Future Indefinite (36 page)

Light snow was falling as the Free crossed Fainpass, but the weather was fine in Lappinvale. Alice had heard predictions that the Thargians there were sure to cause trouble. They would try to block a mass invasion heading for their homeland, and they certainly did not want their Lappinian serfs taking the opportunity to escape over the border.

The doubters had forgotten that the pandemic still raged in Lappinland. Governor Kratch himself brought his wife and children to be healed by the Liberator. Gratitude was not a prized virtue among Thargians, but they always put expediency ahead of principle, and their garrison was outnumbered a hundred to one. The Free marched on unopposed, gathering recruits as they went. These refugees were free to desert as soon as they reached Randorvale, of course, but surprisingly few of them did.

Alice was enjoying herself enormously. London seemed far away now, but she had never truly been a Londoner. Tents she associated with childhood safaris, Uncle Cam and Aunt Rona in Kenya. The climate and the scenery were different, but roughing it did not bother her. Her Norfolk depression forgotten, she helped with the cooking, tended babies, cared for the sick waiting for Edward to arrive, and generally did work that felt more useful than any she had done before in her life. Now that she knew how much fun crusades were, she could understand why the Middle Ages had put on so many of them.

Even so, having Julian Smedley around was an improvement. She needed an interpreter to help her learn some basic Joalian. During her first few days with the Free, she had been forced to rely on Ursula, Dommi, and Edward himself, and they were all too busy with other duties to spend much time with her. Various Olympians began turning up and enlisting after that, but they were quickly put to work as well. Julian was not fluent in Joalian and usually enlisted a native as tutor, translating back and forth and learning along with her. It ate up the hours on the daylong treks and the sometimes monotonous toil, for he pitched in with the lowly work of the commissariat, leaving religious affairs to others.

Captain Smedley qualified as an old friend. Alice had more in common with him than anyone else in this world except Edward, and she rarely saw Edward. Julian had flicked in and out of her life for years, her cousin’s closest chum, a different person every time she met him: bean sprout boy, then spotty, unsure adolescent, debonair youth, shell-shocked hero. And now? Now a lean, competent young man, not quite handsome but certainly attractive, old beyond his years. If he still had daylight nightmares, he hid them behind a cheery façade. He never discussed his own affairs, but he was too personable not to have at least one sweetheart somewhere. Recalling the bedroom roulette that Mrs. McKay had described that long-ago evening in the dining room of the Bull, Alice concluded that Julian Smedley would be regarded as a prime target but might not be ruthless enough to play such games well.

From Lappinvale by Soutpass into Randorvale—and still the sun shone. Randorland might be tricky, Julian warned, because it was home ground for the Lady, the Church was being persecuted there, and Doc Mainwaring still lay in jail. But the prophecy was encouraging, verse 318: “From Randor the mighty shall seek out the Liberator, sleeping in the woods and ditches, crying: aid us, have mercy upon us, and they will shower gold upon him.”

The first thing that happened in Randorvale, though, was that Ursula and Dommi disappeared.

“They’ll be back,” Edward promised. “Dommi’s appointed himself apostle to the Carrots. Ursula’s going to report to whatever’s left of the Service.”

The following morning, King Gudjapate summoned the Liberator to an audience and the Liberator declined the invitation.

Two days later, the king tried again, delivering an emaciated but otherwise unharmed Doc Mainwaring as a peace offering. Edward still refused, although he kept Doc.

On the Free’s fourth night in the vale, when they were camping close to the western end and thus not very far from Olympus, several hundred copper-haired Olympians poured into camp and greeted the Liberator with hysterical adulation. With them came Ursula and some familiar faces: Betsy and Bill Pepper, Iris Barnes, Prof Rawlinson, and others.

Julian learned of the evangelists’ return as he was wrapping himself up in a fur robe beside a campfire. There were still not enough tents, and he could not see why a seasoned campaigner like himself should be given preference. He was quite healthy now, just a little weak, and Flanders had been much worse than this. A man knelt down at his side and grinned at him like a starving crocodile. He sat up quickly.

“Dommi! You’re back? How’s Ayetha?”

“Indeed she is most excellently in good health, Brother Kaptaan. And I am very proudest father of very loud son.”

Julian, formerly
Tyika
Kaptaan, thumped him on the back and shook his hand. “Congratulations, Brother Dommi! And what is his name?” He could guess the answer. The Vales were going to be swarming with D’wards from now on.

“By gracious permission he is named after our esteemed Liberator.”

“And was
Entyika
—Was she there?”

Dommi grinned even wider and nodded. “I have brought missive for you.”

Julian snatched it from his hand and ripped it open. He forgot to say thank you, and he did not see Dommi depart.

That letter very nearly cost the Free one of their number, but in the end he decided to stay aboard. The crusade would not last very much longer, whereas his future with Euphemia could be stretched out for centuries. A few days more would be very little by comparison, however long they might seem.

The following morning, the royal family and most of the court drove into the camp in a caravan of fine carriages. Edward greeted them politely, cured every last runny nose, and did not insist that they sleep in ditches. He accepted their gold and gave it to Dosh to buy more food and more pack beasts.

Prophecy was a two-edged weapon, and next stop was Thovale. By now everyone knew that verse 404 of the
Testament
held some ominous words about D’ward and hunger in Thovale. The encounter was unavoidable—a man of destiny could not pick and choose.

“Should make an early start in the morning,” Julian said. “Beat the rush.”

Alice could see only a sheer wall of mountain, fit to challenge a fly. “Certainly. How is the pass rated?” She knew now that Joalian had a dozen words that might be applied to a mountain pass, depending on its difficulty. Difficulty was a matter of judgment, though. If it couldn’t stop a mountain goat, then it ranked as easy.

“Figpass is a
jaltheraan
.”

“I’m not familiar with that one. What does it mean?”

“Bloody-awful-even-in-summer.”

“Will an hour before dawn be early enough?”

The Figpass trail began rising at once, climbing steeply through scrubby trees, and it soon opened out to reveal vast hills of an impossibly green green under a pure white sky. The Free were a gray rope dropped by a giant, scrolled over the mountain face and ultimately vanishing into clouds thousands of feet above. And that was only the vanguard. There were many, many more behind.

Alice leaned into the slope, trying to keep up a steady plod. In an hour or two she would stand up there and look down to see the masses following. “It seems so unreal! I keep trying to think of earthly equivalents and I can’t find a single one. Visigoths…the Children of Israel…Xerxes crossing the Hellespont—none of them quite fits.”

Julian puffed, his breath already white in the cold. “Peter the Hermit?”

“Don’t even think that!”

“Right-oh, I won’t. It is real. It is also very transient. All of us will remember these days for the rest of our lives. A century from now one or two of those children may still be alive, bragging that they marched with D’ward, following the Liberator into Thargvale.”

These days were also the most important of Alice Pearson’s life. If she lived to be a hundred, like those hypothetical children, everything else would be anticlimax. The Vales were only a small part of the world, and only a tiny fraction of their population was actually involved, but surely this was a moment in history. Who would refuse a grandstand seat at the Hegira, the parting of the Red Sea, or Caesar crossing the Rubicon? She tried not to include the People’s Crusade or the Crucifixion in that list. Whatever was going to happen at Tharg, she would never again see anything to match this. She assumed she would eventually go Home. She had already overstayed the four-week limit she had set with Miss Pimm, but it was certainly not time to leave yet.

No one, even Edward, knew how many followers he had now. The organization alone was a miracle, growing of itself to keep pace with the mushrooming numbers. Having learned over the past five years how incompetent armies were, Alice would not have believed that a large group of people could cooperate so well. The credit was all Edward’s, for he had chosen a superlative team of disciples and inspired them with fanatical loyalty. There were no personal feuds or squabbles over precedence among the shield-bearers.

Their strength as a team sprang from their differences. No one understood human weaknesses better than Dosh, the reformed criminal and libertine. Dommi had scaled up his experience at running households to run the commissariat. Ursula Newton was an irresistible force, a human tidal wave to overcome all resistance, while Eleal’s preaching could wring tears from a field of rocks. Of Edward’s two age-group brothers from the old Nagian days, Tielan was a shrewd trader and Doggan was dogged and untiring in humdrum tasks that drove others crazy. Piol Poet was official archivist, keeping Eleal’s sermons theologically orthodox. Pinky Pinkney moved people as the wind moves snowflakes, usually without their knowing it. Bid’lip had been a soldier, Kilpian a drover, Hasfral a midwife, Gastik a farmer, Imminol a herbalist, and Tittrag a mason.

The Liberator himself could outperform any one of them at anything, but he could not be in a dozen places at once. Whatever he needed done, he had a disciple to do. There were twenty shield-bearers in all, and Edward remarked to Alice in one of his wry asides that he could not imagine how Jesus ever got by with only twelve.

In the last two weeks, she had seen very little of Edward. When he offered apologies, she refused them. “You are working; I am on vacation. I can’t speak the language, so I can’t help much. If you want to talk, then send for me and I’ll come gladly. Otherwise, do what you must do and don’t give me a thought. One thing I am not is bored.”

He did send for her a few times, always late in the day, when others were ready to relax. He seemed to need no rest, but his helpers did, or perhaps he chose the hour merely from habit. She was amused to notice that the two of them were never completely alone, so no tongues would wag, and yet she doubted that the danger of scandal had consciously occurred to him. His instincts were perfect.

At those sessions he would always inquire if she was happy, and she would always assure him that she was. She let him lead the conversation, and thus they talked of England, of the war, of poetry, of their childhoods. Only once did he mention what might happen when the Free arrived in Tharg, and then almost offhandedly.

“They can only be a cheering section,” he said, “but of course it is their cheers that make it possible. There is just one event on the bill—the heavyweight championship of the Vales, between the reigning champion, Zath
(boo! hiss!)
in the black corner and the Liberator
(hip! hip!)
in the gray. We’ve all read the result in the
Testament
, so it should be a very dull…. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just tend to forget that Zath is a real person, not just an allegory.”

“Oh, he’s real all right.” Edward’s eyes narrowed, and for a moment he stared out bleakly at the night. “But what I’m planning is not murder, it’s execution. You know which victims’ names head the indictment.”

Then he shrugged and changed the subject. If he had any doubts about the outcome, he could hide them even from her. But he must know that the battle was not always to the righteous and that most popular uprisings ended in disaster: Wat Tyler, Jan Hus, Peter the Hermit. The People’s Crusade had taken thirty thousand people to slavery or slaughter.

Sometimes he was the Edward she had known. He had shown this same courage and quiet determination when the Blighters were trying to kill him. Sometimes she sensed more, a fearsome coiled power waiting to be unleashed, a calculated hatred for an evil foe—unless that was only her imagination seeing what it wanted to see. Yet, sitting demurely across the fire from him, she would watch the play of light on the angular planes of his face and wonder what her cousin had become.

Once, and only once, he let his inner feelings show. He fell silent for a while, staring at her. She waited, pretending to watch the flames, and finally he said wistfully, “Dear Alice! What would have happened if the war hadn’t come? Happened to us? If there had been no
Filoby Testament
? Do you ever wonder?”

“I can’t imagine.” She studied the pictures in the embers, which was just as practical an occupation as indulging in useless might-have-beens.

Softly, he said, “I was very much in love with you, you know. I still am, but now…well, things are different now. Let’s not complicate matters by talking about that. Would you ever have taken me seriously?”

“I always took you seriously, Edward, dear. Very seriously. I was very frightened of hurting you. I was sure you would find another girl soon enough, probably lots of girls. I was the only one you’d ever known.”