Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

Emil Volstrup left the desk at which he had stood doing accounts. The stares of the other two boys, one Italian and one Greek, followed him, and their hands fell still upon the bolts of fabric. “What is it, Odo?” he called. The Norman French that he used here rang harsh in his ears. “Did you meet trouble on your errand?”

The slender form stumbled into his arms, the face pressed against his robe. He felt the shuddering. “Master,” sobbed at him, “the king is dead. I heard—they are crying it from mouth to mouth through the city—”

Volstrup’s embrace dropped away. He looked outward. You couldn’t see much through the grilles over the arched windows. The door was still agape, though. Cobblestones, an arcaded building opposite, a Saracen passing by in white cloak and turban, sparrows fluttering up from some scrap of food, none of it seemed real any longer. Why should it? Whatever he saw could at any instant cease ever having been. Everything around him could. He himself.

“Our King Roger? No,” he denied. “Impossible. A false rumor.”

Odo drew back and flailed a wild gesture. “It’s true!” His voice cracked across. The shame of that steadied him a little. He swallowed, swiped at tears, tried to straighten. “Messengers from Italy. He fell in battle. His army is broken. They say the prince is dead too.”

“But I know —” Volstrup’s tongue locked in his mouth. Appalled, he realized that he had been about to describe the future until his conditioning stopped him. Had this tale shaken him so badly? “How would people in the street know? Such news would go straight to the palace.”

“The m-messengers—they called it out as they passed by—”

A sound broke through the noises of Palermo, overrode them, strode between the city walls and out the harbor to the bay. Volstrup knew that voice. All did. It was the bells of the cathedral. They were tolling.

For a moment he stood motionless. At the edge of vision he saw the apprentices at the workbench cross themselves, the Catholic left to right, the Orthodox right to left. It came to him that he had better do likewise. That broke his paralysis. He turned to the Greek lad, the most levelheaded. “Michael,” he ordered, “speed forth, learn what has indeed happened, as nearly as you can in a short time, and come tell me.”

“Yes, master,” the apprentice replied. “They should be giving out the news publicly soon.” He left.

“Back to your work, Cosimo,” Volstrup went on. “Join him, Odo. Never mind what I sent you for. I’ll not want it today.”

As he sought the rear of the shop he heard a racket rising beneath the clang and jangle of the bells. It wasn’t talk, song, footfalls, hoofbeats, wheel-creak, the city’s pulsebeat. It was shouts, screams, prayers—Latin, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, a score of vernaculars, dismay that wailed in this neighborhood and everywhere else. Ja, det er nok sandt. He noticed that his mind had gone back to Danish. The story was probably true. If so, he alone understood in full how terrible it was.

Unless the cause of it also did.

He came out into a small garden court with a water basin, cloistered in Moorish style. This house had been built when the Saracens ruled Sicily. After purchasing it, he had adapted it to his business and to the fact that he would maintain no harem, unlike most of those Normans who could afford to. Now the other sides of the enclosure gave on storerooms, kitchen, dormitories for apprentices and servants, and similar utility. A stair led to the upper story, living quarters for himself, his wife, and their three children. He climbed it.

She met him on the gallery, a small, dark woman, gone plump and her hair, black beneath its covering, streaked with gray, nevertheless rather attractive. He had looked at her middle years before returning to her youth and asking for her hand. That skirted the law of the Time Patrol, but he’d spend a long while with her. He needed a wife for appearance’s sake, for family connections, to maintain his household and, yes, warm his bed; by temperament he was a benedict, not a womanizer.

“What is it, my lord?” Her question quavered in Greek. Like most Sicilians born, she got along in several languages, but today she fell back to that of her childhood. Me too, he thought. “What is happening?”

“Bad news, I fear,” he answered. “See that the children and the staff stay calm.”

Though she had become a Catholic in order to marry him, she forgot and crossed herself in Eastern wise. Just the same, he admired the steadiness that came upon her. “As my lord bids.”

It made him smile, squeeze her arm, and say, “Fear not for us, Zoe. I will see to things.”

“I know you will.” She hastened off. His gaze followed her a moment. There passed through him: If only the centuries of Muslim rule hadn’t made women of every faith so submissive, what a companion she might be. But she handled her duties well, her kinfolk remained helpful to his business, and … he couldn’t have anybody who wanted to share his secrets.

He crossed a couple of rooms still furnished in the austere, airy Islamic style, and reached the one that was his alone. It wasn’t kept locked; that might have raised suspicions of witchcraft or worse. However, a merchant naturally required confidential files, strongboxes, and occasional privacy. Barring the door behind him, he drew up a stool in front of a large ambry, sat down, and pressed the foliate pattern carved into the wood in a certain order.

A rectangle of luminance sprang forth before him. He ran tongue over dry lips and whispered in Temporal, “Give me a synopsis of King Roger’s campaign in Italy from, uh, the beginning of last month and onward.”

Text flashed. Memory supplied what had gone before. A year ago, Lothair, the old Holy Roman Emperor, had crossed the Alps to aid Pope Innocent II against Roger II, King of Capua, Apulia, and Sicily. High among their allies was Rogers brother-in-law Rainulf, Count of Avellino. They fought their way far down the Italian peninsula until at the end of August, Anno Domini 1137, they reckoned themselves victorious. Rainulf was created Duke of Apulia, to hold the South against the Sicilian. Lothair left him eight hundred knights and, feeling death nigh, started homeward. Innocent entered Rome although his rival claimant to the throne of St. Peter, Anacletus II, occupied the Castel Sant’ Angelo.

At the beginning of this October, Roger did return. He landed at Salerno and laid waste the lands that had repudiated their allegiance to him; the savagery of his vengeance was a shock even to this brutal age. At the very end of the month, he met Rainulf’s army at Rignano in northern Apulia.

There he suffered defeat. His first charge, under the captaincy of his eldest son and namesake, Duke Roger, carried the enemy before it. The second one, which he himself led, faltered and failed. Duke Rainulf, a gallant and well-beloved leader, threw his whole force against the king’s men. Panic seized them and they fled, save for three thousand whom they left slain. Roger took the remnants of them back to Salerno.

The victory availed little. Roger had other forces at his beck. They besieged Naples and regained Benevento and the great abbey on Monte Cassino. Before long, only Apulia remained to its new duke. Innocent, with his famous partisan Bernard of Clairvaux, must needs agree to let Roger mediate the dispute with Anacletus. Although the anti-Pope was on his side, the king shrewdly declared that he found the case too deep for quick decision. Let there be a further conference in Palermo.

It was never held. Emperor Lothair died in December, on his way home. In January 1138, Anacletus also slipped from life. Roger got a new Pope elected, but this one soon ended the schism by laying down his tiara. Triumphant in Rome, Innocent set about destroying the king, whom he had already excommunicated. He did not succeed. His foremost surviving ally, Rainulf, died of a fever in the spring of 1139; shortly afterward, the elder and younger Rogers ambushed the papal army and took Innocent himself prisoner.