Three times it was blared. The guardsmen froze in their tracks, stared at the gigantic scarlet-robed person who stood bellowing in the doorway, and hit the rug. Harpagus dropped his sword. Everard almost brained him; then, remembering, and hearing the hurried tramp of warriors in the hall, let go his own weapon. For a moment he and the Chiliarch panted into each other’s faces.
“So… he got word… and came… at once,” gasped Everard.
The Mede crouched like a cat and hissed back: “Have a care, then! I will be watching you. If you poison his mind there will be poison for you, or a dagger ”
“The King! The King!” bellowed the herald.
Everard joined Harpagus on the floor.
A band of Immortals trotted into the room and made an alley to the couch. A chamberlain dashed to throw a special tapestry over it. Then Cyrus himself entered, robe billowing around long muscular strides. A few courtiers followed, leathery men privileged to bear arms in the royal presence, and a slave M.C. wringing his hands in their wake at not having been given time to spread a carpet or summon musicians.
The King’s voice rang through the silence: “What is this? Where is the stranger who called on me?”
Everard risked a peek. Cyrus was tall, broad of shoulder and slim of body, older-looking than Croesus’ account suggested—he was forty-seven years old, Everard knew with a shudder—but kept supple by sixteen years of war and the chase. He had a narrow dark countenance with hazel eyes, a sword scar on the left cheekbone, a straight nose and full lips. His black hair, faintly grizzled, was brushed back and his beard trimmed more closely than was Persian custom. He was dressed as plainly as his status allowed.
“Where is the stranger whom the slave ran to tell me of?”
“I am he, Great King,” said Everard.
“Arise. Declare your name.”
Everard stood up and murmured: “Hi, Keith.”
6
Vines rioted about a marble pergola. They almost hid the archers who ringed it. Keith Denison slumped on a bench, stared at leaf shadows dappled onto the floor, and said wryly, “At least we can keep our talk private. The English language hasn’t been invented yet.”
After a moment he continued, with a rusty accent: “Sometimes I’ve thought that was the hardest thing to take about this situation, never having a minute to myself. The best I can do is throw everybody out of the room I’m in; but they stick around just beyond the door, under the windows, guarding, listening. I hope their dear loyal souls fry.”
“Privacy hasn’t been invented yet either,” Everard reminded him. “And VIP’s like you never did have much, in all history.”
Denison raised a tired visage. “I keep wanting to ask how Cynthia is,” he said, “but of course for her it has been—will be—not so long. A week, perhaps. Did you by any chance bring some cigarettes?”
“Left ’em in the scooter,” said Everard. “I figured I’d have trouble enough without explaining that away. I never expected to find you running this whole shebang.”
“I didn’t myself.” Denison shrugged. “It was the damnedest fantastic thing. The time paradoxes—”
“So what did happen?”
Denison rubbed his eyes and sighed. “I got myself caught in the local gears. You know, sometimes everything that went before seems unreal to me, like a dream. Were there ever such things as Christendom, contrapuntal music, or the Bill of Rights? Not to mention all the people I knew. You yourself don’t belong here, Manse, I keep expecting to wake up… Well, let me think back.
“Do you know what the situation was? The Medes and the Persians are pretty near kin, racially and culturally, but the Medes were top dog then, and they’d picked up a lot of habits from the Assyrians which didn’t sit so well in the Persian viewpoint. We’re ranchers and freehold farmers, mostly, and of course it isn’t right that we should be vassals—” Denison blinked. “Hey, there I go again! What do I mean ‘we?’ Anyhow, Persia was restless. King Astyages of Media had ordered the murder of little Prince Cyrus twenty years before, but now he regretted it, because Cyrus’s father was dying and the dispute over succession could touch off a civil war.
“Well, I appeared in the mountains. I had to scout a little bit in both space and time—hopping through a few days and several miles—to find a good hiding place for my scooter. That’s why the Patrol couldn’t locate it afterward… part of the reason. You see, I did finally park it in a cave and set out on foot, but right away I came to grief. A Median army was bound through that region to discourage the Persians from making trouble. One of their scouts saw me emerge, checked my back trail—first thing I knew, I’d been seized and their officer was grilling me about what that gadget was I had in the cave. His men took me for a magician of some kind and were in considerable awe, but more afraid of showing fear than they were of me. Naturally, the word ran like a brushfire through the ranks and across the countryside. Soon all the area knew that a stranger had appeared under remarkable circumstances.
“Their general was Harpagus himself, as smart and tough-minded a devil as the world has ever seen. He thought I could be used. He ordered me to make my brazen horse perform, but I wasn’t allowed to mount it. However, I did get a chance to kick it into time-drive. That’s why the search party didn’t find the thing. It was only a few hours in this century, then it probably went clear back to the Beginning.”
“Good work,” said Everard.
“Oh, I knew the orders forbidding that degree of anachronism.” Denison’s lips twisted. “But I also expected the Patrol to rescue me. If I’d known they wouldn’t, I’m not so sure I’d have stayed a good self-sacrificing Patrolman. I might have hung on to my scooter, and played Harpagus’ game till a chance came to escape on my own.”
Everard looked at him a moment, somberly. Keith had changed, he thought: not just in age, but the years among aliens had marked him more deeply then he knew. “If you risked altering the future,” he said, “you risked Cynthia’s existence.”
“Yes. Yes, true. I remember thinking of that… at the time… How long ago it seems!”
Denison leaned forward, elbows on knees, staring into the pergola screen. His words continued, flat. “Harpagus spit rivets, of course. I thought for a while he was going to kill me. I was carried off, trussed up like butcher’s meat. But as I told you, there were already rumors about me, which were losing nothing in repetition. Harpagus saw a still better chance. He gave me a choice, string along with him or have my throat cut. What else could I do? It wasn’t even a matter of hazarding an alteration; I soon saw I was playing a role which history had already written.
“You see, Harpagus bribed a herdsman to support his tale, and produced me as Cyrus, son of Cambyses.”
Everard nodded, unsurprised. “What’s in it for him?” he asked.
“At the time, he only wanted to bolster the Median rule. A king in Anshan under his thumb would have to be loyal to Astyages, and thereby help keep all the Persians in line. I was rushed along, too bewildered to do more than follow his lead, still hoping minute by minute for a Patrol hopper to appear and get me out of the mess. The truth fetish of all these Iranian aristocrats helped us a lot—few of them suspected I perjured myself in swearing I was Cyrus, though I imagine Astyages quietly ignored the discrepancies. And he put Harpagus in his place by punishing him in an especially gruesome way for not having done away with Cyrus as ordered—even if Cyrus turned out to be useful now—and of course the double irony was that Harpagus really had followed orders, two decades before!
“As for me, in the course of five years I got more and more sickened by Astyages myself. Now, looking back, I see he wasn’t really such a hound from hell, just a typical Oriental monarch of the ancient world, but that’s kind of hard to appreciate when you’re forced to watch a man being racked.