“Here, on the other hand, I do nothing from the very start except try to keep myself and the others alive and I draw ace after ace after ace. Hell, the way it is here, if I tripped and fell facedown in a fucking dungheap, I’d probably come up with a fucking diamond, while the others. …’.’
“Professor Collier, now. for instance. For all that he’s always denigrated by Hal and Wolfie and the King, these days, his many contributions helped Arthur and England far more than did mine, back in the beginning. What did the Fickle Lady deal out to him? Capture and torture by a clan of savage border ruffians and, after belated rescue, a bare monastery cell in which to howl out his insanity for the rest of his life.
“Then there’s Pete Fairley, whose talents set up the Royal Armory at York. His multishot hackbuts won or all but won at least two full-scale battles tor English arms, and his large-bore breechloading rifled cannon are on the way to revolutionizing naval warfare, not to even mention the advances in other, less warlike, directions that his endless experiments are turning out. like that light but sturdy and comfortable springed carriage there, that Buddy Webster came down here in.
“And how about Bud Webster, too? His stockbreeding and general agricultural projects will no doubt feed folks far better in years to come than any of us can now imagine, and he got damned nearly as raw a deal as Bill Collier did. Yes, he’s still got his sanity, but he’ll limp stiff-legged for the rest of his life and never be able to sit a horse in comfort or real security again. And that means a great deal in this primitive, preindustrial world where about the only common means of getting about in peace or war are on horseback or shank’s mare. That fine carriage that Pete has fabricated for Bud is handy and comfortable, true, but much use on the rutted, muddy, hole-pocked abominations that pass for roads in this version of England will soon wreck it, no matter how well and cunningly made, just as they wreck sutler waggons and even ponderous gun carriages, time and again.
“Susan Sunshine, or whatever her name really was, now. that’s another one. In life, both in this world and the one from which she was snatched along with the rest of us. she was a useless parasite, so strung out on drugs most of
the time that she didn’t know which end to wipe. When she and Dave Atkins ran out of drugs and hallucinogens, they started trying to make use of a plethora of what are called ‘witch plants,’ but after she killed herself with amanita of some variety, Dave snapped out of it. I guess it scared the shit out of him, because he’s been straight ever since, so you could say that the crazy little doper accomplished something useful in death.
“Once his mind was clear, Dave turned out to be a very talented, highly intelligent, and most flexible young man, near-genius level, I’d say. Despite the facts that he wasn’t yet thirty when he came here and had wasted some years of that on the dope scene, he still had earned two master’s degrees, and Pete says that he is marvelous at solving problems up at York, that he couldn’t keep the armory going sometimes were it not for Dave and Carey Carr.
“Not that Carey is in York that much of the time. He told me once that he became a trucker because he liked traveling, didn’t like being in one place for any length of time, and he’s the same man here as he was there. I guess he knows the road from York to Norwich or London better than any other man; summer, winter, spring, or fall, good weather or foul, he’s always on the move between York and here or York and the King’s camp, bringing new innovations of his and Pete’s and Dave’s and teaching the recipients how to use them properly and safely.
“Krystal?” Foster sighed to himself. “Despite our son, little Joe, if I had it to do all over again, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t … I think. Krystal could’ve contributed—still could contribute, for that matter—so much to the suffering folks of this world. She’s a doctor of medicine, a trained psychiatrist, and. in a pinch, a damned good battlefield surgeon. The surgeons of this world are bloody-handed butchers who know next to nothing of human anatomy or of the causes of infection, while those quacks who call themselves physicians are. when they’re not poisoning people with their henbane-and-mummy-dust pills, not one whit better than camp-meeting faith healers. “With the assured backing of Hal—who, under the present circumstances, is as good as Pope of England and Wales—she could accomplish true miracles in the fields of medicine, surgery, and the like, but she doesn’t; all she does is sit around and get bored and bitch and rail at me in letters about ignoring her. And what the hell does she want me to do? Should I tell the king that I can’t do his bidding because my wife is bored and lonely and demands that I be constantly nearby to bitch at in person rather than via post-rider?
“I guess that the kernel of the matter is that Krys just isn’t very flexible, as easily adaptable to new and strange situations as the rest of us proved to be when put to the test. To her way of thinking, marriage means togetherness, total togetherness—she said once that her mother and father were never parted for more than a few days at a time in nearly thirty years of marriage—and I just’ve failed to get through to her that this is not twentieth-century New York or America, even, but roughly England, roughly in the seventeenth century, and in a state of warring and invasions with more invasions threatening.
“One thing, of course, is that she just doesn’t have enough to do to occupy her mind and her days. She refused to live at my castle in Rutland because it was too primitive to suit her—I guess she never even thought of having it renovated into a more comfortable residence, she just left and went back to Whyffler Hall. And up there. Sir Geoff and Henny Turnbull and Oily Shaftoe commanding a hundred or more well-trained servants between them keep the place running like oiled clockwork.
“That was why I tried to persuade her to start a training program to impart of her knowledge to the local midwives and maybe help to cut down on the appalling losses of newborn babies and their mothers that are so common in this world. But after only a couple of weeks, she’d come up with every cockamamie reason you could imagine why she couldn’t keep it up—the midwives were all stupid slatterns, know-it-alls, impossibly superstitious, religious fanatics, there was too much of a language barrier, they all were filthy and the stench of a roomful of them gagged her. and on and on ad infmitum, ad nauseam. I guess she’d rather just sit around and feel sorry for herself and bitch at me than try to do something useful or helpful.
“And it’s been damned near the same story since I prevailed upon Hal to let her and our son and her retinue live on the episcopal estate with Bud Webster. Bud tried to get her interested in stock-breeding . . . vainly, as it turned out. Hal, God bless him, took time that he didn’t really have to spare to patiently explain to her just why it was necessary that I be so often gone for so long on the King’s business, and for all the good it did anyone, he might as well’ve been talking to one of Bud Webster’s aurochs bull-calves.”
Melchoro Salazar and Don Diego, the Castilian having but just arrived back in York with Hal and his retinue from Whyffler Hall, had lived on the estate for a few weeks and tried to interest the Duchess of Norfolk in the ancient art of falconry, only to have her deride their sport as barbaric, bloodthirsty foolishness. Both had still provided some diversion to Krystal, however, until a chance remark informed her that both of them either did own or had owned some slaves—a practice still quite common outside England, Wales, and Scotland, in this world—whereupon she had made things so unpleasant for the two well-meaning and now contused noblemen that they left the estate, collected the troop of galloglaiches lent by Bass to Hal for safety in traversing the still-wild and virtually lawless north country between Whyffler Hall and York, and set out for Norwich. As delicately as possible. Baron Melchoro suggested to Bass that his lady-wife was become a bit mad.
“But good old Hal, he doesn’t give up.” thought Bass. “He said in the letter he sent down with Melchoro that immediately he can spare the man, he means to send Rupen Ademian out there to live on the estate for a while, figuring I guess that a relatively urbane man from the same world and time as Krys can maybe settle her down to the realization that she’s going to have to live the rest of her life in this world and among these people so she’d better start making the best of it, maybe doing something to improve conditions in it.