The Corridors of Time

by Poul Anderson

  ‘But your country’s great enemy is only one manifestation of a thing that was born before history: that spoke through the laws of Draco and Diocletian, the burning of the Confucian Willow Books, Torquemada, Calvin, Locke, Voltaire, Napoleon, Marx, Lenin, Arguellas, the Jovian Manifesto, and on and on. Oh, not clearly, not simply – there was no tyranny in the hearts of some who believed in supreme reason; and there was in others, like Nietzsche, who did not. To me, your industrial civilization, even in the countries that call themselves free, comes near to an ultimate horror; yet I use machines more powerful and subtle than you have dreamed. But in what spirit? There is the issue of battle!’

  Her voice dropped. She looked into the forest walling this meadow. ‘I often think,’ she said slowly, ‘that the downward turn started in this very millennium, when the earth gods and their Mother were swept aside by those who worshipped skyward.’

  She shook herself, as if to be rid of something, and continued in a level tone, ‘Well, Malcolm, accept for now that the Wardens are keepers of life – life in its wholeness, boundedness, splendor, and tragedy – while the Rangers would make the world over in the machine’s image. It is an oversimplification. I can perhaps explain better to you later on. But do you find my cause unworthy?’

  Lockridge regarded her, where she rested like a young wildcat, and said with a surge that drove out all terror, remorse, and aloneness: ‘No. I’ll go along, I already have.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘If you knew what the token meant, not only in words but in your blood, I would leap over the fire to you for that.’

  What does it mean? he wanted to ask. Dizzyingly: A man might hope. But before he could speak, Storm grinned and said: ‘The next few months should be interesting for you.’

  ‘Good Lord, yes!’ he realized. ‘Why, any anthropologist would give his right – uh – eye to be here. I still can’t believe I am.’

  ‘There are dangers,’ she warned.

  ‘So what is the situation anyway? What do we have to do?’

  ‘Let me begin at the first,’ Storm said. ‘As I told you, the struggle between Rangers and Wardens cannot be fought in our own time on any major scale. Instead, it has moved largely into the past. Bases are established at strategic points and – no matter now. I know the Rangers have a stronghold in Harald Bluetooth’s reign. Though the Asa religion was already one of Sky Father, still, the introduction of Christianity was another advance for them, laying the foundation for centralized monarchy and the eventual rationalist state. Then came the men we met.’

  ‘Huh? Wait! You mean you people change the past?’

  ‘Oh, no. Never. That is inherently impossible. If one tried, he would find events always frustrated him. What has been, is. We time travelers are ourselves part of the fabric. But let us say that we discover aspects of it which are useful to our respective causes, we get recruits, build up strength for the final contest.

  ‘Well. In my time, the Rangers hold the western hemisphere, the Wardens the eastern. I led a party into the twentieth century and overseas to America. We could not build anything important by ourselves without being observed by enemy agents, who are much more numerous in your age than ours are. But our plan was to organize a company whose ostensible purpose was something remarkable, to pose as ordinary citizens of the era. We picked yours because that was the first century in which such items as we needed – transistors, for instance – could be obtained locally and hence inconspicuously. In the guise of a mining enterprise in Colorado, we produced our underground installations, manufactured an activator, and drove a new passage.

  ‘The plan was to strike through it, emerging in our own time, in the Rangers’ heartland. But the moment the corridor was finished, Brann came down it with an overwhelmingly superior force. I do not know how he got word. Only I escaped. For more than a year, then, I wandered about in the United States, seeking a way of return. Every futureward corridor would be guarded, I knew, the Rangers being so strong in the Early Industrial civilization. Nowhere could I find a Warden.’

  ‘How’d you live?’ Lockridge inquired.

  ‘You would call it robbery,’ Storm said.

  He started. She laughed. ‘This energy gun, which I had with me, can be set to do no more than stun. There was no problem in gathering some thousands of dollars, a few at a time. I was desperate. Can you blame me so very much?’

  ‘I ought to.’ He looked at her in the firelight. ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would,’ she said softly. ‘You are such a one as I hardly dared hope I could find.

  ‘You see, I needed a helper, a bodyguard, someone to make me appear otherwise than a woman traveling alone. That is too conspicuous in all past ages. And I had to go pastward.

  ‘I ascertained there was no guard on this Danish corridor. It was the only one I dared attempt with a gate open on those decades. Even so, you saw how near we came to destruction.

  ‘But now, here we are. There is a Warden base in Crete, where the old faith is still strong. Unfortunately, I cannot simply call them to come fetch us. The Rangers are also active in this milieu – it is, as I said, a crucial one – and they might too likely intercept the message and find us before our friends can. But once we have reached Knossos, we can get an armed escort, from corridor to corridor until I have reached home. You will be dismissed in your own era.’ She shrugged. ‘I left a good many dollars hidden in the United States. You may as well have them for your trouble.’

  ‘Skip that,’ Lockridge said roughly. ‘How do we get to Crete?’

  ‘By sea. There has long been trade between these parts and the Mediterranean. The Limfjord is not far away, and a ship from Iberia, which is under the religion of the megalith builders, should call sometime this summer. From Iberia we can transship. It should take no longer, and is less hazardous, then following the amber route overland.’

  ‘M-m-m … okay, sounds reasonable. And I suppose we have enough metal on us to buy a passage. Or do we?’

  Storm tossed her head. ‘If not,’ she said haughtily, ‘they will not refuse to carry Her Whom they worship.’

  ‘What?’ Lockridge’s mouth fell open. ‘You mean you can pose as—’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I am the Goddess.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  White sunrise mists rolled low across a drenched earth. Water dripped from a thousand leaves, glittered in the air and was lost in brush and bracken. The woods were clamorous with birdsong. High overhead wheeled an eagle, the young light like gold on its wings.

  Lockridge woke to a hand shaking him and blinked sandy lids. ‘Huh? Whuh – No—’ Yesterday had drained him, he was stiff and dull in the head, aching in his muscles. He looked into Storm’s face and fumbled to recognize her, to know and accept what had happened.

  ‘Rise,’ she said. ‘I have started the fire again. You will prepare breakfast.’

  Only then did he see that she was nude. He sat up in his sleeping bag with a choked-off oath of amazement, delight, and – awe was perhaps the word. He had not known the human body could be so beautiful.

  Yet his instinctive reaction died at once. It was not only that she paid him no more attention than if he had been another woman, or a dog. One does not, cannot make passes at Nike of Samothrace.

  And a remote bass bellow, thundering down the forest till a flock of capercailzie took flight with enough wings to blot out the sun, distracted him. ‘What’s that?’ he cried. ‘A bull?’

  ‘An aurochs,’ Storm said. The fact that he was really here, now, personally, stabbed into him.

  He scrambled from the bag shivering in his pajamas. Storm paid the chill no heed, though dew lay heavy in her hair and gleamed down her flanks. Is she human? he wondered. After everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve got ahead of us, not a trace of strain – Superhuman. She made some mention of genetic control. They’ve created the man beyond man, off in the future. She wouldn’t need much trickery to start the cult of Labrys down in Cre
te, centuries ago. Only herself.

  Storm squatted and opened one of the bundles from the cabinet. Lockridge took the opportunity to start changing behind her back. She glanced around. ‘We will need contemporary clothes,’ she said. ‘Our gear will excite sufficient gossip. Take the other costume.’

  He could not resent her ordering him about, but undid the package. The wrapping proved to be a short cloak of loosely woven wool, blue from some vegetable dye, with a thorn brooch. The main garment was a sleeveless bast tunic that he pulled over his head and belted with a thong. Sandals tied onto his feet and a birdskin fillet ornamented in a zigzag pattern went around his head. In addition he got a necklace, bear’s claws alternating with shells, and a leaf-shaped dagger of flint so finely worked as to look almost metallic. The haft was wrapped in leather, the sheath was birchbark.

  Storm surveyed him. He did the same to her. Female dress was no more than sandals, headband, necklace of raw amber, a foxskin purse slung from the shoulder, and a brief skirt decorated with feathers. But he scarcely noticed those details.

  ‘You will do,’ she said. ‘Actually, we are an anachronism. We are dressed like well-to-do clanfolk of the Tenil Orugaray, the Sea People, the aborigines. But you have short hair and are clean-shaven, and my racial type – still, no matter. We will be travelers who have had to purchase our clothes locally when the old ones wore out. That practice is common. Besides, these primitives have small sense for logical consistency.’

  She pointed to a little box that had also been in the bundle. ‘Open that.’ He picked it up, but she had to show him how to squeeze to make the lid curl back. Within lay a transparent globule. ‘Put that in an ear,’ she said.

  Throwing aside a midnight lock of hair, she demonstrated with a similar object. He remembered now the thing she wore in her own left ear, that he had taken for a hearing aid, and inserted his. It did not impair his perception of sound, but felt oddly cool, a momentary tingle ran over his scalp and down his neck.

  ‘Do you understand me?’ Storm asked.

  ‘Why, naturally—’ He strangled on the words. They had not been in English.

  Not in anything!

  Storm laughed. ‘Take good care of your diaglossa. You will find it rather more valuable than a gun.’

  Lockridge wrenched his mind back to observation and reason. What had she actually said? Gun had been English and diaglossa didn’t fit the pattern of the rest. Which was — Gradually, as he used the language, he would find it to be agglutinative, with a complex grammar and many fine distinctions unknown to civilized man. There were, for instance, some twenty different words for water, depending on what kind might be involved under what circumstances. On the other hand, he was unable to express in it such concepts as ‘mass,’ ‘government,’ or ‘monotheism’: at least, not without the most elaborate circumlocutions. Only slowly, in the days that followed, would he notice how different from his own were notions like ‘cause,’ ‘time,’ ‘self,’ and ‘death.’

  ‘The device is a molecular encoder,’ Storm said in English. ‘It stores the important languages and basic customs of an era and an area – in this case, northern Europe from what will someday be Ireland to what will be Esthonia, plus some outside ones that might be encountered like Iberia and Crete. It draws energy from body heat, and meshes its output with the nerve flow of the brain. In effect, you have an artificial memory center added to your natural one.’

  ‘All that, in this cotton-pickin’ little thing?’ Lockridge asked weakly.

  Storm’s wide smooth shoulders lifted and fell. ‘A chromosome is smaller and carries more information. Make us some food.’

  Lockridge was downright glad to escape to the everydayness of camp cooking. Besides, he had gone to sleep supperless. The bundles included metal-sealed materials that he didn’t recognize; but warmed up, the stuff was delicious. There were only a few meals’ worth, and Storm told him impatiently to abandon the remnants. ‘We will live off hospitality,’ she said. ‘That one frying pan is so magnificent a gift as to warrant a year’s keep, even at Pharaoh’s court.’

  Lockridge discovered he was grinning. ‘Yeah, and what if some archeologist digs it up out of a kitchen midden, four thousand years from now?’

  ‘It will be assumed a hoax, and ignored. Though in practice, sheet iron will scarcely last that long in this damp climate. Time is unchangeable. Now be still.’ Storm prowled the meadow, lost in her own thoughts, while he cooked. The long grass whispered about her ankles, dandelion blossoms lay at her feet like coins scattered before a conqueror.

  Either there was some stimulant in the food, or motion worked the stiffness out of Lockridge. When he raked the fire wide and covered the ashes with dirt, and Storm said smiling, ‘Good, you know how to care for the land,’ he felt ready to fight bears.

  She showed him how to operate the gate control tube and hid it in a hollow tree along with their twentieth-century clothes – though not the guns. Then they assembled their packs, put them on, and started.

  ‘We are going to Avildaro,’ Storm said. ‘I have never been there myself, but it is a port of call, and if a ship does not happen by it this year, we will hear where else.’

  Lockridge knew, from the thing in his ear, that ‘Avildaro’ was an elided form of a still older name which meant Sea Mother House; that She to Whom the village was dedicated was, in some way, an avatar of the Huntress Who stalked the forest at its back; that its people had dwelt there for uncounted centuries, descendants of the reindeer hunters who wandered in as the glaciers receded from Denmark and turned to the waters for their life when the herds followed the ice on into Sweden and Norway; that in this particular region they had begun to farm as well, a few generations ago, though not so much as the immigrants further inland from whom they had learned the art – for they still followed Her of the Wet Locks, Who had eaten the land across which their boats now ventured and Who likewise ate men, yet gave the shining fish, the oyster, the seal, and the porpoise to those who served Her; that of late the charioteers of Yuthoaz, who knew Her not but sacrificed to male gods, had troubled a long peace — He stopped summoning those ghostly memories that were not his. They blinded him to the day and the woman beside him.

  The sun was well up now, the mists burned off and the sky clear overhead, with striding white clouds. At the edge of the primeval forest, Storm cast about. Beneath the oaks, underbrush made a nearly impenetrable wall. She took a while to find the trail north: dim, narrow, twisting in light flecks and green shadows among the great boles, beaten more by deer than by men.

  ‘Have a care not to injure anything,’ she cautioned. ‘Woods are sacred. One must not hunt without sacrificing to Her, nor cut down a tree unless it is first propitiated.’

  But they entered no cathedral stillness. Life swarmed about, briar and bramble, fern and fungus, moss and mistletoe crowding under the oaks and burying every log. Anthills stood to a man’s waist, butterflies splashed the air with saffron and dragonflies darted cobalt blue, squirrels ran among the branches like streaks of fire, a hundred kinds of birds were nesting. Song and chatter and wingbeat reverberated down the leafy arches; more distantly, grouse drummed, a wild pig grunted, the aurochs challenged all earth. Lockridge felt his spirit expand until it was one with the wilderness, drunk on sun and wind and the breath of flowers. Oh, yes, he thought, I’ve been out often enough to know this sort of existence can get pretty miserable. But the troubles are real ones – hunger, cold, wet, sickness, not academic infightin’ and impertinent income tax forms – and I wonder if the rewards aren’t the only real ones too. If Storm guards this, sure, I’m with her.

  She said nothing for the next hour, and he felt no need himself to talk. That would have taken his mind off the sight of her, panther-gaited beside him, the light that was blue-black in her hair, malachite in her eyes, tawny down her skin until it lost itself in shadow between her breasts. Once there crossed his memory the myth of Actaeon, who saw Diana naked and was turned to a stag and torn apart by his
own hounds. Well, he thought, I’ve escaped that – physically anyhow – but I’d better not push my luck too hard.

  This arm of the forest was not wide. They emerged by mid-morning. Now north and west the land reached low, flat, to a shimmer on the horizon. Grasses rippled in a breeze, isolated copses soughed, light and shade ran beneath the clouds. The trail widened, grew muddy, and wound off past a bog.

  At that place, abruptly, Storm halted. Reeds rustled around a pool, which was thick with lilypads where frogs jumped from a stork. The big white bird paid the humans no attention, and Lockridge’s new memory told him storks were protected, taboo, bearers of luck and rebirth. A curiously shaped boulder had been rolled to the marge for a shrine. From the top, each year, the headman flung the finest tool that had been made in Avildaro, out to sink as a gift to Our Lady of the Ax. Today only a garland of marigolds lay there, offered by some young girl.

  Storm’s attention was elsewhere. The muscles stretched out in her belly and she dropped a hand to her pistol. Lockridge stooped with her. Wheel tracks and the marks of unshod hoofs remained in the damp ground. Someone, perhaps two days ago had driven through these parts and —

  ‘So they have come this far,’ the woman muttered.

  ‘Who?’ Lockridge asked.

  ‘The Yuthoaz.’ She pronounced the name with an umlauted u and an edh. Lockridge was still mastering the technique of using a diaglossa, and could merely summon up now that this was what the local tribes of the Battle Ax culture called themselves. And the Ax of those sun-worshipping invaders was not the tree-felling Labrys: it was a tomahawk.

  Storm rose, tugged her chin, and scowled. ‘The available information is too scanty,’ she complained. ‘No one thought this station important enough to scout out intensively. We don’t know what is going to happen here this year.’

  After a moment, musingly: ‘However, reconnaissance certainly established that no large-scale use of energy devices occurred in this area during this entire millennium. That is one reason I chose to go so far back, rather than leave the corridor at a later date when the Wardens are also operating. I know the Rangers are not coming here. Thus I dared leave the corridor in the first year of this gate; it will be accessible for a quarter century. And – yes, another datum, a report recorded from a survey party out of Ireland, whose time portals are a century out of phase with Denmark’s – Avildaro still stands, has even grown to importance, a hundred years hence.’ She shifted her pack and resumed walking. ‘So we have little to fear. At most, we may find ourselves involved in a skirmish between two Stone Age bands.’