He sprang to his feet. His sword whirred forth and gleamed aloft. “Do you care to meet me in fight, old gangrel?” he cried. “We can go stake out a ground this very hour. Meet me there, man to man, and I’ll cleave that spear of yours in twain and drive you howling hence!”
The Wanderer did not stir; his weapon shuddered a bit. “Weard will not have that,” he well-nigh whispered. “But I warn you most gravely, for the sake of every Goth, make peace with these men you have aggrieved.”
“I will make peace if they will,” Ermanaric said, grinning. “You have heard my offer, Tharas-mund. Do you take it?”
The Teuring braced himself, while Randwar snarled like a wolf at bay, the Wanderer stood as if he were only an idol, and Sibicho leered from the bench. “No,” he croaked. “I cannot.”
“Then go, the lot of you, before I have you whipped back to your kennels.”
At that, Randwar drew blade. Tharasmund and Liuderis snatched for theirs; iron flashed everywhere. The Wanderer said aloud: “We will go, but only for the sake of the Goths. Bethink you again, king, while yet you are a king.”
He urged his companions away. Ermanaric began to laugh. His laughter hounded them down the length of the hall.
1935
Laurie and I went walking in Central Park. March gusted boisterous around us. A few patches of snow lingered, otherwise grass had started to green. Shrubs and trees were in bud. Beyond those boughs, the city towers gleamed newly washed by weather, on into a blueness where some clouds held a regatta. The chill was just enough to make blood tingle.
Lost in my private winter, I scarcely noticed. She gripped my hand. “You shouldn’t have, Carl.” I felt how she shared the pain, as far as she was able.
“What else could I do?” I replied out of the dark. “Tharasmund asked me to come along, I told you. How could I refuse, and ever sleep easy again?”
“Do you now?” She dropped that question fast. “Okay, maybe it was all right, allowable, to lend whatever consolation there might be in your presence. But you spoke up. You tried to head off the conflict.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, they taught me in Sunday school.”
“That clash is inescapable. Isn’t it? In the selfsame tales and poems you went back to study.”
I shrugged. “Tales. Poems. How much fact is in them? Oh, yes, history knows what became of Ermanaric at the end. But did Swanhild, Hatha-wulf, Solbern die as the saga says? If anything of the kind ever happened – if it isn’t just a romantic imaginihg, centuries later, that a chronicler chanced to take seriously – did it necessarily happen to them?” I cleared my stiffened throat. “My job in the Patrol is to help discover what the events really were that it exists to preserve.”
“Dearest, dearest,” she sighed, “you’re hurting so much. It’s twisting your judgment. Think. I’ve thought – oh, but I’ve thought – and of course I haven’t been there myself, but maybe that’s given me a perspective you… you’ve chosen not to have. Everything you’ve reported, throughout this whole affair, everything shows events driving toward a single goal. If you, as a god, could have bluffed the king into reconciliation, you would have, surely. But no, that isn’t the shape of the continuum.”
“It flexes, though! What difference can a few barbarians’ lives make?”
“You’re raving, Carl, and you know it. I… lie awake a lot myself, afraid of what you might blunder into. You’re too close again to what is forbidden. Maybe you’ve already crossed the threshold.”
“The time lines would adjust. They always do.”
“If that were true, we wouldn’t need a Patrol. You must understand the risk you’ve been running.”
I did. I made myself confront it. Nexus points do occur, where it matters how the dice fell. They aren’t oftenest the obvious ones, either.
An example bobbed into my memory, like a drowned corpse rising to the surface. An instructor at the Academy had given it as being suitable for cadets out of my milieu.
Enormous consequences flowed from the Second World War. Foremost was that it left the Soviets in control of half Europe. (Nuclear weapons were indirect; they would have come into being at approximately that time regardless, since the principles were known.) Ultimately, that military-political situation led to happenings which affected the destiny of humankind for hundreds of years afterward – therefore forever, because those centuries had their own nexuses.