LITMIR.BIZ

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priest’s definitely un-monastic companion.

      She was a girl, twenty, give or take a year or so, with blonde hair cut in what he knew as a page-boy bob. She had blue eyes and red lips and an impudent tilty little nose dusted with golden freckles. She wore a jerkin of something like brown suede, sewn with gold thread, and a yellow undertunic with a high neck and long sleeves, and brown knit hose and thigh-length jackboots. There was a gold chain around her neck, and a gold-hilted dagger on a belt of gold links. No, this wasn’t any monastery, and it wasn’t any peasant hovel, either.

      As soon as he saw her, he began to laugh. He’d met that young lady before.

      “You shot me!” he accused, aiming an imaginary pistol and saying “Bang!” and then touching his chest.

      She said something to the older priest, he replied, and she said something to Morrison, pantomiming sorrow and shame, covering her face with one hand, and winking at him over it. Then they both laughed. Perfectly natural mistake—how could she have known which side he’d been on?

      The two priests held a colloquy, and then the younger brought him about four ounces of something dark brown in a glass tumbler. It tasted alcoholic and medicinally bitter. They told him, by signs, to go back to sleep, and left him, the girl looking back over her shoulder as she went out.

      He squirmed a little, decided that he was going to like it, here-and-now, and dozed off.

      Late in the afternoon he woke again. A different woman, thin, with mouse-brown hair, sat in the chair under the window, stitching on something that looked like a shirt. Outside, a dog was barking, and farther off somebody was drilling troops—a couple of hundred, from the amount of noise they were making. A voice was counting cadence: Heep, heep, heep, heep! Another universal constant.

      He smiled contentedly. Once he got on his feet again, he didn’t think he was going to be on unemployment very long. A soldier was all he’d ever been, since he’d stopped being a theological student at Princeton between sophomore and junior years. He’d owed a lot of thanks to the North Korean Communists for starting that war; without it, he might never have found the moral courage to free himself from the career into which his father had been forcing him. His enlisting in the Army had probably killed his father; the Rev. Alexander Morrison simply couldn’t endure not having his own way. At least, he died while his son was in Korea.

      Then there had been the year and a half, after he came home, when he’d worked as a bankguard, until his mother died. That had been soldiering of a sort; he’d worked armed and in uniform, at least. And then, when he no longer had his mother to support, he’d gone into the State Police. That had really been soldiering, the nearest anybody could come to it in peacetime.

      And then he’d blundered into that dome of pearly light, that time-machine, and come out of it into—into here-and-now, that was all he could call it.

      Where here was was fairly easy. It had to be somewhere within, say, ten or fifteen miles of where he had been time-shifted, which was just over the Clinton County line, in Nittany Valley. They didn’t use helicopters to evacuate the wounded, here-and-now, that was sure.

      When now was was something else. He lay on his back, looking up at the white ceiling, not wanting to attract the attention of the woman sewing by the window. It wasn’t the past. Even if he hadn’t studied history—it was about the only thing at college he had studied—he’d have known that Penn’s Colony had never been anything like this. It was more like Sixteenth Century Europe, though any Sixteenth Century French or German cavalryman who was as incompetent a swordsman as that gang he’d been fighting wouldn’t have lived to wear out his first pair of issue boots. And enough Comparative Religion had rubbed off on him for him to know that those three images on that peasant’s shelf didn’t belong in any mythology back to Egypt and Sumeria.

      So it had to be the future. A far future, long after the world had been devastated by atomic war, and man, self-blasted back to the Stone Age, had bootstrap-lifted himself back this far. A thousand years, ten thousand years; ten dollars if you guess how many beans in the jar. The important thing was that here-and-now was when/where he would stay, and he’d have to make a place for himself. He thought he was going to like it.

      That lovely, lovely blonde! He fell asleep thinking about her.

      Breakfast the next morning was cornmeal mush cooked with meat-broth and tasting rather like scrapple, and a mug of sassafras tea. Coffee, it seemed, didn’t exist here-and-now, and that he was going to miss. He sign-talked for his tunic to be brought, and got his pipe, tobacco and lighter out of it. The woman brought a stool and set it beside the bed to put things on. The lighter opened her eyes a trifle, and she said something, and he said something in a polite voice, and she went back to her knitting. He looked at the tunic; it was torn and blood-soaked on the left side, and the badge was lead-splashed and twisted. That was why he was still alive.

      The old priest and the girl were in about an hour later. This time she was wearing a red and gray knit frock that could have gone into Bergdorf-Goodman’s window with a $200 price-tag any day, though the dagger on her belt wasn’t exactly Fifth Avenue. They had slates and soapstone sticks with them; paper, evidently hadn’t been rediscovered yet. They greeted him, then pulled up chairs and got down to business.

      First, they taught him the words for you and me and he and she, and, when he had that, names. The girl was Rylla. The old priest was Xentos. The younger priest, who dropped in for a look at the patient, was Mytron. The names, he thought, sounded Greek; it was the only point of resemblance in the language.

      Calvin Morrison puzzled them. Evidently they didn’t have surnames, here-and-now. They settled on calling him Kalvan. There was a lot of picture-drawing on the slates, and play-acting for verbs, which was fun. Both Rylla and Xentos smoked; Rylla’s pipe, which she carried on her belt with her dagger, had a silver-inlaid redstone bowl and a cane stem. She was intrigued by his Zippo, and showed him her own lighter. It was a tinderbox, with a flint held down by a spring against a quarter-circular striker pushed by hand and returned by another spring for another push. With a spring to drive instead of return the striker it would have done for a gunlock. By noon, they were able to tell him that he was their friend, because he had killed their enemies, which seemed to be the definitive test of friendship, here-and-now, and he was able to assure Rylla that he didn’t blame her for shooting him in the skirmish on the road.

      They were back in the afternoon, accompanied by a gentleman with a gray imperial, wearing a garment like a fur-collared bathrobe and a sword-belt over it. He had a most impressive gold chain around his neck. His name was Ptosphes, and after much sign-talk and picture-making, it emerged that he was Rylla’s father, and also Prince of this place. This place, it seemed, was Hostigos. The raiders with whom he had fought had come from a place called Nostor, to the north and east. Their Prince was named Gormoth, and Gormoth was not well thought of in Hostigos.

      The next day, he was up in a chair, and they began giving him solid food, and wine to drink. The wine was excellent; so was the local tobacco. Maybe he’d get used to sassafras tea instead of coffee. The food was good, though sometimes odd. Bacon and eggs, for instance; the eggs were turkey eggs. Evidently they didn’t have chickens, here-and-now. They had plenty of game, though. The game must have come back nicely after the atomic wars.

      Rylla was in to see him twice a day, sometimes alone and sometimes with Xentos, or with a big man with a graying beard, Chartiphon, who seemed to be Ptosphes’ top soldier. He always wore a sword, long and heavy, with a two-hand grip; not a real two-hander, but what he’d known as a hand-and-a-half, or bastard, sword. Often he wore a gilded back-and-breast, ornately wrought but nicked and battered. Sometimes, too, he visited alone, or with a young cavalry officer, Harmakros.

      Harmakros wore a beard, too, obviously copied after Prince Ptosphes’. He decided to stop worrying about getting a shave; you could wear a beard, here-and-now, and nobody’d think you were either an Amishman or a beatnik. Harmakros had been on the patrol that had hit the Nostori raiders from behind at the village, but, it appeared, Rylla had been in command.

      “The gods,” Chartiphon explained, “did not give our Prince a son. A Prince should have a son, to rule after him,

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