Poul Anderson - There Will Be Time

Among friends she was regarded initially with respect, not dread. She learned and practiced the normal skills, the normal sports. But her gift marked her out, and awe grew around her as her ability did. From Onda she learned to be sparing of it. (Also, despite stoic fatalism, it hurt to foreknow the misfortunes of those she cared about.) Nevertheless, having such a Skula, Wahorn waxed mighty.

And Leonce, ever more, became lonely. Her siblings married and moved away, leaving her and Onda by themselves in Jem’s old lodge. Both took lovers, as was the custom of unwedded women, but none of Leonce’s sought marriage, if only because she seemed to be barren, and gradually they stopped seeking her at all. Former playmates sought her for help and advice, never pleasure. Reaching after comradeship, she insisted on accompanying and fighting in raids on the lowlands. The kindred of those who fell shunned her and mumbled questions about why the Skula had allowed deaths that surely one of her powers could have forbidden — or did she want them — ? Then Onda died.

Not much later, Eyrie scouts tracked down a far-flung rumor to the source, herself. She welcomed them with tears and jubilation. Wahorn would never see her again.

“My God.” Havig laid an arm around her. “You have had it cruel.”

“Aw, was plen’y good huntin’, skim’, feastin’, singin’, lots o’ jokin’ once I’d gotten here.” She had downed a quantity of wine. It made her breath fragrant as she nuzzled him. “I don’t sing bad. Wanna hear?”

“Sure.”

She bounded to fetch an instrument like a dwarf guitar from a saddlebag, and was back in a second. “I play a bone flute too, but can’t sing ‘long o’ that, hm? Here’s a song I made myself. I used to pass a lot o’ lone-time makin’ songs.”

A little to his astonishment, she was excellent. “ — Ride w’ere strides a rattle o’ rocks, / Thunder ’e sun down t’ dance on your lance — ” What he could follow raised gooseflesh on him.

“Wow,” he said low when she had finished. “What else do you do?”

“Well, I can read an’ write, sort o’. Play chess. Rules changed some from home to here, but I take mos’ games anyhow. An’ Austin taught me poker; I win a lot. An’ I joke.”

“Hm?”

She grinned and leaned into his embrace. “Figgered we’d joke after lunch, Jack, honeybee,” she murmured. “But w’y not ‘fore an ’ after? Hm-m-m-m?”

He discovered, with glee which turned to glory, that one more word would in the course of generations change its meaning.

“Yeah,” he told me. “We moved in together. It lasted till I left. Several months. Mostly they were fine. I really liked that girl.”

“Not loved, evidently,” I observed.

“N-n-no. I suppose not. Though what is love, anyway? doesn’t it have so infinitely many kinds and degrees and mutations and quantum jumps that — Never mind.” He stared into the night which filled the windows of the room where we sat. “We had our fights, roof-shattering quarrels she’d end by striking me and taunting me because I wouldn’t strike back, till she rushed out. Touchy as a fulminate cap, my Leonce. The reconciliations were every bit as wild.” He rubbed weary eyes. “Not suitable to my temperament, eh, Doc? And I’ll admit I was jealous, my jealousy brought on a lot of the trouble. She’d slept with many agents, and commoners for that matter, before I arrived, not to mention her highland lads earlier. She went on doing it too, not often, but if she particularly liked a man, this was her way to be kind and get closer to him. I had the same freedom, naturally, with other women, but … I … didn’t want it.”

“Why didn’t she get pregnant by an, uh, agent?”

His mouth twitched upward. “When she heard in the Eyrie what the situation was, she insisted on being taken to the last High Years, partly for a look around, like me going to Pericles’ Greece or Michelangelo’s Italy, but also to get a reversible sterilization shot. She wanted children in due course, when she felt ready to settle down — Glacier wives are chaste, it seems — but that wasn’t yet and meanwhile she enjoyed sex, same as she enjoyed everything else in life. Judas priest, what a lay she was!”

“If she mainly stayed with you, however, there must have been a strong attraction on both sides,” I said.

“There was. I’ve tried, as near as my privacy fetish will let me, to tell you what held me to her. From Leonce’s side … hard to be sure. How well did we actually know each other? How well have any man and woman ever? — My learning and, yes, intelligence excited her. She had a fine mind, hit-or-miss educated but fine. And, I’ll be frank, I doubtless had the top job in the Eyrie. Then, too, I suppose we felt the attraction of opposites. She called me sweet and gentle — not patronizingly, because I did do pretty well in games and exercises, being from a better-nourished era than average — but I was no stark mountaineer or roughneck Renaissance mercenary.”

Again ghosts dwelt in his smile. “On the whole,” he said, “she gave me the second best part of my life, so far and I think probably forever. I’ll always be grateful to her, for that and for what followed.”

Havig’s suspicions developed slowly. He fought them. But piece by piece, the evidence accumulated that something was being withheld from him. It lay in the evasion of certain topics, the brushoff of certain questions, whether with Austin Caldwell’s embarrassment, or Coenraad van Heuvel’s brusque “I may not say what I have been told,” or Reuel Orrick’s changing the subject and proceeding to get weeping drunk, or the mild “In God’s good time all shall be revealed to you, my son” of Padre Diego the Inquisitor, or an obscene command to shut up from various warrior types.

He was not alone in this isolation. Of those others whom he approached about it, most were complaisant, whether from prudence or indifference. But young Jerry Jennings exclaimed, “By Jove, you’re right!”

So did Leonce, in more pungent words. Then after a moment she said: “Well, they can’t give us new ’uns ever’thing in a single chaw, can they?”

“Coenraad’s as new as I am,” he protested. “Newer than you …”

Her curiosity piqued, she found her own methods of investigation. They were not what you’d think. She could match a tough, woman-despising man-at-arms goblet for goblet till he was sodden and pliable, while her head remained ice-clear. She could trap a sober person by an adroit question; it helped having been a shaman. And she appalled Havig by whispering to him at night, amidst schoolgirl giggles, how she had done what was strictly forbidden without permission, slipped into different periods of the Eyrie’s existence to snoop, pry, and eavesdrop.

She concluded: “Near’s I can learn, ol’ Walls’s jus’ feared you an’ ’em like you might get mad at what some o’ the agents do in some times an’ places. Anyhow, till you’re more used to the idear.”

“I was arriving at the same notion myself,” Havig said bleakly. “I’ve seen what earlier ages are like, what personalities they breed. The travelers who respond to his come-ons, or make themselves conspicuous enough for his searchers to hear about, are apt to be the bold — which in most cases means the ruthless. Coming here doesn’t change them.”

“Seems like orders is, you got to be led slow to the truth. I s’pose I’m only kep’ from it ‘cause of bein’ by you.” She kissed him. “ ’S’kay, darlya.”

“You mean you’d condone robbery and—”

“Hush. We got to use who we can get. Maybe they do be rough. Your folk, they never were?”

Sickly, he remembered how … from Wounded Knee to My Lai, and before and after … he never disowned his nation. For where and when — if it had not abdicated all responsibility for the future-existed a better society?