He looked at her, where she sat supple and sun-browned with one hand trailing in the clucking water, and wondered what her destiny was. History would forget the Tenil Orugaray, they would be no more than a few relics dredged out of bogs; before then, she would be down in dust, and when her grandchildren perished—if she lived long enough to have any, in this world of wild beasts and wilder men, storm, flood, incurable sicknesses and implacable gods—the last memory of her gentleness would flicker out forever.
He saw her few years of youth, when she could outrun deer and spend the whole light summer night giving and getting kisses: the children that would come and come and come, because so many died that every woman must bear the utmost she was able lest the tribe itself die; the middle years, when she was honoured as the matron of the headman’s house, watched sons and daughters grow up and her own strength fade: age. when she gave the council what wisdom she had reaped, while the world closed in with blindness, deafness, toothlessness, rheumatism, arthritis, and the only time left her was in the half-remembered past: the final sight of her, grown small and strange, down into the passage grave through the roofhole that meant birth: and for some years, sacrifices before the tomb and shudders at night when the wind whimpered outside the house, for it might be her ghost returning; and darkness.
He saw her four thousand years hence and four thousand miles westward: cramped over a school desk; dragging out an adolescence bored, useless, titillated and frustrated; marrying a man, or a series of men, whose work was to sell what nobody needed or really wanted—marrying also a mortgage and a commuter’s iron schedule; sacrificing all but two weeks a year of carefully measured freedom in order to buy the silly gadgets and pay the vindictive taxes: breathing smoke and dust and poison; sitting in a car, at a bridge table, in a beauty parlour, before a television, the spring gone from her body and the teeth rotten in her mouth before she was twenty; living in the heartland of liberty, the strongest nation earth had yet known, while it crawled from the march of the tyrants and the barbarians; living in horror of cancer, heart failure, mental disease, and the final nuclear flame.
Lockridge cut off the vision. He was being unjust to his own age, he knew—and to this one as well. Life was physically harder in some places, harder on the spirit in others, and sometimes it destroyed both. At most, the gods gave only a little happiness; the rest was merely existence. Taken altogether, he didn’t think they were less generous here and now than they had been to him. And here was where Auri belonged.
“You think much,” she said timidly.
He started and missed a stroke. Clear drops showered from the paddle, agleam in the level light. “Why, no,” he said. “I was only wandering.”
Again he had misused the idiom. The spirit that wandered, in thought or in dream, could enter strange realms. She regarded him with reverence. After a while when nothing but the canoe’s passage and the far-off cries of homing geese broke the stillness, she asked low, “May I call you Lynx?”
He blinked.
“I do not understand your name Malcolm,” she explained. “So it is a strong magic, too strong for me. But you are like a big golden lynx.”
“Why—why—” However childish, the gesture touched him. “If you want. But I don’t think Flower Feather could be bettered.”
Auri flushed and looked away. They continued in silence.
And the silence lengthened. Gradually Lockridge grew aware of that. Ordinarily, this near the village, there was plenty of noise: children shouting at their games, fishermen hailing the shore as they approached, housewives gossiping, perhaps the triumphant song of hunters who had bagged an elk. But he turned right and paddled up the cove between narrowing wooded banks, and no human voice reached him. He glanced at Auri. Maybe she knew what was afoot. She sat chin in hand, gazing at him, oblivious to everything else. He hadn’t the heart to speak. Instead, he sent the canoe forward as fast as he was able.
Avildaro came in sight. Under the ancient shaw at its back, it was a cluster of sod-roofed wattle huts around the Long House of ceremony, which was a more elaborate half-timbered peat structure. Boats were drawn onto the beach, where nets dried on poles. Several hundred yards off stood the kitchen midden. The Tenil Orugaray no longer lived at the very foot of that mound of oyster shells, bones, and other trash, as their ancestors had done; but they carried the offal there, for the half-tame pigs to eat, and the site was veiled with flies.
Auri came out of her trance. The clear brow wrinkled. “But no one is about!” she said.
“There must be someone in the Long House,” Lockridge answered. Smoke curled from the venthole in its roof. “We had better go see.” He was glad of the Webley at his hip.
He pulled the canoe ashore, with the girl’s help, and made fast. Her hand stole into his as they entered the village. Shadows darkened the dusty paths between huts, and the air seemed suddenly cold. “What does this mean?” she begged of him.
“If you don’t know—” He lengthened his stride.
Noise certainly buzzed from the hall. Two young men stood guard outside. “Here they corne!” one of them shouted. Both dipped their spears to Lockridge.
He went through the skin-curtained door with Auri. His eyes needed a while to adapt to the gloom within; there were no windows, and the smoke that didn’t escape stung. The fire in the central pit was holy, never allowed to go out. (Like most primitive customs, that had a practical basis. Fires were never easy to start before matches were invented, and anyone might come here to light a brand.) It had been stoked up until the flames danced and crackled, throwing uneasy flickers across sooted walls and pillars roughly hewn with magical symbols. The whole population was crowded in: some four hundred men, women, and children squatting on the dirt floor, mumbling to each other.
Echegon and his chief councillors stood near the fire with Storm. When Lockridge saw her, tall and arrogant, he forgot about Auri and went to her. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“The Yuthoaz are coming,” she said.
He spent a minute assimilating what the diaglossa associated with that name. The Battle Axe people; the northward-thrusting edge of that huge wave, more cultural than racial, of Indo-European-speaking warriors which had been spreading from southern Russia in the past century or two. Elsewhere they were destined to topple civilisations: India, Crete, Hatti, Greece would go down in ruin before them, and their languages and religions and ways of life would shape all Europe. But hitherto, in sparsely populated Scandinavia, there had not been great conflict between the native hunters, fishers, and farmers, and the chariot-driving immigrant herdsmen.
Still, Avildaro had heard of bloody clashes to the east.
Echegon hugged Auri to him for a moment before he said: “I had not too much fear for you under Malcolm’s protection. But I thank Her that you are back.” The strong, bearded visage turned to Lockridge. “Today,” he said, “men hunting southward hastened home with word that the Yuthoaz are moving against us and will be here tomorrow. They are plainly a war band, nothing but armed men, and Avildaro is the first village on their way. What have we done to offend them or the gods?”
Lockridge glanced at Storm. “Well,” he said in English, “I kind of hate to use our weapons on those poor devils, but if we’ve got to—”
She shook her head. “No. The energies might be detected. Or, at least, the story might reach Ranger agents and alert them to us. Best that you and I take refuge elsewhere.”
“What? But—but—”
“Remember,” she said, “time is immutable. Since this place survives a hundred years from now, quite likely the natives will repel the attack tomorrow.”
He could not break free of her eyes; but Auri’s were on him too, and Echegon’s, and his boatmates’ and girl friends’ and the flintsmith’s and everyone’s. He squared his shoulders. “Maybe they didn’t, either,” he said. “Maybe they’re conquered underlings in the future, or would be except for us. I’m stayin’.”