The Chronocide Mission

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “I suppose she is a considerable nuisance to you personally,” Egarn said. “You have her living in Midd Village, and you have to work with her and train her, but you will handle things. You always do.”

  Arne led Egarn to the room’s most remote corner and quietly asked him what he thought about a one-namer becoming the prince’s consort. “The only advice I have is what the Old Med gave me,” Egarn said. “If you refuse, you will make an enemy. If you accept, if you establish a real friendship with the prince, you will have an invaluable connection with the court and a lifelong patron. Of course you should do it.” He added, with a gesture of finality, “You have no choice.”

  The trap had closed; there was no way out. Arne protested feebly, “I would have to neglect my work at a critical times.”

  “You’ll manage,” Egarn said. “Anyway, it won’t last long. Peerager matings never do. I didn’t have any choice, and neither do you.” He dismissed the subject with a shrug. “Look—I want to show you something.”

  He hurried Arne back to the large len’s flickering picture. Gevis stepped aside so Egarn could take the controls, and with practiced precision the old man turned knobs that moved the meticulously carved wood gears.

  The picture changed to a different street with fewer cars and much smaller buildings.

  “These places mean nothing to you, of course,” Egarn said. “What you saw before was downtown Rochester, New York. This is a small town in Ohio. I have been there—I recognized it immediately when I chanced on it. It helped me with my calibrations, and it is the place I am going to send Roszt and Kaynor. It has a bank that should be easy to rob. They can buy a car there and be in another state before morning. Then they can settle somewhere and learn something about living in the 20th century before they go to Rochester.”

  “When will this happen?” Arne asked.

  Egarn raised his hands wearily. “There is so much for them to learn, and they are still having serious problems with the language. They will have only one chance, and they must be as carefully prepared as possible. With everything going so well, I have to resist the temptation to rush things.”

  “Certainly you shouldn’t send them before they are ready,” Arne agreed.

  Later, Arne took Egarn and Inskel to the sleeping room, where they could talk undisturbed, and told them of his conversation with Fornzt.

  “It wouldn’t have been possible to do this earlier because we didn’t have the materials,” Inskel said. “Now we can do it easily, thanks to Fornzt’s explorations. My work here is almost finished. There isn’t anything I can contribute to Roszt and Kaynor’s education. I easily can make the necessary duplicates.”

  Egarn nodded. “It is well thought of. Inskel can begin with the smaller parts. The larger ones can be made in the new workroom when it is ready. Will it be located somewhere else in the ruins?”

  “Yes, but somewhere remote from here. You and Inskel can escape to it if everything else fails.”

  “Roszt and Kaynor, also,” Egarn said. “From this time on, they will be more important than we are. But why do you suddenly bring this up now? Do you sense some kind of danger?”

  Arne smiled. “You must remember I was trained from childhood to consider not only what will happen but also what might happen. So I keep looking ahead, and I plan for the bad as well as the good.”

  “Fortunately for us,” Inskel said, and Egarn nodded.

  Egarn returned to workroom, but Arne held Inskel back for a few private words. “The attitude of the new prince, and the fact that the ten peers have finally been persuaded to cooperate, may make it possible to write the history of these times far differently than we anticipated.”

  “It is almost the first cheerful news I have heard in my lifetime,” Inskel said. “But we mustn’t forget the Peerdom of Lant and its enormous army. Unless Lant can be defeated, this land has no future.”

  “Exactly. But I don’t want Egarn to launch his mission until we find out what is going to happen.”

  “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean. We have no obligation to save some other civilization by destroying ours. If we are capable of achieving our own bright future, that is what we must fight for. Egarn looks at this differently. The other civilization he wants to save is his own. I agree with you completely. Nothing need be said now, but if Egarn tries to rush things, I will insist that Roszt and Kaynor aren’t to be sent anywhere without your consent.”

  Arne took his leave of them and hurried away. The walk back to Midd Village always seemed much longer in the dark, and this one seemed longer than usual, but at the end of it he finally was able to go to bed.

  He spent the next day catching up on his work and talking with various villagers whose opinions mattered to him. He wanted to talk with Deline again, to tell her—but there was nothing he tell her except that he still wanted her to wive him and he hoped she would wait until her sister had tired of him. A passionate woman like her could find a mate easily. He wished—but what he wished didn’t matter. Egarn and the others were right. He had no choice.

  When he returned to Midlow Court, he told the land warden, “Now I am ready to take your advice. I would like to confer with the prince.”

  The land warden smiled happily. “I will bring her here. If you come to an understanding, the palace will be no place for a newly-mated couple. The peer is unconscious much of the time. Servers tiptoe and whisper, and happiness would seem like treason. You can use my lodge as long as you like.”

  To Arne’s suprise, the days, and tenites, and monts that followed were reasonably happy ones. He was intensely lonely for Deline—the more so because he spent so much time with her. She remained the capable assistant, was politely cooperative in everything—and as distant as she could be under the circumstances. Probably she had already taken another lover. If she had, she continued to practice discretion. The village gossip never mentioned her.

  The prince was a sympathetic and understanding companion who listened intelligently to everything Arne could tell her about the peerdom’s affairs and whose concern for them matched his own. In public, Arne addressed his new mate as “Highness” and knelt to her like everyone else. In private, he called her “Ely”—from her first name, Elone—but he could not bring himself to use the terms of endearment that he had lavished on Deline. The prince responded with a wholly unexpected passion, and probably it was unfair of him to compare her daily with his memories of her sister, but he could not help it. She was ecstatically happy, and he had to seek his own happiness in that.

  They visited the peer whenever she was alert enough to talk with them. She delighted in seeing them together, and she clung to Arne as the one person capable of guiding her peerdom through dangers most peeragers were incapable of imagining. Arne had been the prince’s consort for three monts when Elone Jermile announced joyfully that she was pregnant. It was cause for celebration at court because the peeragers were always apprehensive of the turmoil that would follow if a peer died with no one to succeed her.

  Lashers and no-namers continued to arrive from the other peerdoms. Working with Arne, Bernal imposed an organization on the army and a rigorous conditioning on the troops. His optimism grew daily.

  Then a message arrived from Inskor, brought by a scout who had ridden his lathery horse all the way from Easlon without stopping. The armies of Lant had broken through.

  14. ARNE (2)

  Beyond the southern border of the Ten Peerdoms, chains of steeply sloping, wooded hills marched southward on either side of long, narrow valleys. The trees often spilled down the hillsides to crowd the banks of the small streams that ran below.

  “The Lantiff are on horseback,” Inskor’s message to Arne said. “They will follow the low ground. We need cover, so we will keep to the hills. Our object is to set trap after trap, lose battle after battle—and make each of the Lantiff’s victories so expensive it will seem like a defeat. They will keep trying to encircle us. We must make them think our army is much larger than it is.”
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  The Lantiff’s formula for victory was a simple one. Their charging vanguard bristled with multi-pronged lances and flashed with gleaming, slashing, curved swords. Every thirtieth Lantiff was an officer, apparently unarmed, and it was these officers who wielded the deadliest weapon, the tube of lens that some unsung Lantian len grinder had invented. Its beam knocked the defenders senseless, after which the Lantiff surged forward to overwhelm an unconscious enemy.

  It was an ideal tactic for troops with minimal intelligence. The Lantiff never had to think at all. They never sent out scouts; never varied their scheme of attack an iota. They had no need to; they were invincible. They tasted victory after victory, and no one bothered to tell them about the occasional defeats Lant suffered. They attacked with deliberation; they conquered even before they made contact with the enemy; and then they occupied themselves with more important matters such as pillaging undefended towns and villages. What the opposing army did or tried to do was no concern of theirs.

  These were the invading hordes that came riding up the narrow valleys that pointed toward the Ten Peerdoms. The terrain forced them into awkward formations—long, narrow columns of mounted warriors with patches of woods to contend with—and Inskor, delighted that he could attack fingers rather than a clenched fist, was spreading his own army as thin as he dared in an effort to convert each of those valleys into a death trap.

  The partly trained army of the Ten Peerdoms now numbered almost five thousand lashers with another two thousand no-namers organized into labor platoons. It was by far the largest army the Ten Peerdoms had ever assembled. Arne’s personal force of one-namers, the one that had defeated the wild lashers, had been expanded to more than five hundred men and women, and one-namers who had been hurriedly trained as scouts added five hundred more. There were another five hundred regular scouts from Weslon. The total seemed astonishing to Arne, who had to find a way to feed this swollen force, but it paled to insignificance beside the massed armies of Lant.

  Arne’s original plan had had been to garrison these troops at strategic points along the southern frontiers. Now he would march them to war instead. He summoned his scattered one-namers, telling them to overtake him as quickly as possible; took a poignant leave of the prince; and set out. He left Deline to make arrangements with all of the Ten Peerdoms for the supplies that must be kept moving after them.

  The army of Lant was moving north at its own deliberate pace. Surprise had never been a Lantian tactic—the peer had long-since learned that the more warning a victim had, the longer it had to wait, the more frightened it became. Many of Lant’s victories were no more than triumphant marches in the wake of a fleeing enemy.

  Arne’s fear was that the Lantiff would arrive before he joined his force with Inskor’s. He left a squad of scouts, a small company of lashers, and a platoon of no-namers in each valley with instructions to build a series of barriers of upright logs, using them to link wooded areas or natural obstacles. When the Lantiff came, the lashers would feign a defense of each barrier, fleeing in pretended terror from one to another to entice the Lantiff to follow them. When the Lantiff were deeply committed to this trap, one-namers hidden on the wooded hillsides would cut them to pieces with Egarn’s weapon.

  They moved east, and Arne’s army shrank dramatically as he left behind one defense force after another. He was becoming extremely worried that he would run out of troops when finally he made contact with Inskor and his Easlon defenders, who were extending westward.

  Inskor greeted him warmly, listened with delight to what Arne had accomplished, and then told him to take the remainder of his force west again, along with a reserve of Easlon lashers and one-namers that had not yet been committed, and extend the defenses as far as possible.

  “The Lantiff will keep moving west,” he said. “When we defeat them in one place, we will have to withdraw as much strength as we can and hurry it westward to meet their next attack.”

  Arne obediently turned back with the Ten Peerdoms’ uncommitted strength. The next day he met a lone rider. He had heard nothing from Midlow Court since he left, and he had been waiting for a peer’s messenger.

  But this rider brought no messages. It was Deline.

  “I have come to fight,” she said.

  Arne said sternly, “Your job is to keep food moving south. That is more important than any fighting you could do.”

  “I have already arranged for that,” she said. “There will be plenty of food. Hutter will look after it.” She added smugly, “I have the peer’s consent. I told her I wanted my horse so I could fight for Midlow. I am not going to sit in a safe place and rot while my one-name friends are dying for the peerdom. Anyway, you need an assistant here more than you did at Midd Village, and that is what I am—your assistant. The peer herself appointed me.”

  “When you asked the peer, what did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything. It is painful for her to talk. She nodded, and the land warden gave me my horse.”

  Arne extended his army as far west as possible, sent scouts far into the wilds to detect any encircling movement, and turned east again. Along the way he conducted training sessions with each valley’s defense unit, and this introduced Deline to something she had never seen before or even imagined: Egarn’s weapon.

  She was astonished. Then, as she began to understand the destructive power of the small tubes, she was elated. “I thought we here helpless against the might of Lant,” she said wonderingly. “It is the Lantiff who will be helpless. Does the peer know about this?”

  “No peerager knows,” Arne said shortly. “Peeragers would use the weapon on each other.”

  Deline was silent for a time. “You are right,” she said finally. “No peerager should know. I’m glad I didn’t know. I would have been worse than the others.”

  When they passed south of the Peerdom of Chang, Deline volunteered to persuade peer and prince—former friends of hers—to furnish more lashers and no-namers so Arne and Inskor could hold a few units in reserve. Chang gave her everything that could be spared, and she trained this force on the march. It arrived in fine fettle and eager to fight the Lantiff.

  So was she. The Prince of Chang had presented her with a uniform designed for the prince’s private guard—the same she had modeled her own guard’s uniforms on—and she arrived resplendent in black and white. She looked magnificent. Unfortunately, this was the wrong war for the heroics that went with her costume, and Arne quietly pointed out to her how a conspicuous dress could give away a battle plan.

  “I didn’t come here to hide,” she said. “I’m going to fight.”

  The long, narrow columns of Lantiff continued to seep northward. Finally one of them encountered the defenses Arne had planned so carefully and erected with so much labor. A barricade of upright logs completely spanned the valley. At intervals there were other barricades where Arne’s lashers waited.

  The Lantiff paused while their officers rode forward a few yards to study these obstacles. Then they aimed their weapons, the weapons of Lant. The logs of each barricade were sent flying. Huge gaps opened up, Arne’s lashers fled, and the Lantiff pressed forward, still moving in leisurely fashion.

  A defense that Inskor had devised proved more effective. A wide stripe of burnooze, a black substance found in the mountains where severe land upheaval had taken place, had been laid down across the valley. When ignited, it burned furiously, and it could be touched off from a distance with Egarn’s weapon. When the Lantiff’s vanguard was almost upon one of these strips, the ground at their horses’ feet erupted in flame. The head of column halted; the Lantiff behind continued to press forward until the valley was crammed with them. Then a scout on the hillside touched off another wall of flame behind them, and Egarn’s weapon systematically cut the Lantiff to pieces. The valley was piled thickly with corpses and with pathetically screaming wounded men and horses, but still the Lantiff tried to surge forward.

  It was Arne’s first close view of the Lantiff. Squa
t, muscular, with dark faces and misshapen eyes, their appearance was completely different from that of the Ten Peerdoms lashers. They had no conception of defeat, and their attacks ceased only when there were no more of them to be killed. Fire might stop them momentarily, but when the leaders shouted their shrill commands, they charged through the wall of flames. The crashing lightning of Egarn’s weapon gave them pause, but the next command sent them blindly forward, crushing their own dead under foot, and they kept charging until they were annihilated. Inskor had expected them to flee in panic the moment the crashing beams of Egarn’s weapon stabbed among them, but they were superbly disciplined—or too stupid to understand what was happening.

  Day after day Arne’s forces decimated the Lantiff in battle after battle in westward succeeding valleys. Finally the Lantiff happened onto a valley that was broader than the others, and their commanders mounted a massive attack. This time they kept charging until Egarn’s weapons exhausted their stored energy. The weapons recharged automatically, but they had to be rested for a short time, and while they were silent, the Lantiff suddenly spurred their horses forward and burst through the last of the defenses into gently rolling terrain where there was little cover for Inskor’s scouts.

  Suddenly a lone rider appeared in their path, a rider clothed in black and white who galloped directly toward the menacing line of lances and swords. The Lantiff reined in their horses and watched this apparent suicide attempt with puzzlement. As the rider drew nearer, it proved to be a woman with blonde hair flying, which magnified their confusion.

  Grooming was difficult in an army fighting one battle after another. All of Arne’s one-name women had been letting their hair grow, and the men were becoming shaggy. Now Deline’s blond hair streamed behind her as she rode recklessly toward the waiting Lantiff.

  Arne, too far away to come to her assistance, could only watch with horror. She seemed intent on a suicidal collision with the leveled lances, but suddenly, at the last moment, she swerved and rode down the long line of Lantiff, turning one of Egarn’s weapons on them.