Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

by H. Beam Piper

  She smiled happily. It would be terrible for him to die, and at her hand, a stranger who had fought so well for them. And such a handsome and valiant stranger, too. She wondered who he was. Some noble, or some great captain, of course.

  “We owe much to Princess Rylla,” Harmakros insisted. “When this man from the village overtook us, I was for riding back with three or four to see about this stranger of Vurth’s, but the Princess said, ‘We’ve only Vurth’s word there’s but one; there may be a hundred Vurth hasn’t seen.’ So back we all went, and you know the rest.”

  “We owe most of all to Dram.” Old Xentos’s face lit with a calm joy. “And Galzar Wolfhead, of course,” he added. “it is a sign that the gods will not turn their backs upon Hostigos. This stranger, whoever he may be, was sent by the gods to be our aid.”

  VERKAN Vall put the lighter back on the desk and took the cigarette from his mouth, blowing a streamer of smoke.

  “Chief, it’s what I’ve been saying all along. We’ll have to do something.” After Year-End Day, he added mentally, I’ll do something. “We know what causes this conveyers interpenetrating in transposition. It’ll have to be sorted.”

  Tortha Karf laughed. “The reason I’m laughing he explained, “is that I said just that, about a hundred and fifty years ago, to old Zarvan Tharg, when I was taking over from him, and he laughed at me just as I’m laughing at you, because he’d said the same thing to the retiring Chief when he was taking over. Have you ever seen an all-time-line conveyer-head map?”

  No. He couldn’t recall. He blanked his mind to everything else and concentrated with all his mental power.

  “No, I haven’t—”

  “I should guess not. With the finest dots, on the biggest map, all the inhabited areas would be indistinguishable blotches. There must be a couple of conveyers interpenetrating every second of every minute of every day. You know,” he added gently, “we’re rather extensively spread out.”

  “We can cut it down.” There had to be something that could be done. “Better scheduling, maybe.”

  “Maybe. How about this case you’re taking an interest in?”

  “Well, we had one piece of luck. The pickup time-line is one we’re on already. One of our people, in a newspaper office in Philadelphia, messaged us that same evening. He says the press associations have the story, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “Well, just what did happen?”

  “This man Morrison and three other state police officers were closing in on a house in which a wanted criminal was hiding. He must have been a dangerous man—they don’t go out in force like that for chicken-thieves. Morrison and another man were in front; the other two were coming in from behind. Morrison started forward, with his companion covering for him with a rifle. This other man is the nearest thing to a witness there is, but he was watching the front of the house and only marginally aware of Morrison. He says he heard the other two officers pounding on the back door and demanding admittance, and then the man they were after burst out the front door with a rifle in his hands. This officer—Stacey’s his name—shouted to him to drop the rifle and put up his hands. Instead, the criminal tried to raise it to his shoulder; Stacey fired, killing him instantly. Then, he says, he realized that Morrison was nowhere in sight.

  “He called, needless to say’ without response, and then he and the other two hunted about for some time. They found nothing, of course. They took this body in to the county seat and had to go through a lot of formalities; it was evening before they were back at the substation, and it happened that a reporter was there, got the story, and phoned it to his paper. The press association actions then got hold of it. Now the state police refuse to discuss the disappearance, and they’re even trying to deny it.”

  “They think their man’s nerve snapped, he ran away in a panic, and is ashamed to come back. They wouldn’t want a story like that getting around; they’ll try to cover up.”

  “Yes. This hat he lost in the conveyer, with his name in it—we’ll plant it about a mile from the scene, and then get hold of some local, preferably a boy of twelve or so, give him narco-hyp instructions to find the hat and take it to the state police substation, and then inform the reporter responsible for the original news-break by an anonymous phone call. After that, there will be the usual spate of rumors of Morrison being seen in widely separated localities.”

  “How about his family?”

  “We’re in luck there, too. Unmarried, parents both dead, no near relatives.” The Chief nodded. “That’s good. Usually there are a lot of relatives yelling their heads off. Particularly on sectors where they have inheritance laws. Have you located the exit time-line?”

  “Approximated it; somewhere on Aryan-Transpacific. We can’t determine the exact moment at which he broke free of the field. We have one positive indication to look for at the scene.”

  The Chief grinned. “Let me guess’ The empty revolver cartridge.”

  “That’s right. The things the state police use don’t eject automatically; he’d have to open it and take the empty out by hand. And as soon as he was outside the conveyer and no longer immediately threatened, that’s precisely what he’d do open his revolver, eject the empty, and replace it with a live round. I’m as sure of that as though I watched him do it. We may not be able to find it, but if we do it’ll be positive proof.”

  MORRISON woke, stiff and aching, under soft covers, and for a moment lay with his eyes closed. Near him, something clicked with soft and monotonous regularity; from somewhere an anvil rang, and there was shouting. Then he opened his eyes. It was daylight, and he was on a bed in a fairly large room with paneled walls and a white plaster ceiling. There were two windows at one side, both open, and under one of them a woman, stout and gray-haired, in a green dress, sat knitting. It had been her needles that he had heard. Nothing but blue sky was visible through the windows. There was a table, with things on it, and chairs, and, across the room, a chest on the top of which his clothes were neatly piled, his belt and revolver on top. His boots, neatly cleaned, stood by the chest, and a long unsheathed sword with a swept guard and a copper pommel leaned against the wall.

  The woman looked up quickly as he stirred, then put her knitting on the floor and rose. She looked at him, and went to the table, pouring a cup of water and bringing it to him. He thanked her, drank, and gave it back. The cup and pitcher were of heavy silver, elaborately chased. This wasn’t any peasant cottage. Replacing the cup on the table, she went out.

  He ran a hand over his chin. About three days’ stubble. The growth of his fingernails checked with that. The whole upper part of his torso was tightly bandaged. Broken rib, or ribs, and probably a nasty hole in him. He was still alive after three days. Estimating the here-and-now medical art from the general technological level as he’d seen it so far, that probably meant that he had a fair chance of continuing so. At least he was among friends and not a prisoner. The presence of the sword and the revolver proved that.

  The woman returned, accompanied by a man in a blue robe with an eight pointed white star on the breast, the colors of the central image on the peasants’ god-shelf reversed. A priest, doubling as doctor. He was short and chubby, with a pleasant round face; advancing, he laid a hand on Morrison’s brow, took his pulse, and spoke in a cheerfully optimistic tone. The bedside manner seemed to be a universal constant. With the woman’s help, he got the bandages, yards of them, off. He did have a nasty wound, uncomfortably close to his heart, and his whole left side was black and blue. The woman brought a pot from the table; the doctor-priest smeared the wound with some dirty looking unguent, they put on fresh bandages, and the woman took out the old ones. The doctor-priest tried to talk to him; he tried to talk to the doctor-priest. The woman came back with a bowl of turkey-broth, full of finely minced meat, and a spoon. While he was finishing it, two more visitors arrived.

  One was a man, robed like the doctor, his cowl thrown back from his head, revealing snow-white hair. He h
ad a gentle, kindly face, and was smiling. For a moment Morrison wondered if this place might be a monastery of some sort, and then saw the old priest’s definitely unmonastic companion.

  She was a girl, twenty, give or take a year or so, with blonde hair cut in what he knew as a page-boy bob. She had blue eyes and red lips and an impudent tilty little nose dusted with golden freckles. She wore a jerkin of something like brown suede, sewn with gold thread, and a yellow under-tunic with a high neck and long sleeves, and brown knit hose and thigh-length jackboots. There was a gold chain around her neck, and a gold-hilted dagger on a belt of gold links. No, this wasn’t any monastery, and it wasn’t any peasant hovel, either.

  As soon as he saw her, he began to laugh. He’d met that young lady before.

  “You shot me!” he accused, aiming an imaginary pistol and saying “Bang!” and then touching his chest.

  She said something to the older priest, he replied, and she said something to Morrison, pantomiming sorrow and shame, covering her face with one hand, and winking at him over it. Then they both laughed. Perfectly natural mistake—how could she have known which side he’d been on?

  The two priests held a colloquy, and then the younger brought him about four ounces of something dark brown in a glass tumbler. It tasted alcoholic and medicinally bitter. They told him, by signs, to go back to sleep, and left him, the girt looking back over her shoulder as she went out.

  He squirmed a little, decided that he was going to like it, here-and-now, and dozed off.

  LATE in the afternoon he woke again. A different woman, thin, with mouse brown hair, sat in the chair under the window, stitching on something that looked like a shirt. Outside, a dog was barking, and farther off somebody was drilling troops—a couple of hundred, from the amount of noise they were making. A voice was counting cadence Heep, heep, heep, heep! Another universal constant.

  He smiled contentedly. Once he got on his feet again, he didn’t think he was going to be on unemployment very long. A soldier was all he’d ever been, since he’d stopped being a theological student at Princeton between sophomore and junior years. He’d owed a lot of thanks to the North Korean Communists for starting that war; without it, he might never have found the moral courage to free himself from the career into which his father had been forcing him. His enlisting in the Army had probably killed his father; the Rev. Alexander Morrison simply couldn’t endure not having his own way. At least, he died while his son was in Korea.

  Then there had been the year and a half, after he came home, when he’d worked as a bank guard, until his mother died. That had been soldiering of a sort; he’d worked armed and in uniform, at least. And then, when he no longer had his mother to support, he’d gone into the state police. That had really been soldiering, the nearest anybody could come to it in peacetime.

  And then he’d blundered into that dome of pearly light, that time-machine, and come out of it into—into here-and-now, that was all he could call it.

  Where here was was fairly easy. It had to be somewhere within, say, ten or fifteen miles of where he had been time-shifted, which was just over the Clinton County line, in Nittany Valley. They didn’t use helicopters to evacuate the wounded here-and-now, that was sure.

  When now was was something else. He lay on his back, looking up at the white ceiling, not wanting to attract the attention of the woman sewing by the window. It wasn’t the past. Even if he hadn’t studied history—it was about the only thing at college he had studied—he’d have known that Penn’s Colony had never been anything like this. It was more like sixteenth century Europe, though any sixteenth-century French or German cavalryman who was as incompetent a swordsman as that gang he’d been fighting wouldn’t have lived to wear out his first pair of issue boots. And enough Comparative Religion had rubbed off on him to know that those three images on that peasant’s shelf didn’t belong in any mythology back to Egypt and Sumeria.

  So it had to be the future. A far future, long after the world had been devastated by atomic war, and man, self-blasted back to the Stone Age, had bootstrap-lifted himself back this far. A thousand years, ten thousand years; ten dollars if you guess how many beans in the jar. The important thing was that here-and-now was when-where he would stay, and he’d have to make a place for himself. He thought he was going to like it.

  That lovely, lovely blonde! He fell asleep thinking about her.

  BREAKFAST the next morning was cornmeal mush cooked with meat broth and tasting rather like scrapple, and a mug of sassafras tea. Coffee, it seemed, didn’t exist here-and-now, and that he was going to miss. He sign talked for his tunic to be brought, and got his pipe, tobacco and lighter out of it. The woman brought a stool and set it beside the bed to put things on. The lighter opened her eyes a trifle, and she said something, and he said something in a polite voice, and she went back to her knitting. He looked at the tunic; it was torn and blood-soaked on the left side, and the badge was leadsplashed and twisted. That was why he was still alive.

  The old priest and the girl were in about an hour later. This time she was wearing a red and gray knit frock that could have gone into Bergdorf Goodman’s window with a $200 price-tag any day, though the dagger on her belt wasn’t exactly Fifth Avenue. They had slates and soapstone sticks with them; paper evidently hadn’t been rediscovered yet. They greeted him, then pulled up chairs and got down to business.

  First, they taught him the words for you and me and he and she, and, when he had that, names. The girl was Rylla. The old priest was Xentos. The younger priest, who dropped in for a look at the patient, was Mytron. The names, he thought, sounded Greek; it was the only point of resemblance in the language.

  Calvin Morrison puzzled them. Evidently they didn’t have surnames, here and now. They settled on calling him Kalvan. There was a lot of picture drawing on the slates, and play-acting for verbs, which was fun. Both Rylla and Xentos smoked; Rylla’s pipe, which she carried on her belt with her dagger, had a silver-inlaid redstone bowl and a cane stem. She was intrigued by his Zippo, and showed him her own lighter. It was a tinderbox, with a flint held down by a spring against a quarter-circular striker pushed by hand and returned by another spring for another push. With a spring to drive instead of return the striker it would have done for a gunlock. By noon, they were able to tell him that he was their fiend because he had killed their enemies, which seemed to be the definitive test of friendship, here-and-now, and he was able to assure Rylla that he didn’t blame her for shooting him in the skirmish on the road.

  They were back in the afternoon, accompanied by a gentleman with a gray imperial, wearing a garment like a fur-collared bathrobe and a sword-belt over it. He had a most impressive gold chain around his neck. His name was Ptosphes, and after much sign-talk and picture-making, it emerged that he was Rylla’s father, and also Prince of this place. This place, it seemed, was Hostigos. The raiders with whom he had fought had come from a place called Nostor, to the north and east. Their Prince was named Gormoth, and Gormoth was not well thought of in Hostigos.

  The next day, he was up in a chair, and they began giving him solid food, and wine to drink. The wine was excellent; so was the local tobacco. Maybe he’d get used to sassafras tea instead of coffee. The food was good, though sometimes odd. Bacon and eggs, for instance; the eggs were turkey eggs. Evidently they didn’t have chickens, here-and-now. They had plenty of game, though. The game must have come back nicely after the atomic wars.

  Rylla was in to see him twice a day, sometimes alone and sometimes with Xentos, or with a big man with a graying beard, Chartiphon, who seemed to be Ptosphe’s top soldier. He always wore a sword, long and heavy, with a two hand grip; not a real two-hander, but what he’d known as a hand-and-a-half, or bastard, sword. Often he wore a gilded back-and-breast, ornately wrought but nicked and battered. Sometimes, too, he visited alone, or with a young cavalry officer, Harmakros.

  Harmakros wore a beard, too, obviously copied after Prince Ptosphes’s. He decided to stop worrying about getting a
shave; you could wear a beard, here-and-now, and nobody’d think you were either an Amishman or a beatnik. Harmakros had been on the patrol that had hit the Nostori raiders from behind at the village, but, it appeared, Rylla had been in command.

  “The gods,” Chartiphon explained, “did not give our Prince a son. A Prince should have a son, to rule after him, so our little Rylla must be as a son to her father.”

  The gods, he thought, ought to provide Prince Ptosphes with a son-in-law, name of Calvin Morrison. or just Kalvan. He made up his mind to give the gods some help on that.

  There was another priest in to see him occasionally a red-nosed, graybearded character named Tharses, who had a slight limp and a scarred face. One look was enough to tell which god he served; he wore a light shirt of finely linked mail and a dagger and a spiked mace on his belt, and a wolfskin hood topped with a jewel-eyed wolf head. As soon as he came in, he would toss that aside, and as soon as he sat down somebody would provide him with a drink. He almost always had a cat or a dog trailing him. Everybody called him Uncle Wolf.

  Chartiphon showed him a map, elaborately illuminated on parchment. Hostigos was all Center County, the southern comer of Clinton, and all Lycoming south of the Bald Eagles. Hostigos Town was exactly on the site of other when Bellefonte; they were at Tarr-Hostigos, or Hostigos Castle, overlooking it from the end of the mountain east of the gap. To the south, the valley of the Juniata, the Besh, was the Princedom of Beshta, ruled by a Prince Balthar. Nostor was Lycoming County north of the Bald Eagles, Tioga County to the north, and parts of Northumberland and Montour Counties, to the forks of the Susquehanna. Nostor Town would be about Hughesville. Potter and McKean Counties were Nyklos, ruled by a Prince Armanes. Blair and parts of Clearfield, Huntington and Bedford Counties made up Sask, whose prince was called Sarrask.