Poul Anderson - The Corridors of Time

He could not resent her ordering him about, but undid the package. The wrapping proved to be a short cloak of loosely woven wool, blue from some vegetable dye, with a thom brooch. The main garment was a sleeveless bast tunic that he pulled over his head and belted with a thong. Sandals tied onto his feet and a birdskin fillet ornamented in a zigzag pattern went around his head. In addition he got a necklace, bear’s claws alternating with shells, and a leafshaped dagger of flint so finely worked as to look almost metallic. The haft was wrapped in leather, the sheath was birchbark.

Storm surveyed him. He did the same to her. Female dress was no more than sandals, headband, necklace of raw amber, a foxskin purse slung from the shoulder, and a brief skirt decorated with feathers. But he scarcely noticed those details.

“You will do,” she said. “Actually, we are an anachronism. We are dressed like well-to-do clanfolk of the Tenil Orugaray, the Sea People, the aborigines. But you have short hair and are clean-shaven, and my racial type—still, no matter. We will be travellers who have had to purchase our clothes locally when the old ones wore out. That practice is common. Besides, these primitives have small sense for logical consistency.”

She pointed to a little box that had also been in the bundle. Open that.” He picked it up, but she had to show him how to squeeze to make the lid curl back. Within lay a transparent globule. “Put that in an ear,” she said.

Throwing aside a midnight lock of hair, she demonstrated with a similar object. He remembered now the thing she wore in her own left ear, that he had taken for a hearing aid, and inserted his. It did not impair his perception of sound, but felt oddly cool, and a momentary tingle ran over his scalp and down his neck.

“Do you understand me?” Storm asked.

“Why, naturally—” He strangled on the words. They had not been in English.

Not in anything!

Storm laughed. “Take good care of your diaglossa. You will find it rather more valuable than a gun.”

Lockridge wrenched his mind back to observation and reason. What had she actually said? Gun had been English and diaglossa didn’t fit the pattern of the rest. Which was—Gradually, as he used the language, he would find it to be agglutinative, with a complex grammar and many fine distinctions unknown to civilized man. There were, for instance, some twenty different words for water, depending on what kind might be involved under what circumstances. On the other hand, he was unable to express in it such concepts as “mass,” “government,” or “monotheism”: at least, not without the most elaborate circumlocutions. Only slowly, in the days that followed, would he notice how different from his own were notions like “cause,” “time,” “self,” and “death.”

“The device is a molecular encoder,” Storm said in English. “It stores the important languages and basic customs of an era and an area—in this case, northern Europe from what will someday be Ireland to what will be Esthonia, plus some outside ones that might be encountered like Iberia and Crete. It draws energy from body heat, and meshes its output with the nerve flow of the brain. In effect, you have an artificial memory center added to your natural one.”

“All that, in this cotton-pickin’ little thing?” Lockridge asked weakly.

Storm’s wide smooth shoulders lifted and fell. “A chromosome is smaller and carries more information. Make us some food.”

Lockridge was downright glad to escape to the everydayness of camp cooking. Besides, he had gone to sleep supperless. The bundles included metal-sealed materials that he didn’t recognize; but warmed up, the stuff was delicious. There were only a few meals’ worth, and Storm told him impatiently to abandon the remnants. “We will live off hospitality,” she said. “That one frying pan is so magnificent a gift as to warrant a year’s keep, even at Pharaoh’s court.”

Lockridge discovered he was grinning. “Yeah, and what if some archaeologist digs it up out of a kitchen midden, four thousand years from now?”

“It will be assumed a hoax, and ignored. Though in practice, sheet iron will scarcely last that long in this damp climate. Time is unchangeable. Now be still.” Storm prowled the meadow, lost in her own thoughts, while he cooked. The long grass whispered about her ankles, dandelion blossoms lay at her feet like coins scattered before a conqueror.

Either there was some stimulant in the food, or motion worked the stiffness out of Lockridge. When he raked the fire wide and covered the ashes with dirt, and Storm said smiling, “Good, you know how to care for the land,” he felt ready to fight bears.

She showed him how to operate the gate control tube and hid it in a hollow tree along with their twentieth-century clothes—though not the guns. Then they assembled their packs, put them on, and started.

“We are going to Avildaro,” Storm said. “I have never been there myself, but it is a port of call, and if a ship does not happen by it this year, we will hear where else.”

Lockridge knew, from the thing in his ear, that “Avildaro” was an elided form of a still older name which meant Sea Mother House; that She to Whom the village was dedicated was, in some way, an avatar of the Huntress Who stalked the forest at its back; that its people had dwelt there for uncounted centuries, descendants of the reindeer hunters who wandered in as the glaciers receded from Denmark and turned to the waters for their life when the herds followed the ice on into Sweden and Norway; that in this particular region they had begun to farm as well, a few generations ago, though not so much as the immigrants further inland from whom they had learned the art—for they still followed Her of the Wet Locks, Who had eaten the land across which their boats now ventured and Who likewise ate men, yet gave the shining fish, the oyster, the seal, and the porpoise to those who served Her; that of late the charioteers of Yuthoaz, who knew Her not but sacrificed to male gods, had troubled a long peace—He stopped summoning those ghostly memories that were not his. They blinded him to the day and the woman beside him.

The sun was well up now, the mists burned off and the sky clear overhead, with striding white clouds. At the edge of the primeval forest, Storm cast about. Beneath the oaks, underbrush made a nearly impenetrable wall. She took a while to find the trail north: dim, narrow, twisting in light flecks and green shadows among the great boles, beaten more by deer than by men.

“Have a care not to injure anything,” she cautioned. “Woods are sacred. One must not hunt without sacrificing to Her, nor cut down a tree unless it is first propitiated.”

But they entered no cathedral stillness. Life swarmed about, briar and bramble, fern and fungus, moss and mistletoe crowding under the oaks and burying every log. Anthills stood to a man’s waist, butterflies splashed the air with saffron and dragonflies darted cobalt blue, squirrels ran among the branches like streaks of fire, a hundred kinds of bird were nesting. Song and chatter and wingbeat reverberated down the leafy arches; more distantly, grouse drummed, a wild pig grunted, the aurochs challenged all earth. Lockridge felt his spirit expand until it was one with the wilderness, drunk on sun and wind and the breath of flowers. Oh, yes, he thought, I’ve been out often enough to know this sort of existence can get pretty miserable. But the troubles are real ones—hunger, cold, wet, sickness, not academic infightin’ and impertinent income tax forms—and I wonder if the rewards aren’t the only real ones too. If Storm guards this, sure, I’m with her.

She said nothing for the next hour, and he felt no need himself to talk. That would have taken his mind off the sight of her, panther-gaited beside him, the light that was blue-black in her hair, malachite in her eyes, tawny down her skin until it lost itself in shadow between her breasts. Once there crossed his memory the myth of Actaeon, who saw Diana naked and was turned to a stag and torn apart by his own hounds. Well, he thought, I’ve escaped that—physically, anyhow—but I’d better not push my luck too hard.