The Corridors of Time (7 page)

‘You have nothing to thank me for, Auri,’ Lockridge said. ‘You and yours have shown me more kindness than I deserve.’

‘No, but much!’ she protested. ‘You bless me.’

‘How so? I have done nothing.’

Her fingers twisted together and she looked into her lap. It was so difficult for her to explain that he wished he hadn’t
asked, but he couldn’t think of a way to stop her.

The story was simple. Among the Tenile Orugaray a maiden was sacred, inviolable. But when she herself felt the time had come,
she named a man to initiate her at the spring sowing festival, a tender and awesome rite. Auri’s chosen had drowned at sea
a few days before their moment. Clearly the Powers were angry, and the Wise Woman decided that, in addition to being purified,
she must remain alone until the curse was somehow removed. That was more than a year ago.

It was a serious matter for her father (or, at least, the head of her household; paternity was anyone’s guess in this culture)
– and, he being headman, for the tribe. While no women who were not grandmothers sat in council, the sexes had essentially
equal rights, and descent was matrilineal. If Auri died childless, what became of the inheritance? As for herself, she was
not precisely shunned, but there had been a bitter year of being left out of almost everything.

When the strangers came, bearing unheard-of marvels and bestowing some as gifts, that appeared to be a sign. The Wise Woman
cast beech chips in the darkness of her hut and told Echegon that this was indeed so. Great and unknown Powers indwelt in
The Storm and her (Her?) attendant Malcolm. By favoring Echegon’s house, they drew off evil. Today, when Malcolm himself had
not scorned to go out on the ever-treacherous water with Auri —

‘You could not stay?’ she pleaded. ‘If you honored me next spring, I would be … more than a woman. The curse would change
to a blessing upon me.’

His cheeks burned. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, as kindly as might be. ‘We cannot wait, but must be gone with the first ship.’

She bent her head and caught her lip between white teeth.

‘But I shall certainly see that the ban is removed,’ he promised. ‘Tomorrow I will confer with the Wise Woman. Between us,
she and I can doubtless find a way.’

Auri wiped away some tears and gave him an uncertain smile. ‘Thank you. I still wish you could remain – or come back in spring?
But if you give me my life again—’ She gulped. ‘There are no words to thank you for that.’

How cheaply one became a god.

Trying to put her at ease, he turned the talk to matters that were commonplace for her. She was so surprised that he should
ask about potterymaking, which was woman’s work, that she quite forgot her troubles, especially since she was reckoned good
at fashioning the handsome ware he had admired. It led her to remember the amber harvest: ‘When we go out after a storm,’
she said breathlessly, eyes alight, ‘the whole people, out on the dunes to gather what has washed ashore … oh, then is a merry
time, and the fish and oysters we
bake! Why do you not raise a storm while you are here, Malcolm, so you may have the fun too? I will show you a place I know
where the gulls come to your hand for food, and we will swim in the breakers after floating chunks, and, and everything!’

‘I fear the weather is beyond my control,’ he said. ‘I am only a man, Auri. I have some powers, yes, but they are not really
great.’

‘I think you can do everything.’

‘Uh … um … this amber. You gather it mostly for trade, do you not?’

The bright head nodded. ‘The inlanders want it, and the folk beyond the westward sea, and the ship people from the South.’

‘Do you also trade flint?’ He knew the answer, having spent hours watching a master at work: chips flew from his stone anvil,
against his leather apron, with sparks and sulfury smell and deep-toned ring of blows, and a thing of beauty grew beneath
the gnarled old hands. But Lockridge wanted to keep the talk light. Auri’s laugh was so good to hear.

‘Yes, tools we sell too, though only inland,’ she said. ‘If the ship calls somewhere else than Avildaro, may I go with you
to see it?’

‘Well… surely, if no one objects.’

‘I would like to go with you to the South,’ she said wistfully.

He thought of her in a Cretan slave market, or puzzled and lost in his own world of machines and sighed. ‘No, that cannot
be. I’m sorry.’

‘I knew it.’ Her tone was quiet, with no trace of self-pity. One learned in the Neolithic to accept what was. Even her long
isolation in the shadow of wrath had not broken her capacity for joy.

He looked at her, where she sat supple and sun-browned with one hand trailing in the clucking water, and wondered what her
destiny was. History would forget the Tenil Orugaray, they would be no more than a few relics dredged out of
bogs; before then, she would be down in dust, and when her grandchildren perished – if she lived long enough to have any,
in this world of wild beasts and wilder men, storm, flood, uncurable sicknesses and implacable gods – the last memory of her
gentleness would flicker out forever.

He saw her few years of youth, when she could outrun deer and spend the whole light summer night giving and getting kisses;
the children that would come and come and come, because so many died that every woman must bear the utmost she was able lest
the tribe itself die; the middle years, when she was honored as the matron of the headman’s house, watched sons and daughters
grow up and her own strength fade; age, when she gave the council what wisdom she had reaped, while the world closed in with
blindness, deafness, toothlessness, rheumatism, arthritis, and the only time left her was in the half-remembered past; the
final sight of her, grown small and strange, down into the passage grave through the roofhole that meant birth; and for some
years, sacrifices before the tomb and shudders at night when the wind whimpered outside the house, for it might be her ghost
returning; and darkness.

He saw her four thousand years hence and four thousand miles westward: cramped over a school desk; dragging out an adolescence
bored, useless, titillated and frustrated; marrying a man, or a series of men, whose work was to sell what nobody needed or
really wanted – marrying also a mortgage and a commuter’s iron schedule; sacrificing all but two weeks a year of carefully
measured freedom in order to buy the silly gadgets and pay the vindictive taxes; breathing smoke and dust and poison; sitting
in a car, at a bridge table, in a beauty parlor, before a television, the spring gone from her body and the teeth rotten in
her mouth before she was twenty; living in the heartland of liberty, the strongest nation earth had yet known, while it crawled
from the march of the tyrants and the barbarians; living in horror of cancer, heart failure, mental disease, and the final
nuclear flame.

Lockridge cut off the vision. He was being unjust to his own age, he knew – and to this one as well. Life was physically harder
in some places, harder on the spirit in others, and sometimes it destroyed both. At most, the gods gave only a little happiness;
the rest was merely existence. Taken altogether, he didn’t think they were less generous here and now than they had been to
him. And here was where Auri belonged.

‘You think much,’ she said timidly.

He started and missed a stroke. Clear drops showered from the paddle, agleam in the level light. ‘Why, no,’ he said. ‘I was
only wandering.’

Again he misused the idiom. The spirit that wandered in thought or in dream, could enter strange realms. She regarded him
with reverence. After a while when nothing but the canoe’s passage and the far-off cries of homing geese broke the stillness,
she asked low. ‘May I call you Lynx?’

He blinked.

‘I do not understand your name Malcolm,’ she explained. ‘So it is a strong magic, too strong for me. But you are like a big
golden lynx.’

‘Why – why —’ However childish, the gesture touched him. ‘If you want. But I don’t think Flower Feather could be bettered.’

Auri flushed and looked away. They continued in silence.

And the silence lengthened. Gradually Lockridge grew aware of that. Ordinarily, this near the village, there was plenty of
noise: children shouting at their games, fishermen hailing the shore as they approached, housewives gossiping, perhaps the
triumphant song of hunters who had bagged an elk. But he turned right and paddled up the cove between the narrowing wooden
banks, and no human voice reached him. He glanced at Auri. Maybe she knew what was afoot. She sat chin in hand, gazing at
him, oblivious to everything else. He hadn’t the heart to speak. Instead, he sent the canoe forward as fast as he was able.

Avildaro came in sight. Under the ancient shaw at its back, it was a cluster of sod-roofed wattle huts around the Long
House of ceremony, which was a more elaborate half-timbered peat structure. Boats were drawn onto the beach, where nets dried
on poles. Several hundred yards off stood the kitchen midden. The Tenil Orugaray no longer lived at the very foot of that
mound of oyster shells, bones, and other trash, as their ancestors had done; but they carried the offal there, for the half-tame
pigs to eat, and the site was veiled with flies.

Auri came out of her trance. The clear brow wrinkled. ‘But no one is about!’ she said.

‘There must be someone in the Long House,’ Lockridge answered. Smoke curled from the venthole in its roof. ‘We had better
go see.’ He was glad of the Webley at his hip.

He pulled the canoe ashore, with the girl’s help, and made fast. Her hand stole into his as they entered the village. Shadows
darkened the dusty paths between huts, and the air seemed suddenly cold. ‘What does this mean?’ she begged of him.

‘If you don’t know—’ He lengthened his stride.

Noise certainly buzzed from the hall. Two young men stood guard outside. ‘Here they come!’ one of them shouted. Both dipped
their spears to Lockridge.

He went through the skin-curtained door with Auri. His eyes needed a while to adapt to the gloom within; there were no windows,
and the smoke that didn’t escape stung. The fire in the central pit was holy, never allowed to go out. (Like most primitive
customs, that had a practical basis. Fires were never easy to start before matches were invented, and anyone might come here
to light a brand.) It had been stoked up until the flames danced and crackled, throwing uneasy flickers across sooted walls
and pillars roughly hewn with magical symbols. The whole population was crowded in: some four hundred men, women, and children
squatting on the dirt floor, mumbling to each other.

Echegon and his chief councilors stood near the fire with Storm. When Lockridge saw her, tall and arrogant, he forgot about
Auri and went to her. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘The Yuthoaz are coming,’ she said.

He spent a minute assimilating what the diaglossa associated with that name. The Battle Ax people; the northward-thrusting
edge of that huge wave, more cultural than racial, of Indo-European-speaking warriors which had been spreading from southern
Russia in the past century or two. Elsewhere they were destined to topple civilizations: India, Crete, Hatti, Greece would
go down in ruin before them, and their languages and religions and ways of life would shape all Europe. But hitherto, in sparsely
populated Scandinavia, there had not been great conflict between the native hunters, fishers, and farmers, and the chariot-driving
immigrant herdsmen.

Still; Avildaro had heard of bloody clashes to the east.

Echegon hugged Auri to him for a moment before he said: ‘I had not too much fear for you under Malcom’s protection. But I
thank Her that you are back.’ The strong, bearded visage turned to Lockridge. ‘Today,’ he said, ‘men hunting southward hastened
home with word that the Yuthoaz are moving against us and will be here tomorrow. They are plainly a war band, nothing but
armed men, and Avildaro is the first village on their way. What have we done to offend them or the gods?’

Lockridge glanced at Storm. ‘Well,’ he said in English, ‘I kind of hate to use our weapons on those poor devils, but if we’ve
got to—’

She shook her head. ‘No. The energies might be detected. Or, at least, the story might reach Ranger agents and alert them
to us. Best that you and I take refuge elsewhere.’

‘What? But – but —’

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘time is immutable. Since this place survives a hundred years from now, quite likely the natives will
repel the attack tomorrow.’

He could not break free of her eyes; but Auri’s were on him too, and Echegon’s, and his boatmates’ and girl friends’ and the
flintsmith’s and everyone’s. He squared his shoulders. ‘Maybe they didn’t, either,’ he said. ‘Maybe they’re conquered underlings
in the future, or would be except for us. I’m stay-in’.’

‘You dare —’ Storm checked herself. A moment she stood taut and still. Then she smiled, reached out and stroked his cheek.
‘I might have known,’ she said. ‘Very well, I shall stay too.’

They came west across the meadows, the oak forest on their left, and the men of Avildaro stood to meet them. They numbered
perhaps a hundred in all, with ten chariots, the rest loping on foot: no more than their opponents. When first he squinted
through the brilliant noontide, Lockridge could hardly believe that these were the dreaded men of the Battle Ax.

As they neared, he studied one who was typical. In body the warrior was not very different from the Tenil Orugaray: somewhat
shorter and stockier, his brown hair twisted into a queue and his beard into a fork, his countenance more Central European
than Russian in its beak-nosed harshness. He wore a jerkin and knee-length skirt of leather, a clan symbol burned in, carried
a round bullhide shield painted with the fylfot, and had for weapons a flint dagger and a beautifully fashioned stone ax.
His lips were drawn wide in carnivore anticipation.

The chariot he followed, evidently his chieftain’s, was a light two-wheeled affair of wood and wicker, pulled by four shaggy
little horses. A young boy, unarmed and clad merely in a loincloth, guided them. Behind him stood the master: bigger than
most, wielding an ax so long and heavy it was a halberd, with two spears racked ready to hand. The chief had a helmet, corselet,
and greaves of reinforced leather; a short bronze
sword hung at his waist, a faded cloak of linen from the South fluttered off his shoulders, and a necklace of massy gold flashed
beneath his shaggy chin.