There was a full moon. Under it, the land lay big and lonely, with a darkness of forest blocking out the horizon. Somewhere a wolf howled. The mound was there yet; they had come late.
Rising on the antigravity unit, they peered across a dense, shadowy wood. A thorp lay about a mile from the barrow, one hall of hewn timber and a cluster of smaller buildings around a courtyard. In the drenching moonlight, it was very quiet.
"Cultivated fields," observed Whitcomb. His voice was hushed in the stillness. "The Jutes and Saxons were mostly yeomen, you know, who came here looking for land. Imagine the Britons were pretty well cleared out of this area some years ago."
"We've got to find out about that burial," said Everard. "Shall we go back and locate the moment the grave was made? No, it might be safer to inquire now, at a later date when whatever excitement there was has died down. Say tomorrow morning."
Whitcomb nodded, and Everard brought the hopper down into the concealment of a thicket and jumped up five hours. The sun was blinding in the northeast, dew glistened on the long grass, and the birds were making an unholy racket. Dismounting, the agents sent the hopper shooting up at fantastic velocity, to hover ten miles aboveground and come to them when called on a midget radio unit built into their helmets.
They approached the thorp openly, whacking off the savage-looking dogs which came snarling at them with the flat of sword and ax. Entering the courtyard, they found it unpaved but richly carpeted with mud and manure. A couple of naked, tow-headed children gaped at them from a hut of earth and wattles. A girl who was sitting outside milking a scrubby little cow let out a small shriek; a thick-built, low-browed farmhand swilling the pigs grabbed for a spear. Wrinkling his nose, Everard wished that some of the "Noble Nordic" enthusiasts of his century could visit this one.
A gray-bearded man with an ax in his hand appeared in the hall entrance. Like everyone else of this period, he was several inches shorter than the twentieth-century average. He studied them warily before wishing them good morning.
Everard smiled politely. "I hight Uffa Hundingsson, and my brother is Knubbi," he said. "We are merchants from Jutland, come hither to trade at Canterbury." (He gave it the present name, Cant-wara-byrig.) "Wandering from the place where our ship is beached, we lost our way, and after fumbling about all night found your home."
"I hight Wulfnoth, son of Aelfred," said the yeoman. "Enter and break your fast with us."
The hall was big and dim and smoky, full of a chattering crowd: Wulfnoth's children, their spouses and children, dependent carls and their wives and children and grandchildren. Breakfast consisted of great wooden trenchers of half-cooked pork, washed down by horns of thin sour beer. It was not hard to get a conversation going; these people were as gossipy as isolated yokels anywhere. The trouble was with inventing plausible accounts of what was going on in Jutland. Once or twice, Wulfnoth, who was no fool, caught them in some mistake, but Everard said firmly: "You have heard a falsehood. News takes strange forms when it crosses the sea." He was surprised to learn how much contact there still was with the old countries. But the talk of weather and crops was not very different from the kind he knew in the twentieth-century Middle West.
Only later was he able to slip in a question about the barrow. Wulfnoth frowned, and his plump, toothless wife hastily made a protective sign toward a rude wooden idol. "It is not good to speak of such things," muttered the Jute. "I would the wizard had not been buried on my land. But he was close to my father, who died last year and would hear of naught else."
"Wizard?" Whitcomb pricked up his ears. "What tale is this?"
"Well, you may as well know," grumbled Wulfnoth. "He was a stranger hight Stane, who appeared in Canterbury some six years ago. He must have been from far away, for he spoke not the English or British tongues, but King Hengist guested him and eftsoons he learned. He gave the king strange but goodly gifts, and was a crafty redesman, on whom the king came more and more to lean. None dared cross him, for he had a wand which threw thunderbolts and had been seen to cleave rocks and once, in battle with the Britons, burn men down. There are those who thought he was Woden, but that cannot be since he died."
"Ah, so." Everard felt a tingle of eagerness. "And what did he whilst yet he lived?"
"Oh . . . he gave the king wise redes, as I have said. It was his thought that we of Kent should cease thrusting back the Britons and calling in ever more of our kinsmen from the old country; rather, we should make peace with the natives. He thought that with our strength and their Roman learning, we could together shape a mighty realm. He may have been right, though I for one see little use in all these books and baths, to say naught of that weird cross-god they have. . . . Well, anyhow, he was slain by unknowns three years ago, and buried here with sacrifices and such of his possessions as his foes had not reaved. We give him an offering twice a year, and I must say his ghost has not made trouble for us. But still am I somewhat uneasy about it."
"Three years, eh?" breathed Whitcomb. "I see. . . ."
It took a good hour to break away, and Wulfnoth insisted on sending a boy along to guide them to the river. Everard, who didn't feel like walking that far, grinned and called down the hopper. As he and Whitcomb mounted it, he said gravely to the bulging-eyed lad: "Know that thou hast guested Woden and Thunor, who will hereafter guard thy folk from harm." Then he jumped three years back in time.
"Now comes the rough part," he said, peering out of the thicket at the nighted thorp. The mound was not there now, the wizard Stane was still alive. "It's easy enough to put on a magic show for a kid, but we've got to extract this character from the middle of a big, tough town where he's the king's right-hand man. And he has a blast-ray."
"Apparently we succeeded—or will succeed," said Whitcomb.
"Nope. It's not irrevocable, you know. If we fail, Wulfnoth will be telling us a different story three years from now, probably that Stane is there—he may kill us twice! And England, pulled out of the Dark Ages into a neoclassical culture, won't evolve into anything you'd recognize by 1894. . . . I wonder what Stane's game is."
He lifted the hopper and sent it through the sky toward Canterbury. A night wind whistled darkly past his face. Presently the town loomed near, and he grounded in a copse. The moon was white on the half-ruined Roman walls of ancient Durovernum, dappled black on the newer earth and wood of the Jutish repairs. Nobody would get in after sunset.
Again the hopper brought them to daytime—near noon—and was sent skywards. His breakfast, two hours ago and three years in the future, felt soggy as Everard led the way onto a crumbling Roman road and toward the city. There was a goodly traffic, mostly farmers driving creaky oxcarts of produce in to market. A pair of vicious-looking guards halted them at the gate and demanded their business. This time they were the agents of a trader on Thanet who had sent them to interview various artisans here. The hoodlums looked surly till Whitcomb slipped them a couple of Roman coins; then the spears went down and they were waved past.
The city brawled and bustled around them, though again it was the ripe smell which impressed Everard most. Among the jostling Jutes, he spotted an occasional Romano-Briton, disdainfully picking a way through the muck and pulling his shabby tunic clear of contact with these savages. It would have been funny if it weren't pathetic.
There was an extraordinarily dirty inn filling the moss-grown ruins of what had been a rich man's town house. Everard and Whitcomb found that their money was of high value here where trade was principally in kind. By standing a few rounds of drinks, they got all the information they wanted. King Hengist's hall was near the middle of town . . . not really a hall, an old building which had been deplorably prettied up under the direction of that outlander Stane . . . not that our good and doughty king is any pantywaist, don't get me wrong, stranger . . . why, only last month . . . oh, yes, Stane! He lived in the house right next to it. Strange fellow, some said he was a god . . . he certainly had an eye for the girls . . . Yes, they said he was behind all this peace-talk with the Britons. More and more of those slickers coming in every day, it's getting so an honest man can't let a little blood without. . . . Of course, Stane is very wise, I wouldn't say anything against him, understand, after all, he can throw lightning. . . .
"So what do we do?" asked Whitcomb, back in their own room. "Go on in and arrest him?"
"No, I doubt if that's possible," said Everard cautiously. "I've got a sort of a plan, but it depends on guessing what he really intends. Let's see if we can't get an audience." As he got off the straw tick which served for a bed, he was scratching. "Damn! What this period needs isn't literacy but flea powder!"
The house had been carefully renovated, its white, porticoed facade almost painfully clean against the grubbiness around it. Two guards lounged on the stairs, and snapped to alertness as the agents approached. Everard fed them money and a story about being a visitor who had news that would surely interest the great wizard. "Tell him, 'Man from tomorrow.' 'Tis a password. Got it?"
"It makes not sense," complained the guard.
"Passwords need not make sense," said Everard with hauteur.
The Jute clanked off, shaking his head dolefully. All these newfangled notions!
"Are you sure this is wise?" asked Whitcomb. "He'll be on the alert now, you know."
"I also know a VIP isn't going to waste time on just any stranger. This business is urgent, man! So far, he hasn't accomplished anything permanent, not even enough to become a lasting legend. But if Hengist should make a genuine union with the Britons. . . ."
The guard returned, grunted something, and led them up the stairs and across the peristyle. Beyond was the atrium, a good-sized room where modern bearskin rugs jarred with chipped marble and faded mosaics. A man stood waiting before a rude wooden couch. As they entered, he raised his hand, and Everard saw the slim barrel of a thirtieth-century blast-ray.
"Keep your hands in sight and well away from your sides," said the man gently. "Otherwise I shall belike have to smite you with a thunderbolt."
Whitcomb sucked in a sharp, dismayed breath, but Everard had been rather expecting this. Even so, there was a cold knot in his stomach.
The wizard Stane was a small man, dressed in a fine embroidered tunic which must have come from some British villa. His body was lithe, his head large, with a face of rather engaging ugliness under a shock of black hair. A grin of tension bent his lips.
"Search them, Eadgar," he ordered. "Take out aught they may bear in their clothing."
The Jute's frisking was clumsy, but he found the stunners and tossed them to the floor. "Thou mayst go," said Stane.
"Is there no danger from them, my lord?" asked the soldier.
Stane grinned wider. "With this in my hand? Nay, go." Eadgar shambled out. At least we still have sword and ax, thought Everard. But they're not much use with that thing looking at us.
"So you come from tomorrow," murmured Stane. A sudden film of sweat glistened on his forehead. "I wondered about that. Speak you the later English tongue?"
Whitcomb opened his mouth, but Everard, improvising with his life at wager, beat him to the draw. "What tongue mean you?"
"Thus-wise." Stane broke into an English which had a peculiar accent but was recognizable to twentieth-century ears: "Ih want know where an' when y're from, what y'r 'tendons sir, an' all else. Gimme d' facts 'r Ih'll burn y' doon."
Everard shook his head. "Nay," he answered in Jutish. "I understand you not." Whitcomb threw him a glance and then subsided, ready to follow the American's lead. Everard's mind raced; under the brassiness of desperation, he knew that death waited for his first mistake. "In our day we talked thus. . . ." And he reeled off a paragraph of Mexican-Spanish chatter, garbling it as much as he dared.
"So . . . a Latin tongue!" Stane's eyes glittered. The blaster shook in his hand. "When be you from?"
"The twentieth century after Christ, and our land hight Lyonesse. It lies across the western ocean—"
"America!" It was a gasp. "Was it ever called America?"
"No. I wot not what you speak of."
Stane shuddered uncontrollably. Mastering himself: "Know you the Roman tongue?"
Everard nodded.
Stane laughed nervously. "Then let us speak that. If you know how sick I am of this local hog language. . . ." His Latin was a little broken, obviously he had picked it up in this century, but fluent enough. He waved the blaster. "Pardon my discourtesy. But I have to be careful."
"Naturally," said Everard. "Ah . . . my name is Mencius, and my friend is Iuvenalis. We came from the future, as you have guessed; we are historians, and time travel has just been invented."
"Properly speaking, I am Rozher Schtein, from the year 2987. Have you . . . heard of me?"
"Who else?" said Everard. "We came back looking for this mysterious Stane who seemed to be one of the crucial figures of history. We suspected he might have been a time traveler, peregrinator temporis, that is. Now we know."
"Three years," Schtein began pacing feverishly, the blaster swinging in his hand; but he was too far off for a sudden leap. "Three years I have been here. If you knew how often I have lain awake, wondering if I would succeed. . . . Tell me, is your world united?"
"The world and the planets," said Everard. "They have been for a long time." Inwardly, he shivered. His life hung on his ability to guess what Schtein's plans were.
"And you are a free people?"
"We are. That is to say, the Emperor presides, but the Senate makes the laws and it is elected by the people."
There was an almost holy look on the gnomish face, transfiguring it. "As I dreamed," whispered Schtein. "Thank you."
"So you came back from your period to . . . create history?"
"No," said Schtein. "To change it."
Words tumbled out of him, as if he had wished to speak and dared not for many years: "I was a historian too. By chance I met a man who claimed to be a merchant from the Saturnian moons, but since I had lived there once, I saw through the fraud. Investigating, I learned the truth. He was a time traveler from the very far future.
"You must understand, the age I lived in was a terrible one, and as a psychographic historian I realized that the war, poverty, and tyranny which cursed us were not due to any innate evil in man, but to simple cause and effect. Machine technology had risen in a world divided against itself, and war grew to be an ever larger and more destructive enterprise. There had been periods of peace, even fairly long ones; but the disease was too deep-rooted, conflict was a part of our very civilization. My family had been wiped out in a Venusian raid, I had nothing to lose. I took the time machine after . . . disposing . . . of its owner.
"The great mistake, I thought, had been made back in the Dark Ages. Rome had united a vast empire in peace, and out of peace justice can always arise. But Rome exhausted herself in the effort, and was now falling apart. The barbarians coming in were vigorous, they could do much, but they were quickly corrupted.
"But here is England. It has been isolated from the rotting fabric of Roman society. The Germanics are entering, filthy oafs but strong and willing to learn. In my history, they simply wiped out British civilization and then, being intellectually helpless, were swallowed up by the new—and evil—civilization called Western. I want to see something better happen.
"It hasn't been easy. You would be surprised how hard it is to survive in a different age until you know your way around, even if you have modern weapons and interesting gifts for the king. But I have Hengist's respect now, and increasingly more of the confidence of the Britons. I can unite the two people in a mutual war on the Picts. England will be one kingdom, with Saxon strength and Roman learning, powerful enough to stand off all invaders. Christianity is inevitable, of course, but I will see to it that it is the right kind of Christianity, one which will educate and civilize men without shackling their minds.
"Eventually England will be in a position to start taking over on the Continent. Finally, one world. I will stay here long enough to get the anti-Pictish union started, then vanish with a promise to return later. If I reappear at, say, fifty-year intervals for the next several centuries, I will be a legend, a god, who can make sure they stay on the right track."
"I have read much about St. Stanius," said Everard slowly.
"And I won!" cried Schtein. "I gave peace to the world." Tears were on his cheeks.
Everard moved closer. Schtein pointed the blast-ray at his belly, not yet quite trusting him. Everard circled casually, and Schtein swiveled to keep him covered. But the man was too agitated by the seeming proof of his own success to remember Whitcomb. Everard threw a look over his shoulder at the Englishman.
Whitcomb hurled his ax. Everard dove for the floor. Schtein screamed, and the blast-ray sizzled. The ax had cloven his shoulder. Whitcomb sprang, getting a grip on his gun hand. Schtein howled, struggling to force the blaster around. Everard jumped up to help. There was a moment of confusion.
Then the blaster went off again and Schtein was suddenly a dead weight in their arms. Blood drenched their coats from the hideous opening in his chest.
The two guards came running in. Everard snatched his stunner off the floor and thumbed the ratchet up to full intensity. A flung spear grazed his arm. He fired twice, and the burly forms crashed. They'd be out for hours.
Crouching a moment, Everard listened. A feminine scream sounded from the inner chambers, but no one was entering at the door. "I guess we've carried it off," he panted.
"Yes." Whitcomb looked dully at the corpse sprawled before him. It seemed pathetically small.
"I didn't mean for him to die," said Everard. "But time is . . . tough. It was written, I suppose."
"Better this way than a Patrol court and the exile planet," said Whitcomb.
"Technically, at least, he was a thief and a murderer," said Everard. "But it was a great dream he had."
"And we upset it."
"History might have upset it. Probably would have. One man just isn't powerful enough, or wise enough. I think most human misery is due to well-meaning fanatics like him."
"So we just fold our hands and take what comes."
"Think of all your friends, up in 1947. They'd never even have existed."
Whitcomb took off his cloak and tried to wipe the blood from his clothes.
"Let's get going," said Everard. He trotted through the rear portal. A frightened concubine watched him with large eyes.
He had to blast the lock off an inner door. The room beyond held an Ing-model time shuttle, a few boxes with weapons and supplies, some books. Everard loaded it all into the machine except the fuel chest. That had to be left, so that up in the future he would learn of this and come back to stop the man who would be God.
"Suppose you take this to the warehouse in 1894," he said. "I'll ride our hopper back and meet you at the office."
Whitcomb gave him a long stare. The man's face was drawn. Even as Everard watched him, it stiffened with resolution.
"All right, old chap," said the Englishman. He smiled, almost wistfully, and clasped Everard's hand. "So long. Good luck."
Everard stared after him as he entered the great steel cylinder. That was an odd thing to say, when they'd be having tea up in 1894 in a couple of hours.
Worry nagged him as he went out of the building and mingled with the crowd. Charlie was a peculiar cuss. Well. . . .
No one interfered with him as he left the city and entered the thicket beyond. He called the time hopper back down and, in spite of the need for haste lest someone come to see what kind of bird had landed, cracked a jug of ale. He needed it badly. Then he took a last look at Old England and jumped up to 1894.
Mainwethering and his guards were there as promised. The officer looked alarmed at the sight of one man arriving with blood clotting across his garments, but Everard gave him a reassuring report.
It took a while to wash up, change clothes, and deliver a full account to the secretary. By then, Whitcomb should have arrived in a hansom, but there was no sign of him. Mainwethering called the warehouse on the radio, and turned back with a frown. "He hasn't come yet," he said. "Could something have gone wrong?"
"Hardly. Those machines are foolproof." Everard gnawed his lip. "I don't know what the matter is. Maybe he misunderstood and went up to 1947 instead."
An exchange of notes revealed that Whitcomb had not reported in at that end either. Everard and Mainwethering went out for their tea. There was still no trace of Whitcomb when they got back.
"I had best inform the field agency," said Mainwethering. "Eh, what? They should be able to find him."
"No. Wait." Everard stood for a moment, thinking. The idea had been germinating in him for some time. It was dreadful.
"Have you a notion?"
"Yes. Sort of." Everard began shucking his Victorian suit. His hands trembled. "Get my twentieth-century clothes, will you? I may be able to find him by myself."
"The Patrol will want a preliminary report of your idea and intentions," reminded Mainwethering.
"To hell with the Patrol," said Everard.