Everard rode off across a field where corpses sprawled and gaped, wounded men moaned, mutilated horses thrashed and shrieked. Most likely no one paid him any particular heed. Glancing back, he saw how Duke Roger pursued hundreds down the road to Siponto. He also saw how Rainulf rallied and regrouped his army, while King Roger’s stayed immobile.
Mostly that vision was in his mind’s eye, from his knowledge of history—of how history was supposed to read. The actual sight was confusion, a mob scene, that ultimate absurdity which is war.
A little distance away rose a tree-grown hillock. Once behind it, he was hidden from view. “All right,” he ordered through his medallion. “Come fetch me.”
The sharpness still thrilled within him. While it lasted, he should go aloft and survey the battle as a whole, make sure that now events unrolled right.
A vehicle blinked into his presence, large enough for the horse as well as its crew. Quickly, they got the animal stalled inboard. Everard praised him, stroked the wet, dirt-streaked mane, patted the velvety nose. “He’d like a sugar cube better,” said a short blond woman—she looked Finnish—and offered him one. She trembled in glee barely controlled. This day, she could believe, she had helped restore the world from which she came.
The vehicle flicked into heaven. Sky surrounded it. Earth was dun land and quicksilver sea, far below. Everard sought an optical. He sat down before it, adjusted magnification, studied what happened. Seen thus, the death and pain, anger and glory became unreal, a puppet show, a chronicler’s paragraph.
Gifted in many ways, the Norman cloth of him dyed in Oriental subtleties, King Roger was nonetheless no tactical genius. He owed his victories mainly to crack troops, ruthless determination, and frequent disarray among his opponents. At Rignano he waited too long, he lost the advantage that his son’s charge had gained him. When he did attack, his wave broke as if on a sea-cliff. Thereupon Rainulf threw his entire force against the Sicilians. The prince’s return was of no avail. Panic seized them and they stampeded, each for himself. Rainulf’s people hunted them down by ones and twos, without quarter. At day’s end, three thousand lay dead on the field. The two Rogers gathered a few survivors, fought their way clear, and escaped into the mountains, back to Salerno.
But that was as it should be, as it had been in the Patrol’s world. The triumph would not long endure. Roger would collect fresh forces and win back what he had lost. Rainulf was to die of a fever in April 1139. The mourning was great and futile. In July 1139, the two Rogers bushwhacked a papal army at Galuccio, whose noble leaders fled while thousands drowned trying to flee across the River Garigliano; and Pope Innocent became a prisoner of war.
Oh, King Roger was very respectful. He knelt before the Holy Father and pledged allegiance. In return he received absolution and approval of all his claims. Little remained thereafter but mopping-up operations. In the end, even Abbot Bernard hailed the king as a righteous lord and relations grew downright affectionate. Further storms were to come, Roger’s conquests in Africa, the Second Crusade which he more or less sat out, his attempt on Constantinople, fresh conflicts with the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—but meanwhile he timbered strongly the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as he nurtured the growth of that hybrid civilization which presaged the Renaissance.
Everard slumped in his seat. Weariness rose to overwhelm him. Victory tasted like the dust still in his mouth. Only let him sleep, let him for a little time forget what he had lost.
“Looks okay,” he said. “Proceed to base.”
1989 α A. D.
Beyond the Mississippi, the first signs of white occupation appeared. They were outposts, thinly strewn across wilderness, little more than wooden forts connected by roads that might better be called trails. Trading posts, Tamberly guessed. Or did they mainly support missionaries? No stockade failed to enclose a building with a tower or steeple, usually surmounted by a cross and often the largest. She didn’t pause for closer observation. The radio silence hounded her onward.
East of the Alleghenies she found real colonies. They took the form of walled towns surrounded by plowland and pasture laid out in long strips. Villages dotted the hinterlands, rows of cottages very like each other. A few boasted a sort of plaza that was probably a marketplace, centered on a tall crucifix or a structure somewhat like a Breton calvary. All had a chapel, and every town was dominated by its main church. Never did Tamberly see a farmstead by itself. The scenes reminded her of what she’d read and heard about the Middle Ages. Swallowing tears and terror, she leapfrogged on over the miles.
Settlement thickened as she neared the seaboard. A small city occupied lower Manhattan. Its cathedral (?) dwarfed the St. Patrick’s she remembered. The style was foreign to her, massive, many-tiered, brutally powerful. “Enough to scare off Billy Graham,” she quavered at her mute communicator.
Several ships lay in the harbor, and she got a good look from on high, through her magnifying optical, at one that was standing out the Narrows. A broad-beamed, three-masted square-rigger, it resembled a merchantman of about 1600, according to pictures she had seen, though even to her landlubber’s eye the differences of detail were countless. A flag of lilies on a blue field flew on the staff. At the mainmast top another, yellow and white, displayed crossed keys.
Blackness surged over her. She was well out to sea before she fought halfway clear of it.
Go ahead. Scream.
That steadied her more. The trick was not to let it go on and on, feeding hysteria, but to blow off emotion till you could think again. She loosened her painfully tight grip on the handlebars, worked her shoulder blades to free up those muscles, and was into reasoning about the situation before she noticed, with a harsh little laugh, that she’d forgotten to unclench her jaw.
The cycle flew itself ever farther. Ocean heaved immense, empty, a thousand shifting greens, grays, blues. Split air rumbled and whistled. Cold eddied past the force-screen and around her.
No doubt left. The terrible thing has happened. Something has changed the past, and the world I knew—my world, Manse’s, Uncle Steve’s, everybody’s and everything’s—is gone. The Time Patrol is gone. No, I’m thinking wrongly. They never were. I exist without parents, grandparents, country, history, without cause, a random thing tossed up by quantum chaos.
She couldn’t grasp it. Though she put it into Temporal, which had a grammar made to deal with the paradoxes of time travel, the concept wouldn’t come real to her in the way that something as abstract as evolutionary biology was nevertheless real, hand-graspable. This state of affairs set logic at naught and made reality a cloud-shadow.
Oh, sure, they explained the theory to us at the Academy, but as a sketch, like a freshman general science course required of an English major. My class of cadets wasn’t being prepared for police work or anything like that. We’d be field scientists, off in prehistory, when humans were few and it was practically impossible to cause any changes that the course of events wouldn’t soon compensate for. We’d go on our expeditions in the same straightforward way that Stanley went to explore darkest Africa.
What to do, what to do?
Leap back to the Pleistocene, I guess. It should be safely far downtime. Manse should be there still. (No, “still” is meaningless, isn’t it?) He’ll take charge. He’s hinted at having already (“already”) experienced something of this kind. Maybe now I can get him to tell me what it was. (Maybe I should tell him I know he’s in love with me, the dear sweet bear. I’ve been too bashful, or afraid, or unsure of my own feelings…. God damn it, woman, will you stop this woolgathering?)