“It was not because of romanticism,” she said. There was no more of the accustomed asperity in her tone, not even grief. She told her story flatly, as though it were the scenario of a stage play that she had been forced to attend too many times, or even an act of confession.
“In the beginning, when I was only greedy for money, I did not care what kind of world lay on the other side of the time-portal. But later, when my heart was finally touched, it became very different. I attempted to have the travelers send messages back to me, reassuring me about the nature of the Pliocene land. Time and again I gave to sensible-seeming persons materials that I felt certain would survive the reversal of the temporal field. Very early tests by my late husband had shown that amber was best, and so my envelopes were pieces of this material, carefully sliced in half, with little wafers of ceramic to insert. These could be written upon with an ordinary graphite pencil, then sealed in the amber with natural balsam cement. I instructed certain travelers to study the ancient scene, write down their considered judgment of it, then return to the vicinity of the time-gate where the translations invariably took place at dawn. You see, Professor Guderian had long ago established that solar time in the ancient epoch was the same as that of the modern world we lived in. I had wished to give the new arrivals maximum daylight to adjust to the new environment, so I always sent them at sunup. Malheureusement, this unvarying program made it most convenient for the minions of the Tanu to control the portal! Long before it occurred to me to try the amber message holders, the exotics had built Castle Gateway and taken steps to seize all time-travelers immediately upon their arrival.”
“So you never got any messages from the past?”
“Nothing. In later years, we tried more sophisticated techniques for mechanical retrieval of information, but nothing worked. We could get no pictures, no sounds from the Pliocene. The devices always returned to us in a useless condition. Of course, it is easy to see why!”
“And yet you kept sending people through.”
Her face was haunted. “I was tempted again and again to shut down the operation, but the pathetic ones would implore me, and so I continued. Then there came the time when my fearful conscience could no longer be denied. I took the amber materials, constructed a simple trip-lever device to operate the switch of the machine, and came to see for myself this world six million years distant from our own.”
“But…” Claude began.
“In order to elude my devoted staff, who would surely have stopped me, I made the translation at midnight.”
“Ah.”
“I found myself enveloped in a terrible dust storm, a hell of choking wind that threw me to the ground and rolled me as easily as a Russian thistle across the arid plateau. I had taken cuttings of my beloved roses, and in my fright I clung to them as the hurricane tumbled and battered me. I was blown to the lip of a dry watercourse and precipitated into its rocky depths, where I lay unconscious until dawn, badly bruised but otherwise unhurt. By the time the sun rose the sirocco was gone. I spied the Castle and had just made up my mind to go to it for aid when the attendants came trooping ou to wait for the morning’s arrivals.”
She paused and a slow smile stole over her lips. “No time-travelers came that day. My staff was too much in a tumult, you understand. The people from the Castle became very agitated and rushed back inside. Not long thereafter a troop of soldiers came galloping posthaste out of the barbican and rushed off to the east, passing not thirty meters from the bushy cleft where I lay hidden. At the head of the train was an enormously tall exotic man dressed in robes of purple and gold.
“You will understand that I was in great pain from my battering. I crawled into a kind of shallow cave beneath the roots of an acacia tree that grew on the rim of the dry ravine. As the sun climbed, my thirst became dreadful. But this torment was as nothing compared to my agony of soul. Back in the auberge, I had imagined many possible derangements of the Pliocene world, fierce beasts, inhospitable terrain, exploitation of newcomers by the earlier arrivals among the time-farers, even a malfunction of the translational field that would cast the poor travelers into oblivion. But never had I imagined that the ancient epoch would see our planet in thrall to a nonhuman race. All unwitting, I had sent my pathetic, hopeful people into slavery. I turned my face into the dust and asked God to grant me death.”
“Oh, Angélique.”
She did not seem to see or hear him. Her voice was very quiet, barely audible among the rising evening clamor of the Rhineland birds and insects.
“When I finally stopped weeping, I saw a round object half-buried in the dust not an arm’s length away on the ravine floor. It was a melon. The rind was thick and it had not been broken by its rolling across the plateau in the windstorm. When I cut into it with my small couteau de poche I found it sweet and laden with water. And so my thirst was quenched and I lived through the day.
“Very late in the afternoon there came a procession of carts drawn by strange animals. I know now that these were hellads, large giraffes with short necks used for draft purposes. The carts had human drivers and contained vegetables resembling large beetroots, fodder for the Cattle chalikos. The carts entered the fortress by the postern gate and after a time returned laden with manure. As they journeyed back into the lowlands I followed at a far distance. Just before nightfall we came to a kind of farm with the buildings secure behind a stockade. I hid myself in bushes and tried to decide what to do. If I revealed myself to the farm people they would surely recognize me. And was it not possible that they would exact retribution for my betrayal of their dreams? I would accept this punishment if God willed. But I had already begun to suspect that a different role had been ordained to me. So I did not approach the gate of the farm but went instead into a dense forest adjacent to it. I found a spring, ate a small amount of the food in my Survival Unit, and prepared to spend the night in a great cork tree, even as we have sheltered ourselves in this cypress today…”
The other three members of the expedition had wakened on their perches among the higher branches. Now they swung down as slowly and quietly as sloths to take places next to Claude and listen. The old woman, sitting far out from the trunk with her legs dangling, did not seem to notice them.
“Very late in the night, after the moon went down, the monsters came. At first there was a great silence, with all of the jungle noises falling still as though a switch had been cut. I heard a sound of horns and a distant baying. And then it seemed as though the moon were rising again over a ridge of land just north of my tree. There was light of many colors coming from some flaming thing twisting in and out of the trees. It raced down the slope toward me. I heard a noise like a tornado, at once terrible and musical. The fiery apparition became an elfin cavalcade, the Hunt!, and it glowed as it raged downhill. It was chasing something. That I saw when the whirlwind of jeweled riders came into a small glen some two hundred meters away from me. By the bright starlight I saw the, prey shambling along, a huge creature, black as ink, with coiling arms like those of a devilfish springing from its shoulders and eyes like great red lamps.”
“Fitharn!” Richard hissed. Claude gave him an elbow in the ribs. Madame paid no attention to the interruption.
“The black monster dodged among the trees on the slope below me, coming ever closer, with the Hunt in hot pursuit. I have never in my life known such terror. My very soul seemed to shriek with it, although I uttered no sound. With all of my will I prayed for deliverance, clinging to the large branch of my cork tree with eyes tightly shut. There was a noise of carillons and thunderbolts, a buffeting wind, blinding flashes of light that penetrated my closed lids, smells of ordure and ozone and doping perfume. Every nerve end of mine seemed assaulted and overloaded, but still I willed myself to be safe.