“How are you, Malcolm?”
Lockridge twisted his head around. Storm Darroway knelt beside him. He could see her as little more than another shadow in the murky cabin, but he caught the fragrance of her hair, her hands moved softly across him, and she sounded more anxious than he had ever heard her before.
“Alive ... I reckon.” He touched fingers to face and breast, where some grease had been smeared. “Doesn’t hurt. I—I actually feel rested.”
“You were lucky that Brann had antishock drug and enzymatic ointment with him, and decided to save you,” Storm said. “Your burns will be healed by tomorrow.” She paused, then—her tone might almost have been Auri’s: “So I am also lucky.”
“What’s goin’ on out there?”
“The Yuthoaz are plundering Avildaro.”
“Women—kids—no!” Lockridge struggled to stand.
She pulled him down. “Save your strength.”
“But those devils—”
She said with a touch of her old sharpness: “At the moment, your female friends do not suffer greatly. Remember the local mores.” Empathy returned. “But of course they mourn for those they love, dead or fled, and they will be slaves. . . . No, wait. This isn’t the South. A barbarian’s slave does not live so very differently from the barbarian himself. She suffers—unfreedom, yes, homesickness, the fact that no woman whatsoever has the respect among the Indo-Europeans that she had in this place. But spare your pity for later. You and I are in worse trouble than your little companion of yesterday.”
“M-m-m, okay.” He subsided. “What went wrong?”
She moved around to sit on the floor in front of him, hugged her knees, and let the breath whistle out between her lips. “I was a slogg,” she said bitterly. “I never imagined Brann was in this age. He organised the attack, that is obvious.”
He felt the shaken self-accusation in her, reached out and said, “You couldn’t have known.”
Her fingers hugged his. They went limp again, and she said in a winter voice: “There are no excuses for a Warden who fails. There is only the failure.”
Because that was the code of the service whose uniform he had worn, he thought suddenly that he understood her and they had become one. He drew her to him as he might have drawn his sister in her sorrow, and she laid her head on his shoulder and clung tight.
After a while, when darkness was nigh absolute, she pulled herself gently free and breathed, “Thank you.” They sat side by side now, hands clasped.
She said low and fast: “You must realise the numbers in this war through time are not large. With powers such as a single person may wield, they cannot be. Brann is—you have no word. A crucial figure. Though he must take the field himself, because so few are able, he is a commander, a maker of planet-shaking decisions, a . . . king. And I am as great a prize. And he has me.
“I do not know how he learned where, and when I was. I cannot imagine. If he could not find me in your century, how could he hound me down to this forgotten moment? It frightens me, Malcolm.” Her clasp was cold and close around his. “What contortion in time itself has he made?
“He is here alone. But no more were needed. I think he must have come out of the tunnel under the dolmen earlier than we did, sought the Battle Axe people, and made himself their god. That would not be hard to do. This whole inwandering of the Indo-Europeans—Dyaush Pitar’s, Sky Father’s, the sun’s worshippers, herdsmen, weaponmakers, charioteers, warriors, the men of clever hands and limitless dreams, whose wives are underlings and whose children are property—this was engineered by the Rangers. Do you understand? The invaders are the destroyers of the old civilisations, the old faith; they are the ancestors of the machine people. The Yuthoaz belong to Brann. He need but appear among them, as I need but appear in Avildaro or Crete, and in their dim way they will know what he is and he will know how to control them.
“Somehow he learned we were here. He could have brought his full force against us. But that might have warned our agents, who are still strong in this millennium, and led to uncontrollable events. Instead, he told the Yuthoaz to fall on Avildaro, swore the sun and the lightning would fight with them, and swore truly.
“Having won—” Lockridge felt her shudder—“he will send for a certain few of his people, and what else he needs, to work on me.”
He held her close. Her whisper was frantic in his ear: “Listen. You may get a chance to escape. Who knows? The book of time was written when first the universe exploded outward; but we have not yet turned over the next leaf. Brann will take you for a mere hireling. He may see no danger in you. If you can—if you can—go up the corridor. Seek out Herr Jesper Fledelius in Viborg, at the Inn of the Golden Lion, on an All Hallows Eve in the years from 1521 to 1541. Can you remember that? He is one of us. Can you but reach him, perhaps, perhaps—”
“Yes. Sure. If.” Lockridge did not want to speak further. In an hour or two she could explain. But right now she was so alone. He reached around with his free hand to clasp her shoulder. She moved to make his palm slip downward, and laid her mouth on his.
“Not much life is left me,” she choked. “Use what I have. Comfort me, Malcolm.”
Stunned, he could only think: Storm, oh, Storm. He gave her back the kiss, he drowned in the waves of her hair, there was nothing but darkness and her.
And a torch flared through the bars. A spear gestured, a voice barked, “Come. You, the man. He wants you.”
8
Brann of the Rangers sat alone in the Long House. The holy fire had gone out, but radiance from a crystalline globe sheened off the bearskin on his dais. The warriors who led Lockridge to him bent their knees with awe.
“God among us,” said their burly red-haired leader, “we have fetched the wizard as you commanded.”
Brann nodded. “That is well. Wait in a corner.”
The four men touched tomahawk to brow and withdrew beyond the circle of illumination. Their torch sputtered red and yellow, light barely touching the weather-beaten faces. Silence stretched.
“Be seated, if you wish,” Brann said mildly, in English. “We have much to talk about, Malcolm Lockridge.”
How did he know the complete name?
The American remained on his feet, because otherwise he would have had to sit by Brann, and looked at him. So this was the enemy.
The Ranger had removed his cloak, to show a lean, long-muscled body almost seven feet tall, clad in the form-fitting black Lockridge remembered from the corridor. His skin was very white, the hands delicately tapered, the face . . . beautiful, you could say, narrow, straight-nosed, a cold perfection of line. There was no trace of beard; the hair was dense and closely cut, like a sable cap. His eyes were iron grey.
He smiled. “Well, stand, then.” He pointed to a bottle and two glasses, slim lovely shapes beside him. “Will you drink? The wine is Bourgogne 2012. That was a wonderful year.”
“No,” Lockridge said.
Brann shrugged, poured for himself, and sipped. “I do not necessarily mean you harm,” he said.
“You’ve done enough already,” Lockridge spat.
“Regrettable, to be sure. Still, if one has lived with the concept of time as unchangeable, unappeasable—has seen much worse than today, over and over and over, and risked the same for himself—what use in sentimentalism? For that matter, Lockridge, today you killed a man whose wives and children will mourn him.”
“He was fixin’ to kill me, wasn’t he?”
“True. But he was not a bad man. He guided his kin and dependants as well as he was able, treated his friends honourably and did not go out of his way to be horrible to his enemies. You passed through the village on your way here. Be honest. You saw no slaughter, no torture, no mutilation, no arson—did you? On the whole, in centuries to come, this latest wave of immigrants will blend in rather peacefully. The affray here was somewhat exceptional. Far oftener, in northern Europe if not in the South or East, the newcomers will dominate simply because their ways are better suited to the coming age of bronze. They are more mobile, have wider horizons, can better defend themselves; on that account, the aborigines will imitate them. You yourself have been shaped by them, and so has much you hold dear.”