The Gate of Time

by Philip José Farmer

  He explained this to O’Brien. While he was talking, he saw the farmer’s expression break loose from its stony cast. He looked puzzled and frowned as if he thought there was something familiar about the language. However, he had no more success in translating than Two Hawks had had with their language.

  The two aviators sat down at a five-legged table of smoothly planed but unvarnished pine. The woman served them, then busied herself working around the kitchen. She pumped water out of a handpump over the sink. Two Hawks felt a touch of nostalgia and homesickness at this, since it reminded him of the kitchen pump in his parents’ farmhouse in upper New York when he had been a little boy. The man paced back and forth, talking to the woman, then sat down with the two and began eating from a large bowl. This was of ceramic with some symbols painted in blue on it. One of them was the likeness of the broken mask Two Hawks had seen in the cellar.

  When he had finished eating, the farmer stood up abruptly and gestured at them to follow him. They stepped out through a swinging screen door with a mosquito net made of closely woven cotton fibres. Its interstices seemed too large to do its job, but the threads had been soaked in oil. Suddenly, Two Hawks recognized the odor. It was the same oil with which the woman had plastered her hair.

  Although the oil was not sunflower seed oil, it triggered off a sequence of thought. Some of the older women on the reservation near his father’s farm had used sunseed oil on their hair. His mind leaped at a conclusion which he could only reject because it was incredible. But there was also the undeniable fact that he now recognized the speech of the two peasants as a form of very peculiar Iroquoian. It was still largely unintelligible. But it was not Rumanian nor Hungarian nor Slavic, neither Indo-European nor Ugro-Altaic. It was a dialect related to the tongue of the Onondaga, the Seneca, Mohawk, and the Cherokee. Not only in its phonology but in its structure.

  He said nothing to O’Brien but silently followed the man and girl across the now dark barnyard. They passed an outhouse, and O’Brien made a request which Two Hawks tried to pass on to the farmer. The man was impatient, but he agreed. A few minutes later, they resumed their path to the barn.

  O’Brien said, “We’re really in the sticks. They don’t have no paper; there’s a pile of clean rags and a bin for dirty ones. They must wash them afterward. Geeze, and to think we was eating from food she made. I bet she doesn’t even wash her hands!”

  Two Hawks shrugged. He had more important matters to thing about than sanitation. The man opened the barndoors, and they stepped inside.

  The two large barndoors swung shut with a creaking of wooden hinges. In the darkness, Two Hawks put his hand on O’Brien’s shoulder and pushed gently to urge him several feet to the left. If the farmer planned to surprise them with an attack, he would not find his victims where he had last seen them. For about thirty seconds, there was no noise. Two Hawks crouched down on the ground, O’Brien by his side. He closed his fingers around the butt of his .32 and waited.

  Then the farmer moved through the straw on the ground away from Two Hawks. Slightly metallic sounds made Two Hawks wonder if blades, or maybe guns, were being taken from a hiding place. Suddenly, a match flared, and he saw the farmer applying the flame to the wick of a lantern.. The wick caught fire; the farmer adjusted the flow of oil; the interior of the barn was cut into light and shadows.

  The farmer, seeing them crouching on the ground, smiled briefly. His smile seemed to indicate more of approval than anything else. He gestured for them to follow him. They rose and came after the farmer and the girl. Near the back of the barn, a pig grunted from a stall. Large brown eyes looked at them in the lantern light from behind wooden bars. Cows and pigs and sheep, thought Two Hawks, but no horses. Could the Germans have taken them all? Perhaps they had requisitioned all the horses of this particular farmer. But the photographs taken by reconnaissance planes before the raid had shown plenty of horses on Rumanian farms. And then there was O’Brien’s brief sight of the column on the road. Cars and oxen-drawn wagons.

  The farmer stopped before a shed built on to the back wall of the barn. He knocked three times, waited several seconds, knocked three times again, waited, and rapped three more times. The door swung open; the shack was dark inside. The two natives went inside, and the farmer gestured at them to come on in. As soon as the two fliers had entered, the door was closed, and the farmer turned up the lantern flame.

  There were six people crowded inside the shed. The odor of dried sweat and rancid hair oil was strong. Four men, dark, eagle-faced, dressed in heavy cloth garments, were squatting or else leaning against the wall. All wore small round caps with single red feathers projecting from the top of each cap. Two had muzzle-loading, long-barreled muskets. One had a quiverful of arrows strapped to his back and a short recurved bow of horn in his fist. Two had the same type of rifles with revolving cartridge chambers that the soldiers had carried. All had long knives in scabbards at their belts; the handle of a tomahawk was thrust into the belt of one.

  “Jeeze!” O’Brien said under his breath. He may have exclaimed because he was in a trap or because of the oddity and disparity of the weapons. More probably, he was startled by the sixth person, a woman. She was dressed in the same clothes as the others, but she was obviously not one of them. Her skin was very white, where there was no dirt, and her long hair was golden. She had a pretty although tired looking face with a snub nose and a sprinkling of faint freckles. Her eyes were large and deep blue.

  Two Hawks, standing close to her, knew she had been in her clothes a long time. She stank, and her hands were dirty, the fingernails half-moons of filth. The whole group had the air and looks of fugitives. Or of guerrillas who had been a long time from their base.

  The leader was a tall man with hollow cheeks and burning black eyes. His coarse black hair was cut to resemble the shape of a German helmet, and he wore heavy leather boots. His shirt was of buckskin and hung outside his belt. The backs of his fists were tattooed with the faces of monsters or demons.

  He spoke at length with the farmer and his daughter. Now and then he glanced sharply at the two Americans. Two Hawks listened with his ears tuned up. Occasionally, he could make a little sense out of the rapid firecracker explosions. Yes, the phonology was familiar, and so was a word or a phrase here and there. But he would never have understood anything if he had not had a fluent knowledge of all the Iroquoian languages, including Cherokee.

  Once, the leader (his name was Dzikohses) turned to speak to the blonde. He used an entirely different language then, but it was one that also seemed vaguely familiar to Two Hawks. He was sure that it belonged to the Germanic family and that it was Scandinavian. Or was it? Now he could swear it was Low German.

  Abruptly, Dzikohses focused his attention on O’Brien and Two Hawks. His index finger stabbing at them, occasionally indicating items of their uniforms, he rattled off one question after another. Two Hawks understood the pitches of interrogation, but he did not understand the questions themselves. He tried to reply in Onondaga, then Seneca, then Cherokee. Dzikohses listened with his eyebrows raised and a puzzled, sometimes irritated, expression. He switched to the same speech he had used with the blonde. Finding that this was not understood, he tried another language and worked his way through three others before Two Hawks could comprehend a word. The final attempt was in some form of Greek. Unfortunately, although Two Hawks had a fair reading knowledge of Homeric and Attic Greek, he had not conversational ability. Not that this knowledge would have helped him much, since Dzikohses’ Greek seemed to be only distantly related to those that Two Hawks knew.

  “What the hell’s he gibbering about?” O’Brien growled.

  “Ask him something in Gaelic,” Two Hawks said.

  “You nuts?” O’Brien replied, but he rattled off several sentences.

  Dzikohses frowned and then threw his hands up as if to indicate that he was thrown for a complete loss. One thing Two Hawks was sure of, however. Dzikohses was no peasant. A linguist of his ability ha
d to have traveled much or been well educated. And he bore himself as a man used to command.

  Dzikohses became impatient. He gave several orders. The men checked their weapons; the girl pulled a revolver from under her loose foxskin jacket and examined the chambers. Dzikohses held out his hand for Two Hawks’ automatic. Smiling, Two Hawks shook his head. Slowly, so that he would not startle the others or cause them to misinterpret his actions, he took his automatic from his holster. He ejected the clip of bullets and then reinserted them, making sure the safety was on before he put the gun back into the holster.

  The eyes of the others widened, and there was a starburst of questions from them. Dzikohses told them to shut up. The farmer extinguished the lamp, and the whole group left the shed. Within two minutes, they were in the woods. The farmer and the daughter bade them a soft goodbye, then returned under the light of the half-moon to their house.

  4

  All night, the party followed a path that left the shadows of the trees only when necessary to cross fields to get from one wood to another. They saw nothing to disturb them and, shortly before dawn, they bedded down for the day in a broad hollow deep inside the forest. Their travel had been generally northeastward.

  Before falling asleep under a pile of leaves, O’Brien asked Two Hawks if they were going towards Russia. Two Hawks said he thought so.

  “These people ain’t Russians or Rumanians either,” O’Brien said. “When I was a kid in Chicago, I lived in a neighborhood that had some Russkies and Rumanians, so I know these people ain’t talking neither. What in hell are these gooks?”

  “They’re speaking some obscure dialect,” Two Hawks said. He did not think that now was the time to spring some of his speculations on O’Brien. They would only confuse him. Besides, they were so fantastic, that he could not seriously entertain them himself.

  O’Brien said, “You know something else that’s funny? Back there at that farmer’s, and on all the other farms we seen, there wasn’t a single horse. You suppose the Krauts took them all?”

  “Somebody did,” Two Hawks said. “Better get to sleep. It’s going to be a long tough night tomorrow.”

  It was also a long tough day. The huge mosquitoes that had made their life hell during the night did not go away with the daylight. When he could stand it no longer, Two Hawks awoke Dzikohses. With sign language, he made it apparent that he would now accept the offer he had previously turned down. He took the little bottle Dzikohses handed him and poured out a thin liquid. It had the vilest, most stomach-turning odor he had ever been unfortunate enough to whiff. But it kept the mosquitoes away. He smeared it over his face and the back of his hands, then burrowed under the leaves. The leaves protected the rest of him, since the needle-suckers of the mosquitoes seemed to go through even his clothing. He could understand now why the others wore such heavy garments even in the heat of summer. It was either suffer from the heat, which was endurable, or go mad from the unendurable stabs of the mosquitoes.

  Even shielded from the insects, he did not sleep heavily. By noon, the woods became hot, and what with the sweat encasing him and the sounds of men turning over, rustling the leaves, or eliminating nearby, he woke frequently. Once, he opened his eyes to see the hatchet face and black eyes of Dzikohses over him. Two Hawks grinned at him and turned over on his side. He was helpless; he could be disarmed or killed at any time. But, so far, Dzikohses had shown no inclination to treat him as a possible enemy. Plainly, he was puzzled by everything about the two strangers. No more puzzled by us than I am about him, Two Hawks thought, and slid back into his bumpy sleep.

  At dusk, they ate dried beef and hard black bread and drank from canteens filled from a nearby creek. The men then all faced east and took from their leather provision-packs strings of beads and various carved wooden images. They put the strings of beads around their necks and began telling them with the left hands while they held the wooden images up above their heads in their right hands. Their voices murmured what seemed to be chants, although the chants were not all the same. Two Hawks was startled by the image held by the man nearest him. It was the head of a mammoth, its proboscis curled aloft as if trumpeting, its long tusks curving upwards, its eyes little gems that glared red.

  The men were standing up and facing east. The blonde squatted, facing westwards. She, too, told beads, but did it with her right hand. She had taken a silver stickpin from her bag and driven it into the earth before her. Now, regarding the image fixedly, her lips moved, and only by getting very close to her could Two Hawks distinguish the words of her slow measured speech. Now he heard a language none had spoken before. It sounded Semitic to him, and he could have sworn that he heard more than once words similar to the Hebrew “Ba’al” and “Adoni”. The silver image was a symbolic representation of a tree from which a man hung, the rope around his neck tied with nine knots.

  It was all very strange. O’Brien shivered and swore, crossed himself, and said a rapid Paternoster in a very low voice. Then he said, “Lieutenant, what kind of heathens have we fallen among?”

  “I wish I knew,” Two Hawks replied. “Anyway, let’s not worry about their religion. If they get us to neutral territory, or to Russia, they’ve done their jobs.”

  The ceremonies took about three minutes. The beads and idols (if they were idols) were put away, the march was resumed. Not until midnight did they stop. Two men slipped into a village only a hundred yards away. They returned in fifteen minutes with more dried strips of beef, black bread, and six bottles of a very sour wine. All took a swig from the bottles, and then the fast walking was resumed. At dawn, as they bedded down, they heard the far-off boom of big cannon. Sometime late in the afternoon, Two Hawks was awakened by O’Brien. The Irishman pointed upwards through a break in the trees, and Two Hawks saw a huge silvery sausage shape passing at about a thousand feet overhead.

  “That sure as hell looks like one of them dirigibles I read about when I was a kid,” O’Brien said. “I didn’t know the Krauts still had ‘em.”

  “They don’t,” Two Hawks said.

  “Yeah? How do you account for that, then? The Russians use ‘em?”

  “Maybe,” Two Hawks said. “They got a lot of obsolete equipment.”

  He did not believe that the airship was Russian or German. But he might as well keep O’Brien from panicking now. Once the full truth was known, of course, O’Brien would have to go through an inevitable terror. Two Hawks hoped he could take it. He was having enough trouble quelling his own panic.

  He sat up, yawned, stretched, and pretended an indifference he did not feel. The girl was sleeping near him; her lips were slightly open. Despite the dirt and the mosquito-repelling grease on her face, she looked cute. Like a pre-adolescent child who had been too tired to wash her face before going to bed. By now he knew her name, Huskarle Ilmika Thorrsstein. Huskarle, however, might be her title, corresponding to Lady. She was treated with great respect by the others.

  She did not sleep very long, however. Dzikohses woke them all up, and they began walking in the daylight now. Apparently, he felt that they were far enough from the enemy to venture out under the sun. They saw very few farms after that, and the going became rougher. For several days the hills continued to get larger and the woods thicker. Then they were in the mountains. Two Hawks consulted his map. According to it, they should not yet be in the Carpathians. But they were here, and there was no use denying the reality of the mountains. Moreover, they seemed to him to be higher than the map indicated.

  Their beef and bread and wine ran out. For a whole day, they walked along the lower slopes of the mountains without food. The next day, Ka’hnya, the bowman, slipped away into the forest while the others took a nap beneath the pines or birches. It was colder up here, and the nights were chilly enough to justify the heavy clothing they wore. Even so, the mosquitoes flourished during the day and part of the night. Somehow, they managed to find and to penetrate thin spots in the uniforms of Two Hawks and O’Brien, who could only completely escape
by burying themselves under leaves.

  Two hours later, Ka’hnya reappeared. He was a big man, but he was staggering under the weight of the half-grown boar on his shoulders. He smiled at the congratulations and rested while the others busied themselves butchering the giant porker. Two Hawks helped them, since he had had experience on his father’s farm in such matters. He knew then that Dzikohses might consider their location safe enough for traveling in daylight, but he was not so confident that he wanted to risk firing a gun. Perhaps the bows and arrows had been brought along for such safety measures. He did not think so. He got the impression from their odd assortment of weapons that these people had to use whatever was on hand. The two rifles with revolving chambers had probably been taken from dead enemies.

  The pig was soon cooking over a number of small and relatively smokeless fires. Two Hawks ate hungrily and felt the strength flow back into him. The meat was strong and rank and only half- cooked, but he had no trouble wolfing it down. Ilmika Thorrsstein, however, seemed to have a delicate stomach. She refused the large chunk offered her. She smiled when she rejected it, but when she turned her face away and thought herself unseen, she could not repress a grimace of disgust. Then, as she watched the others eat, she seemed to have a change of mind—or of appetite. She took a small book from her bag and leafed through it. Two Hawks, looking over her shoulder, saw what appeared to be a calendar. It was not marked with Arabic numerals, however, but with numerals derived from the Greek alphabet. There were several that resembled runic symbols.