Fairley shook his head. “No you won’t, feller. You won’t cawse you won’t git to Edinburgh.”
The King’s guarantee and his escort— began Collier.
“Goes only far as the border” nodded Fairley. “And I hear tell it’s a good seventy, eighty miles from there to Edinburgh, and the most of it smack through the stompin’ groun’s of somma the meanest, orneriest, nastiest, bloodthirstiest folks this side o’ hell. If they ketches you alive, they’ll tek you apart a lil bit at a time, jest so’s they kin hear you screech. These ole boys ’round here done told me all ’bout the thrice-damned Scots.”
Collier just smiled. “Oh, never fear, Fairley, I shall reach Edinburgh whole, unharmed, and with some style. It developed that two of my Sussex officers were, in reality, agents of the Regent and the Church. Arthur and that damned renegade Archbishop, Harold, had known about their duplicity all along, yet had told me nothing of it, damned ingrates. Both are English, of course, but Captain Michael Glede has close blood ties with two very powerful families of southern Scotland, the Humes and the Kerrs. No, I shall reach Edinburgh.”
“Where,” commented Foster, “there’s at least one Papal Legate, not to mention assorted archbishops, and other clerics who’ll no doubt be very anxious to make an example of you for the edification of laymen who might scheme to make their own niter. You’ve heard what happened to the poor bastards they caught after the Empire lost to Crusaders. You’ve got to be nuts to put yourself into the bloody hands of churchmen, Collier.” Then he added, “What ever happened to the teachings of that gentle man called Jesus?”
“In our world, Foster, there is doubt, among sophisticated scholars at least, that such a person ever lived. That matter aside, if you please, because we are not in our world, we arc in this backward and savage one.
“During the weeks the army was at York and since, at Manchester, I’ve engaged in considerable research. Of course, almost all the available books are written in Latin, but thafs no problem for a man of my erudition; and I speak the language as well but I’ll get to that shortly. For a long while, I thought that we had gone backward in time, something which is theoretically possible, for all that frightened scientists assure the general public to the contrary. But I have changed my mind on the basis of what facts I have uncovered.
“Foster, similar in so many ways as this world is to our own, still it is not ours at any era in our world’s history. Can’t you see what this means? I, William Collier, have proven the theory of parallel worlds! We are on one of them.”
“So? Wen how in hell’d we gitchere, Perf esserr demanded Webster pugnaciously.
Collier waved a hand impatiently. “Later, Webster, later, but I do have a reasonable theory.
“The first thing I determined was that the Holy Roman Catholic Church of this world is most radically different from the Church of our own world. There are three Popes—the Pope of the West in Rome, the Pope of the East in Constantinople, and the Pope of the South whose seat is called Roma Africana and is somewhere on the east coast of Africa, but the few maps are so inexact that that city could be anywhere between Durban and Mogishu.”
“What do the Moslems have to say about this Pope of the South, Collier? As I recall, East Africa—hell, most of Africa—was their private preserve for one heck of a long time,” asked Foster dubiously.
Collier rested his elbows on the mantel and leaned back, his long cloak steaming in the heat from the fire. “There are no Moslems, Foster, not here and now.”
“Oh, come on, Professor, they have Templars here, too.” Collier smiled again. “Quite so, Foster, and if you’ll but check you’ll find that their main Consistory is located, even now, in Jerusalem and has been for five hundred years within Palestine.”
“But, dammit, there have to be Moslems! Sir Francis’ family’s patents of noblity date from an ancestor who was with Richard I on the Third Crusade. I know, he told me.”