Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks tp-6 Read online

  Everard remembered how the Bible gloated (would gloat) over the wealth of Solomon, and whence he got it. “For the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.—”

  Pummairam was quick to switch off conversations with shopkeepers and start Everard onward. “Let me show my master where the really good stuff is.” Doubtless that meant a commission for Pummairam, but what the hell, the youngster had to live somehow, and didn’t seem ever to have lived terribly well.

  For a while they followed the canal. To a bawdy chant, sailors towed a laden ship along. Its officers stood on deck, wrapped in the dignity that behooved businessmen. The Phoenician bourgeoisie tended to be a sober lot… except in—their religion, some of whose rites were orgiastic enough to compensate.

  The Street of the Chandlers led off from this waterway. It was fairly long, being hemmed in by massive buildings that were warehouses as well as offices and homes. It was quiet, too, despite its far end giving on a thronged avenue; no shops crouched against the high, hot walls, and few people were in sight. Captains and shipowners came here for supplies, merchants came to negotiate, and, yes, two monoliths flanked the entrance of a small temple dedicated to Tanith, Our Lady of the Waves. Several little children who must belong to resident families—boys and girls together, naked or nearly so—darted about at play while a gaunt, excited mongrel dog barked.

  A beggar sat, knees drawn up, by the shady entrance to an alley. His bowl rested at his bare feet. A kaftan muffled his body and a cowl obscured his face. Everard did see the rag tied over the eyes. Poor, blind devil; ophthalmia was among the countless damnations that made the ancient world not so glamorous after all… Pummairam darted past the fellow, to overtake a man in a priestly robe who was leaving the temple. “Hoy, sir, your reverence, if you please,” he called, “which is the door of Zakarbaal the Sidonian? My master condescends to visit him—” Everard, who already knew the answer, lengthened his stride to follow.

  The beggar rose. His left hand plucked away his bandage, to reveal a lean, thick-bearded visage and a pair of eyes that had surely been watching through the cloth. From that flowing sleeve, his right hand drew something that gleamed.

  A pistol!

  Reflex flung Everard aside. Pain whipped through his own left shoulder. Sonic gun, he realized, from futureward of his home era, soundless, recoilless. If that invisible beam got him in the head or heart, he’d be dead, and never a mark upon him.

  No place to go but forward. “Haaa!” he roared, and plunged zigzag to the attack. His sword hissed forth.

  The other grinned, drifted back, took careful aim.

  A smack! resounded. The assassin lurched, yelled, dropped his weapon, grabbed at his ribs. Pummairam’s spent slingstone clattered over the cobbles.

  Children scattered, screaming. The priest returned prudently through his temple door. The stranger whirled and ran. He vanished down the lane. Everard was too slow. His injury wasn’t serious, but for the moment it hurt abominably. Half dazed, he stopped at the alley mouth, stared down the emptiness before him, panted, and rasped in English, “He’s escaped. Oh, God damn it, anyway.”

  Pummairam darted to him. Anxious hands played over the Patrolman’s form. “Are you wounded, my master? Can your servant help? Ah, woe, woe, I’d no time for a proper windup, nor to aim right, else I’d have spattered the evildoer’s brains for yon dog to lick up.”

  “You… did mighty well… just the same.” Everard drew shuddering breaths. Strength and steadiness began to return, agony to recede. He was still alive. That was miracle enough for one day.

  He had work to do, though, and urgent it was. Having obtained the gun, he laid a hand on Pummairam’s shoulder and made their gazes meet. “What did you see, lad? What d’you think happened this while?”

  “Why, I—I—” Ferret-fast, the youth collected his wits. “It seemed to me that the beggar, though such he scarcely was, threatened my lord’s life with some talisman whose magic did inflict harm. May the gods pour abominations on the head of him who would have extinguished the light of the universe! Yet, naturally, his wickedness could not prevail against the valor of my master—” the voice dropped to a confidential whisper: “—whose secrets are assuredly locked away safe in the bosom of his worshipful servant.”

  “Good,” Everard grunted. “Sure, and these be matters about which common folk should never dare talk, lest they be stricken with palsy, deafness, and emerods. You’ve done well, Pum.” Saved my life, probably, he thought, and stooped to untie the cord on a fallen bag. “Here, small reward it is, but this ingot ought to buy you something you’d like. And now, before the brannigan started, you did learn which is the house I want, did you not?”

  Underneath the business of the minute, fading pain and shock from the assault, exhilaration of survival, grimness rose. After all his elaborate precautions, within an hour of arrival, his cover was blown. The enemy had not only had Patrol headquarters staked out, somehow their agent had instantly seen that it was no ordinary wanderer come into this street, and had not hesitated a second before trying to kill him.

  This was a hairy mission for sure. And more was at stake than Everard liked to think about—first the existence of Tyre, later the destiny of the world.

  Zakarbaal closed the door to his inner chambers and latched it. Turning around, he held out his hand in the manner of Western civilization. “Welcome,” he said in Temporal, the Patrol language. “My name, you may remember, is Chaim Zorach. May I present my wife Yael?”

  They were both of Levantine appearance and in Canaanite garb, but here, shut away from office staff and household servants, their entire bearing changed, posture, gait, facial expressions, tone of voice. Everard would have recognized them as being of the twentieth century even if he had not been told. The atmosphere was as refreshing to him as a wind off the sea.

  He introduced himself. “I am the Unattached agent you sent for,” he added.

  Yael Zorach’s eyes widened. “Oh! An honor. You… you are the first such I have met. The others who’ve been investigating, they are just technicians.”

  Everard grimaced. “Don’t be too awe-struck. I’m afraid I haven’t made much of a showing so far.”

  He described his journey and the contretemps at its end. She offered him some painkiller, but he said he was pretty well over hurting, and her husband thereupon produced what was better anyway, a bottle of Scotch. Presently they were seated at their ease.

  The chairs were comfortable, not unlike those of home-a luxury in this milieu, but then, Zakarbaal was supposed to be a wealthy man, with access to every kind of imported goods. Otherwise the apartment was austere by future standards, though frescos, draperies, lamps, furnishings were tasteful.

  It was cool and dim; a window opening on a small cloister garden had been curtained against the heat of the day.

  “Why don’t we relax a while and get acquainted before we buckle down to duty?” Everard suggested.

  Zorach scowled. “You can do that right after you almost got killed?”

  His wife smiled. “I think he might need to all the more, dear,” she murmured. “We too. The menace can wait a little longer. It’s been waiting, hasn’t it?”

  From the pouch at his belt, Everard drew anachronisms he had permitted himself, hitherto used only in solitude: pipe, tobacco, lighter. Zorach’s tension eased a trifle, he chuckled and fetched cigarettes out of a locked coffer which held various such comforts. His language changed to Brooklyn-accented English: “You’re American, aren’t you, Agent Everard?”

  “Yes. Recruited in 1954.” How many years of his lifespan had passed “since” he answered an ad, took certain tests, and learned of an organization that guarded a traffic through the epochs? He hadn’t added them up lately. It didn’t matter much, when he and his fellows were the beneficiaries of a treatment that kept them unaging. “Uh, I thought you two were Israelis.”
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  “We are,” Zorach explained. “In fact, Yael’s a sabra. Me, though, I didn’t immigrate till I’d been doing archaeology there for a spell and had met her. That was in 1971. We got recruited into the Patrol four years later.”

  “How’d that happen, if I may ask?”

  “We were approached, sounded out, finally told the truth. Naturally, we jumped at the chance. The work’s often hard and lonesome—twice as lonesome, in a way, when we’re home on furlough and can’t tell our old friends and colleagues what we’ve been up to—but it’s totally fascinating.” Zorach winced. His words became a near mumble. “Also, well, this post is special for us. We don’t just maintain a base and its cover business, we manage to help local people now and then. Or we try to, as much as we can without causing anybody to suspect there’s anything peculiar about us. That makes up, somehow, a little bit, for… for what our countrymen will do hereabouts, far uptime.”

  Everard nodded. The pattern was familiar to him. Most field agents were specialists like these, passing their careers in a single milieu. They had to be, if they were to learn it thoroughly enough to serve the Patrol’s purposes. What a help it would be to have native-born personnel! But such were very rare before the eighteenth century A.D., or still later in most parts of the world. How could a person who hadn’t grown up in a scientific-industrial society even grasp the idea of automatic machinery, let alone vehicles that jumped in a blink from place to place and year to year? An occasional genius, of course; however, most identifiable geniuses carved niches for themselves in history, and you didn’t dare tell them the facts for fear of making changes…

  “Yeah,” Everard said. “In a way, a free operative like me has it easier. Husband-and-wife teams, or women generally—Not to pry, but what do you do about children?”

  “Oh, we have two at home in Tel Aviv,” Yael Zorach answered. “We time our returns so we’ve never been gone from them for more than a few days of their lives.” She sighed. “It is strange, of course, when to us months have passed.” Brightening: “Well, when they’re of age, they’re going to join the outfit too. Our regional recruiter has examined them already and decided they’ll be fine material.”

  If not, Everard thought, could you stand it, watching them grow old, suffer the horrors that will come, finally die, while you are still young of body? Such a prospect had made him shy away from marriage, more than once.

  “I think Agent Everard means children here in Tyre,” Chaim Zorach said. “Before traveling from Sidon—we took ship, like you, because we were going to become moderately conspicuous—we quietly bought a couple of infants from a slave dealer, took them along, and have been passing them off as ours. They’ll have lives as good as we can arrange.” Unspoken was the likelihood that servants had the actual raising of those two; their foster parents would not dare invest much love in them. “That keeps us from appearing somehow unnatural. If my wife’s womb has since closed, why, it’s a common misfortune. I do get twitted about not taking a second wife or at least a concubine, but on the whole, Phoenicians mind their own business pretty well.”

  “You like them, then?” Everard inquired.

  “Oh, yes, by and large, we do. We have excellent friends among them. We’d better—as important a nexus as this is.”

  Everard frowned and puffed hard on his pipe. The bowl had grown consolingly warm in his clasp, aglow like a tiny hearthfire. “You think that’s correct?”

  The Zorachs were surprised. “Of course!” Yael said. “We know it is. Didn’t they explain to you?”

  Everard chose his words with care. “Yes and no. After I’d been asked to look into this matter, and agreed, I got myself crammed full of information about the milieu. In a way, too full; it became hard to see the forest for the trees. However, my experience has been that I do best to avoid grand generalizations in advance of a mission. It could get hard to see the trees for the forest, so to speak. My idea was, once I’d been dropped off in Sicily and taken ship for Tyre, I’d have leisure to digest the information and form my own ideas. But that didn’t quite work out, because the captain and crew were infernally curious about me; my mental energy went into answering their questions, which were often sharp, without letting any cat out of the bag.” He paused. “To be sure, the role of Phoenicia in general, and Tyre in particular, in Jewish history—that’s obvious.”

  On the kingdom that David had cobbled together out of Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem, this city soon became the main civilizing influence, its principal trading partner and window on the outside world. Now Solomon continued his father’s friendship with Hiram. The Tyrians were supplying most of the materials and nearly all the skilled hands for the building of the Temple, as well as structures less famous. They would embark on joint exploratory and commercial ventures with the Hebrews. They would advance an immensity of goods to Solomon, a debt which he could only pay off by ceding them a score of his villages… with whatever subtle long-range consequences that had.

  The subtleties went deeper, though. Phoenician customs, thoughts, beliefs permeated the neighboring realm, for good or ill; Solomon himself made sacrifices to gods of theirs. Yahweh would not really be the sole Lord of the Jews until the Babylonian Captivity forced them to it, as a means of preserving an identity that ten of their tribes had already lost. Before then, King Ahab of Israel would have taken the Tyrian princess Jezebel as his queen. Their evil memory was undeserved; the policy of foreign alliance and domestic religious tolerance which they strove to carry out might well have saved the country from its eventual destruction. Unfortunately, they collided with fanatical Elijah—“the mad mullah from the mountains of Gilead,” Trevor-Roper would call him. And yet, had not Phoenician paganism spurred them to fury, would the prophets have wrought that faith which was to endure for thousands of years and remake the world?

  “Oh, yes,” Chaim said. “The Holy Land’s aswarm with visitors. Jerusalem Base is chronically swamped, trying to regulate the traffic. We get a lot fewer here, mostly scientists from different eras, traders in artwork and the like, the occasional rich tourist. Nevertheless, sir, I maintain that this place, Tyre, is the real nexus of the era.” Harshly: “And our opponents seem to have reached the same conclusion, right?”

  The starkness took hold of Everard. Precisely because the fame of Jerusalem, in future eyes, overshadowed that of Tyre, this station was still worse undermanned than most; therefore it was terribly vulnerable; and if indeed it was a root of the morrow, and that root was cut away—

  The facts passed before him as vividly as if he had never known them before.

  When humans built their first time machine, long after Everard’s home century, the Danellian supermen had arrived from farther yet, to organize the police force of the temporal lanes. It would gather knowledge, furnish guidance, aid the distressed, curb the wrongdoer; but these benevolences were incidental to its real function, which was to preserve the Danellians. A man has not lost free will merely because he has gone into the past. He can affect the course of events as much as ever. True, they have their momentum, and it is enormous. Minor fluctuations soon even out. For instance, whether a certain ordinary individual has lived long or died young, flourished or not, will make no noticeable difference several generations later. Unless that individual was, say, Shalmaneser or Genghis Khan or Oliver Cromwell or V. I. Lenin; Gautama Buddha or Kung Fu-Tze or Paul of Tarsus or Muhammad ibn Abdallah; Aristotle or Galileo or Newton or Einstein-Change anything like that, traveler from tomorrow, and you will still be where you are, but the people who brought you forth do not exist, they never did, it is an entirely other Earth up ahead, and you and your memories bespeak the uncausality, the ultimate chaos, which lairs beneath the cosmos.

  Before now, along his own world line, Everard had had to stop the reckless and the ignorant before they worked that kind of havoc. They weren’t too common; after all, the societies which possessed time travel screened their emissaries pretty carefully as a rule. However, in the course of a million
years or more, mistakes were bound to happen.

  So were crimes.

  Everard spoke slowly: “Before going into detail about that gang and its operation—”

  “What pitiful few details we have,” Chaim Zorach muttered.

  “—I’d like some idea of what their reasoning was. Why did they pick Tyre for the victim? Aside from its relationship to the Jews, that is.”

  “Well,” Zorach began, “for openers, consider political events futureward of today. Hiram’s become the most powerful king in Canaan, and that strength will outlive him. Tyre will stand off the Assyrians when they come, with everything that that implies. It’ll push seaborne trade as far as Britain. It’ll found colonies, the main one being Carthage.” (Everard’s mouth tightened. He had cause to know, far too well, how much Carthage mattered in history.) “It’ll submit to the Persians, but fairly willingly, and among other things provide most of their fleet when they attack Greece. That effort will fail, of course, but imagine how the world might have gone if the Greeks had not faced that particular challenge. Eventually Tyre will fall to Alexander the Great, but only after a siege of months—a delay in his progress that also has incalculable consequences.

  “Meanwhile, more basically, as the leading Phoenician state, it will be in the forefront of spreading Phoenician ideas abroad. Yes, to the Greeks themselves. There are religious concepts—Aphrodite, Adonis, Herakles, and other figures originate as Phoenician divinities. There’s the alphabet, a Phoenician invention. There’s the knowledge of Europe, Africa, Asia that Phoenician navigators will bring back.