Vertical stick. Its upper end forked. End of a cross pole in it. Support for the lean-to in which he found himself. Firelight reflected from the pole’s surface. Dark beyond the pole: Snow, trees, and shadows. It was night. Snowing lightly, the flakes small and dry.
He turned his head gently to his left, the pain in his head making him lightheaded. When he could risk opening his eyes once more, Gordon saw in the swim of images that he was in a lean-to thatched with cedar boughs. Looking to his right he saw that the open side of the shelter faced a fire in a ring of stones. The biggest of the stones, a gray plate the size of a car wheel, was on the far side, reflecting the heat into the lean-to, a pair of ghostly images beyond the rock plate dissolving in the light. The ground outside was white with a thin coating of snow. He could feel he was on a warm pelt-covered bed of more cedar boughs, their fragrance mixing pleasantly with the smell of wood smoke. Gordon was covered with a blanket of fur and also by a very warm human body. He risked glancing down.
“God’n? Mina ah tu?”
He forced his eyes to focus. There was the face of a young woman among the fur covers looking up at him. Middle twenties, maybe. Her complexion was a tannish-sandy caramel, quite fair, her hair straight, pinkish brown in the firelight, and braided with little white dried flowers. Her face was roundish, her dark, almost Asian eyes separated by a very Roman-looking nose. “Squanto?” he asked in a rough whisper.
She looked surprised, grinned, placed her hand against the fur of her coat, and said, “Nom. Nomat. Pela. Peh-la.” She placed her hand on Gordon’s breast and said, “God’n.” Returning the hand to her own breast she repeated, “Pela.”
“Pela,” he repeated. Gordon studied her face and it seemed like it was in the wrong time. Pela was no stooped-over, heavy-browed, shaggy-haired Neanderthal. But, then again, her people had all been wiped out without leaving a discoverable petroglyph or tooth by which to remember them. A good question for the archeologist.
He gingerly raised his head and tried to look around. The woman took his chin in a firm but gentle hand and drew his gaze back to her face. She was shaking her head, sadness in her eyes. “Tallygan, Mimmit,” she said as she held up two fingers, shook her head, then placed the palm of her left hand against her left cheek, closed her eyes, and tilted her head over on her left side. With two fingers of her other hand she pinched her nose shut. It didn’t look to Gordon as though the two Egyptians had made it.
With a great effort he propped himself up on his elbows and gestured with his head in one and then another direction, regretting both movements.
“Eta?” she said.
Where. Gordon nodded. “Eta.”
Pela pointed toward the foot of the shelter. Limb by limb, Gordon struggled from beneath the furs, stood, and steadied himself by holding onto the trunk of a sapling as a wave of faintness and nausea hit and passed. Opening his eyes once again, he looked into the darkness. Pela was standing beside him wearing a suit of furs. He had only a moment to admire the furs when the cold suddenly cut through his light desert clothing like a thousand razors and began running his headache into the red zone. He sagged, wrapped his arms around his shoulders, and peered into the dark. From where he stood he could see two crude graves that had been scraped into the soil, the dirt and stones heaped upon the bodies, a dusting of new snow on the fresh dirt. “Hell,” he whispered to himself as sadness filled his heart. The archeologist and his former student had paid a steep price for Coyote’s lesson.
He squatted and pressed his thumb and index finger against his eyes. By the time he took his hand away, a small part of the pain and dizziness had subsided. He looked at the graves once again, then noticed beyond them a strange shape reflected dully in the firelight. A few meters past the graves, jammed at a crazy angle between the shredded trunks of three cedars, was the hull of the timespan capsule, the side facing him crumbled like a sand sculpture too long past the sculpting. The hole in the hull made an opening larger than the hatch door that was now so much dust lost in the falling snow. As he watched, another piece of the hull dropped from its place to the dust beneath.
He had only begun to wonder what they must be thinking at the empty gantry at Site Safar when the world starting spinning again. The invisible electric ice pick slammed into his right eye and he clutched at his head. There was a tug at his arm. “God’n?”
“Pela.” He waited until the pain in his eye eased, stood, then turned and looked down at the woman. The top of her head came up to the middle of his chest, and she had a white fur cap on her head that would’ve been the envy of any fashion model in Paris or New York. She handed him a white fur robe that had a hole cut in it for his head. Pela held it up for him to put on, which he did. His shoulders and upper torso immediately began to warm. She indicated with her hands and the hat on her own head that she was making a hat for Gordon from the circle she had cut from the fur he was wearing and from some other pieces. Very special hat.
He nodded toward the graves. “Taleghani, Mehmet,” he said. Squatting down he drew a disk in the snow and a crown of flames around it and pointed up in the sky.
“Ekav,” she named the sun. With his finger Gordon traced a path across the sky from one horizon to another, perpendicular to the lay of the bodies in the graves.
“Nom,” she answered, tracing the path of the sun from one end of the graves to the opposite horizon. It took very little time after that to determine in which direction the doctor and his student’s heads were pointed. They both pointed east. Suddenly he felt very tired and remarkably silly. What did it matter in what direction a corpse was buried in this time? Mecca wasn’t even a settlement yet, Abraham’s deal with his god still a hundred and thirty-five millennia in the future. The ancient Babylonian gods Abraham rejected to follow his god weren’t even theories. Neither was Babylon. Still, the east was sacred. The rising sun does that to those who want to move in tune with the universe.
Pela tugged on his arm to coax him back to the lean-to. He showed her with his hands he would remain for a time and she should leave him be. She nodded and returned to the fire. Gordon saw a log on its side, went over, brushed the thin layer of snow from its top, and sat on it heavily, facing the graves. When he was certain he wouldn’t pass out, he pulled the fur up around his neck and ears.
He had known the archeologist and the Timespan pilot only a few hours. “Didn’t take me long to get caught up in the doctor’s vision, though,” muttered Gordon. He lifted his right hand and touched his right temple. There was a large scabbed-over cut there that extended up into his hairline. After touching the wound, he sniffed at his fingers. They smelled like pine sap. Pela had treated it with something. Gordon lowered his hand to his knee.
“So, Doc,” he whispered to Taleghani’s grave, “what’s Plan B? Hang in here and hope Harith and Mehmet’s old man can organize a rescue?”
How long to arrange for another timespanner, he wondered. How long to get permission for a rescue? There was a return window in twenty-six days, but when would be the next arrival window? Before the end of the twenty-some days. And the next? It could be in fifty days or five months. Meanwhile what?
Strange sounds in the night answered his questions—something between a moan and a whisper. He wasn’t sure he hadn’t made the sounds himself. And meanwhile? He smiled as he imagined the archeologist standing before him. “Meanwhile,” he whispered, “don’t do anything permanent.” Do nothing that might be projected into the future. Watch out for those grains of sand.