by Robert Adams
With the front door behind five feet or more of snow and ice, they all had been using the patio door to effect entrance, and it was through that door that a booted, spurred, and heavily cloaked figure strode. Before they could say a word, the newcomer was across the room and facing the fire, holding open his cloak to warm his body. He threw back the cloak's hood and took off a lobster-tail helmet, placed it on the mantel, then unwound a long strip of wool from about his face, head, and neck. Then William Collier turned to face them.
Carey and Pete smiled greeting, but Foster did not, nor did either Webster or Krystal. Clad in slacks and chamois-cloth shirt, shod only in slippers, Foster was unarmed, and Collier was between him and the gun cabinet, as well as being fully armed with broadsword, Luger, and dirk.
Foster arose and strolled—casually, he hoped—past the uninvited guest to the gun cabinet, his spine tingling, opened the wooden door, and took out the big Colt Peacemaker, quickly made certain that it was loaded, then brought the hammer to full cock and spun about to level the long barrel at Collier.
"You're not welcome under my roof, my lord Earl," he grated, rendering the title mockingly. "I strongly advise you to leave, now. Or have you forgotten the way to the door?"
"You're acting childish, Foster." Collier's tone was superciliously reproving. "But then, ordering someone you consider to be an enemy from your property at gunpoint is just the sort of flamboyant, swashbuckling action I should have expected from a perpetual adolescent such as you."
"But, gun or no gun, I shall not leave until I have said what I came to say, and shooting me would be most unwise, as I travel under the King's protection."
Webster snorted. "And this ole boy says you lyin', Perfesser. I hear tell the King done took back damn near everythin' he give you, so you shore lawd ain't no fav'rite of his no more, and it jest don't stand to reason he'd stend you no kinda perteckshun."
"Although parts of what you say are true, Webster, you are substantially wrong; I am not lying. Yes, that arrogant young puppy who calls himself 'King' stripped me of my lands and title, disregarding all that I and I alone had done for him and his ragtag army, simply because of a few intemperate words I spoke in a moment of frustrated anger, when I was suffering both illness and injury."
"Were I a vindictive man, I might blame Foster for all my reverses. I—"
"Me?" exploded Foster. "What the hell did I do?" He then spoke' to Carey, Pete and Krystal. "This boyo here went a little crazy, I think, when Arthur ennobled him. No sooner had Buddy and I ridden in dog-tired from that Irish business than Earl William sends an arrogant ape to order us to his tent. Then he demands that I immediately ride clear up here to fetch some antibiotics for the goddam head cold he had."
"And," Webster took up the sorry tale, "when Bass tole him he won't gonna do it, the ole bastid tried to have Bass tied up and whipped. You ever hear tell of suthin' like thet, Pete? And now he ain't a earl no more, he wants us to treat him like he's still a frind. Shit!"
The smiles had departed the faces of Carr and Fairley, and they now regarded Collier with plain hostility. Fairley arose and stretched with a crackling of his joints. "You wawnt we should chuck the muthuh out, Bass?" he asked, taking a slow step toward Collier.
Hurriedly, Collier held up both hands, palms outward, looking at Foster. "Wait, dammit. Before you eject me, hear me out. I advise you all to forget the past and think of the future. As you'll shortly be aware, Arthur has no future and you'll be wise to come with me, to Scotland."
"So, that's it, is it?" snapped Foster. "You're deserting the King."
"Why not? He deserted me," replied Collier coldly. "But it's not really desertion, you know; he is fully aware of my intended destination. Indeed, his own guards are escorting me to the border, under command of Captain William ap Owen and the godson of the prince of boors, Reichsherzog Wolfgang, with some of his Tartar Cossacks. Arthur guaranteed my safety as far as the border, but he warned me that to set foot back across it would be death; apparently he means to declare me outlaw, the thankless young swine. But come back I will, with the victorious Scots, as a conqueror."
Fairley shook his head. "No you won't, feller. You won't cawse you won't git to Edinburgh."
"The King's guarantee and his escort—" began Collier.
"Goes only far as the border." nodded Fairley. "And I hear tell it's a good seventy, eighty miles from there to Edinburgh, and the most of it smack through the stompin' groun's of somma the meanest, orneriest, nastiest, bloodthirstiest folks this side o' hell. If they ketches you alive, they'll tek you apart a lil' bit at a time, jest so's they kin hear you screech. These ole boys 'round here done told me all 'bout the thrice-damned Scots."
Collier just smiled. "Oh, never fear, Fairley, I shall reach Edinburgh whole, unharmed, and with some style. It developed that two of my Sussex officers were, in reality, agents of the Regent and the Church. Arthur and that damned renegade Archbishop, Harold, had known about their duplicity all along, yet had told me nothing of it, damned ingrates. Both are English, of course, but Captain Michael Glede has close blood ties with two very powerful families of southern Scotland, the Humes and the Kerrs. No, I shall reach Edinburgh."
"Where," commented Foster, "there's at least one Papal Legate, not to mention assorted archbishops, and other clerics who'll no doubt be very anxious to make an example of you for the edification of laymen who might scheme to make their own niter. You've heard what happened to the poor bastards they caught after the Empire lost to Crusaders. You've got to be nuts to put yourself into the bloody hands of churchmen, Collier." Then he added, "What ever happened to the teachings of that gentle man called Jesus?"
"In our world, Foster, there is doubt, among sophisticated scholars at least, that such a person ever lived. That matter aside, if you please, because we are not in our world, we are in this backward and savage one."
"During the weeks the army was at York and since, at Manchester, I've engaged in considerable research. Of course, almost all the available books are written in Latin, but that's no problem for a man of my erudition; and I speak the language as well but I'll get to that shortly. For a long while, I thought that we had gone backward in time, something which is theoretically possible, for all that frightened scientists assure the general public to the contrary. But I have changed my mind on the basis of what facts I have uncovered."
"Foster, similar in so many ways as this world is to our own, still it is not ours at any era in our world's history. Can't you see what this means? I, William Collier, have proven the theory of parallel worlds! We are on one of them."
"So? Wen how in hell'd we gitchere, Perfesserr?" demanded Webster pugnaciously.
Collier waved a hand impatiently. "Later, Webster, later, but I do have a reasonable theory."
"The first thing I determined was that the Holy Roman Catholic Church of this world is most radically different from the Church of our own world. There are three Popes—the Pope of the West in Rome, the Pope of the East in Constantinople, and the Pope of the South whose seat is called Roma Africana and is somewhere on the east coast of Africa, but the few maps are so inexact that that city could be anywhere between Durban and Mogishu."
"What do the Moslems have to say about this Pope of the South, Collier? As I recall, East Africa—hell, most of Africa—was their private preserve for one heck of a long time," asked Foster dubiously.
Collier rested his elbows on the mantel and leaned back, his long cloak steaming in the heat from the fire. "There are no Moslems, Foster, not here and now."
"Oh, come on, Professor, they have Templars here, too."
Collier smiled again. "Quite so, Foster, and if you'll but check you'll find that their main Consistory is located, even now, in Jerusalem and has been for five hundred years within Palestine."
"But, dammit, there have to be Moslems! Sir Francis' family's patents of nobility date from an ancestor who was with Richard I on the Third Crusade. I know, he told me."
Collier smiled at
Krystal. "Miss Kent, that mulled wine smells delicious. May I have some?"
Krystal wordlessly filled a ceramic beer mug, arose, and served Collier, then resumed her seat, still unspeaking.
Collier sipped, then took a long draught and, still holding the mug, continued. "Oh, yes, Foster, there were Moslems here, as on our own world, but they . . . but let me backtrack a bit. In our world, the Church suffered a schism in the fifth century which weakened both resulting churches and made the Moslem conquests easier and quicker—divide et vincit. That never happened on this world; rather, it was amicably decided to split the papacy into two separate but equal sees, East and West. The Moslems enjoyed some successes, as too did the Seljuk Turks, and the same number of Crusades were launched against them as were in our own history, but with about equal results."
"The difference occurred in the middle of the thirteenth century, here, when hordes of Mongols began to pour in from the east, sacking Samarkand and overrunning most of the expanse of the old Parthia before a Moslem army of Seljuks, Swarizmi, Kurds, Ortuquids, Zangids, Abbasids, and Azerbaijans met them on the banks of the Tigris and were soundly trounced. The same thing happened to them twice more, and in the third defeat the Seljuk Sultan was killed."
"At that juncture, Alexius VII of Byzantium offered the new young Sultan, Kilji Arslan III, the aid of a huge Christian army—in return for certain concessions, of course; trust a Greek to make a profit, they're as bad as Jews—to stiffen his own, which I imagine was by that time a battered, draggle-tailed lot. An agreement was reached and the combined armies had their first meeting with the Mongols near Mosu, and, while the Mongols did not lose, they did not win, either, but their khan fell at that battle and they retired to Bagdad to choose a new one."
"They spent most of the next year assassinating claimants and fighting out the succession among rival clans, and all the while both Popes were preaching a Crusade against them, so that when they had patched together enough cohesiveness to again take the field, they were faced by a host nearly as large as their own, even including the fresh fighters who had ridden in from the east during that year, better armed and mounted for the most part and with a knowledge of the terrain which allowed them to choose advantageous battle sites."
"It is chronicled that one hundred and fifty thousand Mongols were slain at the Battle of Samarra." He smiled another of those infuriatingly superior smiles. "Naturally, the figures are open to question; but, be that as it may, the Mongol migration into the Middle East did not here succeed, as it did in our own world. And when, some thirty years later, the infamous Golden Horde swept across Russia, one arm of it was stopped and generally extirpated at Tula, another arm at Novgorod, and both battles were won by combined armies of Christians and Moslems, drawn from almost every principality of Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Those Mongols who were not killed or did not return to the east settled in various enclaves from southern Finland to the Caucasus and as far west as portions of Poland and Transylvania. It is their descendants who are Wolfgang's mercenaries."
"I've no time to go into all the details, but suffice it to say that as time went on the two faiths—widely disparate, at their respective inceptions—began imperceptibly to merge, to adapt certain of each others' usages and formulae. Now, Christianity of a sort extends from Cape Finisterre to Kashmir and from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Good Hope."
Krystal wrinkled her high forehead. "But was there no Reformation here?"
Collier took another pull at the wine. "No. First, the Church here is, due to Her amalgamated composition, less hidebound, dogmatic, intolerant of variations and shadings of belief and practice in religious matters, and less corrupt than the Church of our world was at the time of our Reformation; also, this Church is far more powerful, in large measure because of her monopoly of niter."
Foster had taken a seat, although the Peacemaker still was cocked and still was pointed in Collier's direction. "How in hell did that come about, anyway, Collier?"
"The Church chronicles attribute the invention to two English monks-alchemists," replied the broken Earl. "Roger Bacon, here, and Berthold Black—also called 'die Englander'—living in a monastery in the Empire, they were in correspondence and made their discoveries virtually simultaneously. The then-Pope, Alexander IV, was a highly intelligent, enlightened man, and when he was apprised of the unusual discoveries, he had Bacon and Black summoned to Rome and set them up under ideal conditions to pursue their experiments. The upshot was that by the middle of the fourteenth century, the use of bombards or large cannon was widespread through all three papal dominions and the innovation of hand-held firearms was beginning."
"Throughout the ensuing centuries, the Church has kept a very tight rein on this, her most valuable asset, and through judicious use of her power has been able to keep wars small and prevent them being waged against the best interests of the Church as a whole, through the simple and effective means of placing a ban on the sale of sacred powder—niter—to one or both sides. Whenever some renegade churchmen or inventive laymen start making their own, it is considered rebellion; they are excommunicated and a Crusade is preached against them."
"There have been any number of smaller rebellions, but the first one of any note or enduring consequence took place in North Africa near the end of the fifteenth century; fifty or sixty years later, there was another in the Crimea. Then, thirty-odd years back, when a duke of Bavaria died without issue, an aggregation of commoners and petty nobles tried to set up a confederation along the lines of that of the Swiss."
"The Church might have let them alone, stayed out of the issue entirely, had the fools not started producing unhallowed niter. A Crusade was preached, of course. The Bavarians fought long and hard, but they had no chance of victory against the tens of thousands, and when they were at last crushed, the Church made a savage example of the ringleaders and made quite certain that a maximum number of Crusaders witnessed the example."
"So why was a Crusade launched against England, hey?" asked Foster. "No powder was manufactured by the loyal forces until our arrival, and the invading troops were already here then, most of them."
"Arthur," replied Collier, "defied the temporal authority of Rome in another way. The Treaty of Tordesillas, in 1494, divided all the Western Hemisphere between Spain and Portugal, excepting those northerly portions long settled by the Norse and the Irish. Since then, the French have established far-trading stations at points too far north to be challenged by either Spain or Portugal and too far south to interest the Norse; the Irish are constantly carping on French trespassing but—though, of course, the chronicles record no such thing—I would say that the French have been greasing choice churchly palms and, since only small numbers of Frenchmen and a mere handful of tiny settlements are involved, Rome his cast a blind eye on the incursions, thus far. The deposed English King, on the other hand, has decided that while the Norse and the Irish claims are legal, the Spanish, Portuguese and French are all interlopers and that the rightful owners of all the northerly landmass are the English—or, more precisely, the Welsh—by right of first settle ment. This tenuous claim is based upon certain questionable records reposing in the Abbey of Strata Florida in South Wales. They detail a certain Prince Madoc ap Owen who is said to have settled with ten shiploads of his adherents somewhere in the interior during the latter half of the twelfth century."
"When first he ascended the throne, Arthur put forward this bizarre claim, documented with copies of the Strata Florida manuscripts into which had been inserted a map—which map Vatican scholars quickly determined to be a clever forgery—and this discovery clouded the whole issue to the point that Rome refused even to consider an English claim. Arthur, naturally, disavowed any knowledge of the map or of how it might have become bound in with the authentic records, but the damage was done and the then-Pope forbade any English encroachment in the West."
"Well, dammit, it stands to reason, doesn't it," demanded Foster with some heat, "that anti-English people co
uld easily have doctored the King's proofs?"
"Tchtchtch." Collier again smiled that ultra-superior smile. "We have become a fanatic royalist, have we not? But do not allow Arthur to deceive you as, for so long, he deceived me. He is an exceedingly devious young man, Foster, and not above exploiting anyone or utilizing any means to justify his actions or bring about his desired ends. But I digress."
"With rank insubordination of the Church and her definite authority, Arthur planted three colonies—fortified colonies—on the mainland at various points between Spanish and Irish lands. The Irish quickly eliminated the northernmost colony, leaving no single survivor. The Spanish were not so thorough, however, and a few settlers got back to England to tell of the butchery of colonists who had honorably surrendered to the Spaniards."
"Now, both the previous and the present Popes and Queen Angela, the Regent, all were born in Spain. When Arthur added insult to injury, petulantly ordering his brother's widow and his own nephew incarcerated as enemies of the state until he made up his mind whether to execute them or simply exile them, the present civil war commenced. When word of his transgressions reached Rome, moreover, he was excommunicated and Rome expected that his nobles and people would then either depose him or force him to bow to the just dictates of the Church."
Foster shook his head in disgust. "Talk about theocratic despotism! Well, it must have really toasted the goddam Pope's balls when the most of Arthur's subjects stood with him against everything the meddling bastards could do."
"You still don't or can't or, more likely, refuse to understand, Foster," Collier sighed, then went on as if addressing a retarded pupil. "Arthur is in the wrong, Foster. Rightfully, he is not even King. His illegal actions have brought destruction and immense suffering upon his lands and people, death to his wife and family and, no doubt, ramifications more widespread and long-lasting than any of us can now imagine. This rebellion is the largest and most stubborn that the Church ever has faced, involving not just a province or two and a few tens of thousands of peasants, burghers and minor nobles, but an entire kingdom, its ruler and a large proportion of its total population, including one of its highest clergymen."