For King and Country

by Robert Asprin

  "But—"

  "I speak Welsh and Gaelic, Dr. Bhaskar."

  "But do you speak Latin and Brythonic?"

  "Latin, no. Brythonic, that's early Welsh, isn't it?"

  "Yes. And as much like modern Welsh as the Old English of Beowulf is like the language you and I are speaking now!"

  "Nevertheless, I'm still the best-qualified agent you have. I majored in military history at Edinburgh University. Cut my milk teeth on both my grandfathers' stories about the glorious King Arthur, and I'm familiar with all the legendary sites, in Scotland, England, and Wales. And I'm a trained counterterrorist officer. Frankly, you haven't got a better agent to send after them, not anywhere in Britain." He resolutely refused to think about the consequences to any mistakes he might make, that far back in history. He could easily destroy the future he was trying to protect, with one ill-timed blunder. He refused to consider it, because he'd spoken the simple, stark truth. There wasn't anyone better qualified to go. God help them all...

  And a whole year to screw it up.

  "I want an outside phone line," he said through clenched teeth.

  "To phone the police?"

  "No. To phone my commanding officer." Colonel Ogilvie was going to spit nails, when he heard, which certainly wouldn't do Stirling's own career much good. What the Home Office would do, once Ogilvie finished notifying the Minister, he genuinely did not want to contemplate. Pity was the overriding emotion he felt for the scientists left to face the authorities.

  His conversation with Ogilvie was brutally short. "Stirling here. Beg leave to report full infiltration, sir, with casualties. Initiating pursuit, within the quarter hour."

  "Geographical?" Ogilvie asked carefully, his voice a rasp through the telephone wires.

  "No, sir."

  "I see."

  "Better run a complete security check on Brenna McEgan, Colonel, and Cedric Banning, as well. I'd like to know how Banning found out McEgan's Cumann Na Mbann."

  "Bloody hell. Home Office won't like that."

  "No, sir. They'll like what Dr. Mylonas has to say even less. Better get a full team up here, sir. I daren't say more over the telephone. I'll leave a complete situation report for you, before I go after them. Time is far more critical than you think."

  An understatement, if ever he'd made one.

  "Do what you must, Stirling."

  "Yes, sir."

  He was on his own. With all of history waiting.

  * * *

  Brenna woke slowly, through a dim and dreamlike confusion of images, sounds, and stenches. How long she'd been out, she had no way of measuring. She was quite sure she'd returned at least partway to consciousness at some point, for she retained memory of a throbbing pain in her jaw and cheekbone, of clothing plastered wetly to her body and the stink of blood from somewhere close by. She remembered terror at finding her coat and gun missing. She remembered, too, lying paralyzed on a padded surface, stretched out as though for sleep or a doctor's examination. And she remembered hearing him breathing, somewhere very close by, above the background of lab noises—computers and their cooling fans and the almost subliminal hum of expensive equipment brought to life.

  Her final, fragmented memory was awareness of the electrical leads taped to her skin and a wavery image of his face, smiling merrily into her foggy eyes, the paisley scarf looking jaunty at his throat—a sick in-joke the other scientists had dismally failed to comprehend.

  "Hello, love," he'd said with a laugh that froze her blood. "You've my undying gratitude for providing the perfect scapegoat. And don't worry, I'll be joining you shortly. Catch me if you can."

  He'd thrown a switch—and her reality had shattered.

  Leaving her... where? Or—more chilling—when? She was lying down, or at least her borrowed body was. When she struggled to focus her awareness, she felt a fluttering at the back of her mind, the frantic beating of a terrified bird trapped on the wrong side of a window glass. Thoughts not quite her own flickered like heat lightning, as though she had become someone else with a very different set of memories. The presence howling through her awareness was thinking in a language Brenna could not at first make out. It sounded a little like Gaelic. A very little. More like... Welsh? Not any Welsh she'd ever heard spoken. This had a very ancient sound to it. Why would Cedric Banning have chosen a time and place where archaic Welsh was spoken?

  At first, she thought Banning might have marooned her in a time different from the one where he planned to attack, but a moment's further thought convinced her otherwise. Once the computers had locked onto a destination and activated the transfer, the system could not be reset. It was a simple matter of the computer's data storage capacity, processor speed, and power drain. Not even the grandson of the Cray supercomputer, an immensely fast and powerful machine used for the time-spanning jump, could have handled two temporal destinations at once.

  She was unsure whether to feel relief or deeper alarm.

  Gradually, meaning began to seep through the confused blur of unfamiliar words in her mind, giving her clues to the language, at least. The owner of her borrowed body was terrified nearly witless—but not completely so. She sensed a keen intelligence filtering through to her own mind, with overtones of religious—or perhaps superstitious—awe, triggered by the incomprehensible event which had befallen them. Brenna tried to relax into the flow of thoughts and churning emotions and finally succeeded in getting across her own fear and disorientation. The other mind, or rather, the mind they now shared, reflected startlement, followed by a guarded relaxation from the worst of its own frantic panic.

  She gradually realized that the flow of memory images and thoughts ran both ways. Even as Brenna was inundated by a flood of images—a high cliff with a fortress of dark, rough stone at the summit, glinting in the slanted light of late afternoon above her horse's weary, forward-pricked ears; the smell of venison stew rising thick with savory herbs from a vast iron cauldron suspended over a hearth in a stone hall; a lingering, unpleasant impression of some deeply disturbing nightmare filled with blood and the screams of dying men—even as these images and impressions sank into Brenna's awareness, her host's mind was getting the gist of what had happened to Brenna in a twenty-first-century research laboratory at the base of a Scottish mountain.

  And images of Northern Ireland's violence were seeping through, as well, memories Brenna would have given half her soul to forget: her sister and niece lying on the pavement at broken, blasted angles; her father, dead and cold in his grave at the end of a prison hunger strike; the bloodied victims of IRA bombings and shootings; the whole, hideous patchwork of terror that was her homeland...

  To Brenna's vast surprise, the mind she now shared space with did not recoil in horror and disgust. A moment later, she understood why, as memory images flooded into her awareness: villages burning in the snow, women and children butchered alongside the menfolk; the clash of steel and the scream of men and horses as battle raged while she struggled to lead a whimpering line of children to safety; her father lying cold and still, pierced in a dozen fatal places, her mother shrieking and tearing at her hair in a wild excess of grief...

  They understood one another, even before they were aware of one another's names.

  Brenna, she thought slowly and carefully, Brenna McEgan is my name.

  Abrupt, flaring suspicion arrowed into her awareness. Irish! The word came as a snarl. Brenna was accustomed to such hatred, having grown up in Londonderry, but it jolted her badly all the same. Then she caught another undercurrent of memory, which showed her warships of a very ancient design against a backdrop of grey ocean and what looked suspiciously like the western coast of the Isle of Man, jutting like a sharp knife blade at the not-so-distant shore of Northern Ireland. Invasion, she realized, an invasion fleet, threatening the homeland of her host—or, rather, hostess.

  Brenna tried to get across the idea that she was from the future, far in the future, and braced herself, but met with much less incredulity than she'd exp
ected. After a moment's puzzlement, she understood why. As strange as the ancient sailing ships had looked to her, Brenna's memories of cars and lorries, electric lights, telephones, and the explosive detonations of car bombs were utterly alien to her hostess, alien and powerful arguments that Brenna was, in fact, telling the truth. She also began to get a sense that her hostess' religious beliefs somehow supported Brenna's claim. The soul, being immortal and moving between this world and the Otherworld, dying here to be born there, dying there to be born here, was capable of crossing great barriers, and was not time itself merely another form of barrier which the soul transcended?

  Brenna had to blink several times before that sank in fully.

  She had landed in the mind of a philosopher... .

  I'm no threat to you or yours, Brenna tried to get across, but the one who attacked me and sent me here is a very great threat. He's quite mad, utterly ruthless. I don't know what he plans, but it will be a very great disaster, whatever it is. I must stop him, whatever the cost to myself.

  After a long moment of silence, a reply came arrowing back. Then we must find and kill this enemy we share, Brenna McEgan of the Irish. After a moment's pause, the voice inside her head added, very formally, I am called Morgana, Queen of Galwyddel and Ynys Manaw, Queen of Gododdin and the Northgales, stepsister to Artorius, the Dux Bellorum, and a healer born to an ancient family of Druidic caste, trained by the Nine Ladies of Ynys Manaw. You Irish call it by the name Ablach, for it is a land rich in apples, symbol of the soul and potent for use in healing medicines. You will not find me an inconsiderable ally. Are you and your enemy the only soul-travelers from your world?

  Brenna hardly took the question in, for the room had begun to spin as more and more clues fell sickeningly into place. Morgana of the Apple Isle, Artorius the Dux Bellorum of Britain, who was Morgana's stepbrother, war with invading Irish clans...

  Cedric Banning, the devious, mad bastard! He'd brought her to the time of Arthur's cataclysmic war against Saxon, Pict, and Irish invasions. Banning had laughed at the notion of King Arthur, last night in the pub, with Indrani Bhaskar and the SAS captain comparing notes on the real Artorius. Banning had put everyone at ease with that laughter, pulling a monstrously successful cloak of misdirection across everyone's eyes. Her own included. She was furious with herself, for being so utterly, stupidly blind. Within two hours of publicly and carefully making fun of the notion, Banning had sent himself straight to Artorius' Britain—and Brenna with him, the perfect scapegoat, unable to testify on her own behalf with her mind trapped in the sixth century a.d. Banning was intent on destroying only God knew how much history. A vengeful blow at the most famous British commander in history, in retaliation for what the Orangeman saw as British betrayal of his entire culture...

  And a chance to destroy the Irish utterly, by helping his own Anglo-Saxon ancestors smash and grab far more than they should have been able to, years too early and with who knew how many lives lost that should have been spared? The destruction of those lives would smash British and Irish cultures to flinders and fracture history to shards. How long had Banning been planning this moment? Long before the elections, certainly. She'd been activated by Cumann Na Mbann and put onto his trail months previously, which meant the Orangeman had realized well in advance that a Catholic majority population—the first such majority in centuries—would sweep Sinn Fein candidates into office across the breadth of Northern Ireland. Had known it, had laid his plans for retaliation, and set out to take the ultimate revenge, willing to sacrifice everything rather than see a Catholic state take away his power and his culture of hatred.

  It was exactly what she had come to expect of the Orange terror machine.

  And Brenna had not the faintest idea how to stop him.

  Speaking very gently indeed, Morgana repeated her question, helping Brenna gather her scattered wits. Are you and your enemy the only soul-travelers from your world, Brenna McEgan?

  Brenna struggled to answer that calm question. I think not. One other will come, at the very least. A soldier who believes I am his enemy. Worse, he will believe that Cedric Banning, a murdering madman, is his ally.

  Morgana, calm and practical, said, Tell me more of this soldier, Brenna McEgan.

  How to explain the British SAS? She took a deep, metaphorical breath. He and many like him were sent to my homeland to keep the peace. It didn't work, she added bitterly, for the Irish have memories that stretch back centuries and we never forgive or forget a wrong. From what little I've seen of this man, he is honorable, intelligent, dedicated to his mission. He's an officer, used to command, a formidable ally and dangerous enemy.

  Morgana gave a slight nod, startling Brenna with the sensation of having someone else move her body without her conscious volition. How is he called, this man we must ensure becomes our ally?

  Brenna's lips twitched into a fleeting smile, encouraged by the cool competence of that response. Trevor Stirling, Captain in the SAS. Ah, Special Air Service is what that means. When Morgana evinced an understandable confusion over the meaning of that name, she added, They are an elite group of men with advanced training in the art of warfare.

  Ah. That is precisely what we shall need.

  Brenna found herself grinning, despite the seriousness of her predicament. Then, curious about her surroundings—for the room was as black as the inside of a Paisleyite's heart—she tried to sit up, which took her three shaken attempts. A mass of long, unbound hair cascaded down her back, heavy and luxuriant, puddling like rainwater around her hips. She wore what felt like linen robes. A heavy band of cold metal circled her neck, the ends meeting in the hollow of her throat. She could see neither the outlines of windows nor the thin thread of light from a doorway. Brenna gulped hard. Was her hostess blind? A chuckle from Morgana rumbled through their shared mind, then a powerful urge to grope with both hands took control and sent her fingertips seeking across what must have been a low table. She found two small, hard objects, which her hands—clearly under Morgana's direction—picked up on their own.

  She struck them together rapidly, with a scraping motion. Sparks danced in the blackness and momentary giddiness swept through her. She was not, at least, blind. She struck more sparks and, this time, some landed in a dry substance which crackled and briefly flared into brilliance. She blew gently and the flames took hold, revealing a small mound of dried moss in a pottery bowl, a sort of archaic tinderbox arrangement. She spotted an oil lamp of very ancient design, made of rough-fired ceramics and looking like it had recently been dug from the nearest archaeological treasure hunt. Brenna carefully lifted the burning moss and used the flame to catch the lamp's wick alight.

  She then blew out the blazing moss to conserve it for another night and sat for long moments, just gazing at that disturbingly antiquated clay lamp, which cast a soft light into the room. Other disturbing details impinged upon her awareness. The room was small, with plastered walls which had been decorated with distinctive frescoes. The style was utterly and convincingly Roman—birds and gardens and architectural forms, mysterious female figures performing some religious ritual which involved wine and birds and dancing. She could almost hear the music from the painted pipes and lyres, while wisps of smoke rose from painted braziers decorated with garlands of flowers. The floor was a beautifully worked mosaic with a mythological theme, Ceres and Proserpine, it looked like. An incongruous and jarring note was struck when she glimpsed a small crucifix mounted on the wall amidst the riot of pagan celebration.

  "Where am I?" she whispered aloud.

  The whisper of an answer floated up from Morgana's portion of their shared mind. Caer-Iudeu, of course...

  She was still puzzling it out when the door flew open and a young man flung himself into the room. "Aunt Morgana! Please, you must come at once!" The boy's voice was ragged with distress. "It's Artorius and Uncle Ancelotis—they've come with dreadful tidings. Lot Luwddoc is dead from fighting Picts just across the border and Ancelotis has collapsed, riding into
Caer-Iudeu!"

  Blood drained from Morgana's face in a disastrous, icy flood. "No..." The sound came out strangled, a cry of protest and fear as Morgana swayed, dizzy and nearly collapsing from shock. Brenna realized with a flood of pity and sudden shared grief that Lot Luwddoc was Morgana's husband. To give the boy credit, Morgana's nephew splashed wine into a cup from an earthenware jug beside the oil lamp, and held it gently to her lips. Morgana leaned against the boy, fingers clenched around his arm, breath coming in shallow gasps that were not quite sobs, while she fought for control. She sipped at the wine, eyes streaming and hands trembling. Her next words astonished Brenna.

  "The Saxons will take advantage of our disarray; dear God, Medraut, there could be no worse time to lose your uncle. We can afford to show no weakness to the Saxons, or they will strike like jackals in the night, grinding us between the hammer of their swords and the anvil of invading Picts."

  To think first of her people, at a time like this...

  Yet the pain of her loss burned in their shared heart, brought into even sharper focus by the helpless clench of her fingers around her nephew's arm. And somewhere farther down the worn stones of the road she and Medraut had been traveling—a Roman road, Brenna realized, cutting across the Scottish hills—Morgana had a son who would be king. Her fear for the young boy's safety, his and his younger brother's, burned nearly as brightly as the grief and twice as hot. Brenna's heart went out to her, along with a large dollop of respect for the grieving queen.

  "Aunt," Medraut said quietly, but with a note of urgency, "Ancelotis is ill. He collapsed on the road into Caer-Iudeu, trying to bring the king's body home for burial. By luck, Covianna Nim is in the fortress—"

  "Covianna Nim?" Morgana echoed, so shocked, she momentarily forgot the rest of the dire news. "What in Brigantia's name is Covianna Nim doing in Gododdin? Her home is Glastenning Tor, closer to Caer-Lundein than we are to the Firth of Forth! It must be well above four hundred miles from Caer-Iudeu to Glastenning Tor!"