Richard sure as hell hoped so. He had drunk too much water.
From the head of the column came the silvery notes of a horn sounding a three-toned call. This was echoed distantly. After a few minutes had passed, a dozen or so tiny pinpricks of fire emerged from the vicinity of the downslope bonfire and approached the caravan in a sinuous line: riders carrying torches, coming to escort them.
By the time that the groups converged, Claude and Richard could see that the last beacon fire burned outside of a walled enclosure resembling an ancient American plains fort. It stood on a bluff above a tree-crowded watercourse that must drain into the Saône. The caravan halted momentarily, and Lady Epone and Waldemar went forward to greet the escort party. In the torchlight, Richard unconcernedly admired the stately Tanu woman, who was riding a white chalicothere of exceptional size and wearing a dark-blue hooded cloak that floated behind her.
After a moment’s conference, two of the soldiers from the fort rode off to one side and in some manner called in the pack of amphicyons. The bear-dogs were led away on a side path while the rest of the escort fell in beside the caravan for the last part of the journey. A gate in the palisade opened and they rode inside, two by two. Then, in what was to become a familiar procedure, the prisoners had their mounts tethered to posts in front of double troughs of feed and water. At the left of each chaliko was a dismounting block. After the soldiers unlocked their chains, the muscle-sore travelers descended and gathered in an untidy group while Waldemar addressed them once again.
“All you travelers! We’ll rest here for one hour, then go on until early morning, another eight hours.” Everybody groaned. “Latrines in the small building behind you, get your food and drink in the bigger building next door. Anybody sick or gotta complaint, see me. Be ready to remount when you hear the horn. Nobody comes into the area beyond the hitching rail. That’s all.”
Epone, who was still on chalikoback, guided her beast delicately through the throng until she loomed over Richard.
“I’m glad to see you’re recovering.”
He gave her a quizzical look. “I’m just dandy. And it’s nice to know you’re a lady who cares about the health of her livestock.”
She threw her head back and laughed, cascades of sound like the deep strumming of a harp. Her partially hidden hair gleamed in the torchlight. “It really is too bad about you,” she said. “You’ve certainly got more spirit than that silly medievalist.”
She turned her animal away, rode to the opposite side of the compound, and was helped out of the saddle by obsequious men in white tunics.
“What was that all about?” inquired Amerie, who had come up with Felice.
Richard glowered. “How the fuck should I know?” He went tottering off toward the latrine.
Felice watched him go. “Are all your patients this grateful?”
The nun laughed. “He’s coming along just fine. You know they’re on the mend when they bite your head off.”
“He’s nothing but a stupid weakling.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” Amerie said. But Felice only snorted and went off to the mess hall. Later, when the two women and Claude were eating cheese and cold meat and maize bread, Richard came and apologized.
“Think nothing of it,” the nun said. “Sit down with us. We’ve got something to talk over with you.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah?”
Claude said softly, “Felice has a plan for escape. But there are problems.”
“No shit?” the pirate guffawed.
The little ring-hockey player took Richard’s hand and squeezed. His eyes bulged and he pressed his lips together. “Less noise,” Felice said. “The problem isn’t in the escape itself, but in the aftermath. They’ve taken our maps and compasses. Claude has a general knowledge of this part of Europe from his paleontology studies more than a hundred years ago, but that won’t help us if we can’t orient ourselves while we’re on the run. Can you help us? Did you study the large-scale map of Pliocene France when we were back at the auberge?”
She dropped his hand and Richard stared at the whitened flesh, then threw her a glance of pure venom. “Hell, no. I figured there’d be plenty of time for that once we arrived. I brought a self-compensating compass, a computer sextant, all the charts I’d need. But I suppose all the stuff was confiscated. The only route I looked at was the one west to the Atlantic, to Bordeaux.”
Felice grunted in disgust. Claude persisted in a peaceable tone, “We know you must be experienced in navigation, son. There’s got to be some way we can orient ourselves. Can you locate the Pliocene polestar for us? That would be a big help.”
“So would a frigate of the Fleet Air Arm,” Richard grumbled. “Or Robin Hood and his merry men.”
Felice reached out for him again and he dodged back hastily. “Can you do it, Richard?” she asked. “Or are those stripes on your sleeves for good conduct?”
“This isn’t my home planet, dykey-doll! And the noctilucent clouds don’t make the job any easier.”
“A lot of volcanism,” Claude said. “Dust in the upper atmosphere. But the moon has set and there aren’t any ordinary clouds. Do you think you’d be able to get a fix as the glowing patches come and go?”
“I might,” Richard muttered. “But why the hell I should bother beats me… What I want to know is, what happened to my pirate outfit? Who put this coverall on me?”
“It was there,” Felice said sweetly, “and you needed it. Badly. So we obliged. Anything to help out a friend.”
Claude hurried to say, “You got all messed up in some fight you were in back at the castle. I just cleaned you up a bit and washed your other clothes. They’re hanging on the back of your saddle. Should be dry by now.”
Richard looked suspiciously at the smirking Felice, then thanked the old man. But a fight? Had he been in a fight? And who had been laughing at him with lofty contempt? A woman with drowning-pool eyes. But not Felice…
Amerie said, “Please try for the polestar if you feel well enough to manage it. We only have one more night of travel on this high north road. Then we’ll be angling off every which way and traveling in the daytime. Richard, it’s important.”
“Okay, okay,” he grouched. “I don’t suppose any of you Earthworms knows the latitude of Lyon.”
“About forty-five north, I think,” said Claude. “Around the same as my boyhood home in Oregon, anyhow, from the way I remember the sky over the auberge. Too bad we don’t have Stein. He’d know.”
“A rough guess is good enough,” Richard said.
The nun lifted her head. The sound of a horn came from outside in the fort’s yard. “Well, here we go again, Group. Good luck, Richard.”
“Megathanks, Sister. If we follow any escape plan tins kid dreams up, we’re gonna need it.”
They rode on through the night, traveling from beacon to beacon along the plateau trail with the river valley at their right and the scattered small volcanoes of the Limagne giving an occasional ruby pulse in the southwest. Constellations totally unfamiliar to the Earth natives of the twenty-second century crowded the sky of Exile. Many of those stars were the same ones that would be visible in the planet’s future; but their differing galactic orbits had twisted the familiar star patterns all out of recognition. There were stars in the Pliocene sky that were destined to die before the time of the Galactic Milieu; others that Milieu people would know were at this time still dark in their dust cloud wombs.
Richard viewed the Pliocene heavens with nonchalance. He’d seen an awful lot of different skies. Given plenty of time and a fixed base for observation, finding the local Polaris would be a snap, even with eyeball instrumentation alone. It was only the fact that they were moving on animal-back, and the need for a quick fix, that made the thing a bit tricky.