Foster smiled humorlessly. “From my own experiences from time to time with functionaries in or attached to the King’s camp and court, the greedy bastards probably were expecting you to bribe them to let their gunners use the primers.”
“But … but that’s just crazy. Bass,” spluttered Sir Peter, “I … ever’thing I do up in York is for the King and the kingdom. I ain’t some fucking traveling salesman peddling a new kinda soap powder. Don’t they know that?”
Shrugging, Foster replied. “Most likely they do, but if they’re of the type of which I’m thinking, the adoption of a military advance matters far less to them than does the weight of their private purses. Probably you could gain instant, official approval of the primers if you were to go back to the King’s Camp and slip each of those officers a brace of gold onzas.”
“In a pig’s asshole!” snorted Sir Peter. “Bass, I’ll be fucked if I’ll pay a passel of crooks extra to do their goddam jobs right!”
Bass just shook his head. “Pete, I know it goes against the grain with an honest man like you, but that’s the way affairs are conducted in this world, I’ve found, especially in proximity to the King or to other high-ranking nobles and churchmen. I don’t like it either, but I’m sure as hell having to leam to adapt to it and to other things I don’t like. This world is very different from our world, the time and place from which you and I and Buddy and the others came, but it would appear that we’re going to live out the rest of our lives here in this different world, for better or for worse, so we’re just going to have to learn to live as do the people who were born here. We have only three options: die, as did Arthur Collier and Susan Sunshine, go mad, as did Bill Collier, or adapt to our surroundings and live. And you strike me as the survival type, Pete.”
Sir Peter Fairley cracked his big, scarred knuckles, his firm jaw set, then he relaxed. “Well, most likely you’re right, Bass, and I’m just too stubborn for my own fucking good. But I couldn’t go back and bribe them bastards now, even was I a mind to. I only had a few more then twelve hunnerd of them primers to start with, and I used up some down to the King’s Camp and then nearly half a gross more of them today out on that big ship, and the rest of them is all promised now to Walid Pasha and Ed Alfshoot and Sir Lem and it’ll take months to make up another big batch of them. My smiths up in York—and it seems like I never can get enough good ones, as many as I need—has got more important things to do, mostly, than make and temper lots of little-bitty steel springs, and then too, Bass, you just wouldn’t believe the prices merchants is getting anymore for copper ingots.”
Bass nodded again. “And, of course, you can’t use iron or steel tubing because of the danger of accidental sparking and premature explosions of the gunpowder. But … let me think for a minute, yes. Pete, how about using steel tubes faced with tin? To the best of my knowledge, tin is still being mined in Wales and Cornwall, in this world, so it wouldn’t have to be imported like most of the copper is. Tin isn’t ferrous—it won’t spark.”
Fairley slammed a work-hardened palm onto the table-top, a broad smile lighting up his face. “Now, god-dammitall. Bass, that’s a first-class idea, one I never would of thought up in a million years. Sure thing, and we can do better than just facing the tubes, too. Buddy and me. ’bout a year ago, we had the batt’ries out our old rigs and out your Jeep pickup, too. brought down to York. We worked out a bicycle recharger for them and I’ve been doing some electroplating here and there, already. I could tin-plate them tubes. Thanks a whole lot. Bass. Is it anything I can do for you, now?”
Foster squirmed in his chair, then said hesitantly. “Pete . . . it’s Krys, my wife . . . Have you seen her, spoken to her, lately? I … her letters get worse and worse, and I . . . I’m worried about her. frankly.”
“You got you a right to be. buddy,” replied Pete, grimly, ” ’cause it ain’t none of it I’ve seen or heard about good. I think Krys is done flipped her lid.”
CHAPTER
THE THIRD
His Holiness Abdul, Pope of Rome, lay dying. Despite the ever present risk of fire, the streets closest to his favorite palace had been buried in straw in order to mute the sounds of shod horse hooves and steel-rimmed wheels. Grim-faced, swarthy Moors of His Holiness’s picked guards stalked those streets armed with pikestaves, clubs, and short, thick whips of rhinoceros hide to enforce quiet and quell any outbreak of noise or loud talk that might possibly disturb their master. Their ways were cruel, and they were feared and avoided.
Cardinal Prospero Sicola was summoned, searched, but courteously, for weapons, then ushered into the bedchamber of the dying prelate, where the hot air was thick with the reeks of incense and illness. He thought that Abdul already was beginning to look like a corpse—the dry skin drawn tight over the big bones of the face giving his profile an unmistakable raptorial cast.
Upon hearing Sicola’s soft tread, Abdul opened his too-bright eyes but did not otherwise move where he sat half propped against a mound of cushions, with his one hand resting upon his chest and his other beneath the gold-stitched silken coverlet.
“Is Your Holiness awake, then?” asked Sicola softly.
“Yes, Brother Prospero,” came the reply in a weaker voice than Sicola ever before had heard from the often sickly old man. “We are awake and still extant, though for how much longer is in the hands of our Lord. That merchant-banker, D’Este, must have dug really deep this time and hired on a master poisoner; we have been poked, probed, poulticed, pilled, purged, bled, even clystered, and none of it to any salubrious effect upon our holy person. Apparently your latest regicidal plot upon our life has succeeded.”
Not until he had knelt and kissed the pontiffs ring did Sicola make reply, arising to stand beside the high, wide, intricately carven bedstead. He said sadly, “Your Holiness should have accepted my terms and, after secretly stepping down, retired to live out the remainder of his life in comfort and serenity at that small monastery near Tunis. But allow me to assure Your Holiness that if your suspicions of poisoning be true—and your very own physicians seem to think otherwise—neither I nor Cardinal D’Este had aught to do with it, nor I doubt me did any of our close associates, else I would surely have heard of it. and I swear upon my hope of salvation that I have heard no such thing.
“Consider, Your Holiness, you are a very elderly man, nor have you been in truly good health for some years now. Death is the eventual end of all mortal creatures, that is God’s plan and His way. He—”
With a brief flash of his old fire, Abdul snorted. “Don’t preach homilies to us, you whey-skinned, snubnosed Frank bastard! We have thought more and more in recent years that mayhap the sainted Mahmud al-Qaleefah did err by helping Islam to be merged with, polluted by, and befouled by the brimming cesspool of baseless superstitions and myths called Christianity. The Veiled Men of the Mountains and the other small, persecuted bands of folk who still cleave unto pure, untainted Islam are, we are beginning to think, the only remaining True Believers. Allah is God, Brother Prospero. Jesus called Christ was but another of the great prophets, only a man, like Moses or Mohammed, of flesh and blood. But, alas, the pattern is irrevocably set and we all must go down to Gehenna together. Who can unscramble an egg? We never were able to conceive of a method to set the thing again right, to undo the well-meaning sins wrought by St. Mahmud and those who succeeded him in his aims.
“You think us a backslider. Brother Prospero—no, don’t bother to try to deny it, you do, we know. You look upon us in horror, you see before you an apostate Pope. But tear us not, we are dying. But ere long, you and all of the other pretenders may—nay, will—wish old Abdul still alive.
“You spoke at our last meeting but one of Rome being in need of a ‘Wind of Change’ to sweep away the host of supposed errors and mistakes wrought by us and our predecessor.” The old man gasped a rattling gurgle of laughter, then spoke on. “Well, Brother Prospero, lying here with grim death nibbling at us constantly, we have seen snatches of what the near future holds for Rome and for those who, fit to do so or not, would rule her and hers.