The Corridors of Time

6

Auri, whose name meant Flower Feather, had said: “Do you truly wish to see the fowl marshes? I could be your guide.”

Lockridge had rubbed his chin, where the bristles were now a short beard, and glanced at Echegon. He expected anything from shocked disapproval to an indulgent chuckle. Instead, the headman fairly leaped at the chance, almost pathetically eager to send his daughter on a picnic with his guest. Lockridge wasn’t sure why.

Storm refused an invitation to join them, to Auri’s evident relief. The girl was more than a little frightened of the dark woman who held herself so aloof and spent so much time alone in the forest. Storm admitted to Lockridge that this was as much to confirm her own mana in the eyes of the tribe as for any other reason; but she seemed to have withdrawn from him too, he hadn’t seen a lot of her during the week and a half they had dwelt in Avildaro. Though he was too fascinated by what he experienced to feel deeply hurt, it had nonetheless reminded him what a gulf there was between them.

Now, as the sun declined, he dug in his paddle and sent the canoe homeward.

This was not one of the big skin coracles which went outside the Limfjord. He had already been on a seal hunt in one of those, a breakneck, bloody affair with a crew that whooped and sang and made horseplay amidst the long grey waves. Awkward with a bone-tipped harpoon, he got back respect when they hoisted the felt sail; steersmanship was not hard for one who had used the much trickier fore-and-aft rig of a twentieth-century racer. His canoe today was merely a light dugout with wicker bulwarks, calling for no more care than a green branch tied at the bow to keep the gods of the wet under control.

Still, reedy, but aswarm with ducks, geese, swans, storks, herons, the marsh fell behind. Lockridge paralleled the southern bayshore, which sloped in a greenness turned gold by the long light. On his left, the water shimmered to the horizon, disturbed only by a few circling gulls and the occasional leap of a fish. So quiet was the air that those remote sounds came almost as clear as the swirl and drip from his paddle. He caught a mingled smell of earth and salt, forest and kelp. The sky arched cloudless, deeply blue, darkening toward evening above Auri’s head where she sat in the bows.

Whoof! Lockridge thought. A nice day, but am I glad to be out of those mosquitoes! They didn’t bother her any . . . well, I reckon these natives are bitten so often they develop immunity.

His itches weren’t too bad, though, not even the unsatisfiable itch for a cigarette; and what he felt was compensated for by the sense of water turned alive by his strokes and the rubbery resurgence in his muscles. Also, of course, by having a pretty girl along.

“Did you find pleasure in the day?” she asked shyly.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Thanks so much for taking me.”

She looked astonished, and he recalled that the Tenil Orugaray, like the Navajo, spoke thanks only for very great favours. Everyday helpfulness was taken for granted. The diaglossa made him fluent in their language but didn’t override long-established habits.

Colour stained her face and throat and bare young bosom. She dropped her eyes and murmured, “No, I must thank you.”

He considered her. They didn’t keep track of birthdays here, but Auri was so slim, with such an endearing coltishness in her movements, that he supposed she was about fifteen. At that, he wondered why she was still a virgin. Other girls, wedded or not, enjoyed even younger a Sarnoan sort of liberty.

Naturally, he wouldn’t dream of jeopardising his position here by getting forward with the sole surviving female child in his host’s house. More important yet was honour—and inhibition, no doubt. He’d already refused the advances of some he felt were too young; they had plenty of older sisters. Auri’s innocence came to him like a breeze from the hawthorns flowering behind her home.

He must admit being a wee bit tempted. She was cute: immense blue eyes, freckle-dusted snub nose, soft mouth, the unbound hair of a maiden flowing in flaxen waves from under a garland of primroses and down her back. And she hung around him in the village to a downright embarrassing extent. However.

“You have nothing to thank me for, Auri,” Lockridge said. “You and yours have shown me more kindness than I deserve.”

“No, but much!” she protested. “You bless me.”

“How so? I have done nothing.”

Her fingers twisted together and she looked into her lap. It was so difficult for her to explain that he wished he hadn’t asked, but he couldn’t think of a way to stop her.

The story was simple. Among the Tenil Orugaray a maiden was sacred, inviolable. But when she herself felt the time had come, she named a man to initiate her at the spring sowing festival, a tender and awesome rite. Auri’s chosen had drowned at sea a few days before their moment. Clearly the Powers were angry, and the Wise Woman decided that, in addition to being purified, she must remain alone until the curse was somehow removed. That was more than a year ago.

It was a serious matter for her father (or, at least, the head of her household; paternity was anyone’s guess in this culture)—and, he being headman, for the tribe. While no women who were not grandmothers sat in council, the sexes had essentially equal rights, and descent was matrilineal. If Auri died childless, what became of the inheritance? As for herself, she was not precisely shunned, but there had been a bitter year of being left out of almost everything.

When the strangers came, bearing unheard-of marvels and bestowing some as gifts, that appeared to be a sign. The Wise Woman cast beech chips in the darkness of her hut and told Echegon that this was indeed so. Great and unknown Powers indwelt in The Storm and her (Her?) attendant Malcolm. By favouring Echegon’s house, they drew off evil. Today, when Malcolm himself had not scorned to go out on the ever-treacherous water with Auri—

“You could not stay?” she pleaded. “If you honoured me next spring, I would be . . . more than a woman. The curse would change to a blessing upon me.”

His cheeks burned. “I’m sorry,” he said, as kindly as might be. “We cannot wait, but must be gone with the first ship.”

She bent her head and caught her lip between white teeth.

“But I shall certainly see that the ban is removed,” he promised. “Tomorrow I will confer with the Wise Woman. Between us, she and I can doubtless find a way.”

Auri wiped away some tears and gave him an uncertain smile. “Thank you. I still wish you could remain—or come back in spring? But if you give me my life again—” She gulped. “There are no words to thank you for that.”

How cheaply one became a god.

Trying to put her at ease, he turned the talk to matters that were commonplace for her. She was so surprised that he should ask about potterymaking, which was woman’s work, that she quite forgot her troubles, especially since she was reckoned good at fashioning the handsome ware he had admired. It led her to remember the amber harvest: “When we go out after a storm,” she said breathlessly, eyes alight, “the whole people, out on the dunes to gather what has washed ashore . . . oh, then is a merry time, and the fish and oysters we bake! Why do you not raise a storm while you are here, Malcolm, so you may have the fun too? I will show you a place I know where the gulls come to your hand for food, and we will swim in the breakers after floating chunks, and, and everything!”

“I fear the weather is beyond my control,” he said. “I am only a man, Auri. I have some powers, yes, but they are not really great.”

“I think you can do everything.”

“Uh . . . urn . . . this amber. You gather it mostly for trade, do you not?”

The bright head nodded. “The inlanders want it, and the folk beyond the westward sea, and the ship people from the South.”

“Do you also trade flint?” He knew the answer, having spent hours watching a master at work: chips flew from his stone anvil, against his leather apron, with sparks and sulfury smell and deep-toned ring of blows, and a thing of beauty grew beneath the gnarled old hands. But Lockridge wanted to keep the talk light. Auri’s laugh was so good to hear.

“Yes, tools we sell too, though only inland,” she said. “If the ship calls somewhere else than Avildaro, may I go with you to see it?”

“Well . . . surely, if no one objects.”

“I would like to go with you to the South,” she said wistfully.

He thought of her in a Cretan slave market, or puzzled and lost in his own world of machines, and sighed. “No, that cannot be. I’m sorry.”

“I knew it.” Her tone was quiet, with no trace of self-pity. One learned in the Neolithic to accept what was. Even her long isolation in the shadow of wrath had not broken her capacity for joy.

He looked at her, where she sat supple and sun-browned with one hand trailing in the clucking water, and wondered what her destiny was. History would forget the Tenil Orugaray, they would be no more than a few relics dredged out of bogs; before then, she would be down in dust, and when her grandchildren perished—if she lived long enough to have any, in this world of wild beasts and wilder men, storm, flood, incurable sicknesses and implacable gods—the last memory of her gentleness would flicker out forever.

He saw her few years of youth, when she could outrun deer and spend the whole light summer night giving and getting kisses: the children that would come and come and come, because so many died that every woman must bear the utmost she was able lest the tribe itself die; the middle years, when she was honoured as the matron of the headman’s house, watched sons and daughters grow up and her own strength fade: age. when she gave the council what wisdom she had reaped, while the world closed in with blindness, deafness, toothlessness, rheumatism, arthritis, and the only time left her was in the half-remembered past: the final sight of her, grown small and strange, down into the passage grave through the roofhole that meant birth: and for some years, sacrifices before the tomb and shudders at night when the wind whimpered outside the house, for it might be her ghost returning; and darkness.

He saw her four thousand years hence and four thousand miles westward: cramped over a school desk; dragging out an adolescence bored, useless, titillated and frustrated; marrying a man, or a series of men, whose work was to sell what nobody needed or really wanted—marrying also a mortgage and a commuter’s iron schedule; sacrificing all but two weeks a year of carefully measured freedom in order to buy the silly gadgets and pay the vindictive taxes: breathing smoke and dust and poison; sitting in a car, at a bridge table, in a beauty parlour, before a television, the spring gone from her body and the teeth rotten in her mouth before she was twenty; living in the heartland of liberty, the strongest nation earth had yet known, while it crawled from the march of the tyrants and the barbarians; living in horror of cancer, heart failure, mental disease, and the final nuclear flame.

Lockridge cut off the vision. He was being unjust to his own age, he knew—and to this one as well. Life was physically harder in some places, harder on the spirit in others, and sometimes it destroyed both. At most, the gods gave only a little happiness; the rest was merely existence. Taken altogether, he didn’t think they were less generous here and now than they had been to him. And here was where Auri belonged.

“You think much,” she said timidly.

He started and missed a stroke. Clear drops showered from the paddle, agleam in the level light. “Why, no,” he said. “I was only wandering.”

Again he had misused the idiom. The spirit that wandered, in thought or in dream, could enter strange realms. She regarded him with reverence. After a while when nothing but the canoe’s passage and the far-off cries of homing geese broke the stillness, she asked low, “May I call you Lynx?”

He blinked.

“I do not understand your name Malcolm,” she explained. “So it is a strong magic, too strong for me. But you are like a big golden lynx.”

“Why—why—” However childish, the gesture touched him. “If you want. But I don’t think Flower Feather could be bettered.”

Auri flushed and looked away. They continued in silence.

And the silence lengthened. Gradually Lockridge grew aware of that. Ordinarily, this near the village, there was plenty of noise: children shouting at their games, fishermen hailing the shore as they approached, housewives gossiping, perhaps the triumphant song of hunters who had bagged an elk. But he turned right and paddled up the cove between narrowing wooded banks, and no human voice reached him. He glanced at Auri. Maybe she knew what was afoot. She sat chin in hand, gazing at him, oblivious to everything else. He hadn’t the heart to speak. Instead, he sent the canoe forward as fast as he was able.

Avildaro came in sight. Under the ancient shaw at its back, it was a cluster of sod-roofed wattle huts around the Long House of ceremony, which was a more elaborate half-timbered peat structure. Boats were drawn onto the beach, where nets dried on poles. Several hundred yards off stood the kitchen midden. The Tenil Orugaray no longer lived at the very foot of that mound of oyster shells, bones, and other trash, as their ancestors had done; but they carried the offal there, for the half-tame pigs to eat, and the site was veiled with flies.

Auri came out of her trance. The clear brow wrinkled. “But no one is about!” she said.

“There must be someone in the Long House,” Lockridge answered. Smoke curled from the venthole in its roof. “We had better go see.” He was glad of the Webley at his hip.

He pulled the canoe ashore, with the girl’s help, and made fast. Her hand stole into his as they entered the village. Shadows darkened the dusty paths between huts, and the air seemed suddenly cold. “What does this mean?” she begged of him.

“If you don’t know—” He lengthened his stride.

Noise certainly buzzed from the hall. Two young men stood guard outside. “Here they corne!” one of them shouted. Both dipped their spears to Lockridge.

He went through the skin-curtained door with Auri. His eyes needed a while to adapt to the gloom within; there were no windows, and the smoke that didn’t escape stung. The fire in the central pit was holy, never allowed to go out. (Like most primitive customs, that had a practical basis. Fires were never easy to start before matches were invented, and anyone might come here to light a brand.) It had been stoked up until the flames danced and crackled, throwing uneasy flickers across sooted walls and pillars roughly hewn with magical symbols. The whole population was crowded in: some four hundred men, women, and children squatting on the dirt floor, mumbling to each other.

Echegon and his chief councillors stood near the fire with Storm. When Lockridge saw her, tall and arrogant, he forgot about Auri and went to her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“The Yuthoaz are coming,” she said.

He spent a minute assimilating what the diaglossa associated with that name. The Battle Axe people; the northward-thrusting edge of that huge wave, more cultural than racial, of Indo-European-speaking warriors which had been spreading from southern Russia in the past century or two. Elsewhere they were destined to topple civilisations: India, Crete, Hatti, Greece would go down in ruin before them, and their languages and religions and ways of life would shape all Europe. But hitherto, in sparsely populated Scandinavia, there had not been great conflict between the native hunters, fishers, and farmers, and the chariot-driving immigrant herdsmen.

Still, Avildaro had heard of bloody clashes to the east.

Echegon hugged Auri to him for a moment before he said: “I had not too much fear for you under Malcolm’s protection. But I thank Her that you are back.” The strong, bearded visage turned to Lockridge. “Today,” he said, “men hunting southward hastened home with word that the Yuthoaz are moving against us and will be here tomorrow. They are plainly a war band, nothing but armed men, and Avildaro is the first village on their way. What have we done to offend them or the gods?”

Lockridge glanced at Storm. “Well,” he said in English, “I kind of hate to use our weapons on those poor devils, but if we’ve got to—”

She shook her head. “No. The energies might be detected. Or, at least, the story might reach Ranger agents and alert them to us. Best that you and I take refuge elsewhere.”

“What? But—but—”

“Remember,” she said, “time is immutable. Since this place survives a hundred years from now, quite likely the natives will repel the attack tomorrow.”

He could not break free of her eyes; but Auri’s were on him too, and Echegon’s, and his boatmates’ and girl friends’ and the flintsmith’s and everyone’s. He squared his shoulders. “Maybe they didn’t, either,” he said. “Maybe they’re conquered underlings in the future, or would be except for us. I’m stayin’.”

“You dare—” Storm checked herself. A moment she stood taut and still. Then she smiled, reached out and stroked his cheek. “I might have known,” she said. “Very well, I shall stay too.”