The Year of the Ransom

11 May 2937 B.C.

“When I saw they were off guard and close together,” Castelar said, “I called on Sant’Iago in my mind, and sprang. My kick took the first in the throat and he went to the floor. I whirled about and gave the second the heel of my hand below the nose, an upward blow, thus.” The movement was quick and savage. “He fell too. I retrieved my blade, made sure of them both, and came after you.”

His tone was almost casual. Tamberly thought, in the daze dulling his brain, that the Exaltationists had made the common mistake of underestimating a man of a past era. This one was ignorant of nearly everything they knew, but his wits were fully equal to theirs. Thereon was laid a ferocity bred by centuries of war—not impersonal high-technological conflict but medieval combat, where you looked into your enemy’s eyes and cut him down with your own hand.

“Were you not the least afraid of their . . . magic?” Tamberly mumbled.

Castelar shook his head. “I knew God was with me.” He crossed himself, then sighed. “It was stupid of me to leave their guns behind. I will not fail like that again.”

Despite the heat, Tamberly shivered.

He sat slumped in long grass beneath a noonday sun. Castelar stood above him, metal a-shine, hand on hilt, legs apart, like a colossus bestriding the world. The timecycle rested several yards off. Beyond, a stream flowed toward the sea, which was not visible here but which, he estimated from his glimpse aloft, lay twenty or thirty miles distant. Palm, chirimoya, and other vegetation told him they were “still” in tropical America. He had a vague recollection of chancing to give the temporal activator a harder thrust than the spatial.

Could he get up, make a break for it, beat the Spaniard to the machine and escape? Impossible. Were he in better shape, he would try. Like most field agents, he’d received training in martial arts. That might offset the other’s cruder skills and greater strength. (Any cavalier spent his whole life in such physical activity that an Olympic champion would be flabby by comparison.) Now he was too weak, in body and mind alike. With the kyradex off his head, he had volition again. But it wasn’t much use yet. He felt drained, sand in his synapses, lead in his eyelids, skull scooped hollow.

Castelar glowered downward. “Cease twisting words, sorcerer,” he rapped. “It is for me to put you to the question.”

Should I just keep mum and provoke him into killing me? Tamberly wondered in his weariness. I imagine he’d apply torture first, seeking to force my cooperation. But afterward he’d be stranded, made harmless. . . . No. He’d be sure to monkey with the vehicle. That could easily bring about his destruction; but if it didn’t, what else could happen? I must keep my death in reserve till I’m certain it’s the only thing I have to offer.

He lifted his gaze to the dark eagle visage and dragged forth: “I am no sorcerer. I merely have knowledge you don’t, of various arts and devices. The Indies thought our musketeers commanded the lightning. It was simple gunpowder. A compass needle points north, but not by magic.” Though you don’t understand the actual principle, do you? “Likewise for weapons that stun without wounding, and for engines that overleap space and time.”

Castelar nodded. “I had that feeling,” he said slowly. “My captors whom I slew let words drop.”

Lord, this is a bright fellow! A genius, perhaps, in his fashion. Yes, I remember him remarking that besides his studies among the priests, he’s enjoyed reading stories of Amadis—those fantastic romances that inflamed the imagination of his era—and another remark once showed a surprisingly sophisticated view of Islam.

Castelar tautened. “Then tell me what this is about,” he demanded. “What are you in truth, you who falsely claim ordainment?”

Tamberly groped through his mind. No barriers crossed it. The kyradex had wiped out his reflex against revealing that time travel and the Time Patrol existed. What remained was his duty.

Somehow he must get control of this horrible situation. Once he’d had a rest, let flesh and intelligence recover from the shocks they had suffered, he should have a pretty good chance of outwitting Castelar. No matter how quick on the uptake, the man would be overwhelmed by strangeness. At the moment, however, Tamberly was only half alive. And Castelar sensed the weakness and hammered shrewdly, pitilessly on it.

“Tell me! No dawdling, no sly roundabouts. Out with the truth!” The sword slid partly from its scabbard and snicked back.

“The tale is long and long, Don Luis—”

A boot caught Tamberly in the ribs. He rolled over and lay gasping. Pain went through him in waves. As if among thunders, he heard: “Come, now. Speak.”

He forced himself back to a sitting position, hunched beneath implacability. “Yes, I masqueraded as a friar, but with no un-Christian intention.” He coughed. “It was necessary. You see, there are evil men abroad who also have these engines. As it was, they sought to raid your treasury, and bore us two off—”

The interrogation went on. Had it been the Dominicans under whom Castelar studied, they who ran the Spanish Inquisition? Or had he simply learned how to deal with prisoners of war? At first Tamberly had a notion of concealing the time travel part. It slipped from him, or was jarred from him, and Castelar hounded it. Remarkable how swiftly he grasped the idea. None of the theory. Tamberly himself had just the ghostliest idea of that, which a science millennia beyond his people’s was to create. The thought that space and time were united baffled Castelar, till he dismissed it with an oath and went on to practical questions. But he did come to realize that the machine could fly; could hover; could instantly be wherever and whenever else its pilot willed.

Perhaps his acceptance was natural. Educated men of the sixteenth century believed in miracles; it was Christian, Jewish, and Muslim dogma. They also lived in a world of revolutionary new discoveries, inventions, ideas. The Spanish, especially, were steeped in tales of chivalry and enchantment—would be, till Cervantes laughed that out of them. No scientist had told Castelar that travel into the past was physically impossible, no philosopher had listed the reasons why it was logically absurd. He met the simple fact.

Mutability, the danger of aborting an entire future, did seem to elude him. Or else he refused to let it curb him. “God will take care of the world,” he stated, and went after knowledge of what he could do and how.

He readily imagined argosies faring between the ages, and it fired him. Not that he was much interested in the truly precious articles of that commerce: the origins of civilizations, the lost poems of Sappho, a performance by the greatest gamelan virtuoso who ever lived, three-dimensional pictures of art that would be melted down for a ransom. . . . He thought of rubies and slaves and, foremost, weapons. It was reasonable to him that kings of the future would seek to regulate that traffic and bandits seek to plunder it.

“So you were a spy for your lord, and his enemies were surprised to find us when they came as thieves in the night, but by God’s grace we are free again,” he said. “What next?”

The sun was low. Thirst raged in Tamberly’s throat. His head felt ready to break open, his bones to fall apart. Blurred in his vision, Castelar squatted before him, tireless and terrible.

“Why, we . . . we should return . . . to my comrades in arms,” Tamberly croaked. “They will reward you well and . . . bring you back to your proper place.”

“Will they, now?” The grin was wolfish. “And what payment to me, at best? Nor am I sure you have spoken truth, Tanaquil. The single sure thing is that God has given this instrument into my hands, and I must use it for His glory and the honor of my nation.”

Tamberly felt as if the words driven against him, hour after hour, had each been a fist. “What would you, then?”

Castelar stroked his beard. “I think first,” he murmured, narrow-eyed, “yes, assuredly first, you shall teach me how to manage this steed.” He bounced to his feet. “Up!”

He must well-nigh drag his prisoner to the timecycle.

I must lie, I must delay, at worst I must refuse and take my punishment. Tamberly couldn’t. Exhaustion, pain, thirst, hunger betrayed him. He was physically incapable of resistance.

Castelar crouched over him, alert to every move, ready to pounce at the slightest suspicion; and Tamberly was too stupefied to deceive him.

Study the console between the steering bars. Press for the date. The machine recorded every shift it made through the continuum. Yes, they’d come far indeed into the past, the thirtieth century before Christ.

“Before Christ,” Castelar breathed. “Why, of course, I can go to my Lord when he walked this earth and fall on my knees—”

At that instant of his ecstasy, a hale man might have given him a karate chop. Tamberly could merely sag across the saddles and reach for an activator. Castelar flung him aside like a sack of meal. He lay half conscious on the ground till the sword pricked him into creeping back up.

A map display. Location: near the coast of what would someday be southern Ecuador. At Castelar’s behest, Tamberly made the whole world revolve in the screen. The Conquistador lingered a while over the Mediterranean. “Destroy the paynim,” he murmured. “Regain the Holy Land.”

With the help of the map unit, which could show a region at any scale desired, the space control was childishly simple to use. At least, it was if a coarse positioning sufficed. Castelar agreed shrewdly that he’d better not try such a stunt as appearing inside a locked treasure vault before he’d had plenty of practice. Time settings were as easy, once he learned the post-Arabic numerals. He did that in minutes.

Facile operation was necessary. A traveler might have to get out of somewhere or somewhen in a hell of a rush. Flying, on the antigravity drive, paradoxically required more skill. Castelar made Tamberly show him those controls, then get on behind him for a test flight. “If I fall, you do too,” he reminded.

Tamberly wished they would. At first they wobbled, he nearly lost his seat, but soon Castelar was gleefully in charge. He experimented with a time jump, went back half a day. Abruptly the sun was high, and in the magnifying scanner screen he saw himself and the other a mile below in the valley. That shook him. Hastily, he sprang toward sunset. With the space jump, he shifted close to the now deserted ground. After hovering for a minute, he made a bumpy landing.

They got off. “Ah, praise God!” Castelar cried. “His wonders and mercies are without end.”

“Please,” Tamberly begged, “could we go to the river? I’m nigh dead of thirst.”

“Presently you may drink,” Castelar answered. “Here is neither food nor fire. Let us find a better place.”

“Where?” Tamberly groaned.

“I have thought upon this,” Castelar said. “Seeking your king, no, that would be to put myself in his power. He would reclaim this device that can mean so much to Christendom. Back to that night in Caxamalca? No, not at once. We could run afoul of the pirates. If not, then certainly my own great captain Pizarro—with due respect—It would be difficult. But if I come carrying invincible weapons, he will heed my counsel.”

Amidst the inner murk bearing down on him, Tamberly remembered that the Indians of Peru were not fully subjugated when the Conquistadores fell into combat against each other.

“You tell me that you hail from some two thousand years after Our Lord,” Castelar proceeded. “That age could be a good harbor for a while. You know your way about in it. At the same time, the marvels should not be too bewildering to me—if this invention was made long afterward, as you have said.” Tamberly realized that he had no dream of automobiles, airplanes, skyscrapers, television. . . . He kept his tigerish wariness: “However, I would fain begin in a peaceful haven, a backwater where the surprises are few, and feel my way forward. Yes, if we can find one more person there, someone whose word I can compare with yours—” Explosively: “You heard. You must know. Speak!”

Light ran long and golden out of the west. Birds streamed home to roost in darkling trees. The river gleamed with water, water. Again Castelar used physical force. He was efficient about it.

Wanda . . . she’d be in the Galapagos in 1987, and God knew those islands were peaceful enough. . . . Exposing her to this danger did worse than break the Patrol’s directive; the kyradex had broken that within Tamberly anyway. But she was as smart and resourceful, and almost as strong, as any man. She’d be loyal to her poor battered uncle. Her blond beauty would distract Castelar, while he grew incautious of a mere female. Between them, the Americans could find or make an opportunity. . . .

Afterward, often and often, the patrolman cursed himself. Yet it was not really himself that responded, by whimpers and jerks, to the urging of the warrior.

Maps and coordinates of the islands, which no man recorded in history would tread before 1535; some description of them; some explanation of what the girl did there (Castelar was amazed, until he remembered amazons in the medieval romances); something about her as a person; the likelihood that she would be surrounded by friends most of the time, but toward the end might well take occasion to hike off alone—Again it was the questions, the cunning carnivore mind, that hunted everything out into the open.

Dusk had fallen. Tropically rapid, it deepened toward night. Stars winked forth. A jaguar yowled.

“Ah, so.” Castelar laughed, softly and joyously. “You have done well, Tanaquil. Not of your free will; nevertheless, you have earned surcease.”

“Please, may I go drink?” Tamberly would have to crawl.

“As you wish. Abide here, though, so I can find you later. Otherwise I fear you will perish in this wilderness.”

Dismay jagged through Tamberly. Roused, he sat straight in the grass. “What? We were leaving together!”

“No, no. I have scant trust in you yet, my friend. I will see what I can do for myself. Afterward—that is in the hands of God. Until I come fetch you, farewell.”

Sky-glow sheened on helmet and corselet. The knight of Spain strode to the time machine. He mounted it. Luminous, the controls yielded to his fingers. “Sant’Iago and at them!” rang aloud. He lifted several yards into the air. There followed a puff, and he was gone.