Time Patrol (71 page)

The thought was unworthy of a Christian. He hastened on.

The watchmen at the treasury were a reassuring sight. Lantern glow sheened off armor, pikes, muskets. These were of the iron ruffians who had sailed from Panama, marched through jungle and swamp and desert, shattered every foe, raised their strongholds, come in a handful over a range that stormed heaven, to seize the very king of the pagans and lay his country under tribute. No man or demon would get past them without leave, nor stop them when again they fared onward.

They knew Castelar and saluted him. Fray Tanaquil was waiting, a lantern in his own hand. He led the cavalryman beneath a lintel sculptured in the form of a snake, though not such a snake as had ever haunted white men's nightmares, into the building.

It was large, multiply chambered, of stone blocks cut and fitted together with exquisite care. The roof was timber, for this had been a palace. The Spaniards had supplied exterior entrances with stout doors, where the Indios had used curtains of reeds or cloth. Tanaquil shut the one through which he came.

Shadows filled corners and bobbed misshapen over wall paintings which priests had piously defaced. Today's consignment lay in an anteroom. Castelar saw gleams beyond. He wondered half dizzily how many hundredweight of precious metal were heaped there.

He must content himself for the present with gloating over what he had seen arrive. Pizarro's officers had hastily unwrapped the bundles, to assure themselves about the contents, and left everything where they tossed it. Tomorrow they would weigh the mass and put it with the rest. Cords and wrappings rustled under Castelar's boots, Tanaquil's sandals.

The friar set his lantern on the clay floor and hunkered down. He picked up a golden cup, brought it near the dim light, shook his head and muttered. The thing was dented, the figures cast in it crumpled. "The receivers dropped this, or kicked it aside." Did anger tremble in his tone? "They've no more care for workmanship than animals."

Castelar took the object from him and hefted it. Easily a quarter pound, he reckoned. "Why should they?" he asked. "It'll soon go to the smelter."

Bitterness: "True." After a moment: "They will send a few pieces intact to the Emperor, for the sake of whatever interest he may have. I've been picking out the best, hoping Pizarro will listen to me and choose them. But mostly he won't."

"What's the difference? Everything is just as unsightly."

Gray eyes turned aloft to reproach the warrior. "I thought you might be a little wiser, a little able to understand that men have many ways of . . . praising God through the beauty they create. You have an education, no?"

"Latin. Reading, writing, ciphering. A bit of history and astronomy. It's largely dropped out of me, I fear."

"And you've traveled."

"I fought in France and Italy. Gained a smattering of those languages."

"I have the impression you've acquired Quechua too."

"A minim. Can't let the natives play stupid, you know, or conspire in earshot." Castelar felt himself under inquisition, mild but probing, and changed the subject. "You told me you record what you see. Where are your quill and paper?"

"I have an excellent memory. As you observed, there is not much point in itemizing things that are to become ingots. But to make sure no curse, no witchcraft lingers—"

Tanaquil had been sorting and arranging articles as he talked, ornaments, plates, vessels, figurines, grotesque in Castelar's sight. When they were marshaled before him, he reached inside a pouch hung at his waist and drew forth a curiosum of his own. Castelar stooped and squinted for a better look. "What's that?" he asked.

"A reliquary. It holds a finger bone of Saint Ippolito."

Castelar signed himself. Nonetheless he peered closer. "I've never seen its like." It was a hand's breadth in size, smoothly rounded, black save for a cross of nacreous material inset on top and, in front, two crystals more suggestive of lenses than of windows.

"A rare piece," the friar explained. "Left behind when the Moors departed Granada, later sanctified by these contents and the blessing of the Church. The bishop who entrusted it to me declared it has special efficacy against infidel magic. Captain Pizarro and Fray Valverde agreed it could be wise, and would certainly be harmless, if I subject each piece of Inca treasure to its influence."

He assumed a more comfortable position on the floor, selected a small gold image of a beast, revolved it in his left hand before the crystals of the reliquary, which he held in his right. His lips moved silently. When he had finished, he put the object down and went on to another.

Castelar shifted from foot to foot.

After a while Tanaquil chuckled and said, "I warned you this would prove tedious. I'll be at it for hours. You may as well go to bed, Don Luis."

Castelar yawned. "I think you are right. Thank you for your courtesies."

A whoosh and thud brought him whirling around. For an instant he poised locked in unbelief.

Over by the wall, a thing had appeared. A thing—massive, dully slick, perhaps of steel, with a pair of handles and two stirrupless saddles—He saw it clear, for light radiated from a baton the rearmost rider held. Both men wore form-fitting black. It made their hands and faces stand forth bone-white, unweathered, unnatural.

The Friar sprang up. He yelled. The words were not Spanish.

In that eyeblink of time, Castelar saw amazement on the aliens. Be they wizards or devils straight from hell, they were not all-powerful, not before God and His saints. Castelar's sword whipped into his grasp. He plunged forward. "Santiago and at them!" he roared, the ancient battle cry of his people as they drove the Moors from Spain back to Africa. Make such a racket that the guards outside would hear and—

The rider in front lifted a tube. It blinked. Castelar spun down into nothingness.

15 April 1610

Machu Picchu!
was the immediate recognition as Stephen Tamberly awoke. And then:
No. Not quite. Not as I've known it.
When
am I?

He climbed to his feet. Clarity of mind and senses told him he had been knocked out by an electronic stunner, probably a twenty-fourth-century model or later. No surprise. The deadly shock had been the apparition of those men on a machine such as was not to be made for thousands of years after he was born.

Around him lifted the peaks he knew, misty, tropically green even at their altitudes save for snow on the most remote. A condor hovered aloft. A blue-and-gold morning flooded the Urubamba gorge with light. But he saw no railway down there, no station, and the only road in sight was up here, built by engineers of the Incas.

He stood on a platform that had been attached, with a descending ramp, to a high point on a wall above a ditch. Below him the city spread over acre upon acre; it clung, it soared, in buildings of dry-laid stone, staircases, terraces, plazas, as powerful as the mountains themselves. If those heights might almost have been from a Chinese painting, the human works might almost have been from medieval southern France; and yet not really, for they were too foreign, too imbued with their own spirit.

A breeze blew cool. Its whittering was the single sound amidst the bloodbeat in his temples. Nothing stirred throughout the fastness. With the mind-speed of desperation, he saw that it had not long lain deserted. Weeds and shrubs were everywhere, but they and the weather had hardly begun the work of demolition. That didn't reveal much, for it still had far to go when Hiram Bingham discovered the place in 1911. However, he spied structures almost intact which he remembered as ruins or not at all. Traces remained of wood and thatch roofs. And—

And Tamberly was not alone. Luis Castelar crouched beside him, stupefaction fading out before a snarl. Men and women stood around, themselves tense. The timecycle rested near the platform edge.

First Tamberly was aware of weapons aimed at him. Then he stared at the people. They were like none he had met in his wanderings. Their very alienness made them look somehow alike. Faces were finely chiseled, high in the cheekbones, thin in the noses, large in the eyes. Despite raven darkness of hair, skin was alabaster and irises were light, while men seemed never to have had any growth of beard. Bodies poised tall, slender, supple. Basic clothing for both sexes was a close-fitted one-piece garment with no visible seams or fastenings, and soft half-boots of the same lustrous black. Silver patterns, an Oriental-like tracery, ornamented most, and several persons added cloaks of flamboyant red, orange, or yellow. Wide belts held pockets and holsters. Hair fell to the shoulders, held in place by a simple headband, arabesqued fillet, or diamond-glittery coronet.

They numbered about thirty. All seemed young—or ageless? Tamberly thought he perceived many years of lifespan behind them. It showed in both the pride and the alertness, above a feline self-composure.

Castelar glared from side to side. He had been deprived of knife and sword. The latter flashed in the hand of a stranger. He tautened as if to attack. Tamberly caught him by the arm. "Peace, Don Luis," he urged. "This is hopeless. Call on the saints if you wish, but stay quiet."

The Spaniard growled before he subsided. Tamberly felt him shiver beneath sleeve and skin. Somebody in the group said something in a language that purred and trilled. Another gestured, as if for silence, and stepped forward. The grace of the motion was such that one could say he flowed. Clearly, he dominated the rest. His features were aquiline, green-eyed. Full lips curved in a smile.

"Greeting," he said. "You are unexpected guests."

He used fluent Temporal, the common speech of the Time Patrol and many civilian travelers; and the machine was scarcely different from a Patrol runabout; but he must surely be an outlaw, an enemy.

Breath shuddered into Tamberly. "What . . . year is this?" he mumbled. Peripherally, he noticed Castelar's reactions when Fray Tanaquil replied in the unknown tongue—astonishment, dismay, grimness.

"By the Gregorian calendar, which I suppose you are accustomed to, it is the fifteenth of April, 1610," said the stranger. "I daresay you recognize the site, although your companion obviously does not."

Of course he doesn't,
passed through Tamberly.
What the natives of a later day called Machu Picchu was built by the Inca Pachacutec as a holy city, a center for the Virgins of Sun. It lost its purpose when the headquarters of resistance to the Spaniards became Vilcabamba, till they captured and killed Tupac Amaru, the last who bore the name of Inca before the Andean Resurgence of the twenty-second century. So nothing led the Conquistadores to find it, and it lay empty, forgotten by everyone but a few poor countryfolk, till 1911. . . .
He barely heard: "I suppose, likewise, you are an agent of the Time Patrol."

"Who are
you
?" Tamberly choked.

"Let us discuss matters in a more convenient location," said the man. "This is merely the place to which our scouts have returned."

Why?
A timecycle could appear within seconds and centimeters of any point, any moment within its range—from here to Earth orbit, from now to the age of the dinosaurs, or, futureward, the age of the Danellians, though that was forbidden—Tamberly guessed these conspirators built this landing stage, exposed to outside eyes, in order to keep the local Indians frightened and therefore distant. Stories about magical comings and goings would die out in the course of generations, but Machu Picchu would remain shunned.

Most of those who had been watching dispersed to whatever their business was. Four guards with drawn stunners walked behind the leader and prisoners. One also carried the sword, perhaps as a souvenir. By ramp, paths, and staircases they made their way down among the compounds of the city. Silence lay thick about them until the chieftain said, "Apparently your companion is just a soldier who happened to be with you." At the American's nod: "Well, then, we'll put him aside while you and I talk. Yaron, Sarnir, you know his language. Interrogate him. Psychological means only, for the time being."

They had reached that structure which Tamberly, if he remembered aright, knew as the King's Group. An outer wall marked off a small courtyard where another timecycle was parked. Curtains of nacreous iridescence shimmered in doorways and across the roofless tops of the buildings that bounded the rest of the open space. Those were force fields, Tamberly recognized, impervious to anything short of a nuclear blast.

"In God's name," Castelar cried when a boot nudged him, "what is this? Tell me before I go mad!"

"Easy, Don Luis, easy," Tamberly answered fast. "We're captives. You've seen what their weapons can do. Go as they command. Heaven may have mercy on us, but by ourselves we're helpless."

The Spaniard clenched his jaws and went with the two assigned him, into a lesser unit. The leader's group sought the largest. Barriers blinked out of existence to admit both parties. They stayed off, giving a look at stones and sky and freedom. Tamberly supposed that was to let fresh air in; the room he entered did not appear to have been used lately.

Sunshine joined radiance from the canopy overhead to illuminate its windowlessness. The floor had been given a deep-blue covering that responded slightly to footfalls, like living muscles. A couple of chairs and a table bore halfway familiar shapes, though their darkly glowing material was new to him. He could not identify the things shelved in what might have been a cabinet.

The guards took stance on either side of the entrance. One was male, one a woman no less steely. The leader settled into a chair and invited Tamberly to take the other. It fitted itself to his contours, to his every motion. The leader pointed at a carafe and glasses on the table. Those were enameled—made in Venice about now, Tamberly judged. Bought? Stolen? Looted? The man glided forward to fill two vessels. His master and Tamberly took them.

Smiling, the leader lifted his goblet and murmured, "Your health." The implication was:
You'd better do whatever is necessary to keep it.
The wine was a tart chablis type, so refreshing that Tamberly thought it might contain a stimulant. They had broad and subtle knowledge of human chemistry in his future.