So much for the sentinel system of Parolando. Every quarter mile on The River’s front was guarded by a hut on thirty-foot stilts with four men on duty. If they saw anything suspicious, they were to beat on their drums, blow their bone horns and light their torches.
Two men slipping out of the fog to carry news to King John, ex-King John, of England?
Fifteen minutes later Sam saw a shadow running between shadows. The rope attached to the small bell just inside the entrance rang. He looked through the starboard port. A white face looked up at him. Sam’s own spy, William Grevel, famous wool merchant, citizen of London, died in 1401 in the Year Of Our Lord. There were no sheep or, in fact, any mammals other than man along The River. But the ex-merchant had shown great aptitude for espionage, and he loved to stay up all night and skulk around.
Sam beckoned to him; Grevel ran up the “ladder” and entered after Sam had unbarred the thick oak door.
Sam said, in Esperanto, “Saluton, leutenanto Grevel. Kio estas?”
(Translation: “Hello, Lieutenant Grevel. What’s the matter?”) Grevel said, “Bonan matenon, Estro. Ciu grasa
ripono, Rego Johano, estas jus akceptita duo spionoj.”
(Translation: “Good morning, Boss. That fat rascal, King John, has just received two spies.”)
Neither Sam nor Grevel could understand each other’s English, but they got along very well in Esperanto, except now and then.
Sam grinned. Bill Grevel had let himself down from the limb of an irontree, passing directly over a sentry, and down a rope onto the edge of the roof of the two-story building. He had passed through the bedroom, where three women slept, and then crawled to the top of the staircase. John and his spies, a twentieth-century Italian and a sixthcentury Hungarian, were at a table below Grevel. The two had reported the results of their trip upRiver. John was furious and justly so, from his viewpoint. Sam, hearing Grevel’s report, also became furious.
“He tried to assassinate Arthur of New Brittany? What is that man trying to do, ruin all of us?”
He paced back and forth, stopped, lit a big cigar and began pacing again. Once he stopped to invite Grevel to a bite of cheese and a glass of wine.
It was one of the ironies of Chance or, perhaps, of the Ethicals, for who knew what things they arranged, that King John of England and the nephew he had murdered most foully should have been located within thirty-two miles of each other. Arthur, Prince of Brittany of dead Earth, had organized the peoples among whom he found himself into a state he called New Brittany. There were very few old Bretons in the ten-mile-long territory he ruled, but that did not matter. New Brittany it was.
It had taken eight months before Arthur had discovered that his uncle was his neighbor. He had traveled incognito to Parolando to verify with his own eyes the identity of the uncle who had slit his throat and dropped his weighted body into the Seine. Arthur wanted to capture John and keep him alive for as long as possible under exquisite torture. Killing John would only bar him, possibly forever, from getting his revenge. John, murdered, would awake the next day someplace thousands of miles away on The River.
But Arthur had sent emissaries demanding that John be given up to him. These demands had been rejected, of course, though only Sam’s sense of honor and his fear of John kept him from agreeing to Arthur’s demands.
Now John had sent four men to assassinate Arthur. Two had been killed; the others had escaped with minor wounds. This would mean invasion. Arthur not only had wanted revenge on John, he would like to get possession of the meteorite iron.
Between Parolando and New Brittany, a fourteen-mile stretch of the right bank of The River was known as Chernsky’s Land, or in Esperanto, Cernskujo. Chernsky, a sixteenth-century Ukrainian cavalry colonel, had refused an alliance with Arthur. But the nation immediately to New Brittany’s north was governed by Iyeyasu. He was a powerful and ambitious person, the man who had established the Tokugawa Shogunate in 1600 with its capital at Yedo, later called Tokyo. Sam’s spies said that the Japanese and the Breton had met six times in a war conference.