Four hundred years hence lay the happy country Lockridge had seen. That was cold comfort, on this grey cold evening. How long would its moment be?
“Come,” he said. “We’d best hurry. They close the gates at sunset.”
He led the way by the lakeside, till the path joined the highroad. According to the boy who had opened a little toward him, even sung him the ballad (which was of the great noblemen, loosed upon the common folk now that King Kristiern II who had been their friend lay captive in Sønderborg Castle), tomorrow was the Eve of All Hallows. His timing had been close; he wanted to get settled in town and acquire some feel of things before seeking out Jesper Fledelius.
The highway was also dirt, muddy and deeply rutted. No traffic moved on it. North Jutland was still a ghostly country after last year’s revolt, broken by the cannon of Johan Rantzau. The wind shrilled through leafless branches.
Half a dozen men stood guard at the portal. They were German Landsknechts, in soiled blue uniforms whose sleeves puffed out around the corselets. Two-handed swords, five feet long, were slung on their backs. A pair of halberds clashed together to bar the way, a third slanted toward Lockridge’s breast. “Halt!” snapped the leader. “Wer gehts da?”
The American wet his lips. These mercenaries didn’t look impressive. They were shorter than he by several inches—most people were in this undernourished age, as they had not been in his time or in Auri’s—and faces under the tall helmets were scarred by smallpox. But they could kill him with no trouble.
He had cobbled together a story. “I am an English merchant, travelling with my wife,” he said in their own language. “Our ship was wrecked on the west coast.” So desolate had that been, what he saw of it, that he didn’t think anyone would give him the lie. The diaglossa informed him that marine disasters were not uncommon. “We made our way here overland.”
The sergeant looked sceptical. His men tautened. “At this time of year? And you were the only ones saved?”
“No, no, everyone got ashore without harm,” Lockridge said. “The ship is aground and damaged, but not broken apart.” Travel-stained though he was, he had obviously not been through salt water. “The master chose to keep the men there, lest the goods be plundered. As I had business in Viborg that will scarcely wait, I offered to carry word and ask for help.” Such an expedition would take at least three days to arrive and find nothing, an equal time to get back. By then he should be gone.
“English, ha?” The little eyes narrowed. “I never heard an Englander speak as if born in Mecklenburg.”
Lockridge swore at himself. He should have used what fragments of German he remembered from college, not been seduced by the instrument in his ear. “But I was,” he said. “My father was a factor there for many years. Believe me, I am respectable.” He dipped into his purse, brought out a couple of gold nobles, and jingled them suggestively. “See, I can afford to ask honest men to drink my health.”
“Friedrich! Fetch the Junker!” A Landsknecht sloped off through the tunnel-like gate. His spear butt rattled on cobblestones. Lockridge backed away. “Stay where you are, outlander!” Edged steel thrust forward.
Auri caught at Lockridge’s arm. The sergeant twisted his moustache. “Yonder’s no wife to a rich merchant,” he pounced. “She’s been in the sun as much as any serf wench.” He wiped his nose with the back of one hairy hand and stood pondering. “Yet she walks like a lady,” he muttered. “What are you two, anyhow?”
Lockridge saw fear give way in Auri’s eyes to something she had not known before: shame, at the way the Landsknechts leered. His fingers itched for a gun. “Watch yourselves,” he barked. “Else I’ll have you whipped.”
The sergeant snickered. “Or I’ll see you on the gallows, other side of town—spy! The crows’ll welcome you. They’ve long picked clean the peasants we dangled up for them.”
Lockridge choked. He hadn’t expected trouble. What had gone wrong?
His glance flickered about, seeking escape. There was none. Arquebuses were racked with smouldering matches, ready to shoot, and he heard iron-shod hoofs clatter near.
The rider came into view, clad in half armour, his long face cast in arrogant lines. He must be one of the Danish aristocrats, Lockridge thought, in charge of this watch, of this foreign garrison set among his own people. The Germans saluted clumsily. “Here’s Junker Erik Ulfeld,” the sergeant announced. “Tell him your tale.”
Blond brows lifted. “What have you to say?” Ulfeld drawled, also in German.
Lockridge gave his right name—might as well—and repeated his yarn in more detail. Ulfeld stroked his chin. He was what passed for clean-shaven, which with contemporary razors meant that his palm went over a skin like sandpaper.
“What proof have you?”
“No documents, my lord,” Lockridge said. Sweat trickled from his armpits, down his ribs. The horseman loomed mountainous over him, against a roiling cloud mass; sunlight had taken on a brazen storm tinge which made the world stand out stark, and the wind moaned louder. “Those were lost in the shipwreck.”
“Do you know anyone here, then?” Ulfeld snapped.
“Yes, at the Inn of the Golden Lion—” Lockridge’s voice jerked to a stop. Ulfeld had laid hand to hilt. Lockridge understood, and cursed his diaglossa. The question had been in Danish; unthinkingly, he had answered likewise.
“An Englishman who speaks two foreign languages so well?” Ulfeld murmured. His pale eyes flared. “Or a man of Count Kristoffer’s?”
“God’s bones, my lord!” blurted the sergeant. “A murder-burner!”
Weapons rammed closer. The knowledge came too late into Lockridge. Because they had gunpowder, and the earth had been circumnavigated, and Copernicus was alive, he hadn’t stopped to examine just how different this period really was from his own. With wooden houses, straw roofs, no more water than could be drawn in a bucket, hardly a town escaped repeated devastation by fire. Today’s fear of enemy arsonists was akin to the fear he remembered of atomic rockets.
“No!” he cried. “Listen to me! I’ve lived in Denmark and the German cities—”
“Beyond a doubt,” said Ulfeld dryly, “in Lübeck.”
Through the lurching of his wits, a curious, detached chain of logic zigzagged in Lockridge. Lübeck was a Hanseatic town, evidently leagued with Kristoffer, the count whose doomed war on behalf of the old king still raged in the islands, from what little that poor peasant boy had known to tell. Ulfeld’s conclusion was much too natural.
“But you said a good burgher could identify you,” the Dane went on. “Who is he?”
“They call him Jesper Fledelius,” Auri ventured.
“What the pox!” Ulfeld’s calm broke. His horse snorted and curvetted, mane aflutter in the wind. The sergeant gestured to his Landsknechts, who closed around the strangers.
Oh, Lord, Lockridge groaned to himself, weren’t we in deep enough? I was goin’ to stall if I could, till I found out if that name meant anything. He hardly noticed when he was relieved of sword and knife, nor even how rudely Auri was frisked.
Ulfeld got back his mask of remoteness. “At the Inn of the Golden Lion, did you say?” he asked.
Lockridge could only go ahead. “Yes, my lord. So I was told. Though he may not be there yet. But I haven’t been in Denmark for years. I know little of what’s happened here. In fact, I have never met this Jesper. My company of merchant adventurers only gave me his name as one who . . . who could help us arrange trade. If I were an enemy agent, my lord, would I come as I have done?”
“If you were a true merchant,” Ulfeld retorted, “would you not have known you could not come here to trade, as freely as if we were Indian savages with no laws governing who may do so?”
“He has a full purse, Junker,” the sergeant said smugly. “He tried to buy his way past us.” Lockridge wanted to smash the man’s teeth. He almost enjoyed hearing Ulfeld say curtly: