He ate a good though lonely dinner, and in his luxurious though lonely chamber took a sleeping pill. He needed to be rested before he embarked.
Constantinople, late afternoon on the thirteenth of April, 1204. Havig emerged in an alley downhill from his destination. Silence pressed upon him-no slap of buskins, clop of hoofs, rumble and squeal of cartwheels, no song of bells, no voices talking, chattering, laughing, dreaming aloud, no children at their immemorial small games. But the stillness had background, a distant jagged roar which was fire and human shrieking, the nearer desperate bark of a dog.
He made ready. The gun, a 9-mm Smith & Wesson mule-killer, he holstered at his waist. Extra ammunition he put in the deep pockets of his jacket. Kit and chronolog he strapped together in an aluminum packframe which went on his back.
Entering the street, he saw closed doors, shuttered windows. Most dwellers were huddled inside, hungry, thirsty, endlessly at prayer. The average place wasn’t worth breaking into, except for the pleasures of rape, murder, torture, and arson. True, this was the district of the goldsmiths. But not every building, or even a majority, belonged to one. Residential sections were not based on economic status; the poor could be anywhere. With booths and other displays removed, you couldn’t tell if a particular façade concealed wealth or a tenement house--until, of course, you clapped hands on a local person and wrenched the information out of him.
Evidently those who rushed the Manasses home were in advance of the mobs which would surely boil hither as soon as palace and church buildings were stripped. Were they here yet? Havig hadn’t been sure of the exact time when he saw them.
He trotted around a corner. A man lay dead of a stab wound. His right arm reached across his back, pulled from its socket. A shabby-clad woman crouched above him. As Havig passed, she screamed: “Wasn’t it enough that you made him betray our neighbor? In Christ’s name, wasn’t that enough?”
No, he thought. There was also the peculiar thrill in extinguishing a life.
He went on by. The agony he had seen earlier returned to him in so monstrous a flood that the tears of this widow were lost. He could do nothing for her; trousers, short hair, shaven chin marked him a Frank in her eyes. When he was born, she and her grief were seven hundred years forgotten.
At least, he thought, he knew how the Crusaders had located Doukas’s shop. One among them must understand some Greek, and their band had decided to seek out this part of town ahead of the rush. He knew also that his scheduling was approximately right.
Yells, clangor, and a terrible stammer reverberated wall to wall, off the cobbles, up to soot-befouled heaven. He stretched lips over teeth. “Yeah,” he muttered, “I got it exactly right.”
He quickened his pace. His younger self would be gone by the time he arrived. Obvious: he had not seen his later self. He didn’t want that house unwatched for many minutes.
Not after considering what sort of man the average Eyrie warrior was.
The street of his goal was steep. Gravity dragged at him. He threw his muscles against it. His bootsoles thudded like his heart. His mouth was dry. Smoke stung his nostrils.
There!
One of the wounded Crusaders saw him, struggled to his knees, raised arms. Blood shone its wild red, hiding the cross on the surcoat, dripping in thick gouts to the stones. “Ami,” croaked from a face contorted out of shape, on whose waxen-ness the beard stubble stood blue. “Frère par lesu-” The other survivor could merely groan, over and over.
Havig felt an impulse to kick their teeth in, and immediate shame. Mortal combat corrupts, and war corrupts absolutely. He ignored the kneeling man, who slumped behind him; he lifted both hands and shouted in English:
“Hold your fire! I am from the Eyrie! Inspection! Hold your fire and let me in!” Not without a tightness in his own unriddled guts, he approached the doorway.
An oxcart stood by, the animal tethered to a bracket which had formerly upheld Doukas’s sign, twitching its ears against flies and with mild interest watching the Crusaders die. It would have been arranged for beforehand, to bring gold and silver and precious stones, ikons and ornaments and bridal chaplets, down to the ship which waited. Havig wasn’t the only traveler who had been busy in the years before today. An operation like this took a great deal of work.
Nobody guarded the entrance. Armed as they were, the agents could deal with interference, not that any such attempt would be made. Havig stopped. Scowling, he examined the door. It was massive, and had surely been barred. The Franks had doubtless meant to chop their way in. But at the point when Havig glimpsed them and halted for a clear look, it had stood open. That was one fact which had never stopped plaguing him.
From the way it sagged on its hinges, scorched and half splintered, Wallis’s boys must have used a dynamite charge. That had been done so quickly that, in Havig’s dim chronokinetic sight, their arrival had blurred together with that of the Franks a few minutes afterward.
Why had they forced an entrance? Such impatience would panic the household, complicate the task of assisting it to safety.
A scream fled down the rooms inside: “No, oh, no, please!” in Greek and Xenia’s voice, followed by an oath and a guffaw. Havig crouched back as if stabbed.
In spite of everything, he had come late. At the moment of his arrival, the agents had already blown down the door and entered. They’d posted a man here to await the plunderers whom Havig had reported. Now he’d gone back within to join the fun.
For an instant which had no end, Havig cursed his own stupidity. Or naïveté-he was new to this kind of thing, bound to overlook essentials. To hell with that. Here he was and now he was, and his duty was to save whatever might be left.
His call must not have been noticed. He repeated it while he went through the remembered house. That sobbed-out cry for mercy had come from the largest chamber, which was the main workshop and storeroom.
Family, apprentices, and servants had been brought together there. It was more light and airy than usual in Byzantium, for a door and broad windows opened on the patio. Yonder the fountain still tinkled and twinkled, oranges glowed amid darkgreen leaves, Eastertide flowerbeds were budding, the bust of Constantine stood in eternal embarrassment. Here, on shelves and tables, everywhere crowded that beauty which Doukas Manasses had seen to the making of.
He sprawled near the entrance. His skull was split open. The blood had spread far, making the floor slippery, staining footwear which then left crimson tracks. But much had soaked into his robe and white beard. One hand still held a tiny anvil, with which he must have tried to defend his women.
Four agents were present, dressed as Crusaders. In a flash, Havig knew them. Mendoza, of the Tijuana underworld in his own century, who had been among those who went to Jerusalem, was in charge. He was ordering the natives to start collecting loot. Moriarty, nineteenth-century Brooklyn gangster, kept guard, submachine gun at the ready. Hans, sixteenth-century Landsknecht, watched Coenraad of Brabant, who had wanted to draw sword and save the Savior, struggle with Xenia.
The girl screamed and screamed. She was only fourteen. Her hair had fallen loose. Sweat and tears plastered locks to her face. Coenraad grasped her around the waist. His free hand ripped at her gown. A war hammer, stuck in his belt, dripped blood and brains.
“Me next,” Hans grinned. “Me next.”
Coenraad bore Xenia down to the wet floor and fumbled with his trousers. Anna, who had stood as if blind and deaf near the body of her husband, wailed. She scuttled toward her daughter. Hans decked her with a single blow. “Maybe you later,” he said.
“Hard men, you two,” Moriarty laughed. “Real hard, hey?”
The sequence had taken seconds. Havig’s call had again failed to pierce their excitement. Mendoza was first to see him, and exclaim. The rest froze, until Coenraad let Xenia go and climbed to his feet.
She stared up. Never had he thought to see such a light as was born in her eyes. “Hauk!” She cried. “Oh, Hauk!”
Mendoza swung his gun around. “What is this?” he demanded.
Havig realized how far his own hand was from his own weapon. But he felt no fear--hardly any emotion, in fact, on the surface, beyond a cougar alertness. Down underneath roiled the fury, sorrow, horror, disgust he could not now afford.
“I might ask you the same,” he replied slowly.
“Have you forgotten your orders? I know them. Your job is to gather intelligence. You are not to risk yourself at a scene of operations like this.”
“I finished my job, Mendoza. I came back for a personal look.”
“Forbidden! Get out, and we’ll talk later about whether or not I report you.”
“Suppose I don’t?” Despite control, Havig heard his voice rise, high and saw-edged: “I’ve seen what I wasn’t supposed to see in one lump, only piece by piece, gradually, so I’d make the dirty little compromises till it no longer mattered, I’d be in so deep that I’d either have to kill myself or become like you. Yes, I understand.”
Mendoza’s shrug did not move the tommygun barrel aimed at Havig’s stomach. “Well? What do you expect? We use what human material we can find. These boys are no worse than the Crusaders--than man in most of history. Are they, Jack? Be honest.”
“They are. Because they have the power to come into any time, any place, do anything, and never fear revenge. How do they spend their holidays, I wonder? I imagine the taste for giving pain and death must grow with practice.”
“Listen--”
“And Wallis, his whole damned outfit, doesn’t even try to control them!”
“Havig, you talk too much. Get out before I arrest you.”
“They keep the few like me from knowing, till we’ve accepted that crock--about how the mission of the Eyrie is too important for us to waste lifespan on enforcing common humanity. Right?”
Mendoza spat. “Hokay, boy, you said plenty and then some. You’re under arrest. You’ll be escorted uptime and the Sachem will judge your case. Be good and maybe you’ll get off easy.”
For a moment it was tableau, very quiet save for Xenia’s sobs where she cradled the head of her half-conscious mother. Her eyes never left Havig. Nor did those of the household he had known--hopeful young Bardas, gifted Ioannes, old Maria who had been Xenia’s nurse, all and all of the dozen--nor those of Mendoza and Moriarty. Hans’s kept flickering in animal wariness, Coenraad’s in thwarted lechery.
Havig reached his decision, made his plan, noted the position of each man and weapon, in that single hard-held breath.
Himself appeared, six-fold throughout the room. The fire-fight exploded.
He cast himself back in time a few minutes while sidestepping, sped uptime while he drew his pistol, emerged by Hans. The gun cracked and kicked. The Landsknecht’s head geysered into pieces. Havig went back again, and across the chamber.
Afterward he scarcely remembered what happened. The battle was too short, too ferocious. Others could do what he did, against him. Coenraad wasn’t quick-witted enough, and died. Moriarty vanished from Havig’s sight as the latter arrived. Mendoza’s gun blasted, and Havig sprang future-ward barely in time. Traveling, he saw Moriarty’s shadow form appear. He backtracked, was there at the instant, shot the man and twisted off into time, away from Mendoza.
Then the Mexican wasn’t present. Havig slipped pastward--a night when the family slept at peace under God--to gasp air and let the sweat stop spurting, the limbs stop shaking. At last he felt able to return and scan the period of combat in detail. Beyond a certain point, not long after the beginning, he found no Mendoza.
The fellow must have gone way uptime, maybe to the far side of the Judgment, for help.
This meant fast action was vital. Havig’s friends could not time-hop. The enemy would be, no, were handicapped by the difficulty of reaching a precise goal without a chronolog. But they could cast around, and wouldn’t miss by much.
Havig rejoined Earth at the earliest possible second. Moriarty threshed about, yammering anguish, like those men outside whom he, perhaps, had been the one to shoot. Never mind him. The Byzantines huddled together. Bardas lay dead, two others wounded in crossfire.
“I come to save you,” Havig said into the reek of powder and fear, into their uncomprehending glazed-eye shock. He drew the sign of the cross, right to left in Orthodox style. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. In the name of the Virgin Mary and every saint. Come with me, at once, or you die.”
He helped Xenia rise. She clung to him, face buried against his breast, fingers clutching. He rumpled the long black hair and remembered how he a child would grasp at a father bound for death. Across her shoulder he snapped: “Ioannes, Nicephorus, you look in the best shape. Carry your lady Anna. The rest of you who’re hale, give aid to the hurt.” English broke from him: “Goddammit, we’ve got to get out of here!”
Numbly, they obeyed. In the street he stopped to don the surcoat off a dead Crusader. His pack he gave a man to carry. From another corpse he took a sword. He didn’t waste time unbuckling the scabbard belt. That weapon indicated a high enough rank that his party wasn’t likely to meet interference.
Several streets down, dizziness overwhelmed him. He must sit, head between knees, till strength returned. Xenia knelt before him, hands anxiously trying to help. “Hauk,” went her raw whisper. “Wh-wh-what’s wrong, dearest Hauk?”
“We’re safe,” he finally said.
From the immediate threat, at least. He didn’t suppose the Eyrie would spend man-years scouring Constantinople for him and these, once they had vanished into the multitudes. But he had still to safeguard their tomorrows, and his own. The knowledge gave him a glacial kind of resolution. He rose and led them further on their stumbling way.
“I left them at a certain monastery,” he told me (long afterward on his own world line). “The place was jammed with refugees, but I foreknew it’d escape attention. In the course of the next several days, local time, I made better arrangements. A simple task--” he grimaced--”distasteful but simple, to hijack unidentifiable loot from ordinary Franks. I made presents to that monastery, and to the nunnery where I later took the women. This won favor for the people I’d brought, special favor out of the hordes, because with my donations the monks and nuns could buy bread to feed their poor.”
“What about the hordes?” I asked softly.
He covered his face. “What could I do? They were too many.”
I gripped his shoulder. “They are always too many, Jack.”
He sighed and smiled a little. “Thanks, Doc.”
I had exceeded my day’s tobacco ration, but the hour was far into night and my nerves required some help. Drawing out my pipe, I made an evil-smelling ceremony of cleaning it. “What’d you do next?”
“Went back to the twentieth century--a different hotel--and slept a lot,” he said. “Afterward ... well, as for my Byzantines, I could do nothing in their immediate futures. I’d cautioned them against talking, told them to say they’d just fled from a raid. After a ‘saint’ had rescued them from ‘demons,’ it was a safe bet they’d obey. But as fail-safe, I did not tell the men where I led the women.
“Further than that, no transportation being available, and me not wanting to do anything which might make them noticeable, my best tactic was to leave them alone. The organized institutions where they were could care for them better than I’d know how.
“Besides, I had to provide for my own survival.”
I reamed the pipe with needless force. “Yes, indeed,” I said. “What did you do?”
He sipped his drink. While he dared not blur mind or senses, the occasional taste of Scotch was soothing. “I knew the last date on which I had publicly been J. F. Havig,” he told me. “At the start of my furlough, in 1965, in conference with a broker of mine. True, there had been later appearances in normal time, like my 1969 trip to Israel, but those were brief. Nineteen sixty-five marked the end of what real continuity there
was in my official persona. Everything was in order, the broker told me. I didn’t see how so complicated a financial and identity setup could be faked. Thus my existence was safe up to that point.”
“The Eyrie couldn’t strike at you earlier? Why not?”
“Oh, they could appear at a previous moment and lay a trap of some kind, no doubt. But it couldn’t be sprung till later. On the whole, I doubted they’d even try that. None of them really know their way around the twentieth century, its upper echelons in particular, as I do.”
“You mean, an event once recorded is unalterable?”
Now his smile chilled me. “I suspect all events are,” he said. “I do know a traveler cannot generate contradictions. I’ve tried. So have others, including Wallis himself. Let me give you a single, personal example. Once in young manhood I thought I’d go back downtime, break my ‘uncle’s’ prohibition, reveal to my father what I was and warn him against enlisting.”
“And?” I breathed.
“Doc, remember that broken leg of mine you treated?”
“Yes. Wait! That was--”
“Uh-huh. I tripped on an electric cord somebody had carelessly left at the top of some stairs, the personal-time day before I planned to set out. . . . When I was well and ready to start afresh, I got an urgent call from my trust company and had to argue over assorted tedious details. Returning to Senlac, I found my mother had made her final break with Birkelund and needed my presence. I looked at those two innocent babies he and she had brought into this world, and got the message.”
“does God intervene, do you think?”
“No, no, no. I suppose it’s simply a logical impossibility to change the past, same as it’s logically impossible for a uniformly colored spot to be both red and green. And every instant in time is the past of infinitely many other instants. That figures.
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