It was a gruesome effort to step through the gate, when anything might lie beyond. But the corridor stretched in humming whiteness, empty as far as he could see. He let the wind out of his chest and collapsed weakly onto the gravity sled.
They couldn’t linger, though. At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them. (Just what did that mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He’d think about it later.) Moving his hands experimentally to cover the control lights, he found how to operate the vehicle and sent it gliding futureward.
Auri sat close beside him. She clutched the bench hard, but panic was gone and she even showed a trace of bright-eyed curiosity. There was less amazement in her than he had felt. But then, to her all these wonders were equally wonderful, and, in fact, no more mysterious than rain, wind, birth, death, and the wheel of the seasons.
So what to do?” Lockridge puzzled aloud. “I could go on to 1964, and we might try just to disappear. But I don’t reckon that’d work. Too damn many Rangers there, and too damn easy for ’em to trace a man, especially when you’d make us sort of conspicuous, kid. And if Storm herself couldn’t make contact with any Wardens then, I sure can’t.” He realised he had spoken in English. Doubtless Auri took his words for an incantation.
What had Storm told him?
Instantly, overwhelmingly, he was back in the prison hut, and she was with him, and his mouth knew her kiss. For a while he forgot everything else.
Sense came back. The corridor encompassed him with blind radiance, with hollowness and strangeness. Storm was far away—centuries away. But he could return to her. And would, by heaven!
Might he dash clear up to her age? No. This shaft didn’t reach that far. And too risky, in any event. The sooner they got out and vanished in the world, the better. But she had spoken of a Herr Jesper Fledelius, in Viborg of the Reformation era. Yes, his best bet. And, too, a feeling of destiny still drove him.
He slowed the sled and paid attention to the gate markers. He couldn’t read their alphabet, but Arabic numerals were recognisable. Pretty clearly, years were counted from the “lower” end of the passage. So, if 1827 B.C. equalled 1175. . . .
When the numbers 4 5 - - appeared, he stopped the sled and sent it back. Auri waited while he forced himself to study the layout and think. Blast that uncertainty factor! He wanted to come out a few days in advance of All Hallows, to allow time to reach Viborg, but riot so far in advance that Brann’s hounds could get on his track.
As best he could, he selected a line in the set corresponding to Anno Domini 1535. Auri linked fingers with him and followed him trustingly through the curtain.
Again the long, still room, and the locker. But the clothes stored here were something else from the Neolithic. A variety of costumes was available, peasant, gentleman, priest, soldier, and more. He didn’t know which was best. What the hell had cone on in Denmark of the sixteenth century? Hell indeed, if the time war were involved.
Well, here was a purse of gold, silver, and copper money—Auri exclaimed at the sight of all that metal—and cash was always useful. But a lower-class person who carried so much would be suspected of robbery. Thus Lockridge chose what he imagined was a prosperous man’s travelling garb: linen underclothes and shirt, satin doublet, crimson trunk hose, high boots, floppy-brimmed cap, blue cloak trimmed with fur, sword and knife (the latter doubtless mainly for eating purposes), and miscellaneous gear that he could only guess about. Diaglossas, of course, for him and Auri; and then he knew that there were so many wigs because men today wore their hair long. He donned a yellow one. It seemed briefly to writhe, as if alive, and settled onto his head with a firmness that gave a perfect illusion of nature.
Auri stripped off her skirt and ornaments, innocent beneath his eyes, and fumbled with the long gray gown and hooded cloak he picked for her. “The seafarers from the South do not dress more queerly than those who dwell below the earth,” she said.
“We are bound up again,” Lockridge told her. “Into a very different land. Now, this thing I have put in your ear will guide you in speech and behaviour. But best hold yourself as meek and quiet as you can. Let me take the lead. We will tell people you are my wife.”
She frowned, turning the implications over in her head. Her sense of wonder was stunned, she accepted everything as it came to her, though she kept a fox’s alertness: an attitude that Zen masters might envy. But the Danish word hustru held a universe of concepts about the relationship between the sexes that the Yuthoaz would have taken for granted but that were new to her.
Abruptly she flushed. Her passivity vanished in joy, she threw her arms about him and cried: “Then the curse is gone? Oh, Lynx, I am yours!”
“Whoa, there. Whoa!” He fended her off. His own ears burned. “Not so fast. The month, uh, won’t be spring here.”
Nor was it. When they emerged on the moundside and closed the door, he found night again—a cold, autumnal night where the half moon flew between ragged clouds and the wind whined in sere grasses. Naked and empty stood the dolmen above. The forest where once the Goddess walked was gone; only a few scrubby elms swayed in the north. Beyond them, bone-white, gleamed encroaching sand dunes that the future had yet to drive back.
But there had been cultivation around the hillock. Had been. Traces of furrows remained among weeds, and the clay chimney of a burned cottage reared jagged on the southern ridge. War had passed through these parts, less than a year ago.
10
In awe, the Neolithic girl asked, “Is the Knossos they tell of as great as that?”
Despite weariness and unease, Lockridge had to grin. To his eyes, sixteenth-century Viborg was like the crossroads town where his parents used to shop. Much prettier, though, especially after two days of heathland. And it promised snugness, now when the last sunlight speared through rain clouds rising blue-black on a wind that flapped his cloak and whistled of winter.
Past the lake, he glimpsed through an oak grove (the beeches had still not driven the king tree out of Denmark) the warm brick hue of an abandoned monastery. Hard by, the city walls retained some green in the grass that covered their lower embankments. The same tinge was given by moss to such of the high-peaked thatch roofs as he could see. Spare and graceful, the cathedral’s twin towers reached for heaven.
“I think Knossos may be a little bigger,” he said.
His smile faded. Thirty-three hundred years, he thought, and every hope which had then blossomed so brightly was dust, not even remembered. And other hopes had sprung, and died, until today—
The diaglossa gave basic information but was silent about historical events. So had it been in Auri’s age and, he suspected, in every year of earth’s existence on which a time gate opened. He had a guess at the reason. Rangers and Wardens recruited native auxiliaries; but who could remain steady if he knew what must befall his people?
Denmark lay in evil days. He and Auri had kept to the lesser roads, little more than cartwheel tracks that wound through forest and heather; they lived off rations from the supply bundle and slept out, wrapped together in their cloaks, when exhaustion forced a halt more than darkness did. But they saw farmsteads and folk; they stopped to drink at wells; and though every peasant was sullen, frightened, short-spoken, one was bound to learn a few things. A song was in the land: