Brave To Be a King tp-2 Read online

  “Hold! Halt!”

  The call was a weak flutter in the air, less loud than the mountain stream, but the warriors stepped back and lowered their blades. Even the dying Persian took his eyes from heaven.

  Harpagus struggled to sit up, in a puddle of his own blood. His skin was turned gray. “No… hold,” he whispered. “Wait. There is a purpose here. Mithras would not have struck me down unless… ”

  He beckoned, a somehow lordly gesture. Everard dropped his sword, limped over and knelt by Harpagus. The Mede sank back into his arms.

  “You are from the King’s homeland,” he rasped in the bloody beard. “Do not deny that. But know… Aurvagaush the son of Khshayavarsha… is no traitor.” The thin form stiffened itself, imperious, as if ordering death to wait upon its pleasure. “I knew there were powers—of heaven, of hell, I know not which to this day—powers behind the King’s advent. I used them, I used him, not for myself, but because I had sworn loyalty to my own king, Astyages, and he needed a… a Cyrus… lest the realm be torn asunder. Afterward, by his cruelty, Astyages forfeited my oath. But I was still a Mede. I saw in Cyrus the only hope—the best hope—of Media. For he has been a good king to us also—we are honored in his domains second only to the Persians… Do you understand, you from the King’s home?” Dim eyes rolled about, trying to see into Everard’s but without enough control. “I wanted to capture you—to force your engine and its use from you, and then to kill you… yes… but not for my own gain. It was for the realm’s. I feared you would take the King home, as I know he has longed to go. And what would become of us? Be merciful, as you too must hope for mercy.”

  “I shall,” said Everard. “The King will remain.”

  “It is well,” sighed Harpagus. “I believe you speak the truth… I dare not believe otherwise… Then I have atoned?” he asked in a thin anxious voice. “For the murder I did at my old king’s behest—that I laid a helpless infant upon the mountainside and watched him die—have I atoned, King’s countryman? For it was that prince’s death… which brought the land close to ruin… but I found another Cyrus! I saved us! Have I atoned?”

  “You have,” said Everard, and wondered how much absolution it lay in his power to give.

  Harpagus closed his eyes. “Then leave me,” he said, like the fading echo of a command.

  Everard laid him upon the earth and hobbled away. The two Persians knelt by their master, performing certain rites. The third man returned to his own contemplations. Everard sat down under a tree, tore a strip from his cloak and bandaged his hurts. The leg cut would need attention. Somehow he must get to the scooter. That wouldn’t be fun, but he could manage it and then a Patrol doctor could repair him in a few hours with a medical science future to his home era. He’d go to some branch office in an obscure milieu, because there’d be too many questions in the twentieth century.

  And he couldn’t afford that. If his superiors knew what he planned, they would probably forbid it.

  The answer had come to him not as a blinding revelation, but as a tired consciousness of knowledge which he might well have had subconsciously for a long time. He leaned back, getting his breath. The other four Persians arrived and were told what had happened. All of them ignored Everard, except for glances where terror struggled with pride and made furtive signs against evil. They lifted their dead chief and their dying companion and bore them into the forest. Darkness thickened. Somewhere an owl hooted.

  9

  The great King sat up in bed. There had been a noise beyond the curtains.

  Cassandane, the Queen, stirred invisibly. One slim hand touched his face. “What is it, sun of my heaven?” she asked.

  “I do not know.” He fumbled for the sword which lay always beneath his pillow. “Nothing.”

  Her palm slipped down over his breast. “No, it is much,” she whispered, suddenly shaken. “Your heart goes like a war drum.”

  “Stay there.” He trod out past the drapes.

  Moonlight streamed from a deep-purple sky, through an arched window to the floor. It glanced almost blindingly off a bronze mirror. The air was cold upon bare skin.

  A thing of dark metal, whose rider gripped two handlebars and touched tiny controls on a panel, drifted like another shadow. It landed on the carpet without a sound and the rider got off. He was a burly man in Grecian tunic and helmet. “Keith,” he breathed.

  “Manse!” Denison stepped into the moonlight. “You came!”

  “Tell me more,” snorted Everard sarcastically. “Think anybody will hear us? I don’t believe I was noticed. Materialized directly over the roof and floated slowly down on antigrav.”

  “There are guards just outside the door,” said Denison, “but they won’t come in unless I strike that gong, or yell.”

  “Good. Put on some clothes.”

  Denison dropped his sword. He stood rigid for an instant, then it blazed from him: “You’ve got a way out?”

  “Maybe. Maybe.” Everard looked away from the other man, drummed fingers on his machine’s control panel. “Look, Keith,” he said at last, “I’ve an idea which might or might not work. I’ll need your help to carry it out. If it does work, you can go home. The front office will accept a fait accompli and wink at any broken regulations. But if it fails, you’ll have to come back to this very night and live out your life as Cyrus. Can you do that?”

  Denison shivered with more than chill. Very low: “I think so.”

  “I’m stronger than you are,” said Everard roughly, “and I’ll have the only weapons. If necessary, I’ll shanghai you back here. Please don’t make me.”

  Denison drew a long breath. “I won’t.”

  “Then let’s hope the Norns cooperate. Come on, get dressed. I’ll explain as we go. Kiss this year goodbye, and trust it isn’t, ‘So long’—because if my notion pans out, neither you nor anyone else will ever see it again.”

  Denison, who had half turned to the garments thrown in a corner for a slave to replace before dawn, stopped. “What?” he said.

  “We’re going to try rewriting history,” said Everard. “Or maybe to restore the history which was there in the first place. I don’t know. Come on, hop to it!”

  “But—”

  “Quick, man, quick! D’you realize I came back to the same day as I left you, that at this moment I’m crawling through the mountains with one leg stabbed open, just to save you that extra time? Get moving!”

  Decision closed upon Denison. His face was in darkness, but he spoke very low and clear: “I’ve got one personal goodbye to say.”

  “What?”

  “Cassandane. She’s been my wife here for, God, for fourteen years! She’s borne me three children, and nursed me through two fevers and a hundred fits of despair, and once when the Medes were at our gates she led the women of Pasargadae out to rally us and we won… Give me five minutes. Manse.”

  “All right, all right. Though it’ll take more than that to send a eunuch to her room and—”

  “She’s here.”

  Denison vanished behind the bed curtains.

  Everard stood for a moment as if struck. You expected me to come tonight, he thought, and you hoped I’d be able to take you back to Cynthia, So you sent for Cassandane.

  And then, when his fingertips had begun to hurt from the tightness of his grip on the sword hilt: Oh, shut up, Everard, you smug self-righteous whelp.

  Presently Denison came back. He did not speak as he put on his clothes and mounted the rear seat on the scooter. Everard spacehopped, an instantaneous jump; the room vanished and moonlight flooded the hills far below. A cold gust searched around the men in the sky.

  “Now for Ecbatana.” Everard turned on his dashlight and adjusted controls according to notes scribbled on the pilot pad.

  “Ec—Oh, you mean Hagmatan? The old Median capital?” Denison sounded astonished. “But it’s only a summer residence now.”

  “I mean Ecbatana thirty-six years ago,” said Everard.

  “Huh?”


  “Look, all the scientific historians in the future are convinced that the story of Cyrus’s childhood as told by Herodotus and the Persians is pure fable. Well, maybe they were right all along. Maybe your experiences here have been only one of those little quirks in space-time which the Patrol tries to eliminate.’’

  “I see,” said Denison slowly.

  “You were at Astyages’ court pretty often when you were his vassal, I suppose. Okay, you guide me. We want the old guy himself, preferably alone at night.”

  “Sixteen years was a long time,” said Denison.

  “Hm?”

  “If you’re going to change the past anyway, why use me at this point? Come get me when I’d been Cyrus only one year, long enough to be familiar with Ecbatana but—”

  “Sorry, no. I don’t dare. We’re steering close enough to the wind as is. Lord knows what a secondary loop in the world lines could lead to. Even if we got away with it, the Patrol would send us both to the exile planet for taking that kind of chance.”

  “Well… yes. I see your point.”

  “Also,” said Everard, “you’re not a suicidal type. Would you actually want the you of this instant never to have existed? Think for a minute precisely what that implies.”

  He completed his settings. The man behind him shuddered. “Mithras!” said Denison. “You’re right. Let’s not talk more about it.”

  “Here goes, then.” Everard threw the main switch.

  He hung over a walled city on an unfamiliar plain. Though this was also a moonlit night, the city was only a black huddle to his eyes. He reached into the saddlebags. “Here,” he said. “Let’s put on these costumes. I had the boys in the Middle Mohenjodaro office fix ’em up to my specs. Their situation is such that they often need this type of disguise for themselves.”

  Air whistled darkly as the hopper slanted earth-ward. Denison reached an arm past Everard to point. “That’s the palace. The royal bedchamber is over on the east side…”

  It was a heavier, less graceful building than its Persian successor in Pasargadae. Everard glimpsed a pair of winged bulls, white in an autumnal garden, left over from the Assyrians. He saw that the windows before him were too narrow for entrance, swore, and aimed at the nearest doorway. A pair of mounted sentries looked up, saw what was coming, and shrieked. Their horses reared, throwing them. Everard’s machine splintered the door. One more miracle wasn’t going to affect history, especially when such things were believed in as devoutly as vitamin pills at home, and possibly with more reason. Lamps guided him down a corridor where slaves and guards squalled their terror. At the royal bedroom he drew his sword and knocked with the pommel. “Take over, Keith,” he said. “You know the Median version of Aryan.”

  “Open, Astyages!” roared Denison. “Open to the messengers of Ahuramazda!”

  Somewhat to Everard’s surprise, the man within obeyed. Astyages was as brave as most of his people. But when the king—a thickset, hard-faced person in early middle age—saw two beings, luminously robed, halos around their heads and fountaining wings of light on their backs, seated on an iron throne in midair, he fell prostrate.

  Everard heard Denison thunder in the best tent-meeting style, using a dialect he could not follow:

  “O infamous vessel of iniquity, heaven’s anger is upon you! Do you believe that your least thought, though it skulk in the darkness which begot it, was ever hidden from the Day’s Eye? Do you believe that almighty Ahuramazda would permit a deed so foul as you plot…”

  Everard didn’t listen. He strayed into his own thoughts: Harpagus was probably somewhere in this very city, full of his youth and unridden as yet by guilt. Now he would never bear that burden. He would never lay a child upon the mountain and lean on his spear as it cried and shivered and finally became still. He would revolt in the future, for his own reasons, and become the Chiliarch of Cyrus, but he would not die in his enemy’s arms in a haunted forest; and a certain Persian, whose name Everard did not know, would also be spared a Greek sword and a slow falling into emptiness.

  Yet the memory of two men whom I killed is printed on my brain cells; there is a thin white scar on my leg; Keith Denison is forty-seven years old and has learned to think like a king.

  “…Know, Astyages, that this child Cyrus is favored of heaven. And heaven is merciful: you have been warned that if you stain your soul with his innocent blood, the sin can never be washed away. Leave Cyrus to grow up in Anshan, or burn forever with Ahriman! Mithras has spoken!”

  Astyages groveled, beating his head on the floor.

  “Let’s go,” said Denison in English.

  Everard hopped to Persian hills, thirty-six years futureward. Moonlight fell upon cedars near a road and a stream. It was cold, and a wolf howled.

  He landed the scooter, got off and began to remove his costume. Denison’s bearded face came out of the mask, with strangeness written upon it. “I wonder,” he said. His voice was nearly lost in the silence under the mountains. “I wonder if we didn’t throw too much of a scare into Astyages. History does record that he gave Cyrus a three-year fight when the Persians revolted.”

  “We can always go back to the outbreak of the war and provide a vision encouraging him to resist,” said Everard, struggling to be matter-of-fact; for there were ghosts around him. “But I don’t believe that’ll be necessary. He’ll keep hands off the prince, but when a vassal rebels, well, he’ll be mad enough to discount what by then will seem like a dream. Also, his own nobles, Median vested interests, would hardly allow him to give in. But let’s check up. Doesn’t the King lead a procession at the winter solstice festival?”

  “Yeah. Let’s go. Quickly.”

  And the sunlight burned around them, high above Pasargadae. They left their machine hidden and walked down on foot, two travelers among many streaming in to celebrate the Birthday of Mithras. On the way, they inquired what had happened, explaining that they had been long abroad. The answers satisfied them, even in small details which Denison’s memories recorded but the chronicles hadn’t mentioned.

  At last they stood under a frosty-blue sky, among thousands of people, and salaamed when Cyrus the Great King rode past with his chief courtiers Kobad, Croesus, and Harpagus, and the pride and pomp and priesthood of Persia followed.

  “He’s younger than I was,” whispered Denison. “He would be, I guess. And a little smaller… different face entirely, isn’t it?… but he’ll do.”

  “Want to stay for the fun?” asked Everard.

  Denison drew his cloak around him. The air was bitter. “No,” he said. “Let’s go back. It’s been a long time. Even if it never happened.”

  “Uh-huh.” Everard seemed more grim than a victorious rescuer should be. “It never happened.”

  10

  Keith Denison left the elevator of a building in New York. He was vaguely surprised that he had not remembered what it looked like. He couldn’t even recall his apartment number, but had to check with the directory. Details, details. He tried to stop trembling.

  Cynthia opened the door as he reached it. “Keith,” she said, almost wonderingly.

  He could find no other words than: “Manse warned you about me, didn’t he? He said he would.”

  “Yes. It doesn’t matter. I didn’t realize your looks would have changed that much. But it doesn’t matter. Oh, my darling!”

  She drew him inside, closed the door and crept; into his arms.

  He looked around the place. He had forgotten how cramped it was. And he had never liked her taste in decoration, though he had yielded to her.

  The habit of giving in to a woman, even of asking her opinion, was one he’d have to learn all over again. It wouldn’t be easy.

  She raised a wet face for his kiss. Was that how she looked? But he didn’t remember—he didn’t. After all that time, he had only remembered she was little and blond. He had lived with her a few months; Cassandane had called him her morning star and given him three children and waited to do his will for fourtee
n years.

  “Oh, Keith, welcome home,” said the high small voice.

  Home! he thought. God!

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