Star of the Sea

Out of the east, the morning behind them, rode the Anses into the world. Sparks flew across heaven from the wheels of their wains, which rumbled so that mountains shook. The tracks of their horses smoldered black. Their arrows darkened the air. The sound of their battle horns woke a killing rage in men.

Against these newcomers went the Wanes. Froh was at the forefront, astride his bull, the Living Sword in his hand. Wind scourged the sea until its waves foamed near the feet of the moon, who fled. Over them in her ship came Naerdha. Her right hand steered with the Ax of the Tree for oar. Her left hand cast eagles to shriek, strike, and tear. Upon her brow a star burned white as the fire’s heart.

Thus did the gods war on each other, while the eotans of the high North and the low South watched and talked of how it would clear the way for them. But the birds of Wotan saw and warned him. The head of Mim heard and warned Froh. Thereat the gods called truce, gave hostages, and held council.

In the peace they made, they apportioned the world between them. They held weddings, Anse to Wane—father to mother, wizard to wife—and Wane to Anse—huntress to craftsman, witch to warrior. By him whom they hanged, by her whom they drowned, and by their own blood that they mingled, they swore faith, which should abide until the day of doom.

Then they raised walls for their defense, a wooden stockade in the North, high-piled stones in the South; and they set themselves to their sway over those things that are under the Law.

But one among the Anses, Leokaz the Thief, half eotan, grew restless. He longed for the old wild years and felt himself now reckoned of little worth. At last he slipped unbeknownst away. South he fared to the wall of stone. At the gate he threw a sleep spell on its watchman, took the key from its hiding place, and passed into the Iron Land. There he bargained with its lords. When they gave him the spear Summer’s Bane, he gave them the key.

In this wise did the Iron Lords gain a way into the Earthworld. Their hosts came through bringing slavery and slaughter. It was the West that first knew them, and often the sun goes down into a lake of blood.

But the giant Hoadh strode northward, thinking to reach the Frost Land and make alliance with the eotans there. Wherever he went, he took what he wanted. Kine he plucked from the meadows. Houses he clubbed asunder to reave his bread. Fire he sowed and men he slew for his sport. The road he made was of wreckage.

He reached the seashore. Afar he spied Naerdha. Unawares she sat on a skerry, combing her hair. The locks shone like gold and her breasts like snow where shadows lie blue. Lust swelled. Night-softly for all his hugeness, Hoadh crept nigh, until he waded out and seized her. When she struggled, he knocked her head against the rock and stunned her. There in the surf, he ravished her.

The waters have risen over that reef, to hide the shame even at low tide. Because of this, many a ship has struck, and the breakers have taken their crews. It does not slake the wrath and grief of Naerdha.

She roused with a wildcat scream to find herself alone again. On wings of storm she rushed to her hall beyond the sunrise. “Whither has he gone?” she cried.

“We know not,” wailed her daughters, “save that he went from the sea.”

“Vengeance will follow him,” said Naerdha. She returned landward and sought the dwelling she shared with Froh, to bid him help her. But the season was spring and he had gone to quicken life, the round on which she ought to have come likewise. Hence she could not claim the bull Earthshaker either, as was her right.

Instead she called their eldest son to her and changed him into a tall black stallion. Mounting, she rode to Ansaheim. Wotan lent her his spear that never misses, Tiwaz his Helm of Dread. Off she hastened on Hoadh’s track. That was a gaunt year, when she had forsaken Froh and her sea.

Hoadh heard her coming after him. He climbed a mountain and lifted his club for battle. Night fell. The moon rose. By its light he saw, across many furlongs, the spear, the helm, and the grim stallion. His heart failed him and he bolted west. So fast did he run that she could barely keep him in sight.

Hoadh reached his fellow Iron Lords and begged their help. Shield to shield they stood before him. Naerdha cast the spear above their heads and pierced her foe. His blood flooded the lowlands.

She wended home full of anger yet at Froh for his broken promise. “I will take the bull when I choose,” she said, “and sorely will you miss him on the day of doom.” He was angry too, for what she had made of their son. They dwelt apart.

On Midwinter Eve she bore Hoadh’s get, nine sons. She turned them into hounds as black as her horse.

Thonar of the Thunders drove to her hall. “Froh left his sister and you left your brother that you twain might be together,” he said. “If you no longer are, life will die from land and sea alike. What then shall feed the gods?” Therefore in spring Naerdha returned to her husband, but not gladly. She left him once more in autumn. So has it been ever since.

“Leokaz broke the oath we swore,” said Wotan to her. “Henceforward the world will never know peace. We have dire need of my spear.”

“I will recover it for you,” answered Naerdha, “if you will lend it again and Tiwaz the helm when I go hunting.”

The flood had borne it out to sea. Long did Naerdha range in search. Many are the tales of a strange woman who came to this land or that. She repaid those who guested her by healing their hurts, righting their wrongs, and foretelling their morrows. Still she sends women wandering across the world who do as she did, in her name and at her behest. In the end she found the spear floating below the evening star.

Vengefulness cannot die within her. At the turnings of the year, and whenever else her heart freezes at the memory, she goes forth. With horse and hounds, helm and spear, she rides in the night wind, to raid the Iron Lords, harry the ghosts of evildoers, and bring ill on the foes of those folk who worship her. Fearful it is to hear that rush and clamor in the sky, horn, hoofs, howls, the Wild Hunt. Yet men who bear weapons against them she hates shall have her stern blessing.

11

Westward from the Elbe, south of where Hamburg would someday arise, stretched the realm of the Langobardi. Centuries futureward their posterity ended a migration lifetimes long by conquering northern Italy and founding what became known as the Lombard kingdom. At present they were only another German tribe, albeit a powerful one that had dealt many of the hardest blows Rome took in Teutoburger Wald. Lately their axes had hewn out the decision of who should be king among their neighbors the Cherusci. Wealthy, haughty, they drew trade and news from the Rhine to the Vistula, from the Cimbri in Jutland to the Quadi along the Danube. Floris decided she and Everard couldn’t simply ride in, claiming to be distressed travelers from somewhere else. That was feasible in 70 and 60, among peoples on the western fringe who were engaged with Rome—hostilely, servilely, or peacefully—more than with easterlings. Here the risk of making a slip would be too great.

But here and now Edh was, in a sojourn of two years. Here was where the next clue to her origin must be, as well as an opportunity to observe in more depth her effect on the folk through whom her pilgrimage went.

Luckily, though logically, an ethnographer was in residence, like Floris among her Frisii. The Patrol also wanted a sampling of central Europe during the first century, and this was a better locale than most.

Jens Ulstrup had settled down a dozen years ago. He related that he was Domar, from what was to become the Bergen area of Norway, virtual terra incognita to the landlocked Langobardi. A family feud drove him into exile. He took passage to Jutland; the southern Scandinavians had already developed rather large vessels. Thence he wandered on shank’s mare, welcomed for his songs and poetry. As was customary, the king rewarded some flattering verses with gold and an invitation to stay. Domar invested in trade goods, parlayed his fortune remarkably fast, and in due course acquired a homestead of his own. Both his mercantile interests and his curiosity about the world, natural in a scop, accounted for his frequent lengthy absences. Many of his trips really were within contemporary lands, though he might expedite them by his timecycle.

Having walked to a spot where he knew he was unobserved, he summoned the machine from its hiding place. Moments later but days earlier, he was at the camp of Everard and Floris. They had established themselves farther north, in the uninhabited stretch—the American called it the DMZ—between Langobardian and Chaucian territory.

From a bluff screened by trees they looked down over the river. It flowed broad between deeply green banks; reeds rustled, frogs croaked, fish splashed silvery, waterfowl flew in their tumultuous thousands; occasionally men paddled a boat along the opposite, Suarinian shore. “We will be a little in the life of the country,” Floris had said, “not quite like disembodied spirits flitting through.”

They sprang to their feet when Ulstrup appeared. He was a slender, sandy-haired man, as barbaric-looking as them. That did not mean bearskin kilts. His shirt, coat, and pants were of cloth well woven, tastefully patterned, and skillfully tailored. The goldsmith who made the brooch at his throat did not go by Hellenic canons, but was nonetheless an artist. His hair was combed and tied in a knot on the right side. His mustache was trimmed, and if his chin was stubbly, it was because razors were not of Gillette sharpness.

“What have you found?” Floris exclaimed.

Ulstrup’s smile showed how tired he was. “That will take a stretch to tell,” he answered.

“Give the guy a break,” Everard said. “Here, sit down.” He gestured at a mossy log. “Want some coffee? You can smell it’s fresh.”

“Coffee,” Ulstrup crooned. “I often drink it in my dreams.”

Odd, Everard thought momentarily, that we should be using twentieth-century English, we three in this scene. But no. He happens to be from then too, doesn’t he? For a while, English will sort of play the role that Latin does today. Not for as long a while.

They made very little small talk before Ulstrup turned earnest. His stare fixed upon the others as an animal might stare from a trap. He spoke with care. “Yes, I do believe you are right. This is something unique. I confess the potentials frighten me; and I have no experience with variable reality or expertise in it.

“As I told you before, I had heard tales of an itinerant sibyl or witch or whatever she was, but paid no special attention. That kind is . . . oh, not common in this culture, but not extraordinary either. I was concerned about the ongoing civil strife among the Cherusci and, frankly, resented your demand that I investigate her, an outsider. My apologies, Agent Floris, Unattached Agent Everard. Now I have encountered her. I have listened to her. I have spoken at length with a number of men about her. My Langobardian wife has told me what women are saying to each other.

“You related what a tremendous impact Edh will have on the western tribes. I suspect you did not anticipate how strong it is here, already, or how swiftly it increases. She arrived in a primitive wagon. I heard the Lemovii gave it to her, after she had come to them afoot. She will leave in a magnificent van the king is having made, drawn by his finest oxen. She arrived with four men in her train. She will leave with a dozen. She could have had far more than that—and women, too—but chose them and set the limit with intelligent practicality. I think that was on the advice of the Heidhin you described. . . . No matter. I have seen proud young warriors begging to abandon everything and follow her as servants. I have seen their lips tremble and their eyes blink hard when she refused them.”

“How does she do it?” Everard whispered.

“She bears a myth,” Floris said. “Isn’t that correct?”

Surprised, Ulstrup nodded. “How did you guess?”

“I heard her uptime, and I know well what could influence the Frisii. They cannot be greatly unlike these easterners.”

“No. Perhaps a difference comparable to that between Dutch and Germans in our period. Of course, Edh is not proclaiming the gospel of a whole new religion. That is outside the pagan mentality. In fact, I rather imagine her ideas are evolving as she goes along. She is not even adding a new deity. Her goddess is known through most of the Germanic range. The local name is Naerdha. She must be more or less identical with the Nerthus whose cult Tacitus describes. Do you remember?”

Everard nodded. The Germania told of a covered oxcart that each year drew an image in procession around the land. That was a time when war was set aside, a time of rejoicing and fertility rites. After the goddess returned to her grove, the idol was taken to a secluded lake and washed by slaves, who immediately afterward were drowned. Nobody asked “what that sight is that may only be seen by the eyes of the dying.”

“A pretty grim sort,” Everard said. The neopagans of his home milieu did not include her in their fairy tales of a prehistoric matriarchy when everybody was nice.

“It is a pretty grim life they lead,” Floris observed.

The scholar in Ulstrup took over. “This is clearly a figure in an aboriginal chthonic pantheon, the Wanes or Vanir,” he said. “It originated before the Indo-Europeans reached these parts. They brought their characteristic warlike, masculine sky-gods, the Anses or Aesir. Dim memories of the conflict between cultures survived in myths of a war between the two divine races, which was finally settled by negotiations and intermarriage. Nerthus—Naerdha—is still female. In centuries ahead she will become male, the Eddic god Njordh, father of Freyja and Frey—who today is still her husband. Njordh will be a sea god, as Nerthus is associated with the sea, though she is also an agricultural deity.”

Floris touched Everard’s arm. “Suddenly you look bleak,” she murmured.

He shook himself. “Sorry. My mind strayed. I was remembering an episode that hasn’t happened yet, among the Goths. It involved their gods. But that was quite a minor eddy in the time stream, easily damped except for what it cost the persons involved. This is different. I don’t know how it is, but I feel it in my marrow.”

Floris turned to Ulstrup. “What is Edh preaching, then?” she asked him.

He shivered. “ ‘Preaching.’ What a spooky word. Pagans don’t preach—at least, heathen Germans don’t—and at this moment Christianity is hardly more than a persecuted Jewish heresy. No, Edh does not deny Wotan and the rest. She simply tells new stories about Naerdha and Naerdha’s powers. But there is nothing simple about what they imply. And . . . by sheer intensity and eloquence, yes, it is fair to say that she delivers sermons. These tribes have never known anything of the kind before. They are . . . not immunized. It is why so many will so readily turn Christian, once those missionaries get here.” As if defensively, his tone dried. “To be sure, there will also be political and economic reasons to convert, which no doubt decide the issue in most cases. Edh offers nothing like that, unless you count her hatred of Rome and her prophecies of its downfall.”

Everard rubbed his chin. “Then she’s invented preaching, religious fervor, independently,” he said. “How? Why?”

“We must find out,” Floris responded.

“What are these new myths?” Everard inquired.

Ulstrup frowned into the distance. “It will take me long to tell you everything I have learned. And it is inchoate, not a neat theological system, you realize. And I doubt I have heard all of it, listening to her or at second hand. Certainly I have not heard what will develop as time goes on.

“But—well, she does not say it outright, perhaps she herself is not conscious of it, but she is making her goddess into a being at least as powerful, as . . . cosmic . . . as any. Naerdha is not exactly usurping Wotan’s authority over the dead, but she too receives them in her hall, she too leads them in a hunt through heaven. She is becoming as much a deity of war as Tiwaz, and the destined destroyer of Rome. Like Thonar, she commands elemental forces, weather, storm, together with the sea, rivers, lakes, all water. Hers is the moon—”

“Hecate,” Everard muttered.

“But she keeps her ancient precedence over begetting and birth,” Ulstrup finished. “Women who die in childbed go directly to her, like fallen warriors to the Eddic Odin.”

“That must appeal to women,” Floris said.

“It does, it does,” Ulstrup agreed. “Not that they have a separate faith—mystery cults, and sects for that matter, are unknown among the Germans—but here is a, a special devotion for them.”

Everard paced to and fro in the glen. His fist beat his palm. “Yeah,” he said. “That was important to the success of Christianity, in both the South and the North. It had more for women than any paganism did, even the Magna Mater. They might not convert their husbands, but they’d sure influence their children.”

“Men can behold visions too.” Ulstrup regarded Floris. “Do you see the same possibility that I do?”

“Yes,” she answered, not quite steadily. “It could happen. Tacitus Two . . . Veleda went back into free Germany after Civilis was crushed, bearing her message, and a new religion spread among the barbarians. . . . It could grow and develop onward after her death. It would have no real competition. Oh, it would not become monotheistic or anything like that. But this goddess would be the supreme figure, around whom everything gathered. She would give folk as much, spiritually, or almost as much, as Christ could. Few would ever join the Church.”

“The more so if they lacked political reason to,” Everard added. “I watched the process in viking Scandinavia. Baptism was the admission ticket to civilization, with all its commercial and cultural advantages. But a collapsed West Roman Empire won’t be anywhere near that attractive, and Byzantium is a long ways off.”

“True,” Ulstrup said. “Quite conceivably the Nerthus faith can become the seed and core of a Germanic civilization—not barbarism but a civilization, however turbulent—which has the inner richness to resist Christendom, as Zoroastrian Persia will. Already they are not mere woods-runners here, you know. They are aware of an outside world, they interact with it. When the Langobardi intervened in the dynastic quarrels of the Cherusci, it was to restore a king who had been overthrown because he was Roman-reared and sent by request from Rome. Not that the Langobardi are cat’s-paws; it was a Machiavellian move. Trade with the South increases year by year. Roman or Gallo-Roman ships sometimes ply as far as Scandinavia. The archaeologists of our time will speak of a Roman Iron Age, followed by a Germanic Iron Age. Yes, they are learning, these barbarians. They are assimilating what they find useful. It does not follow that they must inevitably be assimilated themselves.”

His voice dropped. “Of course, if they are not it will be a different future. Our twentieth century will never exist.”

“That’s what we’re trying to head off,” Everard said harshly.

A silence fell. Wind lulled, leaves rustled, sunlight skipped on the ruffled stream. The peacefulness made the landscape feel unreal.

“But we’ve got to learn how this deviation started, before we can do anything about it,” Everard went on. “Did you find where Veleda hails from?”

“I am afraid not,” Ulstrup confessed. “Poor communications, vast reaches of wilderness—and Edh does not talk about her past, nor does her associate Heidhin. He may feel a little more at ease with himself twenty-one years hence, when he mentions the Alvarings to you, whoever they are. Even then, I think, it would be dangerous to ask him for details. At present he and she are totally reticent.

“However, I did hear that she appeared first among the Rugii on the Baltic littoral, five or six years ago as nearly as I can determine from the vague accounts. They say she came in a ship, as befits the prophetess of a sea deity. That and her accent suggest to me a Scandinavian origin. I’m sorry I cannot do better for you.”

“It’ll serve,” Everard replied. “You did okay, buddy. With patience and instruments, maybe occasional inquiries on the ground, we’ll track down the place and moment of her landing.”

“And then—” Floris’s words trailed away. She gazed past the river and the forest beyond, northeasterly toward an unseen shore.

12

Right and left the strand reached, sand rising into dunes where stiff grass grew, until haze blurred sight. Kelp, shells, bones of fish and birds lay sparsely strewn on the darker stretch below the high-water line. A few gulls rode the wind. It whistled raw-cold. A taste of salt was on it, and smells from the deeps. Waves washed low onto the shore, hissed back down, came again a little higher up. Farther out they ran strong, hollowly booming, white-capped above steely gray, to a horizon that likewise lost itself in the sky. It pressed in on the world, did that sky, hueless as the sea. Tatters of cloud scudded murky beneath it. Rain walked in the west.

Inland, sedge swayed around pools whose algal green was the only lightness. Forest gloomed in the distance. A brook seeped through the marsh to the beach. Doubtless the dwellers used it to move whatever boats they owned. Their hamlet lay a mile from the coast, some wattle—and-daub cabins hunched below turf roofs. Smoke blew out of louvers, otherwise nothing stirred.

The ship brought abrupt vividness. She was a beauty, long and lean, clinker-built, stem- and sternposts curving high, mastless but swiftly driven by thirty oars. Though her red paint had weathered, the oak remained stout. To the chant of the helmsman, her crew brought her aground, leaped over the sides, and hauled her partway out.

Everard approached. They waited for him in restrained wariness. Nearing, they had seen that he stood alone. He drew close and put the butt of his spearshaft on the sand. “Hail,” he greeted.

A grizzled, scarred fellow who must be the captain asked, “Are you from yon houses?” His dialect would have been hard to understand had Everard and Floris not received an imprint. (It was of a Danish tongue four centuries uptime, the closest available. Fortunately, early Nordic languages didn’t change fast. However, the agents could not hope to pass for natives, either of the ship’s home or of this region.)

“No, I am a wayfarer. I was bound for there, wanting shelter tonight, but spied you and thought I would hear your tale first. It should be better than aught that any homefast hinds can tell. I hight Maring.”

Ordinarily the Patrolman would just have said, “Everard,” which sounded like a name in some other patois. But he’d be using it uptime when he met Heidhin, whom he hoped to buttonhole this day. He couldn’t afford recognition then—another shift in reality, with unguessable consequences. Floris had suggested this monicker, authentically southern German. She had also assisted him with a flowing blond wig and false beard, plus a Jimmy Durante nose that would keep attention off the rest of him. Given the fading of memory with years, that should serve.

A grin creased and crinkled the mariner’s face. “And I am Vagnio Thuthevar’s son, from Hariu thorp in the land of the Alvarings. Whence come you?”

“From afar.” The Patrolman jerked a thumb at the settlement. “They’re staying within their walls, hey? Afraid of you?”

Vagnio shrugged. “We could be reavers, for aught they know. This is nobody’s port of call. It’s merely the landfall we made—”

Everard already realized that. On timecycles aloft, he and Floris had observed the ship, once scanning revealed that she, among all they had checked, carried a woman. A jump into the future showed where she would halt; a jump back into the past deposited him close by. Floris stayed above the clouds. Explaining her presence away would have been too much trouble.

“-where we’ll camp the night,” Vagnio went on, “and fill our water casks in the morning. But then we coast west to the Anglii, with goods for a great market they hold this time of year. If yon folk like, they can call on us, else we’ll leave them be. Their kind has naught worth robbing.”

“Not even themselves, to sell for thralls?” The question was foul in Everard’s mouth, but natural in this age.

“No, they’d run off as soon as they saw us bound for them, and scatter what livestock they have. That’s why they built where they did.” Vagnio squinted. “You must be a landlubber not to ken that.”

“Yes, of the Marcomanni.” The tribe was safely remote, about where western Czechoslovakia would lie. “You are, uh, from Scania?”

“No. The Alvarings hold half of an island off the Geatish coast. Stay the night with us, Mating, and we’ll swap yarns—What’re you peering at?”

Sailors had crowded around, eager to hear. They were mostly tall blonds, who blocked the Patrolman’s view of their vessel. A couple of them had shifted, restless, and he got a clear look. A slender youth had just sprung out of the prow to the beach. He lifted his arms and helped the woman follow. Veleda.

No mistaking her. I’d know that face, those eyes, at the bottom of her goddess’s ocean. But how young she was today, a girl in her teens, withy-thin. The wind tossed loose brown tresses and flapped skirt around ankles. Across the ten or fifteen yards between, Everard thought he saw—what? A look that sought something beyond this place, lips that would suddenly quiver and maybe whisper, a grief, a lostness, a dream, he couldn’t say.

Certainly she showed none of the interest in him he had counted on. He wondered if she had so much as cast him a glance. The pale countenance turned away. She spoke briefly with her dark-haired companion. They walked off together, down the strand from the ship.

“Ah, her,” Vagnio deduced. Unease touched him. “An uncanny twain, those.”

“Who are they?” Everard asked. That too was a natural question, when women crossing the sea other than as captives were well-nigh unheard of. Eventually invaders from the Frisian and Jutish shores would bring their families along to Britain, but that wouldn’t happen for centuries.

Unless Scandinavian women occasionally took ship at this early date? His information didn’t say. Those lands in those years were little studied. It hadn’t seemed they would make much difference to the rest of the world until the Völkerwanderung. Surprise, surprise.

“Edh Hlavagast’s daughter and Heidhin Viduhada’s son,” Vagnio said. Everard noticed that he named her first. “They bought aboard, but not to trade alongside us. Indeed, she’d not seek the market at all, but wants we let her—them—off somewhere else, she has not yet said where.”

“Best we make ready for night, skipper,” growled a man. A mutter of agreement went among others. Darkness was hours off, and it wasn’t likely the rain would come this way. They’d rather not have talk about her, Everard realized. They’ve nothing against her, I’m sure, but she is, yes, uncanny. Vagnio was quick to assent.

Everard offered to lend a hand with setting up. Bluffly polite, for a guest was sacred, the captain expressed doubt that a landlubber could expedite matters. Everard strolled off, the way Edh and Heidhin had gone.

He saw them stop, well ahead of him. They appeared to argue. She made a gesture strangely imperious for such a slip of a lass. Heidhin wheeled about and started back with long stiff strides. Edh went onward.

“This may be my chance,” Everard subvocalized. “I’ll see if I can get the boy into conversation.”

“Have a care,” Floris replied. “I think he is upset.”

“Yeah. I’ve got to try, though, don’t I?”

It was the reason for making this rendezvous, instead of simply tracing the ship across the water, backward through time. They dared not charge blind into what might well be the source of the instability, the obscure and easily annulled event from which an entire future could spring. Here, they hoped, was an opportunity to learn something beforehand at minimal risk.

Heidhin jarred to a halt, glowering, before the foreigner. He also was in his teens, perhaps a year or two older than Edh. In this milieu that made him an adult, but he was still gangly, not quite filled out, the sharp countenance darkened by no more than fuzz. He wore wadmal, odorous in the damp air, and salt-stained boots. A sword hung at his flank.

“Hail,” said Everard amiably. That was on the surface. Cold prickles went over his scalp.

“Hail,” grunted Heidhin. The surliness would have been considered appropriate to his years in twentieth-century America. Here it meant real trouble. “What would you?” He paused before adding roughly, “Follow not the woman. She wants to be alone.”

“Is that safe for her?” Everard asked: another natural question.

“She’ll not go too far, and will return ere nightfall. Besides—” Again Heidhin fell mute. He seemed to be wrestling with himself. Everard guessed that a youthful desire to be important and mysterious won out over discretion. Yet he heard an almost frightening sincerity: “Whoso offends her shall suffer worse than death. She is the chosen of a goddess.”

Did the wind really blow keener all at once? “You know her well, then?”

“I . . . fare at her side.”

“Whither?”

“Why would you know?” flared Heidhin. “Let me be!”

“Easy, friend, easy,” Everard said. It helped being large and mature. “I do but ask, I, an outlander. Gladly would I hear more about—Edh, did the shipmaster call her? And you Heidhin, I think.”

Curiosity awoke. The boy relaxed a bit. “What of you? We wondered as we drew nigh.”

“I am a wayfarer, Maring of the Marcomanni, a folk you may never have heard of. You’ll get my tale this evening.”

“Where are you bound?”

“Wherever my luck may lead me.”

Heidhin stood still a moment. The small surf mumbled. A gull mewed. “Could you be sent?” he breathed.

Everard’s pulse raced. He forced his tone to stay casual. “Who might have sent me, and why?”

“See you,” Heidhin blurted, “Edh is going whither Niaerdh bids her, by dreams or signs. She’s now had a thought that this is where we should leave the ship and wend overland. I tried to tell her it’s a niggard country, dwellings wide-scattered, maybe outlaws running free. But she—” He gulped. The goddess was supposed to protect her. Faith struggled with common sense and found a compromise. “If a second warrior fared along—”

“Oh, wonderful!” crowed Floris’s voice.

“I don’t know how well I can act like somebody that destiny has tapped,” Everard warned her.

“At least you can draw him out in conversation.”

“I’ll try.”

To Heidhin: “This is news to me, you understand. But we can talk about it. I’ve naught else to do at once, have you? Come, let’s walk to and fro while you tell me about yourself and Edh.”

The boy looked downward. He bit his lip, reddened, whitened, reddened again. “That’s less easy than you think,” he grated.

“Yet I must know—eh?—ere I can plight faith.” Everard clapped the stooped shoulder before him. “Take your time, but tell me the whole of it.”

“Edh—She should—She will decide—”

“What is it about her that makes you, a man, wait on her word?” Show plenty of respect. “Is she a spaewife, she, a girl to behold? That would be a mighty thing.”

Heidhin looked up. He trembled. “Yes, that and more than that. The goddess came to her and, and now she is Niaerdh’s, she shall bear Niaerdh’s wrath across the world.”

“What? At whom is the goddess angry?”

“The folk of Romaburh!”

“Why, what harm have they done?” In these distant parts.

“They—they—No, this is too holy to speak of. Wait till you meet her. She will make you as wise as she deems needful.”

“This is asking much of me,” Everard protested reasonably, as a practical-minded hobo would. “You say naught of what has happened aforetime, naught of whither you would fare or why, though you’d have me ward with my life a maiden who’ll rouse lust in any rover, greed in any slaver—”

Heidhin screamed. His sword flashed from the sheath. “You dare!” The blade whirred down.

Drilled-in reflex saved Everard. He brought his spear aslant fast enough to block. Iron slammed deep. The seasoned ash did not quite break. Heidhin whipped the blade high again. Everard swept his weapon quarterstaff style. Mustn’t kill him, he’s alive in the future, and anyway he’s just a kid—Impact thudded. The blow to the head would have knocked Heidhin woozy, had the shaft not snapped. As was, he lurched.

“Hold off, you murderous lout!” Everard roared. Alarm and rage buzzed in his skull. What the hell is going on? “D’you want men for your girl or not?”

Yowling, Heidhin sprang at him. This sword slash was weak, easily sidestepped. Everard dropped the spear, got in close, grasped the tunic, took the moving body on his hip, and sent Heidhin asprawl six feet away.

The youth crawled to his feet. He fumbled for the knife at his belt. Got to end this. Everard delivered a karate kick to the solar plexus. He kept it mild. Heidhin doubled over, collapsed, lay heaving for breath. Everard hunkered down to make sure there was no serious damage or choking on vomit or any such thing.

“Wat drommel—What is this?” Floris cried in dismay.

Everard straightened. “I dunno,” he answered dully, “except that somehow, in my ignorance, I touched the wrong, inflamed nerve. He must’ve been overwrought, maybe after days or weeks of brooding. He’s very young, remember. Something I said or did triggered a hysterical break. In this culture, you know, among males, that’s apt to take the form of a killing frenzy.”

“I don’t suppose . . . you can . . . mend the situation.”

“Nope. Especially as precarious as the whole business is.” Everard looked down the beach. Edh was a dwindled bit of fluttering darkness, half lost in the sea mist, into which she drifted onward. Wrapped in her dreams, or nightmares, or whatever they were, she had not noticed the fight. “I’d better clear out. The sailors will accept that I’m bewildered—true enough, huh?—but unwilling to cut Heidhin’s throat while he’s helpless, or chance him cutting mine later, or bother negotiating a reconciliation. He’s nothing to me, I’ll say, and walk off.”

He picked up his spearhead, as Maring would, and started in the direction of the ship. They’ll be disappointed, he thought wryly. Gossip from afar is a rare treasure. Well, I’m spared rehashing that elaborate story we concocted.

“Then we may as well go straight to Öland,” said Floris, equally toneless.

“Hm?”

“Edh’s home. The captain identified it unmistakably. It is a long, narrow island off the Baltic coast of Sweden. The city of Kalmar will be built opposite it. I was there once on holiday.” The voice became wistful. “It was, will be, quite charming. Old windmills everywhere, ancient barrows, snuggled villages, and at either tip a lighthouse overlooking a sea where sailboats bob along—But that is then.”

“Sounds like a place I’d visit to visit myself,” Everard said. “Then.” Maybe. Depends on what memories I bring back from it now, nineteen hundred years earlier. He trudged on up the beach.

13

Hlavagast Unvod’s son was king of the Alvarings. His wife was Godhahild. They dwelt in Laikian, the biggest thorp their tribe had, more than a score of houses within a wall of dry-laid stone. Around it reached heath, where only sheep could thrive. Neither, though, could foemen fall on it without being seen from afar. The walk was short to the eastern strand, nor much longer to the western, and there timber grew. Southward, also, one soon found good grazing and cropland, which went for some ways before it came to its own shore.

Once the Alvarings held all the Eyn, until Geats crossed over from the mainland and, in the course of lifetimes, overran the richer northern half. At last the Alvarings fought them to a standstill. Many among the Geats said the south was not worth taking; many among the Alvarings said the fear of Niaerdh had gripped them. The Alvarings still paid her as much worship as they did the Anses, or more, whereas the Geats gave the goddess only a cow in springtime. Be that as it may, since then the two tribes had done more trading than warring.

Both had men who rowed cargoes over the sea to swap, as far as the Rugii southward or the Anglii westward. The Geats of the Eyn also held a yearly market at Kaupavik haven, which drew traffickers from widely about. To this, Alvarings brought their woolen goods, salt fish, sealskins, blubber oil, feathers and down, amber when a storm had left a hoard of it on their coast. Now and then a young man of theirs joined the crew of an outland ship; if he lived, he would come home with tales of strange countries.

Hlavagast and Godhahild lost three children early on. Then he vowed that if Niaerdh saved those who came after, when the first of them had shed all its milk teeth he would give her a man—not the two thralls, usually old and sick, that she got when she had blessed the fields, but a hale youth. A girl was born. He named her Edh, Oath, to keep the goddess reminded. The sons for whom he hoped followed her.

When the time was ripe, he took a ship and warriors across the channel. Not to stir up the mainland Geats, he fared north well beyond them and fell on a Skridhfennian camp. Of the captives he brought back, he slaughtered the choicest one in Niaerdh’s grove. The rest he sold in Kaupavik. Otherwise Hlavagast did not go warlike abroad, for he was a mild and thoughtful man.

Maybe because of her beginnings, maybe because she had only brothers, Edh grew up a quiet, withdrawn child. She had friends among the others in the thorp, but none close, and when they played together she was always at the rim of it. She was quick to learn her tasks and carried them out faithfully, but was best at those, such as weaving, that she could do by herself. She seldom chattered or giggled.

Yet when she spoke freely, girls listened. After a while boys did, and sometimes the full-grown: for she could make stories. These became more wonderful as the years passed, and she began to put verses into them, almost like a skald. They were of wide-faring men, lovely maidens, wizards, witches, talking animals, merfolk, lands beyond the sea where anything could happen. Ofttimes Niaerdh came into them, a counselor or rescuer. At first Hlavagast feared the goddess might wax wroth; but no ill smote, so he did not forbid it. After all, his daughter had a certain tie to her.

In the thorp Edh was never alone. Nobody ever was. Houses crowded against the wall. In each, stalls for cows or the horses that a few men owned ran along one side, bedsteads along the other. A stone-weighted loom stood near the door for light to weave and sew by, a bench and table at the far end, a clay hearth in the middle. Food and housewares hung from the roof beams or lay across them. The buildings opened on a yard where pigs, sheep, fowl, and gaunt dogs wandered loose around a well. Life crammed together, talking, laughing, singing, weeping, lowing, neighing, grunting, bleating, cackling, barking. Hoofs thumped, wagon wheels creaked, hammer clashed on anvil. Lying in the dark between straw and sheepskin, among the warm smells of animals, dung, hay, embers, you could hear a baby cry till Mother gave it suck, or she and Father thrash about for a while gasping and groaning, or from outside a howl at the moon, a rush of rain, the wind sough or whine or roar—and that other noise, somewhere, what was it, a night-raven, a troll, a dead man out of his howe?

There was much for a little girl to watch whenever she was free, comings and goings, breeding and bearing, hard work and hard frolic, skilled hands shaping wood, bone, leather, metal, stone, the holy days when folk offered to the gods and feasted. . . . When you grew bigger they took you with them and you saw the car of Niaerdh go by, covered that none might behold her; you wore an evergreen garland and strewed last year’s flowers in her path and sang to her in your thin voice, it was joy and renewal but also awe and an unspoken underlying fear. . . .

Edh grew onward. Bit by bit she got new tasks that took her farther and farther off. She gathered dry twigs for kindling, woad and madder for dyes, berries and blossoms in season. Later she went in a band to the woods for nuts and to the strand beyond for shells. Later yet, first with a gleaning basket, a year or two after with a sickle, she helped harvest the fields to the south. Boys herded the livestock, but often girls brought them food and might well linger most of a long, long summer’s day. Outside the brief busy times of year, folk seldom had anything to hurry for. Neither did they fear anything but sickness, baneful witchcraft, night-beings, and the anger of the gods. No bears or wolves prowled the Eyn, and no foes had sought this poor part of it within living memory.

Thus, more and more as she changed from child to maiden, Edh could stray off by herself, over the heath till her moodiness blew from her. Commonly she ended by the sea, and there she might well sit, lost in the sight, until shadows and a breeze plucked at her sleeve to say she had better go home. From the limestone heights on the western shore she looked across to the mainland, dim with distance; from the sandy east she saw only water. It was enough. In every weather it was enough. Waves danced bluer than heaven, snow streaks of foam on their shoulders, snowstorms of gulls above. They ran heavy, green and gray, their manes flew in the wind, their galloping beat through the ground into her bones. They surged, battered, bellowed, embittered the air with spindrift. They laid a molten road toward her from a low sun, they dimpled beneath oncoming rain and gave it back its rushing noise, they cloaked themselves in fog and whispered unseen of things unknown. Niaerdh was in them with dread and blessing. Hers were the kelp and upcast amber, hers the fish, fowl, seals, great whales, and ships. Hers was the quickening in the land when she came ashore to her Frae, for her sea embraced it, warded it, mourned for its winter death and called it back to life in spring. Very small amidst these things, hers was the child she had kept in this world.

So Edh grew toward womanhood, a tall, shy, slightly awkward girl with a gift for words when she chose to speak of things other than the everyday. She wondered much about them, and spent much time in a waking dream, and when alone might suddenly break into tears, not knowing quite why. Nobody shunned her, but nobody sought her out either, for she had stopped sharing the tales she made and there was otherwise something a little odd about Hlavagast’s daughter. This was the more true after her mother died and he took a new wife. They two did not get along well. Folk muttered that Edh sat too often by Godhahild’s grave.

Then one day a youth of the thorp saw her walk by. Wind blew hard over the heath and her loose brown hair tossed full of sunlight. He, who had never hung back, found that his throat froze tight and the heart fluttered in his breast. A long time passed before he could utter a word to her. She lowered her eyes and he barely heard how she answered. After a while, though, they learned to feel easier.

This was Heidhin Viduhada’s son. He was a lean, dark lad, short on merriment but sharp of wits, tough and lithe, good at weapon-play, a leader among his fellows albeit some of them hated him for his toploftiness. None cared to tease him about Edh.

When they saw how it was going, Hlavagast and Viduhada went aside for a talk. They agreed that such a linking of their families would be welcome, but a betrothal should wait. Edh’s courses had begun just last year; the youngsters might fall out, and an unhappy marriage meant trouble for everybody; abide and see, and meanwhile drink a stoup of ale to the hope of a glad outcome.

Winter passed, rain, snow, cavernous darknesses, the night of fear before the sun turned back and the day of feast that followed, lightening skies, thaw, newborn lambs, budding boughs. Spring brought leaves and northbound wings; Niaerdh rode about the land; men and women coupled in the fields where they would plow and sow. The Sun Car rolled ever higher and slower, green swelled, thunderstorms flashed and banged above the heath, rainbows glimmered far out at sea.

Time came for the market at Kaupavik. Alvaring men gathered their wares and busked themselves. Word thrilled from homestead to homestead: this year a ship had arrived from beyond the Anglii and Cimbri, from realms of the very Romans.

No one knew much about Romaburh. It lay somewhere remote in the South. But its warriors were like locusts, they had eaten land after land; and finely made things trickled out of those realms, glass and silver vessels, metal discs bearing faces, unbelievably lifelike little figures. The stream must be strengthening, for more such goods reached the Eyn every year. Now, at last, Roman chapmen had themselves made it to the country of the Geats! Those who stayed behind in Laikian watched with envy those who left.

Having scant work to do just then, they took comfort in idleness. No sign of evil marked that day a sennight later when Edh and Heidhin strolled west to the shore.

Huge reached the heath, man-empty once they left the thorp out of sight, treeless and flat, so that most of the world was sky. Dizzyingly tall the clouds loomed, dazzlingly white, in a blue without bounds. Light and heat fell from the sun like rain. Poppies flared red, gorse yellow, amidst the murky ling. When they sat down for a while they caught a scorched smell of spurrey; bees hummed in a silence through which larksong drifted earthward; then wings racketed, a grouse hastened low overhead, they looked into one another’s eyes and laughed aloud at their own astonishment. Walking, they held hands, no more, for theirs was a chaste folk and he felt himself the warder of a fragile sacredness.

Their path skirted the bluffs that stretched north from the farms and brought them through woods to a strand. Starred with wildflowers, grass grew nearly to the water’s edge. Wavelets chuckled on stones they had long since worn smooth. Farther out they gleamed and glinted. Across the channel, the mainland shadowed the horizon. Closer, cormorants on a rock dried their wings in the breeze. A stork flew by, white bearer of luck and growth.

Heidhin caught his breath. His finger leaped to point. “Look!” he cried.

Edh squinted north against the brightness. Her voice wavered. “What is it?”

“A ship,” he said, “bound this way. A big, big ship.”

“No, it can’t be. That thing above it—”

“I’ve heard about such. Men who’ve been abroad have sometimes seen them. They catch the wind and push the hull along. Yon’s the Roman ship, Edh, it has to be, headed home from Kaupavik, and we came right in time to behold!”

Rapt, they stared, forgetting all else. The vessel glided nigh. Indeed she was a wonder. Black with gold trim, she was no longer than a large Northern craft, but much wider, round-bellied to hold an untellable freight of treasures. She was decked over, men standing high above the hold. They seemed a swarm, plenty to fight off any rovers. The stempost curved grandly up and aft, while the carving of a giant swan’s neck lifted at the stern. Between them rested a wooden house. No oars drove this ship. From a great pole with a crosspiece swelled a cloth as broad as the beam. She moved along noiseless, a wave at her bow and wake aswirl behind the double steering blades.

“Surely they are beloved of Niaerdh,” Edh breathed.

“Now I can see how they clutch half the world,” Heidhin said shakenly. “What can withstand them?”

The ship changed course, nearer to the island. Youth and maiden saw crewmen peer their way. A hail rang faintly in their ears. “Why, I, I do think it’s us they look at,” Edh stammered. “What could they want?”

“Maybe . . . they would like me to join them,” Heidhin said. “I’ve heard from travelers to western parts that the Romans will take tribesmen into their war-hosts. If those are shorthanded because of sickness or something—”

Edh cast him a stricken glance. “Would you go with them?”

“No, never!” Her fingers closed tight around his. He squeezed back. “But let’s hear them out anyway, if they do land. They may want something else, and pay us well for our help.” A pulse throbbed in his throat.

The yard rattled down. What must be an anchor, though it was not a stone but a hook, went out at the end of a line. A boat trailed on another line. Sailors hauled it alongside and lowered a rope ladder. Men climbed down and seated themselves on the thwarts. Their mates handed them oars. One stood up and flapped a fine cloak he carried. “He smiles and beckons,” said Heidhin. “Yes, they have a wish they hope we can grant.”

“How beautiful, that garment,” Edh murmured. “I think Niaerdh wears the like when she visits the other gods.”

“Maybe ere sundown it will be yours.”

“Oh, I dare not ask.”

“Ho, there!” bawled a man in the boat. He was the biggest, fair-haired, doubtless a German-born interpreter. The rest were a mixed lot, some also light of hue, some darker than Heidhin. But of course the Romans had many different folk to draw on. All wore knee-length tunics over bare legs. Edh flushed and kept her gaze from the ship, where most went naked.

“Be not afraid,” the German called. “We’d fain deal with you.”

Heidhin reddened too. “An Alvaring knows no fear,” he shouted. As his voice cracked he grew redder yet.

The Romans rowed in. The two ashore waited, blood loud in their heads. The boat grounded. A man jumped forth and made fast. The one with the cloak led them up the strand. He smiled and smiled.

Heidhin clasped hard his spear. “Edh,” he said, “I like not the look of them. I think we’d be wisest if we kept out of reach—”

He was too late. The leader yelled an order. His followers dashed forward. Before Heidhin could raise his weapon, new hands grabbed it. A man stepped behind him and caught his arms in a wrestler’s lock. He struggled, screeching. A short stick, to which he had paid no heed—the gang was unarmed save for knives—struck his nape. That was a skillful blow, to stun without real harm. He sagged, and they bound him.

Edh had whirled to run. A sailor caught her hair. Two more closed in. They flung her down on the grass. She screamed and kicked. Another pair grabbed her ankles. The leader knelt between her spraddled legs. He grinned. Spit ran from a corner of his mouth. He hiked up her skirt.

“You trolls, you dog turds, I’ll kill you,” Heidhin raged weakly, out of the pain that stabbed through his skull. “I swear by every god of war, no peace shall your breed ever have with me. Your Romaburh shall burn—” Nobody listened. Where Edh lay pinned, the thing went on and on.

14

Tracing Vagnio’s voyage back to his departure from Öland was easy. With skill and persistence, it was possible to find that a boy and a girl had walked to his home from a village about twenty miles south. But what happened earlier? Some cautious inquiries on the ground were in order. First, though, Everard and Floris planned an aerial survey over the previous several months. The more clues they collected in advance, the better. Vagnio would not necessarily hear of an event such as a murder; perhaps the family could hush it up. Or he and his men might keep silent about it before a stranger. Or Everard might simply get no chance to ask before circumstances forced him from the camp on the beach.

Leaving behind their van and horses, the agents flitted off together on separate hoppers. Their search pattern was a set of leaps from point to point of a precalculated space-time grid. If they spied anything unusual, they would take as close a look through as long a duration as needful. The procedure wasn’t guaranteed to pay off, but it was better than nothing and they didn’t have infinite lifespan to spend here.

A mile above the village, they flashed from midsummer balefires to a couple of weeks later and hung in an enormous blue. Wind whittered thin and cold. The view wheeled over a sunlit Baltic Sea, Sweden’s hills and forests to the west, Öland a straitness mottled with heather, grass, woods, rock, sand—names no dweller would speak for unchronicled centuries to come.

Everard swept his scanner around. Abruptly he stiffened. “Yonder!” he exclaimed into the transmitter at his neck. “About seven o’clock—see?”

Floris whistled. “Yes. A Roman ship, is it not, anchored offshore?” Thoughtfully: “Gallo-Roman, most likely, out of some such port as Bordeaux or Boulogne, rather than the Mediterranean. They never had a regular trade directly with Scandinavia, you know, but records mention a few official visits, and occasional entrepreneurs sail to Denmark and beyond, bypassing the long chain of middlemen. Amber, especially.”

“This might be significant for us. Let’s check.” Everard increased magnification.

Floris had already done it. She screamed.

“Oh, my God,” Everard choked.

Floris swooped downward. Cloven air boomed behind her.

“Stop, you fool!” Everard yelled. “Come back!”

Floris ignored him, her popping ears, everything but that which was ahead of her dive. Still her shriek trailed after. So might a plunging hawk scream, or a wrathful Valkyrie. Everard struck fist on control console, cursed, and grimly, all but helplessly, trailed at a slower pace. He halted a few hundred feet aloft, keeping the sun at his back.

The men, clustered to watch the show or wait their turns, heard. They looked up and saw the death-horse bound for them. They wailed and scrambled in every direction. The one on the girl pulled from her, got to his knees, yanked out his knife. Maybe he meant to kill her, maybe it was only defensive reflex. No matter. A sapphire-blue energy bolt smote him through the mouth. He crumpled at her feet. From a hole in the back of his skull curled the smoke off his brain.

Floris whipped her cycle about. A man’s height above ground, she fired at the next nearest. Gut-shot, he yammered and threshed on the grass, to Everard like an overturned beetle. Floris chased a third and dropped him cleanly. She ceased then, motionless in the saddle for a minute. Sweat mingled with tears on her face, as cold as her hands.

Breath shuddered into her. She holstered her pistol and leaf-gentle descended by Edh.

Done is done, tolled through Everard. Swiftly he considered his options. In blind panic, surviving sailors spurted along the shore or toward the woods. Two had kept some wits, had waded out and were swimming for the ship, where horror boiled. The Patrolman bit his lip till blood ran. “Okay,” he said aloud, tonelessly. With jumps around space and precise aim, he killed each of those who had landed. Finally he put the wounded man out of his misery. I don’t suppose Janne left him on purpose. She just forgot. Everard rode back to a fifty-foot altitude and poised. By scanner and amplifier he observed what went on below him.

Edh sat up. Her stare was blank, but she plucked at her skirt and got it down over the red-streaked thighs. Hog-tied, Heidhin writhed toward her. “Edh, Edh,” he groaned. He stopped when the timecycle settled between. “Oh, goddess, avenger—”

Floris dismounted and knelt beside Edh. She laid her arms about the girl. “It is over, dear,” she sobbed. “It will be well with you. Nothing like this, ever again. You are free now.”

“Niaerdh,” she heard. “All-Mother, you came.”

“No use denying your divinity,” Everard snarled in Floris’s receiver. “Get the hell out before you make matters worse.”

“No,” the woman answered. “You don’t understand. I have to give her what little comfort I am able.”

Everard sat mute. The crewmen in the channel heaved frantic on halyard and anchor rode. “Loose me,” Heidhin pleaded. “Let me to her.”

“Maybe I do understand,” Everard said. “Be as quick as possible, can you?”

The daze was lifting from Edh, but unearthliness brimmed the hazel eyes. “What do you want of me, Niaerdh?” she whispered. “I am yours. As I always was?”

“Slay the Romans, all the Romans!” Heidhin bawled. “I’ll pay you for it with my life if you will.”

Poor muchacho, Everard thought, your life is already ours to take, anytime we might choose. But I could hardly expect you to act sensible right off the bat, could I?

Or ever, by my lights. You are not a scientifically educated post-Christian Western European. To you, the gods are real and your highest duty is avenging a wrong.

Floris stroked the matted hair. Her free arm drew the reeking, shivering, slight body close. “I want only your well-being, only your gladness,” she said. “I love you.”

“You saved me,” Edh stammered, “because . . . because I must—what?”

“Listen to me, Floris, for everything’s sake,” Everard called between his teeth. “The time is out of joint and you can’t set it right today. You can’t. Meddle any more, and I swear there’ll never be a Tacitus One book, maybe never a Tacitus Two. We don’t belong in these events, and that’s why the future is in danger. Leave them be!”

His partner fell altogether still.

“Are you troubled, Niaerdh?” Edh asked as a child might. “What can trouble you, the goddess? That the Romans befoul your world?”

Floris closed her eyes, opened them, and let go of the girl. “It . . . is . . . your woe, my dear,” she said. Rising: “Fare you well. Fare you bravely, free from fear and sorrow. We shall meet again.” To Everard: “Shall I release Heidhin?”

“No, Edh can take a knife and cut the rope. He can help her back to the village.”

“True. And that should do both of them good, shouldn’t it? A pitiful tiny bit of good.”

Floris mounted her timecycle. “I suppose we’d best ascend, instead of winking out of sight,” Everard said. “Come on.”

He threw a last glance down. It was as if he felt the two there looking and looking. Out on the water, sail filled, the ship bore west. Lacking several hands and, no doubt, at least a couple of officers, she might or might not make it home. If she did, the crew might or might not relate what they had seen. It would scarcely win credence. They’d be smarter to invent something more plausible. Of course, any tale could well be taken for a fabrication, an attempt to cover up a mutiny. In that case, they had an unpleasant death in store. Maybe they’d try their luck among the Germans instead, slim though the prospects be. Knowing their fate would not affect history, Everard didn’t give a damn what it was.

15

The sun was newly down, clouds lay red and gold in the west, eastward the sky deepened while night rose in a tide over the wilderness. Light lingered on a treeless hilltop in central Germany, but already the grass there was full of shadows and warmth draining from the quiet air.

Having seen to the horses, Janne Floris squatted at the blackened spot in front of the twin shelters and began assembling wood for a fire. Some remained, split and stacked, from the last time the Patrol agents had used the site, a few days ago if you counted by the turning of the planet. A gust and thump brought her to her feet. Everard swung off his vehicle.

“Why are you—I expected you back sooner,” she said half timidly.

He shrugged his heavy shoulders. “I figured you might as well do the camp chores while I did mine,” he replied. “And nightfall is a logical return point. I don’t want more than a bite to eat, but then a clock dial’s worth of sleep. I’m wrung out. Aren’t you?”

She looked away. “Not yet. Too tense.” With a gulp, she made herself confront him. “Where did you go? You just told me to wait, immediately after we got here, and left.”

“I guess I did. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking. It seemed obvious.”

“I thought I was being punished.”

He shook his head more vigorously than his words would have suggested. “Good Lord, no. In fact, I’d a vague notion of sparing you a discussion. What I did was skip back to Öland, after dark on . . . that day. The kids were gone and nobody else was around, as I’d hoped. I lifted the corpses one after another, took them well out to sea, and dumped them. Not a fun job. No reason for you to be in on it.”

She stared. “Why?”

“Isn’t that obvious either?” he snapped. “Think. Same reason I shot the swine that you didn’t get around to. Minimize impact on local people, because we’ve got too flinking many variables as is. I daresay they’ll believe Edh and Heidhin, more or less, but they live in a world of gods and trolls and magic anyway. Material evidence or independent witnesses would hit them a lot harder than a doubtless incoherent story.”

“I see.” She twisted her hands together. “I am being quite stupid and unprofessional, am I not? I wasn’t trained for this kind of mission, but that is no excuse. I am very sorry.”

“Well, you caught me by surprise,” he growled. “When you skited off into action, I was dumbfounded for a second. And then what could I do? Not mess around with causality anymore, for certain, nor risk Heidhin seeing my face, to recognize it in Colonia this year. Duck back uptime, get a different disguise from the one I used on the beach, and return to the same minute? No, it wouldn’t do for mortals to see the gods quarreling; that’d confuse things worse yet. I could only play along with you.”

“I am sorry,” she said desperately. “I couldn’t help myself. There was Edh, Veleda whom I saw among the Langobardi—no woman ever impressed me more—I knew her—but this was a young girl, and those animals—”

“Yeah. Berserk rage, followed by overwhelming sympathy.”

Floris straightened. Fists doubled, she gazed squarely at Everard and said, “I am explaining, not making excuses. I will take whatever penalty the Patrol gives me, without complaint.”

He stood a few heartbeats unspeaking before he made a crooked smile and answered, “There won’t be any if you carry on honestly and competently. Which I’m sure you will. As an Unattached agent on this case, I can make summary judgments. You are hereby pardoned.”

She blinked hard, rubbed wrist over eyes, and said unevenly, “Sir, you are too kind. Because we have worked together—”

“Hey, give me credit,” he protested. “Yes, you’ve been a grand companion, but I wouldn’t let that influence me . . . much. What counts is that you’ve proved yourself a crack operative, which the outfit is always short of. More important still, this hasn’t actually been your fault.”

Bemusement: “What? I allowed my emotions to take me over—”

“Under the circumstances, that isn’t exactly to your discredit. I’m not at all sure what I’d’ve done myself, though maybe sneakier; and I’m not a woman. It didn’t bother me killing those vermin. I didn’t enjoy it, mind you, especially since they hadn’t a chance against me, but as long as it had to be done, I’ll sleep okay.” Everard paused. “You know, in my salad days, before I joined the Patrol, I favored the death penalty for forcible rape, till a lady pointed out to me that then the bastard would have an incentive to murder his victim and no motive not to. My feelings stayed the same. If I remember right, you twentieth-century Dutch, in your civilized, clinical fashion, treat the problem with castration.”

“Nevertheless, I—”

“Get off that guilt trip. What are you, some kind of a liberal or something? Let’s put sentiment on the shelf and think about the matter from a Patrol point of view. Listen. It seems fairly clear—do you agree?—those were merchant seamen who’d finished whatever business they’d done on Öland, if any, and were bound elsewhere, probably home. They happened to see Edh and Heidhin on that lonely shore and seized an opportunity. That sort of thing is common throughout the ancient world. Maybe they didn’t intend to come back, or maybe it’d be to a different tribe—from the air, I got an impression the island’s divided—or maybe they figured nobody would know. Whichever, they trapped the kids. If we hadn’t interfered, they’d have taken Heidhin off to sell for a slave. Edh too, unless they injured her so badly it was only worthwhile slitting her throat for one last bit of sport. That’s what would have happened. An incident like thousands of others, important to nobody but those who suffer, and they soon dead, forgotten, lost forever.”

Floris crossed fists over breasts. The waning light glimmered in her eyes. “Instead—”

Everard nodded. “Yeah. Instead, we appeared. We’ll want to seek out her home town, a few years after she left it, settle down for a while as visitors, ask discreet questions, get to know her people. Then maybe we’ll have some idea of how poor little Edh became terrible Veleda.”

Floris grimaced. “I think I do. In a, a general way. I can imagine myself into her. I think she was more intelligent and sensitive than most, yes, devout, if we can say that of a heathen. This dreadful thing came upon her, fear, shame, despair, not simply her body but her spirit crushed under those heaving, thrusting weights; and suddenly the veritable goddess arrived, to slay them and embrace her. From the bottom of hell, up to glory. . . . But afterward, afterward! The defilement, the sense of having been made worthless, it will not ever quite leave a woman, Manse. Worse for her, because in Iron Age Germany the blood, the womb, is sacred to the clan and a wife’s adultery is punished by the most brutal death. They would not blame her for what she could not help, I suppose, but she would be contaminated and—and the element of the supernatural would rouse fear, I think, more than reverence. Pagan gods are tricky, often cruel. I wonder if Edh and Heidhin dared say much. Perhaps they said nothing; and that would itself make a tearing conflict in them.”

Everard wished for his pipe but didn’t believe he should go to his hopper’s carrier box for it. Floris had become too vulnerable. She never called me by my first name before, as careful as we’ve been to avoid entanglements. I doubt she’s aware she did. “You’re probably right,” he agreed. “At the same time, there the supernatural occurrence was. It had left them alive and free. If her body was degraded, her soul couldn’t really be. Somehow, she was worthy of the goddess. It must be because she had a destiny, she was chosen for something enormous. Only what? Well, with Heidhin talking to her, over and over, full of male revengefulness—In terms of her culture, it would make sense. She was appointed to bring about the destruction of Rome.”

“She could accomplish nothing on her backwater island,” Floris finished. “Nor could she any longer fit into its life. She would wander west, confident of the goddess’s protection. Heidhin went with her. Between them they scraped together enough goods to buy passage across the sea. What they saw and heard of Roman doings as they traveled fueled their hatred, their sense of her mission. But I think, in spite of everything, and rare though it is in their society, I think he loved her.”

“I suspect he does yet. Remarkable, when it’s pretty plain she never let him into her bed.”

“Understandable.” Floris sighed. “For her, after that experience—and he, if nothing else, he would not force himself on a vessel of the goddess. I heard he has a wife and children among the Bructeri.”

“Uh-huh. Well, what we’ve found is the irony that our investigation of a disturbance to the plenum is what brought it about. To be quite frank, that sort of nexus is by no means unprecedented. Another reason for not condemning you, Janne. Often a causal loop has a powerful and subtle force to it. What we’ve got to do is prevent it from developing into a causal vortex. We have to forestall the events that would lead to Tacitus Two, while not unduly perturbing those that are described in Tacitus One.”

“How?” she asked despairingly. “Dare we meddle more? Should we not appeal for help from . . . the Danellians?”

Everard smiled the least bit. “M-m, the situation doesn’t look that bad to me. We’re expected to handle everything we can, you know, economizing on lifetime of other agents. First, as I remarked, it seems wise to spend a while on Öland, researching background. Then we’ll return to this year, the Batavi, the Romans, and—well, I have some preliminary thoughts, but I want to discuss them with you in depth, and you’ll be vital to whatever we do.”

“I will try.”

They stood silent. The air grew colder. Night rose up the hillside. Sunset colors smoldered to gray. Above them kindled the evening star.

Everard heard a ragged breath. Through the dusk, he saw Floris shudder and hug herself. “Janne, what’s the matter?” he asked, already guessing.

She looked out over the darkness. “All this death and pain, loss and grief.”

“The norm of history.”

“I know, I know, but—And I thought living among the Frisii had hardened me, but today, in this today of mine, I killed men, and, and I will not sleep soundly—”

He stepped close, laid hands on shoulders, murmured. She spun about to throw her arms around him. What could he do but the same? When she raised her face to his, what could he do but kiss her?

She responded wildly. Her lips tasted salt. “Oh, Manse, yes, yes, please, don’t you yourself need to forget for this night?”

16

Sleet hissed, blown out of unseen heaven across a land that rain had already half drowned. Vision soon lost itself; flat acres, withered grass, leafless trees tossing in the wind, the burnt-out remnant of a house, dissolved in a noontide murk. As dank as the chill was, clothing gave little defense. The north wind smelled of the swamps over which it had roared, of the sea beyond, and of winter striding down from the Pole.

Everard hunched in the saddle, cloak drawn tight. Water dripped from the hood past his face. The horse’s hoofs went plop-squelp, plop-squelp in pastern-deep mud. Yet this was the entryway through an estate to a manor house.

The building hove in view before him. In modified Mediterranean style, tile-roofed, stuccoed, it had been raised by Burhmund when he was Civilis, ally and officer of Rome. His wife was its matron, his children filled it with laughter. Now it served as headquarters for Petillius Cerialis.

Two sentries stood in the portico. Like those at the gate, they challenged the Patrolman when he drew rein at the foot of the stairs. “I am Everardus the Goth,” he told them. “The general is expecting me.”

One soldier gave his companion an inquiring glance. The latter nodded. “I’ve been instructed,” he said. “In fact, I escorted the preliminary courier.” Was he snatching at any scrap of pride, of importance? He snuffled and sneezed. Probably the first man was a last-minute replacement for a ranker who lay fevered, teeth chattering, in sick bay. Although they appeared to be of Gallic breed, both these were pretty wretched themselves. Their metal was tarnished, their kilts hung sodden, gooseflesh studded their arms, sunken cheeks spoke of short rations.

“Pass,” the second legionary said. “We’ll call a groom to stable your mount.”

Everard entered a gloomy atrium, where a slave took his cloak and knife. Several men sitting slumped, staff with nothing to do, gave him stares in which, perhaps, a sudden feeble hope flickered. An aide came to conduct the visitor to a room in the south wing. He knocked on the door, heard a gruff “Open,” obeyed, and announced: “Sir, the German delegate is here.”

“Send him in,” rumbled the voice. “Leave us alone but stand outside, just in case.”

Everard entered. The door shut behind him. Scant light seeped through a leaded window. Candles stood around in holders. Tallow, not wax, they smoked and stank. Shadows bulked in corners and slid across a table strewn with papyrus dispatches. Otherwise there were a couple of stools and a chest that might hold changes of clothing. An infantry sword and its sheath hung side by side on a wall. A charcoal brazier had warmed the air but made it stuffy.

Cerialis sat behind the table. He wore merely a tunic and sandals: a burly man with a hard square face whose clean-shavenness revealed deep furrows. His eyes raked the newcomer. “You are Everardus the Goth, eh?” he greeted. “The go-between said you speak Latin. You’d better.”

“I do.” This’ll be tricky, the Patrolman thought. It wouldn’t be in character for me to grovel, but he might decide I’m arrogant and he’s not going to take any lip from any Jupiter-damned native. His nerves must be worn thin, like everybody else’s. “The general is both kind and wise to receive me.”

“Well, frankly, by now I’d listen to a Christian, if he claimed he’d something to offer. If it turned out he didn’t, I could at least have the pleasure of crucifying him.”

Everard feigned puzzlement. “A Jew sect,” Cerialis grunted. “Heard about the Jews? Another pack of mutinous ingrates. But you, your tribe’s way to the east. Why in Tartarus are you running errands hereabouts?”

“I thought that was explained to the general. I am no enemy of yours, nor of Civilis either. I’ve spent time in the Empire as well as in different parts of Germany. I got to know Civilis a bit, and lesser chieftains a bit more. They trust me to speak straightforwardly for them, because of my being an outsider whom you have nothing against. And because of knowing Roman ways somewhat, I can bring them your words clear, not scrambled. As for myself, I’m a trader who’d like to do business with this region. I stand to benefit from peace and their thankfulness.”

Persuading them had been more complicated than that, but not very much more. The rebels were in fact weary and discouraged. The Goth might be granted personal access to the Imperial commander, where he might do some good and could scarcely do worse harm than already went on. After heralds had carried the request, the ease with which arrangements were made surprised the Germans. Everard had awaited it. He knew better than they, from Tacitus and from aerial observation, how badly off the Romans were too.

“I do know!” Cerialis snapped. “Except that they didn’t mention what was in it for you. Very well, we’ll talk. I warn you, get that long-winded again and I’ll boot you out myself. Sit down. No, pour us wine first. It makes this frog-marsh country a hair less horrible.”

Everard filled two silver goblets from a graceful glass decanter. The seat he took was likewise handsome, and the drink tasted well, if a tad too sweet for his preferences. This must all have belonged to Civilis. To civilization.

I’ll never be fond of the Romans, but they do bring other things with them than slave traders, tax farmers, and sadistic games. Peace, prosperity, a widened world—those don’t last, but when the tide ebbs it leaves behind, scattered through the wreckage, books, technologies, faiths, ideas, memories of what once was, stuff for later generations to salvage and treasure and build with again. And among the memories is that there was, for a while, a life not given over entirely to naked survival.

“So the Germans are ready to surrender, are they?” Cerialis prompted.

“I beg the general’s pardon if we gave the wrong impression. We are not masters of the Latin language.”

Cerialis thumped the table. “I told you, stop pussyfooting or get out! You’re royal at home, descended from Mercury. Got to be, the way you bear yourself. And I’m the emperor’s kinsman, but he and I are plain soldiers who’ve pulled heavy duty. We two can be blunt with each other, here while we’re alone.”

Everard ventured a grin. “As you wish, sir. I daresay you did not really misunderstand us. Then why don’t you come to the point? The chieftains who sent me do not propose to go under the yoke or chained in a triumph. But they’d like an end to this war.”

“What gall have they got, to demand terms? What have they left to fight with? We hardly even see a hostile any more. Civilis’s last attempt worth mentioning was a naval demonstration in fall. I wasn’t worried, I was astonished that he bothered. Nothing came of it and he withdrew across the Rhine. Since then we’ve ravaged his homeland.”

“I’ve seen, including the fact that you spared his properties.”

Cerialis fired off a laugh. “Of course. Drive a wedge between him and the rest. Make ’em wonder why they should bleed and die for his benefit. I know they’re pretty well fed up. You came on behalf of a clutch of tribal chiefs, not him.”

That’s true, and you’re shrewd, mister. “Communication is slow. Besides, we Germans are used to acting independently. It does not mean that they sent me to betray him.”

Cerialis swallowed from his cup, slammed it down, and said, “All right, let’s hear. What am I offered?”

“Peace, I told you,” Everard declared. “Can you afford to refuse? You’re in as much trouble as they are. You claim you don’t see enemy fighters any more. That’s because you aren’t advancing any farther. You’re bogged down in a land picked bare, every road a quagmire, your troops cold, wet, hungry, sickening, miserable. Your supply problems are hideous, and it won’t get better till the state has recovered from the civil war, which will take longer than you can wait.” I wish I could quote that great line of Steinbeck’s, about the flies having conquered the flypaper. “Meanwhile Burhmund, Civilis, is recruiting in Germany. You could lose, Cerialis, the way Varus lost in the Teutoburg Forest, with the same long-range consequences. Better come to terms while you’ve got the chance. There, was that plain-spoken enough?”

The Roman had flushed and knotted his hands. “It was insolent. We’ll not reward rebellion. We cannot.”

Everard softened his tone. “It seems to . . . those whose mouth I’m being . . . that you’ve punished it adequately. If the Batavi and their allies return to their allegiance and to quietness beyond the river, haven’t you reached your objective? What they ask in exchange is no more than they owe to their people to get. No decimation, no enslavements, no captives for the triumph or the arena. Instead, amnesty for all, including Civilis. Restoration of tribal lands, where these are occupied. Correction of the abuses that brought the revolt on in the first place. This means, mostly, reasonable tribute, local autonomy, access to trade, and an end to conscription. Given that, you’ll once again get as many volunteers enlisting as Rome can use.”

“That’s no small set of demands,” Cerialis said. “It goes beyond my authority.”

Ah, he’s willing to consider it. A thrill coursed through Everard. He leaned forward. “General, you’re of Vespasian’s house, Vespasian for whom Civilis fought too. The emperor will listen to you. Everybody says he’s a hardheaded man who’s interested in making things work, not in hollow glory. The Senate will . . . listen to the emperor. You can bring this treaty about, general, if you want to, if you’ll make the effort. You can be remembered not as a Varus but as a Germanicus.”

Cerialis peered slit-eyed across the table. “You talk almighty knowing for a barbarian,” he said.

“I’ve been around, sir,” Everard answered.

Oh, I have, I have, around the whole globe, up and down the centuries. Most recently at the wellspring of your sorest woes, Cerialis.

How long ago it already felt, that idyll on Öland, no, on the Eyn. Twenty-five years past by the calendar. Hlavagast and Viduhada and most of those who had been so hospitable were likeliest dead by now, bones in the earth and names on tongues wearing down toward oblivion. Gone with them were the pain and puzzlement left behind by children whom strangeness had called away. But for Everard it was scarcely a month since he and Floris bade farewell to Laikian. Man and wife, wanderers from the far South who had gotten passage over the sea for themselves and their horses, and would like to pitch their tent for a while close to this friendly thorp. . . . It was extraordinary, therefore enchanting; it caused people to talk more freely than ever before in their lives; but there were also the hours alone, in the tent or out on the summery heath. . . . Afterward the Patrol agents got floggingly busy.

“And I have my connections,” Everard said.

The histories, the data files, the great coordinating computers, the experts of the Time Patrol. The knowledge that this is the proper configuration of a plenum that has powerful negative feedback. We’ve identified the random factor that could bring on an avalanching change; what we must do is damp it.

“Hm,” Cerialis said. “I’ll want a fuller account.” He cleared his throat. “Later. Today we’ll stick to business. I do want my men out of the mud.”

I find that I kind of like this guy. In many ways he reminds me of George Patton. Yes, we can dicker.

Cerialis weighed his words. “Tell your lordlings this, and have them pass it on to Civilis. I see one big stumbling block. You speak of the Germans beyond the Rhine. I can’t concede what he wants and pull the legions out while they are faunching for somebody to whistle them up all over again.”

“He would not, I assure you,” Everard said. “Under the conditions proposed, he’d have won what he was fighting for, or at least a decent compromise. Who else might start a new war?”

Cerialis’s mouth tightened. “Veleda.”

“The sibyl among the Bructeri?”

“The witch. D’you know, I’ve thought about a strike into that country just to seize her. But she’d vanish into the woods.”

“And if you did somehow succeed, it’d be like snatching a hornets’ nest.”

Cerialis nodded. “Every crazy tribesman from the Rhine to the Suebian Sea up in arms.” He meant the Baltic, and he was right. “But it might well be worse, for my grandchildren if not me, to let her go on spewing her venom amongst them.” He sighed. “Except for that, the furor could die down. But as is—”

“I think,” said Everard weightily, “if Civilis and his allies are promised honorable terms, I think we can get her to call for peace.” Cerialis goggled. “You mean that?”

“Try it,” Everard said. “Negotiate with her as well as with the male leaders. I can carry word between you.”

Cerialis shook his head. “We couldn’t leave her running loose. Too dangerous. We’d have to keep an eye on her.”

“But not a hand.”

Cerialis blinked, then chuckled. “Ha! I see what you mean. You’ve got a gift of gab, Everardus. True, if ever we arrested her or anything like that, we’d likely get a whole new rebellion. But what if she provoked it? How can we know she’ll behave herself?”

“She will, once she’s reconciled with Rome.”

“What’s that worth? I know barbarians. Flighty as geese.” Evidently it didn’t occur to the general that he might offend the emissary, unless he didn’t care. “From what I’ve gathered, that’s a war goddess she serves. What if Veleda takes it into her head that this Bellona’s hollering for blood once more? We could have another Boadicea on our hands.”

A sore point with you, huh? Everard sipped of his wine. The sweetness glowed down his throat, invoking summers and southlands against the weather that ramped outside. “Give it a try,” he said. “What can you lose by exchanging messages with her? I think a settlement that everybody can live with is possible.”

Whether in superstition or in metaphor, Cerialis replied, surprisingly quietly, “That will depend on the goddess, won’t it?”

17

The early sunset smoldered above the forest. Boughs were like black bones athwart it. Puddles in field and paddock glowed dull red with it beneath a greenish sky as cold as the wind that eddied whimpering across them. A flight of crows passed. Their hoarse cries sounded for a while after the dusk had swallowed them up.

A hind carrying hay between stack and house shivered, not only because of the weather, when he saw Wael-Edh go by. She was not unkindly, in her stark way, but she was in league with the Powers, and now she walked from the halidom. What there had she heard and said? For months no man had fared hither to speak with her, as often erstwhile. By day she paced her grounds or sat under a tree and brooded, alone. It was surely at her own behest—but why? This was a grim time, even for the Bructeri. Too many of their men had come home from Batavian or Frisian lands with tales of mishap or woe, or had not come home at all. Could the gods be turning from their spaewife? The hind muttered a luck-spell and hastened his steps.

Her tower loomed dark ahead of the woman. The warrior on watch dipped his spear to her. She nodded and opened the door. In the room beyond, a pair of thralls sat cross-legged at a low hearthfire, palms held close. Smoke drifted around bitter until it found its outlet. Their breath mingled with it, wan in the light of two lamps. They scrambled to their feet. “Does my lady want food or drink?” the man asked.

Wael-Edh shook her head. “I will sleep,” she answered.

“We will guard your dreaming well,” the girl said. It was needless, nobody save Heidhin would dare climb the ladder unbidden, but she was new here. She gave her mistress one of the lamps and Wael-Edh went up.

A ghost of daylight lingered in a window covered with thin-scraped gut, and the flame burned yellow. Nonetheless the loft-room was already heavy with gloom, wherein her things crouched like trolls underground. Not yet wishing for her shut-bed, she put the lamp on a shelf and sat down on her high three-legged witch-seat, cloak drawn tight. Her gaze sought the shifty shadows.

Air whuffed in her face. The floor groaned beneath a sudden heavy weight. Edh leaped back. The stool clattered to the boards. She gasped.

Soft radiance flowed out of a ball atop the horns of the thing that stood before her. Two saddles were on its back, it was the bull of Frae, cast in iron, and on it rode the goddess who had claimed it from him.

“Niaerdh, oh, Niaerdh—”

Janne Floris got off the timecycle and stood as stately as might be. Last time, caught unawares, she had been garbed like any Germanic woman of the Iron Age. It hadn’t mattered then, but no doubt memory made her more impressive, and for this visit she had outfitted herself with care. Her gown draped lustrous white, jewels glinted in the belt, a silver pectoral had the pattern of a fishnet, and her hair hung in twin amber-hued braids below a diadem.

“Fear not,” she said. The tongue she used was the dialect of Edh’s girlhood. “Speak low. I have returned to you as I promised.”

Edh straightened, pressed hands to breasts, swallowed once or twice. Her eyes stood huge in the thin, strong-boned countenance. The hood had fallen back and light picked out the gray that was stealing across her head. For a few seconds she only breathed. Then, amazingly fast, a sort of calm flowed into her, an acceptance more stoic than exalted but altogether willing.

“Ever I knew you would,” she said. “I am ready to go.” A whisper: “How very ready.”

“Go?” asked Floris.

“Down hell-road. You will bring me to darkness and peace.” Anxiety fluttered. “Will you not?”

Floris tautened. “Ach, what I want of you is harder than death.”

Edh was silent a little before she replied, “As you will. I am no stranger to pain.”

“I would not hurt you!” Floris blurted. She regained due gravity. “You have served me for long years.”

Edh nodded. “Since you gave me back my life.”

Floris could not stifle a sigh. “A life lamed and twisted, I fear.”

Emotion quickened. “You did not save me for nothing, I know. It was for all the others, wasn’t it? All the women ravished, men slain, children bereft, free folk laid in bonds. I was to call their avenging down upon Rome. Was I not?”

“You are no longer sure?”

Tears glinted on lashes. “If I was wrong, Niaerdh, why did you let me go on?”

“You were not wrong. But child, hearken.” Floris held out her hands. Like a small girl in truth, Edh took them. Hers were cold and faintly atremble. Floris drew breath. The majestic words rolled forth.

“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away; a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.”

Awe looked at her. “I hear you, goddess.”

“It is olden wisdom, Edh. Hear onward. You have wrought well, you have sown for me as I would have you. But your work is not yet done. Now gather in the harvest.”

“How?”

“Thanks to the will that you aroused in them, the westfolk have fought for their rights, until at last the Romans would fain yield them back what was robbed. But they, the Romans, still fear Veleda. As long as you might cry again for their downfall, they dare not withdraw their hosts. It is time that you, in my name, call for peace.”

Rapture blazed. “They will go away then? We shall be rid of them?”

“No. They will take their tribute and have their warders among the tribes as erstwhile.” In haste: “But they will be righteous; and dwellers on this side of the Rhine will also gain by the trade and the lawfulness.”

Edh blinked, shook her head violently, crooked fingers into claws at her sides. “No real freedom? No revenge? Goddess, I cannot—”

“This is my will,” Floris commanded. “Obey.” Once more she gentled her voice. “And for you, child, there shall be reward, a new home, a place of calm and comfort, where you shall tend my shrine, that will henceforward be the halidom of peace.”

“No,” Edh stammered. “You, you must be aware—I have sworn—”

“Tell me!” Floris exclaimed. After an instant: “I . . . wish you to make yourself clear to yourself.”

The shaking, straining figure before her gained back its balance. Edh had long coped with menaces and horrors. She could overcome bewilderment. Briefly, she sounded almost wistful. “I wonder if I ever have been. . . .” She stiffened herself. “Heidhin and I, he got me to swear I would never make peace while he lives and Romans remain in German lands. We mingled our blood in the grove before the gods. Were you elsewhere?”

Floris scowled. “He had no right.”

“He—invoked the Anses—”

Floris donned haughtiness. “I will deal with the Anses. You are free of that oath.”

“Heidhin would never—He has been faithful through all these years,” Edh faltered. “Would you have me cast him out like a dog? For he will never end war against the Romans, whatever other men or you gods yourselves may do.”

“Tell him I gave you my bidding.”

“I know not, I know not!” ripped from Edh’s throat. She sank to the floor and buried her face on the knees she hugged. Her shoulders quivered.

Floris glanced aloft. Roof beams and rafters were lost in blackness. Light had left the window and cold crept inward. The wind hooted.

“We have a crisis, I fear,” she subvocalized. “Loyalty is the highest morality these people know. I’m not certain Edh can bring herself to break that pledge. Or if she does, she may be shattered.”

“Which’d leave her incapable,” sounded Everard’s English in her head, “and we’ve got to have her authority to make this deal work. Besides, poor tortured woman—”

“We must make Heidhin release her from the vow. I hope he will heed me. Where is he?”

“I was just checking on that. He’s at home.” They had bugged it some time ago. “M-m, it happens Burhmund is with him, riding circuit among the trans-Rhine chiefs, you know. I’ll find another day for you to approach him.”

“No, wait. This may be a stroke of luck.” Or the world lines tightening as they seek to regain their proper configuration? “Since Burhmund is trying to rouse the tribes to a new effort—”

“We’d better not pull any epiphanies on him. No telling how he’d react.”

“Of course not. I mean, I won’t appear directly to him. But if he sees Heidhin the implacable suddenly converted—”

“Well . . . okay. It’s dicey whatever we do, so I’ll trust your judgment, Janne.”

“Hsh!”

Edh looked up. Tears streaked her cheekbones, but she had fought the weeping off. “What can I do?” she asked colorlessly.

Floris moved to stand above her, bent, again offered her hands. She helped the other rise, clasped arms about her, stood thus for a minute giving what warmth her body was able. Stepping back, she said: “Yours is a clean soul, Edh. You need not betray your friend. We will go together and speak with him. Then he ought to understand.”

Wonder and dread became one. “We twain?”

“Is that wise?” Everard questioned. “M-m, yeah, I suppose having her along will reinforce you.”

“Love may be as strong as religion, Manse,” Floris said.

To Edh: “Come, mount my steed behind me. Hold fast to my waist.”

“The holy bull,” Edh breathed. “Or the hell horse?”

“No,” Floris said. “I told you, yours is a harder road than the way under.”

18

Fire sprang and crackled in a trench down the middle of Heidhin’s house. Smoke did not rise well toward the louvers, but hazed and made stinging an air that the flames hardly warmed. Their red light wrestled with darknesses among the pillars and beams. It wavered across the men on the benches and the women who brought them drink. Most sat wordless. Although Heidhin’s home was as grand as many a royal hall, it had commonly known less mirth than a crofter’s hut. This eventide there was none. Outside, wind shrilled through a deepening dusk.

“Naught can come of it save treachery,” Heidhin snarled.

Seated beside him, Burhmund slowly shook his grizzled head. The fire threw a bloodshot shimmer over the milkiness of his blind eye. “I know not,” he answered. “Yon Everard is an odd one. He may be able to bring something about.”

“The best he, or anybody, could bear back to us is a refusal. Any offer would be meant for our ruin. You should never have let him go.”

“How could I have stopped him? It was the lords of the tribes whom he spoke with, and they who sent him off. I told you how I did not hear till lately, when I was already on this quest.”

Heidhin’s lips writhed. “They dared!”

“They had the right.” Burhmund’s tone fell dull to the ground. “They do not forswear themselves merely by talk with the foe. I think, now, I would not have tried to forbid them, had I been on hand. They are sick of this war. Maybe Everard can find them a hope. I too am death-weary.”

“I thought better of you,” fleered Heidhin.

Burhmund showed no anger; but then, Wael-Edh’s oath-brother stood well-nigh as high as he did. “Easy for you,” said the Batavian patiently. “Your house has not been riven. My sister’s son fell in battle against me. My wife and another sister lie hostage in Colonia; I know not whether they yet live. My homeland is laid waste.” He stared down into his drinking horn. “Are the gods done with me?”

Heidhin sat spear-straight. “Only if you yield,” he said. “I never will.”

A knock sounded on the door. The man seated nearest took an ax and went to open it. Wind gusted in; the flames jumped and streamed sparks. Murk rimmed the shaped that trod through.

Heidhin leaped up. “Edh!” he cried, and started toward her.

“Lady,” Burhmund whispered. A mumble went around the hall. Men got to their feet.

Unhooded, she moved a ways alongside the fire trench. They saw she was stiff and pale, and that her gaze went beyond them. “How, how came you here?” Heidhin stumbled. The sight of him, the relentless, thus shaken, daunted every heart. “Why?”

She halted. “I must speak with you alone,” she said. Fate rang in her low voice. “Follow me. None else.”

“But—you—what—”

“Follow me, Heidhin. Mighty tidings are come. You others, abide them.” Wael-Edh turned and strode back out.

Like a sleepwalker, Heidhin went after her. At the entry, his hand of itself plucked a spear from the weapons left leaning against the wall. The two of them passed into the dark. Shuddering, a man crept to close the door.

“No, bar it not,” Burhmund told him. “We will wait here as she bade till she returns or morning does.”

The first stars winked faint overhead. Buildings crouched shapeless. Edh led the way from the yard to the open ground beyond. Sere grass and wind-ruffled puddles faded off into blindness. Near the edge of sight stood a great oak at which Heidhin offered to the Anses. From behind it spilled a steady white light. Heidhin jarred to a stop. He made a noise in his gullet.

“You must be brave tonight,” Edh said. “Yonder is the goddess.”

“Niaerdh . . . she . . . has come back?”

“Yes, to my tower, whence she fetched me hither. Come.” Edh went steadily on. Her cloak flapped in the wind, which threw the loosened hair about the head she bore so high. Heidhin gripped his spearshaft hard and trailed her.

Gnarled boughs reached widely, half seen by the glow. The wind clicked their twigs together. Dead leaves squelched wet underfoot. The two came around the bole and saw her who stood next to a bull or a horse cast in steel.

“Goddess,” Heidhin moaned. He dropped to a knee and bent his neck. But when he rose again, he held firm. If his spear shook, it was with the same wild gladness that burst from his lips. “Will you now lead us to the last fight?”

Floris’s look searched over him. He stood lean and dark, somberly clad, face etched and locks streaked by the hunter years, the iron of his weapon asheen above them. Her lamp cast his shadow across Edh. “No,” said Floris. “The time for war is past.”

Breath rattled between his jaws. “The Romans are dead? You slew them all for us?”

Edh flinched.

“They live,” Floris said, “as your folk shall live. Too many have died in every tribe, theirs also. They will make peace.”

Heidhin’s left hand joined his right, clutching the spearshaft. “I never will,” he rasped. “The goddess heard my vow I made at the shore. When they go, I will dog their heels, I will harry them by day and raid them by night—Shall I give you my kills, Niaerdh?”

“The Romans are not going. They will remain. But they will restore to the folk their rights. Let that suffice.”

Heidhin shook his head as if smitten. He gaped from woman to woman for a whole minute before he whispered, “Goddess, Edh, do you both betray them? I will not believe it.”

He seemed unaware that Edh reached toward him. The wind ran between them. Her tone pleaded. “The Batavi and the rest, they are no tribe of ours. We have done enough for them.”

“I tell you, the terms will be honorable,” Floris said. “Your work is ended. You have won what will content Burhmund himself. But Veleda must make known that this is what the gods want and men should lay down their arms.”

“I—you—We swore, Edh.” Heidhin sounded puzzled. “Never would you make peace while the Romans held on and I lived. We swore to it. We mingled our blood in the earth.”

“You will set her free of that vow,” Floris commanded, “as I already have done.”

“I cannot. I will not.” Raw with pain, the words suddenly lashed at Edh. “Have you forgotten how they made you their slut? Do you no longer care for your honor?”

She fell to her knees. Her hands fended. Her mouth stretched wide. “No,” she keened, “don’t, no, no.”

Floris moved toward the man. In the night above, Everard aimed a stun pistol. “Have done,” she said. “Are you a wolf, to rip her whom you love?”

Heidhin flung an arm wide, baring his breast to her. “Love, hate—I am a man. I swore to the Anses.”

“Do as you like,” Floris said, “but spare my Edh. Remember you owe me your life.”

Heidhin slumped. Leaning on his spear, Edh huddled at his feet, he shadowed her while the wind blew around them and the tree creaked like a gallows rope.

All at once he laughed, squared his shoulders, and looked straight into Floris’ eyes. “You speak truth, goddess,” he said. “Yes, I will let go.”

He lowered the spear, gripped it with hands below the head, and stabbed the point into his throat. In a single swording motion he slashed the edge from side to side.

Edh’s shriek overrode Floris’s. Heidhin went down in a heap. Blood spouted, blackly aglisten. He kicked and clawed at the grass, blind reflex.

“Stop!” Everard rapped. “Don’t try to save him. This damned warrior culture—it’s his only way out.”

Floris didn’t trouble to subvocalize. A goddess might well use an unknown tongue to sing the soul on its way. “But the horror of it—”

“Yeah. Think, though, think about everybody who will not die, if we work this right.”

“Can we, now? What will Burhmund think?”

“Let him wonder. Tell Edh not to answer any questions about it. An apparition of her, when she’d been miles away—the man who wanted no end to violence, dead by it—Veleda speaking for peace—The mystery will lend force, though I suppose people will draw the obvious conclusions, which’ll be a big help.”

Heidhin lay still. He looked shrunken. Blood pooled around him and soaked into the ground.

“It is Edh we must help first,” Floris said.

She went to the other woman, who had risen and stood numbed. Blood had splashed onto Edh’s cloak and gown. Heedless of it, Floris laid arms around her.

“You are free,” Floris murmured. “He bought your freedom with his life. Cherish it.”

“Yes,” Edh said. She stared into the dark.

“Now you may cry peace over the land. You shall.”

“Yes.”

Floris warmed her for a while and a while.

“Tell me how,” Edh said. “Tell me what to say. The world has gone empty.”

“Oh, my child,” Floris breathed into the graying tresses. “Be of good heart. I have promised you a new home, a new hope. Would you like to hear about it? It is an island, low and green, open to the sea.”

Life stirred a little in the answer. “Thank you. You are kind. I will do my best . . . in your name.”

“Now come,” Floris said. “I will bear you back to your tower. Sleep. When you have slept your fill, send forth that you would fain speak to the kings and chiefs. When they are gathered before you, give them the word of peace.”

19

New-fallen snow covered ash heaps that had been homesteads. Where junipers had caught some of it in their deep green, it lay like whiteness’s self. Low to the south, the sun cast their shadows across it, blue as heaven. Thin ice on the river had thawed with morning but still crusted dried reeds along the banks, while bits of it drifted in midstream, slowly northward. A gloom on the eastern horizon marked the edge of wilderness.

Burhmund and his men rode west. Hoofs struck muffled on hard ground beneath, baring the ruts of a road. Breath steamed from nostrils and made rime in beards. Metal gleamed frosty. The riders spoke seldom. Shaggy in wadmal and fur, they rode from the forest to the river.

Ahead of them lifted the stump of a wooden bridge. Piers jutted naked out of the water beyond. On the opposite shore stood the other fragment. Workers who demolished the middle had rejoined the legionaries ranked on that side. They were few, like the Germans. Their armor gave back the light but kilts, cloaks, legwear, all cloth hung worn and dirty. The plumes of officers’ helmets were faded.

Burhmund drew rein, got down, and stepped onto the bridge. His boots thudded hollow over the planks. He saw that Cerialis already stood in place. That was a friendly gesture, when it was Burhmund who requested a parley-though it did not mean much, because the understanding had been clear that they would hold one.

At the end of his section, Burhmund stopped. The two thick-set men regarded one another across a dozen feet of winter air. The river clucked below them on its way to the sea.

The Roman unfolded his arms and lifted his right hand. “Hail, Civilis,” he greeted. Accustomed to addressing troops, he easily cast his voice the needful distance.

“Hail, Cerialis,” Burhmund responded in like manner.

“You would discuss terms,” said Cerialis. “That is difficult to do with a traitor.”

His tone was matter-of-fact, his words an opening. Burhmund took it. “But I am no traitor,” he replied gravely, in Latin. He pointed out that this was no legate of Vitellius with whom he met; Cerialis was Vespasian’s. Burhmund the Batavian, Claudius Civilis, went on to number the services he had rendered over the years to Rome and its new emperor.