Читать книгу Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen: Paratime Police Saga - H. Beam Piper - Страница 11

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Morrison woke, stiff and aching, under soft covers, and for a moment lay with his eyes closed. Near him, something clicked with soft and monotonous regularity; from somewhere an anvil rang, and there was shouting. Then he opened his eyes. It was daylight, and he was on a bed in a fairly large room with paneled walls and a white plaster ceiling. There were two windows at one side, both open, and under one of them a woman, stout and gray-haired, in a green dress, sat knitting. It had been her needles that he had heard. Nothing but blue sky was visible through the windows. There was a table, with things on it, and chairs, and, across the room, a chest on the top of which his clothes were neatly piled, his belt and revolver on top. His boots, neatly cleaned, stood by the chest, and a long unsheathed sword with a swept guard and a copper pommel leaned against the wall.

The woman looked up quickly as he stirred, then put her knitting on the floor and rose. She looked at him, and went to the table, pouring a cup of water and bringing it to him. He thanked her, drank, and gave it back. The cup and pitcher were of heavy silver, elaborately chased. This wasn’t any peasant cottage. Replacing the cup on the table, she went out.

He ran a hand over his chin. About three days’ stubble. The growth of his fingernails checked with that. The whole upper part of his torso was tightly bandaged. Broken rib, or ribs, and probably a nasty hole in him. He was still alive after three days. Estimating the here-and-now medical art from the general technological level as he’d seen it so far, that probably meant that he had a fair chance of continuing so. At least he was among friends and not a prisoner. The presence of the sword and the revolver proved that.

The woman returned, accompanied by a man in a blue robe with an eight-pointed white star on the breast, the colors of the central image on the peasants’ god-shelf reversed. A priest, doubling as doctor. He was short and chubby, with a pleasant round face; advancing, he laid a hand on Morrison’s brow, took his pulse, and spoke in a cheerfully optimistic tone. The bedside manner seemed to be a universal constant. With the woman’s help, he got the bandages, yards of them, off. He did have a nasty wound, uncomfortably close his heart, and his whole left side was black and blue. The woman brought a pot from the table; the doctor-priest smeared the wound with some dirty-looking unguent, they put on fresh bandages, and the woman took out the old ones. The doctor-priest tried to talk to him: he tried to talk to the doctor-priest. The woman came back with a bowl of turkey-broth, full of finely minced meat, and a spoon. While he was finishing it, two more visitors arrived.

One was a man, robed like the doctor, his cowl thrown back from his head, revealing snow-white hair. He had a gentle, kindly face, and was smiling. For a moment Morrison wondered if this place might be a monastery of some sort, and then saw the old priest’s definitely un-monastic companion.

She was a girl, twenty, give or take a year or so, with blonde hair cut in what he knew as a page-boy bob. She had blue eyes and red lips and an impudent tilty little nose dusted with golden freckles. She wore a jerkin of something like brown suede, sewn with gold thread, and a yellow undertunic with a high neck and long sleeves, and brown knit hose and thigh-length jackboots. There was a gold chain around her neck, and a gold-hilted dagger on a belt of gold links. No, this wasn’t any monastery, and it wasn’t any peasant hovel, either.

As soon as he saw her, he began to laugh. He’d met that young lady before.

“You shot me!” he accused, aiming an imaginary pistol and saying “Bang!” and then touching his chest.

She said something to the older priest, he replied, and she said something to Morrison, pantomiming sorrow and shame, covering her face with one hand, and winking at him over it. Then they both laughed. Perfectly natural mistake—how could she have known which side he’d been on?

The two priests held a colloquy, and then the younger brought him about four ounces of something dark brown in a glass tumbler. It tasted alcoholic and medicinally bitter. They told him, by signs, to go back to sleep, and left him, the girl looking back over her shoulder as she went out.

He squirmed a little, decided that he was going to like it, here-and-now, and dozed off.

Late in the afternoon he woke again. A different woman, thin, with mouse-brown hair, sat in the chair under the window, stitching on something that looked like a shirt. Outside, a dog was barking, and farther off somebody was drilling troops—a couple of hundred, from the amount of noise they were making. A voice was counting cadence: Heep, heep, heep, heep! Another universal constant.

He smiled contentedly. Once he got on his feet again, he didn’t think he was going to be on unemployment very long. A soldier was all he’d ever been, since he’d stopped being a theological student at Princeton between sophomore and junior years. He’d owed a lot of thanks to the North Korean Communists for starting that war; without it, he might never have found the moral courage to free himself from the career into which his father had been forcing him. His enlisting in the Army had probably killed his father; the Rev. Alexander Morrison simply couldn’t endure not having his own way. At least, he died while his son was in Korea.

Then there had been the year and a half, after he came home, when he’d worked as a bankguard, until his mother died. That had been soldiering of a sort; he’d worked armed and in uniform, at least. And then, when he no longer had his mother to support, he’d gone into the State Police. That had really been soldiering, the nearest anybody could come to it in peacetime.

And then he’d blundered into that dome of pearly light, that time-machine, and come out of it into—into here-and-now, that was all he could call it.

Where here was was fairly easy. It had to be somewhere within, say, ten or fifteen miles of where he had been time-shifted, which was just over the Clinton County line, in Nittany Valley. They didn’t use helicopters to evacuate the wounded, here-and-now, that was sure.

When now was was something else. He lay on his back, looking up at the white ceiling, not wanting to attract the attention of the woman sewing by the window. It wasn’t the past. Even if he hadn’t studied history—it was about the only thing at college he had studied—he’d have known that Penn’s Colony had never been anything like this. It was more like Sixteenth Century Europe, though any Sixteenth Century French or German cavalryman who was as incompetent a swordsman as that gang he’d been fighting wouldn’t have lived to wear out his first pair of issue boots. And enough Comparative Religion had rubbed off on him for him to know that those three images on that peasant’s shelf didn’t belong in any mythology back to Egypt and Sumeria.

So it had to be the future. A far future, long after the world had been devastated by atomic war, and man, self-blasted back to the Stone Age, had bootstrap-lifted himself back this far. A thousand years, ten thousand years; ten dollars if you guess how many beans in the jar. The important thing was that here-and-now was when/where he would stay, and he’d have to make a place for himself. He thought he was going to like it.

That lovely, lovely blonde! He fell asleep thinking about her.

Breakfast the next morning was cornmeal mush cooked with meat-broth and tasting rather like scrapple, and a mug of sassafras tea. Coffee, it seemed, didn’t exist here-and-now, and that he was going to miss. He sign-talked for his tunic to be brought, and got his pipe, tobacco and lighter out of it. The woman brought a stool and set it beside the bed to put things on. The lighter opened her eyes a trifle, and she said something, and he said something in a polite voice, and she went back to her knitting. He looked at the tunic; it was torn and blood-soaked on the left side, and the badge was lead-splashed and twisted. That was why he was still alive.

The old priest and the girl were in about an hour later. This time she was wearing a red and gray knit frock that could have gone into Bergdorf-Goodman’s window with a $200 price-tag any day, though the dagger on her belt wasn’t exactly Fifth Avenue. They had slates and soapstone sticks with them; paper, evidently hadn’t been rediscovered yet. They greeted him, then pulled up chairs and got down to business.

First, they taught him the words for you and me and he and she, and, when he had that, names. The girl was Rylla. The old priest was Xentos. The younger priest, who dropped in for a look at the patient, was Mytron. The names, he thought, sounded Greek; it was the only point of resemblance in the language.

Calvin Morrison puzzled them. Evidently they didn’t have surnames, here-and-now. They settled on calling him Kalvan. There was a lot of picture-drawing on the slates, and play-acting for verbs, which was fun. Both Rylla and Xentos smoked; Rylla’s pipe, which she carried on her belt with her dagger, had a silver-inlaid redstone bowl and a cane stem. She was intrigued by his Zippo, and showed him her own lighter. It was a tinderbox, with a flint held down by a spring against a quarter-circular striker pushed by hand and returned by another spring for another push. With a spring to drive instead of return the striker it would have done for a gunlock. By noon, they were able to tell him that he was their friend, because he had killed their enemies, which seemed to be the definitive test of friendship, here-and-now, and he was able to assure Rylla that he didn’t blame her for shooting him in the skirmish on the road.

They were back in the afternoon, accompanied by a gentleman with a gray imperial, wearing a garment like a fur-collared bathrobe and a sword-belt over it. He had a most impressive gold chain around his neck. His name was Ptosphes, and after much sign-talk and picture-making, it emerged that he was Rylla’s father, and also Prince of this place. This place, it seemed, was Hostigos. The raiders with whom he had fought had come from a place called Nostor, to the north and east. Their Prince was named Gormoth, and Gormoth was not well thought of in Hostigos.

The next day, he was up in a chair, and they began giving him solid food, and wine to drink. The wine was excellent; so was the local tobacco. Maybe he’d get used to sassafras tea instead of coffee. The food was good, though sometimes odd. Bacon and eggs, for instance; the eggs were turkey eggs. Evidently they didn’t have chickens, here-and-now. They had plenty of game, though. The game must have come back nicely after the atomic wars.

Rylla was in to see him twice a day, sometimes alone and sometimes with Xentos, or with a big man with a graying beard, Chartiphon, who seemed to be Ptosphes’ top soldier. He always wore a sword, long and heavy, with a two-hand grip; not a real two-hander, but what he’d known as a hand-and-a-half, or bastard, sword. Often he wore a gilded back-and-breast, ornately wrought but nicked and battered. Sometimes, too, he visited alone, or with a young cavalry officer, Harmakros.

Harmakros wore a beard, too, obviously copied after Prince Ptosphes’. He decided to stop worrying about getting a shave; you could wear a beard, here-and-now, and nobody’d think you were either an Amishman or a beatnik. Harmakros had been on the patrol that had hit the Nostori raiders from behind at the village, but, it appeared, Rylla had been in command.

“The gods,” Chartiphon explained, “did not give our Prince a son. A Prince should have a son, to rule after him, so our little Rylla must be as a son to her father.”

The gods, he thought, ought to provide Prince Ptosphes with a son-in-law, name of Calvin Morrison . . . or just Kalvan. He made up his mind to give the gods some help on that.

There was another priest in to see him occasionally: a red-nosed, gray-bearded character named Tharses, who had a slight limp and a scarred face. One look was enough to tell which god he served; he wore a light shirt of finely linked mail and a dagger and a spiked mace on his belt, and a wolfskin hood topped with a jewel-eyed wolf head. As soon as he came in, he would toss that aside, and as soon as he sat down somebody would provide him with a drink. He almost always had a cat or a dog trailing him. Everybody called him Uncle Wolf.

Chartiphon showed him a map, elaborately illuminated on parchment. Hostigos was all Centre County, the southern corner of Clinton, and all Lycoming south of the Bald Eagles. Hostigos Town was exactly on the site of otherwhen Bellefonte; they were at Tarr-Hostigos, or Hostigos Castle, overlooking it from the end of the mountain east of the gap. To the south, the valley of the Juniata, the Besh, was the Princedom of Beshta, ruled by a Prince Valthar. Nostor was Lycoming County north of the Bald Eagles, Tioga County to the north, and parts of Northumberland and Montour Counties, to the forks of the Susquehanna. Nostor Town would be about Hughesville. Potter and McKean Counties were Nyklos, ruled by a Prince Armanes. Blair and parts of Clearfield, Huntington and Bedford Counties made up Sask, whose prince was called Sarrask.

Prince Gormoth of Nostor was a deadly enemy. Armanes was a friendly neutral. Sarrask of Sask was no friend of Hostigos; Balthar of Beshta was no friend of anybody’s.

On a bigger map, he saw that all this was part of the Great Kingdom of Hos-Harphax—all of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey—ruled by a King Kaiphranos at Harphax City, at the mouth of the Susquehanna, the Harph. No, he substituted—just reigned over lightly. To judge from what he’d seen on the night of his arrival, King Kaiphranos’ authority would be enforced for about a day’s infantry march around his capital and ignored elsewhere.

He had a suspicion that Hostigos was in a bad squeeze between Nostor and Sask. He could hear the sounds of drilling soldiers every day, and something was worrying these people. Too often, while Rylla was laughing with him—she was teaching him to read, now, and that was fun—she would remember something she wanted to forget, and then her laughter would be strained. Chartiphon seemed always preoccupied; at times he’d forget, for a moment, what he’d been talking about. And he never saw Ptosphes smile.

Xentos showed him a map of the world. The world, it seemed, was round, but flat like a pancake. Hudson’s Bay was in the exact center, North America was shaped rather like India, Florida ran almost due east, and Cuba north and south. Asia was attached to North America, but it was all blankly unknown. An illimitable ocean surrounded everything. Europe, Africa and South America simply weren’t.

Xentos wanted him to show the country from whence he had come. He’d been expecting that to come up, sooner or later, and it had worried him. He couldn’t risk lying, since he didn’t know on what point he might be tripped up, so he had decided to tell the truth, tailored to local beliefs and preconceptions. Fortunately, he and the old priest were alone at the time.

He put his finger down on central Pennsylvania. Xentos thought he misunderstood.

“No, Kalvan. This is your home now, and we want you to stay with us always. But from what place did you come?”

“Here,” he insisted. “But from another time, a thousand years in the future. I had an enemy, an evil sorcerer, of great power. Another sorcerer, who was not my friend but was my enemy’s enemy, put a protection about me, so that I might not be sorcerously slain. So my enemy twisted time for me, and hurled me far back into the past, before my first known ancestor had been born, and now here I am and here I must stay.”

Xentos’ hand described a quick circle around the white star on his breast, and he muttered rapidly. Another universal constant.

“How terrible! Why, you have been banished as no man ever was!”

“Yes. I do not like to speak, or even think of it, but it is right that you should know. Tell Prince Ptosphes, and Princess Rylla, and Chartiphon, pledging them to secrecy, and beg them not to speak of it to me. I must forget my old life, and make a new one here and now. For all others, it may be said that I am from a far country. From here.” He indicated what ought to be the location of Korea on the blankness of Asia. “I was there, once, fighting in a great war.”

“Ah! I knew you had been a warrior.” Xentos hesitated, then asked: “Do you also know sorcery?”

“No. My father was a priest, as you are, and our priests hated sorcery.” Xentos nodded in agreement with that. “He wished me also to become a priest, but I knew that I would not be a good one, so when this war came, I left my studies and joined the army of my Great King, Truman, and went away to fight. After the war, I was a warrior to keep the peace in my own country.”

Xentos nodded again. “If one cannot be a good priest, one should not be a priest at all, and to be a good warrior is the next best thing. What gods did your people worship?”

“Oh, my people had many gods. There was Conformity, and Authority, and Expense Account, and Opinion. And there was Status, whose symbols were many, and who rode in the great chariot Cadillac, which was almost a god itself. And there was Atombomb, the dread destroyer, who would some day come to end the world. None were very good gods, and I worshipped none of them. Tell me about your gods, Xentos.”

Then he filled his pipe and lit it with the tinderbox that replaced his now fuelless Zippo. He didn’t need to talk any more; Xentos was telling him about his gods. There was Dralm, to whom all men and all other gods bowed; he was a priest of Dralm himself. Yirtta Allmother, the source of all life. Galzar the Wargod, all of whose priests were called Uncle Wolf; lame Tranth, the craftsman-god; fickle Lytris, the Weather-Goddess; all the others.

“And Styphon,” he added grudgingly. “Styphon is an evil god, and evil men serve him, but to them he gives wealth and great power.”