Poul Anderson - The Year of the Ransom

His tone was almost casual. Tamberly thought, in the daze dulling his brain, that the Exaltationists had made the common mistake of underestimating a man of a past era. This one was ignorant of nearly everything they knew, but his wits were fully equal to theirs. Thereon was laid a ferocity bred by centuries of war—not impersonal high-technological conflict but medieval combat, where you looked into your enemy’s eyes and cut him down with your own hand.

“Were you not the least afraid of their . . . magic?” Tamberly mumbled.

Castelar shook his head. “I knew God was with me.” He crossed himself, then sighed. “It was stupid of me to leave their guns behind. I will not fail like that again.”

Despite the heat, Tamberly shivered.

He sat slumped in long grass beneath a noonday sun. Castelar stood above him, metal a-shine, hand on hilt, legs apart, like a colossus bestriding the world. The timecycle rested several yards off. Beyond, a stream flowed toward the sea, which was not visible here but which, he estimated from his glimpse aloft, lay twenty or thirty miles distant. Palm, chirimoya, and other vegetation told him they were “still” in tropical America. He had a vague recollection of chancing to give the temporal activator a harder thrust than the spatial.

Could he get up, make a break for it, beat the Spaniard to the machine and escape? Impossible. Were he in better shape, he would try. Like most field agents, he’d received training in martial arts. That might offset the other’s cruder skills and greater strength. (Any cavalier spent his whole life in such physical activity that an Olympic champion would be flabby by comparison.) Now he was too weak, in body and mind alike. With the kyradex off his head, he had volition again. But it wasn’t much use yet. He felt drained, sand in his synapses, lead in his eyelids, skull scooped hollow.

Castelar glowered downward. “Cease twisting words, sorcerer,” he rapped. “It is for me to put you to the question.”

Should I just keep mum and provoke him into killing me? Tamberly wondered in his weariness. I imagine he’d apply torture first, seeking to force my cooperation. But afterward he’d be stranded, made harmless. . . . No. He’d be sure to monkey with the vehicle. That could easily bring about his destruction; but if it didn’t, what else could happen? I must keep my death in reserve till I’m certain it’s the only thing I have to offer.

He lifted his gaze to the dark eagle visage and dragged forth: “I am no sorcerer. I merely have knowledge you don’t, of various arts and devices. The Indies thought our musketeers commanded the lightning. It was simple gunpowder. A compass needle points north, but not by magic.” Though you don’t understand the actual principle, do you? “Likewise for weapons that stun without wounding, and for engines that overleap space and time.”

Castelar nodded. “I had that feeling,” he said slowly. “My captors whom I slew let words drop.”

Lord, this is a bright fellow! A genius, perhaps, in his fashion. Yes, I remember him remarking that besides his studies among the priests, he’s enjoyed reading stories of Amadis—those fantastic romances that inflamed the imagination of his era—and another remark once showed a surprisingly sophisticated view of Islam.

Castelar tautened. “Then tell me what this is about,” he demanded. “What are you in truth, you who falsely claim ordainment?”

Tamberly groped through his mind. No barriers crossed it. The kyradex had wiped out his reflex against revealing that time travel and the Time Patrol existed. What remained was his duty.

Somehow he must get control of this horrible situation. Once he’d had a rest, let flesh and intelligence recover from the shocks they had suffered, he should have a pretty good chance of outwitting Castelar. No matter how quick on the uptake, the man would be overwhelmed by strangeness. At the moment, however, Tamberly was only half alive. And Castelar sensed the weakness and hammered shrewdly, pitilessly on it.

“Tell me! No dawdling, no sly roundabouts. Out with the truth!” The sword slid partly from its scabbard and snicked back.

“The tale is long and long, Don Luis—”

A boot caught Tamberly in the ribs. He rolled over and lay gasping. Pain went through him in waves. As if among thunders, he heard: “Come, now. Speak.”

He forced himself back to a sitting position, hunched beneath implacability. “Yes, I masqueraded as a friar, but with no un-Christian intention.” He coughed. “It was necessary. You see, there are evil men abroad who also have these engines. As it was, they sought to raid your treasury, and bore us two off—”

The interrogation went on. Had it been the Dominicans under whom Castelar studied, they who ran the Spanish Inquisition? Or had he simply learned how to deal with prisoners of war? At first Tamberly had a notion of concealing the time travel part. It slipped from him, or was jarred from him, and Castelar hounded it. Remarkable how swiftly he grasped the idea. None of the theory. Tamberly himself had just the ghostliest idea of that, which a science millennia beyond his people’s was to create. The thought that space and time were united baffled Castelar, till he dismissed it with an oath and went on to practical questions. But he did come to realize that the machine could fly; could hover; could instantly be wherever and whenever else its pilot willed.

Perhaps his acceptance was natural. Educated men of the sixteenth century believed in miracles; it was Christian, Jewish, and Muslim dogma. They also lived in a world of revolutionary new discoveries, inventions, ideas. The Spanish, especially, were steeped in tales of chivalry and enchantment—would be, till Cervantes laughed that out of them. No scientist had told Castelar that travel into the past was physically impossible, no philosopher had listed the reasons why it was logically absurd. He met the simple fact.

Mutability, the danger of aborting an entire future, did seem to elude him. Or else he refused to let it curb him. “God will take care of the world,” he stated, and went after knowledge of what he could do and how.

He readily imagined argosies faring between the ages, and it fired him. Not that he was much interested in the truly precious articles of that commerce: the origins of civilizations, the lost poems of Sappho, a performance by the greatest gamelan virtuoso who ever lived, three-dimensional pictures of art that would be melted down for a ransom. . . . He thought of rubies and slaves and, foremost, weapons. It was reasonable to him that kings of the future would seek to regulate that traffic and bandits seek to plunder it.

“So you were a spy for your lord, and his enemies were surprised to find us when they came as thieves in the night, but by God’s grace we are free again,” he said. “What next?”

The sun was low. Thirst raged in Tamberly’s throat. His head felt ready to break open, his bones to fall apart. Blurred in his vision, Castelar squatted before him, tireless and terrible.

“Why, we . . . we should return . . . to my comrades in arms,” Tamberly croaked. “They will reward you well and . . . bring you back to your proper place.”

“Will they, now?” The grin was wolfish. “And what payment to me, at best? Nor am I sure you have spoken truth, Tanaquil. The single sure thing is that God has given this instrument into my hands, and I must use it for His glory and the honor of my nation.”

Tamberly felt as if the words driven against him, hour after hour, had each been a fist. “What would you, then?”

Castelar stroked his beard. “I think first,” he murmured, narrow-eyed, “yes, assuredly first, you shall teach me how to manage this steed.” He bounced to his feet. “Up!”