The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Everard tossed off his shot and chased it with a long draught. “Don’t bother,” he said harshly. “I can’t place those two you did. What’s strange about them and the rest?”

  “The precise dates of their occurrences do not agree with what scholars from their future have recorded. Nor do various other minor details, such as the exact text of that play or the exact objects depicted on a certain scroll by Ma Yuan.” Guion sipped. “Minor, mind you. Nothing that changes the general pattern of later events, or even anyone’s daily life to a noticeable degree. Nevertheless they indicate instability in those sections of history.”

  Everard fought down a shudder. “Two-thirteen B.C., did you say?” My God. The Second Punic War. He stuffed his pipe with needless force.

  Guion nodded again. “You were largely responsible for aborting that catastrophe.”

  “How many others have there been?” Everard rasped.

  The query was absurd, put in English. Before he could go to Temporal, Guion said, “That is a problem inherently insolvable. Think about it.”

  Everard did.

  “The Patrol, existent humankind, the Danellians themselves owe you much because of the Carthaginian episode,” Guion continued after a silent while. “If you wish, regard the steps lately taken on your behalf as a small recompense.”

  “Thanks.” Everard struck fire and puffed hard. “Although I wasn’t being entirely unselfish, you realize. I wanted my home world back.” He tautened. “What have these anomalies you speak of got to do with me?”

  “Quite possibly nothing.”

  “Or with Wanda—Specialist Tamberly? What’re you getting at with the pair of us?”

  Guion lifted a hand. “Please don’t develop resentments of your own. I know of your desire for emotional privacy, your feeling that it is somehow your right.”

  “Where I come from, it damn well is,” Everard grumbled. His cheeks smoldered.

  “But if the Patrol is to watch and guard the evolution of the ages, must it not also watch over itself? You have in truth become one of the more important agents operating within the past three millennia. Because of this, whether you know it or not, your influence radiates farther than most. Inevitably, some of the action is through your friends. Tamberly did have a catalytic effect on a milieu she was supposed merely to study. When you protected her from the consequences of her act, you became involved in them. No harm was done in either case, and we do not expect that either of you will ever willingly or wittingly do harm; but you must understand that we want to know about you.”

  The hairs stood up on Everard’s arms. “‘We,’ you say,” he whispered. “Who are you, Guion? What are you?”

  “An agent like you, serving the same ends as you, except that my work is within the Patrol.”

  Everard pushed the attack. “When are you from? The Danellian era?”

  Defense broke down. “No!” Guion made a violent fending gesture. “I have never even met one!” He looked away. The aristocratic visage writhed. “You did, once, but I—No, I am nobody.”

  You mean you are human, like me, Everard thought. We are both to the Danellians what Homo erectus—or Australopithecus?—is to us. Though you, born in a later and higher civilization, must know more about them than I’d be able to. Enough more to be terrified?

  Guion recovered himself, drank, and said, again quietly, “I serve as I am bidden. That is all.”

  With a sudden sympathy, an irrational wish to give comfort, that was itself heartening, Everard murmured, “And so at present you’re just tying up loose ends, clearing the decks, nothing fancy.”

  “I hope so. I pray so.” Guion drew breath. He smiled. “Your commonplace way of putting it, your workaday attitude—what strength they give.”

  Tension ebbed out of Everard too. “Okay. We went up a bad street for a minute, didn’t we? Actually, I shouldn’t worry, on my account or Wanda’s.”

  Beneath his regained coolness, Guion sounded equally relieved. “That is what I came to assure you. The aftermath of your clash with Agent Corwin and others is no more. You can dismiss it from your mind and go about your business.”

  “Thanks. Cheers.” They raised glasses.

  It would take a little ordinary conversation, gossip and shop talk, to achieve genuine relaxation. “I hear you are preparing for a new mission,” Guion remarked.

  Everard shrugged. “No biggie. Securing the Altamont case. You wouldn’t know about that, nor care.”

  “No, please, you rouse my curiosity.”

  “Well, why not?” Everard leaned back, puffed his pipe, savored his beer. “It’s in 1912. World War One is brewing. The Germans think they’ve found a spy who can infiltrate the opposition, an Irish-American called Altamont. Actually he’s an English agent, and in the end will turn the tables on them very neatly. The trouble from our viewpoint is, he’s too observant and smart. He’s uncovered certain odd goings-on. They could lead him to our military studies group in those years. A member of the group knows me and asked me to come help work up something to divert the man’s attention. Nothing major. Mainly we’ll have to do it in such a way that he doesn’t deduce something still curiouser is afoot. It should be kind of fun.”

  “I see. Your life isn’t entirely hairbreadth adventure, then.”

  “It better not be!”

  They swapped trivia for an hour, till Guion took his leave. Alone, Everard felt hemmed in. Conditioned air hung lifeless around him. He went to a window and opened it. The lungful that he drew was sharp with the smell of the oncoming thunderstorm. Wind boomed and buffeted.

  Foreboding touched him anew. He’s obviously a high-powered type. Would the far future really send him on an errand as trifling as what he described? Might they not, rather, be afraid of what he barely hinted at, a chaos they cannot chart and therefore cannot turn aside? Are they making what desperate provision they can?

  Lightning flared like a banner suddenly flown above the enclosing towers. Everard’s mood responded. Cut that out. You’ve got the word that all’s well, haven’t you? Let him proceed in good spirits with his next job, and afterward seek what pleasure he could hope for.

  PART SIX

  AMAZEMENT OF THE WORLD

  1137 α A. D.

  The door opened. Sunlight struck bright and bleak into the silk merchant’s shop. Autumn air streamed after it, full of chill and street noises. Then the apprentice stumbled through. Seen from the dimness inside, against the day outside, he was almost a shadow. But they heard how he wept. “Master Geoffrey, oh, Master Geoffrey!”

  Emil Volstrup left the desk at which he had stood doing accounts. The stares of the other two boys, one Italian and one Greek, followed him, and their hands fell still upon the bolts of fabric. “What is it, Odo?” he called. The Norman French that he used here rang harsh in his ears. “Did you meet trouble on your errand?”

  The slender form stumbled into his arms, the face pressed against his robe. He felt the shuddering. “Master,” sobbed at him, “the king is dead. I heard—they are crying it from mouth to mouth through the city—”

  Volstrup’s embrace dropped away. He looked outward. You couldn’t see much through the grilles over the arched windows. The door was still agape, though. Cobblestones, an arcaded building opposite, a Saracen passing by in white cloak and turban, sparrows fluttering up from some scrap of food, none of it seemed real any longer. Why should it? Whatever he saw could at any instant cease ever having been. Everything around him could. He himself.

  “Our King Roger? No,” he denied. “Impossible. A false rumor.”

  Odo drew back and flailed a wild gesture. “It’s true!” His voice cracked across. The shame of that steadied him a little. He swallowed, swiped at tears, tried to straighten. “Messengers from Italy. He fell in battle. His army is broken. They say the prince is dead too.”

  “But I know—” Volstrup’s tongue locked in his mouth. Appalled, he realized that he had been about to describe the future until his conditioning stopped hi
m. Had this tale shaken him so badly? “How would people in the street know? Such news would go straight to the palace.”

  “The m-messengers—they called it out as they passed by—”

  A sound broke through the noises of Palermo, overrode them, strode between the city walls and out the harbor to the bay. Volstrup knew that voice. All did. It was the bells of the cathedral. They were tolling.

  For a moment he stood motionless. At the edge of vision he saw the apprentices at the workbench cross themselves, the Catholic left to right, the Orthodox right to left. It came to him that he had better do likewise. That broke his paralysis. He turned to the Greek lad, the most levelheaded. “Michael,” he ordered, “speed forth, learn what has indeed happened, as nearly as you can in a short time, and come tell me.”

  “Yes, master,” the apprentice replied. “They should be giving out the news publicly soon.” He left.

  “Back to your work, Cosimo,” Volstrup went on. “Join him, Odo. Never mind what I sent you for. I’ll not want it today.”

  As he sought the rear of the shop he heard a racket rising beneath the clang and jangle of the bells. It wasn’t talk, song, footfalls, hoofbeats, wheel-creak, the city’s pulsebeat. It was shouts, screams, prayers—Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, a score of vernaculars, dismay that wailed in this neighborhood and everywhere else. Ja, det er nok sandt. He noticed that his mind had gone back to Danish. The story was probably true. If so, he alone understood in full how terrible it was.

  Unless the cause of it also did.

  He came out into a small garden court with a water basin, cloistered in Moorish style. This house had been built when the Saracens ruled Sicily. After purchasing it, he had adapted it to his business and to the fact that he would maintain no harem, unlike most of those Normans who could afford to. Now the other sides of the enclosure gave on storerooms, kitchen, dormitories for apprentices and servants, and similar utility. A stair led to the upper story, living quarters for himself, his wife, and their three children. He climbed it.

  She met him on the gallery, a small, dark woman, gone plump and her hair, black beneath its covering, streaked with gray, nevertheless rather attractive. He had looked at her middle years before returning to her youth and asking for her hand. That skirted the law of the Time Patrol, but he’d spend a long while with her. He needed a wife for appearance’s sake, for family connections, to maintain his household and, yes, warm his bed; by temperament he was a benedict, not a womanizer.

  “What is it, my lord?” Her question quavered in Greek. Like most Sicilians born, she got along in several languages, but today she fell back to that of her childhood. Me too, he thought. “What is happening?”

  “Bad news, I fear,” he answered. “See that the children and the staff stay calm.”

  Though she had become a Catholic in order to marry him, she forgot and crossed herself in Eastern wise. Just the same, he admired the steadiness that came upon her. “As my lord bids.”

  It made him smile, squeeze her arm, and say, “Fear not for us, Zoe. I will see to things.”

  “I know you will.” She hastened off. His gaze followed her a moment. There passed through him: If only the centuries of Muslim rule hadn’t made women of every faith so submissive, what a companion she might be. But she handled her duties well, her kinfolk remained helpful to his business, and … he couldn’t have anybody who wanted to share his secrets.

  He crossed a couple of rooms still furnished in the austere, airy Islamic style, and reached the one that was his alone. It wasn’t kept locked; that might have raised suspicions of witchcraft or worse. However, a merchant naturally required confidential files, strongboxes, and occasional privacy. Barring the door behind him, he drew up a stool in front of a large ambry, sat down, and pressed the foliate pattern carved into the wood in a certain order.

  A rectangle of luminance sprang forth before him. He ran tongue over dry lips and whispered in Temporal, “Give me a synopsis of King Roger’s campaign in Italy from, uh, the beginning of last month and onward.”

  Text flashed. Memory supplied what had gone before. A year ago, Lothair, the old Holy Roman Emperor, had crossed the Alps to aid Pope Innocent II against Roger II, King of Capua, Apulia, and Sicily. High among their allies was Rogers brother-in-law Rainulf, Count of Avellino. They fought their way far down the Italian peninsula until at the end of August, Anno Domini 1137, they reckoned themselves victorious. Rainulf was created Duke of Apulia, to hold the South against the Sicilian. Lothair left him eight hundred knights and, feeling death nigh, started homeward. Innocent entered Rome although his rival claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Anacletus II, occupied the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

  At the beginning of this October, Roger did return. He landed at Salerno and laid waste the lands that had repudiated their allegiance to him; the savagery of his vengeance was a shock even to this brutal age. At the very end of the month, he met Rainulf’s army at Rignano in northern Apulia.

  There he suffered defeat. His first charge, under the captaincy of his eldest son and namesake, Duke Roger, carried the enemy before it. The second one, which he himself led, faltered and failed. Duke Rainulf, a gallant and well-beloved leader, threw his whole force against the king’s men. Panic seized them and they fled, save for three thousand whom they left slain. Roger took the remnants of them back to Salerno.

  The victory availed little. Roger had other forces at his beck. They besieged Naples and regained Benevento and the great abbey on Monte Cassino. Before long, only Apulia remained to its new duke. Innocent, with his famous partisan Bernard of Clairvaux, must needs agree to let Roger mediate the dispute with Anacletus. Although the anti-Pope was on his side, the king shrewdly declared that he found the case too deep for quick decision. Let there be a further conference in Palermo.

  It was never held. Emperor Lothair died in December, on his way home. In January 1138, Anacletus also slipped from life. Roger got a new Pope elected, but this one soon ended the schism by laying down his tiara. Triumphant in Rome, Innocent set about destroying the king, whom he had already excommunicated. He did not succeed. His foremost surviving ally, Rainulf, died of a fever in the spring of 1139; shortly afterward, the elder and younger Rogers ambushed the papal army and took Innocent himself prisoner.

  So much for the Middle Ages, when all men were devout sons of Mother Church, gibed the Lutheran in Volstrup’s past. Immediately, shocked, he recalled: But I’ve let the record run on into the future. I sit here in early November, 1137.

  That fits. So much time is just right for word to reach Roger’s capital that he did not merely suffer a reversal at Rignano, he was killed.

  Then what becomes of that morrow in which he was to play so mighty a role?

  He bade the text stop. For a moment he sat chilled and stinking with sweat. Resolution came. He was—he believed—the only time traveler now on the island; but he was not unique on the planet.

  His was scarcely a Patrol base. He was an observer, who also gave assistance and guidance to whatever travelers might arrive. Not many did. The glory days of Norman Sicily were yet to come; and after them, events on the mainland would swallow it up. Headquarters for this entire milieu were in Rome, commencing in 1198, when Innocent III took over the Papacy. But all Europe was astir, and beyond Europe all the world. No matter how desperately thinly they were spread, Patrol agents were trying to monitor its history.

  Aided occasionally by the databank, Volstrup ran his mind across the globe. At this moment, Lothair was still on his way back to Germany; strife over the succession would follow his death, becoming civil war. Louis VII had just inherited the crown of France and married Eleanor of Aquitaine; his reign would be largely a series of disastrous blunders. In England, the contest between Stephen and Matilda was growing violent. In Iberia, an ex-monk had been forced against his will to become King of Aragon, but it would lead to union with Catalonia; Alfonso VII of Castile was proclaiming himself Emperor of all Spaniards and proceeding with the reconquista.
Poor Denmark, under a weakling lord, lay ravaged by pagan raiders from across the Baltic….

  John II ruled ably over the East Roman Empire; he was campaigning in Asia Minor, hoping to win Antioch back from the Crusaders. The Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem was hard pressed by resurgent Muslims. Yet the Caliphate in Egypt was divided against itself, Arabia had split into a welter of petty realms, and Persia was in the throes of dynastic war.

  The principalities of Kievan Russia were likewise at odds with each other. Eastward, the Muslim conquest of India had stalled while Mahmud’s family fought the Afghan princes. The Kin Tatars were conquering northern China and had established their own imperium there, while the Sung rulers hung on in the South. The feud between Taira and Minamoto clans tore Japan apart. In the Americas—

  A knock sounded. Volstrup lurched to his feet and unbarred the door. Michael stood atremble. “It is true, Master Geoffrey,” the apprentice said. “King Roger and his son fell in battle at a place called Rignano, in Apulia. The bodies were not recovered. Couriers sped here from what was left of the army. They say that every part of Italy they passed through is falling away again, ready to open itself to Duke Rainulf. Master, are you ill?”

  “I am grieved, of course,” Volstrup mumbled. “Go back to your work. I will rejoin you presently. We must carry on with our lives.”

  Can we?

  Alone again, he opened a locked coffer. Within it lay a pair of metal cylinders, smoothly tapered, about the length of his forearm. He knelt and ran fingers across the controls of one. His timecycle was concealed outside the city, but these tubes would carry messages to wherever and whenever he commanded.

  If that destination exists.

  He rasped his news at the recording unit. “Please inform me of the actual situation and of what I should do,” he finished. He set the goal for milieu headquarters in Rome, the time somewhat arbitrarily for this same date in 1200. By then, yonder office should be well organized and familiar with its surroundings, while not yet preoccupied with such crises and disasters as the Latin conquest of Constantinople.