Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

This wasn’t a tilting field, where gentlemen in plate rode at each other with a barrier between and intended nothing more than knocking the opposition to the ground. Tournaments like that lay centuries futureward. Here the aim was to kill.

I haven’t spent my lifetime practicing the art. But I’ve picked up enough, and I’ve got the weight and this superb creature under me — Here goes.

His horse veered ever so slightly. The point aimed for his throat shocked against his shield instead and glided off. Everard also missed a lethal strike but caught ring-mail and gave the impact all that was in his shoulders. The Italian went over, lost his right stirrup, fell. Foot caught in the left, he bounced behind his steed.

The encounter had yanked at the attention of those Sicilians who rode near Everard. They saw the enemy detachment on its way. As one, they left the main force and followed the Patrolman. Hoofs crunched over the fallen warrior.

Everard dropped his lance and drew sword. In a mixup at close quarters, he could do things he dared not in the open. He kept going, on into the dust toward the foe.

‘One o’clock,’ said the voice. He directed Blackie and after a moment made out Lorenzo’s pennon.

He ought to know it. He’d eaten that man’s salt, flown his falcons, chased his deer, he’d yarned and sung, laughed and gotten drunk, gone to church and gone to festival with Lorenzo, heard out his dreams, pretended to tell his own, day after day and night after night, a year in the future of this meeting. Lorenzo shed tears when they parted and called him brother.

The knights met.

Men hewed and battered, horses pushed and reared. Men yelled, horses screamed. Iron crashed and rattled. Blood welled and spouted. Bodies went to earth, threshed for a moment, got trampled to red mush and splinters of bone. The melee churned about in dust as thick as smoke. Everard crammed on through it. The watchers above warned him of danger on either side, in time for him to raise shield or parry with blade. Then he’d be past, deeper into the violence.

Lorenzo was before him. The young man had likewise abandoned his lance. He swept sword right and left. Blood drops whirled off the steel. “On, on!” he cried through the din. “St. George for Rainulf—for the Holy Father—”

He saw Everard loom out of clouds and chaos. He didn’t know the giant, of course, he’d never met him, but he grinned gamely and urged his mount around to meet this challenger.

Sportsmanship be damned. Everard pointed his weapon and squeezed in a finger-by-finger sequence. Invisibly, a stun beam sprang. Lorenzo’s jaw dropped. The sword left his grasp. He sagged forward.

Somehow he didn’t fall from the saddle. He sprawled along the neck of his horse, which whinnied and skittered aside. Were the rider’s reflexes so good as to keep him there, even unconscious? In that case, he’d soon wake up, none the worse. He’d guess somebody had dealt him a blow from behind, hard enough to knock him out through the mail and quilting on his neck.

Everard hoped so.

No time for sentiment. “C’mon, Blackie, let’s get our ass out of here. Also the rest of us.” The tongue that croaked it was dry as a block of wood.

The fight was breaking up anyhow. It had been a minor skirmish, unnoticed by most of Duke Roger’s and Rainulf’s troops. The Sicilians boomed onward, struck the enemy, scattered him, clove a path through the middle of his host.

Everard rode off across a field where corpses sprawled and gaped, wounded men moaned, mutilated horses thrashed and shrieked. Most likely no one paid him any particular heed. Glancing back, he saw how Duke Roger pursued hundreds down the road to Siponto. He also saw how Rainulf rallied and regrouped his army, while King Roger’s stayed immobile.

Mostly that vision was in his mind’s eye, from his knowledge of history—of how history was supposed to read. The actual sight was confusion, a mob scene, that ultimate absurdity which is war.

A little distance away rose a tree-grown hillock. Once behind it, he was hidden from view. “All right,” he ordered through his medallion. “Come fetch me.”

The sharpness still thrilled within him. While it lasted, he should go aloft and survey the battle as a whole, make sure that now events unrolled right.

A vehicle blinked into his presence, large enough for the horse as well as its crew. Quickly, they got the animal stalled inboard. Everard praised him, stroked the wet, dirt-streaked mane, patted the velvety nose. “He’d like a sugar cube better,” said a short blond woman—she looked Finnish—and offered him one. She trembled in glee barely controlled. This day, she could believe, she had helped restore the world from which she came.

The vehicle flicked into heaven. Sky surrounded it. Earth was dun land and quicksilver sea, far below. Everard sought an optical. He sat down before it, adjusted magnification, studied what happened. Seen thus, the death and pain, anger and glory became unreal, a puppet show, a chronicler’s paragraph.

Gifted in many ways, the Norman cloth of him dyed in Oriental subtleties, King Roger was nonetheless no tactical genius. He owed his victories mainly to crack troops, ruthless determination, and frequent disarray among his opponents. At Rignano he waited too long, he lost the advantage that his son’s charge had gained him. When he did attack, his wave broke as if on a sea-cliff. Thereupon Rainulf threw his entire force against the Sicilians. The prince’s return was of no avail. Panic seized them and they stampeded, each for himself. Rainulf’s people hunted them down by ones and twos, without quarter. At day’s end, three thousand lay dead on the field. The two Rogers gathered a few survivors, fought their way clear, and escaped into the mountains, back to Salerno.

But that was as it should be, as it had been in the Patrol’s world. The triumph would not long endure. Roger would collect fresh forces and win back what he had lost. Rainulf was to die of a fever in April 1139. The mourning was great and futile. In July 1139, the two Rogers bushwhacked a papal army at Galuccio, whose noble leaders fled while thousands drowned trying to flee across the River Garigliano; and Pope Innocent became a prisoner of war.

Oh, King Roger was very respectful. He knelt before the Holy Father and pledged allegiance. In return he received absolution and approval of all his claims. Little remained thereafter but mopping-up operations. In the end, even Abbot Bernard hailed the king as a righteous lord and relations grew downright affectionate. Further storms were to come, Roger’s conquests in Africa, the Second Crusade which he more or less sat out, his attempt on Constantinople, fresh conflicts with the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire—but meanwhile he timbered strongly the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, as he nurtured the growth of that hybrid civilization which presaged the Renaissance.

Everard slumped in his seat. Weariness rose to overwhelm him. Victory tasted like the dust still in his mouth. Only let him sleep, let him for a little time forget what he had lost.

“Looks okay,” he said. “Proceed to base.”

Beyond the Mississippi, the first signs of white occupation appeared. They were outposts, thinly strewn across wilderness, little more than wooden forts connected by roads that might better be called trails. Trading posts, Tamberly guessed. Or did they mainly support missionaries? No stockade failed to enclose a building with a tower or steeple, usually surmounted by a cross and often the largest. She didn’t pause for closer observation. The radio silence hounded her onward.

East of the Alleghenies she found real colonies. They took the form of walled towns surrounded by plowland and pasture laid out in long strips. Villages dotted the hinterlands, rows of cottages very like each other. A few boasted a sort of plaza that was probably a marketplace, centered on a tall crucifix or a structure somewhat like a Breton calvary. All had a chapel, and every town was dominated by its main church. Never did Tamberly see a farmstead by itself. The scenes reminded her of what she’d read and heard about the Middle Ages. Swallowing tears and terror, she leapfrogged on over the miles.