The Corridors of Time

12

“Hai-ee-ee! Hingst, Hest, og Flag faar flygte Dag! Kommer, kommer, kommer!”

The witchmaster’s robe flapped about him like wings. As his arms and face turned heavenward, a whirlwind unseen, unfelt, unheard, lifted him and his chosen. Upward they fled until they were lost among cold constellations. The balefire flared from its coals, threw spark and flame after its lord, and sank again. The folk of the Coven shuddered and departed.

Auri bit back a cry, shut her eyes, clung to Lockridge’s hand. Jesper Fledelius rattled a string of foul oaths, then felt himself safe after all and whooped like a boy. The American shared some of that excitement. He’d flown before, but never at the end of a gravity beam.

There was no airblast. The force that streamed from the belt under Mareth’s habit deflected it. One went bat silent, several hundred feet above ground, and speed mounted into the hundreds of miles per hour.

Darkling rolled the heath; Viborg was a blot seen for an instant and lost; the Limfjord shimmered; the western dunes fell behind, and the North Sea ran in waves touched with icy gleams by a sickle moon rising ahead of dawn. Lost in night and wonder, Lockridge was startled when England bulked into view—so soon?

Across the flatlands of East Anglia they went. Thatch-roofed villages lay among stubblefields, a castle raised battlements above a river, it was a dream and impossible that he, prosaic he, should follow a wizard through the sky on the same night as King Henry snored beside Anne Boleyn . . . poor Anne whose head would fly from the axe in less than a year, and none to warn her. But her daughter lay cradled in that same palace and was named Elizabeth. The strangeness possessed Lockridge like a vision: not merely his own fate, but the mystery that was every man’s.

Cultivation gave way to a wilderness where islands crowded among meres and marshy streams, the Lincolnshire Fens. Mareth swooped downward. The last withered leafage parted before him, he came to rest and deftly drew in the others. By the paling sky Lockridge saw a wattle hut.

“This is my English base,” the Warden told him. “The time gate lies beneath. You will remain here while I gather men.”

Behind that primitive facade, the cabin was almost luxurious, with hardwood floors and wainscoting, ample furniture and a good store of books. Food stocks and other supplies from the future were hidden behind sliding panels; nothing showed that would have been too foreign to this century. An intruder might have noticed how the interior kept warm and dry in every season. However, none ventured here. The peasants had their superstitions, the gentry were indifferent.

The three from Mareth’s past were only too glad of a respite. They were ordinary humans, not masterworks of an age that could shape heredity in any desired pattern, and their nerves were stretched near breaking. The next two days were an interlude of sleep and hazy half wakefulness.

On the third morning, though, Auri sought Lockridge. He was seated on a bench outside the door, enjoying a smoke. While not an addict, he had rather missed tobacco, and it was thoughtful, if slightly anachronistic, of the Wardens to keep some on hand along with clay pipes. And the weather had turned pleasant. Sunlight spilled wan between the naked willows. A belated flock of geese made a southward V far overhead, their honking drifted down to him through a great quietness, far and lonely wander-song. Then he heard her feet latter close, looked up and was struck by beauty.

There had been no time, before he tumbled into this drowsy interlude, to think of her as much except a child that needed what small protection he could spare. But on this morning she had gone out in a marsh almost like the one at home, clad in no more than her waist-long cornsilk hair, and was renewed. She scampered toward him with a deer’s grace, eyes blue and huge in the pert countenance. He saw laughter and marvel on her lips and stood up with his pulse begun to race.

“Oh, come look,” she cried, “I’ve found the most wonderful boat!”

“Good Lord!” Lockridge choked. “Get some clothes on, girl.”

“Why? The air is warm.” She danced before him. “Lynx, we can go out on the water and fish, the whole day is ours and the Goddess is happy and you must be rested now, come along, do!”

“Well—” Well, why not? “Yes. You get dressed, though, understand?”

“If you wish.” Puzzled but obedient, she fetched a shift from the cabin, where Fledelius was still noisily asleep among strewn ale jugs, and darted through the woods ahead of Lockridge.

The skiff, tied to a stump, looked simple to him. But of course Auri’s boats were coracles, or dugouts with bulwarks secured by pegs and withes. This one used nails of real metal! And she gasped to see him row, instead of punt or paddle. “Surely this came from Crete,” she breathed.

He hadn’t the heart to tell her Crete lay impoverished and oppressed under the Venetians, awaiting next century’s Turkish conquest. “Maybe.” He slid the boat among reeds and osiers until he reached an open stretch of shallow water. Here the island was hidden by brush and the mere blinked bright and still. Auri had taken fishing tackle as well as her garment. She baited a hook and cast skilfully toward a lurking place under a log. He sprawled back and got his pipe started afresh.

“That’s a strange rite you do,” Auri said.

“Only for pleasure.”

“Can I try? Please?”

She wheedled him into it, with the expected results. Gulping and sputtering, she handed back the pipe. “Whoo-ah!” She wiped her eyes. “No, too strong for the likes of me.”

Lockridge chuckled. “I warned you, young one.”

“I should have listened. You are never wrong.”

“Now, wait—”

“But I wish you wouldn’t speak to me as to a child.” She flushed. The long lashes quivered downward. “I am ready to become a woman whenever you want me.”

The blood mounted in Lockridge too. “I’ve promised to take the spell off you,” he mumbled. The idea occurred to him that he might die in the coming battle. “In fact, it is off. You need no further magic. Uh . . . passage through the underworld, you know . . . rebirth. Do you see?”

Gladness leaped in her. She moved toward him.

“No, no, no!” he said desperately. “I can’t—myself—”

“Why not?”

“Look, uh, look around you, this isn’t springtime.”

“Does that matter? Everything else has changed. And Lynx, you are so very dear to me.”

She pressed against him, warm, round, and eager. Her mouth and hands had an enchanting awkwardness. He thought, in the cloud of her tresses and herself, Why, my own grandfather would’ve called her husband high. . . . No, God damn it!

“I’ll have to leave you, Auri—”

“Then leave me with your child. I w-w-won’t think past that, not today.”

Strictness was beyond him. He could only hit on one thing to do. He let himself be pushed too far to one side, and the skiff capsized.

By the time they had righted it and bailed it out, matters were under control. Auri accepted the sign of godly displeasure without fear, for she had spent her life among such omens, nor even with overmuch disappointment, for the heart was too sunny in her. She peeled off the wet shift in a fit of giggles at Lockridge’s refusal to do likewise.

“At least I may look at you,” she said when a soberer mood came. “There will be other times, after you have set Avildaro free.”

A glumness had settled on him. “The village you knew won’t come again,” he said. “Remember who fell.”

“I know,” she answered gravely. “Echegon, who was always kind, and Vurowa the merry, and so many more.” But everything that had passed since had blurred her grief. Besides, the Tenil Orugaray were not given to mourning a loss as keenly as those who came after them. They had learned too well to accept what was.

“And you 11 still have the Yuthoaz to reckon with,” Lockridge said. “We may push this one band out, this one time. But there are others, strong and land-hungry. They will return.”

“Why must you always fret so, Lynx?” Auri cocked her head. “We do have this day . . . and whee, a fish!”

He wished he could join her in more than a pretence of merriment. But his own dead were too much with him: nations, kings, and the unremembered humble, through all the ages of the time war—yes, even that kid he’d killed in his own land, four hundred years hence. He saw now that his self-righteousness had been a cover for blood guilt. Oh, o’ course I never meant the thing to happen, he told himself wearily, but it did happen . . . it will happen . . . and I’d turn time inside out if I could, to undo it.

They were lunching off their catch, sashimi style, when a horn blew. Lockridge started. This fast? He rowed hard to get back.

Mareth was indeed there, with six other Wardens. They had abandoned the disguises of priest, knight, merchant, yeoman, beggar for a uniform skin-tight like the Rangers’, but forest green and with iridescent cloaks cataracting from their shoulders. Under the bronzy helmets, long dark eyes in faces eerily akin to Storm’s looked aloofly upon their helpers.

We have one more agent in the British Isles,” Mareth said.

“He will bring our army after dark. Meanwhile, we have preparations to make.”

Lockridge, Auri, and Fledelius found themselves working on tasks they did not understand. Because this corridor was secret from the enemy, and this gate opened on a vital period the anteroom was stocked with engines of war and the exits were broad enough to admit them. The American could identify some things in a general way, vehicles, guns; but what was the crystalline globe in which a night swirled studded with starlike points? What was the helix of yellow fire that felt cold to the touch? His questions were rebuffed.

Even Fledelius bristled. “I’m no serf of theirs,” he growled to Lockridge.

The American checked his own annoyance. “You know how often underlings like to throw their weight around. When we get to the queen, she’ll be different.”

“Yes, true. For Her I’ll swallow pride. . . . Throw their weight around. Haw, haw! You’ve a rare wit, lad.” Fledelius guffawed and slapped Lockridge’s back so he staggered.

Dusk fell, and dark. Down the sky there whirled the men of Harry’s England.

They were a wild, tough crew, a hundred in number: discharged soldiers, sailors half buccaneer, fortune-hunting younger sons, highwaymen, tinkers, rebellious Welshmen, Lowland cattle rustlers, gathered together from Dover to Lands End, from the Cheviot Hills to the London alleys. Lockridge could only guess how each had been recruited. Some for religion, some for money, some for refuge from the hangman—one by one, the Wardens found them and drew them into a secret league, and now the hour was on hand to use them.

Torchlight picked faces out of the mass that seethed and grumbled on the island. Lockridge stood next to a squat, pig-tailed seaman in ragged shirt and trousers, barefoot, earringed, scarred by old fights. “Where are you from, friend?” he asked.

“A Devon man, I be.” Lockridge could just understand him; even a Londoner still treated his vowels like a Dutchman, and this fellow added a dialect thick enough to cut. “But I were in Mother Colley’s stew in Southampton when the summons.” He smacked his lips. “Ah, there were a rare bouncetail trull! Had I had I had one hour the longer, not soon ’ud she forget Ned Brown. But when the medallion spoke, God’s bones, I’ve stood ’neath French gunfire and piked Caribals when they howled up the sides of our galleon, yet never ’ud I dare leave yon summons unheeded.”

“The, uh, medallion?”

Brown tapped a disc hung about his neck, stamped with the image of the Virgin. Lockridge noticed the same thing on several other hairy breasts. “What, thou wert not gi’en this token? Well, it whispers when they’ve need o’ thee, in such a way that none may hear save thyself, and tells whither thou must hie. He met me there and flitted me to a meeting ground in the wilds, thence hither. . . . I knew not the service numbered this many.”

Mareth stood forth at the cabin door. His voice rose, not loudly, but the turbulence was hushed. “Men,” he said, “long have most of you been in the Fellowship, and no few will remember times when it saved you from dungeon or death. You know you are enlisted in the cause of white magicians, who by their arts aid the Holy Catholic Faith against paynim and heretic. This night you are called to redeem your pledge. Far and strangely shall you fare, to battle against wild men while we your masters engage the wizards they serve. Go you bravely forward, in God’s name, and those who outlive the day shall have rich reward, while those who fall shall be yet more highly rewarded in Heaven. Kneel, now, and receive absolution.”

Lockridge went through the ritual with a bad taste in his mouth. Was this much cynicism necessary?

Well—to save Storm Darroway. I’ll be seein’ her again, he thought, and the heart fluttered in him.

More hushed and serious than he would have believed possible, the English filed through the cabin door and down the ramp. In the anteroom, before the curtain of rainbow, they got their weapons: sword, pike, axe, crossbow. Gunpowder would be useless against the Rangers, needless against the Yuthoaz. But Mareth beckoned to Lockridge. “You had best stay with me, for a guide,” he said, and laid an energy pistol in the American’s hand. “Here, you come from a sufficiently sophisticated era to operate this. The controls are simple.”

“I know how,” Lockridge snapped.

Mareth dropped his hauteur. “Yes, she singled you out, did she not?” he murmured. “You are no ordinary man.”

Auri struggled through the press. “Lynx,” she pleaded. The terror was back to gnaw at her. “Stay near me.”

“Have her wait here,” Mareth ordered.

“No,” Lockridge said. “She comes along if she wants to.”

Mareth shrugged. “Keep her out of the way, then.”

“I have to be in the forefront,” Lockridge told her. She shivered between his palms. He must give her a kiss . . . mustn’t he?

“Come, lass,” Jesper Fledelius laid a gorilla arm across her shoulders. “Stay near me. We Danes should hang together, amidst these English louts.” They slipped off into the crowd.

During the day, Lockridge had helped manhandle several flyers through the gate. They were sheening ovoids, transparent, not of matter but of forces he did not comprehend. Each could hold twenty. He shoved into the lead one with Mareth. The men already there breathed heavily, whispered prayers or curses, and flicked their eyes about like trapped animals. “Will they not be too panicky to fight?” Lockridge wondered in Danish.

“No, I know them,” Mareth said. “Besides, the initiation ceremonies involve unconscious conditioning. Their fear will turn to fury.”

The machine rose without sound and started down the cold-white, humming bore. A Warden at every console, the others followed. “Since you’ve got this passage,” Lockridge asked, “why didn’t you get still more reinforcements from other periods?”

“None are available,” Mareth said. He spoke absently, hands moving over the control lights, features taut with concentration. “The corridor was built chiefly for access to this very era. Its future end terminates in the eighteenth century, when we have another strong point in India. The Rangers are especially active in England between the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, so we have no gates there opening on the Middle Ages at all—nor many in earlier epochs, when the critical regions, the theatres of major conflict, are elsewhere. In fact, gates throughout the Neolithic and Bronze Age North serve as little more than transfer points. It is largely a fortunate coincidence that we do have one here with a temporal overlap on the one in Denmark.”

Lockridge wanted to inquire further. But the flyer, remorselessly swift, was already at the year they sought.

Mareth guided it out. He left for a glance at the calendar clock in the locker. “Good!” he said fiercely when he returned. “We were lucky. No need to wait. This is night, with sunrise due soon, and must be quite near the moment when she was captured.”

Force beams had kept the fleet together while they crossed the time threshold. They swept up the entry, which opened for them and closed again behind. Mareth set his controls for low flight eastward.

Lockridge stared out. Under the Stone Age moonlight, the Fens lay yet bigger and wilder. But beyond them, on the coast, he spied fisher villages that might almost have been Avildaro.

That was no accident. Before the North Sea came into being, men had walked from Denmark to England; the Maglemose culture was one. Afterward their boats crossed the waters, and Her missionaries came from the South to both lands. The diaglossa in his left ear told him that if they spoke slowly, the tribes of eastern England and western Jutland could still understand each other.

Such kinship faded with inland miles. Northern England was dominated by the hunters and axemakers who centred at Langdale Pike but traded from end to end of the island. The Thames valley had been settled, peacefully enough, by recent immigrants from across the Channel; and the farmers of the south downs were giving up those grim rites which formerly made them shunned. That might be due to the influence of a powerful, progressive confederation in the southwest, which had even started a little tin mining to draw merchants from the civilized lands. Chief among those were the Beaker People, who travelled in small companies and dealt in bronze and beer. An old era was dying in Denmark, a new one being born in England: this westland lay nearer to the future. Looking back, Lockridge saw rivers and illimitable forests; as if from a dream, he knew how birds winged in their millions and elk shook their great horns and men were happy. It came to him with a pang that here was where he belonged.

No. The sea rolled beneath him. He was bound home to Storm.

Mareth went at a dawdler’s pace, waiting for the sky to lighten. Even so, only a couple of hours had passed when the Limfjord slipped into view.

“Stand by!”

The flyers snarled downward. Water flashed steely, dew glittered on the grass and leaves of a young summer suddenly reborn, Avildaro’s roofs sprang from behind her sacred grove. Lockridge saw that the Battle Axe men were still encamped in the fields further on. He glimpsed a sentry, wide-eyed by a dying watchfire, shouting men out of their blankets.

Another shimmery vessel whipped up from before the Long House. So Brann had had time to call in his people. Lightnings crackled under the waning stars, dazzling bright, thunder at their heels.

Mareth rattled a string of commands in an unknown language. A pair of flyers converged on the Rangers’ one. Flame raved, and that bubble was no longer. Black-clad forms tumbled through the air to spatter horribly on the ground.

“Down we go,” Mareth said to Lockridge. “They didn’t expect attack, so there aren’t many here. But if they call for help—We have to take control fast.”

He skimmed the flyer along the bay, struck earth, and made the force-field vanish. “Get out!” he yelled.

Lockridge was first. The English poured after him. Another flyer landed beside his. Jesper Fledelius led the wave from it. His sword flared aloft. “God and King Kristiern!” he roared. The other vehicles had descended some ways off, in the meadows where the Yuthoaz were. They rose again after their men were out. Cool and detached, the Warden pilots oversaw the battle, spoke commands through the amulets, made each man of theirs a chess piece.

Metal clanged against stone. Lockridge dashed for the hut he recalled. It was empty. With a curse, he whirled and sped to the Long House.

A dozen Yuthoaz were on guard. Gallant in the face of supernatural dread, they stood fast with axes lifted. Brann trod forth.

His long visage was drawn into a disquieting grin. An energy pistol flashed in his hand. Lockridge’s own gun was set to protect him. He plunged through the fire geyser and hurled his body at the Ranger. They went over in the dust. Their weapons skittered free and they sought each other’s throats.

Fledelius’ sword rose and fell. An axeman tumbled in blood. Another smote, the Dane countered, his English followers arrived and combat erupted.

From the corner of an eye, Lockridge glimpsed two more black-clad forms, spouts and crackles where beams played on shields. He himself had all he could do, fighting Brann. The Ranger was inhumanly strong and skilled. But suddenly he saw who Lockridge was, face to face. Horror stretched his mouth open. He let go and made a fending motion. Lockridge chopped him in the larynx, got on top, and banged his head on the earth till he went limp.

Not stopping to wonder what had happened inside that long skull, the American sprang up. Elsewhere, Fledelius and his men pursued Yutho sentries. The other Rangers lay scorched before Mareth and his Warden companions. Lockridge ignored them. He burst through the doorway of the Long House.

Gloom filled the interior. He groped forward. “Storm,” he called shakily, “Storm, are you there?”

Shadow among shadows, she lay bound on a dais. He felt sweat chill on her naked skin, ripped the wires from her head drew her to him and sobbed. There was a moment beyond time when she did not move and he thought her dead. Then “You came,” she whispered, and kissed him.