Again Lockridge saw her, felt her. He clutched the other man’s robe. “Hell take it, you’re supposed to handle problems! There must be something we can do!”
“Yes, yes.” Annoyed, Mareth brushed him off. “We must certainly act. But not precipitately. You have not experienced the oneness of time. Respect those who have.”
“Look, if I could come up the local corridor, we can all go back down it. We can even arrive in the Neolithic before Brann does, and be waiting for him.”
“No.” Mareth shook his head with needless violence. “Time is immutable.” He drew a breath and continued more calmly. “The attempt would be foredoomed. We would be certain to encounter something, like a superior enemy force within the corridor, that would frustrate us. Anyhow, I see no point in using the Danish shaft at all. We have nothing here to help us except these.” His gesture at the Coveners, kneeling frightened on the rim of firelight, was contemptuous. “True, we could try to go down it by ourselves and get reinforcements from the pre-Viking era. But why do so—or why take the risk of crossing the world to seek our Oriental and African bases—when better help is so much closer to hand?”
“Huh?” Lockridge gaped at him.
The Warden’s academic manner slipped off. He paced back and forth, thinking aloud, a war chief in friar’s gown.
“Brann came alone, since he knew the Koriach—she—was also alone, and he has no more forces to spare than we do. But having caught her, he will summon men to consolidate his gains. We have to reckon with that. The uncertainty of emergence, you remember. Since we did not appear to save her that night, we will not. Therefore, the chances are that we will not appear—will not have appeared—until after he has a number of Rangers with him. And, obviously, they will post a guard on the corridor gate.
“But in this present century, Denmark is not where our real European strength lies. Rather we are concentrated in Britain. King Henry has forsaken the Roman Church; but we saw to it that he did not go over to Lutheranism either, and for us his kingdom is pivotal. What you know as the episode of the two Queen Marys is a time of gain for the Wardens; the Rangers will resurge with Cromwell, but we will drive them out at the Restoration.
“I know. You are wondering why anyone would wage a campaign whose outcome is known beforehand. Well, for one thing, in the course of waging it, casualties are inflicted on the enemy. More important, each milieu which is firmly held is a source of strength, of recruits, of power to call on, another weight thrown in the scalepans of the future when the final decision, whose nature we do not know, is reached.
“But to continue. I have a flock in England too; and there I am not the pagan ritemaster of a few starveling peasants, but a preacher to knights and strong yeomen, urging them to stand by the Holy Catholic Faith. And . . . we have a corridor there whose existence the Rangers do not suspect, with its own gate on the Neolithic. That gate opens pastward of the Danish one, but there is a few months’ overlap, in the exact year we must reach.”
He seized Lockridge’s shoulders. His visage blazed. “Man, are you with me? For her?”
12
“Hai-ee-ee! Hingst, Hest, og Flag faar flygte Dag! Kommer, kommer, kommer!”
The witchmaster’s robe flapped about him like wings. As his arms and face turned heavenward, a whirlwind unseen, unfelt, unheard, lifted him and his chosen. Upward they fled until they were lost among cold constellations. The balefire flared from its coals, threw spark and flame after its lord, and sank again. The folk of the Coven shuddered and departed.
Auri bit back a cry, shut her eyes, clung to Lockridge’s hand. Jesper Fledelius rattled a string of foul oaths, then felt himself safe after all and whooped like a boy. The American shared some of that excitement. He’d flown before, but never at the end of a gravity beam.
There was no airblast. The force that streamed from the belt under Mareth’s habit deflected it. One went bat silent, several hundred feet above ground, and speed mounted into the hundreds of miles per hour.
Darkling rolled the heath; Viborg was a blot seen for an instant and lost; the Limfjord shimmered; the western dunes fell behind, and the North Sea ran in waves touched with icy gleams by a sickle moon rising ahead of dawn. Lost in night and wonder, Lockridge was startled when England bulked into view—so soon?
Across the flatlands of East Anglia they went. Thatch-roofed villages lay among stubblefields, a castle raised battlements above a river, it was a dream and impossible that he, prosaic he, should follow a wizard through the sky on the same night as King Henry snored beside Anne Boleyn . . . poor Anne whose head would fly from the axe in less than a year, and none to warn her. But her daughter lay cradled in that same palace and was named Elizabeth. The strangeness possessed Lockridge like a vision: not merely his own fate, but the mystery that was every man’s.
Cultivation gave way to a wilderness where islands crowded among meres and marshy streams, the Lincolnshire Fens. Mareth swooped downward. The last withered leafage parted before him, he came to rest and deftly drew in the others. By the paling sky Lockridge saw a wattle hut.
“This is my English base,” the Warden told him. “The time gate lies beneath. You will remain here while I gather men.”
Behind that primitive facade, the cabin was almost luxurious, with hardwood floors and wainscoting, ample furniture and a good store of books. Food stocks and other supplies from the future were hidden behind sliding panels; nothing showed that would have been too foreign to this century. An intruder might have noticed how the interior kept warm and dry in every season. However, none ventured here. The peasants had their superstitions, the gentry were indifferent.
The three from Mareth’s past were only too glad of a respite. They were ordinary humans, not masterworks of an age that could shape heredity in any desired pattern, and their nerves were stretched near breaking. The next two days were an interlude of sleep and hazy half wakefulness.
On the third morning, though, Auri sought Lockridge. He was seated on a bench outside the door, enjoying a smoke. While not an addict, he had rather missed tobacco, and it was thoughtful, if slightly anachronistic, of the Wardens to keep some on hand along with clay pipes. And the weather had turned pleasant. Sunlight spilled wan between the naked willows. A belated flock of geese made a southward V far overhead, their honking drifted down to him through a great quietness, far and lonely wander-song. Then he heard her feet latter close, looked up and was struck by beauty.
There had been no time, before he tumbled into this drowsy interlude, to think of her as much except a child that needed what small protection he could spare. But on this morning she had gone out in a marsh almost like the one at home, clad in no more than her waist-long cornsilk hair, and was renewed. She scampered toward him with a deer’s grace, eyes blue and huge in the pert countenance. He saw laughter and marvel on her lips and stood up with his pulse begun to race.
“Oh, come look,” she cried, “I’ve found the most wonderful boat!”
“Good Lord!” Lockridge choked. “Get some clothes on, girl.”
“Why? The air is warm.” She danced before him. “Lynx, we can go out on the water and fish, the whole day is ours and the Goddess is happy and you must be rested now, come along, do!”
“Well—” Well, why not? “Yes. You get dressed, though, understand?”
“If you wish.” Puzzled but obedient, she fetched a shift from the cabin, where Fledelius was still noisily asleep among strewn ale jugs, and darted through the woods ahead of Lockridge.
The skiff, tied to a stump, looked simple to him. But of course Auri’s boats were coracles, or dugouts with bulwarks secured by pegs and withes. This one used nails of real metal! And she gasped to see him row, instead of punt or paddle. “Surely this came from Crete,” she breathed.