"We are here." The captain laid a fingertip on a spot about a hundred miles east of the Pyrenees and fifty miles north of the Mediterranean. "Do you know where you are now?"
Matt shook off the mood. "No. I mean - for all intents and purposes. I think so."
"Ah, good." The captain nodded, satisfied. "Then where is your homeland?"
"Oh, somewhere along about - here." Matt stabbed a forefinger down, about two feet to the left of the map.
The captain stared, and his face darkened. "I have tried to aid you in every way I can, sirrah, and this is how you repay my courtesy!"
"No, no, I'm serious! There really is a land out there, about three thousand miles to the west! I was born there. Although," Matt added as an afterthought, "I expect it's changed a good deal since I've - been gone. In fact, I think I'd scarcely recognize it."
"There have been rumors," the sergeant said darkly.
"Aye, of an ever-warm land where the wild grape grows, ruled by a saintly wizard and filled with fabulous monsters!" the captain snapped. "A land seen by dreamers, grown out of the dregs in their wine cups! Surely your are not foolish enough to believe in such!"
"Oh, the tale could stand to go on a diet, I'm sure." Matt smiled slightly, suddenly very calm. "But, even with the climate the way it is, they should still have warm winters in Louisiana; and wild Concord grapes are a bit tart, but really very good. They do grow wizards there, or they did, when I left. We didn't call them that, of course - but you would."
The room was suddenly very quiet, and Matt was sure that he had their fullest attention.
The captain licked his lips and swallowed. "And you are such a one."
"Who, me?" Matt looked up, startled. "Lord, no! I scarcely know what an atom is, let alone how to split one!"
The captain nodded. "Atoms I have heard of - 'tis a sorcery of an ancient Greek alchemist."
Matt couldn't quite keep his lip from curling. "Democritus was scarcely an alchemist."
"He knows of such matters," the sergeant breathed.
"Knows them by name," the captain agreed.
Matt stared, aghast. "Hey, now! You can't think that I-"
"Do you know how to change lead into gold?" the captain rapped.
"Well, not really. Just the broad outline. It takes a cyclotron, you see, and..." Matt's voice trailed off as he looked around at all the flinty stares. He never had learned when to lie ...
The captain turned away in a whirl of velvet. "Enough! We know he's a sorcerer; we need know no more!"
"Wizard!" Matt squawked. "Not a sorcerer!"
The captain shrugged impatiently. "Wizard, sorcerer - it adds to the same sum; 'tis greater than any authority I claim."
The sergeant raised an eyebrow, and the captain nodded. "Take him to the castle."
CHAPTER 2
They loaded him down with chains, at least one of which Matt was certain was silver, and heaved him into an oxcart for the trip uptown, literally; it was uphill all the way. They wound through curving alley streets, constantly on the upgrade, through a melange of domestic architecture ranging from about 600 to 1300 A.D. This wasn't out of the ordinary in a European town; what bothered Matt was that some of the seventh-century shops looked almost as new as the fourteenth century ones. He gave up trying to make sense out of the historical periods; apparently every universe had its own sort of sequence.
Which reminded him that he was about as far from home as a man could get. What had that parchment fragment said? "Cross the void of time and space ... ?" He had a sudden, vivid image of the chaos that would result as an infinite number of time tracks crossed and put the thought behind him with a shudder.
Enough. He was in a universe other than his own; let it stand at that. It was one where the Ice Age had stayed late, or humanity had come early, for starters-and how many snarls would that make, in history's long yarn? Starting with England still being connected to France, it could make quite a few. Sure, the Britons probably wouldn't have built a wall across that narrow neck of land that connected Calais to Dover, but the Romans would have done so; the Brito-Romans had probably built such a wall to keep the Goths out, as Rome started to decline. If there had been a Rome here.
Assume there had been; the language had some root words that resembled Latin cognates. And the captain had mentioned ancient Greece. The histories seemed to run a rough parallel; so there probably had been a Mediterranean empire corresponding to Rome.
Okay. As Rome declined, the Brito-Romans probably would have built the wall, and it probably would have been every bit as effective as Hadrian's Wall-which is to say, in the long run, that the analog-Goths simply ignored it. And the Danes had probably come sailing in as merrily as in Matt's world.
So England would have had its familiar potpourri of peoples and cultures, but with the pace possibly accelerated. Would that also apply to the English doing the conquering?
It was possible. Henry II had made a fair bid for conquering as much of France as he hadn't inherited or married. And Canute was king of Norway, Denmark, and England all at the same time, but he ruled from England. If an ambitious Englishman had started moving in this universe, he might have taken the whole ball, of wax, since he didn't have to worry about naval supply lines.
That could explain the English-language influence in southern France. Maybe Canute had done it. He was the one who'd commanded the sea not to roll in ... For a giddy moment, Matt found himself wondering if that might not be a better explanation of the lower waterline than glaciation; after all, magic seemed to work, in this universe ...
He jerked himself out of the morass of mysticism; that way lay dragons. Magic was just superstition and an interesting academic study; it didn't really work anywhere. There was a perfectly logical explanation for the sudden appearance of so many beggars! If he could just find it...
He gave his head a shake, forcing the flood of speculation. into the back of his mind, and found himself looking upward, along a twisting hill road, at a square, forbidding granite castle. In spite of the medievalisms he'd been seeing all morning, a cold-air movement coiled itself around his backbone. That castle looked so damned military, so real...
The iron teeth of the portcullis seemed to bite down at him as the guards rolled him over the drawbridge. With a sudden ache, Matt wished with every ounce of his being that he were no place else than his own sloppy kitchen back in his off-campus, hole-in-the-wall apartment. Home ...
They took him through a series of drafty corridors that seemed to grudge giving up an ounce of the winter's cold. Some had narrow, arrow slit windows; some had an occasional torch; some had nothing. The stairways they marched him up were broad enough for an army, which was probably what they were designed for, but just as dark, and possibly colder.
The guards turned left suddenly and trundled him though a huge oaken door into a fifteen-by-twenty study with two large windows to let sunlight in through actual glass. How come no arrow slits? Matt took a peek and saw a courtyard-with soldiers drilling.
But the rest of the room was reassuring, though only by comparison. The two side walls were hung with huge tapestries, one showing the seige of a castle and the other showing a stag brought to bay; and most of the floor space was occupied by a brilliant purple-and-red Moorish carpet. So Spain had fallen to North Africa, which meant this universe had had its Mohammed, and probably also its Charles Martel and its Roland. In fact, that last hero might be more probable here than at home.
The furnishing was surprisingly sparse-a tall writing-desk and stool at the side, and a large, heavy table with an hourglass-shaped chair centered in front of the window.