The Overlords of War (20 page)

“Wait a moment,” Corson said. He had turned pale. He sat down on the ground and put his head in his hands. Veran must be right. He was experienced in temporal warfare.

“Shock treatment, hm?” Veran said. “Maybe you’re wondering why I said all that to you. Don’t bother working it out. As soon as I’m rid of Ngal R’nda I’m going to send you as my envoy to the Council. Since I have a future statesman in my hands, I’m going to exploit the fact. I told you I want to make a deal. I’m not going to ask for much: just some gear, like robots and spaceships. Then I’ll move on and leave this world in peace. I won’t touch it again even if I conquer the rest of the galaxy.”

Corson raised his head.

“And how are you going to get rid of Ngal R’nda? He seems to be very much on his guard.”

Veran gave a short wolfish laugh. “If you haven’t figured that out, I’m not going to tell you. You might double-cross me. But you’ll see.”

They had to enter the anteroom of the Egg chamber naked. There they underwent a ritual cleansing and put on yellow togas. Corson imagined he could feel the rays of countless scanners brushing his skin, but knew that was an illusion—the Urians possessed more subtle techniques. He was sure that Veran was going to take advantage of the Presentation of the Egg to try something, but he could not guess what. Almost certainly he could not be carrying a weapon; the Urians knew human anatomy well enough to check all the body’s natural hiding places. And if Veran wanted violent action he would have come charging in at the head of his pegasone cavalry: a dangerous tactic, but one which would have invoked time as his ally, even though the Urians had the means to fight back. No, he must have a bolder stroke in mind.

Baffled, Corson passed for the second time through the ranked nobles, and Veran followed him to the front of the throng. He spent a long while wordlessly examining the altar-like box. Then the lights went down. The door irised open and Ngal R’nda made his entrance. To Corson he seemed haughtier than ever. He had recruited these two human mercenaries to his cause. No doubt his yellow eyes were already seeing in imagination the blue standards of Uria floating above the smoking wrecks of cities, or hanging dead still in space

at the prows of starships. He was dreaming of a crusade. There was something of pathetic greatness in him. To think that a creature of such intelligence should have been seduced by the notion of a mere color, a superstition dating back to time immemorial which Veran had summed up and dismissed in three words: “a genetic curiosity.”

Yes, it must have something to do with the Egg. Suddenly Corson realized what Veran must have in mind. Full of terror yet also of a Strange pity for the plight of this last Prince of Uria, and with an equally strange admiration for Veran’s audacity, he followed with wide eyes the smallest details of the ceremony. He heard Ngal R’nda utter and the crowd chant after him words impossible to transcribe in human writing, the names of his ancestors. He watched the metal case open, the egg rise on its pillar like a monstrous turquoise. The Urians stretched their thin necks, despite being long accustomed to all this, and their double eyelids blink-blinked as fast as hummingbird wings.

The last Prince of Uria opened his beak, but before he had time to chirp again, there was a commotion. Veran thrust aside the Urian nobles around him, made a leap, flung his left arm around Ngal R’nda’s neck, pointed at the egg with his other hand, and shouted: “Impostor! Piiekivo! Piiekivol”

Corson did not need a dictionary to work that one out.

“It’s painted!” Veran shouted. “This scoundrel has tricked you! I’ll prove it!”

The Urians were too dumbfounded to move. That was lucky for Veran, Corson thought, but clearly he had been banking on the fact that not even the nobility were allowed to carry weapons into the Egg chamber. There was time for him to rub his palm against the shell. Where he touched it, the surface turned from blue to ivory.

A hell of a trick, Corson thought, panting, feeling his end was near despite the fact that the Urians had completely ceased to pay him any attention.

But that egg was not simply painted. Some sort of chemical had been needed to neutralize the dye Veran had applied two hundred and fifty years ago ... or was it last week? He could have brought nothing in with him. The Urians’ scanners would have located a capsule hidden in his mouth, or anywhere else. And if he had smeared something on his skin before coming here, the ritual bath would have washed it off. The trick was impossible.

And then he caught on. Even naked, even thrice washed and rubbed down with a rough towel, Veran had brought a very active substance with him, a complex liquid that was both acid and alkaline.

His own perspiration.

On the shell the reaction was spreading. Molecular bonds were breaking one after another. The dye was dissolving into colorless constituents or more likely subliming. Veran did not like to leave traces behind.

Shrill whistles arose from the crowd. Claws dug into Corson’s shoulders; he offered no resistance. Veran let go of Ngal R’nda, who, beak wide, struggled to regain his breath. Urians in violet togas seized the mercenary, but he shouted, “I proved it, I proved it—the egg is not blue and he’s an impostor!”

“He’s lying!” Ngal R’nda cried. “He sprayed a dye on the shell! I saw him! Put him to death!”

“Break the egg!” Veran shouted. “If I’m lying the inside will be blue! Break the eggl”

Ngal R’nda was confronted by uproar. Around him Urians formed a circle, still deferential but somehow threatening. It was the chick from a blue egg that these vassals feared, not their warlord. He whistled high, piercing, weary-sounding notes that Corson could not understand. But their import was clear.

“Shall I break the egg?”

Silence. Then more whistling, curt and merciless. Ngal R’nda bowed his head.

“So be it. I shall break the shell which should only be crushed at my death, that its dust might be mingled with my ashes. I, last of the Princes of Uria, shall be the only one of my long line who ever broke the blue shell twice!”

He seized the egg in both claws, lifted it, and smashed it on the base of its pedestal. Fragments fell to the floor. Ngal R’nda seized one of those which remained on the pediment and brought it close to his age-dimmed eyes. He recoiled and fell in a faint.

Then one of the nobles advanced and seized a fold of his blue toga. He pulled on it violently. It did not tear, and Ngal R’nda was dragged with it as in a sack. There was a stampede. Corson felt himself released, then someone bumped into him so that he nearly fell and had to struggle to prevent himself being trampled. At last the tide of bodies swept past him. Mad with rage, the avians were pecking to death the last Prince of Uria. A bitter stench of chlorine filled the air.

Someone touched his arm: Veran.

“Come along before they start wondering how I worked my trick!” They walked unhurriedly to the door, their ears full of angry cries. On the threshold Veran glanced back with a shrug.

“So,” he said, “perish all fanatics.”

About once every decade he dismounted, approached a passer-by, and asked, “What year is this?"

Some fainted. Others fled. Some few vanished. Those must know how to travel in time. But he always found some willing to inform him. They looked at the man and the Monster without surprise, and smiled. An old man, a boy, a Urian, a woman.

A question burned on Corson’s lips: “Do you know who I am?” For their smiles and their readiness to cooperate smacked too much of a miracle. They must know who he was. They were so many guides, beaconing his way. But they simply gave him the date and, if he tried to engage them in further conversation, managed to divert him adroitly into a dead end. Even the child. He was unfit to match wits with these people. In six thousand years culture had advanced a long way. He had not soaked up enough of it. He was still a barbarian, even though he knew some things that they did not

When he saw the Urian, he almost made the blunder of jumping back into time. But the great bird made a sign of peace to him. He wore a white toga with fine embroidery on it, and said with a grimace that Corson took to be a smile, “What are you afraid of, my son?”

At first he had looked like Ngal R’nda. Now Corson realized the resemblance was solely due to his great age.

“I seem to recognize you,” the Urian said. “In a time of trouble you appeared from nowhere. I was fresh from the egg then, but if I recall aright I took you to a bath and gave you food before escorting you to a secret ceremony. Things have changed since then, and for the better too. I am glad to see you again. What do you wish to know?”

“I’m looking for the Council,” Corson said. “I have a message for them. Maybe several messages.”

“You will find them on the seashore, about thirty or forty kilometers from here. But you will have to wait a hundred and twenty years or so.”

"Thanks,” Corson said. “But I won’t have to wait at all. I can travel in time.”

“I presumed so,” the avian said. “It was a manner of speaking. It is a fine animal that you have there.”

“I call him Archimedes,” Corson said. “As a souvenir of something that happened long ago.”

As he was on the point of remounting, the Urian checked him.

“I trust you hold no grudge against us for what happened. It was a mischance. Tyranny always engenders violence. And beings like ourselves are pawns in the hands of gods. They impel us to battle for the pleasure of the spectacle. They love the dance of fire and death. You resolved the situation with much tact. Someone else might have provoked a bloodbath. All we Urians are most grateful to you.”

“All. . . including you?” Corson asked in disbelief.

“The Old Race and the humans. All who live on Uria.”

“All who live on Uria,” Corson repeated thoughtfully. “That’s good news.”

“Good luck on your journey, my son,” the old Urian said.

So, Corson said to himself, peering through the time fog which rose from the ground to engulf him and his pegasone, the humans and the natives have become reconciled. Splendid!

The Urians must have managed to exorcise the demons of war. Their species was not doomed, as he had imagined.

By now he was getting to know the planet well. The location of the beach reminded him of something. That was where Antonella had taken him. By coincidence?

He decided to make a detour via Dyoto. It was an irrational impulse, an urge to make a sort of pilgrimage. He locked the pegasone to the present at the top of a hill, and looked skyward in search of that pyramidal cloud of a city seemingly balanced on its twin vertical rivers.

The sky was empty.

He reconfirmed his position. There was no possible doubt. Up there, a hundred and fifty years ago, a colossal city had reared to heaven. It had not left a trace.

He looked down, into a hollow made by the convergence of three grassy valleys between wooded hillsides. A lake filled it. Corson narrowed his eyes to see better. In the middle of the lake a sharp peak pierced the surface; elsewhere ripples broke around obstacles a few centimeters underwater. Among the vegetation on the shore he recognized other geometrical ruins.

The city had fallen and the vertical river had given birth to the lake. Underground canals were still supplying it and the overflow escaped by a little brook running along the lowermost valley. Dyoto had been destroyed. The force which had upheld its buildings over a kilometer in the air had failed. It had all happened long ago, perhaps a century, to judge by the density of the vegetation.

Sadly Corson recalled its lively streets, the swarms of floaters which poured from it like bees from a hive, that store where he had stolen food, that mechanical voice which had so courteously reprimanded him. And he thought of the women he had met there.

Dyoto was dead like so many other cities overwhelmed by the tempest of war. Perhaps at the bottom of that lake reposed the body of Floria Van Nelle, who had by chance introduced him to the strangeness of this world.

The old Urian had been lying. His smile had been false. The war had occurred and the humans had lost. It must be so, if their cities were in ruins.

He hoped Floria had not had time to realize what was happening. She was unprepared for this or any war. If she had survived for a while, it would have been as a plaything for Veran’s mercenaries, or worse still as a victim of the pitiless crusaders serving whoever had taken Ngal R’nda’s place.

So he had failed.

With an effort he resisted the impulse to jump back into the past. He remembered his dream of a city being destroyed and the cry of its inhabitants, who, too late, were foreseeing their doom. Sweat ran down his face. He could not go back now; he had an appointment in the future which he could not escape. Up there, with the Council if it proved still to be in existence, he would have to discuss the problem and find out whether the lumbering wagon of history might yet be diverted down another road. Then there would be time to come back and discover what had gone amiss.

And even if he could accomplish nothing more, he could kill Veran. A cracked bell rang in his head. If he killed Veran he himself would die. This collar would pierce his neck with poisoned spikes. He was not even supposed to think of fighting Veran without killing himself. He could not quit now.

He suppressed his lust for vengeance. Exhausted, he remounted the pegasone and urged it onward.

It went forward sullenly, and for the first time Corson noticed how gray everything was around him. In the impenetrable fog of the centuries, where nights and days were intermingled, he felt the pegasone escape from his control. His fingers tugged on its tendrils, but in vain. The beast, whether from fatigue or under the command of another will, threatened to lock into the present. Disheartened, he let it do so.

The sound of the sea, a slow and regular rhythm. He was on a long beach which the setting sun had gilded. That struck him as odd. Left to their own devices pegasones normally preferred to synch with daylight because of their appetite for energy. But this time his mount had been drawn to twilight.