He was thinking of Mike Macklin.
“Oh—in our years, which are round and about the same as yours, so I am told, about ten. More or less. We have been wandering too long.”
“And King Clinton is dead now? I was hoping—”
“Dead? The King? I devoutly hope not! But he had to go away—some things neither man nor king can control and destiny is a harsh mistress—” Dalreay sounded mystical and Prestin let it go, since the mythical King Clinton was not available for a cozy chat. There were so many more things he had to know if he was to find his way back to the Earth he called home.
Quite evidently, these people were accustomed to trade across the dimensions. The strangeness of the concept to Prestin meant nothing beside the cheerful acceptance of him by Dalreay. Then Prestin said, “Clinton. That’s not an Italian name.”
“Why should it be?” Dalreay kept looking out to the featureless horizon, marked only by isolated clumps of the tenpin trees. “He wasn’t Italian—”
“Do,” said Prestin in English, “do you speak English?”
Before he had finished he knew the answer for, clear in his mind like a rock shaking free of receding waves, he recalled that hazy conversation of last night, when Todor Dalreay had promised to take on himself the responsibility for this new out-worlder Prestin. The man with the harsh voice of authority had spoken English. Preston had been too far gone in weariness and dizziness to react.
“Of course!” Dalreay laughed delightedly. “If you mean to say we’ve been prancing around each other in Italian all this time!” His English was excellent, uninflected by the thickness that marred his Italian. “Great jumping Jehoshaphat!”
“Amen,” said Prestin. He asked the next questions as though they were all part of what had gone before, but more than anyone else he knew the importance of what he asked; as much as he liked Dalreay and imagined he could come to endure and possibly enjoy this life, he had to get back. “Tell me, Todor. Where are we going now? Can I ever get back to my own dimension?”
“As to the second question,” said Delreay, squinting under his hand at the bar horizon, “I could not say. Only the Valcini have access to the Contessa, curse her black soul—”
“The Montevarchi!”
Dalreay halted and turned in a lithe panther motion that gripped Prestin’s wrists together, grinding the bones. He shoved his face close up to Prestin, his lips ricked back snarling as he spoke, his eyes boring in with hatred.
“You know that she-cat, that devil’s spawn! Speak, out-worlder Prestin, quickly—or you die—slowly!”
“Here—what the—” And then Prestin saw that here was no time for niceties of speech. “I don’t know her!” he screamed. “I’ve heard of her as an evil woman but I’ve never met her. She tried to kill me. I was escaping from her when I was trapped into this world!”
Dalreay glared levelly into Prestin’s face. What he saw gave him some reassurance. He let the Earthman’s wrists go and Preston rubbed them in turn, ruefully aware of the quick strength of the hunter.
“Look, Todor,” he said in his reasonable voice, the one he used arguing to get his byline on a story anyone could have written. “My friends on the other side were being chased by Trugs of the Montevarchi. We were shot and shelled”—he had had to alter that at the blank expression on Dalreay’s face—”We were in big trouble. A helicopter—a machine that flies—was about to fall on us when I came through here without knowing. I think maybe all my friends were killed.”
The look Dalreay gave him held a hard calculating decision. “You are not just an unfortunate fallen through a nodal point into our world, then. You have knowledge, I see. And you say you are fighting the Contessa?”
“Yes. I know little about all this.” He swallowed. “Do you know a man named Macklin?”
“Macklin? No. The name means nothing to me.”
“Too bad. Still. You haven’t told me where we are going. I was trying to head north when you found me.”
“North. Yes, toward the Big Green. You would have been sorry to have reached it.” And he laughed, a short ugly bark. “Come, friend Bob. Breakfast is ready. I am hungry.”
Sensibly, Prestin considered, he would let the subject lie. Naturally Dalreay would be suspicious of anyone knowing his enemies here, where any out-worlder would have come tumbling in helplessly—like Fritzy.
As they walked toward the kitchen Galumpher, Prestin nerved himself, and then said harshly, “Tell me, Todor. Have you heard of a girl called Fritzy Upjohn?”
He did not know if he wanted to hear a yes as answer—the subsequent details might harrow him so unmercifully that he would be unsane for a period long enough to approach insanity.
“No.” Dalreay glanced shrewdly at Prestin. “Is she—important to you?”
Prestin’s immediate answer would have been, “No! No, of course not.” But now he said slowly, “She could be, Todor. She could be, for I feel responsible for her.”
“Well, come and eat. You’ll feel more like life after that.” He clapped Prestin on the back and began to mount the leather-thonged ladder that swayed from the rear of the Galumpher. From the top, a mouth-watering whiff of frying savored down. Prestin climbed with a will. He could do nothing for Fritzy until he reached the approximate position in the north of Rome where she had been transferred. And he would go north, despite the vague warnings he had against that compass point.
The broad flat back of the Galumpher contained a ring of old women muffled in shawls, a number of the ubiquitous half-naked children, squealing and struggling, and a few men, clad like Dalreay in green. A man with one eye, a wisp of gray beard and a wisp of gray scalp hair, leered at Dalreay, his portly belly aswag with half the contents of the earthenware goblet balanced at his side. He wore dark brown patterned with yellow and his scant gray hairs were half covered by a lopsided helmet.
“Hey, Todor! I hear you did a grand job!” he said in good English but with a thick sloshing sound, a well-belching sound of good living. “You are to be congratulated!”
The women poked into a pot over the fire which burned thriftily on its bed of slate, ladling out fried rashers of meat onto earthenware plates. Prestin accepted one gratefully, with a twist of brown bread broken from a long roll. A gourd of water stood nearby.
Dalreay said something to the swag-bellied man in a tongue Prestin could not understand, at which the fat man half-reared up, spluttering, while the women cackled shrilly and the other men guaffawed, biting into their meat with strong white teeth.
“I gave you enough to do the job!” Once more the wine rose to the fat shining lips. “If you bungled it—”
“No, Nodger, I didn’t bungle it! You gave me enough powder to bring down half the mountains of the Daneberg!”
“I am the fire master of this caravan! I measure the powder—”
“Next time, Nodger, do not drink so deeply when you measure. Or I shall personally refuse to barter for wine the next time we go south!”
“You wouldn’t do that, Todor, would you, to an old man who has only his wine and his gunpowder for comfort and family? Think, Todor, what your poor father said—”
“Enough!” Flushed, Dalreay spat out a bone and fixed his unwinking stare on the old Nodger. “My parents are dead, slaughtered by the Honshi guards of the Valcini. No more, Nodger, if you value your hide.”
The oldster went back to his meat and bread with frequent sips of wine. Thinking of what David Macklin had said that first time he met him, Prestin had to smile. Every dimension, then, had its Falstaff? And a good thing, too.
“By Amra!” said one of the men through his meat. “I heard the accursed jewel mines spouted to the sky!”