Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen

by H. Beam Piper

  Prince Gormoth of Nostor was a deadly enemy. Armanes was a friendly neutral. Sarrask of Sask was no friend of Hostigos; Balthar of Beshta was no friend of anybody’s.

  On a bigger map, he saw that all this was part of the Great Kingdom of Hos-Harphax—all of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey—ruled by a King Kaiphranos at Harphax City, at the mouth of the Susquehanna, the Harph. No, he substituted—just reigned over lightly. To judge from what he’d seen on the night of his arrival, King Kaiphranos’s authority would be enforced for about a day’s infantry march around his capital and ignored elsewhere.

  He had a suspicion that Hostigos was in a bad squeeze between Nostor and Sask. He could hear the sounds of drilling soldiers every day, and something was worrying these people. Too often, while Rylla was laughing with him—she was teaching him to read, now, and that was fun—she would remember something she wanted to forget, and then her laughter would be strained. Chartiphon seemed always preoccupied; at times he’d forget, for a moment, what he’d been talking about. And he never saw Ptosphes smile.

  Xentos showed him a map of the world. The world, it seemed, was round, but flat like a pancake. Hudson’s Bay was in the exact center, North America was shaped rather like India, Florida ran almost due east, and Cuba north and south. Asia was attached to North America, but it was all blankly unknown. An illimitable ocean surrounded everything. Europe, Africa and South America simply weren’t.

  Xentos wanted him to show the country from whence he had come. there’d been expecting that to come up, sooner or later, and it had worried him. He couldn’t risk lying, since he didn’t know on what point he might be slipped up, so he had decided to tell the truth, tailored to local beliefs and preconceptions. Fortunately, he and the old priest were alone at the time.

  He put his finger down on central Pennsylvania. Xentos thought he misunderstood.

  “No, Kalvan. This is your home now, and we want you to stay with us always. But from what place did you come?”

  “Here,” he insisted. “But from another time, a thousand years in the future. I had an enemy, an evil sorcerer, of great power. Another sorcerer, who was not my friend but was my enemy’s enemy, put a protection about me, so that I might not be sorcerously slain. So my enemy twisted time for me, and hurled me far back into the past, before my first known ancestor had been born, and now here I am and here I must stay.”

  Xentos’s hand described a quick circle around the white star on his breast, and he muttered rapidly. Another universal constant.

  “How terrible! Why, you have been banished as no man ever was!”

  “Yes. I do not like to speak, or even think, of it, but it is right that you should know. Tell Prince Ptosphes, and Princess Rylla, and Chartiphon, pledging them to secrecy, and beg them not to speak of it to me. I must forget my old life, and make a new one here and now. For all others, it may be said that I am from a far country. From here,.” He indicated what ought to be the location of Korea on the blankness of Asia. “I was there, once, fighting in a great war.”

  “Ah! I knew you had been a warrior.” Xentos hesitated, then asked “Do you also know sorcery?”

  “No. My father was a priest, as you are, and our priests hated sorcery.” Xentos nodded in agreement with that. “He wished me also to become a priest, but I knew that I would not be a good one, so when this war came, I left my studies and joined the army of my Great King, Truman, and went away to fight. After the war, I was a warrior to keep the peace in my own country.”

  Xentos nodded again, “If one cannot be a good priest, one should not be a priest at all, and to be a good warrior is the next best thing. What gods did your people worship?”

  “Oh, my people had many gods. There was Conformity, and Authority, and Expense Account, and Opinion. And there was Status, whose symbols were many, and who rode in the great chariot Cadillac, which was almost a god itself And there was Atom-bomb, the dread destroyer, who would some day come to end the world. None were very good gods, and I worshiped none of them. Tell me about your gods, Xentos.”

  Then he filled his pipe and lit it with the tinderbox that replaced his now fuelless Zippo. He didn’t need to talk any more; Xentos was telling him about his gods. There was Dram, to whom all men and all other gods bowed; he was a priest of Dralm himself. Yirtta Allmother, the source of all life. Galzar the war god all of whose priests were called Uncle Wolf; lame Tranth, the craft-man god; fickle Lytris, the weather goddess; all the others.

  “And Styphon,” he added grudgingly. “Styphon is an evil god and evil men serve him, but to them he gives wealth and great power.”

  AFTER that, he began noticing a subtle change in manner toward him. Occasionally he caught Rylla regarding him in awe tinged with compassion. Chartiphon merely clasped his hand and said, “You’ll like it here, Lord Kalvan.” It amused him that he had accepted the title as though born to it. Prince Ptosphes said casually, “Xentos tells me there are things you don’t want to talk about. Nobody will speak of them to you. We’re all happy that you’re with us; we’d like you to make this your home always.”

  The others treated him with profound respect; the story for public consumption was that he was a Prince from a distant country, beyond the Western Ocean and around the Cold Lands, driven from his throne by treason. That was the ancient and forgotten land of wonder; that was the Home of the Gods. And Xentos had told Mytron, and Mytron told everybody else, that the Lord Kalvan had been sent to Hostigos by Dralm.

  As soon as he was on his feet again, they moved him to a suite of larger rooms, and gave him personal servants. There were clothes for him, more than he had ever owned at one time in his life, and fine weapons. Rylla contributed a pair of her own pistols, all of two feet long but no heavier than his Colt .38-special, the barrels tapering to almost paper thinness at the muzzles. The locks worked with the tinderboxes, flint held tightly against moving striker, like wheel-locks but with a simpler and more efficient mechanism.

  “I shot you with one of them,” she said.

  “If you hadn’t,” he said, “I’d have ridden on, after the fight, and never come to Tarr-Hostigos.”

  “Maybe it would have been better for you if you had.”

  “No, Rylla. This is the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.” As soon as he could walk unaided, he went down and outside to watch the soldiers drilling. They had nothing like uniforms, except blue and red scarves or sashes, Prince Ptosphes’ colors. The flag of Hostigos was a blue halberd head on a red field. The infantry wore canvas jacks sewn with metal plates, or brigantines, and a few had mail shirts; their helmets weren’t unlike the one he had worn in Korea. A few looked like regulars; most of them were peasant levies. Some had long pikes; more had halberds or hunting-spears or scythe-blades with the tangs straightened and fitted to eight-foot staves, or woodcutters’ axes with four-foot halves.

  There was about one firearm to three polearms. Some were huge muskets, five to six feet long, 8- to 6-bore, aimed and fired from rests. There were arquebuses, about the size and weight of an M1 Garrand, 16- to 20-bore, and calivers about the size of the Brown Bess musket of the Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. All were fitted with the odd back-acting flintlocks; he wondered which had been adapted from which, the gunlock or the tinderbox. There were also quite a few crossbowmen.

  The cavalry wore high-combed helmets and cuirasses; they were armed with swords and pistols, a pair in saddle-holsters and, frequently, a second pair down the boot-tops. Most of them also carried short musketoons or lances. They all seemed to be regulars. One thing puzzled him while the crossbowmen practiced constantly, he never saw a firearm discharged at a target. Maybe a powder-shortage was one of the things that was worrying the people here.

  The artillery was laughable; it would have been long out of date in the sixteenth century of his own time. The guns were all wrought-iron, built up by welding bars together and strengthened with shrunk-on iron rings. They didn’t have trunnions; evidently nobody her
e-and-now had ever thought of that. What passed for field-pieces were mounted on great timbers, like oversized gunstocks, and hauled on four-wheel carts. They ran from four to twelve pound bore. The fixed guns on the castle walls were bigger, some huge bombards firing fifty, one hundred, and even two-hundred pound stone balls.

  Fifteenth century stuff; Henry V had taken Harfleur with just as good, and John of Bedford had probably bombarded Orleans with better. He decided to speak to Chartiphon about this.

  He took the broadsword he had captured on the night of his advent here-and-now to the castle blacksmith, to have it ground down into a rapier.. The blacksmith thought he was crazy. He found a pair of wooden practice swords and went outside with a cavalry lieutenant to demonstrate. Immediately, the lieutenant wanted a rapier, too. The blacksmith promised to make real ones, to his specifications, for both of them. His was finished the next evening, and by that time the blacksmith was swamped with orders for rapiers.

  Almost everything these people used could be made in the workshops inside the walls of Tarr-Hostigos, or in Hostigos Town, and he seemed to have an unlimited expense-account with them. He began to wonder what, besides being the guest from the Land of the Gods, he was supposed to do to earn it. Nobody mentioned that; maybe they were waiting for him to mention it.

  He brought the subject up, one evening, in Prince Ptosphes’s study, where he and the Prince and Rylla and Xentos and Chartiphon were smoking over a flagon of after-dinner wine.

  “You have enemies on both sides—Gormoth of Nostor and Sarrask of Sask—and that’s not good. You have taken me in and made me one of you. What can I do to help against them?”

  “Well, Kalvan,” Ptosphes said, “perhaps you could better tell us that. We don’t want to talk of what distresses you, but you must come of a very wise people. You’ve already taught us new things, like the thrusting-sword”—he looked admiringly at the new rapier he had laid aside and what you’ve told Chartiphon about mounting cannon. What else can you teach us?”

  Quite a lot, he thought. There had been one professor at Princeton whose favorite pupil he had been, and who had been his favorite teacher. A history prof, and an unusual one. Most academic people at the middle of the twentieth century took the same attitude toward war that their Victorian opposite numbers had toward sex one of those deplorable facts nice people don’t talk about, and maybe if you don’t look at the horrid thing it’ll go away. This man had been different. What happened in the cloisters and the guild-halls and the parliaments and council-chambers was important, but none of them went into effect until ratified on the battlefield. So he had emphasized the military aspect of history in a freshman from Pennsylvania named Morrison, a divinity student, of all unlikely things. So, while he should have been studying homiletics and scriptural exegesis and youth-organization methods, that freshman, and a year later that sophomore, had been reading Sir Charles Oman’s Art of War.

  “Well, I can’t tell you how to make weapons like that six-shooter of mine, or ammunition for it,” he began, and then tried, as simply as possible, to explain about mass production and machine industry. They only stared in incomprehension and wonder. “I can show you a few things you can do with the things you have. For instance, we cut spiral grooves inside the bores of our guns, to make the bullet spin. Such guns shoot harder, straighter and farther than smoothbores. I can show you how to build cannon that can be moved rapidly and loaded and fired much more rapidly than what you have. And another thing.” He mentioned never having seen any practice firing. “You have very little powder—fireseed, you call it. Is that it?”

  “There isn’t enough fireseed in all Hostigos to load all the cannon of this castle for one shot,” Chartiphon told him. “And we can get no more. The priests of Styphon have put us under the ban and will let us have none, and they send cartload after cartload to Nostor.”

  “You mean you get your fireseed from the priests of Styphon? Can’t you make your own?”

  They all looked at him as though he was a cretin. “Nobody can make fireseed but the priests of Styphon,” Xentos told him. “That was what I meant when I told you that Styphon’s House has great power. With Styphon’s aid, they alone can make it, and so they have great power, even over the Great Kings.”

  “Well I’ll be Dralm-damned!” He gave Styphon’s House that grudging respect any good cop gives a really smart crook. Brother, what a racket! No wonder this country, here-and-now, was divided into five Great Kingdoms, and each split into a snakepit of warring Princes and petty barons. Styphon’s House wanted it that way; it was good for business. A lot of things became clear. For instance, if Styphon’s House did the weaponeering as well as the powder-making, it would explain why small-arms were so good; they’d see to it that nobody without fireseed stood an outside chance against anybody with it. But they’d keep the brakes on artillery development. Styphon House wouldn’t want bloody or destructive wars—they’d be bad for business. Just wars that burned lots of fireseed; that would be why there were all these great powder-hogs of bombards around.

  And no wonder everybody in Hostigos had monkeys on their backs. They knew they were facing the short end of a war of extermination. He set down his goblet and laughed.

  “You think nobody but those priests of Styphon can make fireseed?” There was nobody here that wasn’t security-cleared for the inside version of his cover-story. “Why, in my time, everybody, even the children, could do that.” (Well, children who’d gotten as far as high school chemistry; he’d almost been expelled, once) “I can make fireseed right here on this table.” He refilled his goblet.

  “But it is a miracle; only by the power of Styphon...” Xentos began.

  “Styphon’s a big fake!” he declared. “A false god; his priests are lying swindlers.” That shocked Xentos; good or bad, a god was a god and shouldn’t be talked about like that. “You want to see me do it? Mytron has everything in his dispensary I’ll need. I’ll want sulfur, and saltpeter.” Mytron prescribed sulfur and honey (they had no molasses here-and-now), and saltpeter was supposed to cool the blood. “And charcoal, and a brass mortar and pestle, and a flour-sieve and something to sift into, and a pair of balance-scales.” He picked up an unused goblet. “This’ll do to mix it in.”

  Now they were all staring at him as though he—had three heads, and a golden crown on each one.

  “Go on, man! Hurry!” Ptosphes told Xentos. “Have everything brought here at once.”

  Then the Prince threw back his head and laughed—maybe a trifle hysterically, but it was the first time Morrison had heard Ptosphes laugh at all. Chartiphon banged his fist on the table.

  “Ha, Gormoth!” he cried. “Now see whose head goes up over whose gate!” Xentos went out. Morrison asked for a pistol, and Ptosphes brought him one from a cabinet behind him. It was loaded; opening the pan, he spilled out the priming on a sheet of parchment and touched a lighted splinter to it. It scorched the parchment, which it shouldn’t have done, and left too much black residue. Styphon wasn’t a very honest powder maker; he cheapened his product with too much charcoal and not enough saltpeter. Morrison sipped from his goblet. Saltpeter was seventy-five percent, charcoal fifteen, sulfur ten.

  After a while Xentos returned, accompanied by Mytron, bringing a bucket of charcoal, a couple of earthen jars, and the other things. Xentos seemed slightly dazed; Mytron was frightened and making a good game try at not showing it. He put Mytron to work grinding saltpeter in the mortar. The sulfur was already pulverized. Finally, he had about a half pint of it mixed.

  “But it’s just dust,” Chartiphon objected. “Yes. It has to be moistened, worked into dough, pressed into cakes, dried, and ground. We can’t do all that here. But this will flash.” Up to about 1500, all gunpowder had been like that—meal powder, they had called it. It had been used in cannon for a long time after grain powder was being used in small arms. Why, in 1588, the Duke of Medina-Sidonia had been very happy that all the powder for the Armada was coined arquebus powder, and not meal p
owder. He primed the pistol with a pinch from the mixing goblet, aimed at a half-burned log in the fireplace, and squeezed. Outside somebody shouted, feet pounded up the hall, and a guard with a halberd burst into the room.

  “The Lord Kalvan is showing us something about a pistol,” Ptosphes told him. “There may be more shots; nobody is to be alarmed.”

  “All right,” he said, when the guard had gone out and closed the door. “Now let’s see how it’ll fire.” He loaded with a blank charge, wadding it with a bit of rag, and handed it to Rylla. “You fire the first shot. This is a great moment in the history of Hostigos. I hope.”

  She pushed down the striker, set the flint down, aimed at the fireplace, and squeezed. The report wasn’t quite as loud, but it did fire. Then they tried it with a ball, which went a half inch into the log. Everybody thought that was very good. The room was full of smoke, and they were all coughing, but nobody cared. Chartiphon went to the door and shouted into the hall for more wine.

  Rylla had her arms around him. “Kalvan! You really did it!” she was saying. “But you said no prayers,” Mytron faltered. “You just made fireseed.”

  “That’s right. And before long, everybody’ll be just making fireseed. Easy as cooking soup.” And when that day comes, he thought, the priests of Styphon will be out on the sidewalk, beating a drum for pennies.

  Chartiphon wanted to know how soon they could march against Nostor. “It will take more fireseed than Kalvan can make on this table,” Ptosphes told him. “We will need saltpeter, and sulfur, and charcoal. We will have to teach people how to get the sulfur and the saltpeter for us, and how to grind and mix them. We will need many things we don’t have now, and tools to make them. And nobody knows all about this but Kalvan, and there is only one of him.”

  Well, glory be! Somebody had gotten something from his lecture on production, anyhow.

  “Mytron knows a few things, I think.” He pointed to the jars of sulfur and saltpeter. “Where did you get these?” he asked.