The Dragons of Rhuddlan
An accident with the Stargate sends Sam and Daniel to Wales and the year 1282 AD. In the same freak accident, Mitchell is transported to an early version of the SGC. Only Vala and Teal'c come out to the same SGC they left. What's happened, and how can SG1 be reunited?
A/N: I speak Welsh, but poorly (yay for the Big Welsh Challenge!). I don't own anything except my Welsh blood. The historical characters are as accurate as I can portray them. If you want a good idea of what happened in 1282 Wales, the Wikipedia articles on Edward I and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd are good places to start. At any rate, this is something I've been working on for a very, very long time, ever since I wrote my bachelor's thesis on Welsh nationalists. I'm having loads of fun playing around with the Grandfather Paradox and history with this one!
Chapter 1
Buru Glaw
Daniel Jackson slowly swam toward light, sensations returning one by one. He was strapped securely to something—perhaps a travois, from the feel of it—and it was bouncing over rough ground. His side hurt with every jostle.
He forced his eyes open. His eyelids felt crusty, and searing pain pounded through his head. The world swam into focus.
Someone moved to his left, calling out something that sounded like Rhodri. That was a Welsh name, Daniel remembered. His college roommate's girlfriend had been Welsh, and her brother's name was Rhodri. Was that the same Rhodri?
The jostling stopped. Daniel felt the top of the travois being unhooked, and he was lowered to the ground. Above him, a horse's tail swished as it was led to one side.
A young woman's pale face appeared, and she asked him something in a musical language he barely understood—a language akin to Welsh. He tried to remember how to speak the words—speaking a language and reading a language are completely different from each other. He knew that the woman's language was still being spoken in the modern world, but would it be the same syntax and grammar in this place? He finally gave up and asked, simply, "Where am I?" through dry lips with a tongue that felt like leather, falling back on English. He glanced over the woman's costume as best he could, and surmised that he was in a place where the inhabitants were living a life similar to that of central England in the medieval period.
"You are badly hurt," the woman said, in English, but haltingly. The English, Daniel realized, was different from even the British English spoken in his time. Where was he? When was he? Her voice indeed had the musical quality Daniel always associated with the Welsh, thickly rolled about the tongue.
"Annwsta!" another voice broke in. The speaker was male, but probably not much older than Annwsta. He spoke in Welsh, and only with effort could Daniel understand him. "Have a care with him! We must continue."
The travois was fastened back to the horse's harness, and Annwsta kept up a steady stream of chatter. If she could speak English, Daniel thought, they must be close to the Marches, the area that in medieval times had been considered the border between Wales and England. It might even have been the Perfeddwlad. Annwsta informed Daniel that they were taking him to Rhodri's brother, where a doctor could be summoned from the abbey. She laughed in poorly concealed astonishment when Daniel asked who Rhodir's brother was.
"He is Llywelyn, of course!" Annwsta said. "Rhodri himself is grandson to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth!"
"Llywelyn!" a woman's voice said urgently.
Colonel Samantha Carter squinted in the light of the fire, the wood smoke stinging her eyes.
The woman's voice chattered in what Sam thought was French as a middle-aged man moved into Sam's field of vision. He spoke in the woman's language, then in a lyrical language Sam didn't recognize.
"I'm sorry," she said. Her throat stung with thirst. "I don't understand."
And miraculously, the man answered her. "Who are you?" he asked in blessed English.
"My name," she started, but she broke off into a fit of coughing. When the coughing subsided, she lay back for a moment, to catch her wind, then tried again. "My name is Samantha Carter."
"You are not Welsh," the man said, his eyes narrowing. "Be you one of Edward's women?"
She looked at him blankly. "Who's Edward?"
"Edward Longshanks, of course," he replied curtly. "The English king. Yet you do not speak as the English."
"I'm not Welsh, and I'm not English, either," she said. "I'm American." She remembered a mission, not so very long ago, when they had been on a Celtic-influenced planet. What was it that Daniel had called Earth, then? The man at her side was looking quizzically at her. Finally, she remembered. "I'm from the Land Between the Sunsets. What the Irish call Tir-Na-Nog."
Comprehension dawned in the man's face. "Then you are one of Prince Madoc's people!"
"No!" she bit out harshly, and winced when the exclamation sent nausea sweeping through her and bile surging up her throat. She swallowed the bitter sting down. "I'm not one of this Madoc's people." For all she knew, he could be a Goa'uld, and this man was implying she served him! "My commander is Lieutenant Colonel Cameron Mitchell. We're in the United States Air Force. I'm also a colonel in that Air Force."
The man was looking quizzically at her again. "I've not heard of such a rank amongst Edward's troops," he admitted. He stood, and offered her his hand. "I am Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, Prince of Gwynedd," he told her.
Panic swept Cameron Mitchell faster than normal through the Stargate's wormhole, hoping beyond hope the Jaffa loyal to the Ori on PXS-282 weren't following him. Adrenalin still coursing through him, he stumbled upon reaching the familiarity of the SGC gate room, somehow landing visciously on one knee. He hauled himself up, ignoring the twinge of protest from his battered knee, to face Teal'c's staff weapon and a platoon of Marines pointing assault rifles at him.
"Who are you?" Teal'c demanded. "Where are Captain Carter and Doctor Jackson? What has happened to Colonel O'Neil?"
"Oh, crap," Mitchell muttered. His day had gone from bad to worse.
Mitchell gritted his teeth and gripped the edge of the infirmary bed as the petit doctor wrapped his sore knee with a bandage. From what he'd been able to gather, this was an early version of the SGC, before he and Vala had joined the team and when Dr. Janet Fraiser was still alive.
"I want you to keep weight off your knee for a couple of days," Dr. Fraiser said while she plastered the sticky bandage in place. "Come in on Friday and we'll see how it's healing. Right now it's just a mild sprain, but if you move around too much you'll be looking at spending the rest of the summer, and not just this week, on crutches."
General George Hammond stood to one side, watching with his arms folded. As Mitchell struggled to his feet, leaning awkwardly on the crutches Fraiser had brought out and adjusted for him, Hammond finally spoke. "Do you feel up to a briefing, Colonel?"
"As long as we figure out where the hell Carter and Daniel are, and why the hell I'm here and not with them, count me in," Mitchell agreed, taking a few experimental steps with the crutches. He was glad he'd only have to use the things till Friday, at the rate they pinched and rubbed the tender skin of his arms.
The crutches were still awkward, Mitchell, noted wryly, even after being forced to use them for weeks after that battle in Antarctica. He crutched behind Hammond up to the briefing room, seating himself as soon as possible at the long table and propping the crutches up beside him.
"What happened out there?" Hammond asked as soon as Teal'c sat down across from Mitchell, propping his staff weapon within easy reach. Subtle, Mithell thought. He still doesn't trust me.
"We were ambushed by Jaffa," Mitchell said. "We were on a planet labeled PXS-282 trying to find out how to get rid of the Ori, only the Ori have—oh, I dunno, three or four platoons of Jaffa under them there. The MALP didn't show any signs of life near the 'gate, but they were there waiting for us. They let us get far enough from the Stargate to pin us down where we couldn't escape. Daniel was hit with one of their staff weapons—he took a pretty close-range blast in his side, and another one grazed his head. Carter covered him while Teal'c, Vala, and I cleared a path toward the DHD. We held the Jaffa back while Carter got Daniel over to us. Teal'c and Vala got through the Stargate…"
"Come on, Colonel, move!" Mitchell shouted as Carter dragged Daniel back to the DHD. "Teal'c and Vala are already through!"
"I'm trying!" she protested, breathless.
"Go on!" Daniel said, wincing and breathing heavily. How he was still conscious, Mitchell didn't know. The archaeologist groaned. "I'm only slowing you down."
Mitchell growled, "I am not leaving anybody on my team in hostile territory!" He aimed his P90 where the weapons fire seemed heaviest and gave the trigger a few pulls, then dropped and scooted over to help Carter. Somehow, together they managed to help Daniel stand. "We cover each other," Mitchell ordered. Carter nodded….
"I thought they were right behind me," Mitchell said, starting into the glass of water on the table in front of him. "Carter was coming up the steps when she shouted that the Jaffa were coming at us from behind. I heard her fire a couple of rounds. The minute she and Daniel made it to the top of the steps, I thought they could get through okay. I should have come last."
"The Stargate must have been hit with weapons fire," Teal'c said. "It may have caused the wormhole to jump to another Stargate between here and PXS-282."
"How could something that weak cause me to come through to a different reality—time—well, different SGC?" Mitchell asked. "Somehow, I don't think it will be that simple."
Daniel was trying to think through each jolt of pain that every bounce of the travois sent through his side. Annwsta had said that Rhodri was a grandson of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. At least, he thought wryly through another flash of pain that left him sweaty and gasping for breath, he was still on Earth. When, though, was an entirely different matter, because this Llywelyn ap Iorwerth had married King John's illegitimate daughter, Joan, in 1205 A.D. Gruffydd ap Llywelyn was Llywelyn ap Iorwerth's son (ap meaning "son of"). And Annwsta had said that Rhodri was a grandson of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth through Gruffydd, making Rhodri's full name Rhodri ap Gruffydd. Daniel knew that Gruffydd ap Llywelyn had had at least two other sons, Llywelyn and Dafydd. So all of that meant he had come out of the Stargate into a Wales that was under the rule of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd—in other words, sometime between 1260 and 1282 A.D, give or take a few decades.
But that didn't mean Sam, Mitchell, Teal'c, or Vala were there.
And it didn't mean he'd easily find a way to get home.