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

  The debate went on for hours. It was afternoon before Yael suggested they break for food. “Thanks,” Everard said, “but I think I’d better get back to the palace. Otherwise Hiram might suspect I’m loafing, at his expense. I’ll check in again tomorrow, okay?”

  The truth was that he had no appetite for the usual heavy meal of the day, roast lamb or whatever else it would be. He’d rather get a slab of bread and a hunk of goat cheese at some foodstall, while he tried to sort out this new problem. (Thank technology again. Without the gene-tailored protective microbes the Patrol medics had implanted in him, he’d never have dared touch local stuff that wasn’t cooked dead. And vaccinations against every sort of disease that came and went through the ages would long since have overloaded his immune system.)

  Twentieth-century style, he shook hands all around. Korten might be wrong, or he might not be, but he was pleasant, able, and well-intentioned. Everard went forth into a street that brooded and simmered beneath the sun.

  Pum waited. He rose less exuberantly than before. An odd gravity was on the thin young face. “Master,” he breathed, “can we talk unheard?”

  They found themselves a tavern where they were the only customers. In actuality, it was a lean-to roof shading a small area on which cushions lay; you sat cross-legged, and the landlord fetched clay goblets of wine from inside his home. Everard paid him in beads, after desultory haggling. Foot traffic swarmed and babbled up and down the street on which the shop intruded, but at this hour men were generally busied. They’d relax here, those who could afford to, when cooling shadows had fallen between the walls.

  Everard sipped the thin, sour drink and grimaced. In his opinion, nobody understood wine before about the seventeenth century A.D. Beer was worse. No matter. “Speak, son,” he said. “And you needn’t waste breath or time calling me the radiance of the universe and offering to lie down for me to wipe my feet on. What have you been doing?”

  Pum gulped, shivered, leaned forward. “O lord of mine,” he began, and his voice broke in an adolescent squeak, “your underling has dared take much upon his head. Upbraid me, beat me, have me whipped, whatever your will may be, if I have transgressed. But never, I beg, never think I have sought anything but your welfare. My sole wish is to serve you as far as my poor abilities allow.”

  A brief grin flashed. “You see, you pay so well!”

  Soberness returned: “You are a strong man, a man of great powers, in whose service I may hope to flourish. Now for that, I must prove myself worthy. Any lout can carry your baggage or lead you to a pleasure house. What can Pum-mairam do, over and above this, that my lord will wish to keep him as a retainer? Well, what does my lord require? What does he need?

  “Master, it pleases you to pose as a rude tribesman, but from the very first I had a feeling there was far more to you. Of course you would not confide in a chance-met guttersnipe. So, without knowledge of you, how could I tell what use I might be?”

  Yeah, Everard thought, in his kind of hand-to-mouth existence, he had to develop a pretty keen intuition, or else go under. He kept his tone mild: “I am not angry. But tell me what you did.”

  Pum’s big, russet-hued eyes met his and stayed, almost as equal to equal. “I made bold to query others about my master. Always carefully, never letting out what my purpose was or, in sooth, letting the person suspect what he or she revealed. As proof of this, has anyone seemed to doubt my lord?”

  “M-m… no… not any more than I could expect. Who did you talk with?”

  “Well, the lovely Pleshti—Bo-ron-u-wen, for a start.” Pum lifted a palm. “Master! She said never a word you would not have approved. I read her face, her movements, while I asked certain questions. No more. She refused me answers, now and then, herself, and those refusals told me something too. And her body does not know how to keep secrets. Is that her fault?”

  “No.” Also, I wouldn’t be surprised but what you reopened your door a crack that night and eavesdropped. Never mind. 1 don’t want to know.

  “Thus I learned you are not of the… the Geyil folk, is that their name? It was no surprise. I had already guessed as much. You see, although I am sure my master is terrible in battle, he is as forbearing with women as a mother with her child. Would a half-savage wanderer be?”

  Everard laughed ruefully. Touche! On previous missions, he’d sometimes heard remarks about his lack of normal callousness, but nobody else had drawn conclusions from it.

  Encouraged, Pum hurried on: “I shan’t weary my lord with details. Menials are always watching the mighty, and love to gossip about them. I may have deceived Sarai the housekeeper a tiny bit. Since I was your footman, she saw no reason to bid me begone. Not that I asked her very much directly. That would have been both foolish and unnecessary. I was content to get myself steered toward the dwelling of Jantin-hamu, where they were agog over their visitor yesterday eventide. Thus did I get a hint of what it is my lord seeks.”

  He puffed himself up. “That, resplendent master, was what his servant required. I hied myself down to the docks and started gadding about. Lo!”

  A billow passed through Everard. “What did you find?” he nearly yelled.

  “What,” Pum declaimed, “but a man who lived through the shipwreck and onslaught of demons?”

  Gisgo appeared to be in his mid-forties, short but wiry, his weathered nutcracker face full of life. Over the years, he had risen from deckhand to coxswain, a skilled and well-rewarded post. Over the years, too, his cronies had tired of hearing about his remarkable experience. They took it for just another tall tale, anyway.

  Everard appreciated what a fantastic piece of detective work Pum had done, tracing the man down by getting sailors in wineshops to talk about who told what kind of yarns. He himself could never have managed it; they’d have been too leery of such an outsider, who moreover was a royal guest. Like sensible people throughout history, the average Phoenician wanted as little to do with his government as possible.

  It had been a lucky break that Gisgo was home in voyaging season. However, he had attained enough seniority and saved enough wealth that he need no more join long expeditions, hazardous and uncomfortable. His ship was on the Egypt run, and took layovers between passages.

  In his neat fifth-floor apartment, his two wives brought refreshments while he lolled back and spouted at his guests. A window gave on a court between tenements. The view was of clay walls and laundry strung on lines between. Yet sunlight came in alongside an eddy of breeze, to touch souvenirs of many a trip—a miniature Babylonian cherub, a syrinx from Greece, a faience hippopotamus from the Nile, an Iberian juju, a leaf-shaped bronze dagger from the North… Everard had made a substantial golden gift, and the mariner waxed expansive.

  “Aye,” Gisgo said, “that was an eldritch journey, ’twas. Bad time of year, equinox drawing nigh, and those there Sinim from who knows where, carrying misfortune in their bones for aught we knew. But we were young, the whole crew of us, from the captain on down; we reckoned on wintering in Cyprus, where the wines are strong and the girls are sweet; those Sinim, they’d pay well, they would. For that kind of metal, we were ready to give the fig to death and hell. I’ve since grown wiser, but won’t claim I’m gladder, no, no. I’m still spry, but I feel the teeth gnawing, and believe me, my friends, it was better to be young.”

  He signed himself. “The poor lads who went down, may their shades rest peaceful.” With a glance at Pum: “One of them looked like you, younker. Gave me a start, you did, when first we met. Adiyaton, was that his name? Aye, I think so. Maybe he was your grandsire?”

  The boy gestured ignorance. He had no way of knowing.

  “I’ve made my offerings for the lot of them, I have,” Gisgo went on, “as well as in thanks for my own deliverance. Always stand by your friends and pay your debts, then the gods will help you in your need. They surely helped me.

  “The Cyprus run is tricky at best. Can’t make camp; it’s overnight on the open sea, sometimes for days on end if the wind�
��s foul. This time—ah, this time! Scarce were we beyond sight of land when the gale struck, and little did it avail us to spread oil on those waters. Out oars and keep her head to the waves, it was, till breath failed and sinews cracked but we must row regardless. Black as a pig’s bowels, it was, and howling and lashing and rolling and pitching while the salt crusted my eyes and stung the cracks in my lips—and how to keep stroke when we couldn’t hear the cox’s drum through the wind?

  “But on the midships catwalk I saw the chief of the Sinim, cloak flapping about him, faced straight into the blast, and laughing, laughing!

  “I don’t know whether he was bold, or landlubber-ignorant of the danger, or wiser than I then was in the ways of the sea. Afterward I’ve harked back, in the light of much hard-won knowledge, and decided that with any luck we could have ridden out the storm. That was a well-found ship, and her officers knew their trade. However, the gods, or the demons, would have it otherwise.

  “For suddenly, crack and blaze! The brightness blinded me. I lost hold of my oar, like most of us did. Somehow I fumbled out and got a grip on it again before it slid away between the tholes. That may have saved my sight, because I wasn’t looking up when the second bolt smote.

  “Aye, we’d been hit by lightning. Twice. I’d heard no thunder, but maybe the roar of the waves and shriek of the wind covered that. When the dazzle began to clear from my eyes, I saw the mast aflame like a torch. The hull was slashed and weakened. I felt the sea shiver my skull, and my arse, too, as it broke the ship apart under me. “That scarce seemed to matter right away. For by that fitful, ragged light I glimpsed things in heaven, like yonder winged bull but huge as real oxen and ashine as if cast in iron. Men were astride them. They swooped downward—

  “Then everything went to pieces. I found myself in the water, clutching my oar. A couple other men in my sight had got hold of flotsam also. But the fury wasn’t done with us. A lightning bolt struck down, straight into poor Hurum-abi, my drinking friend since I was a kid. He must’ve been killed right off. Me, I ducked below and held my breath as long’s I could.

  “When I must needs bring my nose up for air, I seemed to be alone in the sea. But overhead was a swarm of those dragons or chariots or whatever they were, a-dart through the wind. Flame raged between them. I went under again.

  “I think they were soon gone to wherever in the Beyond they’d come from, but I was too busy staying alive to pay any more heed. Finally I made it to land. What had happened seemed unreal, like a mad dream. Maybe it was. I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m the single man on that ship who ever came back. Praise Tanith, eh, girls?” Undaunted by memory, Gisgo pinched the bottom of his nearest wife.

  More reminiscence followed, which took a couple of hours to disentangle. Finally Everard could ask, his tongue dry despite the wine: “Do you remember just when this was? How many years ago?”

  “Why, sure I do, sure I do,” Gisgo answered. “An even one score and six years, come fifteen days before the fall equinox, or pretty near to that.”

  He waved a hand. “How do I know, you wonder? Well, it’s like the Egyptian priests, that keep such a close calendar because their river floods and falls every year. A seaman who doesn’t take care, he’s not likely to get old. Did you know that beyond the Pillars of Melqart the sea rises and falls like the Nile, but twice a day? You’d better watch those times sharp, if you’d fare in those parts.

  “But the Sinim, they were what really drove the idea home in this head. There I was, attendant on my captain while they bargained with him for passage, and they kept talking about exactly which day we’d depart—talking him into it, you understand. I listened, and I thought what gains might lie in that kind of remembering, and told myself I’d make a point of it. Back then, I couldn’t read or write, but what I could do was mark whatever special things happened each year, and keep those happenings in order and count back over them when I needed to. So this was the year in between a venture to the Red Cliff Shores and the year when I caught the Babylonian disease—”

  Everard and Pum emerged and began walking from the Sidonian Harbor quarter, down a Street of the Ropemakers now filling with dusk and quietness, toward the palace.

  “My lord gathers his forces, I see,” murmured the boy after a while.

  The Patrolman nodded absently. His mind was in a storm of its own.

  Varagan’s procedure seemed clear to him. (Everard felt well-nigh certain it was Merau Varagan, perpetrating a fresh enormity.) From wherever in space-time his hideout was, he and half a dozen of his confederates had sought the Usu area, twenty-six years ago. Others must have carried them on hoppers, which let them off and immediately returned. The Patrol couldn’t hope to catch the vehicles in that brief an interlude, when the exact place and moment were unknown. Varagan’s band had gone afoot into town and ingratiated themselves with King Abibaal.

  They must have done this after bombing the temple, leaving the ransom note, and probably making the attempt on Everard—after, that is, in terms of their world lines, their continuity of experience. It would not have been hard to pick such a target, or even plant such an assassin. Scientists studying Tyre had written books which were readily available. The preliminary mischief would give Varagan an idea as to the feasibility of his entire scheme. Having decided that it would be worth a substantial investment of lifespan and effort, he thereupon sought the detailed knowledge, the kind that seldom gets into books, which he would need in order to do a really thorough job of wrecking this society.

  When they had learned as much at the court of Abibaal as they felt was called for, Varagan and his followers left town in conventional wise, so as not to engender stories among the people that would spread and persist and eventually give the Patrol a lead. For the same reason, the dying out of public interest in them, they wanted it thought that they had perished.

  Hence their departure date, on which they had insisted; a scouting flight had revealed that a storm would suddenly rise within hours. Those of the gang who were to pick them up had fired energy beams to destroy the ship and kill the witnesses. Had they not chanced to miss Gisgo, they would have covered their tracks almost completely. In fact, without Sarai’s assistance, Everard would most likely never have heard of those Sinim who were unfortunately lost at sea.

  From his base, Varagan had “already” dispatched agents to keep an eye on Patrol HQ in Tyre, as the time of his demonstration attack drew near. If such a gunman succeeded in recognizing and killing one or more of the scarce, valued Unattached officers, excellent! It would increase the probability of the Exaltationists getting what they wanted—whether that be the matter transmuter or the destruction of the Danel-lian future. Everard didn’t think Varagan cared which. Either would gratify his power hunger and Schadenfreude.

  Well, but Everard had found the spoor. He could loose the hounds of the Patrol—Can I?

  He gnawed his Celtic mustache and thought irrelevantly how glad he’d be to mow the damned fungus off, once this operation was finished. Will it be?

  Outnumbered, outgunned, Varagan was not necessarily outsmarted. His scheme had a built-in fail-safe that might be impossible to break.

  The trouble was, the Phoenicians possessed neither clocks nor accurate navigation instruments. Gisgo didn’t know, any closer than a week or two, when his ship suffered disaster; nor did he know, any closer than fifty miles or so, where it had been at the time. Therefore Everard didn’t.

  Of course, the Patrol could easily ascertain the date, and the course for Cyprus was known. But anything more precise required keeping watch from the air nearby, didn’t it? And the enemy must have detectors which would warn him of that. The pilots who were to scuttle the ship and take away Vara-gan’s group could arrive prepared for a dogfight. They wouldn’t need but a few minutes to carry out their mission, then they’d be untraceably gone.

  Worse, they might cancel the mission altogether. They could wait for a more favorable instant to recover their associates—or, worse yet
, do it at an earlier time, before the ship ever sailed. In either case, Gisgo would not have (had) the experience which Everard had just heard him relate. The trail that the Patrolman had so painfully uncovered would never have existed. Probably the long-range consequences to history would be trivial, but there was no guarantee of that, once you started monkeying around with events.

  For the same reasons, certain nullification of clues and possible upheaval in the continuum, the Patrol could not anticipate Varagan’s plan. It dared not, for instance, swoop down on the ship and arrest the passengers before the gale and the Exaltationists struck.

  Looks like the only way we can proceed is to appear exactly where they are, within that time-slot of five minutes or less when the riders carry out their dirty work. But how are we to pinpoint it without alerting them?

  “I think,” said Pum, “my lord intends to do battle, in a strange realm where wizards are his foes.”

  Am I that transparent to him? “Yes, it may be,” Everard replied. “I’ll first recompense you well, for you’ve been a right-hand man to me.”

  The youth plucked his sleeve. “Lord,” he implored, “let your servant follow you.”

  Astounded, Everard stopped in mid-stride. “Huh?”

  “I would not be parted from my master!” cried Pum. Tears gleamed in his eyes and down his cheekbones. “Better death at his side—aye, better the demons cast me down to hell—than return to that cockroach life you raised me from. Teach me what I should do. You know I learn fast. I shall not be afraid. You have made me into a man!”

  By God, I do believe that for once his passion is perfectly genuine.

  It’s out of the question, of course. Is it? Everard stood thunderstruck. Pum danced before him, laughing and weeping. “My lord will do it, my lord will take me!”