The Corridors of Time

10

In awe, the Neolithic girl asked, “Is the Knossos they tell of as great as that?”

Despite weariness and unease, Lockridge had to grin. To his eyes, sixteenth-century Viborg was like the crossroads town where his parents used to shop. Much prettier, though, especially after two days of heathland. And it promised snugness, now when the last sunlight speared through rain clouds rising blue-black on a wind that flapped his cloak and whistled of winter.

Past the lake, he glimpsed through an oak grove (the beeches had still not driven the king tree out of Denmark) the warm brick hue of an abandoned monastery. Hard by, the city walls retained some green in the grass that covered their lower embankments. The same tinge was given by moss to such of the high-peaked thatch roofs as he could see. Spare and graceful, the cathedral’s twin towers reached for heaven.

“I think Knossos may be a little bigger,” he said.

His smile faded. Thirty-three hundred years, he thought, and every hope which had then blossomed so brightly was dust, not even remembered. And other hopes had sprung, and died, until today—

The diaglossa gave basic information but was silent about historical events. So had it been in Auri’s age and, he suspected, in every year of earth’s existence on which a time gate opened. He had a guess at the reason. Rangers and Wardens recruited native auxiliaries; but who could remain steady if he knew what must befall his people?

Denmark lay in evil days. He and Auri had kept to the lesser roads, little more than cartwheel tracks that wound through forest and heather; they lived off rations from the supply bundle and slept out, wrapped together in their cloaks, when exhaustion forced a halt more than darkness did. But they saw farmsteads and folk; they stopped to drink at wells; and though every peasant was sullen, frightened, short-spoken, one was bound to learn a few things. A song was in the land:

Four hundred years hence lay the happy country Lockridge had seen. That was cold comfort, on this grey cold evening. How long would its moment be?

“Come,” he said. “We’d best hurry. They close the gates at sunset.”

He led the way by the lakeside, till the path joined the highroad. According to the boy who had opened a little toward him, even sung him the ballad (which was of the great noblemen, loosed upon the common folk now that King Kristiern II who had been their friend lay captive in Sønderborg Castle), tomorrow was the Eve of All Hallows. His timing had been close; he wanted to get settled in town and acquire some feel of things before seeking out Jesper Fledelius.

The highway was also dirt, muddy and deeply rutted. No traffic moved on it. North Jutland was still a ghostly country after last year’s revolt, broken by the cannon of Johan Rantzau. The wind shrilled through leafless branches.

Half a dozen men stood guard at the portal. They were German Landsknechts, in soiled blue uniforms whose sleeves puffed out around the corselets. Two-handed swords, five feet long, were slung on their backs. A pair of halberds clashed together to bar the way, a third slanted toward Lockridge’s breast. “Halt!” snapped the leader. “Wer gehts da?”

The American wet his lips. These mercenaries didn’t look impressive. They were shorter than he by several inches—most people were in this undernourished age, as they had not been in his time or in Auri’s—and faces under the tall helmets were scarred by smallpox. But they could kill him with no trouble.

He had cobbled together a story. “I am an English merchant, travelling with my wife,” he said in their own language. “Our ship was wrecked on the west coast.” So desolate had that been, what he saw of it, that he didn’t think anyone would give him the lie. The diaglossa informed him that marine disasters were not uncommon. “We made our way here overland.”

The sergeant looked sceptical. His men tautened. “At this time of year? And you were the only ones saved?”

“No, no, everyone got ashore without harm,” Lockridge said. “The ship is aground and damaged, but not broken apart.” Travel-stained though he was, he had obviously not been through salt water. “The master chose to keep the men there, lest the goods be plundered. As I had business in Viborg that will scarcely wait, I offered to carry word and ask for help.” Such an expedition would take at least three days to arrive and find nothing, an equal time to get back. By then he should be gone.

“English, ha?” The little eyes narrowed. “I never heard an Englander speak as if born in Mecklenburg.”

Lockridge swore at himself. He should have used what fragments of German he remembered from college, not been seduced by the instrument in his ear. “But I was,” he said. “My father was a factor there for many years. Believe me, I am respectable.” He dipped into his purse, brought out a couple of gold nobles, and jingled them suggestively. “See, I can afford to ask honest men to drink my health.”

“Friedrich! Fetch the Junker!” A Landsknecht sloped off through the tunnel-like gate. His spear butt rattled on cobblestones. Lockridge backed away. “Stay where you are, outlander!” Edged steel thrust forward.

Auri caught at Lockridge’s arm. The sergeant twisted his moustache. “Yonder’s no wife to a rich merchant,” he pounced. “She’s been in the sun as much as any serf wench.” He wiped his nose with the back of one hairy hand and stood pondering. “Yet she walks like a lady,” he muttered. “What are you two, anyhow?”

Lockridge saw fear give way in Auri’s eyes to something she had not known before: shame, at the way the Landsknechts leered. His fingers itched for a gun. “Watch yourselves,” he barked. “Else I’ll have you whipped.”

The sergeant snickered. “Or I’ll see you on the gallows, other side of town—spy! The crows’ll welcome you. They’ve long picked clean the peasants we dangled up for them.”

Lockridge choked. He hadn’t expected trouble. What had gone wrong?

His glance flickered about, seeking escape. There was none. Arquebuses were racked with smouldering matches, ready to shoot, and he heard iron-shod hoofs clatter near.

The rider came into view, clad in half armour, his long face cast in arrogant lines. He must be one of the Danish aristocrats, Lockridge thought, in charge of this watch, of this foreign garrison set among his own people. The Germans saluted clumsily. “Here’s Junker Erik Ulfeld,” the sergeant announced. “Tell him your tale.”

Blond brows lifted. “What have you to say?” Ulfeld drawled, also in German.

Lockridge gave his right name—might as well—and repeated his yarn in more detail. Ulfeld stroked his chin. He was what passed for clean-shaven, which with contemporary razors meant that his palm went over a skin like sandpaper.

“What proof have you?”

“No documents, my lord,” Lockridge said. Sweat trickled from his armpits, down his ribs. The horseman loomed mountainous over him, against a roiling cloud mass; sunlight had taken on a brazen storm tinge which made the world stand out stark, and the wind moaned louder. “Those were lost in the shipwreck.”

“Do you know anyone here, then?” Ulfeld snapped.

“Yes, at the Inn of the Golden Lion—” Lockridge’s voice jerked to a stop. Ulfeld had laid hand to hilt. Lockridge understood, and cursed his diaglossa. The question had been in Danish; unthinkingly, he had answered likewise.

“An Englishman who speaks two foreign languages so well?” Ulfeld murmured. His pale eyes flared. “Or a man of Count Kristoffer’s?”

“God’s bones, my lord!” blurted the sergeant. “A murder-burner!”

Weapons rammed closer. The knowledge came too late into Lockridge. Because they had gunpowder, and the earth had been circumnavigated, and Copernicus was alive, he hadn’t stopped to examine just how different this period really was from his own. With wooden houses, straw roofs, no more water than could be drawn in a bucket, hardly a town escaped repeated devastation by fire. Today’s fear of enemy arsonists was akin to the fear he remembered of atomic rockets.

“No!” he cried. “Listen to me! I’ve lived in Denmark and the German cities—”

“Beyond a doubt,” said Ulfeld dryly, “in Lübeck.”

Through the lurching of his wits, a curious, detached chain of logic zigzagged in Lockridge. Lübeck was a Hanseatic town, evidently leagued with Kristoffer, the count whose doomed war on behalf of the old king still raged in the islands, from what little that poor peasant boy had known to tell. Ulfeld’s conclusion was much too natural.

“But you said a good burgher could identify you,” the Dane went on. “Who is he?”

“They call him Jesper Fledelius,” Auri ventured.

“What the pox!” Ulfeld’s calm broke. His horse snorted and curvetted, mane aflutter in the wind. The sergeant gestured to his Landsknechts, who closed around the strangers.

Oh, Lord, Lockridge groaned to himself, weren’t we in deep enough? I was goin’ to stall if I could, till I found out if that name meant anything. He hardly noticed when he was relieved of sword and knife, nor even how rudely Auri was frisked.

Ulfeld got back his mask of remoteness. “At the Inn of the Golden Lion, did you say?” he asked.

Lockridge could only go ahead. “Yes, my lord. So I was told. Though he may not be there yet. But I haven’t been in Denmark for years. I know little of what’s happened here. In fact, I have never met this Jesper. My company of merchant adventurers only gave me his name as one who . . . who could help us arrange trade. If I were an enemy agent, my lord, would I come as I have done?”

“If you were a true merchant,” Ulfeld retorted, “would you not have known you could not come here to trade, as freely as if we were Indian savages with no laws governing who may do so?”

“He has a full purse, Junker,” the sergeant said smugly. “He tried to buy his way past us.” Lockridge wanted to smash the man’s teeth. He almost enjoyed hearing Ulfeld say curtly:

“That would have been a dear gift for you.” The nobleman sat his horse a while, expertly curbing its restlessness. Auri shrank from the beast, it was so much bigger than the ponies she knew and never had she heard of riding one.

Decision came. “Fetch me a squad,” Ulfeld ordered.

“I’ll come too, my lord,” the sergeant said.

Ulfeld’s mouth bent upward. “No doubt you smell reward money. Indeed there is a price on Herr Jesper’s head. But keep your post.”

The Landsknechts muttered in their whiskers. Ulfeld gave them a look. They fell to a sort of attention; there was that gallows behind the city.

“We shall go to the inn,” Ulfeld said, “and see what there is to see, and afterward put some questions.” His gaze brooded on Auri. She straightened and glared back. “A wench from the Ditmarsh, I’ll be bound. No other basebom folk dare hold themselves so high. My father died there in King Hans’ day, when they opened the sluices on our army. Perhaps tonight—”

Sickness filled Lockridge’s throat.

Several more foot soldiers appeared. Ulfeld told them to bring the prisoners along, and rode on through the gate.

Viborg within was less attractive than from a distance. The streets were lanes where pigs rooted in ripe offal above which the stepping stones down the middle scarcely rose. With dusk setting in, few people were abroad. Lockridge saw a workman in his smock, bent from a lifetime’s toil; a serving maid with a basketful of bread; a leper who shook his rattle in warning as he tottered near; a laden ox-drawn wagon with great wooden wheels. They faded rapidly into the gloom that waxed between high-gabled houses already barred and shuttered against night robbers. The first spatters of rain stung his cheeks.

Then a sound broke through wind, foot-splash, hoof-clop, a high and striding peal. “Oh!” Auri exclaimed. “The Goddess’ voice!”

“Church bells,” Lockridge said. In all his desperation, he had to admit the sound was lovely; and so was the sight of the cathedral, dim across a market square. . . . The wind shifted and filled his nose with graveyard stench.

Not far beyond, Ulfeld drew rein. A wooden sign creaked as it swayed. By light leaking yellow through door and shutters, into the now heavy dusk, Lockridge could just make out a crudely painted lion rampant. The Landsknechts grounded their pikes with a bang. One hastened to hold the nobleman’s stirrup while he dismounted. Dully sheening in his breastplate and helmet, Junker Erik waited with drawn sword and let a soldier beat on the door.

“Open, you swine!” the German shouted.

The door groaned ajar. A stout little man peered out and said angrily, “We want none of your trade in an honest place—Herr Knight! I beg forgiveness!”

Ulfeld shoved him aside. Lockridge and Auri were hustled after.

The room was small. A twentieth-century man would bump his head on the sooty rafters if he stood erect, and the walls closed narrowly in. The floor was dirt, strewn with rushes. Lamps flickered on shelves to throw a dull light and many hulking shadows. A stove built of clay pots, in whose mouths a frozen hand or foot might be warmed, gave some heat; its crude vent gave more smoke, until Lockridge’s eyes smarted. A trestle table had not yet been taken down for the night. One man sat there with a pot of beer.

“Who else is guesting?” Ulfeld demanded.

“None, my lord.” It was unpleasant how the innkeeper cringed. “We get scant custom these days, you know.”

Ulfeld jerked his head. “Search.” He advanced on the lone patron, who remained benched. “Who are you?”

“Herr Torben Jensen Sverdrup, of Vendsyssel.” The gravelly bass was amiable, as from much drink. “Pardon me if I do not rise. I’ve carried Swedish iron in my leg for long years. Seek you someone?”

Ulfeld glowered at him. The man was big, he would have been big in any century, with ox shoulders above an impressive paunch. His face was made ugly by pockmarks and flattened nose, but the eyes were light and cheerful. Grizzled dark hair and beard fell unkempt to a doublet equally greasy. “Have you proof who you are?” Ulfeld asked.

“Oh, indeed, indeed. I am on lawful business, trying to get the beef trade started again, now it’s back where it belongs in well-born hands.” Sverdrup belched. “Will you drink with me? I think I can even spare a few pennies to treat your men.”

Ulfeld aimed his sword at the throat of the other. “Jesper Fledelius!”

“Ha? Who’s that? Never heard of him.”

A frightened feminine squeal from the rooms to the rear was followed by German laughter. “Ah, yes,” Sverdrup grinned, “mine host has a pretty daughter.” He peered at Lockridge and Auri. “That’s another nice little partridge you have with you, Herr. What’s the meaning?”

“I have heard—” Ulfeld’s look speared Sverdrup and the landlord—“that the traitor Fledelius is in this house.”

Sverdrup took a giant’s draught from his pot. “One hears many things. Are you not satisfied to have Skipper Klement in Viborg?”

“There’s a cell next his, and a headsman’s axe, for Fledelius. These strangers tell of an appointment with him. I must ask for letters that prove who you are.”

Sverdrup blinked at the prisoners. “I might well wish to be Fledelius, if so fair a lady craves to see him. But alas, no, I am only a poor old squire from the Skaw.” He fumbled in his clothes, dislodging a substantial colony of fleas. “Here. I trust your schooling is less rusty than mine.”

Ulfeld scowled at the parchment. His men came back. “None but the landlord’s family, Herr,” one reported.

“So, so, did I not tell you?” the innkeeper chattered. “Herr Torben has guested the Golden Lion in former years, my lord. He is known to me, and I have always had a good name, ask the burgomaster if Mikkel Mortensen is not an honest loyal man.”

Ulfeld tossed the letter on the table. “We will keep a watch,” he decided. “The outlaw may still show himself. But give him no chance of a warning. You two—” He pointed at a couple of his mercenaries. “Remain here for the time. Guard each door and arrest any who enter. Let no one leave. You others, follow me.”

“Will you not even have a pot with a lonely old man?” Sverdrup urged.

“No. I must see these prisoners questioned.”

If need be, with rack and pincers and the bone-crushing boot. For Auri—Through a mist that swirled, Lockridge stared at the man behind the table. “No, wait,” he croaked. “Help.”

The pouched eyes drooped. “I am sorry, little maiden,” Sverdrup mumbled. “But so many are dead, so many more soon to die.” He traced a cross.

A hand thrust Lockridge toward the door. He dug in his heels. The butt of a pike cracked across one knee. Pain lanced through him, he stumbled and cursed. Auri’s hood had fallen back, and a soldier snatched her by a lock of hair.

“No!” the girl screamed. “We belong to Her!”

Sverdrup’s mug banged down on the board. Auri drew a sign in the air. Lockridge couldn’t make it out, something of her own ritual, dead and forgotten, a blind cry—

The big man reached under the table and climbed stiffly to his feet. From the cloak that had covered it on the floor, a crossbow looked forth, cocked and loaded.

“Not so hasty, my lord,” he puffed. “Not quite so hasty, I beg you.”

Ulfeld spun on his heel. The sword gleamed up. German spears poised amidst obscene oaths.

If a bear could grin, it would look like the man who must be Jesper Fledelius. “Calmly, now, calmly,” he said. “One move, one least of little moves, and my lord the knight will not be so handsome any longer. We do not wish to distress the ladies of Viborg, do we?”

“They’ll kill you!” the tavern keeper wailed. “Jesus have mercy on us!”

“Well, they might try, after this lady I embrace has said her one sharp word,” Fledelius nodded. “But here is also my sword. It’s made meals off a good many Swedes, and Holsteiners, and even Danes. Naught is so tasty as a Dane who’s foresworn the old eagle—unless maybe a German hireling. We might have a most interesting discussion, we several. However, you, Herr Knight, would unhappily be forced to a spectator’s seat, and even though you would doubtless be given one befitting your rank in Hell, nevertheless, any of these lads who outlived the night would not be thanked for losing a life so precious. They might even be asked to dance on a rope’s end, eh? So do let us try to settle our dispute by peaceful, scholastic means, as is seemly for Christian men.”

A silence closed in that made Lockridge’s breath more loud in his ears than the wind and thickening rain outside.

“Mikkel, my good man,” said Jesper Fledelius, “you must have somewhere a length of rope. With that we may bind these excellent fellows, rather than cut them down like Turks. Of course, it is a Turkish fate to lie in a tavern and have no means of drawing beer. But someone will happen along tomorrow. Men are always thirsty. A symbol of the Evangelicum, think you not?—beer laving the throat as salvation laves the sin-parched soul.” He beamed at Auri. “Scripture speaks truly of wisdom in innocence, little maiden. Words might not have moved this cowardly old carcass of mine, for words are cheap and crafty. But you showed me Her token, which does not lie. I thank you.”

The landlord began to sob. A woman and a couple of children stuck terrified faces out from the back entrance. “Be of good cheer, Mikkel,” the outlaw said. “Plainly, you and yours must leave this town with us. A pity, to let this fine hostel fall into the oafish hands of Junker bailiffs. But the Coven will feed and shelter you.” The gross face flashed momentarily with utter love. “And when She returns, you shall be rewarded.”

He gestured with his chin at Lockridge. “Herr, be so kind as to remove the weapons from these—” the expression was shocking in that cool tone—“and get them secured. We must be off as fast as God allows. Our Lady’s business does not wait.”