Julian May - The Many-Coloured Land

She turned her animal away, rode to the opposite side of the compound, and was helped out of the saddle by obsequious men in white tunics.

“What was that all about?” inquired Amerie, who had come up with Felice.

Richard glowered. “How the fuck should I know?” He went tottering off toward the latrine.

Felice watched him go. “Are all your patients this grateful?”

The nun laughed. “He’s coming along just fine. You know they’re on the mend when they bite your head off.”

“He’s nothing but a stupid weakling.”

“I think you’re wrong about that,” Amerie said. But Felice only snorted and went off to the mess hall. Later, when the two women and Claude were eating cheese and cold meat and maize bread, Richard came and apologized.

“Think nothing of it,” the nun said. “Sit down with us. We’ve got something to talk over with you.”

Richard’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah?”

Claude said softly, “Felice has a plan for escape. But there are problems.”

“No shit?” the pirate guffawed.

The little ring-hockey player took Richard’s hand and squeezed. His eyes bulged and he pressed his lips together. “Less noise,” Felice said. “The problem isn’t in the escape itself, but in the aftermath. They’ve taken our maps and compasses. Claude has a general knowledge of this part of Europe from his paleontology studies more than a hundred years ago, but that won’t help us if we can’t orient ourselves while we’re on the run. Can you help us? Did you study the large-scale map of Pliocene France when we were back at the auberge?”

She dropped his hand and Richard stared at the whitened flesh, then threw her a glance of pure venom. “Hell, no. I figured there’d be plenty of time for that once we arrived. I brought a self-compensating compass, a computer sextant, all the charts I’d need. But I suppose all the stuff was confiscated. The only route I looked at was the one west to the Atlantic, to Bordeaux.”

Felice grunted in disgust. Claude persisted in a peaceable tone, “We know you must be experienced in navigation, son. There’s got to be some way we can orient ourselves. Can you locate the Pliocene polestar for us? That would be a big help.”

“So would a frigate of the Fleet Air Arm,” Richard grumbled. “Or Robin Hood and his merry men.”

Felice reached out for him again and he dodged back hastily. “Can you do it, Richard?” she asked. “Or are those stripes on your sleeves for good conduct?”

“This isn’t my home planet, dykey-doll! And the noctilucent clouds don’t make the job any easier.”

“A lot of volcanism,” Claude said. “Dust in the upper atmosphere. But the moon has set and there aren’t any ordinary clouds. Do you think you’d be able to get a fix as the glowing patches come and go?”

“I might,” Richard muttered. “But why the hell I should bother beats me… What I want to know is, what happened to my pirate outfit? Who put this coverall on me?”

“It was there,” Felice said sweetly, “and you needed it. Badly. So we obliged. Anything to help out a friend.”

Claude hurried to say, “You got all messed up in some fight you were in back at the castle. I just cleaned you up a bit and washed your other clothes. They’re hanging on the back of your saddle. Should be dry by now.”

Richard looked suspiciously at the smirking Felice, then thanked the old man. But a fight? Had he been in a fight? And who had been laughing at him with lofty contempt? A woman with drowning-pool eyes. But not Felice…

Amerie said, “Please try for the polestar if you feel well enough to manage it. We only have one more night of travel on this high north road. Then we’ll be angling off every which way and traveling in the daytime. Richard, it’s important.”

“Okay, okay,” he grouched. “I don’t suppose any of you Earthworms knows the latitude of Lyon.”

“About forty-five north, I think,” said Claude. “Around the same as my boyhood home in Oregon, anyhow, from the way I remember the sky over the auberge. Too bad we don’t have Stein. He’d know.”

“A rough guess is good enough,” Richard said.

The nun lifted her head. The sound of a horn came from outside in the fort’s yard. “Well, here we go again, Group. Good luck, Richard.”

“Megathanks, Sister. If we follow any escape plan tins kid dreams up, we’re gonna need it.”

They rode on through the night, traveling from beacon to beacon along the plateau trail with the river valley at their right and the scattered small volcanoes of the Limagne giving an occasional ruby pulse in the southwest. Constellations totally unfamiliar to the Earth natives of the twenty-second century crowded the sky of Exile. Many of those stars were the same ones that would be visible in the planet’s future; but their differing galactic orbits had twisted the familiar star patterns all out of recognition. There were stars in the Pliocene sky that were destined to die before the time of the Galactic Milieu; others that Milieu people would know were at this time still dark in their dust cloud wombs.

Richard viewed the Pliocene heavens with nonchalance. He’d seen an awful lot of different skies. Given plenty of time and a fixed base for observation, finding the local Polaris would be a snap, even with eyeball instrumentation alone. It was only the fact that they were moving on animal-back, and the need for a quick fix, that made the thing a bit tricky.

Now, if the old fossil-flicker was right about the rough latitude, and if they were on a near-northerly course on this trail as Claude thought they’d have to be, given the lay of the land, then the polestar should be about halfway between the horizon and the zenith somewhere in… there.

He had picked up a couple of stiff twigs from the litter back at the fort and now bound them together into a cross-sight with a hair from his mount’s mane. Each stalk was twice as long as his hand. He hoped the field wouldn’t be too limited.

Adjusting his position in the saddle to minimize the effect of the chaliko’s rocking gait, he memorized the constellations that had to be roughly circumpolar. Then he held the cross-sight at arm’s length and aligned the vertical axis with the straight track ahead (analog: two upright chaliko ears) and centered it on a likely star he had tentatively selected. He carefully noted the positions of five other bright stars within the quadrants of his sight and then relaxed. Three hours from now, when planetary rotation had made those six stars seem to change position slightly, he’d take another sighting His near-photographic memory would do an angular comparison within the field of the cross-sight, and with luck he would be able to discern the imaginary hub in the sky about which all those stars were turning. The hub would be the pole. It might or might not have a star on it or near it that could be dubbed Pliocene Polaris.

He would center the cross-sight anew on this point in the sky and try to verify the pole’s position before dawn with a two-hour shot. Failing that, he would check it tomorrow night with a good long time interval for maximum rotation.

Richard set his wrist chronometer’s alarm for 0330, glad that he hadn’t followed the impulse to throw the thing away back in Madame Guderian’s rose garden on that rainy morning when he had abandoned his universe… Less than twenty hours ago.

Even though he had been partially briefed by Creyn on what to expect, Bryan found the reality of the riverside city of Roniah nearly overwhelming. The party of riders came suddenly upon the place after wending their way through a dark canyon where the guards’ torches barely illuminated a narrow trail cut in buff sandstone. The caravan emerged onto a knoll overlooking the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône and saw the town below on the west bank, just south of the snout of forested crags where the two great rivers joined.