The Chronocide Mission

4. EGARN (3)

The Peerdom of Lant was at war, but its campaigns had been little more than organized pillage. The peer began her invasions with a tiny force. Opposing generals invariably reacted to this insolent gesture by flinging every available lasher into a massive counterattack in the hope of overwhelming the Lantiff and ending the war quickly.

Strokes of lightning tore that counterattack to shreds, and claps of thunder routed the terrified survivors. Formal resistance in a newly invaded peerdom ended before battle was joined. The defending forces had neither the bravery nor the fanaticism to stand and fight against a foe that could invoke the terror of the elements. The peer’s army, which had been waiting in concealment, then moved forward to rape and loot and vandalize at leisure.

The moment it became known that Egarn had escaped, the peer called off two of her wars to turn long ranks of Lantiff toward the western mountains. She had begun her southern invasion only recently, and she was reluctant to interfere with it; but she snatched entire armies from the north and east, leaving token forces to occupy the conquered peerdoms there. By the time Egarn’s fever abated, the opportunity for flight that had existed during the first days of his escape had vanished.

His conscience-stricken gesture of destroying his weapons may have come too late—as Bernal pointed out, Lant’s swollen armies no longer needed them for their conquests—but that fact did nothing to mitigate the peer’s rage. She reacted with mindless fury and threw every available force into her search for the traitor. Now the Lantiff had sealed off all approaches to the border and were diligently combing the forested mountain slopes.

“Never mind,” Bernal told Egarn. “We still have the advantage. If the dead Lantiff have been found, the peer knows you have horses, and she is lying awake nights wondering which way you went. North, south, east, west, you could have covered a lot of ground while the hunt was getting organized. No matter what oaths her border guards may swear, she will fear you slipped through one of the passes before word of your escape reached them. In that case, you are already in Easlon, and her massive hunt is a farce.”

“If one-name foresters found the dead Lantiff, the peer will never find out what happened to them,” Roszt said. “The foresters know from bitter experience that the nearest villages would be pillaged on principle if they left the bodies for the peer’s army to find.”

“Whether they were found or not, the peer won’t rest until she catches me,” Egarn said resignedly. “She will use torture to make me restore the weapons to her, and then she will have me killed in the most painful way she can think of. She will do the same with you three, of course.”

“She will have to catch us first,” Bernal said cheerfully.

“You know how to take care of yourselves. She wouldn’t be able to catch you if you didn’t have me to look after.”

“Nonsense. There is nothing wrong with your legs, and anyway, we have the horses. As soon as you get your strength back, we will run for it.”

Egarn stretched out languidly on his rough bed and remained silent for a time. Then he said, speaking slowly and hesitantly, “I wish I were able to tell you things—and show you things—just in case you escape and I don’t. If I die without telling anyone, my life has been wasted.”

Bernal waited silently.

“It is difficult to explain,” Egarn said. “Can you grind a Honsun Len?”

Bernal chuckled. “I wouldn’t know how to begin.”

Egarn’s voice took on a note of puzzlement. “I thought all one-name boys learned len grinding. They do in Lant, and med servers take the most talented as prentices. This civilization couldn’t survive without Honsun Len grinders. There is an oddity about the len I have never been able to figure out. Whether it is used or not, in time it loses its effectiveness. Medical lens have to be replaced every sike and sometimes oftener—which is why med servers must become expert len grinders. That is also why the peer believed me when I told her the weapons needed new lens. They didn’t, but eventually they would have. Lant’s med servers are always looking for prentices. Are things different in the Ten Peerdoms?”

“No different,” Bernal assured him. “My schooler taught len grinding to the younger boys, and a med server looked in on the classes and gave special lessons to those who had ability. He didn’t include me. Probably the talents that made me a successful scout also made it impossible for me to sit for long hours grinding meaningless ripples in glass.”

Egarn said regretfully, “Then you have never ground even one Honsun Len.”

“According to my schooler, the mutilated objects I produced didn’t bear the faintest resemblance to one. Those ripples required a precision that seemed inhuman to me. Only a few boys had both the patience and the ability, and they were sent to a special school. When we next saw them, they were wearing their prentice smocks and bragging about their futures as high servers of the peer. I wonder what they think of those futures now.”

“Don’t Easlon crafters have confidence in the future?”

“Perhaps len grinders do. We scouts know Lant will turn westward as soon as it conquers its other neighbors.”

“So it will,” Egarn agreed. There was a note of bitter sadness in his voice. He was silent for a moment, and then he returned to the subject of len grinding. “Did your schooler tell you anything about the Honsun Len?”

“That was for the students who became prentices.”

“He should have told you as much as he knew. It has shaped your entire life. It will shape the lives—and deaths—of your children. It made your civilization what it is, and it will also destroy it.”

“We scouts aren’t much given to deep thinking,” Bernal said cheerfully. “We have to be able to do the right thing quickly without thinking at all. But perhaps if you would explain what you mean—”

“I am sorry,” Egarn said. “I would like to, but I wouldn’t know how to begin if you don’t know anything about the Honsun Len. Perhaps Roszt or Kaynor—”

“They are as ignorant as I am, but don’t worry yourself about it. If we were expert len grinders, you might be able to make us understand, but we wouldn’t have the slightest notion of how to get you out of Lant. What you need right now are expert scouts, and you have them. When you are safely across the mountains, you will find plenty of len grinders to talk with.”

Egarn’s arm was healing. He would never be able to use his hand again, but he was much more fortunate than most victims of the Lantiff’s dogs. As he became stronger, the three scouts began planning their next move. It promised to be very dangerous indeed—so risky, in fact, that Bernal brought up the subject of Egarn’s strange weapon.

“I don’t want you to use it,” he told Egarn soberly. “If you do, and there is a survivor, the peer will know exactly where we are. Her armies will stop chasing all over western Lant and start looking where they are likely to find us. On the other hand, the Lantiff have filled the forests with traps, and we haven’t time to scout out all of them. It would be far better to use the weapon in order to escape than to not use it and be captured or killed.”

“I will give it to you,” Egarn said. “You can use it when you think it is necessary.”

“But I don’t know how,” Bernal objected.

“It is easily learned. The Lantiff had no trouble with it, and what the Lantiff can learn in a week, any one-namer can master in an hour. It takes a bit of practice be accurate with it, and I don’t suppose we can risk that, but even without practice you will be at least as good as I was. If I had aimed better, that last dog wouldn’t have got to me.”

The weapon did indeed seem easy to use. One pointed the correct end at the enemy and moved a small lever back and forth—an astonishingly simple manipulation for such an overwhelming result. Bernal tried it once, inside the cave, and marveled at the smoking hole it bored through solid rock.

When Egarn was finally ready to travel, Roszt and Kaynor went to search out a safe escape route. They reported that Lantiff were building encampments all along the frontier.

“I am sorry to hear that,” Bernal said. “I was hoping the peer would have a message from the south by now about a corpse found with Egarn’s clothing and pack.”

Roszt shook his head. “I told you at the time—there were far too many corpses and far too many human vultures plundering the dead. Only an incredible stroke of luck would have got that body identified as Egarn’s before the looters stripped it completely.”

“I thought there was a fair chance,” Bernal said. “These encampments mean the peer is combining the search for Egarn with preparations to invade Easlon, and that doubles our problems. We must get out of Lant quickly.”

A trek through the mountains would have been difficult for an elderly cripple even in the best of circumstances, and they would travel in darkness, on rugged, little-used tracks known only to the scouts, and under a constant threat of ambush or attack. Egarn resigned himself to a nightmarish journey that would tax his strength to the utmost.

When they finally started, the going seemed so easy that he had a bewildered feeling of disappointment. The Lantiff had blocked all the roads, but he rode a horse at a leisurely pace half of the night, from one of the scouts’ way stations to another, without seeing a single soldier.

“Where are they?” he blurted during one of their brief rests.

“You will see more than enough of them before we are finished,” Bernal said. “The Lantiff have concentrated to protect the passes. The further west we go, the more of them we will encounter. Enjoy your ride while you can.”

Roszt and Kaynor rode ahead. Then came Egarn, with Bernal bringing up the rear. The two scouts from Slorn cheerfully accepted the fact that they were expendable. If the little party rode into an ambush, their task was to keep Egarn from becoming involved. Even if they were disastrously outnumbered, they had to somehow occupy the Lantiff until Egarn and Bernal slipped away. Bernal carried Egarn’s weapon inside his shirt; he would use it only as a last resort.

The moon, which had been full the night of Egarn’s escape, was now only a sliver in the sky, but so thick was the forest that they rarely saw it. They followed paths that the forest floor did not hint of—ways known only to the scouts of Easlon. They threaded along hillsides and took unexpected loops to avoid roads and habitations.

On the first night they came abruptly on a place where a landslide had peeled away the forest and left a sweeping view of a broad valley. It was a cove, a rare area of cultivated land in the Lantian hills, and they paused for a moment to look down on the community there: the long sheds where the no-name males slept; the brood buildings where no-name females conceived and bore their children; the nursery; the lashers’ dormitory; the cook shed and storage buildings; the inevitable neat med cottage where a med server gave the community’s population its Honsun Len treatments. Day and night had no meaning for the no-namers, the work-humans. They were laboring in torch-lined fields, long hair and beards drooping as their muscular bodies bent low to strain at the ropes that drew the heavy cultivating sledges. The lashers were shouting orders and wielding their whips. The scene looked small and very far away, and the coarse shouts were only faintly audible, but the whups of whips striking the no-namers’ bare backs could be heard clearly. Of course the upwelling blood that appeared as each stroke peeled away living flesh could not be seen from such a distance.

Egarn knew the blood was there. He had witnessed such scenes often enough during his long lifetime in Lant. He jerked sharply on his reins and sat looking down into the valley until Bernal overtook him.

“’Man’s inhumanity to man,’” he muttered. “How can anyone look at that without sickening? Poor, mindless brutes laboring their lives away while other brutes trained to sadism systematically torture them. In the med cottage, we practice a different form of viciousness on them from the moment of their birth. I have done it myself. I am as responsible as anyone. These are the foul dregs of a humanity that once sought the stars. Perhaps it is no longer possible to save the human race, but if I have time—if I live long enough—”

Bernal had been listening quietly. “When we get to Easlon, we will send for Arne. This is his kind of problem. You mentioned once that the way to save humanity is by destroying it. What would that accomplish?”

“Maybe nothing,” Egarn said.

They spent their days in hiding places well-known to the scouts, and they had the carefully contrived good fortune to slip past the Lantiff’s watchposts without incident. It was evident by the third night, however, that they couldn’t go much farther. The mere presence of so many Lantiff clogged not only the roads but even the trailways leading west, and though they deftly avoided these routes, they still had to cross one occasionally. That became increasingly difficult, and finally Bernal decided to turn north.

They moved laterally across the mountain trails, slipping between Lantiff encampments, and eventually they gained the high mountains far north of the heavily guarded passes. Then they turned south. It was a journey perilous beyond Egarn’s imagining, but his strength was returning rapidly, and he throve on it. Frequently he had to dismount—because a misstep might send both horse and rider plunging into an abyss— and lead his blindfolded steed along ledges that looked far too narrow for any animal larger than the short-eared mountain rabbits. They traveled high, lonely valleys, riding recklessly at night but not daring to expose themselves by day. In that barren country, one could see for many kilometers. Finally they left their horses with Easlon scouts they met at a secret way station near the border, and they performed a final, tortuous climb on foot. In this way they reached Low Pass, one of the two gateways to the west the Lantiff were guarding so zealously.

They looked down on it from a thousand meters above.

“This is one of our passes,” Bernal said grimly. “The Lantiff would consider it impassable—which is why they have never been able to figure out how Easlon scouts come and go so easily.”

“Easily?” Egarn muttered.

But their tribulations were not over. Once they were safely across the high divide, they discovered that Lantiff had already pushed beyond the pass into Easlon, and they had to turn north again. For a time they feared the long expected invasion was upon them, but the Lantiff contented themselves with patrolling a few lateral valleys. Finally, after several nerve-wracking near encounters, they left the forces of Lant behind them.

They pressed onward until, in the deepest hours of an overcast night, they saw flares ahead of them. It was a lumber camp where no-name laborers strained at ropes to haul logs to a rushing river while the lashers’ whips wrote new chapters in agony on their bare backs—but these were Easlon lashers and no-namers working in an Easlon camp. Bernal halted their march long before dawn. He authorized a campfire and announced that they could rest until the following middae and then travel by daelight. He would try to find a horse somewhere and get to headquarters as quickly as possible to warn Inskor, the chief scout, that the Lantian invasion was imminent. Then he would meet them somewhere down the line with horses.

“You are safe, now,” Bernal told Egarn. “You are as safe as anyone can be in these troubled times. That doesn’t mean there is no longer any hurry. It is too early to say whether Lant is planning a full-scale invasion or only a reconnaissance, but we must prepare for the worst. We will need some of your weapons as quickly as we can make them. Inskor will send for the best len grinders in Easlon, and they will do whatever you want.”

“Will he send for the Med of Easlon?” Egarn asked.

“Certainly not. What help would he be? One-namers will make your weapons for you. One-name scouts will use them. We won’t let Easlon’s peeragers know anything about them. Otherwise, you would quickly find yourself in the same kind of trouble we just rescued you from.”

Roszt and Kaynor were nodding their agreement.

“What we absolutely must do is crush the Lantiff,” Bernal went on. “If we don’t, we won’t have any future to plan for. A victory will buy time for us and give you a chance to tell your ideas to Arne and the League of One-Namers. They are the ones concerned with saving humanity.”

He spoke his farewell and vanished into the night.

Egarn watched him go with a feeling of emptiness. He had become fast friends with Roszt and Kaynor. The tall, gaunt scouts from the ravished Peerdom of Slorn were rootless exiles like himself and victims of the same tyranny he was fleeing from. There was a strong empathy between them; but Bernal was their leader. He had made the decisions, sternly kept them on the move, and finally led them to safety.

Now they could relax for the first time in more than a tenite. The scouts from Slorn were far better company than the dour Bernal, who had become increasingly tense and irritable as they faced one delay after another. Even Kaynor, who liked to complain, also liked to joke. Before sleeping, they sat by the fire and ate hot food—a rare treat—and Egarn listened contentedly while the other two discussed the lore of the trail and hazards faced alone in the land of an inexorable enemy. The tales fascinated him. So did the scouts. In his long years at the court of Lant, he had come to know many people well, but he had never met anyone like these refugees from Slorn.

“In my childhood, there were legends told of a Med of Lant who was a sorcerer,” Roszt said suddenly. “I suppose he was long before your time.”

Egarn said quietly, “I was his student.”

Roszt nodded understandingly. “Every med trains his successor from boyhood, or so it is said. I thought perhaps you were an exception because you don’t look like a Lantian. The sorcerer med traveled through all the neighboring peerdoms ransacking old ruins for books. He had a reputation for acquiring forgotten wisdom that extended far beyond Lant.”

“He was a great man,” Egarn said. “He not only acquired wisdom, but he was also wise enough to know when not to use it.”

Both Roszt and Kaynor seemed interested, so Egarn told them about the Old Med and his experiments. When he reached the point where things began to disappear or appear out of nowhere, he expected them to turn away with polite skepticism. Instead, they were fascinated.

“Where did the things come from?” Roszt asked.

Egarn described the Old Med’s experiment with the porkley and its astonishing result.

“Were you the man?” Kaynor asked.

Egarn changed the subject. “The Old Med made many discoveries. It was he who invented the weapon. Then—when we understood a little about what it would do—he destroyed it. He said, ‘This is far too dangerous for anyone to know about, even us.’ He was far wiser than I.”

Roszt’s mind was still fixed on the disappearances and appearances. “But where did you come from?”

“It took us many sikes to find out,” Egarn said with a wistful smile. “We worked on it together, experiment after experiment. Each of us knew half the answer, but there was no way either of us could explain his half so the other could understand. We experimented, and we searched through book after book of the Old Med’s collection. Finally the combination of my past and his present gave us the answer.”

“Gave you—what answer?” Kaynor asked blankly.

“I had traveled through time. That meant—”

He broke off. There was so little chance of their understanding him that he might as well have been talking to himself.

“Too bad you didn’t bring the Old Med’s machine with you when you escaped,” Roszt said. “You could have sent the four of us to Easlon without the trek across the mountains.”

“Could you have done that?” Kaynor asked.

“Yes. With time to experiment, I suppose I could have.”

“Could you send scouts into Lant from here and bring them back when they are ready to come? That would save tenites of weary travel each trip.”

“If he could send a few scouts, he could send an army,” Roszt observed. “That would give the Peer of Lant something to think about—an army that appeared out of nowhere, attacked her in the rear, and then vanished. It might even convince her to keep her own armies at home. What else can this machine do?”

“It can save humanity,” Egarn said.

“That’s what you were telling Bernal. How could it save humanity?”

Egarn looked at them uncertainly across the dying campfire. Their ugly faces were weathered like ancient rocks that had been exposed to the elements for eons, and their lank bodies were preposterously thin despite their hearty appetites. Their rough, leather clothing was worn and soiled from their long days and nights of travel. They seemed like the most unlikely audience possible for speculation about time travel, but Egarn had had no one to talk with for sikes—not since the Old Med died.

“If they start looking bored,” he thought, “I will plead exhaustion and totter off to bed. Either way, they will forget about it by morning.”

He told them of his plan to send someone more than three hundred years into the past to prevent a certain Johnson from inventing the Honsun Len. He was convinced, now, that the only sure way to accomplish this was to murder him, but he carefully avoiding mentioning that.

They listened attentively. They may have been simple men, but their perceptions were sharpened by the dangers they faced constantly, and they hated the Peer of Lant and her infamous deeds as much as he did.

When he finished, the two scouts were silent for a time. Then Kaynor said, “If someone traveled through time and kept this Johnson from inventing his len, what would happen to Lant, and the Ten Peerdoms, and everyone who lives here?” His gesture delineated the world as it was known to him. “What would happen to everything that is all around us right now? You say that without the Honsun Len, something decent would take its place. Where would it come from, and where would this go?”

“I don’t know,” Egarn said soberly. “Perhaps nothing at all would happen. Perhaps time has a momentum that would prevent wrenching it aside into some other path. Or we might change the past, and give humanity another chance, without affecting this doomed present at all. Perhaps every past has many possible futures and this is only one of them. I simply don’t know.” He paused. “Or perhaps ‘here and now’ might vanish the way the flame on a candle vanishes when it’s blown out.”

“And all the people with it?”

Egarn nodded. “It is the future of the human race that must concern us, not our own futures.”

Kaynor turned to Roszt. “It sounds like a job for for scouts,” he said.

“A job for us,” Roszt agreed. “It will be much more interesting than snooping about the court of Lant. When you are ready to send someone, let us know.”

“You couldn’t go—just like that,” Egarn protested. “It would take work and study to prepare yourselves. Hard work and hard study. Maybe for sikes. And if you do go, you can’t come back. It also will be extremely dangerous, and you may be risking your lives for nothing. I can’t even promise you will accomplish anything if you succeed. Maybe the whole idea is impossible.”

“We don’t mind danger as long as there is a worthwhile purpose,” Kaynor said. “If there is any chance at all of blowing out the Peer of Lant and her armies, I want to help.”

Egarn had spent daes worrying about the difficulty of finding a willing emissary, and he was astonished that this was happening so easily.

It was happening too easily. The scouts from Slorn were were superbly qualified as scouts—as spies and saboteurs in enemy territory. If courage and resourcefulness were the only necessary qualifications, they would be an ideal choice, but when he tried to visualize them in any twentieth century social situation, such as ordering food in a restaurant or doing research in a library reading room, he failed. They would look clumsily out-of-place wherever they went. Probably they would attract attention to themselves with every move they made—he could imagine them bumping into people, stumbling over things, spilling their drinks, dropping their forks, and destroying their mission out of sheer clumsiness.

He said slowly, “You will be exiles forever in a place that will be terrifyingly strange to you. You will have to face dangers of a kind you can’t even imagine.”

“One place is as good as another to us—or as bad,” Roszt said. “We no longer have homes anyway. As for the dangers, we have no fear at all of death—only of a wasted death. We welcome a cause to die for.”

Kaynor added, “When we first heard you talk about saving humanity by destroying it, we thought it was some silliness brought on by your fever. Now we understand, and we want to help you.”

“If your plan doesn’t work, humanity is going to destroy itself anyway and leave nothing,” Roszt said.

That was Egarn’s thought exactly, but he had wanted an emissary who would appear completely ordinary in every respect; one who would never stand out in a crowd—who could carry out the mission almost unnoticed.

But perhaps it was a job for scouts—for what would they be when they reached the twentieth century but saboteurs in enemy territory? Perhaps courage and resourcefulness were more important than a commonplace appearance. “Very well,” Egarn said. “If you are able to learn what you have to know, you can go together.”

“We will find this Johnson,” Roszt said, “but it won’t be enough to destroy his len. As soon as we left him, he would make another.”

Kaynor nodded. “That is obvious. We will have to kill him.”