The Shield of Time

by Poul Anderson

  Manson and his two attendants, hired in Bari, had set up camp in the open, until the king summoned him yesterday after returning from parley. In the city he had also purchased—or so everybody else believed—mounts, a pack horse, and a charger, the last a great barb that nickered, tossed head, stamped hoofs, ha, ha among the trumpets. “Quick, help me on with my outfit,” he ordered.

  “Do you really have to go, sir?” asked Jack Hall. “Damn risky, I reckon. Worse’n fightin’ Injuns.” He looked upward. Invisibly high, riders poised on their cycles and scanned the field through instruments that could count the drops of sweat on a man’s face. “Can’t they take out that hombre you’re after—quiet-like, you know, with a stun beam from above?”

  “Get cracking!” Everard snapped. “No, you idiot, we’re steering too bloody close to the wind as is.”

  Hall reddened and Everard realized he had been unfair. You couldn’t expect an instant grasp of crisis theory from an ordinary agent in place, hastily co-opted. This man was a cowboy till 1875, when the Patrol recruited him. Like the large majority of personnel, he worked in his own milieu, maintaining his original persona among the people who knew him. His secret self was a contact for such time travelers as came by, informant, guide, policeman, whatever they needed. If anything really untoward happened, he was to send for qualified help. It simply chanced that he d been taking a vacation in the Pleistocene, hunting game and girls, when Everard had been, and that he was good with horses.

  “Sorry,” Everard said, “but I am in a hurry. Action starts in less than half an hour.” Given the information he brought from Anagni, Patrolmen had “already” charted the fatally wrong course of the battle. Now he would seek to turn it back.

  Jean-Louis Broussard got busy. Meanwhile he explained, “You see, my friend, what we do is dangerous enough. An open miracle, that men witnessed, that is not chronicled in either history, ours or this misbegotten one—it would be a new factor, warping events still worse.” He was a more scholarly sort, born in the twenty-fourth century but operating in France of the tenth, not as an enforcer but as an observer. So much information perished when nobody at the time recorded it, or recorded it wrong, or when books moldered, burned, were mislaid. If the Patrol was to guard the time-stream, it must know what it guarded. As vital to it as its police agents were its field scientists.

  Like Wanda. “Hurry, God damn it!” Set her aside. Don’t remember her, don’t think about her, not now.

  Hall occupied himself with the stallion. “Well, but I’d say you’re too valuable a guy to throw into that fracas, sir,” he persisted. “Like puttin’ Robert E. Lee in the front lines.”

  Everard made no reply, save inside his skull. I demanded this. I pulled rank. Don’t ask me why, because I couldn’t quite tell you, but I’ve got to strike the blow myself.

  “We have our part, you and I,” Broussard reminded Hall. “We are the reserves, here on the ground, if things go badly.” He left unspoken the fact that in that case the causality vortex would probably have grown unredeemably great.

  Everard had slept in his shirt and pants. Over them went a quilted coat, plus a similar coif and spurred boots replacing shoes. The coat of mail slid smoothly down from head and shoulders to hang to his knees, divided from the crotch so he could ride. Supple, it felt less heavy than you might have expected; the weight was well distributed. A noseguarded spangenhelm was secured above. A sword belt, dagger on the right, completed the ensemble, which a Patrol workshop had produced to his specs. He hadn’t needed more than a little practice, for he’d long since made a point of acquiring as many combat techniques as possible.

  He put foot in stirrup and mounted. Ideally a warhorse was raised to its master from colthood. This, though, was a Patrol animal, more intelligent than is natural among equines. Broussard reached him his shield. He slipped his left arm through its straps before taking the reins in that hand. Heraldry had not yet developed, but individuals sometimes used symbols, and in a fit of forlornness he had painted on his a fabulous bird—a turkey. Hall offered him his lance. It too handled easier than its length suggested. He gave the men a thumbs-up and trotted off.

  Commotion was dwindling as squadrons formed. Borne by a squire, the banner of the younger Roger hung gaudy from a crossarm at the head of the army. He was to lead the first charge.

  Everard drew nigh, reined in, and lifted his lance in a kind of salute. “Hail, my lord,” he called. “The king bade me join you in the vanguard. My thought is that I might best ride on the outside at the left.”

  The duke nodded impatiently. Battle eagerness flamed in him, for his years numbered but nineteen though already he had won fame as a brilliant and gallant warrior. In the Patrol’s history, his death on another field, eleven years hence, without legitimate issue, would in the long run prove evil for the kingdom, because he was the ablest son of Roger II. But in this history, today was doomsday for the lithe and lively boy.

  “As you will, Manson,” he said. With a laugh: “That should keep things quiet there!” Commanders of later military would have been appalled at such sloppiness, but so far nobody in western Europe was long on organization or doctrine. The Norman cavalry was the best you’d find this side of the Byzantine Empire or the two Caliphates.

  As a matter of fact, it was the left flank that Lorenzo would hit. Everard cantered into position and studied his surroundings.

  Beyond the road, the enemy had likewise marshalled. Iron glinted, color splashed a mass of horses and men. Rainulf’s knights were fewer, about fifteen hundred, but close on their tails pressed foot that brought the numbers up to Roger’s or a little more—townsmen and peasants of Apulia, pikes and bills a walking forest, come to defend their homes against this invader who had laid other lands waste.

  Yeah, his own contemporaries think Roger’s too hard on rebels. But he’s only being like William the Conqueror, who tamed northern England by making a desert of it; and unlike William, when he’s at peace he governs justly,

  tolerantly, you could almost say mercifully…. Never

  mind fancy excuses. Magnanimous or monstrous, what he did in my history was establish the Regno, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and it outlived his dynasty and nation, in one form or another it lasted till the nineteenth century, when it became the core of the new Italian state, with everything that that was to mean to the world. I am at a pivotal point in time … But I’m glad I didn’t need to meet him before he’d crossed the mountains. I wouldn’t have slept well after watching him at work in Campania.

  As ever on the verge of combat, Everard lost dread. It wasn’t that he didn’t know fear; he merely grew too busy for it. Sight turned knife-edge keen, he heard each least sound through the racket as though it breathed alone at dead of night, every sense drew taut, but the slugging of his heart and the stench of his sweat faded from an awareness grown almost mathematical.

  “We’ll start in a minute,” he said low. The medallion under his armor, against his chest, picked up the Temporal and transmitted it aloft. Leaving it on continuously would soon exhaust the energy cell, but this day’s business wasn’t going to take long, whichever way it went. “Do you have Lorenzo in your optical?”

  “Two of us do,” vibrated through a bone-transference module built into the crystal structure of his helmet.

  “Keep locked onto him. I’ll want to know exactly where he is as we approach each other. Somebody warn me about anybody else, of course.”

  “Of course. Good hunting, sir.”

  Unspoken: May it indeed be good. May we save Roger the elder and the younger, and recall to reality all our loves and loyalties.

  Folks. Friends. Country. Career. Sure. But not Wanda.

  Duke Roger drew sword. The blade flared aloft. “Haro!” he shouted, and put spurs to horse.

  His followers raised a cry of their own. Hoofs drummed, then thundered, as trot went to canter went to gallop. Lances swayed to the rhythm. The distance narrowed and the shafts came down, horns of a single dra
gon.

  Wanda’s up in that future we mean to kill. She must be; she hasn’t come back. I couldn’t go search for her, none of us Could, our duty’s not to any single human being but to a universe of them. Maybe she died, maybe she got trapped, I’ll never know. When yonder future doesn’t exist, she won’t either. Her bravery and laughter will only be in the twentieth century when she grew up and the far past when she worked, and … I mustn’t go back to see her, ever again. From that last moment in the Ice Age, her world line will reach uptime and come to an end. It won’t unravel into the tracks of single atoms, this isn’t natural death and dissolution, it’s nothingness.

  Everard rammed the knowledge into the far back of his mind. He couldn’t afford it. Later, later, when he was alone, he’d let himself grieve, and perhaps weep.

  Dust clogged nostrils, stung eyes, blurred vision. He saw Rainulf’s ranks ahead as a blur. Muscles surged, saddle rocked.

  “Lorenzo is detaching twenty men on the right,” said the flat voice in his helmet. “They circle around.”

  Yes. The knight from Anagni and those few trusty comrades would hit Roger’s force on the left, punch through, cut down the duke, break up the assault as a hurled rock shatters glass. Dismay would fall on the Sicilians rearward. Regrouping, Lorenzo would take the lead in Rainulf’s countercharge, which would bring down the king.

  And no time traveler, no human blunder or madness or vaunting ambition brought this about. The fluctuation was in space-time-energy itself, a quantum leap, a senseless randomness. There was nobody on whom to avenge Wanda.

  She’s lost anyway. I have to believe that, if we’re to retrieve everybody else.

  “Beware, Agent Everard. Your size makes you conspicuous…. A knight has turned from Lorenzo’s band. He seems to be targeting you.”

  Damn! While I deal with that pest—

  I’ll just have to deal with him fast.

  “He is at ten-thirty o’clock from you.”

  Everard spied him, horse and lance. “Okay, Blackie, this way, let’s get ’im,” he growled to his mount. The animal answered his knees and plunged ahead. Everard glanced back, waved and shouted at Roger’s riders, couched shaft and braced himself.

  This wasn’t a tilting field, where gentlemen in plate rode at each other with a barrier between and intended nothing more than knocking the opposition to the ground. Tournaments like that lay centuries futureward. Here the aim was to kill.

  I haven’t spent my lifetime practicing the art. But I’ve picked up enough, and I’ve got the weight and this superb creature under me—Here goes.

  His horse veered ever so slightly. The point aimed for his throat shocked against his shield instead and glided off. Everard also missed a lethal strike but caught ring-mail and gave the impact all that was in his shoulders. The Italian went over, lost his right stirrup, fell. Foot caught in the left, he bounced behind his steed.

  The encounter had yanked at the attention of those Sicilians who rode near Everard. They saw the enemy detachment on its way. As one, they left the main force and followed the Patrolman. Hoofs crunched over the fallen warrior.

  Everard dropped his lance and drew sword. In a mixup at close quarters, he could do things he dared not in the open. He kept going, on into the dust toward the foe.

  ‘One o’clock,’ said the voice. He directed Blackie and after a moment made out Lorenzo’s pennon.

  He ought to know it. He’d eaten that man’s salt, flown his falcons, chased his deer, he’d yarned and sung, laughed and gotten drunk, gone to church and gone to festival with Lorenzo, heard out his dreams, pretended to tell his own, day after day and night after night, a year in the future of this meeting. Lorenzo shed tears when they parted and called him brother.

  The knights met.

  Men hewed and battered, horses pushed and reared. Men yelled, horses screamed. Iron crashed and rattled. Blood welled and spouted. Bodies went to earth, threshed for a moment, got trampled to red mush and splinters of bone. The melee churned about in dust as thick as smoke. Everard crammed on through it. The watchers above warned him of danger on either side, in time for him to raise shield or parry with blade. Then he’d be past, deeper into the violence.

  Lorenzo was before him. The young man had likewise abandoned his lance. He swept sword right and left. Blood drops whirled off the steel. “On, on!” he cried through the din. “St. George for Rainulf—for the Holy Father—”

  He saw Everard loom out of clouds and chaos. He didn’t know the giant, of course, he’d never met him, but he grinned gamely and urged his mount around to meet this challenger.

  Sportsmanship be damned. Everard pointed his weapon and squeezed in a finger-by-finger sequence. Invisibly, a stun beam sprang. Lorenzo’s jaw dropped. The sword left his grasp. He sagged forward.

  Somehow he didn’t fall from the saddle. He sprawled along the neck of his horse, which whinnied and skittered aside. Were the rider’s reflexes so good as to keep him there, even unconscious? In that case, he’d soon wake up, none the worse. He’d guess somebody had dealt him a blow from behind, hard enough to knock him out through the mail and quilting on his neck.

  Everard hoped so.

  No time for sentiment. “C’mon, Blackie, let’s get our ass out of here. Also the rest of us.” The tongue that croaked it was dry as a block of wood.

  The fight was breaking up anyhow. It had been a minor skirmish, unnoticed by most of Duke Roger’s and Rainulf’s troops. The Sicilians boomed onward, struck the enemy, scattered him, clove a path through the middle of his host.

  Everard rode off across a field where corpses sprawled and gaped, wounded men moaned, mutilated horses thrashed and shrieked. Most likely no one paid him any particular heed. Glancing back, he saw how Duke Roger pursued hundreds down the road to Siponto. He also saw how Rainulf rallied and regrouped his army, while King Roger’s stayed immobile.

  Mostly that vision was in his mind’s eye, from his knowledge of history—of how history was supposed to read. The actual sight was confusion, a mob scene, that ultimate absurdity which is war.

  A little distance away rose a tree-grown hillock. Once behind it, he was hidden from view. “All right,” he ordered through his medallion. “Come fetch me.”

  The sharpness still thrilled within him. While it lasted, he should go aloft and survey the battle as a whole, make sure that now events unrolled right.

  A vehicle blinked into his presence, large enough for the horse as well as its crew. Quickly, they got the animal stalled inboard. Everard praised him, stroked the wet, dirt-streaked mane, patted the velvety nose. “He’d like a sugar cube better,” said a short blond woman—she looked Finnish—and offered him one. She trembled in glee barely controlled. This day, she could believe, she had helped restore the world from which she came.

  The vehicle flicked into heaven. Sky surrounded it. Earth was dun land and quicksilver sea, far below. Everard sought an optical. He sat down before it, adjusted magnification, studied what happened. Seen thus, the death and pain, anger and glory became unreal, a puppet show, a chronicler’s paragraph.

  Gifted in many ways, the Norman cloth of him dyed in Oriental subtleties, King Roger was nonetheless no tactical genius. He owed his victories mainly to crack troops, ruthless determination, and frequent disarray among his opponents. At Rignano he waited too long, he lost the advantage that his son’s charge had gained him. When he did attack, his wave broke as if on a sea-cliff. Thereupon Rainulf threw his entire force against the Sicilians. The prince’s return was of no avail. Panic seized them and they stampeded, each for himself. Rainulf’s people hunted them down by ones and twos, without quarter. At day’s end, three thousand lay dead on the field. The two Rogers gathered a few survivors, fought their way clear, and escaped into the mountains, back to Salerno.

  But that was as it should be, as it had been in the Patrol’s world. The triumph would not long endure. Roger would collect fresh forces and win back what he had lost. Rainulf was to die of a fever in April 11
39. The mourning was great and futile. In July 1139, the two Rogers bushwhacked a papal army at Galuccio, whose noble leaders fled while thousands drowned trying to flee across the River Garigliano; and Pope Innocent became a prisoner of war.

  Oh, King Roger was very respectful. He knelt before the Holy Father and pledged allegiance. In return he received absolution and approval of all his claims. Little remained thereafter but mopping-up operations. In the end, even Abbot Bernard hailed the king as a righteous lord and relations grew downright affectionate. Further storms were to come, Roger’s conquests in Africa, the Second Crusade which he more or less sat out, his attempt on Constantinople, fresh conflicts with the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—but meanwhile he timbered strongly the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as he nurtured the growth of that hybrid civilization which presaged the Renaissance.

  Everard slumped in his seat. Weariness rose to overwhelm him. Victory tasted like the dust still in his mouth. Only let him sleep, let him for a little time forget what he had lost.

  “Looks okay,” he said. “Proceed to base.”

  1989 α A. D.

  Beyond the Mississippi, the first signs of white occupation appeared. They were outposts, thinly strewn across wilderness, little more than wooden forts connected by roads that might better be called trails. Trading posts, Tamberly guessed. Or did they mainly support missionaries? No stockade failed to enclose a building with a tower or steeple, usually surmounted by a cross and often the largest. She didn’t pause for closer observation. The radio silence hounded her onward.

  East of the Alleghenies she found real colonies. They took the form of walled towns surrounded by plowland and pasture laid out in long strips. Villages dotted the hinterlands, rows of cottages very like each other. A few boasted a sort of plaza that was probably a marketplace, centered on a tall crucifix or a structure somewhat like a Breton calvary. All had a chapel, and every town was dominated by its main church. Never did Tamberly see a farmstead by itself. The scenes reminded her of what she’d read and heard about the Middle Ages. Swallowing tears and terror, she leapfrogged on over the miles.