The Shield of Time (39 page)

Volstrup caught on at once. He’d received a message from downtime telling him to expect an agent. “Certainly. Follow me, if you please.”

Upstairs, in the room with the cabinet that doubled as a computer and communicator, Everard admitted he was ravenous. Volstrup stepped out for a minute and returned promising refreshment. His wife brought it herself, a tray loaded with bread, goat cheese, olive oil, cured fish, dried figs and dates, wine, water to cut it. When she had left, the Patrolman attacked it like a Crusader. Meanwhile he told his host what had been going on.

“I see,” murmured Volstrup. “What do you plan to do next?”

“That depends on what I learn here,” Everard replied. “I want to spend a little while getting familiar with this period. You’re doubtless so used to it that you don’t realize how handicapping it is not to know all the nuances
that somehow never get into the databases—the jarring little surprises—”

Volstrup smiled. “Oh, but I well remember my early days. No matter how I had studied and trained beforehand, when I entered this country it was shockingly alien.”

“You’ve obviously adapted well.”

“I had the backing and help of the Patrol, of course. I could never have established myself solo.”

“As I recall, you arrived as a man from Normandy, a younger son of a merchant, who wanted to start up his own business and had some capital from an inheritance. Right?”

Volstrup nodded. “Yes. But the intricacies, the organizations I must deal with, official, ecclesiastical, private—and then the folkways. I thought that from my youth I had known much about the Middle Ages. I was wrong. I had never experienced them.”

“That’s the usual reaction.” Everard was taking his time, getting acquainted, putting the other man at ease. It would expedite operations later. “You’re from nineteenth-century Denmark, is that it?”

“Born in Copenhagen in 1864.” Everard had already noted, in the half-intuitive way one senses personalities, that Volstrup was not the Epicurean Dane common in the twentieth century. His manner was formal, a bit stiff; he gave an impression of primness. Yet the psych tests must have shown adventure in his blood, or the Patrol would never have invited him in. “I grew restless during my student days and took two years free, roaming about Europe as an itinerant worker. It was an accepted thing to do. Returning, I resumed my studies, which concentrated on the history of the Normans. I had no thought, no hope of anything more than a professorship somewhere. Then, shortly after taking my master’s degree, I was recruited.” Volstrup shivered. “But I am not important. What has happened, that is.”

“How did you get interested in this period?”

Volstrup smiled again while he shrugged. “Roman
ticism. Mine was the late Romantic era in the North, you know. And the Scandinavians who originally settled in Normandy, they were not Norwegians, as the
Heimskringla
claims. Personal and place names show they came, at least for the most part, from Denmark. After which they proceeded to fight and conquer from the British Isles to the Holy Land.”

“I see.” For a silent minute, Everard ran the facts through his head.

Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger, together with other kin, reached southern Italy in the previous century. Countrymen of theirs were already on hand, fighters against both Saracens and Byzantines. The land was in turmoil. A leader of warriors, who joined one of the factions, might come to grief when it did, or he might do very well for himself. Robert ended as Count and Duke of Apulia. Roger I became Grand Count of Sicily, with a firmer hold than that on his own territory. It helped that he had obtained a papal bull making him apostolic legate of the island; that gave him considerable power within the Church.

Roger died in 1101. His older legitimate sons were dead before him. Thus he left the title to eight-year-old Simon, child of his last wife, half-Italian Adelaide. She, as regent, crushed a baronial revolt and, when sickness also took Simon off, handed an undiminished authority over to her younger son, Roger II. He took full mastery in 1122, and set about regaining southern Italy for the house of Hauteville. Those conquests had fallen away after Robert Guiscard’s death. The claim was resisted by Pope Honorius II, who did not care for a strong, ambitious lord as the immediate neighbor of the papal territories; by Roger’s rival relatives, Robert II of Capua and Rainulf of Avellino, Roger’s brother-in-law; and by the mainland people, among whom there stirred ideas of city autonomy and republican government.

Pope Honorius actually preached a crusade against Roger. He must needs retract it when the army of Normans, Saracens, and Greeks from Sicily prevailed over
the coalition. By the end of 1129, Naples, Capua, and the rest recognized Roger as their duke.

To nail down his position, he needed the name of king. Honorius died early in 1130. Not for the first or last time, the medieval intermingling of religious and secular politics brought about the election of two claimants to the throne of St. Peter. Roger backed Anacletus. Innocent fled to France. Anacletus paid off his debt with a bull proclaiming Roger king of Sicily.

War followed. Innocent’s great clerical partisan, Bernard of Clairvaux, whom the future would know as St. Bernard, denounced the “half-heathen king.” Louis VI of France, Henry I of England, and Lothair of the Holy Roman Empire supported Innocent. Led by Rainulf, southern Italy revolted anew. Strife went back and forth across that land.

By 1134, Roger seemed to be getting on top. The prospect of a powerful Norman realm alarmed even the Greek emperor in Constantinople, who lent his aid, as did the city-states Pisa and Genoa. In February 1137 Lothair moved south with his Germans and with Innocent. Rainulf and the rebels joined them. Following a victorious campaign, in August he and the Pope invested Rainulf as Duke of Apulia. The emperor started home.

Indomitable, Roger came back. He sacked Capua and forced Naples to acknowledge him lord. Then, at the end of October, he met Rainulf at Rignano….

“You’ve settled in pretty well, I see,” Everard remarked.

“I have learned to like it here,” Volstrup answered quietly. “Not everything, no. Much is gruesome. But then, that is true in every age, not so? Looking uptime after all these years, I see how many were the horrors to which we Victorians smugly closed our eyes. These are wonderful people, in their fashion. I have a good wife, fine children.” Pain crossed his face. He could never confide in them. He must in the end watch them grow old and die—at best; something worse might get them first. A Patrolman did not look into his own future or the fu
tures of those he loved. “It is fascinating to watch the development. I will see the golden age of Norman Sicily.” He stopped, swallowed, and finished: “If we can correct the disaster.”

“Right.” Everard guessed that now going straight to business would be kindest. “Have you gotten any word since your first report?”

“Yes. I have not yet passed it on, because it is very incomplete. Better to assemble a coherent picture first, I assume.” As a matter of fact, it was not, but Everard didn’t press the point. “I never expected an … Unattached agent … so soon.”

Volstrup straightened where he sat and forced firmness into his voice: “A band of Roger’s men who escaped from the battlefield made their way to Reggio, got a boat across the strait, and continued here. Their officer has reported at the palace. I have my paid listeners among the servants there, of course. The story is that Rainulf’s total victory, the slaying of the king and prince, was due to a young knight from Anagni, one Lorenzo de Conti. But this is mere hearsay, you understand. It is gossip that reached them after the fact, in fragments, as they straggled homeward through a country in upheaval, full of people who hated their kind. It may be worthless.”

Everard rubbed his furry chin. “Well, it needs looking into,” he said slowly. “Something that specific ought to have some truth behind it. I’ll want to sound out the officer. You can fix that up for me, can’t you, in a plausible way? And then, if it seems this Lorenzo fellow may be the key to it all—” Again the hunter’s tingle went through his skin and along his backbone. “Then I’ll try to zero in on him.”

To Anagni on its high hill, some forty miles from Rome, came a rider one crisp autumn day. Folk stared, for horse and man were uncommonly large; bearing sword and shield though at present unarmored, he was clearly of rank; a baggage mule followed on a tether; yet he fared alone. The guards at the city gate to which he came answered respectfully when he drew up and hailed them in rough Tuscan. Advised by them, he passed through and wound his way to a decent inn. There he got his gear unloaded and his beasts stabled and fed, while he took a pot of ale and a gab with the landlord. He was affable in a gusty German fashion and readily learned whatever he wanted to know. Presently he gave a coin to one of the boys and bade him carry a message to the right place: “Sir Manfred von Einbeck of Saxony sends his respects to Sir Lorenzo de Conti, the hero of Rignano, and would fain call upon him.”

They brewed a grand local beer at Einbeck in those nineteenth and twentieth centuries that Manse Everard remembered. He needed a little whimsy to keep him
going, keep him from too much silent crying out to his ghosts.

The title he used, Italian
“Signor,”
German
“Herr,”
bore a less definite meaning than it would later, when the institutions and orders of chivalry had fully developed. However, it bespoke a fighting man of good birth, and that sufficed. Eventually, on the Continent, it would merely signify “Mister”—or would it, in the strange world uptime?

The boy sped back with an invitation to come at once, Outsiders were always welcome for the news they could convey. Everard changed into a robe, which a Patrol technician had judiciously given the wear and tear of travel, and accompanied his guide on foot. The streets were cleaner than most because a recent rain had washed their steepness. Narrow between walls and overhanging upper stories, they were filling with gloom, but in a strip of sky he glimpsed evening light ruddy-gold on the cathedral that reared at the summit of the hill.

His destination was lower down but near where the Palazzo Civico stood forth from the hillside on arches. The Conti and Gaetani were the chief families in Anagni, which had gained importance during the past several generations. This house was large, its limestone little marked as yet by time, which would at last obliterate it. A fine colonnade and glass in the windows relieved its ruggedness. Servants in blue-and-yellow livery, all Italians, all Christian, reminded Everard how far from Sicily he had come, in spirit if not in miles or years. A footman took over, conducting him through halls and chambers rather sparsely outfitted. Lorenzo was a younger son, rich only in honors, still unmarried, staying here because he could not afford Rome. Decayed though the great city was, landowning nobility in the backward, agricultural papal territories preferred to inhabit fortress-like mansions there, visiting their rural properties occasionally.

Lorenzo was in a two-room suite at the back, easier to keep warm than the larger spaces. Everard’s first sense when he entered was of vividness. Even quietly seated,
the man somehow blazed. He rose from his bench as a panther might. Expression went across his face like sun-flickers on water where a breeze blew. That countenance was sharply, almost classically sculptured, with big eyes whose gold-brown-russet seemed as changeable instant by instant; it appeared older than his twenty-four years, yet also ageless. Wavy black hair fell to his shoulders. Beard and mustaches were trimmed to points. He was tall for the era, slim but broad-shouldered. His garb was not the usual robe of a gentleman indoors, but blouse, tunic, hose, as if he wanted always to be ready for action.

Everard introduced himself. “Welcome, sir, in the name of Christ and this house.” Lorenzo’s baritone rang. “You honor us.”

“The honor is mine, sir, thanks to your graciousness,” Everard responded, equally polite.

A smile flashed. Teeth that good were a rarity nowadays. “Let’s be frank, shall we? I itch for talk about faring and fighting. Do you not? Come, make yourself easy.”

A buxom young woman, who had been holding her hands near the charcoal brazier that somewhat staved off chill, took Everard’s cloak and poured wine, undiluted, from a pitcher into goblets on a table. Sweetmeats and shelled nuts had been set forth too. At a gesture from Lorenzo, she genuflected, bobbing her head, and retired to the adjacent room. Everard noticed a crib there. The door closed behind her.

“She must remain,” Lorenzo explained. “The infant is not well.” Plainly she was his current mistress, no doubt a peasant girl of the neighborhood, and they had had a baby. Everard nodded without expressing hope for its quick recovery. That was a poor bet. Men didn’t invest much love in a child till it had survived the first year or two.

They sat down, across the table from each other. Daylight was waning, but three brass lamps served vision. By their shadowful glow, the warriors in a fresco
behind Lorenzo—a scene from the
Iliad,
or maybe the
Aeneid,
Everard guessed—came half alive. “You have been on pilgrimage, I see,” Lorenzo said. Everard had taken care to display a palmer’s cross.

“To the Holy Land, for my sins,” the Patrolman told him.

Eagerness leaped: “And how fares the kingdom? We hear ill tidings.”

“The Christians hold on.” They would for another forty-nine years, till Saladin retook Jerusalem … unless that part of history was also gone awry. A torrent of questions rushed over Everard. He’d briefed himself pretty thoroughly, but had trouble with some, as shrewd as they were. In several cases, where he couldn’t well admit ignorance, he invented plausible answers.

“Body of Christ, could I be there!” Lorenzo exclaimed. “Well, someday, God willing. I’ve a mort to do first, nearer home.”

“Everywhere I stopped, on my way up through Italy, I heard how mightily you’ve wrought,” Everard said. “Last year—”

Lorenzo’s hand chopped air. “God and St. George aid our cause. We’ve well-nigh finished driving the Sicilians out. This new King Alfonso of theirs is a bold rogue, but lacks his father’s cunning and skill. We’ll chase him onto his island soon, I vow, and finish the crusade. But for the moment there’s scant action. Duke Rainulf wants to make sure of his hold on Apulia, Campania, and what we’ve won of Calabria before he proceeds farther. So I’ve returned, and been yawning till my jaws ache. Man, it’s good to meet you! Tell me about—”