The Corridors of Time (8 page)

Such were the Yuthoaz. When they saw the uneven line of fishermen, they slowed their pace. Then the lead charioteer winded
a bison horn, the troop howled wolfish war cries, and the horses thudded into gallop. After them banged the wagons, leaped
the yelping footmen, boomed the axes on drum-head shields.

Echegon’s gaze pleaded with Storm and Lockridge. ‘Now?’ he asked.

‘A little longer. Let them get close.’ Storm shaded her eyes and peered. ‘Something about him in the rear – the others block
my view —’

Lockridge could sense the tension at his back: sighs and mutters, feet that shifted, the acrid stink of sweat. Those were
not cowards who waited to guard their homes. But the enemy was equipped and trained for war; and even to him, who had known
tanks, the charge of the chariots grew terrifying as they swelled before his eyes.

He brought up his rifle. The stock was cool and hard along his cheek. Storm had grudgingly agreed to let the twentieth-century
guns be used today. And perhaps the fact they were about to witness lightnings, even on their own behalf, stretched thin the
courage of the Tenil Orugaray.

‘Better let me start shootin’,’ he said in English.

‘Not yet!’ Storm spoke so sharply, above the racket, that he gave her a glance. The feline eyes were narrowed, the teeth revealed,
and a hand rested on the energy pistol she had said she would not employ. ‘I have to see that one man first.’

The charioteer in the van lifted his ax and swept it down again. Archers and slingers at the rear of the Yuthoaz halted, their
weapons leaped clear, stones and flintheaded arrows whistled toward the seafolk.

‘Shoot!’ Echegon bellowed. He need not have done so. A snarl of defiance and a ragged volley lifted from his line.

At this range, no harm was done. Lockridge saw a missile or
two thunk against a shield. But the Yuthoaz were in full career. They’d be on him in another minute. He could make out the
flared nostrils and white-rimmed eyes of the nearest horses, blowing manes, flickering whips, a beardless driver and the savage
grin that split the beard behind, an ax upraised whose stone gleamed like metal. ‘To hell with this!’ he cried. ‘I want ’em
to know what hit ’em!’

He got that chieftain in his sights and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked back with a solidity that strengthened his soul.
Its bang was lost in yells, hoofbeats, squeal of axles and rattle of wheels. But the target flung his arms wide and fell to
earth. The halberd soared through an arc. The grass hid man and weapon alike.

The boy reined in, drop-jawed and scared. Lockridge realized at once that he needn’t kill humans, swung around and went for
the next team of horses.
Crack! Crack!
One animal per bunch would do, to put a wagon out of commission. A stone glanced off the gun barrel, which rang. But the
second chariot went over, harness tangled, tongue snapped across, left wheel demolished in the wreck. The live horses reared
and neighed their fear.

Lockridge saw the charge waver. Two or three more of those battle cars stopped, and the invaders would bolt. He stepped forward
to be in plain sight, his blood too much athrum for him to care about arrows, and let the sun flash off his metal.

The sun itself struck him.

Thunder exploded in his skull. Blinded, shattered, he whirled into night.

Awareness returned with a hurricane of anguish. Light-spots still clouded his vision. Through screams, whinnies, rumbling
and booming, he heard the shout:
‘Forward, Yuthoaz! Forward with Sky Father!’

It was in a language the diaglossa knew, but not the Tenil Orugaray.

He groped to hands and knees. The first thing he saw was his rifle, half melted on the ground. That destruction had absorbed
most of the energy beam. The cartridges had not gone off in the clip, nor had he himself suffered worse than a vicious burn
on face and chest. But fire was in his skin. He could not think for the torment.

A dead man lay nearby. Little remained of the features except charred meat and bone. The copper band on one arm identified
Echegon.

Storm stood close by. Her own weapon was out to make a shield. Brief rainbow fountains of flame played around her. The enemy
beam passed on, to sickle down three young men who had gone sealing with Lockridge.

The Yuthoaz roared! In one tide, they swept over the villagers. Lockridge saw a son of Echegon – unmistakable, that countenance
and that doggedness – ground his spear as if the horses earthquaking down upon him were a wild boar. Their driver swerved
them. The chariot clattered past. The warrior who stood in it swung his ax with dreadful skill. Brains spurted. Echegon’s
son fell by his father. The Yutho hooted mirth, chopped on the other side at someone Lockridge couldn’t see, hurled a spear
at an archer, and was gone by.

Elsewhere, the village men were in flight. Panic had them, and they wailed as they ran into the forest. Pursuit ended there.
The Yuthoaz, whose patron gods were in the sky, did not like those rustling twilit reaches. They turned back to dispatch and
scalp any wounded of their enemy.

One chariot rushed toward Storm. Her energy shield made her lioness form shimmer; in Lockridge’s delirium it was as if he
watched a myth. He had the Webley too. He fumbled for it, but consciousness left him before he got the weapon loose. His last
sight was of the one who stood back of the driver – no Yutho – a man beardless and white-skinned, immensely tall, in a hooded
black cloak that flapped after him like wings —

Lockridge awoke slowly. For a while he was content to lie on the earth and know he was free from pain. Piece by piece, there
came to him what had happened.
When he heard a woman scream, he opened his eyes and sat bolt upright.

The sun was down, but through the doorway of the hut where he was, past the shore and the bloodily shining Lim-fjord, he glimpsed
clouds still lit. The single room here had been stripped of its poor possessions and the entrance was barred with branches
lashed together and fastened to the doorposts by thongs. Beyond, two Yuthoaz stood guard. One kept glancing inside and fingering
a sprig of mistletoe against witchcraft. His mate’s eyes rested enviously on a pair of warriors who drove several cows along
the beach. Elsewhere was tumult, deep-throated male shouts and guffaws, tramp of horses and clatter of wheels, while the conquered
keened their grief.

‘How are you, Malcolm?’

Lockridge twisted his head around. Storm Darroway knelt beside him. He could see her as little more than another shadow in
the murky cabin, but he caught the fragrance of her hair, her hands moved softly across him, and she sounded more anxious
than he had ever heard her before.

‘Alive … I reckon.’ He touched fingers to face and breast, where some grease had been smeared. ‘Doesn’t hurt. I – I actually
feel rested.’

‘You were lucky that Brann had antishock drug and enzymatic ointment with him, and decided to save you,’ Storm said. ‘Your
burns will be healed tomorrow.’ She paused, then – her tone might almost have been Auri’s; ‘So I am also lucky.’

‘What’s goin’ on out there?’

‘The Yuthoaz are plundering Avildaro.’

‘Women – kids – no!’ Lockridge struggled to stand.

She pulled him down. ‘Save your strength.’

‘But those devils —’

She said with a touch of her old sharpness: ‘At the moment, your female friends do not suffer greatly. Remember the local
mores.’ Empathy returned. ‘But of course they mourn for those they love, dead or fled, and they will be slaves…. No, wait.
This isn’t the South. A barbarian’s slave does not live so very
differently from the barbarian himself. She suffers – unfreedom, yes, homesickness, the fact that no woman whatsoever has
the respect among the Indo-Europeans that she had in this place. But spare your pity for later. You and I are in worse trouble
than your little companion of yesterday.’

‘M-m-m, okay.’ He subsided. ‘What went wrong?’

She moved around to sit on the floor in front of him, hugged her knees, and let the breath whistle out between her lips. ‘I
was a
slogg,’
she said bitterly. ‘I never imagined Brann was in this age. He organized the attack, that is obvious.’

He felt the shaken self-accusation in her, reached out and said, ‘You couldn’t have known.’

Her fingers hugged his. They went limp again, and she said in a winter voice: ‘There are no excuses for a Warden who fails.
There is only the failure.’

Because that was the code of the service whose uniform he had worn, he thought suddenly that he understood her and they had
become one. He drew her to him as he might have drawn his sister in her sorrow, and she laid her head on his shoulder and
clung tight.

After a while, when darkness was nigh absolute, she pulled herself gently free and breathed. ‘Thank you.’ They sat side by
side now, hands clasped.

She said low and fast: ‘You must realize the numbers in this war through time are not large. With powers such as a single
person may wield, they cannot be. Brann is – you have no word. A crucial figure. Though he must take the field himself, because
so few are able, he is a commander, a maker of planet-shaking decisions, a … king. And I am as great a prize. And he has me.

‘I do not know how he learned where and when I was. I cannot imagine. If he could not find me in your century, how could he
hound me down to this forgotten moment? It frightens me, Malcolm.’ Her clasp was cold and close around his. ‘What contortion
in time itself has he made?

‘He is here alone. But no more were needed. I think he must have come out of the tunnel under the dolmen earlier than we
did, sought the Battle Ax people, and made himself their god. That would not be hard to do. This whole inwandering of the
Indo-Europeans – Dyaush Pitar’s, Sky Father’s, the sun’s worshippers, herdsmen, weaponmakers, charioteers, warriors, the men
of clever hands and limitless dreams, whose wives are underlings and whose children are property – this was engineered by
the Rangers. Do you understand? The invaders are the destroyers of the old civilization, the old faith; they are the ancestors
of the machine people. The Yuthoaz
belong
to Brann. He need but appear among them, as I need but appear in Avildaro or Crete, and in their dim way they will know what
he is and he will know how to control them.

‘Somehow he learned we were here. He could have brought his full force against us. But that might have warned our agents,
who are still strong on this millennium, and led to uncontrollable events. Instead, he told the Yuthoaz to fall on Avildaro,
swore the sun and the lightning would fight with them, and swore truly.

‘Having won’ – Lockridge felt her shudder – ‘he will send for a certain few of his people, and what else he needs, to work
on me.’

He held her close. Her whisper was frantic in his ear: ‘Listen. You may get a chance to escape. Who knows? The book of time
was written when first the universe exploded outward; but we have not yet turned over the next leaf. Brann will take you for
a mere hireling. He may see no danger in you. If you can – if you can – go up the corridor. Seek out Herr Jesper Fledelius
in Viborg, at the Inn of the Golden Lion, on an All Hallows Eve in the years from 1521 to 1541. Can you remember that? He
is one of us. Can you but reach him, perhaps, perhaps —’

‘Yes. Sure. If.’ Lockridge did not want to speak further. In an hour or two she could explain. But right now she was so alone.
He reached around with his free hand to clasp her shoulder. She moved to make his palm slip downward, and laid her mouth on
his.

‘Not much life is left me,’ she choked. ‘Use what I have.
Comfort me, Malcolm.’

Stunned, he could only think: Storm, oh, Storm. He gave her back the kiss, he drowned in the waves of her hair, there was
nothing but darkness and her.

And a torch flared through the bars, A spear gestured, a voice barked, ‘Come. You, the man. He wants you.’

Brann of the Rangers sat alone in the Long House. The holy fire had gone out, but radiance from a crystalline globe sheened
off the bearskin on his dais. The warriors who led Lockridge to him bent their knees with awe.

‘God among us,’ said their burly redhaired leader, ‘we have fetched the wizard as you commanded.’

Brann nodded. ‘That is well. Wait in a corner.’

The four men touched tomahawk to brow and withdrew beyond the circle of illumination. Their torch sputtered red and yellow,
light barely touching the weatherbeaten faces. Silence stretched.

‘Be seated, if you wish,’ Brann said mildly, in English. ‘We have much to talk about, Malcolm Lockridge.’

How did he know the complete name?

The American remained on his feet, because otherwise he would have had to sit by Brann, and looked at him. So this was the
enemy.

The Ranger had removed his cloak, to show a lean, long-muscled body almost seven feet tall, clad in the form-fitting black
Lockridge remembered from the corridor. His skin was very white, the hands delicately tapered, the face … beautiful,
you could say, narrow, straight-nosed, a cold perfection of line. There was no trace of beard; the hair was dense and closely
cut, like a sable cap. His eyes were iron gray.

He smiled. ‘Well, stand, then.’ He pointed to a bottle and two glasses, slim lovely shapes beside him. ‘Will you drink? The
wine is Bourgogne 2012. That was a wonderful year.’

‘No,’ Lockridge said.

Brann shrugged, poured for himself, and sipped. ‘I do not necessarily mean you harm,’ he said.

‘You’ve done enough already,’ Lockridge spat.

‘Regrettable, to be sure. Still, if one has lived with the concept of time as unchangeable, unappeasable – has seen much worse
than today, over and over and over, and risked the same for himself – what use in sentimentalism? For that matter, Lockridge,
today you killed a man whose wives and children will mourn him.’

‘He was fixin’ to kill me, wasn’t he?’

‘True. But he was not a bad man. He guided his kin and dependents as well as he was able, treated his friends honorably and
did not go out of his way to be horrible to his enemies. You passed through the village on your way here. Be honest. You saw
no slaughter, no torture, no mutilation, no arson – did you? On the whole, in centuries to come, this latest wave of immigrants
will blend in rather peacefully. The affray here was somewhat exceptional. Far oftener, in northern Europe if not in the South
or East, the newcomers will dominate simply because their ways are better suited to the coming age of bronze. They are more
mobile, have wider horizons, can better defend themselves; on that account, the aborigines will imitate them. You yourself
have been shaped by them, and so has much you hold dear.’