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Chapter 5: Wending the Lab-Rat Maze

            “Toss your silver in my tambourine,” Andwan sang, “help a poor man build a pretty dream.”  She was trying to teach the boys a song she was familiar with---Green Tambourine by the Beatles.  It seemed their musical repertoires were worlds apart.  The boys had grounded their selections in late 1990s rock’n’roll.  Andwan had grown up listening to oldies from the ’60s through the early ’80s and the Latin music her father favored.  Therefore, the only common ground they had between them musically was Christmas carols, and even those were different.  Andwan herself favored music from across national borders, and most of her favorites came from the area of Ireland and Scotland.  Some of her favorite Celtic CDs held Christmas carols the boys were familiar with, but played in a style they were totally unfamiliar with.  One of her favorites even went back over a millenium.

            So the only solution was to sing together on the cart ride south to Williamsburg.  They’d passed through several villages, and they knew enough Christmas carols to pass themselves off as a kind of early specialty group.  Through their singing, they had earned enough to pay for real horses; they now owned three real horses to pull their cart.  These horses weren’t broken-down, swaybacked nags, but they weren’t fancy, either; they were good, strong horses, the best they could come by.  They had busked and worked hard at odd but well-paying jobs as farmhands all the way down from Boston; they had amassed quite a bit in the month they’d been on the road.  They had bought the horses as cheaply as they could at whatever carter had come to hand in the towns they had been passing through.  This had been done pretty easily; there were plenty of towns, and they were more than willing to toss silver into Andwan’s tambourine.  These horses were on the high upper end of ordinary; they would go unremarked wherever they went, but he who worked with horses for a living would know them to be animals of good intelligence, musculature, and speed.  They’d also stocked up on sweet feed and oats for their horses and a treat for themselves---real food besides oats.

            Andwan couldn’t believe it; they were into June here.  But she knew it wouldn’t be too bad going home; normally, whenever she needed to come back to her own time, she managed to land at about the same time she’d left.  When they landed home, they would have aged at exactly the same rate as their families and friends back home.  Time would flow at the exact same rate in the past and the present, but they would be slightly apart from it; this was one of the results of the TimeJump.  Andwan figured it was something like Lara Croft’s meeting with her father at the end of the first Tomb Raider movie.  The computer bank tracking them was special equipment, certainly; it had to be, to be able to process all the information they were sending across the time differential.

            That was the only trouble: the time discrepancy.  Andwan could only TimeJump back to a point in time and space that she knew.  This meant that unless they could assure that an area that she knew would be empty at the time they decided to come home, she would be back at the same point she’d left, and no communication would be possible.  Therefore, they decided that the gymnasium would be immediately emptied if one of the Time Teens sent word via their glasses that they needed to transport home.  Also, they decided that Andwan would be kept appraised of the date, time and appearance of the gym back home so that she would be able to visualize the way things should look when she aimed for the center of the gymnasium.  Andwan was certain that this would work.

            This would be done through the Trans-Temporal Locator glasses they all wore.  The left eye transmitted sounds and pictures from the computers tracking them; the right eye transmitted what the Time Teens saw, heard and thought back home.  That was how they’d gotten to talk to their parents and classmates back home; they’d been able to talk via their glasses and the “eavesdroppers” that fit into their ears like the invisible hearing aids available for deaf people.

            They’d gone to a marketplace in the last town they’d passed through.  They’d already bought their horses and gotten enough food to last the horses through to Williamsburg.  Now they needed to stock up on enough food for the five of them and check how far they still had to go.  As soon as they’d played enough to pay for their groceries, they’d gone shopping and had stocked up on as much as they could.  Meat, vegetables, herbs, seasonings, and as many hygienic supplies as they could.  It was a relief to be able to go to the inn and rent the bathhouses for a couple hours.  Andwan had gotten her ears pierced recently; she thanked her lucky stars the piercing had been two months before and she could safely change her earrings to something more suited to the first two years of the 1700s.

            Now, back on the right road, they practiced their music.  Andwan’s mother had sent them more music from their time period via their earpieces, and they practiced these songs, with some late-1900s music thrown in when they were sure they were alone so they wouldn’t get homesick.

            As Andwan brought Green Tambourine to a close, Distie, who was in shape-shift as a bloodhound in the back of the wagon, raised his head off his forepaws.  “We’re coming close to a town,” he told them.  “I can smell the stables and the taverns full of food cooked in oceans of grease.”  The Time-Teens in shape-shift could speak mind-to-mind with those who weren’t, even if those who kept their own shapes couldn’t speak back the same way; it made scouting missions easier.

            Andwan had been in shape-shift since they’d left Boston; they couldn’t risk someone coming up on them and spying her in her own shape before Rusty could change it for her.  Now she sat in the bed of the wagon with Distie and Rusty; Hannon and Ritis were up front on the buckboard, driving the wagon.  Rusty was in shape-shift as a bloodhound, too; he, Distie and Andwan were to watch their backtrail.

            Now Andwan looked down at Distie.  “Do you see what I see, boy?” she asked, pointing back the way they’d come.  “Is that a caravan?”

            So it seemed; about twenty wagons were arrayed behind them.  All were decked out in the same fashion as their own.  One or two of them even had the multiple horses tied behind the wagon.  “Maybe they’re traders,” Andwan guessed via mind-link.  “Or farmers.  Dang, but I hope they’re farmers up for a day’s shopping in Williamsburg.  We’ll blend in better then, and maybe we’ll find legitimate work on a farm.  We can’t pull aside and slow down until we’re in the middle of them and find out what’s going on; if we were really native around here, we’d know if today was a market day.”

            “So what do you recommend?” Distie asked, looking up at her with a bloodhound’s mournful gaze that somehow still looked like the smiling young man who was her classmate.  The combination always made her smile.

            “I say we go on to Williamsburg,” she said.  “We should be able to tell if today is a market day.  With any luck, it will be, and we can get information on what’s going on.  Let’s go, guys.  If that caravan catches up with us, we’ll pull aside and let them go on ahead of us---road courtesy.  In the meanwhile, let’s work on something easy, like . . . um . . . what song shall we work on?”

            “Let’s not and say we did,” suggested Rusty.  “I’m getting a bit sick of music.  Better say something aloud, people, or those good folks in the caravan will think we’re nuts.”

            Andwan looked up at Hannon and Ritis from her job of polishing the guitars and the wooden recorder she’d brought to the past.  She wished she could’ve brought Woodlark, her yellow plastic recorder, but Woodlark was unusual enough even in the 20^th century.  There were plenty of plastic recorders, but Woodlark was the only one Andwan had ever found that was yellow.  Most were either cream or a mix of black and cream.  And this was the only one Andwan had ever found made of wood, so she had given it its own name: Anduriel, after the sword belonging to Aragorn son of Arathorn in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the sword reforged from the shards of Narcil.  In one of the languages Tolkien had invented for his tales, Aragorn had named his sword “Flame of the West,” and Andwan, a huge Tolkien fan, had thought the name appropriate for her recorder.

            “How far are we from town, brother?” she asked, falling into the British accent they’d worked so hard to acquire.  She put down Anduriel and crawled to the door to close it.  “I would clean the wagon a trifle and tidy myself a bit before we pass the gates.”  There---that was the perfect excuse to close the back of the wagon so the people in the caravan wouldn’t see Rusty and Distie changing back into humans.  They could say they’d closed the back so nothing would fall out as they cleaned.  To make good on her words, she placed the guitars and Anduriel back in their carry-cases, closed the containers of wax and polishes and began organizing the wagon neatly.  “I believe I can hear the sounds of a blacksmith now.  Do the horses need shoeing?”

            “I can hear the blacksmith, too, sister,” Ritis said, smiling to himself at the game of calling a girl he bore not the slightest bit of blood relation to “sister.”  “I believe the horses’ feet are sound yet; we need not stretch our funds too far yet.” Rusty and Distie were human again now, and they began to help Andwan to tidy the wagon.

            Ritis went on without missing a beat.  “Andrew and I will pull the wagon off the road,” he said, using Hannon’s given name (which hardly anybody ever did, as far as Andwan knew), “and we shall give you a chance to bind your hair under a bonnet before we enter the town.  Be sure your clothes are straight and tidy.  We must all be presentable when we enter town, Anne Rebecca.”

            Good advice, all of it, and Andwan knew it.  And she knew the caravan had to be very near to them if Ritis had started calling her Anne Rebecca already.  Thanking him in 18^th-century fashion, she dug out her hairbrush, let her hair down and began to comb.  The wagon was as clean as it was going to get---everything stowed in its proper place---so the boys began to help by digging through her bag for her hairpin-holder and every set of earrings she’d brought along.  Andwan wasn’t sure whether it was a good thing or a bad thing that there wasn’t much of a selection.  There were some pewter roses, a pair of plain gold crucifixes, and pearl earrings in two sizes.  Andwan decided on the pewter roses; they went with the brown dress she and her mother had made out of material that was as close to homespun as possible.  Besides, she liked roses.

            Twenty minutes later, she had finished pinning her hair up under her bun, and Ritis, traveling under the name of Robert, pulled the cart off onto a shoulder so Andwan could put in her pewter roses without stabbing herself.  As soon as they were in and she had smoothed her dress out, he flicked the reins to get the horses back in motion again.

            “Well,” Andwan said, “I do believe we made it to market.  But we have no goods to sell save our music, and singers are held somewhat in contempt here as persons of negotiable virtue.  We must get our Pennsylvanian currency changed for Virginian.  And remember,” she added mind-to-mind, “Virginia is a lot bigger at this point than it is in our time.  West Virginia didn’t exist at this point, I don’t think.  Kentucky, either, so don’t go trumpeting the fact that we’re Kentucky-raised.  Just say we’re from England originally, but my father---let’s call him William---and your father---let’s call him Uncle James---moved us around so often that we had no set home.  Father and Uncle James were planning to move our families to the Virginia wilderness---they were both missionaries---when they and their wives were taken by a fever that spared us for some unfathomable reason.  They’ll probably believe you if you say that; plagues could do that.  We’ve had some dealings with the Native Americans since we started down from Boston; we passed them by and traded some of our music for their legends and some food.  That’s basically all anybody needs to know; that’s probably all they’ll ask.  Just in case, though---no, we’ve not seen any hostilities from the British soldiers or the Indians, and it looks as though we might be able to make a legitimate living if we can get a job.”

            “Shall we seek for Nebulon’s Stables?” asked Hannon.  At Ritis’ answering “Aye,” he set the horses---Dancer, Prancer, and Blitzen, they had named the nameless horses---along the main street, following the directions given to them in Boston by George Dellsmith, the carter who’d given them their cart.  Just as he’d told them, Nebulon’s Stables were simplicity itself to find.  As they pulled up to the front door, Ritis hopped down and helped Andwan down out of the cart bed.  As Hannon held the horses (Rusty and Distie had decided to stay put to keep a lookout from the back of the cart), the two Time Teens walked into the stables.  Andwan kept a firm grip on her reticule, where their reference from George Dellsmith resided.  As they went, Andwan reflected that they were lucky they’d decided in Boston that Distie would be her second brother and Rusty and Hannon would be cousins of theirs.

            As they entered, a man in dusty breeches, shirt and vest appeared from one of the stalls.  “Good day to you,” he said politely when he saw them.

            “Good day to you as well, sir,” the two “siblings” responded.  Andwan picked up the tale from here.

            “Would you be Mr. Nebulon?” Andwan asked.

            He nodded.  “Aye, Nebulon White.  And what may your business here be?”

            Andwan continued with her story.  “We are new-arrived from Boston,” she said, “where we worked temporarily for your cousin, George Dellsmith, in his stables.  He is the one who gave us our cart and our reference to your stables, since we had been led to believe that Williamsburg offered fine prospects for decent employment.”  She opened her reticule and withdrew the reference from Mr. Dellsmith, offering it to Mr. White for his perusal.  He took it, examined it, and then asked, “Where are your relations?  My cousin George says there are five of you, yet I see only two before me!”

            “They wait with the cart, sir,” Andwan told him truthfully.  “We were unsure of whether we would get the job.”

            Mr. White nodded, then said, “Bring your beasts and cart into the stables.  I can try you for a week, the same as my cousin did, for food, shelter, stabling, and £2 per week for each of you.  My cousin says he offered you use of his stables, but you were unsure of your horses’ temperaments.  Will you take my offer of stabling?”

            “We will, if you insist,” Andwan said.  “We were forced to sell the horses farther down the road to a more experienced hand for some of his better carthorses.  We haven’t enough experience with horses to handle the wild ones, or to tell much about quality, but he said these he gave us in trade were of good quality and were the best suited to our needs.  From the way these horses pulled our cart here, I am inclined to agree.”

            “Have they had shoeing, these new carthorses of yours?”

            Andwan thought swiftly---had the carthorses been shod yet?  She looked at Ritis; surely he would have noticed, since he was the one who cleaned the horses’ hooves every night to keep them from going lame.

            Ritis caught her look and injected his contribution.  “Aye, sir, they have indeed.  They were when we bought them.  Might we have you check them over for us to make sure they have not got some lameness or illness which we would not have noticed?”

            Mr. Nebulon White nodded, and told them to bring their horses and cart in now---“We might as well get a good start on this now, and see if my cousin has lived up to his standards again.”  Andwan and Ritis went to get their classmates and equipment.  After a month in exile from their own timeframe, the adventure seemed about to start in earnest.

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