trying so hard to get to him,” said Nadine. “If you’re such a bad father, as I’ve exposed, why the care and concern?”

  Matt turned to Nadine, wanting to throw something at her, but he had to admit she’d expressed his thoughts fairly accurately. He just wished she’d disappear.

  “What?” she asked, meeting his glare. “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “Maybe,” he snapped.

  “I’ve made a considerable number of mistakes,” his dad said, looking away over the rolling dunes and the dipping orange disc of the sun. “I can’t erase the errors I’ve committed, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you. I’ve waded through many different ages, and I’ve survived because I learned to avoid notice, to keep my head down. But you, you’re very visible. So much so that this prince sends you after a lion as a training exercise. Did you think I’d just stand by and let that happen? No more than I’d let a Nazi shoot you. Or an SUV run you down. I’m not a very noble man, Matt, but I am your father.”

  Matt’s throat constricted at his words and he choked back some tears.

  Nadine snorted. “Yes, he is your father. Reckless. Stupid. He got in the prince’s face and told him to stop. Stop training you. Stop wasting boys’ lives in battle. Your dad told him he was still a boy himself and asked him if he really thought he could make these kinds of decisions on his own. He may have tried to save you, Matt, but he also might have killed us all in the process.”

  Matt gaped and turned back to his dad. “Is this true?”

  “He had me pinned and I couldn’t get to you. I had to say something to stop him, to make him reconsider what he was doing. Matt, that lion nearly had you. I thought if I could get the prince to intervene . . .”

  “He’s a general and a leader, no matter how old he is. What if you made him doubt himself? He might change his mind about talking to the Medjay. What if that’s what makes the timeline end? And Sarah—we can’t leave her—” Matt gulped and bit down hard on his lip. Couldn’t his dad understand? Maybe he’d been trying to save Matt, but at what cost?

  “Taharqa knows his own mind, Matt. I couldn’t sway him to help you, so I doubt if he altered his decision because of me. Besides, you’re still here. That probably means nothing has changed.”

  “Or everything has changed and we’re just going to live out our lives here,” said Matt.

  His father sighed and raised his hand, as if he wanted to reach out to Matt. “That’s still better than having you dead.”

  A pulse ran through Matt, like an electric shock. Had his father just suggested that if he could save his son, the universe be damned? Did he feel that strongly? It wasn’t something Matt would do. Not risk everything for the love of one person. Or was it? Matt thought of Sarah and the things he’d said to the prince. As his father had said, the prince was stubborn and Matt had likely not been a major factor in his decision, but still Matt had acted surprisingly like his father. Maybe that was why he’d been so mad at him, because he was mad at himself.

  “Other people might not think so,” he muttered, eyeing Nadine to see if she would chime in her agreement, but for once she stayed quiet and scrutinized him thoughtfully.

  “I don’t know what other people you mean, Matt,” said his dad. “I understand you aided the First Nations people, thereby ending a war. You also prevented fifty SOE agents from being captured by the Nazis and ultimately killed. Who would want to see you harmed?”

  Nadine sighed and shook her head. “He means me, of course. He thinks that I’ve hated him all these years, but that was never really the case. I just saw too much of your father in you, Matt. You have good intentions, but meddling with time will eventually end in disaster, as you now know. Yet still neither one of you seems to be able to grasp that point. You still whisper, or, in Nathan’s case, shout in the prince’s ear, no matter what that may do.”

  Matt scowled at her. He wanted to scream, fly at her, blame everything bad that had happened in his life and with the time machine on her. But for the first time, he couldn’t. Because—and he nearly choked when it hit him—she was right. He’d come here to stop his father from influencing the prince and instead had become involved, up to his neck, in the prince’s affairs. If his father, through some slight interference, had caused such disastrous changes, what had he done by becoming front and centre on the prince’s radar? Not to mention what he’d suggested to the prince in the stable. But he couldn’t stop now. His meddling was like a snowball, gathering speed and mass as it hurtled downhill. Nothing but a head-on collision with something just as powerful could stop its forward momentum.

  A snowball. Time moving forward, unstoppable, creating history, except for . . . a time machine. A change in history that alters the timeline, caused by a man who went back in time because of a time machine that he’d invented—that couldn’t be uninvented even though he changes history, because then he couldn’t travel back in time to change it.

  Oh man, he was getting a headache.

  “Dad, erasing history is impossible,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Because the time machine can’t be un-invented.”

  “I know.”

  “Then how . . . ?”

  “Maybe it’s like Nadine said before, we’re part of history. Maybe, no matter what changes we make, it will eventually lead back to me and a time machine—somewhere, somewhen. It could even cycle through another erasure.”

  “You think this might have happened before? We might have erased a different history?”

  His dad nodded. “Possibly many different histories.”

  “I’m really getting a headache.”

  “Which brings me to the ‘we’ in this. You’re here now. You might have been here before. You’re assuming it’s Nadine or me who change the timeline. But . . .”

  “You think Sarah and I might be part of the equation,” said Matt, his voice losing volume. It wasn’t something he wanted to hear, but it was something he was starting to suspect.

  “If it has cycled a number o
f times, then yes, you may be intimately involved. Think about it. An alternate timeline develops that inevitably leads to the creation of a time machine by me—that doesn’t factor in you or Nadine or Sarah, but you’re here, so somehow you’re part of this and you must be created, too. History will mold itself around our mistake in order to remake us and send us back here again—it must recreate the conditions. But in order to stop any more erasures and an infinite number of histories developing, plus the fact that we may never get past the point where the time machine disappears and end up repeating this scenario forever, we need to make a choice that will lead to the original history.”

  “A never-ending loop,” said Matt. His head was going to explode. “But if we keep making the same mistake, wouldn’t the alternate history just continue? Why would history be erased again?”

  “I think, Matt, that until the ‘original’ mistake—the one that had the most impact—is corrected, time must avoid the paradox. Because we made the initial change in the system, we must return until that is rectified. If this alternate history just continued, it wouldn’t meet the conditions of the system, that we must end up back in this time—that perhaps all of us must end up in this time. We must do something every time we come here to destroy the current timeline. But in order to stop the loop, we must fix our first and worst mistake.”

  “Which was?”

  His dad shrugged and looked away. “I hope we’re smart enough to figure it out . . . eventually.”

  Matt couldn’t imagine reliving this ordeal, again and again and again. Seeing Sarah ripped from his side, going through the agony of imagining her injured or worse, fighting a lion, meeting his father as if it were the first time, and being frustrated and disappointed. But this was definitely his dad. A man who had all the answers, except the most important ones.

  A shout rang out from the front of the column.

  “The Nile! We have reached the Nile!”

  Cheers penetrated the still desert air as a sweet tang of moisture touched Matt’s tongue. He squinted, finally spying the green growth of palms and grass, and the sparkling waters of the river. Matt spotted black volcanic spears jutting from the middle of the river, resembling the splintered trees and charred stumps after a forest fire.