Debt of Ages (34 page)

"I understand none of this wizardry,
Pan-Tarkan
," Kai said, turning to face him. "But I know you, for you've come striding out of my very memories. You may say I'm not yours to command in this time and place, I know better. And Ecdicius is your true heir."

Artorius clasped Kai in his arms—this Kai who was to all appearances his own age. "I have one other . . . not command, Kai, but request. Tell no one of this meeting we've been permitted. There are things men are better off not knowing."

"That's an easy one,
Pan-Tarkan
," Kai grinned. "Nobody'd believe me anyway!" And with that grin, Sarnac knew this man to be his old friend—Kai with a few more pounds and some gray hairs, but still Kai. And the world seemed mended.

Artorius smiled back and they embraced one last time. Then the former High King turned and strode toward the portal.

"You'd better stay for now," Tylar murmured to Sarnac. "Your abrupt disappearance would be hard to explain. We'll come back for you and Andreas as originally planned." He followed Artorius through the portal, which vanished. At the instant of its vanishing, the rain resumed its descent onto the parade ground, pelting them, and the stationary figures throughout the camp crashed back into battle. Ecdicius plunged forward, seeming to reacquire his momentum toward them. Then he reined in, puzzled, as Kai knelt before him.

"Bedwyr, the lightning must have dazzled me—I didn't see you get up. And Kai . . . ?"

The erstwhile enemy commander extended his
spatha
hilt-first with his left hand while giving the Roman salute with the right. "Hail Ecdicius Augustus!" he shouted. "Accept my allegiance, and the Army of Germania!"

Ecdicius' jaw dropped. Sarnac grinned weakly as the accumulated exhaustion of this day began to overtake him. "We'd better have the trumpeters signal 'Truce' and send some heralds out to stop the fighting. And let's get in out of this damned rain!"

They rounded the remembered bend in the road and Sarnac saw the three approaching riders, coming from the direction of Cadbury. He bounded ahead of Tylar and Artorius as Tiraena sprang from her horse and ran to him. After a while, they heard a harrumph.

"Ah, you forgot your horse," Cerdic said. He was holding the bridle Tiraena had abandoned.

"Thank you," Tiraena smiled.

"No," the
ealdorman
said with a vehement headshake. "Let you never have any thought of owing me thanks, Lady. The rest of my life will be spent in your debt for the life of my son." He dismounted and, to Tiraena's obvious consternation, fell to his knees at her feet.

"Cerdic!"
she exclaimed, voice rising to a falsetto squeak.

"I know not where you're going, Lady, or whether you'll ever return. But if ever you're in need of a life, the life of Cerdic of the West Saxons is yours."

Tiraena's coppery face turned a dark-red shade new to Sarnac—it came to him that he'd never seen her blush before. "Aw, come on, Cerdic," she stammered. "I'm just glad Cynric is all right." She'd said goodbye to her young erstwhile bodyguard before leaving Cadbury, where he lay raising the roof with his demands to be allowed out of bed after a recovery that had the entire countryside talking of miracles. "That's all the thanks I need. Now
please
get up!"

"As you command, Lady." Cerdic rose with a smile. "My debt to you is yours to release me from. But my honor, and that of my house, is mine—and you'll never want for a shield and a sword in this land!"

Gwenhwyvaer rescued Tiraena from her tongue-tied misery. "Ride on back, Cerdic. I'll catch up. There are things I must say in private."

"Aye, Lady." Cerdic mounted and rode off, leading Tiraena's horse. Silence settled over those who remained. Gwenhwyvaer walked forward until she was within less than an arm's reach of Artorius. Silence stretched as she gazed into the face, seemingly in its forties, of him who'd died in his sixties in Constantinople last spring. The late afternoon chill deepened, for winter was coming on, but neither of them showed any signs of noticing.

"So," the queen finally said, "you're off—to a land I've never heard of, Lucasta tells me, and I can well believe it. Indeed, if I understand aright, to another world, a world of dream where you're a legend! So I've lost you twice, first to death and now to what must be magic, however much you deny it."

"Remember what I told you: you share in the legend in that world. But think not of that, Gwen. For you've grown far beyond me—beyond what I became in this world, beyond what fable made of me in the other. You've grown into what I could never have imagined, for I never took the time to truly know you." He sighed deeply and took her hands. "Ah, Gwen, the waste!"

Tylar cleared his throat softly. "We really should be getting along," he said to Sarnac and Tiraena. "We'll wait for you," he added to Artorius, who nodded abstractedly.

"What was all that about with Cerdic?" Sarnac asked after they'd rounded the bend in the road.

"A long story," Tiraena replied. "I'll tell you about it once we're all aboard the ship."

* * *

Sarnac gasped for breath and held his aching sides. "The Holy Pill of Antioch!" he whooped. "I
love
it!" Then another gust of uncontrollable laughter took him.

Tylar didn't share his amusement. "You really shouldn't have, you know," he told Tiraena primly. "Still, it probably won't do any harm. There'll be so many legends associated with that battle that one more won't matter. Future generations will assume that Cynric's wound wasn't really as serious as it was initially thought to be."

"And remember," Sarnac gasped, having gotten his breath back again, "you owe her one for making sure they burned the Interrogator's body instead of burying it."

"True. A Korvaash skeleton, dug up by a later scientifically oriented age, would have been impossible to explain away. As it is, with no physical evidence, he'll be written off as just one more myth. That was well done on your part."

"I wasn't thinking in those terms at the time," Tiraena admitted. "To be honest, I don't clearly remember
what
I was thinking." She stared moodily out at the panorama revealed by the "observation deck" where they reclined on the extrudable furniture that an invisible magic carpet seemed to be carrying over the English Channel under gray skies. Then she shook herself and smiled. "Anyway, Tylar, you must admit I've been punished for my little transgression." She gestured aft, toward the receding British coastline. "I think I've just proven experimentally that it's not possible to literally die of embarrassment!"

Artorius, hitherto quiet, spoke up in an odd voice. "I'm afraid, Tiraena, that you're not quite through doing it." And, before anyone could react, he was on one knee before her, seeming to kneel in midair.

"Artorius?!"
This time, Tiraena's voice rose above falsetto on the last syllable.

"I know not what meaning the name of King Arthur holds for you, Tiraena, for your blood is of many nations and worlds. But for whatever it's worth, you have his undying gratitude for the life of his grandson."

For the first time since Sarnac had known him, Tylar was dumbfounded to the point of being completely inarticulate. When he finally closed his mouth and opened it again, all that emerged was "But, but, but . . ."

Artorius turned to the time traveller with a crocodilian grin and spoke very clearly and distinctly, like a man who'd been waiting for years to deliver a line. "I'm afraid I haven't been entirely candid with you."

* * *

"So you're really going to stay?" Sarnac had been surprised at first, but on reflection he couldn't imagine why.

Andreas nodded. They'd left him in this Gallic villa to recuperate from his wound while they'd gone to Britain. Now the two of them strolled through its courtyard in the unseasonably warm afternoon sun. His recovery was now complete, thanks to Tylar's medical resources and Julia's TLC. And his spirit was clearly as whole as his body.

"Yes. The world I came from no longer exists, far in the future of this timeline. And I wouldn't want to go back to it even if I could."

"Are you sure you'll be able to get used to this world, though?" Sarnac asked, half-jokingly. "No electric lighting, no computers, no toilet paper . . ."

Andreas smiled. "The only thing I'd really miss is advanced medicine, and Tylar's agreed to supply me with some of that. Otherwise, I'll not be losing anything that can compare with what I've found here."

"Oh, yeah: Julia. Great kid. I don't imagine you two had any problem getting Ecdicius' blessing."

"No. All he asked was that we go back to Italy with him before the wedding. That was fine with us—it's not every couple who have their marriage solemnized by the pope! And," he added, deadpan, "I think I'll get over the loss of my estate in Bithynia."

He really
does
have a sense of humor,
Sarnac realized.
It was just overlaid by the concrete of his conditioning in the world he came from. And now that that world is receding into the realms of fading nightmare, it's growing toward the sun like a flower through a cracked pavement.

"But it's not just Julia," Andreas continued. "It's what I can
do
here. In my old world, all we had was a twilight struggle to hold back the night. But now I'm at this world's dawn. I can make a difference to its future."

"Hmm? You mean you're going to continue to work for Tylar?"

"Indeed," came the time traveller's voice as he approached with Tiraena in tow. "As the son-in-law of the Augustus of the West, Andreas will be in a position to give the course of history an occasional nudge in the right direction over the coming years. He'll be in contact with Koreel, who'll be staying on for a while in the Eastern Empire—which is going to be going through interesting times, in the sense of the old Chinese curse. Wilhelmus and his, er, lady have been discredited by the total failure of their attempt to reconquer the West; I doubt if they'll survive for long."

"So you plan to continue keeping an eye on this timeline, then?" Sarnac asked.

"Certainly. From our perspective, it's an absolutely unique research opportunity. A twentieth-century astronomer, long before the days of interstellar probes, remarked that humanity would never really know anything about its own planetary system until it was able to study some others. Something similar applies to the study of history. At the same time, we'll have to guard against the temptation to intervene excessively."

"Yeah, I remember you telling me about the sensation of morally sanctioned interference with events. Quite a rush, I gathered."

"And you, as I recall, expressed concern that it might become habit-forming. I assure you that it won't. The intervention we've just concluded was justified only by dire necessity. Now, this Earth must take care of itself; the fundamental responsibility of human beings for the consequences of their own actions must remain absolute. Any society that loses sight of that ceases to be viable—as the history of your own North American ancestors demonstrates, Robert. And," Tylar continued briskly, "it goes without saying that our own timeline's past remains sacrosanct; we must continue to safeguard it as we always have."

Tiraena spoke up. "Tylar, in that connection, Bob and I have been meaning to talk to you. Andreas, would you excuse us?"

"Of course. I need to talk to Artorius anyway." He departed with a wave, leaving the other three alone in the courtyard. Tylar seated himself on a bench and raised an interrogative eyebrow, waiting.

Sarnac and Tiraena looked at each other awkwardly. The latter finally took the lead. "Tylar, we know you can't allow us to keep our memories of all this, any more than you could last time. We haven't let ourselves dwell on it, but we haven't forgotten it either. So, since it's about time for us to return to our own reality and our own era, we just wanted to say that . . . that . . ."

"That there are no hard feelings," Sarnac finished for her. "We understand that there's no alternative, and we've accepted that."

"An extremely commendable attitude. However, I've been doing some thinking myself." Tylar gazed up at them over steepled fingers. "You've both done nobly in fulfilling an ethical obligation which you, Robert, never really understood; and in which you, Tiraena, didn't share. So you have, I think, gone beyond paying your debt. Indeed, you've placed
me
in
your
debt—a debt which I believe I'll pay by foregoing memory erasure on this occasion."

There was dead silence as the reality of what he'd said sank home. Sarnac finally broke it. "But . . . but you
can't
, Tylar! I mean, if we go back to our own world knowing what we know now, it would change your history and wipe out the future that includes you. Wouldn't it?"

"I assure you that I've given these matters much thought. Consider: you really have no detailed knowledge of events in the remainder of your own lifetimes, do you? I've never told you, for example, who's going to win the next election for Terra's representative to the PHL Grand Council."

"But, Tylar," Tiraena protested, "we know the answer to the greatest enigma of our age: how the human species appeared on Raehan thirty thousand years before spaceflight! We know there's such a thing as time travel! We know time travellers from the remote future are policing history! We know . . ."

"Yes," Tylar interrupted gently. "You know a great many things. And I think you also know what the reaction would be if you were to announce your knowledge to the human race at large." The silence returned. Tylar smiled. "You're both intelligent people—too intelligent, I'm sure, to want to bring yourselves into disrepute."

"So," Sarnac said slowly, "you're saying we're powerless to change history because nobody would believe us?"

"That's one way to put it." Tylar stood up and regarded them gravely. "With this decision I am, let us say, pushing the envelope of my authority. But I believe I can justify it, when called upon to do so. You can make no practical use of this gift I'm making you. All you can do is cherish the knowledge that you were part of a legend you yourselves learned as children, and that you saved the future of an entire reality. That will have to be enough." Then he smiled in his slightly befuddled way, and was again an ordinary middle-aged human. "And now, if you'll excuse me, there are still a few matters which need my attention before we depart."