"THERE'S A HORSE TROUGH!" GINGER WAS BRAKING. "HE CAN GET a drink there."
Smedley had admitted to feeling thirsty. Mostly he was feeling very foolish, and everyone kept pestering him, asking if he was all right. The gash on his calf was not serious. He did not think he had lost very much blood, he had just lost it rather quickly. They had bandaged his leg with strips of blanket, but he was respectable again, keeping it stretched out along the seat. He was all right now, just thirsty.
The car came to a halt alongside the trough. Where else could one find anything to drink at two o'clock in the morning? Windows overlooked it; Jones turned off the engine, which shuddered into silence broken by irritated tickings.
"Damn!" Alice said. "We don't have anything to drink out of."
"I can walk!" Smedley protested. "Really, you're all making a frightful fuss about nothing."
Exeter opened the door and climbed out. Smedley moved to follow.
Humiliation! "Where did my shoes go?"
Alice tied the laces for him.
He shook off Exeter's helping hand and limped over to the water pipe, feeling nothing worse than a little shakiness. He bent his head to the stream, he drank and drank. That definitely helped. The sky was streaked with silvery clouds, the moon playing peekaboo. Moonlight showed the black blood all over his clothes. Exeter joined him, bundled up in the greatcoat. Even the greatcoat had blood on it. By the time they returned to the car, Jones had brought one of the oil lamps and was inspecting the interior.
It looked like a slaughterhouse.
"I hate to ask this," Exeter said, "but whose car is it?"
"It's stolen!" Alice said quickly.
He yowled like a hyena.
"Quiet, ninny!" she snapped, looking at the cottages flanking the road.
"Seriously, whose is it?"
"Don't worry about it. How much farther, Mr. Jones?"
"Oh, we're about halfway, almost at Chatham. Once we cross the Medway, we could get off the A2."
"What do you think, General Smedley?" Alice asked.
"Backroads'll be slower. I'd say keep on making a run for it."
"I won't argue," Jones said. He sounded very weary. "On irregular French verbs, yes. On strategy, no. Where do we go in London? Your flat, Miss Prescott, I assume?"
"Why don't we drop our jailbirds off there, then you and I go and return the car?"
He grunted agreement and took the lamp away. In a few moments he turned the crank and the engine caught at once. It had not done its worrisome coughing for some time. The car pulled smoothly away from the curb and resumed its journey.
Smedley had arranged himself along the back seat again, with the other two fitted in around him. He was starting to feel quite hopeful. True, they might yet blunder into a police blockade at any minute. The coppers could react very quickly at times, but would they in this case? Officially Exeter was just a shell-shocked soldier with amnesia. To reclassify him as an escaped German spy would require some explanations. The news of his disappearance must be in Whitehall by now, but at this time of night who was going to waken whom to do what or find which file where?
Whose car was it anyway? Alice had been reticent yesterday. Today she seemed even more determined that they not know.
"So I needn't have worried at all!" she said brightly. "Here I thought the Devil himself had carried you off bodily to hell, and all the time you were running around with a spear, stealing cattle?"
"It wasn't hell," Edward admitted, sounding as if he was smothering a yawn. "Actually it was almost fun. They were a likable bunch in their way. A different sort of college."
"But what did you do all day? Throw spears and rustle cattle?"
"No rustling at all. As for what we did . . . Well we all began by jumping in the river, except the day's cook, who made breakfast. Then we divided up in pairs and painted each other's faces. After that we went to work, usually."
Incredible! Smedley shuddered to think what his father would say about the Exeter family if he ever heard this confession. The fellow had gone completely native, it seemed—scars and war paint and all. This Nagland story was quite unlike the hints he'd dropped earlier about Olympus, where people had houseboys and dressed for dinner.
"What sort of work?" Alice asked. "Silversmithing, you said?"
"All sorts of work." Exeter chuckled, not sounding at all ashamed of himself. "Nobody worked very hard or very long, but we all had some sort of morning job. In the afternoon, we usually knocked off to go fishing or spear-throwing. Sports, exercise. We taught the juniors, the seniors taught us. In the evening we sat around and made weapons, gambled, or just talked about girls. None of us knew anything about them, of course."
"How long did you stay there?" Smedley asked, trying not to sound disapproving.
"Much longer than I intended. I soon learned that Kalmak Carpenter had been martyred because he was involved with a new sect, the Church of the Undivided. I could guess that the Service was behind it—the only way to break the tyranny of the Pentatheon would be to start a completely new religion, so that made sense. But the persecution had not been restricted to Sonalby; it had happened all over Nagland. The order had come from Karzon, but no doubt Zath was behind it, so I was probably the immediate cause. I was not very happy when I thought of all the innocent people who had died because of me.
"The new church might put me in touch with the Service, but it had been wiped out in Nagvale and nobody seemed to know anything about it—or even want to discuss it. If my interest in it got back to the wrong ears, then I might wake up dead one morning. I had no other leads, so I just stayed where I was and waited to be rescued. That wasn't very likely, of course. I knew the Service believed the reapers had killed me in the Sacrarium, the night I crossed over. It had sent Onica Mason to confirm this, and she had disappeared also. So the chances that it was still searching for me were about two thirds of zero.
"All I could do, I concluded, was try to find out as much as I could about the Vales. And learn the local jabber, of course. Perhaps one day I might pick up some mention of the Church of the Undivided that would tell me where to look for it. My group brethren were as informative as anyone, which wasn't informative at all. At least I could trust whatever they told me, which was more than you could say for anyone else. Most of them had never been outside Nagvale in their lives, and never expected to be, but there were a dozen or so who had jobs that required them to travel—peddlers and drovers, mostly. A couple had gone off to work in the capital, Nag. As they drifted back home, to stay a while before their next excursion, I got to know them and questioned them. I didn't learn much. I was lazy, I suppose, or just windy. Having nowhere to go, I kept putting off my departure.
"Obviously I needed a job. The group talked it over and decided I was tall and would be good on roofs, so about a dozen of them took me along to see Gopaenum's uncle's brother, Pondarz Thatcher. They suggested he hire me. He didn't argue, because a village has to support its militia. Also, he had a daughter."
"Aha!" Alice said. "Describe this daughter."
"Absolutely gorgeous. About ten, I think . . . I don't know, I never set eyes on her. I never saw much of my supposed wages, either. They went toward her bride price. It didn't matter to me, as long as I ate twice a day. All I had to do was toss bundles of reeds up to the workmen on the roof. The job was well within my capabilities.
"But I agree that the original purpose must have been cattle stealing, just as in Africa. In the olden days—whenever those may have been—a young man's occupation in that herding society would be stealing the neighbors' livestock. He would give his loot to some older man of the village as payment on a wife. When he had paid enough cows and proved his mettle in more or less serious battles, he would marry the girl he had bought and retire. Thereafter he would just watch his own herds grow and his wife do all the work. War he would then leave to the young men, because that was their business."
"If that were true here," Ginger Jones said, "then we might not be in the mess we're in."
Nobody commented for a while. The car roared on through the night. Smedley decided that the remark had been very close to defeatist. The war existed, so it must be won. He had done his bit.
When Exeter spoke again, his tone was more somber than before.
"You can't imagine how strange it feels to be back in England, spinning through the night in a motorcar like this! It feels odder than all these things I've been telling you. I'm sorry to chatter so much. It's such a relief to be able to talk again."
"We're all enjoying it," Alice said. "It is better than having Baron Munchausen along. You're leading up to something. You're going into all this sociology for some reason?"
"Absolutely! You remember Nyagatha and the Embu. A lot of Bantu peoples had that sort of age-group arrangement, or something similar. When the English arrived they usually said, 'Take me to your headman,' and the natives would look blank, not knowing what they meant. Who you talked to depended on what your business was! So the English would appoint a headman and tell him to stop the cattle raiding. Then they wondered why the whole culture collapsed. What astonished me about the Nagians was that they had managed to make a transformation to a money economy without losing their social structure. A lot of the Vales are very close to an industrial revolution, you see, although they don't have guns yet, thank goodness. The Joalians play the part of the English, but without firearms Joalia can't ever make a real colony out of Nagia. They had imported a mercantile culture, though, and yet the traditional ways had very largely persisted. The Nagians had managed to blend the old and the new. I was very intrigued to know how they'd done it. The answer was obvious, but I didn't think of it."
"But who do the warriors fight?" Smedley asked.
Exeter chuckled. "Nobody. Oh, they have periodic brawls with neighboring villages, but they're prearranged, show affairs. A few bones get broken and teeth knocked out and a deuce of a lot of betting goes on, and that's about it. I never saw one.
"The most exciting thing that happened in my first few fortnights there was that Toggan Silversmith got married. His father had money, of course. He was the first of our age group to tie the knot, and it was a big milestone for all of us. I swear it took half a fortnight to decide how our face design should be changed. We could add some more green emblems, you see, because that is the color of manhood. We could introduce some red, which represents the Lady, Eltiana, who's goddess of motherhood and, um, related matters. But if we overdid it, the senior warriors would get in a snit and the juniors might start crowding us on the blue. So we had to appoint delegates to negotiate with other age groups. Everyone found it fascinating.
"As soon as Toggan got married, he wasn't a warrior anymore, but he was still one of the group. He slept with his wife and came around in the morning to get his makeup on. After the first fortnight, we saw a lot more of him than she ever did. Being a warrior just seemed like being in a boarding school. So I assumed. Until the war came."
"Followed you, did it?" Alice said. "Oh, sorry! I didn't mean—"
"No, this was a different war. The first I knew of it was when a priest turned up one evening, an elderly chap in a green robe. I smelled trouble right away. He sat down and negotiated with us. I suppose there were about sixty of us there, sitting around sharpening spears. We didn't stop because of him, either! He said that the temple had learned that the junior warrior age group had adopted a foreigner. Well, the whole village had known that for fortnights. He said that Krobidirkin was Sonalby's patron god, and the foreigner really ought to make a sacrifice to the god and ask for sanctuary—matter of protocol, you see.
That debate lasted all night. A lot of the fellows said the priests just wanted a free meal, but eventually the group decided that it was a good idea. I considered making a break for it, but Krobidirkin must have known about me all along anyway. Moreover, I could see that if I did a bunk, I would get my pals in trouble with the numen and probably with the elder groups. And I was curious.
I couldn't be expected to take part in an important ceremony without the backing of my peers, so the next afternoon the whole age group assembled. We bought a bullock from Gopaenum's uncle and drove it along to the temple.
There we were right on the node. The virtuality made my scalp prickle, as usual. There were shrines to Olfaan, and Wyseth—he's the sun god, and in that climate you don't ever forget the sun. And there was one to Paa Tion, the god of healing, and one to Emthaz, goddess of childbirth. The usual Pentatheon representation. But the temple was the center of the village, and it was Krobidirkin the Herder's.
It was one story high, made of leather and poles. If you can imagine a leather labyrinth, that's what it was. Smelly and hot. The others knew what to expect because they'd been there before, but all the way in I was shivering from the sanctity and thinking I would never find my way out again. The middle was open, a big courtyard: sand underfoot and the sky overhead. There was a paved place for making sacrifices. The priests were waiting eagerly, because they would have red meat for supper afterward. And there was a small, round tent in one corner. A yurt, I think they're called. That was the house of the god. If there was an image of him, it was in there. All we could see was the tent.
I was introduced as D'ward Roofer and put in the front. We all knelt down on the sand and bowed our heads and the ceremony began, chanting and praying and so on. In a few minutes I looked up. The flap of the tent had been pulled aside, and there was a little man standing there, holding it. He smiled at me and beckoned, and I knew that he was the numen himself, Krobidirkin. I could see no alternative, so I just stood up and walked over, and the priests did not notice. I was surprised they couldn't hear my knees knocking.
He took me inside, and the inside was much larger than the outside. There were several rooms to it, and flaps of the roof had been opened to let in the air and light. There were rugs and cushions. It smelled of spices. Someone was playing a zither or something softly in another room, and I could not hear the temple priests doing their awful wailing. It was exotic, but quite pleasant.
"Do sit down, Liberator," he said. "I regret that I cannot offer you tea, but I have a reasonable substitute."
We settled on the cushions, and he poured from a silver pot that stood on a brazier. The cups were beautiful porcelain.
You can't tell how old a stranger is from his appearance. They have a sort of agelessness. Krobidirkin was small, as I said, but tough and wiry looking. He had the serenity of a landscape and could have been eighty, but he had the skin of a youth. He wore only the local leather loincloth, and his face was quite the ugliest I had ever seen, all slanty eyes and squashed nose. His ears stuck out, and his mustache turned down at the ends. He had a whimsical grin that I found reassuring.
It took me a minute or two to find my voice. This numen was a vassal of Karzon's, remember, and therefore an ally of Zath, the god of death, whom I was prophesied to kill and who had been doing his level best to kill me. I had met Tion and escaped unharmed, but he was not allied with the Chamber. This Krobidirkin must be. He had immolated Kalmak Carpenter and his family, and here he was offering me tea!
"I am honored to meet you, sir," I said, or some such nonsense.
He chuckled. "No, the honor is mine. May I say that your father would be proud of you?"
I spilled half a cup of scalding tea down my chest.
"You knew my father, sir?"
The little man was much amused by my reaction. "Yes, indeed. I met him several times. A good man. He made a special journey all the way from his home world to consult with me. He even gave me a picture of you."
I think that was probably the biggest surprise I have ever had in my life. There I was, an infinite distance from home, a stranger in a very strange land indeed, and this all-powerful local god handed me a photograph of the station at Nyagatha! It showed the mater, and you, Alice, and me. We were sitting on the veranda. The gramophone was there, and the parrot's cage, and all sorts of details I had forgotten. I was about three, I suppose. I had never seen that picture before. I made rather an ass of myself over it.
Of course Krobidirkin was pleased, because that was the effect he had wanted to produce. He refilled my cup.
And then I said, "But surely this is impossible! I thought nothing could cross over except people?"
He chuckled, as if he had been waiting for me to work that out in my dim-witted way. "Memories can cross over," he said. "And there is mana." He took the photograph from me—it did seem to be a real, honest-to-god photograph, black-and-white, not colored—and he turned it over. I expected to see the photographer's name there, but it was blank. Then he waved his hand and the back showed another picture. It was the guv'nor, sitting in that very tent, where I was sitting, wearing a Nagian loincloth and smiling.
Well, that floored me.
"May I guess?" I said when I recovered. "He had been put in charge of some people who had once had a society very similar to the Nagians', and he knew that you had managed to preserve their institutions in the face of progress, so he came to ask your advice?"
Krobidirkin's ugly face split in a wide grin. "Of course! Unfortunately, it takes mana to guide such a development, and in the post he then held, Kameron was only another native. A culturally advanced native, and a well-intentioned one, but not a stranger in his own world."
"You have been a good father to your people, sir," I said. "You also are from our world?"
He smiled and nodded. "A very long time ago, yes. I can recall very little of my youth, I am afraid. One forgets. A new world brings a new life, and the old days become unimportant when one decides one will never return. I do remember that my people were very warlike. We had a notable leader, named . . . I forget. He led us against a civilization of great cities, and we were badly defeated. The next year he tried again, and this time he was turned aside by an army led by a priest. The mana was very strong, and he retreated before it, knowing that he could not win against the god power. He died not long after."
That may have been the second worst shock, I suppose. It is one thing to know intellectually that strangers live a long time. To run into a man who remembers battles fought fifteen hundred years ago—that brings it home with a vengeance. "Was his name Attila?" I asked.
The little Hun clapped his hands and said, "That's it! A wonderful leader of men! Great native charisma."
So we sat and talked about the battle of Châlons—which was fought sometime in the middle of the fifth century, in case you forget—and Pope Leo, who somehow persuaded the Huns to withdraw from Italy the following year. How he did it has always been a great historical mystery. My host was delighted to learn that his comrades in arms were still remembered after so long, but I was careful not to go into details about their reputation. He probably wouldn't have minded. Krobidirkin had been a sort of medicine man with the horde, and in his old age he had accidentally crossed over to Nextdoor and become a god.
He soon eased the conversation around to the Filoby Testament and the Liberator.
"I greatly regret what happened to the carpenter and his family," he said. "I had direct orders, and I dared not disobey them. One hates to treat one's people so, however misguided their heresies."
"And what of me?" I asked. "Have you direct orders about me?"
"Oh, yes. But you are the son of my old friend Kameron! Zath does not know where you are. He does not know that I know, and he is furious that you have escaped him. He is a very frightened god!"
"He need not be," I said. "I have no plans to kill him."
The little man chortled. "The prophecy says you will! Zath has tried everything he can think of to break the chain of events and failed every time. So he fears you, and rightly so."
"What of Karzon?"
He screwed up his ugly little face, making it even uglier. "He fears Zath! And that brings me to the reason I invited you here, D'ward. Zath has decreed that there must be war, and more war. War brings him mana, and he is hungry for all the mana he can get, because the Liberator is a threat to him. Now it has begun—in Narshia, which was part of Joaldom, but lies between Thargvale and Lappinvale. Lappinvale has been a Thargian colony for half a century, you know? But recently the Randorians have been stirring up trouble there, urging rebellion and independence."
He looked expectantly at me and I nodded as if it all made sense. I was actually thinking that it didn't, but it still sounded less insane than all Europe exploding over the death of one Austrian nobleman.
Krobidirkin chuckled. "Thargians dislike being inconvenienced or worried by uncertainty. They had been trying to subvert the Narshian government for years, and this summer they ran out of patience. They invaded Narshland. The Joalians plot reprisal." He sighed. "It will be bloody, I fear, and Zath will benefit greatly."
As you may guess, I was not very happy to hear this. "What has it got to do with me?"
He smiled cryptically. "The Joalians plan a lightning raid on Tharg itself, while the Thargian army is absent—that is exceedingly brave of them! To reach Thargvale, they must cross both Nagvale and Lemodvale. Lemodia is part of Thargdom, but we belong to Joal. Our queen is a Joalian puppet. Their vanguard is already here, in Nag, demanding her help. She will muster her warriors as they demand."
I felt ill, and the more I thought about it, the more ill I got.
"I must give myself up!" I said. I probably didn't mean that, of course. It was just the first thing that came into my head.
Krobidirkin looked shocked. "Oh, no! That will not help at all! The war is inevitable now. No, I wish to ask a favor."
"Sir . . . ask!" I owed him my life, remember. He had given me sanctuary, even if I had not realized it until then.
He nodded, well pleased. Numens usually get their own way.
"The summons will arrive soon. I knew you would be tempted to leave. This is not your cause, after all—or at least, you would not have thought it so, had I not invited you here and told you. The Joalians will require each village contingent to have a leader. Nagians prefer to debate and argue, but they do appoint leaders in time of war. In this case they will have to. There is no question whom the Sonalby contingent will choose."
I could not argue with that, because I knew they reacted to my stranger's charisma no matter how much I tried to hide it. "I know little of war, especially this sort of war."
"It is not necessary that you do. The Joalian generals will provide all the skill needed to spill all the blood possible. And I think you would have been my boys' choice even had you not been a stranger." That was just flattery, of course.
"What do you want of me?" I asked gloomily.
"Stay and lead them, D'ward! With you at their head, they will not suffer quite so much. More of them will return to their homeland. Believe me, this is so. You will ease the suffering and reduce the deaths. I fear for my people if their young men are dragged into this without your guidance."
What could I say to that?
I hedged at first. "I was hoping to find the Service and enlist their help in going Home."
He scowled and tugged at his droopy mustache. "Beware the Service, D'ward! They will betray you—it is foretold."
Everyone seemed to have read that damnable Filoby Testament but me! In the end I agreed to accept the leadership of the warriors. One cannot easily refuse a numen, and he had obviously kept my presence in Nagland a secret from Zath. He had probably taken quite a risk doing that. Although he did not labor the point, I knew I was in his debt.
"Your presence honors my humble tent," he said then. "I would be happy to keep you here and talk. I should have invited you before, but it is not safe for either of us. Zath suspects me, and he is far stronger than any of us."
It was dismissal. We rose. He offered to give me the picture. I was sorely tempted, but I had no pockets. Reluctantly I declined it, and promised that one day I would come back, after the war. He showed me to the door. The priests were still at their work, and they did not see me return to my place.
That was the third time I had met a god. He was a true father to his people, the most impressive of the three by far. And he had been one of Attila's Huns! In my innocence, I thought that very wonderful.
Much of what he had told me was true, actually. I later confirmed that the guv'nor did make a flying visit to Nextdoor in August of ninety-nine, and he did go to Nagland. The picture may well have been what Krobidirkin said it was, although he could just have pulled all the images out of my memories as easily as out of the guv'nor's. What the Herder was really doing was playing the Great Game. By enlisting the Liberator in the war, he had made a very cunning move—from his point of view, at least.