Where have I seen this kind of battle ax before?
A chill flew up and down his spine; Axes quite like it on the Bayeux Tapestry, carried by the English at Hastings.
The man growled what must be a string of questions. His language was as alien as the woman’s – no, not quite; it had a spooky half-familiarity, must be related to one Reid had heard in foreign movies or while serving his hitch in Europe. The man made a truculent jerk of his head back toward the coppery object.
Reid’s mouth was too parched for him to talk other than huskily: ‘Sorry. I… I’m a stranger here myself. Do you speak English? Parlez-vous français? ¿Habla usted español? Sprechen sie Deutsch?’ Those were the tongues in which he had a few phrases. They got no response.
However, the man seemed to understand that Reid too was a victim. He slapped his broad chest and said, ‘Oleg Vladimirovitch Novgorodna.’ After several repetitions, Reid caught the syllables.
It rocked him. ‘R-r-russki?’ he stammered. Again persistence was needed to get past the barriers of accent.
Oleg nodded. ‘Da, ya yest Novgorodni. Podvlastni Knyaza Yaroslava.’
Reid shook his head, baffled. ‘Sovietski?’ he ventured. Oleg tried to answer and gave up. Reid stooped past the woman, who had assumed a watchful crouch, and drew in the sand CCCP. He threw Oleg an inquiring lift of eyebrows. Everybody knew that much Cyrillic; it answered to USSR, and the Soviets claimed nearly one hundred percent literacy. But Oleg shrugged and flung his arms wide in a purely Slavic gesture.
The American rose. They peered at each other.
Oleg’s outfit had beer too strange for the human to show through until now. His helmet, conical and rising in a spike, sat atop a padded cloth coif on which, between rim and shoulders, were sewn small rings. The sleeveless hauberk was made of larger rings, interlocked, falling almost to the knees. It like-wise had a quilted undergarment, above a white linen shirt. That must be murderous here; the black iron was wet with the perspiration that ran off its wearer. At a brass-buckled belt were fastened a dagger and a leather purse. Trousers of coarse blue linen were tucked into gaily red and green boots. The gauntlets were leather too, strips of brass riveted on their backs.
The man looked thirtyish, about five feet seven or eight, tremendously wide and muscular. A slight paunch and jowliness didn’t lower the impression of bear strength. His head and face were round, snub-nosed, mustached, dense golden beard cropped under the jaw. Against the redness of a skin long exposed to weather, beneath shaggy yellow brows, his eyes were china blue.
‘You… seem to be… a decent guy,’ Reid said, knowing how foolish he was.
Oleg pointed at him, obviously demanding his name. The recollection of his chat with engineer Stockton – Christ almighty, half an hour ago in the middle of an ocean! – smote Reid like a physical blow. He staggered. The world spun around him. ‘Duncan,’ he mumbled.
‘Duncan!’ The woman leaped up and sprang to him. He leaned on her till things steadied. ‘Duncan,’ she crooned, half laughing, half crying, ‘ka ankhash Duncan.’
A shadow fell across them. Oleg bounced into battle posture. The horseman had joined their group. His bow was taut and his expression mean.
Somehow that rallied Reid. ‘Take it easy, friend,’ he said, uselessly except for the tone, the smile, the palms lifted in peace. ‘We’re not conspiring against you.’ He tapped his chest, gave his name, did likewise for Oleg. Before he could ask of the woman, whom he finally noticed was more than handsome, she said, ‘Erissa,’ like a challenge.
The mounted man considered them.
Neither he nor his steed was prepossessing. The pony was a mustang type – no, not with that blocky head; rather, it resembled the tarpan of central Asia – duncolored, shaggy, mane and tail braided, blue tassels woven in: an entire male, doubtless fast and tough but no show animal. It was unshod, its bridle of primitive design, saddle high-peaked fore and aft and short in the stirrups. From that saddle hung a full quiver, a lariat, a greasy felt bag, and a leather bottle.
The rider wore clumsy felt-soled shoes; full trousers of rough gray cloth, tied at the ankles, unbelievably dirty; a felt shirt which could be smelled ten feet off; a long leather coat, belted at the waist; and a round fur cap. For cutlery he had a knife and a kind of saber.
He was powerfully built but dwarfish, five feet three or so, bandy-legged, hairy except for the head. That was shaven, Reid learned afterward, leaving a single black tuft on top and behind either golden-ringed ear. The face was so hideously scarred that scant beard grew. Those cicatrices must have been made deliberately, since they formed looping patterns. Beneath them, the features were heavy, big hook nose and flaring nostrils, thick lips, high cheekbones, sloping forehead, slitted eyes. The skin was a weatherbeaten olive, the whole effect more Armenian or Turkish than Mongol.
Oleg had been rumbling in his whiskers. ‘Nye Pecheneg’ he decided, and snapped: ‘Polovtsi? Bolgarni?’
The rider took aim. Reid saw his bow was compound, of laminated horn, and remembered reading that a fifty-pound draw would send an arrow through most armor. ‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Easy!’ When the horseman glowered at him, he repeated the introductions; then, pointing to the shimmering cylinder, he acted out his bewilderment and motioned to include Oleg and Erissa.
The rider made up his mind to cooperate. ‘Uldin, chki ata Günchên,’ he said. ‘Uldin. Uldin.’ Stabbing a begrimed fingernail from one to the next, he Worked on their names till he had those straight. Finally he indicated himself again – all the while keeping his bow handy – and uttered a row of gutturals.
Oleg caught the idea first. He made the same gesture. ‘Oleg Vladimirovitch,’ he said. ‘Novgorodski.’ He pointed and questioned: ‘Duncan?’
Who are you? Not you personally; what people do you belong to? That must be it. ‘Duncan Reid. American.’ They were as bemused as everyone else was by Erissa’s ‘Keftiu.’
For her part, she seemed astonished and hurt that Reid was not more responsive to her. She slipped off to recover her knife. He recognized the metal as bronze. And the iron of yonder arrowhead was precisely that, wrought iron; and Oleg’s equipment was either plain iron too or low-carbon steel, and when you looked closely you saw that each ring, each rivet had been individually forged.
And at the end of a sentence, Uldin was saying of himself, ‘– Hun.’
He did not pronounce the word in Anglo-Saxon wise, but it rammed into Reid. ‘Hun?’ he gulped. Uldin nodded, with a wintry grin. ‘At – Attila?’ That drew blank; and, while Oleg tugged his beard and appeared to be searching his memory, the name clearly had no deep significance for him, and none for Erissa.
A Russian who felt his nationality was less important than the fact he hailed from Novgorod; a Hun to whom Attila meant nothing; a Keftiu, whatever that was, whose gaze lay with troubled adoration on … on an American, snatched from the North Pacific Ocean to a desert shore where nobody else had ever heard of America The answer began to break on Reid.
It couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be.
Because Erissa was nearest, he reached toward her. She took both his hands. He felt how she shivered.
She stood a bare three inches under him, which made her towering if she belonged to the Mediterranean race that her looks otherwise bespoke. She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and long-limbed, swan-necked, head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with a classically straight nose and a full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows and sooty lashes framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell past her shoulders; a white streak ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age as about equal to his.
But she walked like a girl, no, like a danseus
e, like a Danilova, a Fonteyn, a Tallchief, a leopard.
His smile wavered forth anew. She put aside both her trouble and her worship and smiled shyly in return.
‘Ah-hmph!’ Oleg said. Reid released Erissa, clasped hands with the Russian, and offered a shake to the Hun, who, after a second, accepted. He urged them by gestures to do the same among each other.
‘Fellowship,’ he declaimed, because any human sound was good in this wasteland. ‘We’re caught in some unbelievable accident, we want home again, okay, we stick together. Right?’
He looked at the cylinder. A minute passed while he mustered courage. The wind blew, his heart knocked. ‘That thing brought us,’ he said, and started toward it.
They hesitated. He waved them to come along. Erissa soared in his direction. He made her follow behind. Oleg muttered what was probably a curse and joined her. He seemed about ready to collapse in a pool of sweat. Uldin advanced too, but further back. Reid guessed the Hun was a pro, more interested in being able to cover a wide field with his archery than in heroics. Not that Oleg was equipped for anything but close-in fighting.
Beneath Reid’s shoes, dirt and gravel scrunched. His topcoat was smothering him. He took it off and, thinking about possible sunstroke, draped it on his head for a crude burnoose. The hollow-voiced wind tried to blow it away. Behind the cylindroid, barrenness reached on, and on, and on, till horizon met sky in a vague blur of mirages and dust devils. The cylindroid was almost as hard to make out, within the shifting mother-of-pearl light-mist that enveloped it.
That’s a machine, though, he compelled himself to understand. And I, the only child here of a machine age, I am the only one who has a chance to deal with it.
How big a chance?
Bitsy. Pam. Mark. Tom. Dad. Mother. Sisters, brothers. Phil Meyer and our partnership. Seattle, the Sound, the Straits, the wooded islands, the mountains behind; Vancouver; funny old Victoria; the Golden Gate Bridge, upward leap of walls from the Rotterdam waterfront, Salisbury Cathedral, half-timbered steep-gabled delight of Riquewihr, a thatch-roofed hut in a Hokusai print and those homes you were going to build; why does a man never know how much there was in his world before he stands at the doors of death?
Pam, Pamela, Pamlet as I called you for a while, will you remember that underneath everything I loved you?
Is that true, or am I just posturing for myself?
No matter. I’m almost at the machine.
The time machine?
Nonsense. A bilgeful of crap. Physical, mathematical, logical impossibility. I proved it once, for a term paper in the philosophy of science.
I, who recall well how it felt to be that confidently analytical twenty-year-old, now know how it feels to be marooned without warning in a grisly desert, nearing a machine like none I had imagined, at my back a medieval Russian and a Hun from before Attila and a woman from no place or age bespoken in any of the books I read when I might have been being kind to Pamela.
Abruptly the iridescence whirled, became a maelstrom, focused its shiningness upon a single point of the metal thing. That point grew outward, opened as a circle, gave onto a dusk-purple space within where twinkled starry sparks of light. A man came forth.
Reid had an instant to see him. He was small, compactly built, mahogany in hue, hair a cap of black velvet, features broad but finely molded. He wore a prismatic white robe and transparent boots. In his hands he bore twin two-foot hemispheres of bright metal upon which were several tiny studs, plates, and switches.
He walked uncertainly, he looked very ill, and his garb was discolored by vomit stains.
Reid halted. ‘Sir—’ he began, making the sign of peace.
The man reeled and fell. Blood ran from his mouth and nostrils. The dust quickly drank it. Behind him, the portal closed.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘My God! If the pilot’s dead!’ Down on his knees, Reid felt across the still body. The rib cage moved, though with unhealthy rapidity and shallowness. The skin was hotter than the desert beneath.
Erissa joined him. Her face had gone utterly intent. Murmuring to herself what sounded like an invocation, she examined the dark man with unmistakable skill: peeling back a lid to study the pupil, timing his pulse against her rhythmic chant, pulling the robe around his shoulders and cutting off the form-fitting undergarment to check for broken bones or flesh injuries. The hale men waited anxiously. She rose, glanced about, pointed toward a ravine.
‘Yeah, get him out of the sun,’ Reid interpreted. ‘Us too.’ He remembered he was not among English speakers. But they caught the idea. Oleg gave Erissa his ax, took the pilot, and bore him easily off. She pulled an amulet from below her tunic, a gold miniature suspended on a thong around her neck, and touched it to the weapon before carrying that with some reverence after the Russian.
Reid tried to study the cylindroid. At a distance of a few feet, where the nacreous flickering began, he was stopped. It was like walking into an invisible rubber sheet, that yielded at first but increased resistance inch by inch. Protective force field, he thought. Not an overwhelming surprise in the present context. Better stay clear – possible radiation hazard – m-m, probably not, since the pilot – but how do we get in?
We don’t, without him.
Reid collected the hemispheres. Their hollow interiors were more elaborate than the exterior shells. The only comprehensible features were triads of crisscrossing bands, suggestive of helmet liner suspensions. Were these, then, communication devices to be worn on the head? He carried them along to the gulch. On the way, he noticed the pipe that had fallen from his mouth and retrieved it. Even on doomsday, you find trivia to take care of.
Steep-sided, the ravine gave shelter from the wind and a few patches of shade. Oleg had stretched the pilot – as Reid thought of the unconscious man – in the largest of these. It was inadequate. Reid and Erissa worked together, cutting sticks and propping them erect to support an awning made of his topcoat. Oleg shed armor and pads, heaving a gigantic sigh of relief. Uldin took the harness off his horse, tethered it to a grass tuft above the gulch, and covered the beast as well as he could with the unfolded saddle blanket. He brought bag and bottle down and shared the contents. Nobody had appetite for the dried meat in the first; but sour and alcoholic though it was, the milky liquid in the second proved a lifesaver.
Then they could do nothing but squat in their separate bits of shadow and endure. Erissa went often to check on the pilot. Oleg and Uldin climbed the crumbly bank by turns, peered through a full circle, and returned shaking their heads. Reid sat amidst thoughts that he never quite recalled later except for his awareness of Erissa’s eyes dwelling on him.
Whatever was happening, he could no longer pretend he’d soon awaken from it.
The sun trudged westward. Shadows in the ravine stretched and flowed together. The four who waited lifted faces streaked with dust and sweat-salt, reddened eyes and cracked gummy lips, toward the first faint balm of coolness.
The pilot stirred and called out. They ran to him.
He threshed his limbs and struggled to sit. Erissa tried to make him lie down. He would not. ‘Mentatór,’ he kept gasping, and more words in a language that sounded faintly Hispanic but was softer. He retched. His nosebleed broke out afresh. Erissa stanched it with a piece torn off a handkerchief Reid had given her. She signed Oleg to uphold him in a reclining posture and herself helped him drink a little of the stuff Uldin called kumiss.
‘Wait a minute.’ Reid trotted back to where he had huddled and fetched the hemispheres. The pilot nodded with a weak vehemence that made Erissa frown, and reached shakily for them. When Reid hunkered to assist him, she stepped aside, clearly setting the American’s judgment above her own.
Damn if I know whether I’m doing right, he thought. This guy looks barely alive, on fire with fever, shouldn’t be put to any strain. But if he can’t get back into his machine, we may all be finished.
The pilot made fumbling adjustments to the devices. He put one on his head
. The shining metal curve turned his sunken-eyed, blood-crusted, dirt-smudged countenance doubly ghastly. He leaned back on Oleg’s breast and signed Reid to don the second helmet. The American obeyed. The pilot had barely strength to reach and press a stud on his. It was the most prominent, directly over his brow. The hand fell into his lap; but fingers fluttered at Reid.
The architect rallied what guts he had left. Be ready for anything, he told himself, and tough it out, son, tough it out. He pushed the control.
A humming grew. The noise must be inside his skull, for none of the others heard; and somehow it didn’t feel physical, not like anything carried along the nerves. He grew dizzy and sat down. But that might be only from tension, on top of these past dreadful hours.
The pilot was in worse case. He twitched, whimpered, closed his eyes and sagged bonelessly. It was as if his machine were a vampire draining his last life. Erissa ventured to kneel by him, though not to interrupt.
After what Reid’s watch said was about five minutes, the humming faded out. The depressed studs popped up. The giddiness passed away. Presumably the helmets had finished their job. The pilot lay half conscious. When Reid took off his headpiece, Erissa removed that of her patient and laid him flat. She stayed beside him, listened to the struggling breath and watched the uncertain pulse in his throat.
Finally he opened his eyes. He whispered. Erissa brought her ear close, frowned, and waved at Reid. He didn’t know what he could do, but joined her anyway. The pilot’s dim glance fell upon him and remained there.
‘Who … are you?’ rattled from the parched mouth. ‘Where, when… are you from?’
American English!
‘Quick,’ pleaded the voice. ‘Haven’t… got long. For your sake too. You know… mentatór? This device?’
The Dancer from Atlantis Page 3