The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Grimness drew Tamberly’s lips tight. “I’ve gathered that, from your accounts that I’ve seen. Frankly, I wish you’d paid more attention to it. The relationship between the two peoples, I mean.”

  “My dear, I can’t cover everything. Not a fraction of what I should, if this were a proper anthropological undertaking. I’ve only been with them seven months or a bit less, their chronology.” He’d gone uptime occasionally, to confer and take a rest, but unlike her among the We, always came back to a day soon after his departure. Continuity was important in human affairs, in ways that it was not when you studied wildlife.

  I’ve got to admit he’s done a remarkable job in so short a span, and under a lot of other handicaps as well, she thought. He did have a head start on the language; it’s close to that of tribes in eastern Siberia who’d been visited, and not terribly different from that of later generations migrating through Canada, whom he himself had worked with. But that was his solitary advantage at the beginning. It took nerve, too. He could’ve been killed. They’re a fierce and touchy lot … he reports.

  “And I scarcely have more time ahead of me,” Corwin continued. “Next year the tribe moves on eastward. I may or may not find it worthwhile to travel with them, or rejoin them wherever they resettle, but the interruption will be disruptive at best.”

  “What?” Tamberly exclaimed. “You haven’t entered that!”

  “No, not yet. It’s such a new discovery for me. At present, they fully expect to stay, they believe they’ve reached their Promised Land. In order to get some idea of how they’d develop in it, the better to understand their interaction with the next immigrants, I jaunted several years uptime. The region is abandoned. I established that will happen this coming spring. No, I don’t know why. Do they find certain resources insufficient? Perhaps you can solve the riddle. I doubt they will feel any threat from the west. I ascertained that no new Paleo-Indians will arrive in these parts for some fifty years, as slow and fitful as their migrations are.”

  Then my We will have that long a peace. The release within Tamberly lasted barely a second. She remembered what had been going on, and apparently would as long as the Cloud People remained. When they left, how many We would be alive?

  She forced herself to tackle the matter. “You said a minute ago, they don’t look on the Tulat as being quite human,” she stated. “Your accounts say very little about how they actually treat them. You just mention ‘tribute.’ What is the truth?”

  His tone grew slightly irritated. “I told you, I haven’t had the chance to examine every detail, and I never shall.” He broke eggs into a mixing bowl as if they were the heads of referees who had rejected an article. “I acquired the Tula language in advance. I spoke with some who came here bearing the levy; the season for that started shortly after my arrival. I mitigated the lot of two or three individuals. I paid a visit to one of their miserable little warrens on the coast. What more do you expect? Like it or not, my concern, my duty is with the peoples who will make the future. Aren’t you supposed to concentrate on those things in nature that are important to them?”

  His testiness evaporated. He offered her a smile. “I don’t want to seem callous,” he added. “You are new in the service, and from a country that had had a remarkably fortunate history. I don’t want to seem condescending to you, either. But the fact is that throughout humanity’s existence, till indefinitely far uptime of our birth period, clans, tribes, nations normally regard the rest of mankind as booty, potential or actual—unless somebody else is sufficiently strong to be an enemy, potential or actual.

  “You’ll find the Wanayimo aren’t so bad. Not Nazis or, for that matter, Aztecs. War was thrust on them, because Siberia is becoming overpopulated for the resources available to Paleolithic technology. They keep memories of that defeat, but you can’t call them warriors when they no longer have anyone to fight. They are bold, macho, yes. That’s a requirement for the life they lead, hunting big, dangerous animals. It’s as natural for them to exploit the Tulat as it is to exploit the caribou. They are not deliberately cruel. In fact, they have a certain reverence for all life. But they take from the world what they can, for their wives, children, old ones, and themselves. They must.”

  Reluctantly, Tamberly nodded. Corwin’s reports had described what a stroke of fortune it was for the Cloud People to come upon the We. Yet it would not have been that had they failed to make use of it. He had not foreseen their doing so. Such a circumstance was unprecedented in their experience. Some genius among them had made an invention—taxation—that immensely benefited those folk to whom he owed his loyalty. It would be made again and again in the millennia ahead, around the world, usually with less justification.

  The wandering had been as long as and far more desperate than the mythical forty years of the Hebrews in the wilderness. No manna fell from heaven, only snow, sleet, ice-cold rain. Others already occupied the good hunting grounds, and in a short time mustered themselves to drive the strangers onward. When at last they reached these parts, farther from the Asian motherland than men of their race had ventured before, their first winter was almost as cruel as the Pilgrims’ first winter was to be in Massachusetts.

  Now they flourished. Wood brought by the We enabled them to replace improvised shelters with real houses. The breaking of a spearshaft was no longer a calamity. Usable stone, fuel, fish, flesh, fat, skins—such things they could and did get for themselves. However, what the We added was priceless. It freed the energies of the Cloud People for bolder hunts, bigger constructions, craftsmanship ever more careful, art ever more beautiful, songs and dances, thoughts and dreams.

  Corwin had pointed out that, for pragmatic reasons, they were following his advice and giving their subjects some recompense, fishhooks, harpoons, needles, knives, stoneworking techniques, ideas. It was progress, he said. “Yeah, and I’ll bet the We sit happily around in the evenings singing spirituals,” Tamberly had muttered.

  Still, she knew the primordial Americans were doomed. Hard though the newcomers made a life that had been tough to begin with, at least these aborigines weren’t being slaughtered like Tasmanians by nineteenth-century whites or pushed beyond their thin margin of survival like Ukrainians and Ethiopians by twentieth-century governments. Nor were alien diseases ravaging them; the bacteriological isolation of New World from Old would not start till Beringia drowned. As long as they brought their tribute and made no trouble, the We could live in their own ways. If occasionally a Wanayimo brave passing by forced himself upon a Tula girl, well, among her folk that wasn’t the shattering disgrace it would have been among his; and wasn’t it better the genes mingle than that one strain go entirely extinct? Wasn’t it?

  Tamberly noticed Corwin’s regard. Time had passed. She shook herself. “Sorry,” she said. “Woolgathering.”

  “Not overly pleasant, I suspect.” His voice was sympathetic. “Really, matters could be far worse. They are far worse, in too much of history. Here we can even ameliorate things a bit. Oh, just a bit, and most cautiously. But, for example, I found that, early on, the Wanayimo had taken a daughter of your friend Aryuk—Daraku, her name is; you probably know her well—they’d brought her here. She wasn’t purposely mistreated. Their idea was simply that they needed someone from whom to learn the rudiments of her language. But she’d fallen into deep depression—homesickness, culture shock, lack of companionship. I persuaded them to give her back to them.”

  Tamberly had jumped to her feet. “Huh?” She stood for a moment staring. The horror receded. A measure of warmth followed. “Why, that, that’s wonderful of you. Thank you.” She swallowed.

  He smiled. “Now, now. Common decency, after all, when the opportunity presented itself. Don’t get overwrought, especially not before breakfast. Which will be ready in the proverbial two lambshakes.”

  The smell of frying bacon restored her mood faster than she supposed was morally right. Over the meal he kept conversation light, often humorous; yes, he could talk about somet
hing besides himself, and give her a chance to speak too. “Delightful city, San Francisco, agreed, but someday you must explore her in the 1930s, before she professionalized her charm. Tell me, though, about that Exploratorium you mentioned. It sounds like a marvelous innovation, quite in the old and truly spirit….”

  When they were done and he had lighted what he called the virginal cigarette of the day, he got serious. “After I’ve washed the dishes—and no, you may not help, at any rate on this first morning—I had better take you to meet Worika-kuno.” She recognized the name, Red Wolf, from frequent mention in his reports. “A courtesy rather than a requirement, but among themselves, the Wanayimo value courtesy as much as will the Japanese.”

  “He’s the chief, right?” Tamberly asked. Her studies had not made his status perfectly clear to her.

  “Not in the sense of being invested with any formal authority. Tribal decisions are a matter of consensus among the men and the old women, those who’ve survived past childbearing age. Outside of council, young women have a tacitly granted say in everyday affairs. However, by sheer ability and force of personality, someone is bound to dominate, to be the most respected, whose word usually settles things. That man is Worika-kuno. Get on the right side of him, and your path will be reasonably smooth.”

  “What about the, um, medicine man?”

  “Yes, the shaman does have a unique and powerful position. My relationship with him is somewhat precarious. I have to go out of my way, over and over, to show that I have no intention of becoming his rival or stealing any of his prestige. So will you. Frankly, you were dispatched to this precise date on my recommendation, after it was determined that you would return, because he’ll be preoccupied, mostly secluded, for the next several days. Give you time to learn the ropes before you come in contact with him.”

  “What’s he busy at?”

  “A death. Yesterday a band that had been out hunting brought home the body of a comrade. A bison gored him. That was more than a loss, it was an evil omen, because he was a skillful hunter, a good provider. Now the shaman must magic the bad luck away. Fortunately for everyone’s morale, Worika-kuno played the animal till his followers got it killed.”

  Tamberly whistled softly. She knew the Pleistocene bison.

  In due course she accompanied Corwin to the village. It was an impressive sight after they came around the concealing hillock. She had seen images, but they conveyed no sense of the human energy that had gone into this work. A dozen or so rectangular sod houses, timber-framed, bungalow-sized, stood on clay foundations along the banks of a shallow stream. Smoke rose from most of the turf roofs. Offside lay a ceremonial area, defined by a ring of stones, at its center a firepit and a cairn covered with the skulls of big animals. Some were from the steppe, some from the woods and vales south of it: caribou, moose, bison, horse, bear, lion, mammoth on top. At the opposite end of the settlement was a workplace. There a fire blazed and women in buckskin gowns or, for the youngest and hardiest, the lightly woven tunics of summer, prepared the latest kill. Despite the death of Snowstrider, talk and laughter blew on the wind. Prolonged grief was a luxury these people could not afford.

  The chatter died away as they saw the pair approaching. Others came from the houses or ceased their amusements among them. Those were mainly men, off duty; they did the hunting and the brute-force heavy work while women handled the home chores. Children hung back. Corwin had related that they were greatly loved and generally brash, but were taught to defer when deference was due.

  The scientists passed on through an obbligato of greetings and ritual gestures, which Corwin returned. Nobody tagged after them. Someone had apprised Red Wolf, for he waited at his dwelling. Two mammoth tusks flanked its doorway and he was better clad than average. Otherwise nothing marked him out but his presence, his panther assurance. He raised a hand. “Always are you welcome, Tall Man,” he said gravely. “Always may you have good hunting and, in your home, contentment.”

  “May fair weather and kindly spirits ever walk with you, Red Wolf,” Corwin responded. “Here I bring her of whom I told you, that we may pay our respects.”

  Tamberly followed the speeches. Corwin had downloaded his knowledge of the language, once he had a reasonable command of it, into a mnemonic unit uptime, and she had had it entered in her brain. Likewise had he painlessly acquired the additional vocabulary and nuances of Tula that she discovered for herself. (He “had!” No, he “would,” some fifteen thousand years in the future.) Eventually, when they had no further use for the knowledge, it would be wiped from them to make room for something else. That was a rather sad thought.

  She pulled her attention back to the Ice Age. Red Wolf’s look lay keen upon her. “We have met before, Sun Hair,” he murmured.

  “W-we have.” She rallied her wits. “I belong to no folk here, but go among the animals. I want to be friends with the Cloud People.”

  “From time to time you may wish a guide,” he said shrewdly.

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Such a one will find me thankful.” That was the closest this language could come to saying that he would be well rewarded. Let’s face it, with the kind of help available here, I can accomplish ten times what I was able to earlier.

  Red Wolf spread his arms. “Enter and be blessed. We shall talk undisturbed.”

  The interior was a single room. Flat stones at the middle made a hearth on which a fire smoldered; starting one afresh was toilsome, to be avoided as much as possible. Low clay platforms along the walls, richly provided with hides, could sleep about twenty adults and children. Hardly any of them were now on hand. Given daylight and reasonable weather, the outdoors had far more to offer. Red Wolf introduced his pretty wife, Little Willow. He went on to present another woman. Her eyes were red from weeping, her cheeks were gashed, and her hair hung unbraided, signs of mourning. She was Moonlight on the Water, Snowstrider’s widow.

  “We plan how to provide for her and her small ones,” Red Wolf explained. “She does not wish to take a new man at once. Well, I think she can stay here until she feels ready to.”

  He gestured his guests to sit on skins spread near the fire. Little Willow brought a leather bottle, not unlike a Spanish bota, that held fermented cloudberry juice. Tamberly squirted a little into her mouth, just to be polite, and learned it wasn’t bad. She was being treated more or less as a man, she knew, but then, her status was extraordinary. At that, Little Willow and Moonlight on the Water weren’t kept in purdah, but listened. If either thought she had something important to say, she would speak.

  “I heard how you slew the terrible bison,” Tamberly told Red Wolf. “That was valiantly done.”—the more so when, in his mind, it must have been possessed by a malignant spirit.

  “I had help,” he said, not modestly but matter-of-factly. He grinned. “By myself, I do not always win. Maybe you can teach me how to make a fox trap that works. Mine never do. I wonder if somehow I once offended the Father of Foxes. Toddling around as a baby, did I leave my sign on top of his?” The grin became a laugh.

  He can joke about the unknown, Tamberly heard herself think. Damn, I believe I’m going to like him. No doubt I shouldn’t, but I believe I’ll have to.

  III

  She mounted her timecycle, projected a map with a coordinate grid, set her destination, touched the activator. Immediately the dome was gone from around her and she back at her old campsite. Locking the controls, though neither man nor beast would come so near so alien an object in the next few hours, she started off afoot.

  Sky and sea reached steely gray, sunless. Even over distance and against the wind she could hear how surf crashed on Beringia and tore at it. The wind skirled across dead grass, dark moss, bare shrubs and trees, strewn boulders, out of a north where darkness had engulfed the horizon. Cold laved her face and searched for any opening in her clothes. The season’s first blizzard was on its way southward.

  Lifetimes of feet had beaten the path she found and took. It led her down into the gulch.
Depth walled off most wind, but the river, engorged by high tide, foamed dirty white. She reached the bluff, now barely above that violence, where three stone huts huddled by a spring.

  Somebody must have spied her through the dwarf alder, for as she arrived, Aryuk pulled aside the bundled wattles that served him for a door, crawled forth, and rose. He gripped a hand ax. His shoulders were stooped under a carrion skin. Between mane and beard she saw a haggardness that shocked her.

  “Ar-Aryuk, my friend—” she stammered.

  He stared at her a long time, as if trying to remember or understand what she was. When he spoke, she could hardly make out the mumble in the roar of river and surf. “We heard you have come back. Not to Us.”

  “No, I—” She reached toward him. He flinched before he stood his ground. She lowered her arm. “Aryuk, yes, I stay with the Mammoth Slayers, but only because I need to. I am not of them. I want to help you.”

  He eased a little—less in relief, she thought, than yielding to his weariness. “True, Ulungu said you were kind to him and his sons when they were there. You gave them the Lovely Sweet.” He meant chocolate. In earlier days she had perforce handed it around very rarely. Else a van-sized Patrol vehicle couldn’t have brought enough.

  She recalled the dull gratitude of those who no longer hoped. God damn it, I will not cry. “I have Lovely Sweet for you and everybody here. First, though,” since Aryuk had made no move to invite her in, not that she really wanted to enter the hovel, “why did you not come too, this moon?”

  It had been the probable last month until spring for the We to bring tribute. After encountering the Bubbling Springs folk, she’d been glad she was away in the field when others appeared. What consolation she could offer was so tiny, and she hadn’t slept that whole night. However, she had asked Corwin to inform her of Aryuk’s advent. She couldn’t forbear to meet him. If need be, she’d hop a few days downtime. But he never showed.