The Corridors of Time (11 page)

The tube glowed and trembled in his grasp. Other Yuthoaz joined the first and plowed through grass and briars, on to do battle.
Lockridge threw Withucar’s as. The lead man dodged and barked laughter. His followers rioted behind him.

The earth moved.

Auri waited, went to her knees, and clutched Lockridge’s waist. The Yuthoaz stopped cold. After an instant, they scampered
with yells into the thicket below. There they halted. Glimpsewise through leaves, Lockridge saw them in their confusion. He
heard their captain bay, ‘The god swore we couldn’t be hurt by any magic! Come on, you sons of rabbits!’

The downramp shone white. The Yuthoaz advanced again. Auri couldn’t be left here. Lockridge seized the girl’s arm and flung
her into the entrance.

The leader was almost upon him. He tumbled through the
hole, fell flat, and twisted the controls. The hovering plug of earth moved down, blotted out the sky, hissed into place.

Silence closed like fingers.

Auri broke it in a shriek that rose swiftly toward hysteria. Lockridge collected himself and slapped her. She sat where she
was, dumbstricken, staring at him with eyes from which humanity was gone.

‘I’m sorry,’ Lockridge said. And he was as he watched the red blotch appear on her cheek. ‘But you must not run wild. We are
safe now.’

‘W-w-w-w —’ She fought for breath. Her gaze dashed back and forth around the icily lit walls that enclosed her; she groveled
on the floor and whimpered, ‘We are in the House of the Old Dead.’

Lockridge shook her and snapped, ‘There is nothing to fear. They have no power against me. Believe!’

He had not expected will to mount so fast in her. She drank several sobs, her body stiffened and shaking, but after a minute
of regarding him she said, ‘I believe you, Lynx,’ and the craziness departed.

That gave him back his own strength, together with a bleak alertness. ‘I did not mean for you to come here,’ he said, ‘but
we had no choice if you were not to be caught. Now you will see strange things. Do not let them frighten you.’ A satiric part
recalled how Storm had given him much the same advice. Had he indeed come to accept this eldritch world of passage between
the ages so soon? His home century seemed a half-forgotten dream.

But that was doubtless because of present urgency. ‘We have to move,’ he said. ‘The Yuthoaz cannot follow us in here, but
they will tell their master, and he can. Or we may meet – well, never mind.’ If they, unarmed, encountered Rangers in the
corridor, that was the end of the affair. ‘This way.’

She followed him mutely, down to the foreroom. The auroral curtain in the gate drew a gasp from her, and she held his hand
with a child’s tightness. He rummaged through the locker but found nothing except outfits appropriate to this milieu. Time
travelers must carry their own advanced gear. Damn!

It was a gruesome effort to step through the gate, when anything might lie beyond. But the corridor stretched in humming whiteness,
empty as far as he could see. He let the wind out of his chest and collapsed weakly onto the gravity sled.

They couldn’t linger, though. At any moment, someone might enter through some other gate and spy them. (Just what did that
mean, here in this time which ran outside of time? He’d think about it later.) Moving his hands experimentally to cover the
control lights, he found how to operate the vehicle and sent it gliding futureward.

Auri sat close beside him. She clutched the bench hard, but panic was gone and she even showed a trace of bright-eyed curiosity.
There was less amazement in her than he had felt. But then, to her all these wonders were equally wonderful, and, in fact,
no more mysterious than rain, wind, birth, death, and the wheel of the seasons.

‘So what to do?’ Lockridge puzzled aloud. ‘I could go on to 1964, and we might just try to disappear. But I don’t reckon that’d
work. Too damn many Rangers there, and too damn easy for ’em to trace a man, especially when you’d make us sort of conspicuous,
kid. And if Storm herself couldn’t make contact with any Wardens then, I sure can’t.’ He realized he had spoken in English.
Doubtless Auri took his words for an incantation.

What had Storm told him?

Instantly, overwhelmingly, he was back in the prison hut, and she was with him, and his mouth knew her kiss. For a while he
forgot everything else.

Sense came back. The corridor encompassed him with blind radiance, with hollowness and strangeness. Storm was far away – centuries
away. But he could return to her. And would, by heaven!

Might he dash clear up to her age? No. This shaft didn’t reach that far. And too risky, in any event. The sooner they got
out and vanished in the world, the better. But she had
spoken of a Herr Jesper Fledelius, in Viborg of the Reformation era. Yes, his best bet. And, too, a feeling of destiny still
drove him.

He slowed the sled and paid attention to the gate markers. He couldn’t read their alphabet, but Arabic numerals were recognizable.
Pretty clearly, years were counted from the ‘lower’ end of the passage. So, if 1827
B.C.
equalled 1175—

When the numbers 45 — appeared, he stopped the sled and sent it back. Auri waited while he forced himself to study the layout
and think. Blast that uncertainty factor! He wanted to come out a few days in advance of All Hallows, to allow time to reach
Viborg, but not so far in advance that Brann’s hounds could get on his track.

As best he could, he selected a line in the set corresponding to Anno Domini 1535. Auri linked fingers with him and followed
him trustingly through the curtain.

Again the long, still room, and the locker. But the clothes stored here were something else from the Neolithic. A variety
of costumes was available, peasant, gentleman, priest, soldier, and more. He didn’t know which was best. What the hell had
gone on in Denmark of the sixteenth century? Hell indeed, if the time war were involved.

Well, here was a purse of gold, silver, and copper money – Auri exclaimed at the sight of all that metal – and cash was always
useful. But a lower-class person who carried so much would be suspected of robbery. Thus Lockridge chose what he imagined
was a prosperous man’s traveling garb: linen underclothes and shirt, satin doublet, crimson trunk hose, high boots, floppy-brimmed
cap, blue cloak trimmed with fur, sword and knife (the latter doubtless mainly for eating purposes), and miscellaneous gear
that he could only guess about. Diaglossas, of course, for him and Auri; and then he knew that there were so many wigs because
men today wore their hair long. He donned a yellow one. It seemed briefly to writhe, as if alive, and settled onto his head
with a firmness that gave a perfect illusion of nature.

Auri stripped off her skirt and ornaments, innocent beneath
his eyes, and fumbled with the long gray gown and hooded cloak he picked for her. ‘The seafarers from the South do not dress
more queerly than those who dwell below the earth,’ she said.

‘We are bound up again,’ Lockridge told her. ‘Into a very different land. Now, this thing I have put in your ear will guide
you in speech and behavior. But best hold yourself as meek and quiet as you can. Let me take the lead. We will tell people
you are my wife.’

She frowned, turning the implications over in her head. Her sense of wonder was stunned, she accepted everything as it came
to her, though she kept a fox’s alertness: an attitude that, Zen masters might envy. But the Danish word
hustru
held a universe of concepts about the relationship between the sexes that the Yuthoaz would have taken for granted but that
were new to her.

Abruptly she flushed. Her passivity vanished in joy, she threw her arms about him and cried: ‘Then the curse is gone? Oh,
Lynx, I am yours!’

‘Whoa, there. Whoa!’ He fended her off. His own ears burned. ‘Not so fast. The month, uh, won’t be spring here.’

Nor was it. When they emerged on the moundside and closed the door, he found night again – a cold, autumnal night where the
half moon flew between ragged clouds and the wind whined in sere grasses. Naked and empty stood the dolmen above. The forest
where once the Goddess walked was gone; only a few scrubby elms swayed in the north. Beyond them, bone-white, gleamed encroaching
sand dunes that the future had yet to drive back.

But there had been cultivation around the hillock. Had been. Traces of furrows remained among weeds, and the clay chimney
of a burned cottage reared jagged on the southern ridge. War had passed through these parts, less than a year ago.

In awe, the Neolithic girl asked, ‘Is the Knossos they tell of as great as that?’

Despite weariness and unease, Lockridge had to grin. To his eyes, sixteenth-century Viborg was like the crossroads town where
his parents used to shop. Much prettier, though, especially after two days of heathland. And it promised snugness, now when
the last sunlight speared through rainclouds rising blue-black on a wind that flapped his cloak and whistled of winter.

Past the lake, he glimpsed through an oak grove (the beeches had still not driven the kind tree out of Denmark) the warm brick
hue of an abandoned monastery. Hard by, the city walls retained some green in the grass that covered their lower embankments.
The same tinge was given by moss to such of the high-peaked thatch roofs as he could see. Spare and graceful, the cathedral’s
twin towers reached for heaven.

‘I think Knossos may be a little bigger,’ he said.

His smile faded. Thirty-three hundred years, he thought, and every hope which had then blossomed so brightly was dust, not
even remembered. And other hopes had sprung, and died, until today —

The diaglossa gave basic information but was silent about historical events. So had it been in Auri’s age and, he suspected,
in every year of earth’s existence on which a time gate opened. He had a guess at the reason. Rangers and Wardens recruited
native auxiliaries; but who could remain steady if he knew what must befall his people?

Denmark lay in evil days. He and Auri had kept to the lesser roads, little more than cartwheel tracks that wound through forest
and heather; they lived off rations from the supply bundle and slept out, wrapped together in their cloaks, when exhaustion
forced a halt more than darkness did. But they saw farmsteads and folk; they stopped to drink at wells;
and though every peasant was sullen, frightened, short-spoken, one was bound to learn a few things. A song was in the land
:

‘All the small birds that are in the woods,

Complain of the hawk the sorest:

He rips from off them both plumes and down,

He’d hunt them out of the forest.

Off then flew the eagle old,

All with his children too;

The other small birds, they grew then wild,

They knew never what to do —’

Four hundred years hence lay the happy country Lockridge had seen. That was cold comfort, on this gray cold evening. How long
would its moment be?

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We’d best hurry. They close the gates at sunset.’

He led the way by the lakeside, till the path joined the highroad. According to the boy who had opened a little toward him,
even sung him the ballad (which was of the great noblemen, loosened upon the common folk now that King Kristiern. II who had
been their friend lay captive in Sonderborg Castle), tomorrow was the Eve of All Hallows. His timing had been close; he wanted
to get settled in town and acquire some feel of things before seeking out Jesper Fledelius.

The highway was also dirt, muddy and deeply rutted. No traffic moved on it. North Jutland was still a ghostly country after
last year’s revolt, broken by the cannon of Johan Rantzau. The wind shrilled through leafless branches.

Half a dozen men stood guard at the portal. They were German Landsknechts, in soiled blue uniforms whose sleeves puffed out
around the corselets. Two-handed swords, five feet long, were slung on their backs. A pair of halberds clashed together to
bar the way, a third slanted towards Lockridge’s breast.
‘Halt!’
snapped the leader.
‘Wer gehts da?’

The American wet his lips. These mercenaries didn’t look
impressive. They were shorter than he by several inches – most people were in this undernourished age, as they had not been
in his time or in Auri’s – and faces under the tall helmets were scarred by smallpox. But they could kill him with no trouble.

He had cobbled together a story. ‘I am an English merchant, traveling with my wife,’ he said in their own language. ‘Our ship
was wrecked on the west coast.’ So desolate had that been, what he saw of it, that he didn’t think anyone would give him the
lie. The diaglossa informed him that marine disasters were not uncommon. ‘We made our way here overland.’

The sergeant looked sceptical. His men tautened. ‘At this time of year? And you were the only ones saved?’

‘No, no, everyone got ashore without harm,’ Lockridge said. ‘The ship is aground and damaged, but not broken apart.’ Travel-stained
though he was, he had obviously not been through salt water. ‘The master chose to keep the men there, lest the goods be plundered.
As I had business in Viborg that will scarcely wait, I offered to carry word and ask for help.’ Such an expedition would take
at least three days to arrive and find nothing, an equal time to get back. By then he should be gone.

‘English, ha?’ The little eyes narrowed. ‘I never heard an Englander speak as if born in Mecklenburg.’

Lockridge swore at himself. He should have used what fragments of German he remembered from college, not been seduced by the
instrument in his ear. ‘But I was,’ he said. ‘My father was a factor there for many years. Believe me, I am respectable.’
He dipped into his purse, brought out a couple of gold nobles, and jingled them suggestively. ‘See, I can afford to ask honest
men to drink my health.’

‘Friedrich! Fetch the Junker!’ A Landsknecht sloped off through the tunnel-like gate. His spear butt rattled on cobblestones.
Lockridge backed away. ‘Stay where you are, out-lander!’ Edged steel thrust forward.