The Corridors of Time (12 page)

Auri caught at Lockridge’s arm. The sergeant twisted his mustache. ‘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 smoldering matches, ready to shoot,
and he heard iron-shod hoofs clatter near.

The rider came into view, clad in half armor, 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?’ Ulfred 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?’ Ulfred 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 on 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, or 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,’ Ulfred 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 :

‘That would have been a dear gift for you.’ The nobleman sat his horse a while, expertly curbing its restlessness. Auri shrank
from the beast, it was so much bigger than the ponies she knew and never had she heard of riding one.

Decision came. ‘Fetch me a squad,’ Ulfeld ordered.

‘I’ll come too, my lord,’ the sergeant said.

Ulfeld’s mouth bent upward. ‘No doubt you smell reward money. Indeed there is a price on Herr Jesper’s head. But keep your
post.’

The Landsknechts muttered in their whiskers. Ulfeld gave them a look. They fell to a sort of attention; there was that gallows
behind the city.

‘We shall go to the inn,’ Ulfeld said, ‘and see what there is to see, and afterward put some questions.’ His gaze brooded
on Auri. She straightened and glared back. ‘A wench from the Ditmarsh, I’ll be bound. No other baseborn folk dare hold themselves
so high. My father died there in king Hans’ day, when they opened the sluices on our army. Perhaps tonight—’

Sickness filled Lockridge’s throat.

Several more foot soldiers appeared. Ulfeld told them to bring the prisoners along, and rode on through the gate.

Viborg within was less attractive than from a distance. The streets were lanes where pigs rooted in ripe offal above which
the stepping stones down the middle scarcely rose. With dusk setting in, few people were abroad. Lockridge saw a workman in
his smock, bent from a lifetime’s toil; a serving maid with a basketful of bread; a leper who shook his rattle in warning
as he tottered near; a laden ox-drawn wagon with great wooden wheels. They faded rapidly into the gloom that waxed between
high-gabled houses already barred and shuttered against night robbers. The first spatters of rain stung his cheeks.

Then a sound broke through wind, foot-splash, hoof-clop, a high and striding peal. ‘Oh!’ Auri exclaimed. ‘The Goddess’ voice!’

‘Church bells,’ Lockridge said. In all his desperation, he had to admit the sound was lovely; and so was the sight of the
cathedral, dim across a market square…. The wind shifted and filled his nose with graveyard stench.

Not far beyond, Ulfeld drew rein. A wooden sign creaked as it swayed. By light leaking yellow through doors and shutters,
into the now heavy dusk, Lockridge could just make out a crudely painted lion rampant. The Landsknechts grounded their pikes
with a bang. One hastened to hold the nobleman’s stirrup while he dismounted. Dully sheening in his breastplate and helmet,
Junker Erik waited with drawn sword and let a soldier beat on the door.

‘Open, you swine!’ the German shouted.

The door groaned ajar. A stout little man peered out and said angrily, ‘We want none of your trade in an honest place — Herr
Knight! I beg forgiveness!’

Ulfeld shoved him aside. Lockridge and Auri were husded after.

The room was small. A twentieth-century man would bump his head on the sooty rafters if he stood erect, and the walls closed
narrowly in. The floor was dirt, strewn with rushes. Lamps flickered on shelves to throw a dull light and many hulking shadows.
A stove built of clay pots, in whose mouths a frozen hand or foot might be warmed, gave some heat; it’s crude vent gave more
smoke, until Lockridge’s eyes smarted. A tresde table had not yet been taken down for the night. One
man sat there with a pot of beer.

‘Who else is guesting?’ Ulfeld demanded.

‘None, my lord.’ It was unpleasant how the innkeeper cringed. ‘We get scant custom these days, you know.’

Ulfeld jerked his head. ‘Search.’ He advanced on the lone patron, who remained benched. ‘Who are you?’

‘Herr Torben Jensen Sverdrup, of Vendsyssel.’ The gravelly bass was amiable, as from much drink. ‘Pardon me if I do not rise.
I’ve carried Swedish iron in my leg for long years. Seek you someone?’

Ulfeld glowered at him. The man was big, he would have been big in any century, with ox shoulders above an impressive paunch.
His face was made ugly by pockmarks and flattened nose, but the eyes were light and cheerful. Grizzled dark hair and beard
fell unkempt to a doublet equally greasy. ‘Have you proof who you are?’ Ulfeld asked.

‘Oh, indeed, indeed. I am on lawful business, trying to get the beef trade started again, now it’s back where it belongs in
well-born hands.’ Sverdrup belched. ‘Will you drink with me? I think I can even spare a few pennies to treat your men.’

Ulfeld aimed his sword at the throat of the other. ‘Jesper Fledelius!’

‘Ha? Who’s that? Never heard of him.’

A frightened feminine squeal from the rooms to the rear was followed by German laughter. ‘Ah, yes,’ Sverdrup grinned, ‘mine
host has a pretty daughter.’ He peered at Lockridge and Auri. ‘That’s another nice little partridge you have with you, Herr.
What’s the meaning?’

‘I have heard’ – Ulfeld’s look speared Sverdrup and the landlord – ‘that the traitor Fledelius is in this house.’

Sverdrup took a giant’s draught from his pot. ‘One hears many things. Are you not satisfied to have Skipper Klement in Viborg?’

‘There’s a cell next his, and a headsman’s ax, for Fledelius. These strangers tell of an appointment with him. I must ask
for letters that prove who you are.’

Sverdrup blinked at the prisoners. ‘I might well wish to be
Fledelius, if so fair a lady craves to see him. But alas, no, I am only a poor old squire from the Skaw.’ He fumbled in his
clothes, dislodging a substantial colony of fleas. ‘Here. I trust your schooling is less rusty than mine.’

Ulfeld scowled at the parchment. His men came back. ‘None but the landlord’s family, Herr,’ one reported.

‘So, so, did I not tell you?’ the innkeeper chattered. ‘Herr Torben has guested the Golden Lion in former years, my lord.
He is known to me, and I have always had a good name, ask the burgomaster if Mikkel Mortensen is not an honest loyal man.’

Ulfeld tossed the letter on the table. ‘We will keep a watch,’ he decided. ‘The outlaw may still show himself. But give him
no chance of a warning. You two —’ he pointed at a couple of his mercenaries. ‘Remain here for the time. Guard each door and
arrest any who enter. Let no one leave. You others, follow me.’

‘Will you not even have a pot with a lonely old man?’ Sverdrup urged.

‘No. I must see these prisoners questioned.’

If need be, with rack and pincers and the bone-crushing boot. For Auri— Through a mist that swirled, Lockridge stared at the
man behind the table. ‘No, wait,’ he croaked. ‘Help.’

The pouched eyes drooped. ‘I am sorry, little maiden,’ Sverdrup mumbled. ‘But so many are dead, so many more soon to die.’
He traced a cross.

A hand thrust Lockridge toward the door. He dug in his heels. The butt of a pike cracked across one knee. Pain lanced through
him, he stumbled and cursed. Auri’s hood had fallen back, and a soldier snatched her by a lock of hair.

‘No!’ the girl screamed. ‘We belong to Her!’

Sverdrup’s mug banged down on the board. Auri drew a sign in the air. Lockridge couldn’t make it out, something of her own
ritual, dead and forgotten, a blind cry —

The big man reached under the table and climbed stiffly to his feet. From the cloak that had covered it on the floor, a
crossbow looked forth, cocked and loaded.

‘Not so hasty, my lord,’ he puffed. ‘Not quite so hasty, I beg you.’

Ulfeld spun on his heel. The sword gleamed up. German spears poised amidst obscene oaths.

If a bear could grin, it would look like the man who must be Jesper Fledelius. ‘Calmly, now, calmly,’ he said. ‘One move,
one least of little moves, and my lord the knight will not be so handsome any longer. We do not wish to distress the ladies
of Viborg, do we?’

‘They’ll kill you!’ the tavernkeeper wailed. ‘Jesus have mercy on us!’

‘Well, they might try, after this lady I embrace has said her one sharp word,’ Fledelius nodded. ‘But here is also my sword.
It’s made meals off a good many Swedes, and Holsteiners, and even Danes. Naught is so tasty as a Dane who’s forsworn the old
eagle – unless maybe a German hireling. We might have a most interesting discussion, we several. However, you, Herr Knight,
would unhappily be forced to a spectator’s seat, and even though you would doubtless be given one befitting your rank in Hell,
nevertheless, any of these lads who outlived the night would not be thanked for losing a life so precious. They might even
be asked to dance on a rope’s end, eh? So do let us try to settle our dispute by peaceful, scholastic means, as is seemly
for Christian men.’

A silence closed in that made Lockridge’s breath more loud in his ears than the wind and thickening rain outside.

‘Mikkel, my good man,’ said Jesper Fledelius, ‘you must have somewhere a length of rope. With that we may bind these excellent
fellows, rather than cut them down like Turks. Of course, it is a Turkish fate to lie in a tavern and have no means of drawing
beer. But someone will happen along tomorrow. Men are always thirsty. A symbol of the Evangelicum, think you not? – beer laving
the throat as salvation leaves the sin-parched soul.’ He beamed at Auri. ‘Scripture speaks truly of wisdom in innocence, little
maiden. Words might not have moved this cowardly old carcass of mine, for words are cheap
and crafty. But you showed me Her token, which does not lie. I thank you.’

The landlord began to sob. A woman and a couple of children stuck terrified faces out from the back entrance. ‘Be of good
cheer, Mikkel,’ the outlaw said. ‘Plainly, you and yours must leave this town with us. A pity, to let this fine hostel fall
into the oafish hands of Junker bailiffs. But the Coven will feed and shelter you.’ The gross face flashed momentarily with
utter love. ‘And when She returns, you shall be rewarded.’