The Doomfarers of Coramonde (9 page)

All at once the
small brown man who was about to dispatch their deaths from the tube on his
shoulder was flung sideways, bent double. Another cover man with an AK-47 stood
up in surprise, looking to
Lobo’s
rear, then collapsed in a paroxysm of
pain, leg flying from under him at the sudden insistent pounding of a .50
machine gun. Gil swiveled his head in the direction of the fire, his rear.

Over Pomorski’s
shoulder he could see, perhaps ten yards behind
Lobo,
another APC. It
was layered with mud and dust, sides gouged and apparently scorched by flame,
its wooden trim vane crushed and splintered. Bronco Jackson? Impossible; the
transmissions about Jackson had been a hoax.

The track
commander in the following APC raised a clenched fist to Gil, who returned it
gratefully. He couldn’t read any unit markings on the newcomer because of its
battered condition, nor had he heard it or been aware of its approach until its
main gun had opened up.

He turned back
to the grips of his own .50, moving to cover the opposite field of fire, when
an intense chill passed over him.
Lobo’s
surroundings were blotted out
by a world of gray, 360 degrees without content, gone almost the instant it
appeared. Alpha-Nine, 32d ACR, U.S. Army Vietnam, was plunging over a green
sweep of lush meadow, VC and Asian road nowhere to be seen.

Woods brought
the track to a halt in surprise. Pomorski scanned to the rear as the remaining
three peeked up over their splash shields, all searching for enemies who’d
threatened them and the friendlies who’d rescued them moments before. They
craned their heads around, taking in the view with their mouths hanging open.

They saw an
unusual building rather like a small castle on a nearby rise, some copses of
trees and a primitive village farther back down the meadow.

“Cut the
engine,” Gil ordered. He needed to hear himself think.

Slowly,
Pomorski said, “MacDonald, what… what’s happened? MacDonald?”

“What is this,
Jeopardy?”
the sergeant roared back. “Am I buzzing my answer buzzer?
Am I?”

A large body of
curiously dressed men on horses had appeared at the edge of the trees and were
regarding the Nine-Mob with a good deal of interest. Gil looked at them and
tried hard to remember if either side was using cavalry in Vietnam.
Horse
type, that is,
he thought.

Four of the
mounted men detached themselves from the rest and moved leisurely toward the
APC. The Nine-Mob was still hunting with growing urgency for the disappeared VC
and related familiar landmarks, but they were not, as individuals or a group,
slow to recover or react. The four riders reined in front of
Lobo
and
Gil spoke softly into his intercom.

“I am now open
for hints.”

“Pass,” said
Pomorski, and that was the only help the sergeant got.

“Right,” he
said after another moment. “Pomorski takes the fifty and the rest of you hang
loose. I’m gonna talk to these bananas.”

His brain
wasn’t sluggish. He knew from gross physical evidence that he was no longer in
the situation in which he’d been only a few seconds before. There was
absolutely no sign of ambush, ambushers or, for that matter, Southeast Asia.

Pomorski put
down his grenade launcher as Gil took off his helmet and headset and leaned
down into the APC and plucked up his submachine gun and a bandolier of
ammunition. He climbed up over the cupola as the grenadier came up from
underneath and replaced him at the machine gun.

The sergeant
slung the bandolier over his head, checked the safety on Shorty, an abbreviated
M-16, and jumped to the ground. Once down, he flicked the safety over to
autofire and walked unhurriedly to the waiting men, chopper cradled
comfortingly against him.

All four sat
horses decked out in splendid harness. The two to the rear wore long outfits
made from metal rings, covering them to the wrists and falling like shirts to
their knees, and steel caps with nasal guards. Moreover, they bore triangular
shields and wore long swords.

Armor?
Swords? Had they wandered into some kind of pageant?

Of the two in
front, one wore a caftan with a hood which hid his face in shadow. The other was
in gaudy robes, sashed pantaloons, pointy-toed shoes and a fur Busby, and was
decorated with a good deal of jewelry.

Hallucinations?
Had somebody been putting something in the Lister bags?

The one with
the hood threw it back suddenly and stared out—although Gil couldn’t actually
see his eyes—from a golden mask which enclosed his entire head. The mask
featured red, jutting fangs and a distinctly hateful expression with graven
scowl and F-shaped brows done in black. But where the eyes and mouth should have
been there were only dark apertures.

Golden Mask
spoke, voice echoing eerily from within the headpiece. “Who are you, who appear
in the fields of Erub for no possible reason save that you are in league with
the renegades?”

The sergeant
didn’t waste time with meaningless sounds of shock and disavowal. It was his
experience that people with submachine guns didn’t have to.

Until today.

“Uh, MacDonald,
Gilbert A., sergeant, U.S. Army,” he said from habit and by way of
introduction. “I don’t think I know where I am right now. Who are
you,
Jack,
and where are we?” He watched the faces of the other three for reactions, since
Golden Mask was unreadable, but they gave him none.

Golden Mask
turned to his fellows. “They are confused, at a loss for their Reality. They
obviously don’t belong to this place-and-time, they are an invocation. Let us
eliminate them now, before those in the castle can offer interference.”

Gil, who hadn’t
missed “eliminate,” was about to shove his way back into the conversation when
the two armored men drew their mounts back cautiously. Golden Mask kept his
place while his colorfully-turned-out companion urged his steed a few steps
closer to the sergeant. Without taking his gaze from the men in front of him,
Gil called. “Pomorski! Cover the two in back; if anything goes down, you ace
’em.”

“Roger-dodger.”

Fancy Pants
stopped a few feet from where Gil stood. He extended his bangled and braceleted
arms toward
Lobo
and the Nine-Mob. His fingers clawed grotesquely as he
began to chant loudly, nothing the American could comprehend.

The same
instinct that had prompted him to look for a backup RPG made Gil’s hackles rise
and sent a signal of fear down his spine. There’d been only the slightest of
breezes a moment before but now a stiff, driving wind began to swirl around
him. It tore at his fatigues, threatened to throw him headlong, yet didn’t seem
to affect Fancy Pants or any of those behind him.

Gil risked a
glance behind him, to start in horror at the murky funnel of air forming around
Lobo
and, impossibly, rocking the giant weight of the APC. The wind
raged around and around in that small circuit, grew in intensity on its
confined course. The cantor continued, in a voice grown loud beyond belief,
deafening even over the tornado howl. The Nine-Mobsters were hanging on for
life, their helmets blown off and their clothes tearing from their bodies.

The sergeant
was obliged to drop to his knees to avoid being blown off his feet. Insane as
it seemed, this gaudy character must be the one responsible for the wind. In a
live-or-die fix, with a conclusion based on the way things must be—no matter
how crazy—that was enough for Gil MacDonald. He brought the chopper up and
fired from the hip, quick-kill style. It was almost impossible to hold even a
stationary target in the malevolent wind, and so he emptied the entire eighteen
rounds in his magazine at Fancy Pants to be sure. Man and horse collapsed in a
spray of blood; M-16 slugs tended to wobble when they hit and eight hits were
more than enough to make a mess.

As quickly as
it had begun, the were-wind died. Gold Mask and the others stared at the form
of their dead companion for a moment as they tried to control their maddened
horses, and Gil slammed home a new magazine from his bandolier and covered
them. They backed their horses away and the American wasn’t sure if he ought to
stop them or be glad they were leaving. Considering all the buckaroos they had
to back them up, he decided that further exchanges would be ill advised. The
entire mounted body moved off, stopping at the tree line several hundred yards
away, in the opposite direction from the castle.

Gil backpedaled
to the APC and scrambled up as the Nine-Mob pulled themselves together.
Pomorski relinquished the .50 and they were all silent for a minute.

Then Gil said,
“The guy and his horse are both dead; each took a couple in the head. Guess I
was shooting high.”

“A shame to
stop him just when he was getting going good,” said Pomorski, as the green
began to leave his complexion, “but conservatively speaking, all isn’t well
here and the obvious question, as I pointed out earlier, is—where are we at?”

“We’re
someplace without VC or dry seasons, okay? Where people dress for Halloween and
have their own cyclones on call, ride horses and live in castles.” Gil waved
his hand at the countryside and said, “Look around you. Everything’s
different—climate, plants, terrain, the works. Everything’s utterly
not-the-same as before we cruised through that gray fog. So Pomorski, carefully
now, I want you to apply all sixty-eight of your Famous College Credits and
tell
me
where we are.”

“How about
this?” Woods asked. “How’d we get here?”

“Damned if I
know, Sportin’ Life,” the sergeant sighed. “This kind of action usually happens
to girls and little dogs after Kansas twisters.” Thoughts of The Outer Limits
bobbed in his brain.

Olivier, thin
face even more pallid than usual behind thick glasses, yelled and pointed
toward the castle. Galloping full tilt in their direction, plainly come from
the now-open castle gate, was a single horseman. He wore a brightly painted
mask with a rooster tail of tall white plumes and sat a big, long-legged
gray—seventeen hands high, Pomorski thought to himself, if he was an inch—whose
neck was thrust forward in exertion. The rider fairly flew across the meadow,
bringing his horse to a stop near them in a shower of turf as they looked to
their weapons against another attack; if they’d been less disciplined they
might have dropped him on the spot without questions.

The rest of the
fellow’s dress matched his war mask. He wore high rider’s boots, leather guards
covering his forearms, loinband and a sword belted to his hip.

“Welcome!” he
cried, “And hurrah for a fine deed in slaying Neezolo Peeno. Andre deCourteney
could not extend the protection of Calundronius to the meadow but Van Duyn said
that the men with—guns, are they called?—would be able to defend themselves
admirably and so you have. But we must hasten now, back to the Keep, before the
soldiers decide to make a sally or Ibn-al-Yed cooks up some wizardish attack to
our sorrow.”

The five
soldiers had been mute throughout Springbuck’s speech. Now Gil rubbed the back
of his sunburned neck with his hand as if it would help. Woods said, “Simply
astonishing.”

“All right,”
said the sergeant, “take us to the fella who knows about guns. Maybe we can get
a little info. I guess we might as well leave the Dearly Departed over there
for his friends and loved ones.”

Fireheel became
skittish as Woods fired up the track’s big Chrysler with a roar, and Springbuck
was careful to trot him a goodly distance in front of this thing, this machine,
which the Prince found delightfully loud and menacing. Gil noticed that none of
the other riders, the ones who had confronted them before, moved to stop or
follow them. In a place where firearms seemed at least a rarity, from their
guide’s remarks, Gil’s response to the were-wind must have been most
impressive.

Shades of
the Connecticut Yankee!

Springbuck led
them to the very drawbridge of the castle, then galloped across. Gil studied
the wooden span and the dozen or so faces staring round-eyed at them from the
ramparts above. That some of them were women, and one in particular an absolute
red-haired fox, did not escape the American’s notice even in these
disconcerting circumstances.

“Hell,” said
Gil at last, “we’re better off stepping on in than sitting out here to rot.
I’ll ground-guide.”

Pomorski took
the .50 again and Gil walked ahead of the track as Woods followed his hand
signals, easing
Lobo
over the drawbridge. Shorty was at the sergeant’s
side again. Woods nursed the ponderous APC along as if he were treading eggs,
but the timbers held firmly enough and they found themselves in a large,
cobble-stoned courtyard filled with weeds, refuse of one kind and another and
some very curious people. These last were dressed in attire as peculiar—from
the Nine-Mob’s point of view—as any other they’d seen in the past fifteen
minutes; mostly woolen clothes, baggy shirts and pantaloons and shapeless
dresses. All were staring in total fascination at
Lobo,
but were
definitely afraid to approach or touch it. Gil wanted to pinch himself.

He wondered if
the Veterans Administration had a nice, comfortable nuthouse anywheres close to
home?

The
soldiers are the cleverest, their wisdom they display there, They know that
miracles like this don’t happen every day there.

HEINRICH HEINE,

“I Dreamt I Was the Dear Lord
God”

THEIR guide had dismounted and
pushed his way through the crowd, mask now in hand. He was quite young, with an
open face bearing an exuberant smile. The imposing saber he wore
notwithstanding, he appeared friendly enough.