“Is he a bad man?”
“No. But—”
“Do you want her to remain single: knowing how unnatural that makes her here?”
“No, no, no—”
“Is anyone else available to her?”
“Well—”
“Unless, perhaps, yourself,” Storm growled.
“Oh, good God!” Lockridge said. “You know I—you and me—”
“Don’t set yourself too high, my man. But as for this wench. If the races are to become one, there have to be unions. Marriage is too strong an institution for the Battle Axe people to give up; therefore the Sea People will have to accept it. Auri is the heiress of this community’s leadership, Withucar is as influential as any in his tribe. Both in practice and as an example, nothing better could happen than their marriage. Of course she threw a fit. Are you so ignorant you think she will never console herself? Nor love her children by him? Nor forget you?”
“Well, though—I mean, she deserves a free choice.”
“Who is there for her to choose, except you who don’t want her? Nor would it help the purpose if you did. You came in complaining of unhappiness among the villagers. The English are going to be still unhappier after the Norman Conquest. But a few centuries later, there are no Normans. Everyone is an Englishman. For us, here and now, that same process begins with Auri and Withucar. Don’t talk to me about free choice . . . unless you think every war should only be fought by volunteers.”
Lockridge stood helpless. Storm came to him and put her arms about his neck. “I believe Auri, in her childish way, calls you Lynx,” she murmured. “I would like to do that.”
“Aw—look—”
She rubbed her head on his breast. “Let me be childish now and then, with you.”
A Yutho voice called from beyond the curtain: “Goddess, the lord Hu asks to come in.”
“Damn!” Storm whispered. “I’ll get rid of him as fast as I can.” Aloud: “Let him enter.”
Spare and lithe in his green uniform, Hu trod in to bow. “I beg your forgiveness, brilliance,” he said. “But I was out on an aerial sweep.”
Storm tautened. “Well?”
“Most likely this means nothing. Still, I saw a considerable fleet beating across the North Sea. The lead ship is Iberian, the rest are skin boats. I never heard of such a combination. They’re plainly bound from England to Denmark.”
“At this season?” Awareness of Lockridge drained from Storm. She let him go and stood alone in the frigid light.
“Yes, that’s another paradox, brilliance,” Hu said. “I couldn’t detect advanced equipment. If they have any, it must be negligible. But they will be here in a day or two.”
“Some Ranger operation? Or a mere local adventure? These are times when the natives themselves look to new things.” Storm frowned. “Best I go glance at them myself.”
She fetched her gravity belt and fastened it about her waist, an energy pistol at the hip. “You may as well stay and rest, Malcolm, I won’t be gone long,” she said, and left beside Hu.
For some time Lockridge prowled the hall. The night was noisy with wind, but he heard a thrusting inner silence. And the gods so clumsily and tenderly hacked out of the pillars—did they look at him? Lord, Lord, he thought, what does a guy do when he can’t help somebody who cares for him?
What is truth?
A woman six thousand years hence told him her son had been burnt alive. But she knew the cause was good. Didn’t she?
Lockridge checked himself. He had almost gone through the veil of lightlessness. Brann had suffered and died behind it. His guts knotted. Why did they continue to maintain the thing?
Why hadn’t he asked?
I reckon I never wanted to, he understood, and stepped through.
This end of the house had not been refurnished. The floor was dirt, the seats covered with skins gone dusty. One globe illuminated the section; shadows lay in every comer. The black barricade cut off sound, too. The wind was gone. Lockridge stood in total quiet.
That which was on the table, wired into the machine, stirred and whimpered.
“No!” Lockridge screamed, and fled.
Long afterward, he got the courage to stop sobbing and return. He could do no else. Brann, who had fought as best he could for his own people, was not dead.
Little was left, except skin drawn dry across the big arching bones. Tubes fed into him and kept the organism together. Electrodes pierced the skull, jolted the brain and recorded what was brought forth. For some reason of stimulus, the eyelids had been cut away and the balls of the eyes must stare into the light overhead.
“I didn’t know,” Lockridge wept.
Tongue and lips struggled in the wreck of a face. Lockridge wasn’t wearing his diaglossa for Brann’s age, but he could guess that a fragment of self pleaded, “Kill me.”
While just beyond the curtain—her and me—
Lockridge reached for the machine.
“Stop! What are you doing?”
He turned, very slowly, and saw Storm and Hu. The man’s energy gun was out, aimed at his belly. The woman said urgently: “I wanted to spare you this. It does take time, to extract the last traces of memory. There isn’t much cerebrum by now, he’s really no more than a worm, so you needn’t feel pity. Remember, he had begun to do the same thing to me.”
“Does that excuse you?” Lockridge shouted.
“Will Pearl Harbour excuse Hiroshima?” she gibed.
For the first time in his existence, Lockridge said an obscenity to a woman. “Never mind your fancy reasons,” he gasped. “I know how you kept yourself in my country . . . by murderin’ my countrymen. I know John and Mary gave me an honest look at the way you run your own territory. How old are you? I got enough hints about that too. You can’t have done every crime you have done, except in hundreds o’ years, your own time. That’s why they’ve got the knife in you, back at the palace—why everybody wants to be the Koriach—she’s made immortal. While Ola’s mother is old at forty.”
“Stop that!” Storm cried.
Lockridge spat. “I’ve got no business wonderin’ how many lovers you’ve had, or how I’m just a thing you used,” he said. “But you aren’t goin’ to use Auri, understand? Nor her people. Nor anyone. To hell with you: the hell you came from!”
Hu levelled the gun and said, “That will suffice.”
20
Rain started before dawn. Lockridge awoke to the sound of it, muffled on the peat roof of the cabin where he lay, loud on the muddy ground. Through a lattice across the doorway, he looked over pastures where Yutho cattle huddled as drenched as their herdsmen. Sere leaves dropped one by one off an oak, under the steady beat of water. He couldn’t see the rest of the village from this outlier hut, nor the bay. That added to an isolation he had believed was already infinite.
He didn’t want to put his Warden uniform back on, but once out from the skins, he found the air too chill and damp. I’ll ask for an Orugaray rig, or even a Yutho one, he thought. She’ll give me that much, I hope, before she—
Does what?
He shook himself, angrily. Having managed a few hours’ sleep, after he was put here, he should now be able to hold his courage.
Hard to do, though, when everything had broken in his grasp during a single night. To learn what Storm and her cause really were—well, he’d had clues enough, had simply ducked his duty to think about them, until the sight of Brann snapped the leash she had put on him. And to know what she would make these people, whom he had become so fond of—that was too deep a wound.
Poor Auri, he thought in his hollowness. Poor Withucar.
The remembrance of the girl was curiously healing. He might yet be able to do something for her, if no one else. Maybe she could stow away on that fleet bound hither. It was evidently a joint Iberian-British venture, to judge from some remarks that passed between Storm and Hu while they oversaw the preparation of a jail for Lockridge. The size as well as composition was unique; but then, some rather large events appeared to be going on in England these days, of which the founding of Stonehenge might be one consequence. Storm was too preoccupied to care much. It satisfied her that everyone aboard, seen through infrared magnifiers, was of archaic racial type, no agents from the future. Of course, in this weather the fleet would doubtless heave to, and not arrive for an extra day or so. He might not be around then. But he could, perhaps, find ways to suggest the idea of escape to Auri.