The front wave of beggars came pouring around the corner, howling. They saw the soldiers and stopped on a shilling. Then they went sprawling as the second wave hit. Those saw the soldiers and stopped dead in their turn. Just then the third wave hit, with the fourth coming up.
The sergeant, or whatever he was, just sat back in his saddle, watching and waiting, with the hint of a smile under his scowl. He kept a viselike hold on Matt's arm.
When the whole mob had gotten the message and more or less stopped, the sergeant cut across the muttering with a bull roar.
"Now, then! What happened here?" And to Matt he added, "Quite a past you have, fellow."
The mob got quiet then. A throat toward the back cleared itself, and Puffyhat came elbowing his way importantly toward the front. "This man is a sorcerer!"
"Is he, now?" the sergeant purred. "Well, that would explain his outlandish costume. What sorceries did he work?"
Puffyhat launched into a tale that would have done credit to Walpole, in which Matt figured largely and luridly. It seemed Matt had brought down a thunderstorm just outside Puffyhat's shop, changed base metal into silver, made the earth slip beneath the feet of four good citizens and true, tarnished the honor of the nation by conjuring up a horde of unskilled workers - who would doubtless compete with the locals for jobs - and changed an honest and worthy baker into a toad.
"That," Matt howled, "is slander! I never changed anyone into a toad!"
"But you did the rest?" He was a quick one, that sergeant.
What could Matt say? "Uh ... Well..."
"So I thought." The sergeant nodded, satisfied. "Well, then, Master Sorcerer."
"Wizard." Matt figured he'd better set the record as straight as possible. "Not sorcerer. No traffic with the devil. None. Wizard."
The sergeant shrugged. "Wizard, then. Will ye now whisk yourself away from us in the blink of an eye? Or come with us to the guardhouse, that our captain may judge ye?"
"Uh..." Matt glanced at the crowd. Ever since Puffyhat's crack about imported labor, they'd been looking uglier and uglier; there was a vicious muttering passing among the townsmen which seemed to imply that Matt would look great with an apple in his mouth.
Matt made one of those impulse decisions. "Uh, I think I'll come along with you, Sergeant."
He had a little time to think it over on the way to the guardhouse, and it all came down to one simple question: What had happened?
Where was he? When was he? How did he get here? Where did all those beggars come from?
And what were soldiers doing patrolling a town? Why were they taking him to a captain, rather than a magistrate?
Martial law, obviously-which meant the town had been recently conquered. But by whom? The soldiers certainly spoke the same language as the civilians-with even the same accent, as far as Matt could tell. It must be civil war, then, which, in a medieval society, meant one of two things-a dynastic dispute, like the Wars of the Roses, or a usurpation.
Why wasn't the sergeant scared of a self-confessed wizard, though? Possibly he was a skeptic and knew any kind of magic was just so much hogwash. But, considering that even most of the best-educated among the medieval set believed wholly in magic, that didn't seem too likely. Which left the probability that he wasn't afraid because he knew he was backed by a more powerful wizard or sorcerer.
That shouldn't have bothered Matt at all, because magic was just so much hogwash.
But where had all those beggars come from?
The captain was the tall, dark, and handsome type, with some indefinable air of the aristocrat about him. Maybe it was the velvet robe over the gleaming chain mail.
"There is something of the outlander about you," he informed Matt.
Matt nodded. "I am an outlander."
The captain lifted his eyebrows. "Are you indeed? From what country?"
"Well, that all depends on where I am."
The captain frowned. "How could that be?"
"It's not easy, believe me. Where am I?"
The captain turned his head a little to the side, eyeing Matt warily. "How could you come here and not know where you've come?"
"The same way you don't know where you've come to when you're going to the place you're coming to, but you don't know how you're going or where you're coming to till you've come to the place you were going to, so by the time that you get there, you don't know whether you're coming or going."
The captain shook his head. "I don't."
"Neither do I. So where am I?"
"But..." The captain knit his brow, trying to figure it out. Then he sighed and gave up. "Very well. You're in the town Bordestang, capital of Merovence. Now, where do you come from?"
"I don't know."
"What?" The captain leaned forward over the rough planks of the table. "After all that? How could you not know where you've come from?"
"Well, I'd know where it was if I were in the right place, but I'm in the wrong place, so I don't know where it is. Or rather, I know where it is, but I don't know what it's called here. That is, if it's there."
The captain squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a quick shake. "A moment, now. You mean to say you do not know our name for your homeland?"
"Well, I suppose you could say that."
"Easily answered." The captain sat back, looking relieved. Matt looked over his shoulder at the semicircle of soldiers surrounding him. The sergeant was watching him narrowly. Matt tried to hide a shiver as he turned back to the captain.
"Tell us where your homeland is," the captain urged, "and I'll tell you our name for it."
"Well, I suppose that's a fair deal." Matt nodded judiciously. "Only one trouble - I left my map at home. So I can't tell you which way my homeland is, till I know a little better where this country is."
The captain threw up his hands. "What must I do? Describe the whole of the continent to you?"
"Well, that would help, yes."
For a moment, Matt thought he'd pushed it too far; the captain's face turned awfully red. His brows came down, and his temples whitened. But he managed to absorb it; his face slowly eased back to its normal color, and he exhaled, long and slowly. Then he stood up and went to a set of shelves over against the undressed planks of the left-hand wall. The shelves were made of undressed planking, too; so was the whole place, for that matter. It had a very improvised air about it. Yes, definitely the war hadn't been overlong.
"Here." The captain took down a huge parchment volume and came back to the table, leafing through the book. He laid it down open, turning it to face Matt. Matt stepped forward to look-and gulped.
He was staring at a map of Europe - with a few modifications. It looked like Napoleon's and Hitler's dream world - the English Channel was gone. There was a narrow neck of solid land between Calais and Dover. Denmark was joined to Sweden, and the pebble of Sicily was clinging to Italy's toe.
Something was definitely wrong here. Matt wondered how Australia and New Zealand were doing, or the Isthmus of Panama.
He looked up at a sudden thought. "What's the climate like, there?" He laid a finger on London. "Warmish in winter? Lots of rain? Heavy fogs?"
The captain gave him an extremely strange look. "Nay, certainly not. 'Tis a frozen waste in winter, and the snows pile up half again the height of a man."
That settled it. "Are there, uh, ice fields that never melt anywhere there?"
The captain perked up. "Aye, so they say - in the mountains of the north. Then you've been there?"
Glaciers in the Highlands! "No, but I've seen some pictures." No question about it, there was an Ice Age going on. Whether it was nature's clock that was off or history's didn't really matter; it still added up to just one thing.
Matt wasn't in his own universe.
The wind off those Scottish glaciers blew through Matt's soul, chilling him to the id. For a moment, he was very much lost and very, very alone, and the warmly lighted windows of a summer campus dusk were very far away.