The Shield of Time Page 11

  “No, no.” In a hasty mutter, the caretaker cautioned him against defiling the temenos—there was a privy on the far side of the grove—and hobbled back to shelter.

  Everard sought the corner where the women sat. Fear no longer stared up at him. Instead he saw grief dulled by fatigue and despair. He couldn’t bring himself to greet them with “Rejoice.”

  “May I join you?” he asked.

  “We can’t forbid you,” mumbled the old woman (forty years of life behind her?).

  He lowered himself to the ground beside the young one. She had been good-looking a day or two ago, before her spirit was shattered. “I too await the will of the god,” he said.

  “We only wait,” she answered tonelessly.

  “Uh, my name is Androcles, a pilgrim. You live hereabouts?”

  “We did.”

  The crone stirred. For a minute, a bitter vitality flickered. “Our home was downstream, so far that we didn’t get warning till late,” she told him. “My son said we must load an oxcart full of what we could take off the farm, or we’d be beggars in the city. Horsemen caught us on the road. They killed him and the boys. They ravished his wife. At least they didn’t kill us also. We found the gates shut. We thought the Earthshaker might give us refuge.”

  “I wish they had killed us,” the young woman said in her dead voice. The infant began to cry. Mechanically, she bared a breast and gave suck. Her free hand stretched a fold of sleeve across to screen against the sun and the flies.

  “I’m sorry” was all Everard could think of. That’s war for you, the thing that governments do best. “I’ll name you in my prayers to him.”

  They didn’t reply. Well, numbness was a mercy of sorts. He raised his hood and leaned back. Poplars gave scant shade. The heat in the wall baked through his cloak.

  Hours passed. As often before during a long and uncertain wait—though oftenest in future centuries—he withdrew into memories. Occasionally he drank some lukewarm water, occasionally he catnapped. The sun trudged up the sky and started down.

  —clouds racing on the wind, light stabbing between them to blaze off the waves, cordage a-thrum, chill salt spray as the ship plunges through seas that thunder green, gray, white-maned, and “Ha!” Bjarni Herjulfsson shouts at the steering oar. “A gull,” promise of the new land ahead—

  The end came slowly at first, then in a rush. Everard heard noises grow, hoofbeats, voices, clatter. His flesh tingled. Instantly alert, he pulled the hood further forward to shadow his face, lifted his knees, and slumped his shoulders to look as apathetic as the women still were.

  Respecting sanctity, the Syrians dismounted outside the grove. Six of them, armed and armored, followed a man into the temenos. Like them, he went in mail and greaves, sword at side, but a horsehair plume stood tall on his helmet, a red mantle hung from his shoulders, an ivory baton was in his hand, held like a swagger stick, and he overtopped his followers by inches. The features within the iron were as if carved by Praxiteles in alabaster.

  Dolon hurried down the steps and prostrated himself. When Alexander prevailed over Asia, the Orient took Hellas over. Rome would have the same experience, unless the Exaltationists aborted its destiny. They won’t. One way or another, we’ll stop them. Energy blazed from Buleni-Polydorus. But Christ if they give us the slip again, with this experience for a lesson—

  “You may rise,” said the aide of King Antiochus. He glanced at those who hunched in the angle of the wall. “Who are they?”

  “Fugitives, master,” Dolon quavered. “They claim sanctuary.”

  The splendid one shrugged. “Well, let the priest decide what to do about them. He’s on his way. We require the temple for a private conference.”

  “Certainly, master, certainly.”

  Obedient to snapped orders, the soldiers took stance on either side of the entry and beneath the stairs. Buleni went inside. Dolon joined Everard and the women, keeping his feet, nervous, perhaps finding comfort in even such wretched company as was theirs.

  Yeah. Nicomachus spoke to the authorities inside Bactra. He may or may not have needed a little help from Zoilus; Theonis would take care of that. The priest must go out and see to his temple. Best would be if a ranking enemy officer could meet him there and they discuss terms more precisely. Neither side in the war wants to offend the Earthshaker. Heralds negotiated. It went easily. Among other considerations, King Antiochus knows his ADC Polydorus is in league with a disaffected element inside the city, and this will establish the espionage link.

  More noises, less arrogant. Again Dolon went flat. Dignified in a white robe that must have complicated his muleback ride from town, Nicomachus paced through the entrance. A slave boy trotted at his side, upholding a parasol. A soldier followed, obviously a Syrian assigned as escort. He and the boy halted while the priest went into the building, after which they hunkered down and relaxed.

  Everard was barely aware of them. He sat as if blinded by sun-blaze off the thing he had seen on Draganizu’s breast. It wasn’t big, a medallion hung on a chain, but he knew what was on the obverse, he’d have known that thing in a coal bin could he have touched it. Athene’s owl. His own two-way communicator.

  The world steadied around him. Why not? he thought. Why surprised, even? They’re maintaining radio silence for the time being, but they’ll want to get in touch right away, should the need arise. Buleni’s bound to have one on his person somewhere. Patrol issue is superior to anything they likely brought with them, and wearing this is typical Exaltationist swank, and there’s no reason why a priest of Poseidon shouldn’t pay Athene honor. In fact, it’s a tactful gesture, considering how often those two are at loggerheads in the Odyssey. Ecumenicism— He strangled a laugh. What startled me when I saw?

  The knowledge came forth. He understood he had seen what might be his death.

  And yet-—and yet, by God!

  He’d have a fighting man’s chance of pulling it off. His prospects of survival were poor in any event. This way, he stood to nail yonder bastards, and maybe, maybe—

  I needn’t commit right this minute. Let me think, let me marshal my memories elsewhere than in this oven of a courtyard.

  Everard rose. He was stiff and he hurt after his long immobility. He started slowly toward the gateway.

  A trooper drew blade. “Halt!” he barked. “Where are you going?”

  Everard stopped. “Please, to the privy behind the temenos,” he said.

  “Now you just wait—”

  Everard loomed at him. “You wouldn’t make me befoul the holy ground, would you? I hate to think what the god would do to us both.”

  Dolon tottered over. “He’s a victim of robbers, the Earthshaker’s given him refuge, he’s Poseidon’s guest,” the caretaker explained.

  The soldier swapped looks with his mates and sheathed his sword. “All right,” he agreed. Stepping to the entry, he called to the pair who watched the horses beyond that this fellow had leave to go. The women’s gazes trailed the large man wistfully. He had given them a kind word.

  Everard sauntered among the trees, savoring their shade. Not too slow, he reminded himself. I don’t imagine Buleni and Draganizu will be inside any longer than it takes them to update each other. He didn’t need the shack as such, but it screened him while he did a few exercises to limber his muscles and took sword in hand beneath his cloak. On the way back, he did drag his feet. That would seem natural enough to anyone who noticed. With his height, he could look over the wall into the temenos.

  He was rounding the far corner when the two principals reappeared. Everard quickened his steps. The Exaltationists reached the ground as the Patrolman came through the opening. “Out o’ the way, you,” the nearest guardsman told him.

  “Yes, sir.” Everard made a production of clumsily salaaming and scuffing off at a slant that brought him closer to his prey. Those two walked on, side by side. Buleni noticed the loutish form ahead and scowled.

  It was a small enclosure. When Everard sprang, he
had just six feet to go.

  Draganizu could touch a point on his medallion while he lifted it toward his mouth, and send an alarm. He must die first. Everard’s leap was a lunge. His steel went in at the throat and out the nape. Blood spouted, sunbrilliant red. The corpse crashed backward.

  Shifting weight as he pounced, Everard landed on his heel, pivoted, and brought his left fist in an uppercut to Buleni’s chin. It was the only blow he could deliver quickly to a man in helmet and mail. The Exaltationist’s weapon was already half free. He lurched, caught his balance, and completed the draw. A superman. But a little shaken, a tad slow. Everard closed. His left hand chopped edge on at the sword wrist. The blade of his right hand cracked into Buleni’s larynx. He felt cartilage break. Buleni dropped on all fours and retched blood.

  Dolon wailed. The soldiers dashed forward, armament aflash. Everard cast himself down beside Draganizu’s gaping face. He snatched the wet medallion, thumbed it, and rasped in Temporal, “Unattached Everard. Come immediately. Combat.”

  That was what he had time for. The first Syrian was at him. He rolled over. Supine, he gave a two-footed kick. The man reeled from him. More arrived. They blotted out the sky.

  One crumpled onto Everard. “O-oof-f-f!” A metal-clad body flopping bonelessly onto your stomach takes the wind out of you.

  When Everard got it back again and sat up, the troopers lay around him where they had collapsed, an ungainly heap. Their breathing snored and wheezed. He knew those beyond the wall had likewise received stun beams and would be comatose for about a quarter hour. Otherwise they were unharmed. A timecycle had landed nearby. A Chinese-looking man and a black woman, hard and supple in skin-tight coveralls, helped him rise. Four more vehicles poised low above the temple; he spied energy projectors in taut hands. “Overkill,” he croaked.

  “What, sir?” asked the man.

  “Never mind. Let’s look this situation over, fast.” Everard would not allow himself to think, yet, how nearly dead he was. He would not permit himself sentiment. That way lay the shakes, which he couldn’t afford. Patrol training summoned the full reserves of mind and body. Later, at leisure, he would pay nature’s debt.

  When it got his call, the Patrol had mobilized a force, safely distant from here, and dispatched it to the instant of his need. Now he must use the resource given him with the same precision. However, he could spare a few minutes to plan his next move.

  Buleni was still alive, barely. Everard pointed. “Bring him and the killed Exaltationist to operation headquarters,” he ordered through an unsoiled transceiver given him. “They’ll know there what they want to do with ’em.” He walked around. Poor old Dolon sprawled in the dust at his feet. “Carry this man into the temple, out of the sun. Give him a medic check and whatever care he needs that you can administer on the spot. I suspect he’d benefit from a stimulant injection. The rest can lie where they are till they rouse.”

  The women had not been stunned, in the corner where they were. They cowered back, made alive again by terror, the grandmother embracing the mother, the mother clutching the child. Everard went over and stood above them. He knew he was a fearsome sight, bloodstained, sweat-dripping, begrimed, but he could fashion a smile.

  “Listen,” he said, as gently as his hoarsened voice was able, “listen well. You have seen the wrath of Poseidon. But it was not against you. I repeat, the Earthshaker is not angry at you. Men here have offended him. They shall be borne to Hades. You are innocent. The god blesses you. In token of that, I am to give you this.” He had been unshipping his purse. He dropped it in front of them. “It is yours. Poseidon cast a slumber on these soldiers, lest they behold what they should not, but he will do them no further harm after they awaken, if they in their turn will see to the well-being of you, his wards. Tell them that. Do you understand me?”

  The baby cried, the mother sobbed. The granny met Everard’s eyes and said, with a steadiness that must be due in part to shock, “I who am old believe I dare understand you and remember.”

  “Good.” He left them and resumed his Patrol business. He had done the best for them that he possibly could—bending rules well out of shape, but after all, he was an Unattached agent.

  Anxiety touched his rescuers. “Sir,” ventured the young woman, “excuse me for asking, but this thing we’ve done—”

  She must be pretty new in the field, but she had handled her job smartly. He decided she and her fellows were worth a minute’s field education. “Don’t worry. We’ve not upset history. What’s your birth milieu?”

  “Jamaica, sir, 1950.”

  “Okay, to put it in terms of your era, imagine you see a brawl start. Suddenly several helicopters come down. They drop tear gas bombs that disable the crowd without seriously hurting anybody. Men climb out wearing masks. They lug two of the brawlers into a chopper. One man tells the witnesses that these are dangerous Communists and this squadron is from the CIA, seizing them at the request of the local government. The squadron flits away. Let’s suppose this all happens in an isolated valley, the phone lines are cut, there’s no immediate linkage with anywhere else.

  “Well, locally it’d be a ninety days’ wonder. By the time the story got to the rest of the world, though, it’d be stale and diluted, the news media would give it little or no play, most people who heard about it at all would guess it was a wild exaggeration and soon forget it. Even you folks who were on hand would stop talking much about it, and it’d fade in your recollections. You weren’t really affected, and you have your lives to get on with. Besides, there’s nothing inherently impossible. You know helicopters, tear gas, and the CIA exist. This was a weird sort of incident, but still, just an incident. You’d tell your children, but probably they wouldn’t tell theirs.

  “That’s what a brief intervention by the gods is like, in the minds of people here-now. Of course, we only stage one when we absolutely must, and the sooner we scramble, the better.”

  Through his communicator Everard included the rest in his instructions. The slain and the live Exaltationist had been slung onto timecycles that blinked from the scene. An extra Patrolman had gone with them, leaving saddle and weapons for the Unattached. Everard’s companion was a tough, stocky man from Europe of his own period, Imre Ruszek, who sat behind him while he piloted. He cast the women a last glance as he rose on antigrav, and saw bewilderment struggling with hope.

  The three hoppers lifted high enough to be no more than glints to any eyes that might chance to catch them, and glided toward Bactra. Below them the land rolled vast from the mountains in the south, fields green and brown, spotted with trees and tiny buildings, the river mercury-bright, the city and the invader camp toylike. No hint of hatred and misery reached these clean cold winds, save what the riders bore with them.

  “Now hear this,” Everard intoned. “There are two bandits left, and if we go about it right, I think we may well take them. The operative phrase is ‘go about it right.’ We only get one shot. No fancy dodging around in time, trying to fix things, if this fails. It’s all very well to show the locals a miracle, but we will not play games with causality and risk setting off a temporal vortex, even if the risk does seem small. Is that clear? You’ve had the doctrine drilled into you, I know, but Ruszek and I are going down, and if we come to grief, somebody could be tempted to rashness. Don’t be.”

  He described Raor’s house and its layout. Alarms were set to yell the moment a vehicle made a space-time jump, departing or arriving, anywhere in a radius of many miles. She and Sauvo would promptly dash for their own machine, or machines, and be off for parts unknown. To hell with the other two. Loyalty was a matter of expediency among those ultimate egoists.

  That was the case if yonder alarms had been alert when Everard called and help for him appeared. The hoppers’ computers knew to the microsecond when that was. He designated an instant sixty seconds earlier, when he was assaulting Draganizu and Buleni; they’d not been in a position to benefit from any warnings that were flashed them a minut
e later. “Call it Time Zero.”

  At hover, he used magnifying opticals and electronic range finders to determine within a few feet the spot at which he wanted to come into the house. He set the controls for that and Time Zero. The rest of the vehicles would return to then also, but remain aloft till it became clear what had happened on the ground.

  “Go!” His finger stabbed the main control point.

  He, his partner, his timecycle were in a corridor. A window on their right stood open to the light and fragrance of the garden court. The door on their left was massive, shut, and locked. They had cut off access to the enemy’s transport.

  Sauvo sped around the corner of the hall, deer-swift. His hand gripped an energy pistol. Ruszek shot first. A thin blue flame streaked past Everard. It pierced Sauvo’s chest. The tunic around it scorched. For that eyeblink of time, the fury on his face became the pathetic surprise of a child suddenly struck. He fell. Scant blood ran from him, most was cooked, but otherwise he died in the usual human uncleanliness.

  “A stunner might have been too slow,” Ruszek said.

  Everard nodded. “Okay,” he answered. “Sit tight. I’ll hunt for the last of ’em.” Into his communicator: “Third down, one to go.” The squad should catch his meaning. “We hold the depot. Watch the doors. If a woman comes out, nab her.” As if from far away he heard terrified sobbing, a female slave, and wished that none of those innocents would suffer.

  “That will not be necessary,” sang coldly through the noise. “I will be no game for your curs to chase.”

  Raor walked toward them. A thin gown clung to every flowing stride. The ebon hair fell loose around beauty and scorn. Everard thought of Artemis the Huntress. His heart stumbled.

  She halted a short way off. He dismounted and approached her. My God, he thought, filthy and stinking, I feel like a naughty schoolboy called up by the teacher. He straightened and stopped. His pulse throbbed, but he could meet the sea-green eyes.

  She continued in Greek: “This is remarkable. I do believe you are that same agent my clone mate spoke of, who almost captured him in Colombia.”