The Corridors of Time (10 page)

The men about the fire, who had watched in amusement, sprang erect and bristled. Withucar looked dismayed. But
Thuno, aroused as he was, snapped, ‘He lies!’

‘I’ll swear by anything you like,’ Lockridge said.

‘What are a wizard’s oaths worth?’ Thuno sneered. ‘If he means she’s a maiden, well, what harm’s that ever done us! And she
can’t be anything else. They don’t have sacred women here, except for one old crone who’s whelped many a time while young.’

Withucar’s gaze flickered back and forth. He tugged his beard and said in unease, ‘Right… right… but still, best you be safe.’

‘I am a free man,’ Thuno said harshly. ‘On my head be whatever happens.’ He laughed. ‘I know the first thing that’ll happen.
Come!’

‘You’re the chief,’ Lockridge raved to Withucar. ‘Stop him!’

The Yutho sighed. ‘I cannot. As he said, he is a free man.’ He regarded the American shrewdly. ‘I’ve seen those who came under
the terror of the gods. You haven’t that look. Maybe you want her for yourself?’

Auri raked fingernails at Thuno’s grinning face. He got her by the arm and twisted. She stumbled before him.

And her father and her brother lay out for ravens to eat – Lockridge exploded into motion.

Withucar stood next to him. Lockridge whirled and drove a fist into the leader’s belly, just below the rib cage. Tough muscle
resisted his knuckles, bruisingly, but the man lurched and went to the ground.

The freckled lad who held the torch dropped it and whipped
up his ax. Lockridge’s Marine training responded. One step brought him close. He chopped at the throat with the edge of his
hand. The Yutho uttered a croak, crumpled, and lay still.

Before he could grab the other’s weapon, Lockridge sensed a body at his back. Reflex brought his wrists to his neck. Arms
closed around it. He felt their hairiness, snapped his wrists apart again, and broke the stranglehold. Turning, he put a leg
behind the warrior’s ankles and shoved. One more down!

The men around the fire howled and surged against him. Lockridge swept the torch off the earth. A comet’s tail of fire blazed
when he swept it at the nearest pair of eyes. That attacker stumbled back before he should be blinded. Two others fell over
him in a tangle of limbs and curses.

Lockridge leaped over the fire. Thuno stood there alone, gaping. But as the American came upon him, he let go Auri’s leash.
His own ax was not quickly reachable, but he yanked out his flint dagger and rushed in with an overhand stab.

Lockridge blocked that with one wrist. The sharp edge slithered along his forearm. Blood ran from the gash it left. Lockridge
didn’t notice. He brought his knee up. Thuno shrieked and reeled away.

‘Run, Auri!’ Lockridge bellowed.

He had only disabled two out of ten. The rest charged around the fire. He couldn’t win over so many, but he could gain her
time. He pelted off. A hurled spear smote the ground beside him.

He stopped, pulled the weapon free, and faced the attack. ‘Don’t try to stab with this thing, he thought amidst the hammering
in his temples. Got better uses for a long straight shaft. He held it in both hands near the middle, balanced on his toes,
and waited.

The mass poured upon him. He went into a rage of quarter-staff play. Wood smote solidly on a head, broke fingers that held
an ax, rammed a solar plexus, darted between legs to trip, whirred and clattered and thudded home. The night turned into blows,
grunts, shouts, where firelight made teeth and eyeballs
flash.

Suddenly, fantastically, Lockridge stood alone. Three Yuthoaz writhed groaning in the shadows that wove about his feet. The
rest had scattered. They panted and glared at him from near the fire. He saw their hides gleam with sweat.

‘Maruts snatch you off!’ Withucar roared. ‘He’s only a man!’ Still his four hale followers remained at bay. They did not even
string a bow.

With his wind back, the chieftain advanced by himself. Lockridge swung the stick at him. Squint-eyed, Withucar had been watching
for that. He parried with his tomahawk. The violence rang through Lockridge’s bones. His weapon fell from numbed hands. Withucar
kicked it out of reach, bawled victory, and trod close. And now, from other camps, others who had heard the racket came running.

Lockridge jumped to meet the Yutho. Again he blocked a downward blow. His shoulder thrust against Withucar. Dimly, he felt
a beard bristle cross his skin. He got an arm lock. A heave, cruelly deft – bone snapped with a pistol crack – Withucar floundered
off, wheezing through tight-held jaws.

A big man from another fire was almost upon Lockridge, ax aloft. He wore a tunic. Lockridge braced himself, swerved from the
attack, took its impact on his hip; his fingers grabbed coarse cloth and a single judo maneuver turned motion into flight.
The big man crashed six feet away.

The night burst with howls. Men drew back, shadows in shadow. Lockridge seized Withucar’s tomahawk, whirled it on high, and
let loose a rebel yell.

Like lightning, he realized what had happened. However total their victory, the invaders were inwardly shaken by the forces
they had seen today. Now one man had beaten half a dozen in as many minutes. Darkness and confusion made it impossible to
see that he had simply used tactics unknown to this era. He was a troll broken free, and terror seized them.

They didn’t run, but they milled beyond his edge of clear vision. The diaglossa hinted what to cry: ‘I will eat the next man
who touches me!’ Their horror winded through the night.
Sky Father’s worshippers still feared the earth gods for whom, further inland, a human being was devoured every harvest.

Slowly, Lockridge turned and walked off. His back ached with the tension of awaiting a spear, an arrow, a skull-crushing ax
blow… and not looking behind. He saw the world through a haze, and his heart kept sickeningly missing beats.

An oak reared gnarly before him. The leaves whispered. Somewhere a nightjar echoed them. Lockridge passed into the dark of
the far side.

A hand plucked at him. He recoiled and struck out. His fist brushed softness. ‘Lynx,’ quivered her voice, ‘wait for me.’

He must husk several times before he could speak, dry-mouthed: ‘Auri, you should have run off.’

‘I did. I stopped here to see what befell you. Come.’ She pressed close, and the universe was no longer a fever dream. ‘I
know ways to the forest,’ she said.

‘That is well.’ Self-possession returned to him, like a series of bolts snicking home. He could think again. Peering around
the tree bole, he saw fires scattered wide across the fields, figures that flitted among them, a rare gleam of polished stone
or copper. The bass babble was just too distant for him to make out words.

‘They will soon get back their courage,’ he said, ‘especially after Brann is told what happened and reassures them. The woods
are not close, and they will search for us. Can we stay hidden?’

‘She of the Earth will help us,’ Auri said.

She urged him out into the open and went on all fours. Weasel slim and supple, she traced a winding path where the grass grew
tallest. Lockridge followed her more clumsily. But he had stalked this way before, ages ago, in that unborn future when he
was a boy.

Beyond enemy view, they rose and loped south. Neither spoke; breath was too precious. Lockridge’s pupils expanded until he
could see how the grass rippled in a breeze and how the copses stood pale on top, solidly black below, under the high constellations.
Through foot-thuds, he heard a fox bark, a
hare scutter, frogs chorus. Auri was a moving slenderness beside him, her mane white in the star-glow.

Then a wolf howled from the woods that began to show darkling ahead. As if it were a signal, the bison horns moaned, and he
heard men yelp in pursuit of him.

The rest of the flight was a blur. He would never have escaped without Auri. Running, twisting, dodging, she led him through
every dip of ground and patch of shadow that her Goddess afforded them. Once they lay behind a boulder and heard men go past,
a yard away; once they got up a tree just before spears went bobbing underneath. When finally the forest enclosed him, he
fell and lay like one whose bones had been sucked out.

Awareness returned in pieces. First he noticed glimmers of sky overhead, where the leaves left small open spaces. Otherwise
he was nearly blind in the night. Bracken rustled and brushed his limbs with harsh fronds, but the ground was soft damp mould,
pungent to smell. He tingled and throbbed. Yet Auri was curled against him, he felt her warmth and breath and caught the faint
woodsmoke odor of her hair. Everything had grown most quiet.

He forced himself to sit up. She awakened when he moved. ‘Did we really get away?’ he mumbled.

‘Yes,’ the girl said, her tone more level than his. ‘If they follow, we will know them by their trampling’ – a note of scorn
for all clumsy heathdwellers – ‘and find concealment.’ She hugged him. ‘Oh, Lynx!’

‘Easy. Easy.’ He disengaged her and groped for the ax. Wonder touched him. ‘I never expected we both would escape.’

‘No, surely you knew what you did. You can do anything.’

‘Uh—’ Lockridge shook his head, trying to clear it. For the first time, he understood what had gone on. He really hadn’t planned
events. Auri’s plight triggered the rage pent in him; thereafter, drilled-in habits had carried him along. Unless, of course,
the Tenil Orugaray were right in believing that a man
could be possessed by Those who walked this wilderness.

‘Why did you come back?’ he asked.

‘To seek you, who would lift the ban on me,’ Auri said naively.

That made sense, though it dashed his ego a little. She’d acted in what seemed her own self-interest. And maybe not too recklessly,
even, judging by how she had given the Yuthoaz the slip afterward. Only by pure bad luck had she been heard and captured;
then pure good luck brought Lockridge to the very band that had seized her.

Luck?
Time could turn on itself. There was indeed such a thing as destiny. Though it might be blind – Lockridge remembered Brann’s
final word. ‘You came to me … and warned me!’ An ugly thrill went down his nerves. No! he spat at the night. That was a lie!

Defiance brought decision. He paid Auri scant heed, while his plan and the somber sense of fate grew within him, but he heard
her talking :

‘Many got from Avildaro into the forest. I know where some are hidden, those I left to return to you. We can seek them out,
and afterward another village of the Tenil Orugaray.’

Lockridge braced himself. ‘You shall,’ he said. ‘But I have a different place to go.’

‘What? Where? Beneath the sea?’

‘No, ashore. And at once, before Brann thinks to send men there. A forsaken dolmen, half a morning’s walk to the south. Do
you know it?’

Auri shivered. ‘Yes.’ Her voice grew thin. ‘The House of the Old Dead. Once the Tenil Vaskulan lived in that place and buried
their great folk; now only ghosts. Must you indeed? And after sunset?’

‘Yes. Have no fears.’

She gulped. ‘Not – not if you say so.’

‘Come, then. Guide me.’

They began to walk, through choked brush and down deer trails saturated with murk, he stumbling and swearing, she slipping
sprite-like along. ‘You see,’ he explained when they
stopped to rest, ‘My, uh, my friend, The Storm, is still in Brann’s hands. I must try to get help for her rescue.’

‘That witch?’ He heard a whisper of tangled locks as Auri tossed her head, and a sniff that actually made him chuckle. ‘Can
she not look after herself?’

‘Well, the rescue party should also be able to chase the Yuthoaz home.’

‘So you will come back!’ she exclaimed in a rush of gladness. Somehow he didn’t think it was selfish. And had her return to
Avildaro been entirely so? He felt uncomfortable.

Little else was said. Progress was too difficult. The slow hours passed; and the night, short in this season near midsummer,
began to wane. Stars paled, a grayness crept between the trees, the first twitter of birds came faint and clear.

Lockridge thought that now he could recognize the path he had followed with Storm. Not far to go___

Auri stiffened. Her eyes, luminous in the small dimly seen face, widened. ‘Hold!’ she breathed.

‘What?’ Lockridge gripped the ax till his palm hurt.

‘Do you not hear?’

He didn’t. She led him forward, turning her head right and left, parting withes with enormous caution. Presently the sound
reached him too: a crackle in the brush, far behind but ever more near.

His gullet tightened. ‘Animals?’ he hoped foolishly.

‘Men,’ Auri told him. ‘Bound our way.’

So Brann had dispatched a patrol to guard the time gate. Had the Yuthoaz been as woodscrafty as this girl, they would have
been waiting there for him. As matters stood, he had a chance.

‘Fast!’ he ordered. ‘Never mind silence. We must reach the dolmen ahead of them.’

Auri sprinted. He came behind. In the misty twilight, he stumbled over a log and into a stand of saplings. They caught at
his garments and cried out in wooden voices. Shouts lifted from the glades at his back.

‘They heard,’ Auri warned. ‘Swiftly!’

Over the trail they fled. Trees crawled past with horrible slowness. And the light strengthened.

When they emerged on the meadow, it lay aglitter with dew under a sky flushed rose. The hillock loomed before them. Breath
raw in his lungs, knifed by his spleen, Lockridge made for the hollow tree where Storm had hidden the entrance control.

He fumbled within. Auri screamed. Lockridge drew forth the metal tube and looked about. A score of warriors were at the edge
of the clearing.

They roared when they saw him and bounded forward. Lockridge staggered with Auri, up the knoll, above a second-growth tangle
into plain view. An arrow went
whoooo
past his ear.

‘No, you dolt!’ called the Yutho leader. ‘The god said to take him alive!’

Lockridge twisted studs on the tube. A man broke through the young trees at the foot of the mound, poised, and waved his fellows
on. Lockridge saw with unnatural sharpness: braided hair, leather kilt, muscular torso and the long tomahawk – Brann must
have nerved this gang up to face almost anything.