The Only Game in Town tp-4 Read online

  The Only Game in Town

  ( Time Patrol - 4 )

  Poul Anderson

  The Only Game in Town

  by Poul Anderson

  1

  John Sandoval did not belong to his name. Nor did it seem right that he should stand in slacks and aloha shirt before an apartment window opening on midtwentieth-century Manhattan. Everard was used to anachronism, but the dark hooked face confronting him always seemed to want warpaint, a horse, and a gun sighted on some pale thief.

  “Okay,” he said. “The Chinese discovered America. Interesting, but why does the fact need my services?”

  “I wish to hell I knew,” Sandoval answered.

  His rangy form turned about on the polar-bear rug, which Bjarni Herjulfsson had once given to Everard, until he was staring outward. Towers were sharp against a clear sky; the noise of traffic was muted by height. His hands clasped and unclasped behind his back.

  “I was ordered to co-opt an Unattached agent, go back with him and take whatever measures seemed indicated,” he went on after a while. “I knew you best, so…” His voice trailed off.

  “But shouldn’t you get an Indian like yourself?” asked Everard. “I’d seem rather out of place in thirteenth-century America.”

  “So much the better. Make it impressive, mysterious.… It won’t be too tough a job, really.”

  “Of course not,” said Everard. “Whatever the job actually is.”

  He took pipe and tobacco pouch from his disreputable smoking jacket and stuffed the bowl in quick, nervous jabs. One of the hardest lessons he had had to learn, when first recruited into the Time Patrol, was that every important task does not require a vast organization. That was the characteristic twentieth-century approach; but earlier cultures, like Athenian Hellas and Kamakura Japan—and later civilizations too, here and there in history—had concentrated on the development of individual excellence. A single graduate of the Patrol Academy (equipped, to be sure, with tools and weapons of the future) could be the equivalent of a brigade.

  But it was a matter of necessity as well as aesthetics. There were all too few people to watch over all too many thousands of years.

  “I get the impression,” said Everard slowly, “that this is not a simple rectification of extra-temporal interference.”

  “Right,” said Sandoval in a harsh voice. “When I reported what I’d found, the Yuan milieu office made a thorough investigation. No time travelers are involved. Kublai Khan thought this up entirely by himself. He may have been inspired by Marco Polo’s accounts of Venetian and Arab sea voyages, but it was legitimate history, even if Marco’s book doesn’t mention anything of the sort.”

  “The Chinese had quite a nautical tradition of their own,” said Everard. “Oh, it’s all very natural. So how do we come in?”

  He got his pipe lit and drew hard on it. Sandoval still hadn’t spoken, so he asked, “How did you happen to find this expedition? It wasn’t in Navajo country, was it?”

  “Hell, I’m not confined to studying my own tribe,” Sandoval answered. “Too few Amerinds in the Patrol as is, and it’s a nuisance disguising other breeds. I’ve been working on Athabascan migrations generally.” Like Keith Denison, he was an ethnic Specialist, tracing the history of peoples who never wrote their own so that the Patrol could know exactly what the events were that it safeguarded.

  “I was working along the eastern slope of the Cascades, near Crater Lake,” he went on. “That’s Lutuami country, but I had reason to believe an Athabascan tribe I’d lost track of had passed that way. The natives spoke of mysterious strangers corning from the north. I went to have a look, and there the expedition was, Mongols with horses. I checked their back trail and found their camp at the mouth of the Chehalis River, where a few more Mongols were helping the Chinese sailors guard the ships. I hopped back upstairs like a bat out of Los Angeles and reported.”

  Everard sat down and stared at the other man. “How thorough an investigation did get made at the Chinese end?” he said. “Are you absolutely certain there was no extratemporal interference? It could be one of those unplanned blunders, you know, whose consequences aren’t obvious for decades.”

  “I thought of that too, when I got my assignment,” Sandoval nodded. “I even went directly to Yuan milieu HQ in Khan Baligh—Cambaluc, or Peking to you. They told me they’d checked it clear back to Genghis’s lifetime, and spatially as far as Indonesia. And it was all perfectly okay, like the Norse and their Vinland. It simply didn’t happen to have gotten the same publicity. As far as the Chinese court knew, an expedition had been sent out and had never returned, and Kublai decided it wasn’t worthwhile to send another. The record of it lay in the Imperial archives, but was destroyed during the Ming revolt which expelled the Mongols. Historiography forgot the incident.”

  Still Everard brooded. Normally he liked his work, but there was something abnormal about this occasion.

  “Obviously,” he said, “the expedition met a disaster. We’d like to know what. But why do you need an Unattached agent to spy on them?”

  Sandoval turned from the window. It crossed Everard’s mind again, fleetingly, how little the Navajo belonged here. He was born in 1930, had fought in Korea and gone through college on the G.I. bill before the Patrol contacted him, but somehow he never quite fitted the twentieth century.

  Well, do any of us? Could any man with real roots stand knowing what will eventually happen to his own people?

  “But I’m not supposed to spy!” Sandoval exclaimed. “When I’d reported, my orders came straight back from Danellian headquarters. No explanation, no excuses, the naked command: to arrange that disaster. To revise history myself!”

  2

  Anno Domini One Thousand Two Hundred Eighty:

  The writ of Kublai Khan ran over degrees of latitude and longitude; he dreamed of world empire, and his court honored any guest who brought fresh knowledge or new philosophy. A young Venetian merchant named Marco Polo had become a particular favorite. But not all peoples desired a Mongol overlord. Revolutionary secret societies germinated throughout those several conquered realms lumped together as Cathay. Japan, with the Hojo family an able power behind the throne, had already repelled one invasion. Nor were the Mongols unified, save in theory. The Russian princes had become tax collectors for the Golden Horde; the Il-Khan Abaka sat in Baghdad.

  Elsewhere, a shadowy Abbasid Caliphate had refuge in Cairo; Delhi was under the Slave Dynasty; Nicholas III was Pope; Guelphs and Ghibbelines were ripping up Italy; Rudolf of Habsburg was German Emperor, Philip the Bold was King of France, Edward Longshanks ruled England. Contemporaries included Dante Alighieri, Joannes Duns Scotus, Roger Bacon, and Thomas the Rhymer.

  And in North America, Manse Everard and John Sandoval reined their horses to stare down a long hill.

  “The date I first saw them is last week,” said the Navajo. “They’ve come quite a ways since. At this rate, they’ll be in Mexico in a couple of months, even allowing for some rugged country ahead.”

  “By Mongol standards,” Everard told him, “they’re proceeding leisurely.”

  He raised his binoculars. Around him, the land burned green with April. Even the highest and oldest beeches fluttered gay young leaves. Pines roared in the wind, which blew down off the mountains cold and swift and smelling of melted snow, through a sky where birds were homebound in such flocks that they could darken the sun. The peaks of the Cascade range seemed to float in the west, blue-white, distant, and holy. Eastward the foothills tumbled in clumps of forest and meadow to a valley, and so at last, beyond the horizon, to prairies thunderous under buffalo herds.

  Everard focused on the expedition. It wound through the open areas, more or less f
ollowing a small river. Some seventy men rode shaggy, dun-colored, short-legged, long-headed Asian horses. They led pack animals and remounts. He identified a few native guides, as much by their awkward seat in the saddle as by their physiognomy and clothing. But the newcomers held his attention most.

  “A lot of pregnant mares toting packs,” he remarked, half to himself. “I suppose they took as many horses in the ships as they could, letting them out to exercise and grazewherever they made a stop. Now they’re breeding more as they go along. That kind of pony is tough enough to survive such treatment.”

  “The detachment at the ships is also raising horses,” Sandoval informed him. “I saw that much.”

  “What else do you know about this bunch?”

  “No more than I’ve told you, which is little more than you’ve now seen! And that record which lay for a while in Kublai’s archives. But you recall, it barely notes that four ships under the command of the Noyon Toktai and the scholar Li Tai-Tsung were dispatched to explore the islands beyond Japan.”

  Everard nodded absently. No sense in sitting here and rehashing what they’d already gone over a hundred times. It was only a way of postponing action.

  Sandoval cleared his throat. “I’m still dubious about both of us going down there,” he said. “Why don’t you stay in reserve, in case they get nasty?”

  “Hero complex, huh?” said Everard. “No, we’re better off together. I don’t expect trouble anyhow. Not yet. Those boys are much too intelligent to antagonize anyone gratuitously. They’ve stayed on good terms with the Indians, haven’t they? And we’ll be a far more unknown quantity.… I wouldn’t mind a drink beforehand, though.”

  “Yeh. And afterward, too!”

  Each dipped in his saddlebag, took out a half-gallon canteen and hoisted it. The Scotch was pungent in Everard’s throat, heartening in his veins. He clucked to his horse and both Patrolmen rode down the slope.

  A whistling cut the air. They had been seen. He maintained a steady pace toward the head of the Mongol line. A pair of outriders closed in on either flank, arrows nocked to their short powerful bows, but did not interfere.

  I suppose we look harmless, Everard thought. Like Sandoval, he wore twentieth-century outdoor clothes: hunting jacket to break the wind, hat to keep off the rain. His own outfit was a good deal less elegant than the Navajo’s Abercrombie Fitch special. They both bore daggers for show, Mauser machine pistols and thirtieth-century stun-beam projectors for business.

  The troop reined in, so disciplined that it was almost like one man halting. Everard scanned them closely as he neared. He had gotten a pretty complete electronic education in an hour or so before departure—language, history, technology, manners, morals—of Mongols and Chinese and even the local Indians. But he had never before seen these people close up.

  They weren’t spectacular: stocky, bowlegged, with thin beards and flat, broad faces that shone greased in the sunlight. They were all well equipped, wearing boots and trousers, laminated leather cuirasses with lacquer ornamentation, conical steel helmets that might have a spike or plume on top. Their weapons were curved sword, knife, lance, compound bow. One man near the head of the line bore a standard of gold-braided yak tails. They watched the Patrolmen approach, their narrow dark eyes impassive.

  The chief was readily identified. He rode in the van, and a tattered silken cloak blew from his shoulders. He was rather larger and even more hard-faced than his average trooper, with a reddish beard and almost Roman nose. The Indian guide beside him gaped and huddled back; but Toktai Noyon held his place, measuring Everard with a steady carnivore look.

  “Greeting,” he called, when the newcomers were in earshot. “What spirit brings you?” He spoke the Lutuami dialect, which was later to become the Klamath language, with an atrocious accent.

  Everard replied in flawless, barking Mongolian: “Greeting-to you, Toktai son of Batu. The Tengri willing, we come in peace.”

  It was an effective touch. Everard glimpsed Mongols reaching for lucky charms or making signs against the evil eye. But the man mounted at Toktai’s left was quick to recover a schooled self-possession. “Ah,” he said, “so men of the Western lands have also reached this country. We did not know that.”

  Everard looked at him. He was taller than any Mongol, his skin almost white, his features and hands delicate. Though dressed much like the others, he was unarmed. He seemed older than the Noyon, perhaps fifty. Everard bowed in the saddle and switched to North Chinese: “Honored Li Tai-Tsung, it grieves this insignificant person to contradict your eminence, but we belong to the great realm further south.”

  “We have heard rumors,” said the scholar. He couldn’t quite suppress excitement. “Even this far north, tales have been borne of a rich and splendid country. We are seeking it that we may bring your Khan the greeting of the Kha Khan, Kublai son of Tuli, son of Genghis; the earth lies at his feet.”

  “We know of the Kha Khan,” said Everard, “as we know of the Caliph, the Pope, the Emperor, and all lesser monarchs.” He had to pick his way with care, not openly insulting Cathay’s ruler but still subtly putting him in his place. “Little is known in return of us, for our master does not seek the outside world, nor encourage it to seek him. Permit me to introduce my unworthy self. I am called Everard and am not, as my appearance would suggest, a Russian or Westerner. I belong to the border guardians.”

  Let them figure out what that meant.

  “You didn’t come with much company,” snapped Toktai.

  “More was not required,” said Everard in his smoothest voice.

  “And you are far from home,” put in Li.

  “No farther than you would be, honorable sirs, in the Kirghiz marches.”

  Toktai clapped a hand to his sword hilt. His eyes were chill and wary. “Come,” he said. “Be welcome as ambassadors, then. Let’s make camp and hear the word of your king.”

  3

  The sun, low above the western peaks, turned their snowcaps tarnished silver. Shadows lengthened down in the valley, the forest darkened, but the open meadow seemed to glow all the brighter. The underlying quiet made almost a sounding board for such noises as existed: rapid swirl and cluck of the river, ring of an ax, horses cropping in long grass. Woodsmoke tinged the air.

  The Mongols were obviously taken aback at their visitors and this early halt. They kept wooden faces, but their eyes would stray to Everard and Sandoval and they would mutter formulas of their various religions—chiefly pagan, but some Buddhist, Moslem, or Nestorian prayers. It did not impair the efficiency with which they set up camp, posted guard, cared for the animals, prepared to cook supper. But Everard judged they were more quiet than usual. The patterns impressed on his brain by the educator called Mongols talkative and cheerful as a rule.

  He sat cross-legged on a tent floor. Sandoval, Toktai, and Li completed the circle. Rugs lay under them, and a brazier kept a pot of tea hot. It was the only tent pitched, probably the only one available, taken along for use on ceremonial occasions like this. Toktai poured kumiss with his own hands and offered it to Everard, who slurped as loudly as etiquette demanded and passed it on. He had drunk worse things than fermented mare’s milk, but was glad that everyone switched to tea after the ritual.

  The Mongol chief spoke. He couldn’t keep his tone smooth, as his Chinese amanuensis did. There was an instinctive bristling: what foreigner dares approach the Kha Khan’s man, save on his belly? But the words remained courteous: “Now let our guests declare the business of their king. First, would you name him for us?”

  “His name may not be spoken,” said Everard. “Of his realm you have heard only the palest rumors. You may judge his power, Noyon, by the fact that he needed only us two to come this far, and that we needed only one mount apiece.”

  Toktai grunted. “Those are handsome animals you ride, though I wonder how well they’d do on the steppes. Did it take you long to get here?”

  “No more than a day, Noyon. We have means.”

 
Everard reached in his jacket and brought out a couple of small gift-wrapped parcels. “Our lord bade us present the Cathayan leaders with these tokens of regard.”

  While the paper was being removed, Sandoval leaned over and hissed in English: “Dig their expressions, Manse. We goofed a bit.”

  “How?”

  “That flashy cellophane and stuff impresses a barbarian like Toktai. But notice Li. His civilization was doing calligraphy when the ancestors of Bonwit Teller were painting themselves blue. His opinion of our taste has just nosedived.”

  Everard shrugged imperceptibly. “Well, he’s right, isn’t he?”

  Their colloquy had not escaped the others. Toktai gave them a hard stare, but returned to his present, a flashlight, which had to be demonstrated and exclaimed over. He was a little afraid of it at first, even mumbled a charm; then he remembered that a Mongol wasn’t allowed to be afraid of anything except thunder, mastered himself, and was soon as delighted as a child. The best bet for a Confucian scholar like Li seemed to be a book, the Family of Man collection, whose diversity and alien pictorial technique might impress him. He was effusive in his thanks, but Everard doubted if he was overwhelmed. A Patrolman soon learned that sophistication exists at any level of technology.

  Gifts must be made in return: a fine Chinese sword and a bundle of sea-otter pelts from the coast. It was quite some time before the conversation could turn back to business. Then Sandoval managed to get the other party’s account first.

  “Since you know so much,” Toktai began, “you must also know that our invasion of Japan failed several years ago.”

  “The will of heaven was otherwise,” said Li, with courtier blandness.

  “Horse apples!” growled Toktai. “The stupidity of men was otherwise, you mean. We were too few, too ignorant, and we’d come too far in seas too rough. And what of it? We’ll return there one day.”