Ashes of Time (The After Cilmeri Series) by Sarah Woodbury

Author:Sarah Woodbury [Woodbury, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: wales, middle ages, time travel, alternate history, medieval, knights, sword, arthurian, after cilmeri
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

November 1291

David

Given what his father had looked like when David had forced him into his bed in the early hours of the morning, he’d been prepared to tell him that there was no way he was continuing with the army towards Maentwrog. But when Dad appeared shortly before noon, he seemed like a completely different person from the man David had put to bed.

“What are you looking at?” Dad said when he caught David staring.

David hastily cleared his expression and deflected his father’s question. “I gather you slept well?”

“Strangely enough, I did.” Dad swung his arms back and forth, loosening his shoulders. “I’m not in my dotage yet, you know.”

“You’ve mentioned that before,” David said, and then opted for the truth. “I don’t know when I’ve ever seen you as gray as you were last night, except when you’ve been ill.”

“I might have lost a step or two, but I make up for it in cunning.” He shot his son a wicked grin, again belying his earlier exhaustion. “I’ve been thinking about our friend Madog.”

“I’m listening,” David said.

Dad took a bite of mutton, chewing hard, and then swallowed. David had learned to eat mutton for breakfast, but he was suddenly envious of Anna, who might be getting cheerios. If she was safe. Worry for her and Mom had David’s stomach clenching, and he put down his buttered roll, no longer hungry.

“I’ve decided that I know what this is about,” Dad said. “And it isn’t about his ancestral lands in Meirionnydd. Or at least only peripherally.”

“Okay,” David had no clue where this was going.

“It’s about gold.”

David had grown fond of gold in the last three years since he’d become King of England. If land meant power, so did cold, hard cash. And in the Middle Ages, gold was cash. “What gold?”

Dad snapped his fingers at one of the pages standing near a doorway that led to a corridor off the great hall. “Bring me the map on my desk. The big one.”

“Yes, my lord.” The page ducked a bow and dashed off, returning a minute later with a two foot square piece of parchment.

Dad whipped it out of the boy’s hand and laid it on the table, using two cups, a pitcher, and a knife to hold down the corners, which wanted to roll back up. It was a map of Gwynedd, one drawn by Mom and Bronwen, from their own memories and using the maps of this time as reference. Distances were hard to gauge in the Middle Ages, and drawn coastlines didn’t always translate to geographical maps like this one.

Latitude was easily determined by the angle of the sun, but longitude was harder. Two years ago, David had printed out an internet account of how navigators had worked out longitude. Upon his return to this world, he’d presented the various options to the scholars at Cambridge and Oxford, who’d shared it with their counterparts on the Continent.

The working out of how to determine longitude, particularly at sea, was one of the greatest collective scientific endeavors in history.

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