Everard sighed. “I have inquired, and been told you performed – will perform – will have performed – satisfactorily. That isn’t enough. You don’t realize, because you haven’t experienced it, how overburdened the Patrol is, how ghastly thin we’re spread across history. We can’t examine every detail of what a field agent does. That’s especially true when he or she isn’t a cop like me, but a scientist like you, exploring a milieu poorly chronicled or not chronicled at all.” He treated himself to a swallow of his drink. “That’s why the Patrol does have a scientific branch. So it can get a slightly better idea of what the hell the events are that it is supposed to keep careless time travelers from changing.”
“Would it make a significant difference, in a situation as obscure as that?”
“It might. In due course, the Goths play an important role, don’t they? Who knows what a happening early on – a victory or a defeat, a rescue or a death, a certain individual getting born or not getting born – who knows what effect that could have, as its results propagate through the generations?”
“But I’m not even concerned with real events, except indirectly,” I argued. “My objective is to help recover various lost stories and poems, and unravel how they evolved and how they influenced later works.”
Everard grinned ruefully. “Yeah, I know. Ganz’s big deal. The Patrol has bought it because it is an opening wedge, the single such wedge we’ve found, to getting the history of that milieu recorded.”
He knocked back his drink and rose. “How about another?” he proposed. “And then we’ll have lunch. Meanwhile, I wish you’d tell me exactly what your project is.”
“Why, you must have talked to Herbert – to Professor Ganz,” I said, astonished. “Uh, thanks, I would like a refill.”
“Sure,” Everard said, pouring. “Retrieve Germanic literature of the Dark Ages. If ‘literature’ is the right word for stuff that was originally word of mouth, in illiterate societies. Mere chunks of it have survived on paper, and scholars don’t agree on how badly garbled those copies are. Ganz’s working on the, um-m, the Nibelung epic. What I’m vague about is where you fit in. That’s a story from the Rhineland. You want to go gallivanting solo away off in eastern Europe, in the fourth century.”
His manner did more than his whisky to put me at ease. “I hope to track down the Ermanaric part,” I told him. “It isn’t properly integral, but a connection did develop, and besides, it’s interesting in its own right.”
“Ermanaric? Who dat?” Everard gave me my glass and settled himself to listen.
“Maybe I better backtrack a little,” I said. “How familiar are you with the Nibelung-Volsung cycle?”
“Well, I’ve seen Wagner’s Ring operas. And when I had a mission once in Scandinavia, toward the close of the Viking period, I heard a yarn about Sigurd, who killed the dragon and woke the Valkyrie and afterward mucked everything up.”
“That’s a fraction of the whole story, sir.”
” ‘Manse’ will do, Carl.”
“Oh, uh, thanks. I feel honored.” Not to grow fulsome, I hurried on in my best classroom style:
“The Icelandic Volsungasaga was written down later than the German Nibelungenlied, but contains an older, more primitive, and lengthier version of the story. The Elder and the Younger Edda have some of it too. Those are the sources that Wagner mainly borrowed from.
“You may recall that Sigurd the Volsung got tricked into marrying Gudrun the Gjuking instead of Brynhild the Valkyrie, and this led to jealousy between the women and at last to his getting killed. In German, those persons are called Siegfried, Kriemhild of Burgundy, Brunhild of Isenstein; and the pagan gods don’t appear; but no matter now. According to both stories, Gudrun, or Kriemhild, later married a king called Atli, or Etzel, who is none other than Attila the Hun.
“Then the versions really diverge. In the Nibelun-genlied, Kriemhild lures her brothers to Etzel’s court and has them set on and destroyed, as her revenge for their murder of Siegfried. Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogoth who took over Italy, gets into that episode under the name of Dietrich of Bern, though in historical fact he flourished a generation later than Attila. A follower of his, Hildebrand, is so horrified at Kriemhild’s treachery and cruelty that he slays her. Hildebrand, by the way, has a legend of his own, in a ballad whose entirety Herb Ganz wants to find, as well as in derivative works. You see what a cat’s cradle of anachronisms this is.”