The Crown of Valencia Read online

  “Professor Kalleberg, Arturo is my son. I’m not leaving him again. Nothing is more important to me. I think it’s time you leave.” I stomped to the front door, waiting, until he had no choice but to follow me.

  “You could see Elena again. She—”

  “She could be dead. She could be with someone else. I made the right choice to raise Arturo, and I’m making the right choice to stay here.”

  We glared at each other. “Kate, I believe you now about the time travel. Why won’t you believe me when I tell you how important this is?” Kalleberg towered over me, impossibly tall, but I would not be intimidated.

  I opened the front door, but he stopped at the threshold. “When that wave gets closer, I don’t know what will happen. You, me, Arturo—we could all blink out of existence, just like the books are doing. We won’t exist in the new timeline.”

  I grabbed his elbow and steered him through the doorway, closing and locking the door behind him. As I leaned against the door, Max barked out back. “Arturo?” No reply. Sick with confusion, I stormed through the house and let Max in. Then I returned to the living room and watched the professor drive away. What was I supposed to do? If I returned to the past, I could get killed, leaving Arturo an orphan once again. I clenched my jaw.

  Behind me Max woofed happily. I turned and my heart leapt into my throat. Max’s head and shoulders were behind the sofa, his back-end squirming with pleasure. “No!” I grabbed the sofa’s base and yanked it away from the wall. Arturo lay pressed against the wall, stiff and cramped.

  “Oh my god,” I whispered. “How much did you—?” I stopped at the wild mix of horror and confusion racing across my son’s face.

  Pale, his upper lip beaded with sudden perspiration, Arturo staggered to his feet. “Everything, Mom. I heard everything.”

  Chapter Nine

  I waited outside the closed door until the dry retching stopped, resisting the urge to burst in and hold a cool hand to Arturo’s hot forehead, much as I’d done when he was young. But instead I paced, my arms squeezing my ribcage like a vise. Finally, only silence reached my ear when I pressed it against the door.

  “Honey? Arturo, may I come in?”

  “No.”

  I leaned against the wall, my muscles limp with exhaustion with the intense horror that must be gripping Arturo. “I suppose you think your mother’s crazy,” I said to the oak door as I sank to the floor. No answer. “I know what you heard is too bizarre to believe. That’s why I never told you. It really did happen, but if that idea upsets you too much, let’s just pretend—”

  “Mom.” I jumped as Arturo yanked the door open. He came out into the narrow hallway wiping his face with a towel. Leaning against the opposite wall, he joined me on the pale green carpeting. He cleared his throat. “Let’s don’t pretend, Mom.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve never been the kind of mom that makes up stupid stories to hide the truth, like Mark’s parents did when his dad ran over Boomer, or Cheri’s parents did when her mom was sleeping with the volleyball coach.”

  My eyes widened. “You knew about that?”

  Arturo rolled his eyes. “God, Mom, we’re fourteen, not stupid.” He rubbed his face again, brown eyes dark with emotion, then reached out with his boot to touch my own sneaker. “I believe you, Mom.”

  Something broke loose from the wall of my chest and thudded into the pit of my belly. I clutched at my knees, half-relieved, half-horrified even to be having this conversation. We stared across the dim hallway at one another. “Thank you,” I said softly.

  “It’s just that—” Arturo’s Adam’s apple began bobbing up and down furiously as he struggled with what I thought was fear.

  “Honey, please don’t worry. I’m not going back there. I’m staying—”

  He held up his sturdy hand, shaking his head. “That’s not it,” he whispered, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “You—you left her, for me.” Sudden anguish twisted his mouth and he wiped his nose on a sleeve. “You’ve been lonely all these years because of me.” He slammed his head back against the wall, rigid with fury. “I thought there was something wrong with you because you didn’t have anyone. Damn it, I feel so stupid. You had someone and you gave her up.” He stopped, unable to speak, frowning in fierce concentration as he struggled for control.

  I knelt on the carpet and took Arturo’s face in my hands, forcing him to look at me. “I do miss Elena, every day. I won’t deny that. But every time I get up in the morning, I’m so happy because I have you. I don’t regret for one instant my choice to be your parent. Do you understand?”

  “All these years I’ve been happy, and you’ve been miserable.”

  I shook him gently. “Stop that. I haven’t been miserable. Being your mother is the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me...ever.”

  He blinked, his lashes stuck together with unshed tears. “More incredible than time travel?” He touched my necklace, rolling the pearl between his fingers.

  I nodded. “More incredible than time travel.” I kissed both his cheeks.

  “Aww, Mom.” His complaint lacked his usual disgust, and his whole face relaxed, warming me completely. We rested in silence for a minute, then he squeezed my hand, rose, and pulled us both to our feet. I threw my arm around his shoulder, and we returned to the living room, where we collapsed on the sofa, and Max rested his head on Arturo’s knee. “You have to go back,” Arturo said.

  “Don’t you start.”

  The afternoon sun filtered across our laps, a blanket of warmth. “What was Elena like?” he asked suddenly. “Do you think I’d like her?”

  I smiled. “She taught me to throw a dagger, so I’m not sure how she would have felt about Tae Kwon Do.” I lay my head back against the sofa, marveling at the lightness lifting my spirits. To talk about Elena was to acknowledge her, honor her, celebrate her. “She made me laugh. She was brave and fair and devoted. She loved to lead men into battle. She thought I was a terrible cook.”

  “You are. But when we go back, I can cook for her. I make a mean burger.”

  “When we go back?” I ran my hands over the nubby sofa, too exhausted to move it back against the wall.

  “Yeah. We’ll ride horses, and I can hunt and maybe I can teach Elena some Tae Kwon Do. We can find this El Cid guy and—”

  “We?”

  “We’ll make him take Valencia, and maybe we’ll even bump off this Rashid guy to make sure.”

  “We?” I felt like a skipping CD.

  Arturo leapt to his feet, face flushed. “Okay, maybe we’ll just lock Rashid up so he can’t run things. But you know El Cid. He’d listen to you. He’d listen to Elena.”

  “Not if he ever found out Luis was a woman.” I stopped. Clever boy to draw me in like that. I held up both hands. “No way. You have no idea what it’s like back there.”

  He stopped. “Then tell me.”

  “If a cut gets infected, you could die. If you’re exposed to influenza or other plagues, you could die. The Moors and Christians are constantly raiding each other’s territory. The Almoravides come up from Africa now and then to kick everyone’s butt. You could be captured and killed or enslaved.”

  He looked out the window, then back at me. “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. A gang could waste me in some random drive-by. My plane could crash. I could eat some E. coli spinach and die. How is that any different?”

  Unable to think of a suitable retort, I closed my mouth, but Arturo dropped to his knees and grabbed my hands. “Mom, we go back together. We find Elena. She can help us. We fix things so Rodrigo does what he’s supposed to do.”

  “Then what?” I squeaked.

  “Then we come home.”

  “No.”

  “It’d be a great history lesson,” he said, turning on his most convincing voice. “An experience no other fourteen-year-old guy could have.”

  “No.”

  “Then you go bac
k by yourself. Someone has to fix—”

  “No.”

  “Then I come along.”

  I leaned forward, patting his hands. “Turito.” He flushed at the baby nickname. “It will be a cold day in hell before I expose my son to the eleventh century.”

  He bit his lip, then met my stubborn look with one of his own. We weren’t genetically related; was stubbornness a learned trait? “Mom, I’d rather live in hell than not live at all. If that professor is right, some day soon this world is going to disappear, and us with it. I don’t think you have much choice.” He stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To pack,” he said, then marched from the room.

  *

  I didn’t know what was in Arturo’s gym bag, but he put it outside his room when he left for school the next morning, as if its mere presence would convince me to pack my own bag. Work passed in a daze, the entire day spent in meetings discussing my new responsibilities. I’m sure the company president questioned his choice several times when I had to drag my mind back to the present and apologize. Manager of Operations was the highest position I’d ever held, but it paled against the possibility that only I could stop some supposed wave of history rolling toward us, fracturing and reconstructing life as it undulated through time.

  Arturo and I arrived home at the same time. “Change your mind yet?” he asked, unlocking the door.

  “Nope.” I picked up a plastic bag of books someone had left on the front step.

  “You will,” he said, closing the door behind us. “You always do the right thing.” With that ridiculous, guilt-charged bomb, he headed upstairs.

  Inside the bag was a stack of worn textbooks with a note on top from Professor Kalleberg that simply said “read these.” I dumped the books in my room, stuck a roast in the oven, then opened my laptop and Googled ‘Is time travel possible,’ groaning when 99,900,000 hits appeared. I tried “theory of time travel” and narrowed it down to 38 million. I began slogging through them.

  I read for an hour, struggling to wrap my non-physics brain around quantum physics’ theoretical discussion of time travel, so I was grateful when Arturo popped into my office. “Mom, what’s time travel like?”

  “You feel nauseous, pass out, come to, throw up, and feel like you’ve been dragged behind a semi for ten miles down a dirt road.”

  “Oh.” He disappeared.

  After another hour, I gave up. To the physicists, time travel was still theoretically impossible.

  *

  After dinner Arturo marched into my room and stood, arms folded like an army sergeant satisfied with his troops’ progress. “The responsible thing for you to do is go back in time and fix things. And because the task is too big for one person, you must take me with you. I have a black belt. Together we are invincible, unyielding, unconquerable.”

  I chuckled, shaking my head. “We aren’t superheroes, Arturo.”

  He grinned but didn’t relax his stance. “How do you know?”

  I swore I’d never say this to my son, but it slipped out. “Because I’m the mom. Now hit the sack and think about the future, or the present. Anything but the past.”

  Once in bed myself, I flipped through the musty books Kalleberg had left. A second note explained that the fractures had moved into the thirteenth century now, leaving behind a firmly established, but different, history of the twelfth century. Kalleberg had marked a page in the last book, luckily all in English, so I flipped to it and began reading. While the language was English, the perspective was Moorish.

  In the late eleventh century young caliph Rashid survived numerous assassination attempts, then eventually conquered all of the Iberian Peninsula and crossed the Pyrenees into France. But before the great al-Rashid assumed the crown of Valencia on June 15, 1094, Christian mercenary Rodrigo Díaz, a divisive force in the region up to that point, laid siege briefly to Valencia. Rodrigo Díaz abandoned his bid for power, Allah be praised, and faded into obscurity, but not before murdering his trusted general, Luis Navarro.

  Jesus Christ. Elena. I shot up in bed, my mouth suddenly dry. She had survived Sagrajas. She had lived eight years without me, as I had lived eight years without her. Then Rodrigo, the man she’d devoted her life to, murdered her.

  Rodrigo Díaz. The leader of thousands. A gruff, cruel man who would find me as threatening as a fly. A greedy, power-hungry man who must survive and take the crown of Valencia to restore the timeline, even though he murdered the woman I had loved.

  Still loved. Could I save her?

  It was late, but I punched in the phone number and waited.

  Professor Kalleberg answered on the second ring. “Kate!”

  “I’ll do it, Professor. I’ll do it.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Where’s Arturo?” Professor Kalleberg asked. We sat on my living room floor, books and notes strewn all around, as if an academic tornado had touched down.

  “He and my credit card are in the den. He’s furious at me, but knows he’s the whiz when it comes to finding cheap tickets to Spain. He does so much online shopping for me he probably has my credit card memorized.”

  “Any clever kid would,” Kalleberg said, chuckling. “Where’s the book on Muslim France?” The professor already had an open book balanced on each knee and one in his lap.

  I reached under my thigh, tossed him the thick green volume, then tried to wade through the essay on my lap. This was like cramming a semester’s work into two days.

  Arturo stomped into the room, Max loping along behind him. My son dropped onto the sofa, glaring at me.

  “Get the tickets?”

  “Done.” He pounded two fists on two knees. “You have to take me with you.”

  I stopped reading, rubbed my weary neck, trying to loosen the tightness creeping into my shoulders. “Arturo, I’ve decided. You’ll stay with Aunt Laura and Aunt Deb until I return.”

  “What if you need help?” he asked.

  “I have friends back there. They’ll help me.”

  “What if you don’t come back?”

  I looked up. Arturo looked six again, an orphan without a home, without anyone to love him. What was I doing? My heart sank all the way to the ends of my toes. I couldn’t leave him behind. I couldn’t bring him along. “No,” I said, more forcefully than I felt.

  Arturo flung himself back, the sofa creaking in protest, his face red with fury.

  Professor Kalleberg consulted his notes. “Okay, according to this, by now Rodrigo has broken with Alfonso for good. They’d tried to work things out, but in 1091 they had a huge fight over a tent.”

  Arturo sat up. “A tent?”

  Nodding, Kalleberg found a page and read: “‘A quarrel broke out over where Díaz pitched his tent during the Granada campaign. He placed his at the same level as the king, not on a lower slope, thereby claiming he was an equal of the king, not one of his subjects.’”

  This sounded like the El Cid I knew. “I’ll bet things go downhill from there.”

  “Yes, they do. History loses sight of Rodrigo for a few years except for raids he carried out to increase his wealth. Then in late 1093 he reappears and conquers city after city on his march toward Valencia.” He removed his glasses and rubbed bleary eyes; he’d gotten as much sleep as I had. He bent over the book again. “1093 was a hard year for Valencia. The emir Ibn Jehaf runs the city while Rodrigo and his army take over town after town on their approach to Valencia. Rodrigo wasn’t a very nice guy. Listen to this: ‘Now that the harvest was ready, Díaz gathered it in and no longer spared the peasants who had cultivated it. All their homes, and all the boats and mills on the river Guadalquivir were burned. All the rich country around Valencia was turned into a desert, and many of the outlying houses and towers of the city were pulled down.’”

  I sighed. “Then what?”

  “Rodrigo demanded an annual tribute of 120,000 gold pieces from Valencia. But this self-proclaimed new caliph al-Rashid moved in, challenged Ibn Jehaf, and closed
the gates into Valencia.”

  “Not a bright move,” Arturo muttered.

  “No. Pissed Rodrigo off royally. He broke down bridges and flooded the plain around the city and began the siege. Al-Rashid and Ibn Jehaf duked it out inside Valencia while the people starved.”

  “So what’s happening in June, when Rodrigo supposedly attacks Luis Navarro?” I tried to ignore my son, who glared out the window, smooth jaw set as stubbornly as I’d ever seen it.

  “I don’t know. Rodrigo wants Valencia, but something changes his mind. He leaves, and al-Rashid kicks Ibn Jehaf out and takes over for good. Rashid’s just a kid, fourteen, maybe fifteen.

  “I could get close to this Rashid guy,” Arturo said. “Maybe lure him into a trap or something.”

  “Arturo.” Now we glared openly at each other.

  To break the tension, Kalleberg tossed Arturo a small textbook. “You should understand where your mother’s going. This is a good place to start.”

  Arturo scowled but took the book. I smiled when he turned straight to the footnotes at the end. When researching a paper on the Alamo for school last month, he’d complained about the endless footnotes, but I knew he’d read them because every fifteen minutes he’d raced into my room with some new fact. He was hooked, and I overheard him counseling a friend. “The real story’s in the footnotes. You wouldn’t believe all the great stuff they hide back there.”

  The professor continued. “Rodrigo had the city surrounded. When starving Valencians lowered themselves down the city walls by ropes, Rodrigo’s men sold them as slaves.”

  “That’s horrible.” I struggled to imagine Elena part of this.

  “Gets worse. Whenever Rodrigo himself found the Valencians on the ropes, he burned them alive in full view of the city, or tore them apart with pincers.”

  “Jesus.” When I looked over at Arturo to see if he was enjoying all the gore, he suddenly gave a strangled cry and shot straight up, his eyes wide with fear. “No,” he whispered, still staring at his book.