Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“Rumors,” Everard mumbled. “You understand, being a pilgrim, I’m especially interested in any signs from Heaven—or from hell.” He rallied himself, tossed off a mouthful, and managed a grin. “Mainly, though, as a soldier, I’m interested in what did happen there. It was no ordinary battle.”

“It was not. In truth, I felt the hand of God upon me when first I lowered lance and spurred horse toward the prince’s standard.” Lorenzo crossed himself. “Otherwise everything was of this world, tumult and turmoil, hardly a moment free for awareness, let alone any real thinking. Tomorrow I’ll be glad to relate what my memory keeps of it.” He smiled. “Not now. The story has grown stale in our household. Indeed, I myself would rather dwell on what we’ll do next.”

I’ll ask, I’ll get every detail I can from him and everybody else, before Sir Manfred regretfully decides that duty calls him back to Saxony after all. Maybe, maybe I’ll pick up a clue to somebody who came out of time and disrupted fate. But I doubt it. The knowledge was freezingly cold.

Beneath a pale sky, those few cottages that were the village of Rignano huddled by a road running from the mountains in the west to Siponto on the Adriatic coast., Low above stubblefields and in woodlots and orchards going sere, sunrise mists blurred the horizons of North Apulia. The air was cold and still. Banners drooped, pavilions sagged wet, in the opposing camps.

A mile or so of mostly bare earth separated them, divided by the road. Smoke rose straight upward from a few fires, but only a few. Clang and clatter, shout and shriek of readymaking violated silence.

Yesterday King Roger and Duke Rainulf had conferred. None less than Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, revered by whole nations, strove to avert bloodshed. But Rainulf was vengefully determined on battle and Roger flushed with victories. Moreover, Bernard was of the party of Pope Innocent.

Today they would fight.

The king trod forth, hauberk darkly shining, and smote fist in palm. “Up and at them!” he exulted. His voice was lionlike. Leonine too were the black-bearded features; but the eyes were viking-blue. He glanced at the man who had shared his tent, beguiling with tales those hours after plans had been laid and before sleep would come. “What, still glum on this day of all days?” he asked jovially. “I should think a djinni like you—Are you afraid yon priest will stuff you back into your bottle?”

Manson Everard forced a smile. “At least let it be a Christian bottle, with some wine in it.” His jest was harsh of tone.

For a space more Roger regarded him. Big though the king was, his companion hulked over him. That was not the sole thing strange about the fellow, either.

His story sounded straightforward enough. Bastard of an Anglo-Norman knight, Manson Everard left England years ago to seek his fortune. Like many of his countrymen, eventually he joined the Varangian Guard of the emperor in Constantinople, fought the barbarian Pechenegs, but as a Catholic felt reluctant when the Byzantines moved against the Crusader domains. Discharged, with a fair amount of money from pay and spoils, he drifted west till he landed in Bari, not far from here. There he spent a while taking his ease and pleasure, and heard much about King Roger, whose third son, Tancred, had been made prince of the city. When Roger, having subdued the rebels of Campania and Naples, crossed the Apennines, Manson rode to meet the army and offer his sword.

So might any footloose adventurer do. Manson, though, drew the royal notice by more than his size. He had much to tell, notably about the Eastern Empire. Half a century ago, Roger’s uncle Robert Guiscard had come near taking Constantinople; barely did the Greeks and their Venetian allies turn that tide. The house of Hauteville, like others in western Europe, still cherished ambitions yonder.

But there were certain curious gaps in what Manson related; and he bore an underlying bleakness, as though some hidden sin or sorrow forever gnawed him—

“No matter,” Roger decided. “Let’s to our harvest. Will you ride with me?”

“By your leave, sire, I think I could better serve under your son the Duke of Apulia,” said the wanderer.

“As you like. Dismissed.” The king’s attention went elsewhere.

Everard pushed through roaring swarms. Heedless of the papal ban, the host had said its prayers at dawn; now oaths ripped across commands, japes, yells in half a dozen languages. Standard-bearers waved their staffs to mark locations. Men-at-arms brawled their way into formation, pikes and axes bared aloft. Archers and slingers deferred to them; not yet was the bowman the master of infantry. Horses neighed, mail flashed, lances whipped on high like reeds in a storm. These were Normans, native Sicilians, Lombards and other Italians, Frenchmen, miscellaneous bullyboys from across half of Europe. In flowing white above their armor, silent but wildness aquiver in them, waited the dreaded Saracen corps.

Manson and his two attendants, hired in Bari, had set up camp in the open, until the king summoned him yesterday after returning from parley. In the city he had also purchased—or so everybody else believed—mounts, a pack horse, and a charger, the last a great barb that nickered, tossed head, stamped hoofs, ha, ha among the trumpets. “Quick, help me on with my outfit,” he ordered.

“Do you really have to go, sir?” asked Jack Hall. “Damn risky, I reckon. Worse’n fightin’ Injuns.” He looked upward. Invisibly high, riders poised on their cycles and scanned the field through instruments that could count the drops of sweat on a man’s face. “Can’t they take out that hombre you’re after—quiet-like, you know, with a stun beam from above?”

“Get cracking!” Everard snapped. “No, you idiot, we’re steering too bloody close to the wind as is.”

Hall reddened and Everard realized he had been unfair. You couldn’t expect an instant grasp of crisis theory from an ordinary agent in place, hastily co-opted. This man was a cowboy till 1875, when the Patrol recruited him. Like the large majority of personnel, he worked in his own milieu, maintaining his original persona among the people who knew him. His secret self was a contact for such time travelers as came by, informant, guide, policeman, whatever they needed. If anything really untoward happened, he was to send for qualified help. It simply chanced that he d been taking a vacation in the Pleistocene, hunting game and girls, when Everard had been, and that he was good with horses.

“Sorry,” Everard said, “but I am in a hurry. Action starts in less than half an hour.” Given the information he brought from Anagni, Patrolmen had “already” charted the fatally wrong course of the battle. Now he would seek to turn it back.

Jean-Louis Broussard got busy. Meanwhile he explained, “You see, my friend, what we do is dangerous enough. An open miracle, that men witnessed, that is not chronicled in either history, ours or this misbegotten one—it would be a new factor, warping events still worse.” He was a more scholarly sort, born in the twenty-fourth century but operating in France of the tenth, not as an enforcer but as an observer. So much information perished when nobody at the time recorded it, or recorded it wrong, or when books moldered, burned, were mislaid. If the Patrol was to guard the time-stream, it must know what it guarded. As vital to it as its police agents were its field scientists.

Like Wanda. “Hurry, God damn it!” Set her aside. Don’t remember her, don’t think about her, not now.

Hall occupied himself with the stallion. “Well, but I’d say you’re too valuable a guy to throw into that fracas, sir,” he persisted. “Like puttin’ Robert E. Lee in the front lines.”