Once More With Footnotes

fighting other would-be kings, so the whole country is in a state of half-hearted war. And everyone goes through life proudly doing things clumsily just because their forefathers did them that way, and no one really enjoys anything, and good fie l ds are filling with weeds ...
     
                  I told Nimue I came from another country, which was true enough.
     
                  I talked to her a lot because she was the only one with any sense around the place. She was small, and skinny, and alert in the same way that a bird is alert . I said I broke the rules to save this country but if I'm honest, I'll have to say I did it all for her. She was the one bright thing in a world of mud, she's nice to have around, she learns quickly, and — well, I've seen what the women here look like by t h e time they're thirty. That shouldn't happen to anyone.
     
                  She talked and she listened to me while she did the housework, if that's what you can call moving the dirt around until it got lost.
     
                  I told her about the future. Why not? What harm could it do? Bu t she wasn't very impressed. I guess she didn't know enough to be impressed. Men on the moon were all one with the fairies and the saints. But piped water caught her interest, because every day she had to go to a spring with a couple of wooden buckets on a yoke thing round her neck.
     
                  "Every cottage has this?" she said, eyeing me carefully over the top of the broom. Sure.
     
                  "Not just the rich?"
     
                  "The rich have more bathrooms," I said. Then I had to explain about bathrooms.
     
                  "You people could do it," I tol d her. "You just need to dam a spring up in the hills, and find a — a blacksmith or someone to make some copper pipes. Or lead or iron, at a pinch."
     
                  She looked wistful.
     
                  "My father wouldn't allow it," she said.
     
                  "Surely he'd see the benefits of having wa ter laid on?" I suggested. She shrugged. "Why should he? He doesn't carry it from the spring. "
     
                  " Oh."
     
                  But she took to following me around, in what time there was between chores. It's just as I've always said — women have always had a greater stake in techno logy than have men. We'd still be living in trees, otherwise. Piped water, electric lighting, stoves that you don't need to shove wood into — I reckon that behind half the great inventors of history were their wives, nagging them into finding a cleaner way o f doing the chores.
     
                  Nimue trailed me like a spaniel as I tottered around their village, if you could use the term for a collection of huts that looked like something deposited in the last Ice Age, or possibly by a dinosaur with a really serious bowel pro blem. She even let me into the forest, where I finally found the machine in a thorn thicket. Totally unrepairable. The only hope was that someone might fetch me, if they ever worked out where I was. And I knew they never would, because if they ever did, th ey'd have been there already. Even if it took them ten years to work it out, they could still come back to the Here and Now. That's the thing about time travel; you've got all the time in the world.
     
                  I was marooned.
     
                  However, we experienced travellers al ways carry a little something to tide us over the bad times. I'd got a whole box of stuff under the seat. A few small gold ingots (acceptable everywhere, like the very best credit cards). Pepper (worth more than gold for hundreds of years). Aluminum (a ra r e and precious metal in the days before cheap and plentiful electricity). And seeds. And pencils. Enough drugs to start a store. Don't tell me about herbal remedies — people screamed down the centuries, trying to stop things like dental abscesses with any g r een junk that happened to be growing in the mud.
     
                  She watched me owlishly while I sorted through the stuff and told her what it all did.
     
                  And the next day her father cut his leg open with his axe. The brothers carried him home. I stitched him up and, wit h her eyes on me, treated the wound. A week later he was walking around again, instead