The Corridors of Time

9

Withucar stood next to him. Lockridge whirled and drove a fist into the leader’s belly, just below the rib cage. Tough muscle resisted his knuckles, bruisingly, but the man lurched and went to the ground.

The freckled lad who held the torch dropped it and whipped up his axe. Lockridge’s Marine training responded. One step brought him close. He chopped at the throat with the edge of his hand. The Yutho uttered a croak, crumpled, and lay still.

Before he could grab the other’s weapon, Lockridge sensed a body at his back. Reflex brought his wrists to his neck. Arms closed around it. He felt their hairiness, snapped his wrists apart again, and broke the stranglehold. Turning, he put a leg behind the warrior’s ankles and shoved. One more down!

The men around the fire howled and surged against him. Lockridge swept the torch off the earth. A comet’s tail of fire blazed when he swept it at the nearest pair of eyes. That attacker stumbled back before he should be blinded. Two others fell over him in a tangle of limbs and curses.

Lockridge leaped over the fire. Thuno stood there alone, gaping. But as the American came upon him, he let go Aim’s leash. His own axe was not quickly reachable, but he yanked out his flint dagger and rushed in with an overhand stab.

Lockridge blocked that with one wrist. The sharp edge slithered along his forearm. Blood ran from the gash it left. Lockridge didn’t notice. He brought his knee up. Thuno shrieked and reeled away.

“Run, Auri!” Lockridge bellowed.

He had only disabled two out of ten. The rest charged around the fire. He couldn’t win over so many, but he could gain her time. He pelted off. A hurled spear smote the ground beside him.

He stopped, pulled the weapon free, and faced the attack. Don’t try to stab with this thing, he thought amidst the hammering in his temples. Got better uses for a long straight shaft. He held it in both hands near the middle, balanced on his toes, and waited.

The mass poured upon him. He went into a rage of quarter-staff play. Wood smote solidly on a head, broke fingers that held an axe, rammed a solar plexus, darted between legs to trip, whirred and clattered and thudded home. The night turned into blows, grunts, shouts, where firelight made teeth and eyeballs flash.

Suddenly, fantastically, Lockridge stood alone. Three Yuthoaz writhed groaning in the shadows that wove about his feet. The rest had scattered. They panted and glared at him from near the fire. He saw their hides gleam with sweat.

“Maruts snatch you off!” Withucar roared. “He’s only a man!” Still his four hale followers remained at bay. They did not even string a bow.

With his wind back, the chieftain advanced by himself. Lockridge swung the stick at him. Squint-eyed, Withucar had been watching for that. He parried with his tomahawk. The violence rang through Lockridge’s bones. His weapon fell from numbed hands. Withucar kicked it out of reach, bawled victory, and trod close. And now, from other camps, others who had heard the racket came running.

Lockridge jumped to meet the Yutho. Again he blocked a downward blow. His shoulder thrust against Withucar. Dimly, he felt a beard bristle cross his skin. He got an arm lock. A heave, cruelly deft—bone snapped with a pistol crack—Withucar floundered off, wheezing through tight-held jaws.

A big man from another fire was almost upon Lockridge, ax aloft. He wore a tunic. Lockridge braced himself, swerved from the attack, took its impact on his hip; his fingers grabbed coarse cloth and a single judo manoeuvre turned motion into flight. The big man crashed six feet away.

The night burst with howls. Men drew back, shadows in shadow. Lockridge seized Withucar’s tomahawk, whirled it on high, and let loose a rebel yell.

Like lightning, he realised what had happened. However total their victory, the invaders were inwardly shaken by the forces they had seen today. Now one man had beaten half a dozen in as many minutes. Darkness and confusion made it impossible to see that he had simply used tactics unknown to this era. He was a troll broken free, and terror seized them.

They didn’t run, but they milled beyond his edge of clear vision. The diaglossa hinted what to cry: “I will eat the next man who touches me!” Their horror winded through the night. Sky Father’s worshippers still feared the earth gods, for whom, further inland, a human being was devoured every harvest.

Slowly, Lockridge turned and walked off. His back ached with the tension of awaiting a spear, an arrow, a skull-crushing axe blow . . . and not looking behind. He saw the world through a haze, and his heart kept sickeningly missing beats.

An oak reared gnarly before him. The leaves whispered. Somewhere a nightjar echoed them. Lockridge passed into the dark of the far side.

A hand plucked at him. He recoiled and struck out. His fist brushed softness. “Lynx,” quivered her voice, “wait for me.”

He must husk several times before he could speak, dry-mouthed: “Auri, you should have run off.”

“I did. I stopped here to see what befell you. Come.” She pressed close, and the universe was no longer a fever dream. “I know ways to the forest,” she said.

That is well.” Self-possession returned to him, like a series of bolts snicking home. He could think again. Peering around the tree bole, he saw fires scattered wide across the fields, figures that flitted among them, a rare gleam of polished stone or copper. The bass babble was just too distant for him to make out words.

“They will soon get back their courage,” he said, “especially after Brann is told what happened and reassures them. The woods are not close, and they will search for us. Can we stay hidden?”

“She of the Earth will help us,” Auri said.

She urged him out into the open and went on all fours. Weasel slim and supple, she traced a winding path where the grass grew tallest. Lockridge followed her more clumsily. But he had stalked this way before, ages ago, in that unborn future when he was a boy.

Beyond enemy view, they rose and loped south. Neither spoke; breath was too precious. Lockridge’s pupils expanded until he could see how the grass rippled in a breeze and how the copses stood pale on top, solidly black below, under the high constellations. Through foot-thuds, he heard a fox bark, a hare scutter, frogs chorus. Auri was a moving slenderness beside him, her mane white in the star-glow.

Then a wolf howled from the woods that began to show darkling ahead. As if it were a signal, the bison horns moaned, and he heard men yelp in pursuit of him.

The rest of the flight was a blur. He would never have escaped without Auri. Running, twisting, dodging, she led him through every dip of ground and patch of shadow that her Goddess afforded them. Once they lay behind a boulder and heard men go past, a yard away; once they got up a tree just before spears went bobbing underneath. When finally the forest enclosed him, he fell and lay like one whose bones had been sucked out.

Awareness returned in pieces. First he noticed glimmers of sky overhead, where the leaves left small open spaces. Otherwise he was nearly blind in the night. Bracken rustled and brushed his limbs with harsh fronds, but the ground was soft damp mould, pungent to smell. He tingled and throbbed. Yet Auri was curled against him, he felt her warmth and breath and caught the faint woodsmoke odour of her hair. Everything had grown most quiet.

He forced himself to sit up. She awakened when he moved. “Did we really get away?” he mumbled.

“Yes,” the girl said, her tone more level than his. “If they follow, we will know them by their trampling—” a note of scorn for all clumsy heath dwellers “—and find concealment.” She hugged him. “Oh, Lynx!”

“Easy. Easy.” He disengaged her and groped for the axe. Wonder touched him. “I never expected we both would escape.”

“No, surely you knew what you did. You can do anything.”

“Uh—” Lockridge shook his head, trying to clear it. For the first time, he understood what had gone on. He really hadn’t planned events. Auri’s plight triggered the rage pent in him; thereafter, drilled-in habits had carried him along. Unless, of course, the Tenil Orugaray were right in believing that a man could be possessed by Those who walked this wilderness.

“Why did you come back?” he asked.

“To seek you, who would lift the ban on me,” Auri said naively.

That made sense, though it dashed his ego a little. She’d acted in what seemed her own self-interest. And maybe not too recklessly, even, judging by how she had given the Yuthoaz the slip afterward. Only by pure bad luck had she been heard and captured; then pure good luck brought Lockridge to the very band that had seized her.

Luck? Time could turn on itself. There was indeed such a thing as destiny. Though it might be blind—Lockridge remembered Brann’s final word. “You came to me . . . and warned me!” An ugly thrill went down his nerves. No! he spat at the night. That was a lie!

Defiance brought decision. He paid Auri scant heed, while his plan and the sombre sense of fate grew within him, but he heard her talking:

Many got from Avildaro into the forest. I know where some are hidden, those I left to return to you. We can seek them out, and afterward another village of the Tenil Orugaray,”

Lockridge braced himself. “You shall,” he said. “But I have a different place to go.”

“What? Where? Beneath the sea?”

“No, ashore. And at once, before Brann thinks to send men there. A forsaken dolmen, half a morning’s walk to the south. Do you know it?”

Auri shivered. “Yes.” Her voice grew thin. “The House of the Old Dead. Once the Tenil Vaskulan lived in that place and buried their great folk; now only ghosts. Must you indeed? And after sunset?”

“Yes. Have no fears.”

She gulped. “Not—not if you say so.”

“Come, then. Guide me.”

They began to walk, through choked brush and down deer trails saturated with murk, he stumbling and swearing, she slipping sprite-like along. “You see,” he explained when they stopped to rest, “my, uh, my friend, The Storm, is still in Brann’s hands. I must try to get help for her rescue.”

“That witch?” He heard a whisper of tangled locks as Auri tossed her head, and a sniff that actually made him chuckle. “Can she not look after herself?”

“Well, the rescue party should also be able to chase the Yuthoaz home.”

“So you will come back!” she exclaimed in a rush of gladness. Somehow he didn’t think it was selfish. And had her return to Avildaro been entirely so? He felt uncomfortable.

Little else was said. Progress was too difficult. The slow hours passed; and the night, short in this season near midsummer, began to wane. Stars paled, a greyness crept between the trees, the first twitter of birds came faint and clear.

Lockridge thought that now he could recognize the path he had followed with Storm. Not far to go—

Auri stiffened. Her eyes, luminous in the small dimly seen face, widened. “Hold!” she breathed.

“What?” Lockridge gripped the axe till his palm hurt.

“Do you not hear?”

He didn’t. She led him forward, turning her head right and left parting withes with enormous caution. Presently the sound reached him too: a crackle in the brush, far behind but ever more near.

His gullet tightened. “Animals?” he hoped foolishly.

“Men,” Auri told him. “Bound our way.”

So Brann had dispatched a patrol to guard the time gate. Had the Yuthoaz been as woodscrafty as this girl, they would have been waiting there for him. As matters stood, he had a chance.

“Fast!” he ordered. “Never mind silence. We must reach the dolmen ahead of them.”

Auri sprinted. He came behind. In the misty twilight, he stumbled over a log and into a stand of saplings. They caught at his garments and cried out in wooden voices. Shouts lifted from the glades at his back.

“They heard,” Auri warned. “Swiftly!”

Over the trail they fled. Trees crawled past with horrible slowness. And the light strengthened.

When they emerged on the meadow, it lay aglitter with dew under a sky flushed rose. The hillock loomed before them. Breath raw in his lungs, knifed by his spleen, Lockridge made for the hollow tree where Storm had hidden the entrance control.

He fumbled within. Auri screamed. Lockridge drew forth the metal tube and looked about. A score of warriors were at the edge of the clearing.

They roared when they saw him and bounded forward. Lockridge staggered with Auri, up the knoll, above a second-growth tangle into plain view. An arrow went whoo-oo past his ear.

“No, you dolt!” called the Yutho leader. “The god said to take him alive!”

Lockridge twisted studs on the tube. A man broke through the young trees at the foot of the mound, poised, and waved his fellows on. Lockridge saw with unnatural sharpness: braided hair, leather kilt, muscular torso and the long tomahawk—Brann must have nerved this gang up to face almost anything.

The tube glowed and trembled in his grasp. Other Yuthoaz joined the first and ploughed through grass and briars, on to do battle. Lockridge threw Withucar’s axe. The lead man dodged and barked laughter. His followers rioted behind him.

The earth moved.

Auri wailed, went to her knees, and clutched Lockridge’s waist. The Yuthoaz stopped cold. After an instant, they scampered with yells into the thicket below. There they halted. Glimpsewise through leaves, Lockridge saw them in their confusion. He heard their captain bay, “The god swore we couldn’t be hurt by any magic! Come on, you sons of rabbits!”

The downramp shone white. The Yuthoaz advanced again. Auri couldn’t be left here. Lockridge seized the girl’s arm and flung her into the entrance.

The leader was almost upon him. He tumbled through the hole, fell flat, and twisted the controls. The hovering plug of earth moved down, blotted out the sky, hissed into place.

Silence closed like fingers.

Auri broke it in a shriek that rose swiftly toward hysteria. Lockridge collected himself and slapped her. She sat where she was, dumbstricken, staring at him with eyes from which humanity was gone.

“I’m sorry,” Lockridge said. And he was as he watched the red blotch appear on her cheek. “But you must not run wild. We are safe now.”

“W-w-w-w—” She fought for breath. Her gaze dashed back and forth, around the icily lit walls that enclosed her; she grovelled on the floor and whimpered, “We are in the House of the Old Dead.”

Lockridge shook her and snapped, “There is nothing to fear. They have no powers against me. Believe!”

He had not expected will to mount so fast in her. She drank several sobs, her body stiffened and shaking, but after a minute of regarding him she said, “I believe you, Lynx,” and the craziness departed.

That gave him back his own strength, together with a bleak alertness. “I did not mean for you to come here,” he said, “but we had no choice if you were not to be caught. Now you will see strange things. Do not let them frighten you.” A satiric part recalled how Storm had given him much the same advice. Had he indeed come to accept this eldritch world of passage between the ages so soon? His home century seemed a half-forgotten dream.

But that was doubtless because of present urgency. “We have to move,” he said. “The Yuthoaz cannot follow us in here, but they will tell their master, and he can. Or we may meet-well, never mind.” If they, unarmed, encountered Rangers in the corridor, that was the end of the affair. “This way.”

She followed him mutely, down to the foreroom. The auroral curtain in the gate drew a gasp from her, and she held his hand with a child’s tightness. He rummaged through the locker but found nothing except outfits appropriate to this milieu. Time travellers must carry their own advanced gear. Damn!

It was a gruesome effort to step through the gate, when anything might lie beyond. But the corridor stretched in humming whiteness, empty as far as he could see. He let the wind out of his chest and collapsed weakly onto the gravity sled.

They couldn’t linger, though. At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them. (Just what did that mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He’d think about it later.) Moving his hands experimentally to cover the control lights, he found how to operate the vehicle and sent it gliding futureward.

Auri sat close beside him. She clutched the bench hard, but panic was gone and she even showed a trace of bright-eyed curiosity. There was less amazement in her than he had felt. But then, to her all these wonders were equally wonderful, and, in fact, no more mysterious than rain, wind, birth, death, and the wheel of the seasons.

So what to do?” Lockridge puzzled aloud. “I could go on to 1964, and we might try just to disappear. But I don’t reckon that’d work. Too damn many Rangers there, and too damn easy for ’em to trace a man, especially when you’d make us sort of conspicuous, kid. And if Storm herself couldn’t make contact with any Wardens then, I sure can’t.” He realised he had spoken in English. Doubtless Auri took his words for an incantation.

What had Storm told him?

Instantly, overwhelmingly, he was back in the prison hut, and she was with him, and his mouth knew her kiss. For a while he forgot everything else.

Sense came back. The corridor encompassed him with blind radiance, with hollowness and strangeness. Storm was far away—centuries away. But he could return to her. And would, by heaven!

Might he dash clear up to her age? No. This shaft didn’t reach that far. And too risky, in any event. The sooner they got out and vanished in the world, the better. But she had spoken of a Herr Jesper Fledelius, in Viborg of the Reformation era. Yes, his best bet. And, too, a feeling of destiny still drove him.

He slowed the sled and paid attention to the gate markers. He couldn’t read their alphabet, but Arabic numerals were recognisable. Pretty clearly, years were counted from the “lower” end of the passage. So, if 1827 B.C. equalled 1175. . . .

When the numbers 4 5 - - appeared, he stopped the sled and sent it back. Auri waited while he forced himself to study the layout and think. Blast that uncertainty factor! He wanted to come out a few days in advance of All Hallows, to allow time to reach Viborg, but riot so far in advance that Brann’s hounds could get on his track.

As best he could, he selected a line in the set corresponding to Anno Domini 1535. Auri linked fingers with him and followed him trustingly through the curtain.

Again the long, still room, and the locker. But the clothes stored here were something else from the Neolithic. A variety of costumes was available, peasant, gentleman, priest, soldier, and more. He didn’t know which was best. What the hell had cone on in Denmark of the sixteenth century? Hell indeed, if the time war were involved.

Well, here was a purse of gold, silver, and copper money—Auri exclaimed at the sight of all that metal—and cash was always useful. But a lower-class person who carried so much would be suspected of robbery. Thus Lockridge chose what he imagined was a prosperous man’s travelling garb: linen underclothes and shirt, satin doublet, crimson trunk hose, high boots, floppy-brimmed cap, blue cloak trimmed with fur, sword and knife (the latter doubtless mainly for eating purposes), and miscellaneous gear that he could only guess about. Diaglossas, of course, for him and Auri; and then he knew that there were so many wigs because men today wore their hair long. He donned a yellow one. It seemed briefly to writhe, as if alive, and settled onto his head with a firmness that gave a perfect illusion of nature.

Auri stripped off her skirt and ornaments, innocent beneath his eyes, and fumbled with the long gray gown and hooded cloak he picked for her. “The seafarers from the South do not dress more queerly than those who dwell below the earth,” she said.

“We are bound up again,” Lockridge told her. “Into a very different land. Now, this thing I have put in your ear will guide you in speech and behaviour. But best hold yourself as meek and quiet as you can. Let me take the lead. We will tell people you are my wife.”

She frowned, turning the implications over in her head. Her sense of wonder was stunned, she accepted everything as it came to her, though she kept a fox’s alertness: an attitude that Zen masters might envy. But the Danish word hustru held a universe of concepts about the relationship between the sexes that the Yuthoaz would have taken for granted but that were new to her.

Abruptly she flushed. Her passivity vanished in joy, she threw her arms about him and cried: “Then the curse is gone? Oh, Lynx, I am yours!”

“Whoa, there. Whoa!” He fended her off. His own ears burned. “Not so fast. The month, uh, won’t be spring here.”

Nor was it. When they emerged on the moundside and closed the door, he found night again—a cold, autumnal night where the half moon flew between ragged clouds and the wind whined in sere grasses. Naked and empty stood the dolmen above. The forest where once the Goddess walked was gone; only a few scrubby elms swayed in the north. Beyond them, bone-white, gleamed encroaching sand dunes that the future had yet to drive back.

But there had been cultivation around the hillock. Had been. Traces of furrows remained among weeds, and the clay chimney of a burned cottage reared jagged on the southern ridge. War had passed through these parts, less than a year ago.