by Robert Adams
A beefy, broad-shouldered man in a floor-length cassock spun about to disclose raised, very bushy black eyebrows on a florid face from which a bulbous nose thrust out like the metal boss from a targe. Upon catching sight of Bass, his face lit up in a broad smile. "Your grace of Norfolk! Thank God you are arrived. His grace has been beside himself. He had expected you far sooner."
Turning briefly back to the group, he said, "We'll continue these matters at a later time. Just now, it is most urgent that I conduct the Duke of Norfolk, here, to his grace."
To the guards officer, he said, "Thank you for bringing these gentlemen to me, but now there is no further need for your guidance. You may return to your desk."
Sir Ali retained his grip on the unfortunate officer, however, looking questioningly at Bass, who said, "That might not be wise, Father Peter . . . unless it is your wish that this man go on with his odious little enterprise of selling audiences with Hal . . . that is, with his grace."
"Is this true, Bridges?" asked the priest sadly.
The officer shook his head violently, opened his mouth to protest his innocence of the charge. Then he took a single look at Sir Ali's cold black eyes, remained silent, and began to tremble again.
"He offered," attested Bass, "to arrange me an audience by sundown tomorrow for my payment of three ounces of gold to him. That's a bit steep, I feel, so I made him an offer he couldn't refuse." He drew out from his buff-coat his right hand and the small wheel-lock pistol it held.
The priest glanced hurriedly about, then waved a hand frantically. "As you love God, your grace, put that thing out of sight before one of our overzealous guards sees it and kills you! With the numerous recent attempts on the life of his grace, we have had to become a virtual armed camp here."
"Bring that piece of filth along. We'll hie us to the inner guardroom—we'd have to pass by it, anyway—and leave him there."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH
Arsen Ademian took the quill in his left hand for a moment and flexed the cramped fingers of his right while, on the apron of the makeshift stage before him, the four drummers—his cousins Haigh and Al, his friend Sinclair, and his uncle Rupen—created rhythmic thunder from the dwnbegs. As the drum section finished its allotted time, Buddy took up the quill and evoked the melody of the ancient Middle Eastern song from his treasured oud, joined now by clarinet, guitar, bass, tambour, zils, and the clapping and shouts of his audience.
The wind from off the river was fitful, and in the lulls, like this present one, the mosquitoes and other bugs zeroed in on the sixty or so people standing and sitting on the sloping riverside lawn. The audience did not seem to mind, but running on nearly pure alcohol as they were by this time, they may not even have felt the ticklings and bites.
As they neared the finale of this number, with the drums all booming and every instrument involved in the complex rhythm, while the three dancers swirled before the stage in their rich, if scanty, costumes, a bug bit Arsen just inside his right nostril, and his involuntary flinch caused him to hit a sour note.
"Aw, goddamnit!" he thought. "Hell, I didn' wanta make this damn gig in the first place! Sure, the fucking money's good for tonight, but it ain't like we do this for a fucking living, for Chrissakes. Besides, it seems kinda like un-American to play for these damn Iranian fuckers; why just last year, they and the fucking Arabs put that damn embargo on our oil because of a war with Israel that we weren't even fighting in. Now the fuckers're all bleeding us dry at the fucking gas pumps and if it keeps up, gas could go sixty, seventy cents a gallon, for God's sake, even a dollar, maybe."
"God knows, it ain't often I can agree with Uncle Rupen and John the Greek and their 'Kill a Turk for Christ' crap, but God love 'em, they're the onliest ones voted with me to not do this fucking mosquito gig tonight."
"Hell, anybody with half a brain would know why all the damn girls wanted to come out here tonight. They thought they could get this bunch of rich, foreign doctors so sexed up with the belly-dancing that they'd end up getting some really heavy bread laid on 'em for whoring before they left here. Heh, heh, none of the sluts knew these Iranian bastards was all going to bring their wives and, some of them, their kids, too, with 'em."
"It's harder to figger why Greg and Mike and Haigh and Al sided with the goddamn broads, unless maybe they thought they all might be able to score some good hash off of these flickers here. Damn 'em, one day they're gonna get the whole fucking band busted for possession, and that is definitely not the kinda publicity we're in need of. Lord knows, I'm no goddamn puritan, I blew grass in the 'Nam, everybody did there, but that there was a completely different situa—what the hell."
In the midst of his silent monologue, it had seemed for a brief flicker of a moment that the audience—men and women in folding chairs grouped around folding tables, under haphazardly strung Japanese lanterns—had disappeared along with the night itself, to be instantly replaced by another, strangely dressed group, none of them sitting, all standing with solemn expressions on their faces under bright sunlight in some open, grassy place. There had been the cloying reek of heavy incense all about and, at Arsen's very elbow, a man in jeweled brocade looking every bit as surprised and shocked as Arsen felt.
But even as he exclaimed, it all shifted back from glaring light to near-darkness, from strange and silent people to the crowded tables of raucous, drunken Iranians on a sloping lawn above the Potomac River.
"God damn Mike, anyway!" thought Arsen. "Sitting right behind me, smoking weed and blowing it this way, and I'm getting high. Funny, though, I don't feel stoned, just hallucinating. . . . I wonder if that crazy Lebanese bastard has taken to smoking opium, now?"
As he shortly would learn to his sorrow, hallucinogens or narcotics had nothing whatsoever to do with the matter.
A light flashed on her private communications device, and Colonel Dr. Jane Stone depressed one of the switches and said, "Yes, Stone here."
"Doctor," a voice came from out the device, "Technic Peterson here. The stolen travel console suddenly reactivated a few moments ago, and we now have a firm lock on it in all dimensions."
"You follow orders well, Peterson," the tall, spare woman said, adding, "Hold that lock right where it is and prepare to beam me to the site and time the console presently occupies. Out."
Arising from behind her painfully neat desk, the woman crossed the spartanly furnished office to a range of lockers, where she removed her indoor uniform and shoes, replacing them with a field-dress coverall, boots, weapons harness, and a small pack. Going on to the end locker, she pressed her thumb into the niche for a print reading, then turned the handle and opened the locker.
After filling certain pockets and pouches with weapons and survival items, some reproduction coins of gold, silver, and copper, a water-purification set, and a supply of food-energy briquettes, she reconsidered for a moment, then added a medium-sized medical kit to her pack.
"Those traitorous bastards would not be trying to come back, knowing just what they're in for here, unless one or both of them are seriously injured or deathly ill, and I would not want either of them to die before I can get them back here to first answer for their crimes against the state, then undergo thorough reeducation. I might even take a leave of absence from here just for the purpose of overseeing the reeducation of Dr. Emmett O'Malley!"
The colonel doctor still seethed when she thought back on how the handsome, smooth-talking, lying bastard had wormed his way into her affections, won her very real love, then used her and her position to set his subversive schemes into motion. She and her intelligence network had gotten onto O'Malley and Dr. Kenmore Harold early on, of course, but they had all feigned complete ignorance just to see how far the two would go in their treasonous activities. And she and the network had waited, it developed, just a little too long to arrest the pair of traitors.
Less than two months ago, during the President's Birthday Holidays, O'Malley and Harold, feigning a state of inebriation, had crossed over from the residence complex to this
one by way of the subriverine railway, assaulted a guard, entered the room housing the time-travel projection equipment, and activated it.
"The activation, of course, set off a silent alarm I had had installed as soon as I was made aware of O'Malley's treachery," the colonel doctor mused. "But before I could get down here to the operations level from my quarters, they had gotten everything set, had the projector on automatic, and before I could stun them down, they were gone to who knows where."
"The cagey scum must have switched off the console immediately after they arrived at wherever/whenever, for our attempts to track it with the computer have been fruitless and burned up so much of our allotment of energy that we had to stop the search. It wasn't until last week when they apparently tried to use that console to project one of the labs to wherever/whenever that I was able to convince the board of the real danger of allowing them to remain at large with our equipment."
"But now they've done it right. The equipment has been turned on and left on; otherwise our rotating scanner couldn't have picked it up just now. And I'll get them and bring them back. And I'll see the bastards broken in every conceivable way. I just hope that I, personally, can wangle control of the breaking of Dr. Emmett O'Malley."
The last item she took from its rack in the locker was a heavy-duty shoulder-model heat-stun weapon and a pouch of spare power units for the device. With the familiarity of long usage, she retracted the folding shoulder stock, then clipped the weapon to her harness so that it hung muzzle-down with the handgrip close to the normal hang of her hand, easy to swing up and use, should the occasion demand.
Loaded for bear, ready to fetch back the traitors to their just and richly deserved punishments, Colonel Dr. Jane Stone closed her office door behind her and stalked down the corridor toward the descending lift.
"As you may or may not know, Bass," said Harold, Archbishop of York, "His majesty has decreed that a church be raised on each of the five battlefields whereon the various armies of Crusaders were smashed, in the last two years, and I had journeyed up to the environs of Hexham to dedicate the chosen plot of ground and also to symbolically break the earth for the construction."
"Then, in the very midst of the high mass, which was being sung out of doors, of course, before the gathered throng, eight men and five women appeared—one of the men at my very side—then disappeared so quickly that one might have thought to have imagined the entire sequence of events, save that it repeated twice over. Then, while still the folk all were exclaiming and calling on God and the saints, those eight men—musicians—were there, before the very altar! Two wantons stood amongst them and three more, almost nude, were whirling in some lascivious Byzantinic dance."
"Bass, I am become an old, old man, and my mind has lost some of its flexibility, alas. I was shocked, deeply shocked, thinking for a brief moment that this was but another plot hatched by Abdul and the thrice-damned Romans; then it dawned on me what must have happened. I knew myself the terror of the unknown that these poor men and women must feel and cursed myself roundly for not making useless that hellish device up there under Whyffler Hall, long since."
"As my own terror melted away, however, the understandable terror and horror of the assembled throng had mounted, and as one they moved forward, blood in all eyes and weapons in right many hands, while their voices roared out their common intent to do fatal violence to those whom they saw as evil warlocks and witches."
"It was a near thing, Bass, a terrifying near thing. Had my guardsmen—of whom I had brought along a goodly number, both horse and foot—not been easily to hand, belike the bemused throng had taken and messily done to death those poor involuntarily projected men and women. But a few prearranged signals brought the guards to me, and two-score of my pikemen and halberdiers proved quite sufficient to halt the ill-armed folk there congregated. Once my horsemen had cloaked the intruders and ridden them out of sight, it was still an hour or more before we could quieten the folk, but it was done, and the mass was concluded."
"Where are the poor bastards now, Hal?" asked the Duke of Norfolk. "Christ, what a shock to them that must've been!"
"Well cared for, Bass, although their movements have been restricted, for their own good, of course, you understand. I felt it wisest not to bring them into York, especially not into my palace, not with all that is here going on these days. They are all being held at the Abbey of St. Olaf. You recall its location, do you not? It is the place where his majesty kept his—aahhh—"ladies" when the royal camp was hereabouts three years agone."
"From my brief conversations with various of them, from their dress—the men, that is—and from the dialect that they all seem to speak, I would guess that they are plucked from a time far closer to yours than to mine own; therefore, I would like for you to take them over, try to ease their transition into this world of the here and now which will be so new and strange and terribly frightening to them all."
"And what am I to tell them of exactly how they got here, Hal?" inquired Bass. "Do I troop them all down into the ground level of Whyffler Hall and show them the console to which you've so often alluded? Is that what these damned royal warrants are for?"
The archbishop shrugged. "It's in your hands entirely, Bass. Your judgment has proved itself good; tell them as much or as little of the actual truth as you think they can understand or believe."
"As to the warrants, that is another matter entirely. Bass, at the far end of the main cable of that console lies a world of technological savagery beyond the imaginings of you or any other man or woman here. That world has almost exhausted its ores and fossil fuels, has poisoned its best croplands and its waters, and its people will do the same or worse here, if once they discover this rich, unspoiled place and know the proper console settings to get here."
"That console and the building full of equipment that backs it and powers it was developed by a project the avowed purpose of which was to find and plunder earlier eras of Earth history, but they would jump at this world just as fast and like it even better."
"I showed you one of the heat-stun weapons from that world, Bass, demonstrated it on that pig, remember? How long do you think even your fine cavalry could stand up against men armed with such weapons? No, every second that that device is turned on—and it must be turned on, else those poor men and women would not have been projected here—is a second that this world lies in the direst form of danger."
"So I want you to take a small force, and those warrants, and ride as fast as horseflesh will bear for Whyffler Hall. There you are to break the seals, have the masonry blocking that archway broken down, descend to the old cellar, and ax the power cable in twain, thus permanently severing all connection with my own world as Emmett and I should have done when first we came here one hundred and fifty-eight years ago."
Bass decided that the newcomers could wait a bit longer. Gathering his lancers, he rode back to his camp at a stiff clip. There he gave a staccato stream of orders and began to change from his more formal clothing into attire more suitable to a hell-for-leather cross-country ride up to the border and his estate of Whyffler Hall.
The Norfolk Lancers had made a fine, brave, colorful military show for the procession into York, but for the kind of ride he now planned, parts of it through the traditional haunts of outlaws, brigands, and the like, an entirely different variety of mounted man-at-arms was needed, so he had ordered Sir Calum and Sir Liam to select fifty galloglaiches to accompany him, and the rest of his gentlemen on the long, hard ride up to the Marches.
He only spared the necessary time to send a galloper over to the archbishop's estates to fetch back Baron Melchoro and Don Diego because he knew that did he not, his lady wife, Krystal, would most likely not see the jolly nobleman again before he had to return to Portugal and his family, estates, and affairs.
They set out for Whyffler Hall in the manner in which he would have preferred to set out for York from Norfolk—sixty-six armed men, no pack train, no servants, no tents; horse grain, p
owder, and absolutely necessary equipment were packed on the spare horses' backs. Quickly inspecting the men chosen from the galloglaiches, Bass silently doubted that any brigands of sound mind would risk a tangle with such specimens, and for the umpteenth time he thanked his stars that they and their comrades of the Royal Tara Squadron of Gallowglasses felt and evidenced such fanatic personal loyalty to him.
What with wind and rain and mist, plus unseasonal chill in the mountains, Bass Foster had occasional cause to regret forcing his unit to travel so light, but they did make good speed and on the only night of really hard, driving rain were able to camp in the partial shelter of the crumbling, weed-grown ruin that had once been a place of cheer called Heron Hall.
Despite the sadness that Bass felt in the ruin, having many far more pleasant memories of the place and its late owner, Sir John Heron, that sadness was allayed with a sense of satisfaction, for a dawn departure from the place would see them at Whyffler Hall by mid-afternoon of the following day.
"You do not love us, do you, Brother Prospero?" asked Pope Abdul in a mild tone tinged with sadness.
Cardinal Sicola, who had been summoned by the pontiff within hours of his return to Rome from Palermo, reflected that the faded blue eyes were radically incongruous in that lined, dark-olive-hued face above that raptorial beak of a nose; they should rightly be black or at least brown to properly match so predatory a face.
In reply, he shrugged, saying candidly, "No, I do not, your holiness, I never have. Nor did I love your holiness' predecessor . . . but he, at least, was properly elected."
"And you feel that we are not, Brother Prospero?" probed Abdul, in the same mild, sad tone.
"Let us not fence, your holiness," said Sicola bluntly. "I know and your holiness knows that that election which saw your holiness elevated was fraudulent; it flew in the very face of every written and oral agreement that has held the various feuding, infighting factions of the College of Cardinals together for above two hundred years."
