by Alma Boykin
The main building stood across a courtyard from a heavy, partly open gate. Rada noted a small cart parked not far from a wellhead, and a few chickens pecking around that startled and fluttered off, squawking. Rada eased in, still silent, and inhaled, trying to catch human or other scent. Horses she smelled, but no humans. Although—and she pivoted, nostrils wide, she caught a hint of decay. That’s not good. Was there a raid on the farm? But that made no sense, and made less when she followed the smell of horse to a small stable-type pen.
Three animals whickered at her. They looked healthy, but their water container felt dry when she reached into it. Rada filled a wooden water carrier from the well and slowly gave the trio a drink, then another. She didn’t want them foundering or bloating, and she grimaced at the memory of the lectures she’d had about caring for beasts of burden. Blessed Bookkeeper but Major Majorica droned on and on and on! Rada gave the horses a little food and some more water, then let them out of the primitive stable. Two of them headed for the pasture outside the open gate but the third lingered, looking quietly at her. Rada checked the animal over and it seemed healthy, if not young, and a bit underweight. An idea struck her. Rada found a rope and soon had a loop around the animal’s neck. She tied the brown horse to the side of the cart, then went back and found very primitive leather harness. It fit the animal, and after a few missteps Rada remembered the trick to getting the horse into the shafts of the cart.
She used a rock to scratch a message in Latin on the crumbling plaster wall of the stable, to the effect that she’d bring the cart back and pay rent. “Get up,” she ordered. The brown horse didn’t understand the language but recognized her tone, and started pulling the cart and driver toward the road. Rada waited, and when no one called or tried to follow her, she shivered. Something very strange is going on. I hope Zabet’s OK, she thought. The horse walked on, then turned toward town as if this was what it was supposed to do. Rada shrugged and looked around, ready to dive for the weeds or bluff her way through if someone challenged her. “I am just borrowing you, after all. Renting, really, if anyone pushes the point,” she defended herself to the placid animal. It seemed content to walk along at a steady pace, undeterred by the teeth-rattling ruts and holes in the so-called road.
After a half-hour or so, a puff of breeze brought a sticky-sweet, dark scent that raised Rada’s neck hair and brought the horse to a stop. “Oh fewmets,” Rada whispered. She got out of the cart and took the reins in her hand, walking alongside the nervous equine. That seemed to calm it a little and the brown horse walked forward, coming around a curve before Rada stopped it. Without thinking she made the Azdhagi warding-off gesture with her left hand as she took in the scene.
Dead humans lay on the side of the road, outside the walls of the town. Bloat already inflated some bodies, but others looked freshly dead. Rada tied the horse to a sapling near the road, then pulled a microbe mask out of her pocket and slipped it on, along with a pair of gloves. A quick inspection revealed no wounds, or at least not enough to tell of a battle or massacre. Most of the people had taken off some of their clothes before they died, Rada noticed, as if overheating or trying to get more air on their skin. She picked her way farther into the encampment, then saw wooden booths and abruptly realized that this had been the fair! A large dog ran up at her, barking angrily, and she drew her hold-out blaster and stunned it. It would stay quiet for an hour or so. Had anyone else heard the commotion? She looked and listened, but she found no one except the dead.
Whatever killed the merchants also scared off two-footed scavengers. Metal pots, bolts of cloth, lengths of ribbon and lace, and kegs of drink remained untouched, as did more valuable items. “I wonder,” Rada said under her breath, looking more carefully. Could her luck have struck this time? She ignored the dead except to avoid them, and went hunting among the carts and wagons pulled up close to some very nice tents. “Well, well, look what I found,” she murmured, smiling. Tapestries, six of them, had been neatly stacked and stored in one of the canvas tents. Rada looked some more and found an account ledger.
She fished her link to the Dark Hart’s databases out of a pocket and called up a translation program. Rada guessed she was looking at a German dialect and tried that dictionary. She’d guessed correctly. To her delight, under “orders” in the ledger book she found six tapestries of garden and hunting scenes. The prices seemed lower than what she’d planned to pay, meaning that the weavings might be smaller than standard for this time period. Rada set the ledger book down and picked up one of the weavings. She could lift it and the short length hinted that her guess had been correct. The Wanderer half-prayed under her breath, “By the Paymaster’ Purse, oh, please don’t be too good to be true.” The ledger contained the name of the recipient and Rada entered that into the translator. Heinrik van Guelden failed to register. Things looked better and better for Rada and she decided to act.
Rada returned to the cart and horse, untied them and led them back up the road, then through several fields and over to the back of the fair, out of sight of anyone watching from the town wall. The brown horse sidled and shied, unwilling to approach the decaying bodies, so Rada tied the gelding to another tree. She’d rather carry the tapestries a few meters extra than risk losing her transportation. Afternoon crept into evening, and when no people appeared Rada set to work. She loaded the weavings one at a time into the cart, left a few small coins to assuage the spirits of the dead, and cut out that page of the ledger. As she turned to leave, a soft noise caught her ears and she turned toward a patch of brush and grass.
Behind the grass she saw the bodies of an adult female and a child. The child moved, then moved again, and Rada hesitated. “Ma?” the infant rasped. “Ma?”
Rada slipped over and felt for a pulse. The plainly dressed woman had none, but the body seemed slightly warm. It had not started bloating yet so Rada turned it over, face up. The black color to the woman’s neck, face, and hands confirmed Rada’ suspicion and she shivered. It was flea plague, the fast-spreading blood-born version. “Ma?” the child pled again.
For reasons she never, ever admitted to Zabet, the Wanderer picked up the child. It seemed to be about three years old or so, and healthy. A quick peek showed that Rada had found a girl. “Shhhhh, shhhh,” Rada soothed, reaching with her mind to quiet the youngster. The girl latched onto Rada’s mind and sent a spate of fear, hunger, thirst, and loneliness. “Te mater morte ist,” Rada explained, or tried to. The child started crying and clung to her discoverer.
“Oh, bugger.” She couldn’t leave the girl to starve. Rada carried the little one over to the cart and planted her firmly in a trough between two of the tapestries. Then she untied the horse and led him away from the field of death. Still no one called to her, or tried to stop her, and Rada shivered. She wasn’t really robbing the dead, she told herself yet again, even as she repeated the warding sign. Besides, they couldn’t do anything to her and they didn’t need the money from the tapestries anymore. Rada decided to do a quick check of the weavings before she delivered them, just to make absolutely certain that she wasn’t disrupting a time-thread, either by saving the tapestries or by saving the little girl.
They had gone about half-way back to the Dark Hart when the girl began whimpering again. “Habeas sitis?” Rada asked. Are you thirsty?
When the girl just stared at her, Rada mimed drinking. “Ya, ya,” came the answer. Or at least that’s what Rada thought the girl said. There seemed to be some daylight left, so Rada turned the cart off the path at the deserted farmhouse and got the girl some water. She drank it happily. Rada also gave her a bit of dried meat, and that also seemed agreeable, especially when followed with more water. After some thought Rada slipped the child part of an anti-worm capsule. She carried them whenever she had to eat strange food anyway, and humans from this time always had parasites of some sort, something Rada preferred to leave in this time.
With that in mind, she quickly built a small fire on the dirt of the courtyard and heat
ed water in a metal pot that she found near the gate. Then she stripped the youngster of her loose garment and gave her a quick wash before boiling the garment. Fleas floated up in the water and Rada winced. They’d both need a good wash once they got back to civilization. Rada tossed the flea-stew and pulled up fresh water, which she gave to the horse. With the girl fed and cleaned (and her bowels emptied), Rada loaded the child and herself into the cart and urged the brown horse back onto the dark road.
By the time Rada got back to the ’Hart, the sun had set and Zabet could barely contain herself with impatience. «I certainly hope you got the right things this... What is that?» The True-dragon’s whiskers went rigid with surprise and dismay when she saw the small figure draped over the load in Rada’s cart.
Rada’s hand flashed up and clamped down hard on Zabet’s muzzle. “That is the only survivor of a plague. These are dead villages, Boss,” the mammal hissed very quietly in Trader. “She’s also a telepath, both projective and receptive, so you’d better direct your sendings until I can teach her to shield.”
Zabet’s blue eyes went wide, then narrowed and her tail stiffened. «Wait, wait just a minute, Pet. What the hell do you mean ‘teach her to shield?’ There is no way I’m taking a human out of her time, especially one that’s sick and has parasites. No. Absolutely not, Ni Drako. En.Oh. Take it back where you got it from,» the reptile ordered firmly.
“She’ll die.” The silver-eyed Wanderer folded her arms and locked eyes with her boss. “She’s starving as it is. I gave her a worm pill already when I fed her, and she’s been washed and de-flea-ed. I did a quick check,” and she tapped the remote link now hanging from her belt, under her long vest. “As far as the Hart can sense, the closest four villages, towns, hamlets, whatever you call them, have been totally depopulated. I can’t take her anywhere too far: they don’t like strangers, especially not now. And we might have been followed, so we need to load the tapestries and get out of here right quick pronto.”
«Oh fewmets. You’re serious,» the silver-blue reptile groaned. «I should have known you’d be the kind to pick up strays.» The reptile moved as she complained, opening the cargo pod grafted onto the time-ship’s hull. The partners quickly loaded the six rolls of weaving into the pod and secured it. Nothing living could travel there, a bonus for anyone worried about bringing insects or rodents along with the tapestries. «Is it housebroken?»
“I don’t know but she went just before we got back to the ship. Let me turn the horse loose so it won’t starve and we can go. And here’s your money.” Rada moved as she spoke, unharnessing the gelding and shooing it away. It would survive or not on its own, but at least it wouldn’t die of thirst in the stable or trapped in the cart. The Wanderer picked up the sleeping child and carried her into the ship, closing the door behind them. Anything watching would have seen the strange vessel disappear with a whistle and would have felt their ears pop as air rushed into the empty space.
Fifteen Terran years later, Rada, Zabet, and the now-grown woman with shoulder-length curly brown hair sat around a table in a café on Delphi 2. “Ok, so why do you call me Anna?” she asked around a mouthful of steaming pasta. “Ow, hot food, hot food,” and she fanned her mouth before swallowing.
“Because, as best we could tell, we found you on the feast day of St. Anna Kim. You were Catholic, so Anna seemed to fit.” Rada explained before taking another bite of her sausage. “And when you woke up you kept saying ‘an an an an’ over and over.”
«And then you tried to eat my tail,» Zabet grumbled. Anna giggled at the True-dragon, who grumped as she picked her way through a large helping of salad.
“What became of the other tapestries, Mum?”
Rada grinned. “Zabet sold them, one to a collector and another to a museum.”
Zabet knocked back half of her mug of beer. «The ledger page that Rada forgot to get rid of served as a provenance, so the museum was willing to pay serious credits for the only survivor of a set of tapestries. Apparently they’d been ordered by a merchant in Leiden but never delivered, and the experts assumed that the order had not been fulfilled because of chaos following the arrival of an epidemic.»
“Instead, they were lost in transit,” Anna filled in. “You were lucky, Mum,” she told Rada.
Rada smiled and ruffled her adopted daughter’s hair. “Yes, I was.”
6: Child Care
“Anna, you are a mess.”
Anna, aged three or four, just grinned and slapped her hands down in the warm mud again, delighted to have “Mum’s” full attention. She’d found the mud puddle within milliseconds of reaching the park and promptly converted the gloppy spot into her personal play space. Which meant that Anna would need another bath and change of clothes before supper, much to Rada Ni Drako’s chagrin. “Anna, you are a mess.”
“Br gurgle? Whee!” The little girl splashed more mud before clambering to her feet and holding out her arms for a hug. Rada couldn’t say no.
Later that afternoon—as she wiped the worst of the dirt off her adopted daughter after Anna tried to climb onto, and then fall into, a fountain—Rada wondered again how human women managed to raise children. It took so much energy! She could not turn her back unless Anna was asleep, and even then Rada kept one ear open for problems. I am so glad your parents got you housebroken before they died, Rada thought as she carried the now tired and cranky young lady back to where they were staying.
That night, once Anna had been tucked into bed, Rada sat down and began listing criteria for a semi-permanent base of operations. First and foremost, it had to be safe for a single female and child. A population open to the presence of mammals and humanoids was also close to the top of the list. Rada needed to be able to support herself and Anna, and had to be able to educate Anna. “Drat,” she complained very quietly. No way existed for her to bring Anna to Drakon IV, not at the child’s current stage of development and education. Although the thought of turning the energetic little human loose with Singing Pines manor’s junior pack sorely tempted Rada. No, with your luck she’d decide to revert to crawling from walking, just because everyone around her goes on all fours. OK, that leaves where?
After winnowing her list, Rada narrowed her options down to four planets. Tromari, Quildar, Dacey’s World, and Earth remained options, although Rada soon scratched Quildar from consideration. She’d be too close to accidently tangling her personal time thread, since she’d trained there with the Komets many years before. Rada tapped the edge of her data pad with her stylus. For some reason Tromari nagged her in a bad way, and she searched her memory. “Maaaaa?” the plaintive call interrupted Rada’s thoughts and she hurried off to comfort her child.
Rada’s business partner reminded Rada of the problem with Tromari. They’d met in a children’s park, where Anna could play at the end of her tether without getting into too much trouble. Once again Rada blessed whoever had invented the baby harness, overhead line, and tether. It gave Anna almost three meters to run back and forth along without wandering too far astray. The park manager kept the grounds in that section free of small debris and dangerous objects, and a baby on one tether could not reach anyone on an adjacent tether. Rada and Zabet sat in the shade as Anna, brown curls bouncing, toddled back and forth along the line.
Zabet’s whiskers fluttered up and down. «If you go to Tromari, you are going to have to get permission from House Trobak to settle there. They own that world.»
“Oh. Good point. I’d forgotten that.” Rada watched Anna nibble some of the grass. “Anna, lovey, don’t eat that.” She got up and returned with the squirming child. As Rada sat, Zabet moved her tail out of grabbing and gnawing range.
“An, an, an,” Anna gabbled as she tried to reach the tempting chew toy. “I wan’!” and she began crying from frustration.
“Shhh, shh,” Rada bounced her. “Boss, can you get the stuffed toy out of the bag, please? My hands are full”
Zabet complied. «Anything to keep her busy,» the reptile urged, p
assing the little girl her teddycat. Anna lunged, grabbing it out of Zabet’s talons, then settled down for the moment.
“I think Earth is going to be the only option,” Rada sighed.
«I told you that you had to put her back where you got her,» Zabet crowed.
“Not the least bit amusing, Boss,” Rada said, tight lipped. “Not at all. You didn’t smell the bodies.”
Zabet subsided. «When would you go?» If Rada picked a time after 2500, then Zabet could visit in the open. Otherwise things might get complicated.
“Probably the early to mid 2300s. There’s a window there where computer systems are easier to crack into. The Second Ideology War is over, but the humans’ outmigration is not yet in full flow. And the economy and cultures of the Northern Hemisphere are recovering from the humans’ experiment with collectivization.”
Zabet rubbed the side of her muzzle with one talon. «Humans can be slow learners, can’t they? I’d think the First Ideology War would have been enough to warn them off.»
“So would I, but their insistence on reinventing themselves tends to terminate their sense of historical perspective. And they do not have a monopoly on cultural foolishness,” Rada reminded her boss. Anna made a sound Rada had come to recognize and the Wanderer bought a little more thinking time with thick kurstem biscuit. “I’ll have to do more research, but if Tromari is not an option, Earth is it. There’s just a little bit too much Trader activity near the Dacey System for me to go there. I need both eyes on this little hooligan, and I can’t hold her and fight.”