“Your concern touches me.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You could have stayed in Tar Kartos. I wish you had. I don’t intend to lose tomorrow, but if I do, I’m counting on you to start the university. I still think that’s the most important thing we can do for this planet.”
“The most important thing you can do is to call off this war,” Gwen said.
“Are you ready to tell me the truth at last?” Rick asked. “That calls for a celebration.” He turned to the door. “Jamiy, a flask of wine, please. And ask the lady Tylara to join us when she arrives.”
“Sir. I think I hear her patrol coming now.”
“Good. All right, Gwen, why is this so important, and why haven’t you told me before?”
“It wasn’t my secret,” Gwen said. “Why couldn’t you leave things alone? Everything was going so well. We had a perfect place to hide, and enough to eat. Parsons would grow those stupid drugs—”
“That’s debatable,” Rick said.
She looked up in alarm. “Why?”
“Parsons and Sarakos don’t have much of a hold on this country. They’ll be doing well to feed their army, much less grow a couple of thousand acres of madweed.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t matter anyway. With any luck, Parsons and Sarakos will both be dead by morning.”
“How?”
Rick grinned without humor. “I selected this place pretty carefully. Took real timing to reach it just about the time that Parsons would. We’ve got a nice muddy field out there—better suited to my infantry than Sarakos’s cavalry. Ideal for a battle. Of course there are other places like that, but this one has a special feature. There’s only one village for thirty kilometers up the road ahead.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Swampy fields. One village. We held it last night and most of today, but we let Sarakos chase us out of it this afternoon. We had to run fast. Didn’t get a chance to burn it down. Warner says Parsons and his people don’t like sleeping in fields. Guess where they’ll make their headquarters tonight—”
“What are you planning?” Gwen demanded.
Rick looked at his watch. “The hardest part was the fusing,” he said. “Took me weeks to come up with a slow match that burned reliably, and I still can’t time it too close. Making twelve barrels of gunpowder wasn’t so difficult, and it was no trick at all to bury it in the village. An hour or so before dawn, André Parsons is going to get one hell of a surprise.”
“You’re going to kill them all? And destroy all their equipment?”
“I certainly hope so. I wish there were another way, but I can’t think of one. I can’t even parley with them. If André knows he’s fighting me and not just locals, he’ll be a lot more suspicious. Where in hell is that wine?” He shouted for his orderly.
“You don’t look very pleased,” he said. “I thought you lived in terror that Parsons would find us and report to the Shalnuksis. Now you won’t have to worry.”
“Oh, boy!” she said. “And I was trying to be careful. I didn’t expect you to be able to win—”
“Thanks for the confidence.”
“Rick, this isn’t a game! If you win—when you win—will you be able to grow the surinomaz for the aliens?”
What is this? Rick wondered. He had noticed her alarm when he told her Parsons might not be able to grow the crops for the aliens. Now this.
Could I manage it? Probably. I’ve got enough allies, and I can talk Camithon and the king into it provided we can import enough grain. But I can think of at least one damn good reason not to deal with the aliens at all. Why is she worried about surinomaz? And how can I make her tell me what she knows?
He shrugged. “Without the equipment Parsons has? Not easily. Madweed isn’t a popular crop here, and taking that much good land out of grain cultivation wouldn’t be simple. But Gwen, I’ve been listening to those legends about the dangers of dealing with the sky gods.”
Jamiy came in with wine and pewter cups. “The lady Tylara has returned safely,” he said. “She will come when she has spoken with her brother.” The orderly hesitated. “I do not think she was pleased to learn that the lady Gwen is here.”
Rick laughed. “I don’t expect she was,” he said. “Thank you.” He filled the cups. “Look, what’s got you scared?”
“I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Maybe I can suggest something,” Rick said. “I’ve given this a bit of thought, too. Try this. The rogue sun comes at six-hundred-year intervals, and that’s the only time the Shalnuksis have any interest in Tran. That’s roughly 1400 A.D., 800 A.D., 200 A.D., 200 A.D., 400 B.C., 1000 B.C., and 1600 B.C. The languages are Indo-European and you’ve several times mentioned similarities to Mycenae and Crete. That’s 1600 B.C. or a little later; the rogue’s period isn’t a full six hundred years. All right so far?”
She nodded. “It’s the earliest I’m sure of. Archaeologists on Earth have violent arguments about the languages of the Mediterranean in that time period—”
“They’d love to know what we know,” Rick said. “All right. The 1000 B.C. expedition blends in with that. Maybe that’s when they brought the Celts. Then or 400 B.c.There’s no question about 200 A.D.— that’s Imperial Rome about the time of Septimius Severus, and we’ve even got Lucius’s parchments. Then about the time of Charlemagne they brought in a group, and there’s plenty of evidence for that. Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor on Christmas Day in 800 AD., and they must have picked up some of his heavy cavalrymen not long before. That brings us to 1400 or so. There’s not one single trace of that visit. Why not?”
Gwen didn’t say anything. Rick leaned forward to throw a block of peat onto the small hearth fire.
“We know they didn’t skip that time,” Rick said. “You told me you’d studied Tran languages of six hundred years ago. But nobody knows anything about longbow tactics, so they couldn’t have brought English or Scots or Welsh. Maybe French. The French didn’t learn anything from Crécy. Only nobody ever heard of the Swiss pike, either. Nobody knows how to make plate armor, but they were using it in Europe in 1400. So who did they bring? There’s no sign of mixed races. No Orientals or blacks or Indians.
“And 1400 is well into the age of gunpowder, but they never heard of it here. Is that reasonable? And it’s not just weapons. Magna Carta in 1213. Nobody ever heard of it. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Malatesta, all thirteenth century. By 1400 a whole slew of geniuses had lived, and nobody’s ever heard of them. Not even Lucius, who’s spent his life digging in old documents; or Yanulf, who’s got epic poems so old there’s even a version of Homer. The 1400 expedition vanished without a trace.
“What happened, Gwen? Did somebody kill the lot of them?”
She looked up unhappily. “Les thought so. For about the same reasons you just gave. Why hasn’t there been any progress on Tran? You can’t blame it all on the unstable climate,” she said. “But he didn’t know. There weren’t’ any records in the computer.”
“But that was why you didn’t want electricity. Or anything else. You weren’t all that worried about Parsons, it’s the Shalnuksis who’ve got you scared.”
“Of course. But if Parsons knew where we were, he’d tell them.” She took a deep breath. “Rick, have you guessed the rest of it? Secret caves. Fire from the sky. And those epic poems about the bad luck that comes from dealing with the evil sky gods. They bring wondrous gifts but take them back again. Fire will fall from the sky, and the only safe place is in deep caves. And there’s another I don’t think you heard—about a taboo place where nothing grows, and a lake with a glass bottom—”
Rick nodded gravely. “They don’t do things by halves, do they? Atom bombs—”
“I don’t know. But even without knowing about Yanulf’s epics, Les thought it likely. That’s why he wanted me to run away. Hide as far from Parsons as possible.”
“And why you didn’t warn me that Parsons was going to mutiny,” Rick said. “So you’d have someone to go with.”
“Yes. Rick, I’m sorry.”
“Sure. But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me all this before.”
“Because I didn’t know what you’d do. Rick, I’m sorry I’ve kept you in the dark, but after all, we’ve done pretty well. We have a safe refuge, enough to eat, a place for a university—I thought of starting one before you did, but it seemed better to let it be your idea. Everything was going fine. Why should I complicate matters by telling you about problems you couldn’t do anything about? And I was afraid you’d want to warn Parsons. After all, they were once your men—”