Grayson flopped back on the grass of the hill. He was tired, hungry, thirsty, and everything was just too much. He stared up at the stars. Familiar stars that he had technically looked at just the night before, though not the same stars in any reasonable probability. He set his neural network to wake him if it heard anything. Under familiar stars in an unfamiliar land, Grayson slowly drifted off to sleep.

  WAKE UP!

  Grayson sat bolt upright, eyes wide and staring into the night. He was focused on his hearing, listening for whatever noise had tripped his alarm. He couldn't hear anything. He prodded his network for any data it could give him.

  Alarm set for proximity approach. No approach detected.

  Alright, that's not too surprising. He had been teleported to a totally unknown location that turned out to be a known location, just wrong. He could have reacted to anything. But it had definitely felt like his alarm had gone off. Grayson looked around from his position on top of the hill. He noticed the lights were still definitely on in the village 50-ish kilometers away. And around the village. The smell of smoke tingled in his nostrils.

  "Ah fuck."

  There could be any number of reasons for a large number of fires to be around a small village in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was a festival. It could be some cultural practice to ward away evil spirits. Someone could have knocked over a tiki torch and started a series of fires that people were struggling to put out before they were spread by the wind. These all seemed unlikely to Grayson as he sprinted towards the village.

  Time travelers are durable. They have to be in case something happens to them and they leave a bunch of incredibly advanced nanites in a pre-spaceflight civilization. Given that the traveler has control of their own time machine, they have to be capable of operating that machine in extreme circumstances. This means they have to be capable of operating in extreme circumstances.

  Grayson hadn't eaten in almost 20 hours, had only slept for what felt like 2 hours, and hadn't drunk anything since he inhaled a lungful of seawater that morning. His brain and muscles didn't get the message. The nanites in his body blocked the thirst, the hunger, and the weariness, letting him sprint at speeds that saw him approaching the village scarcely 30 minutes later. 5km outside of the village, Grayson could hear the wailing.

  He ran into the village, slowing to a more normal speed for the last few hundred meters. Whatever had happened, it was over aside from the cleanup. Several of the village buildings were burning. They were a wooden construction with tiled rooves, which mercifully kept the spreading to a minimum. Several buildings were nothing but charcoal and ashes. There were small pools of blood on the ground. It started to rain.

  "HELLO!" Grayson called as he jogged through the village. "HELLO?"

  There was a shout of something unintelligible from a large building to his left. Grayson turned and followed the sound of the voice. There was a man standing in the doorway of the large building. He was holding a sword and beckoned Grayson in. Grayson stepped through the door and shook a little of the rain off his hands. The man standing beside the door shut it quickly and barred it, turning to Grayson. He said something in a language Grayson, and the TVA library had never heard before.

  Grayson swore, brushing his hand through his hair and looked up to the man. He wasn't threatening Grayson at least, but if he decided to ask a few questions, Grayson's incapability to answer could change that.

  Grayson shook his head, pointed to his chest and said "Grayson". The man looked surprised, then slowly enunciated Grayson's name. Grayson nodded and indicated the man. Tentatively the man pointed to himself and said "Tiber."

  "Tiber," Grayson repeated. The other man nodded tentatively and said something that Grayson really hoped meant yes, before stepping away from the door and deeper into the building. It was dark in the main entry hall, but Grayson could see the build of the man in front of him. He was slightly shorter than Grayson's 6'3, and had his hair cut short. He was pretty wide and muscular, but it was the muscles of a laborer or farmer as opposed to a soldier. Then again perhaps soldiers who fought with swords had different muscles than those who used a nanoshell.

  Tiber lead Grayson into a room lit with several oil lamps and a single glowing rock. There were blankets covering the windows, but the walls were otherwise bare. Several men and women were tending to people lying on a series of tables. In the corner were a few more people, lying with their faces covered. Other people stood, sat, or otherwise mingled with hollow eyes. Some families were whole, their members holding each other. Others were not.

  Tiber walked over to a young boy who was sitting on a bench, staring at the wall. He picked up the boy, who didn't resist, and held him. He looked up at Grayson and gestured at an empty bench nearby. Grayson shook his head.

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  These people at least looked like humans. From what he could see of the people on the tables, they certainly seemed human on the inside. Grayson queried his neural network for surgical techniques and medical knowledge. The response flashed into his mind, ready for specific queries and diagnostic requests. He stepped over to one of the wounded and looked over the man slowly writhing on the table.

  The man had been stabbed in the stomach, probably with a sword. It wasn't deep and seemed to be relatively minor. A quick check at the prompting of his neural network confirmed that the wound was minor and could be sewn up later. Grayson grabbed a blanket from a nearby table, tore off a wide strip and bundled it, providing it to the man to hold in place. Some people looked around at the tearing sound, but most turned back a moment later. Grayson moved on, Tiber's eyes following him as he stepped to the next wounded man.

  The next man had a cut across his arm. It was shallow, but had nicked his bicep. A narrower strip from the same blanket became a bandage. Tiber stood up, still holding the boy. Grayson continued looking at each of the wounded who hadn't been treated. All of them would need stitches unless there was a better way to hold the wounds closed.

  The wounds that hadn't been treated were all shallow. After checking them over, he stepped back and mimed a needle and thread to Tiber. Tiber cocked his head to the side in confusion. Grayson mimed it again, then pointed at one of the wounds. Still visibly confused, Tiber went over to one of the women who was bandaging a wounded man's calf. After speaking to her for a moment, she stopped what she was doing, looked up at Tiber, then at Grayson. She shook her head and got back to work.

  Tiber looked at Grayson and shook his head. Grayson knew that shouting wouldn't achieve anything so he mimed vigorously. Tiber turned back to the woman and they spoke for a few moments, their voices rising. Eventually another woman came over and put her hands on each of their shoulders. She pointed at a man who was presumably her husband and spoke authoritatively. The man got up and left the room.

  Grayson watched as the woman calmed Tiber and the other woman down before sending Tiber and probably his son over to a bench. She went over and tried speaking to Grayson. Grayson shook his head.

  "I don't speak your language."

  The woman's eyes widened in surprise. She started talking away, seemingly uncaring that Grayson visibly couldn't understand a word she said. Belatedly, Grayson set his neural network to start working on grammatical patterns and identifying words. It would be much easier to learn their language than it would be to try and teach them his. After a few minutes, the woman's likely husband returned with a basket of sewing supplies and brought it over.

  Grayson carefully chose a thread that was suitably strong and threaded a needle. He began stitching wounds closed. Initially, he was working alone, but after a few minutes the woman helped him by holding the edges of the wound together and cutting the thread after he finished a stitch. Halfway through, he learned the woman's name was Tera and her husband's name was Brace. Grayson started learning words and building a vocabulary as he worked.

  As he worked, he held things up to be identified by his new helper, or pointed at other things. Over the next hour, he learned the words for pretty much everything in the room, as well as some useful things like left and right, up and down, and yes and no. There were a few false starts with identification. The name for silk was confused with the word for thread. Some names got misidentified as man or woman. He got a handle on their grammar, which was thankfully similar to the normal human standard.

  Once all the wounded were stitched, Grayson went over to Tiber and sat across from the man. Tera and Brace joined them. Slowly they got into a rhythm of conversation that taught Grayson many more new words. Abstract concepts like time were harder to communicate, but after another couple of hours, Grayson could mostly guess words from context.

  Tiber knew how to read and was teaching his son, Kerry. He started teaching Grayson the alphabet, using it as an exercise to help Kerry's lessons as well. The competition drove Kerry to pay attention, attempting to keep ahead of Grayson's rapid learning. Kerry quickly went from helping Tiber demonstrate word and vowel sounds to sitting beside Grayson and working with him to sound out longer words.

  The small gathering of people doing mostly normal things started getting dirty looks. It would have been worse if Grayson hadn't spent his first hour helping to tend the wounded and demonstrating a new healing technique. Even so, Grayson noted the looks and asked Tiber quietly if he had a dictionary.

  Well, strictly speaking he asked for a "book with words that speak words" but that seemed to get the point across.

  Tiber took Grayson out into the darkness of early morning. It was still well before dawn, and most of the fires had died down in the light rain. Tiber drew his sword and they scurried from building to building, checking around corners as they went. They eventually arrived at a small house with 4 rooms separated by a single hallway. There were 2 bedrooms, a living room and a combined kitchen and dining room. In the living room were 2 shelves of books. Tiber drew a single book off one of the shelves and passed it to Grayson before leading him back into the darkness.

  The pair reached the big building again. They arrived back in the room and sat back at their table. Tiber was about to offer to help Grayson with the dictionary when Grayson opened the book and carefully but quickly flipped through it. He spent barely a second looking at each page before flicking to the next. Tiber raised his eyebrows as he watched Grayson. Tera and Brace were similarly bemused at his behavior.

  Grayson reached the end of the small dictionary. He sat in silence for a second, staring into space as he worked with his neural network. It rapidly catalogued all the words he'd just read along with their definitions and likely pronunciations. Instead of just storing it in it's memory, it altered Grayson's own brain connections, teaching him to the limits of the dictionary in his lap. Grayson looked Tiber in the eyes and spoke in his slightly accented language.

  "Now that's done with, what the hells happened here?"