Once More With Footnotes

to call a bed. Just straw and heather with a blanket made of itches woven together. And there was this girl tryin g to feed me soup. Don't even try to imagine medieval soup. It's made of all the stuff they wouldn't eat if it was on a plate and believe me, they'd eat stuff you'd hate to put in a hamburger.
     
                  I'd been there, I found out later, for three days. I didn't e ven know I'd arrived. I'd been wandering around in the woods, half-conscious and dribbling. A side-effect of the travelling. Like I said, normally I just get a migraine, but from what I can remember of that it was jet-lag times one million. If it had been winter I'd have been dead. If there'd been cliffs I would have thrown myself over one. As it was, I'd just walked into a few trees, and that was by accident. At least I'd avoided the wolves and bears. Or maybe they'd avoided me, maybe they think you die i f you eat a crazy person.
     
                  Her father was a woodcutter, or a charcoal burner, or one of those things. Never did find out, or perhaps I did and I've forgotten. He used to go out every day with an axe, I remember that. He'd found me and brought me home. I le arned afterward he thought I was a nobleman, because of my fine clothes. I was wearing Levi's, that should give you some idea. He had two sons, and they went out every day with axes, too. Never really managed to strike up a conversation with either of the m until after the father's accident. Didn't know enough about axes, I suppose.
     
                  But Nimue ... What a girl. She was only ... er ...
     
                  "How old were you, when we met?"
     
                  She wipes her hands on a bit of rag. We'd had to grease the bearings with pig fat.
     
                  "Fi fteen," she says. "I think. Listen, there's another hour of water above the mill, but I don't think the gennyrator will last that long. It's shaking right merrily."
     
                  She looks speculatively at the nobles.
     
                  "What a bunch of by-our-Lady jacks," she says.
     
                  "Jocks."
     
                  "Yes. Jocks."
     
                  I shrug. "One of them will be your king," I tell her.
     
                  "Not my king, Mervin. I will never have a king," she says, and grins.
     
                  By which you can tell she's learned a lot in twelve months. Yes, I broke the rules and told her the truth. And why not? I've broken all the rules to save this damn country, and it doesn't look like the universe is turning into this tiny ball .005 Angstroms across. First, I don't think this is our time line. It's all wrong, like I said. I think I was knoc ked sideways, into some sort of other history. Maybe a history that'll never really exist except in people's heads, because time travel is a fantasy anyway. You hear mathematicians talk about imaginary numbers which are real, so I reckon this is an imagin a ry place made up of real things. Or something. How should I know? Perhaps enough people believing something makes it real.
     
                  I'd ended up in Albion, although I didn't find out until later. Not Britain, not England. A place very much like them, a place that shares a lot of things with them, a place so close to them that maybe ideas and stories leak across — but a place that is its own place.
     
                  Only something went wrong somewhere. There was someone missing. There should have been a great king. You can fill in h is name. He's out there somewhere, in the crowd. It's lucky for him I turned up.
     
                  You want me to describe this world. You want to hear about the jousts, the pennants, the castles. Right. It's got all of that. But everything else has this, like, thin film of mud over it. The difference between the average peasant's hut and a pigsty is that a good farmer will sometimes change the straw in a pigsty. Now, get me right — no one's doing any repressing, as far as I can see. There's no slavery as such, except to tr a dition, but tradition wields a heavy lash. I mean, maybe democracy isn't perfect, but at least we don't let ourselves be outvoted by the dead.
     
                  And since there's no strong man in charge there's a little would-be king in every valley, and he spends most of his time