by Anthology
Bruck recognized the fact that the Marquis was a pretend fighter, not a real one like himself. That was okay; the Marquis was his friend, his only friend.
In a fight or a battle the Marquis needed Bruck to watch his back, though he pretended he didn’t. Bruck always tried to fight on the same side as the Marquis and as near to him as possible, though it didn’t always work out that way.
The Marquis needed Bruck, and Bruck needed the Marquis too. The Marquis explained things to Bruck he wouldn’t have understood otherwise. And the Marquis was the only other person who knew about Nestor—the tall barrel-chested stranger. Bruck always forgot the tall, barrel-chested stranger’s name unless the Marquis was around, saying stuff like, “Just you be patient, little buddy. Pretty soon Nestor will be back . . .”
Funny, the Marquis calling him “little buddy” when the Marquis was a short, solid guy and Bruck was maybe an inch or two taller than him. Always winking, though, just like his friend Nestor, the tall barrel-chested stranger.
The Marquis got up from the table, swaggering away toward a dancing girl with braids, throwing a wink over his shoulder at Bruck. One night the Marquis got into a heated shoving match with a brawny lout, and Bruck had to step in and shoulder the Marquis aside. The brawny lout took a swing at Bruck, and Bruck ducked under the fist and slammed his head into the lout’s stomach so hard the guy crumpled on the spot. The other people in the bar applauded. The Marquis winked and grinned.
“Thanks, little buddy.”
A waitress came by with another beer. Bruck disconsolately handed her his empty. Looking across the room, he saw the braided-haired girl feeling the Marquis’ muscles, giggling.
He didn’t have the heart to tell the Marquis. Bruck wasn’t sure exactly what he knew or remembered anymore, but one thing he was pretty sure of was Nestor would not be coming back soon.
Bruck took a long, slow drink of his beer, nearly draining the tall glass, still straining to remember. He patted his pocket—something valuable in there, he dimly recalled. His thoughts were cloudier and cloudier. He signaled for another beer. He drank too much these days, always drinking when he wasn’t fighting.
Staring across the room he thought he caught a glimpse of a man with curly red hair and a bristly beard, but then people shifted around and the man melted into the crowd. Or was he imagining things?
The waitress brought him another foaming beer. He looked around for the Marquis, but his friend too had melted into the loud, smelly, shouting, dancing crowd.
At night he dreamed of playing double knuckles with the tall barrel-chested stranger against the two brothers, one younger with narrow eyes and a pockmarked face, the older one with curly red hair and a bristly red beard.
The game had been going on for hours. It was long after midnight, and the tavern had all but emptied. The only people left were the four players, the proprietor who sat on a stool behind them watching stoically, a groggy serving girl with her arm stretched around the proprietor, and two or three die-hard regulars who stared with goggle eyes as the pile of coins rose higher than ever before at the Bull’s Bullocks.
There were hundreds and hundreds of coins in the pot. Bruck had wagered more of his earnings than was wise, and several times he had been tempted to fold his cards and walk away. But he was still enjoying himself, and each time he had been tempted to quit, the tall barrel-chested stranger had winked at him and he had stayed.
He was a fighter, not a gamesman, but the tall, barrel-chested stranger proved very, very good at double knuckles, and the brothers were losing and falling farther and farther behind. The young brother grew even more silent and peevish, while the red-haired and bearded one glowered nastily as, finally, he emptied his pockets and pushed his last few coins into the center of the table.
The tall barrel-chested stranger seemed to savor the drama of it all. He hesitated before he reached into his purse and found the right number of coins, flipping them carelessly onto the pile before reaching for his final card.
Bruck and the younger brother played their hands. The unremarkable result made the serving girl yawn. The two looked to their partners for the climax.
The red-haired bristly-bearded brother defiantly slapped his cards down, a smirk on his face. For a moment the tall barrel-chested stranger looked surprised, then winking at Bruck, he gracefully spread his cards to show a hand that vanquished his opponent’s.
Even before the grin on Bruck’s face had started to widen, the place exploded. The younger brother shouted an epithet and stretched a long arm across the table toward the coins. Bruck reacted in a blur, reaching down and grabbing a long knife from his cache of weapons on the floor and bringing the blade up and down in one fluid whirl, plunging it hard into the table and cleanly slicing off the man’s outstretch hand.
The hand appeared to scuttle away and slide off the table as the younger brother screamed and fell back from the table. But then, with a sick feeling, Bruck realized the brother’s screams were mixing with the loud groans of the tall barrel-chested stranger, who had been knocked back in his chair by a thick dirk hurled by the older brother. The blade was stuck in the broad target of his barrel chest. Bruck quickly found his sword and stood, waving his weapon in the air, anxious to avenge his partner.
There was no more opportunity for violence, however. The red-haired bristly-bearded brother had draped his arms around his shrieking brother and, with a baleful look over his shoulders, dragged him and his bloody stump away. The proprietor and handful of observers shrank into the shadows. From somewhere in the room, Bruck could hear the servant girl sobbing. Perhaps, he thought, she’d been sweet on the pockmarked loser, who was now bleeding grievously.
The tall barrel-chested stranger was still alive and strong enough to reach down and yank the dirk out of his chest and toss it on the floor contemptuously. The effort took a lot out of him, though. He gestured weakly to Bruck, who swept the mountain of coins into a sack and then scurried around the table to catch his partner just as he began to slump to the ground. The tall, barrel-chested stranger whose name was Nestor—yes, Nestor, Bruck recalled—pointed to a narrow stairway at the rear of the room, and Bruck half walked, half carried Nestor upstairs, blood wetting both their clothes.
Inside a small sparse room was a pallet, a wooden chair, and a dressing table with a mirror. Bruck helped Nestor to the pallet. Nestor refused to lie down, instead sitting with his legs outstretched, his head propped against the wall, still winking and chuckling despite his wound and shallow breathing.
“I’ve seen worse,” grunted Bruck, after examining the wound, and it was true—he had. But this wound was bad enough that it might kill Nestor if not treated. Bruck would make sure Nestor was settled and comfortable, he wanted to check the winnings, and then he would go and bring a doctor.
Spotting a small flask on the dressing table, Bruck took a sip of foul liquor and handed it over to Nestor, who drank from it several times until it was emptied and he tossed it on the floor, laughing. First things first: As Nestor watched him with glittering eyes, Bruck dumped out the coins and counted them, dividing the haul into two piles.
Whether because of how much he had drank or the shock of his wound, Nestor was beginning to babble. Bruck, almost done, wasn’t listening closely, and Nestor, still laughing, raised his voice insistently. Clutching his bleeding wound with one hand Nestor dug through his pockets with the other and, after arduous effort, produced a rolled parchment and a polished triangle of stone that he thrust at Bruck, urging him to pay attention.
Rising from the floor, Bruck deposited his share of the coins in his sack and put Nestor’s in his purse, which he tossed onto the pallet next to the wounded man. He then sat down at the dressing table, staring at the two items he held in his hand and listening to Nestor’s babble.
The stone triangle had a row of numbers along one edge that changed as Bruck rotated them with his thumb. As Nestor called out numbers in a precise order, Bruck rotated the numbers one by one into the s
equence being urgently dictated by his wounded partner.
Slumped against the wall, his bleeding still copious, Nestor talked nonsense about fighting good fights and traveling through time. Yes, fighting and traveling through time—that was the strange thing that he kept saying.
This was the best trip ever, Nestor said.
Bruck listened more carefully now, fingering the numbers on the stone triangle, following the sequence dictated by Nestor, even as he wondered if Nestor was dazed and hysterical or crazy or dying.
“The best trip ever . . .”
Bruck had not closed the door to the room, and he had been listening very intently to what Nestor was saying. Otherwise, he would have noticed the pairs of feral eyes lurking in the dark shadows outside the door. Too late, he realized that the red-haired bristly-bearded older brother had crept up the stairs and was standing there, listening, with a handful of savage looking men behind him, waiting.
Bruck felt a pang of regret as the red-haired red-bearded brother dashed into the room with a terrible cry and plunged a long sword into the heart of the helpless wounded Nestor.
Nestor slumped over lifeless, the grin on his face permanent now.
Bruck had just rotated the last number into place. But he dropped the rolled parchment on the floor and it skittered away as he ran out of time.
Even as the killer pulled his sword out of Nestor’s dead body and gleefully turned to Bruck, the killer’s blade dripping with blood and his confederates surging behind him, Bruck had begun to shimmer and vanish.
The red-haired bristly-bearded brother was too slow, reaching for Bruck but grabbing nothing, reaching, stretching, grasping futilely with hate-filled eyes.
That was always the last thing Bruck remembered before waking up, the reaching, stretching, grasping hands and the hate-filled eyes of the red-haired bristly-bearded brother.
The line shuffled forward. It was a long line, and there were many other lines inside the building. After each man received his orders he moved outside where there were vast treeless spaces, and grouped areas of machines and equipment, and hundreds if not thousands of men, all attired for imminent battle.
Today Bruck’s weapons included a bow and arrow and several long curved swords tucked into his sash. He carried a shield and wore a winged helmet. Pads of armor were fitted over black pants, a black shirt, and a burgundy vest, everything edged in gilt.
Everywhere around him similarly dressed samurai awaited the signal.
Bruck felt a little foolish.
If only he could remember.
The worst thing was not the fighting all the time. He loved fighting, though he sometimes had to remind himself of that fact. The worst thing was not not knowing what he was fighting for—most of the time. Sometimes he knew the cause, though usually they didn’t tell him and it didn’t really matter.
The worst thing was how false and foolish and pretend it all felt.
The Marquis came by and pointed at Bruck, laughing. Bruck laughed back, pointing at the Marquis, and in a way that cheered him up a little, even though the Marquis quickly moved on to another part of the field, where today he had been picked to ride on horseback.
Bruck was an expert rider. He could have ridden circles around the Marquis and most of the others, but he didn’t care if he was running and carrying a spear or riding a horse. He didn’t care if he was dressed in blue or gray or samurai armor or the uniform he wore several times, with variations, when fighting in something the people in charge insisted on calling World War II. They numbered everything in this place, even wars.
If only he could remember.
Holding the triangle of stone in his hand, he rotated the numbers around into sequence again and again. And although he had been doing the same thing for days and weeks, each time the numbers locked into a new configuration, he waited expectantly for the shimmer and the rocketing, dizzying, nauseating sensation that might send him home again, though that never happened.
Seven numbers.
Bruck had about ten thousand probable sequences to work through, provided he could keep track of all the numbers he had tried before, the Marquis had told him with a laugh.
“Just wait till Nestor gets back . . .”
Bruck looked up, shading his eyes against the hot sun, and there—he spotted him again. A man with curly red hair and a gnarly reddish beard, huddled with another group of samurai, dressed slightly differently, over there on a small rise. Was the man staring at Bruck?
Was he the same man Bruck had glimpsed at Bar None?
The man in the dream?
Bruck felt a sudden excitement, a renewal, hope and expectation. The bile rose in his throat as he pocketed the stone and tightly gripped his sword. Around him others were stirring, standing.
A man came by with a bullhorn shouting instructions.
Bruck felt real again, for the first time in weeks, ready for a real fight.
“Action!”
BUILT UPON THE SANDS OF TIME
Michael Flynn
A wise man once said that we can never step in the same river twice. A very wise man, indeed; because by that he did not mean we should refrain from bathing, as some half-wits at the Irish Pub have suggested, but that times change and the same circumstances are never fully repeated. You are not the same person you were yesterday; nor am I.
But perhaps that old Greek was not half so wise as he thought. Perhaps you cannot step into the same river even once; and you may not be the same person yesterday as you were yesterday.
Friday nights at the irish pub are busier than a husband whose wife has come home early. When The O Neil and myself arrived, the neighborhood crowd was there bending elbows with the University folks from down the street and making, as they like to say, a joyful noise. It was so busy, in fact, that Hennesey, O’Daugherty’s partner, had joined him behind the bar and even so they were barely keeping ahead of the orders. There were another dozen or so boyos in the back room, watching the progress of the pool table and providing encouragement or not to the players, as the case might be. The O Neil placed his challenge by laying a quarter down on the rail and promised to call me in for a game as soon as he won the table. Then he set himself to study the opposition. Seeing as how the quarters were lined up on the rail like so many communion children, I knew it would be a long, sad time before I held a cue in my hand, so I took myself back out to the bar.
O’Daugherty Himself was a wise man, for he had saved a stool for my sitting and, more quickly than I could order it, had placed a pint of Guinness before me. O’Daugherty is a man who knows his manners; and his customers, as well. After a polite nod to the man on my right, whom I did not know, I occupied myself with the foamy stout.
Hennesey was a contrast to his partner. Where O’Daugherty was short, dark, and barrel-chested, Hennesey was tall, fair, and dour, one of the “red-haired race” from the North of Ireland. His long, thick, drooping face seemed always on the verge of tears, though never quite crossing over into the real thing. His shoulders were stooped because, tall as he was, he had to bend over to communicate with the common ruck. He gave me a smile, which for him consisted of raising the corners of his mouth from the vicinity of his chin to a nearly horizontal position. I hoisted my own mug in reply.
But no sooner had I taken the first, bitter sip than I heard Doc Mooney, on the far side of the oval bar, complain. In itself, this was no unusual thing, since complaint is the blood and spit of the man. But the nature of his complaint was more than a little out of the ordinary.
“Which of ye spalpeens,” he cried, “has taken my jawbone?”
Danny Mulloney, sitting two stools to his left, looked at him. “Why, no one, you omadhaun, seeing as how you’re still flapping it.”
Doc gave him the squint-eye. “It’s not my own jawbone I’m speaking of, ye lout; as you would know if you applied what little thought you have to it; but the jawbone we keep at the medical school for purposes of demonstration. I had put it in my pocket when I left fo
r the day.”
“Ah,” said Danny with a sad shake of his head, “and I would hate to be your wife, then, after turning out your pockets for the laundering. Sure, a pathologist should never take his work home with him.”
There was a ripple of laughter at our end of the bar. I confess that I smiled, myself, though it is my constant purpose never to encourage the wit of Danny Mulloney.
Doc turned a shade darker and tapped the bar top with a stiff finger. “I had set it right there, and now it is gone. Someone has taken it.”
“You weren’t thinking of leaving it as a tip, Doc?” I asked, getting into the spirit of the thing.
Doc gave me a look of betrayal. Et tu, Mickey? But Himself spoke up, a twinkle in his eye. “It would depend, I’m thinking, on how many teeth were yet in the jaw. Placed under my pillow, it might draw a tidy sum from the wee folk.”
Hennesey only shook his head at the blathering of mortals. “Now, who would wish to steal such a thing?” he asked, contrabasso.
“Samson,” Danny suggested. “Were there any Philistines about?” Danny being of a religious frame of mind, a Biblical example came most naturally to him.
Doc, who knows a little of Scripture himself, leaned past the poor man who sat between him and Danny and consequently had to listen to the argument with both his ears, and said sweetly, “Nor is it your own jawbone we’re speaking of.”
“There is too much foam,” said the man sitting between them.
Both Danny and Doc pulled away, puzzled at the nonce of the sequitur. Himself reared up. “Too much foam, d’you say? Why, I give honest measure; and the man who says I do not is a liar.”
The man blinked several times. “What? Oh.” He glanced at the sturdy glass mug before him. “Oh, no, I did not mean your fine beer. I was responding to this gentleman’s question concerning his jawbone. I meant the quantum foam.”