The Shield of Time (48 page)

Hoofs clopped. The party had reached a main road. Frederick spurred his horse and, for a moment, drew well ahead of the rest. His hair tossed auburn-gold from beneath a feathered cap. The low sunlight made a halo of it. Yes, he was getting bald, and the trim, medium-sized frame was putting on weight, and lines were deep in the clean-shaven face. (It was a Germanic face, taking more after his grandfather Frederick Barbarossa than his grandfather Roger II.) Nevertheless, for that instant, he looked somewhat like a god.

Peasants still at work in a nearby field bowed clumsily to him. So did a monk trudging toward the city. It was more than awe before power. There had always, also in Everard’s history, been an aura of the supernatural about this ruler. Despite his struggle with the Church, many folk—no few Franciscans, especially—saw him as a mystic figure, a redeemer and reformer of the mundane world, Heaven-sent. Many others saw in him the Antichrist. But that seemed past. In this world, the war be
tween him and the Popes was over, and he had prevailed.

At a ringing canter, the falconers neared the city. Its main gate stood open yet, to be closed an hour after sundown. There was no need for that, no threat, but so the emperor commanded, here and throughout his lands. Traffic must move at certain times, commerce proceed according to regulation. The gate had little about it of the grace and exuberance of Palermo, where Frederick spent his boyhood. Like buildings he had ordered raised elsewhere, strongholds and administrative centers, it was massive, starkly foursquare. Above it a banner rippled in the evening breeze, an eagle on a golden field, the emblem of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

Not for the first time since he came here, Everard wondered how much of this his history had known. Little remained in the twentieth century, his twentieth century, and the survivors of the Patrol had an overwhelming task already without studying architectural developments. Maybe this wasn’t very different from the “original” medieval Foggia. Or maybe it was. A lot would depend on how soon events had veered off track.

Strictly speaking, that happened about a hundred years ago, when Pope Gregory IX failed to be born—unless it was later, when he died young or did not take holy orders or whatever went amiss. But changes in time don’t spread outward on any simple wave front. They’re an infinitely complicated interplay of quantum functions, way over this poor head of mine.

The tiniest alteration could conceivably annul an entire future, if the event concerned was crucial. There should theoretically be countless such; but hardly ever were they felt. It was as if the time-flow protected itself, passed around them without losing its proper direction and shape. Sometimes you did get odd little eddies—and here one of them had grown to monstrousness—

Yet change must needs spread in chains of cause and effect. Who outside the immediate vicinity would ever even hear what went on, or did not go on, in a couple of
families of Anagni? It would take a long time for the consequences of that to reach far. Meanwhile the rest of the world moved onward untouched.

So Constance, daughter of King Roger II, was born after her father’s death. She was over thirty when she married Barbarossa’s younger son, and nine more years went by before she bore to him Frederick, in 1194. Her husband became the Emperor Henry VI, who had gotten the crown of Sicily through the marriage, and who died soon after this birth. Frederick inherited that glamorous hybrid kingdom. He grew up among its plots and tumults, the ward of Pope Innocent III, who arranged his first marriage and maneuvered for a German coalition to hail him supreme king in 1211, because Otto VI had been giving the Church intolerable trouble. By 1220 Frederick was everywhere triumphant and the new Pope, Honorius III, consecrated him Holy Roman Emperor.

Nevertheless, relations with him had long been worsening. He neglected or disowned promise after promise; only in his persecution of heretics did he seem to proceed with any regard to Mother Church. Most conspicuously, time after time he postponed fulfillment of his vow to go on crusade, while he put down revolts and secured his own power. Honorius died in 1227—
Yeah. As far as we can find out, with what skimpy resources we’ve got left, things went pretty much the same up till then. Frederick, a widower, married Iolande in 1225, daughter of the titular King of Jerusalem, uh-huh, just as he was supposed to. A smart bit of groundwork for the recovery of that real estate from the paynim. Except that he kept putting the job off, he tried instead to assert his authority over Lombardy by force. And then in 1227 Honorius died.

And the next Pope was not Gregory IX, he was Celestine IV, and after that the world became less and less what it ought to have been.

“Hail!” roared the sentries. They lifted their pikes on high. For a moment the bright hues of the falconers dimmed in the tunnellike gateway. Echoes rolled off
stone. They came forth onto the lists, the broad, smoothly paved open space under the wall, beyond which reared the buildings of the city. Above roofs Everard glimpsed cathedral towers. Somehow, against the eastern sky, they looked somber, as if night were already drawing down over them.

A well-clad man with an attendant waited beyond the gate. Judging by the restlessness of their horses, they had been there for a considerable time. Everard recognized the courtier, who brought his mount close and made salutation.

“Your Grace, forgive my intrusion,” he said. “I believed you would desire to know at once. This day did word come. The ambassador from Baghdad landed yesterday at Bari. He and his train were to start hither at dawn.”

“Hellfire!” exclaimed Frederick. “Then they’ll arrive tomorrow. I know how Arabs ride.” He glanced about. “I regret the festivity planned for eventide must be stricken,” he told the party. “I will be too occupied making ready.”

Piero della Vigna raised his brows. “Indeed, sire?” he wondered. “Need we show them great honor? Yon Caliphate is but a wretched husk of ancient greatness.”

“The more need for me to nurse it back to strength, an ally on that flank,” the emperor replied. “Come!” He, his chancellor, and the courtier clattered off.

The disappointed revelers went their separate ways by ones and twos and threes, chattering about what this might portend. Some lived at the palace and followed their sovereign more slowly. Everard would too. However, he dawdled and went roundabout, preferring to ride alone so he could think.

The significance
—
Hm. Maybe Fred, or his successor, really will get the Near East bulwarked and stop the Mongols when they invade there. Wouldn’t
that
be a sockdolager?

The past ran on through the Patrolman’s head, but now it was not his world’s, it was the course of this world
that ought not to be, as inadequately charted by him and his few helpers.

Mild, in frail health, Pope Celestine was no Gregory, to excommunicate the emperor when the crusade was postponed yet again. In Everard’s world, Frederick had, at last, sailed regardless, and proceeded actually to regain Jerusalem, not by fighting but by shrewd bargaining. In this present history, he had not then needed to crown himself its king; the Church anointed him, which gave immense leverage that he well knew how to apply. He suppressed and supplanted such enemies as John Ibelin of Cyprus and cemented firm agreements with the Muslim rulers of Egypt, Damascus, and Iconium. Given that network throughout the region, the Byzantines had no prospect of overthrowing their hated Latin overlords—who must more and more fit themselves to the wishes of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Meanwhile, in Germany, Frederick’s heir apparent Henry revolted; in this world, too, the father put down the rebellion and confined the son for the rest of a short life. Likewise, in this world poor little Queen Iolande died young, of neglect and heartbreak. However, without a temporarily conciliated Pope Gregory to arrange it, Frederick’s third marriage was not to Isabella of England but to a daughter of the Aragonese royal house.

His breach with Celestine occurred when he, freed from other tasks, took his armies into Lombardy and ruthlessly brought it under himself. Thereupon, in contempt of all pledges, he seized Sardinia and married his son Enzio to its queen. Seeing the papal states thus caught in a vise, even Celestine had then no choice but to excommunicate him. Frederick and his merry men ignored the ban. In the course of the next several years they overran central Italy.

Thus he was able to send a mighty force against the Mongols when they struck into Europe, and in 1241 inflict resounding defeats on them. When Celestine died that same year, the “savior of Christendom” easily got a puppet of his elected Pope as Lucius IV.

He had annexed those parts of Poland where his armies met the Mongols. Aided by him, whose tool they had become, the Teutonic Knights were in process of conquering Lithuania. Negotiations for a dynastic marriage were under way in Hungary—
What’s next? Who is?

“I beg your pardon!” Everard reined in his horse, hard. Lost in thought, passing through a narrow lane where gloom gathered thick, he had almost ridden down a man afoot. “I didn’t see you. Are you all right?” Here he dared be fluent in the local Italian. He must, for decency’s sake.

“It is nothing, sir, nothing.” The man pulled his muck-spattered gown close about him and backed meekly off. Everard made out the beard, broad cap, yellow emblem. Yes, a Jew. Frederick had decreed that Jews wear distinct dress, with no man to shave, and a long list of other restrictions.

Since no real harm had been done, Everard could swallow his conscience and ride on, keeping in character. The alley gave on a marketplace. Dusking, it was nearly deserted. People in medieval cities mostly stayed indoors after dark, whether because of a curfew or from choice. Here they needn’t fear crime—the emperor’s patrols and hangmen kept that well down—but it was no fun stumbling through unlighted streets full of manure and dumped garbage. A charred stake rose at the middle of the square, not yet removed, the ash and debris only roughly cleaned up. Everard had heard about a woman convicted of Manichaeanism. Apparently this had been the day they burned her.

He clenched his teeth and continued riding.
It isn’t that Frederick’s really malignant, like Hitler. Nor is he some kind of twisted idealist, nor a politician trying to curry favor with the Church. He burns heretics in the same spirit as he burns defiant cities and butchers their inhabitants
—
the same spirit as he restricts not only Jews and Muslims, but strolling players, whores, every kind of independent
operator
—
they simply are not subservient. He sees to the welfare of those who are.

Studying up for this mission, more than once I read historians who said he founded the first modern state (in western Europe, at least; since the fall of Rome, anyhow), bureaucracy, regulation, thought police, all authority concentrated at the top. Damn if I’ll ever feel sorry that it went to pieces after his death, in my world!

On this time line, obviously, it did not. Everard had seen what lay seven centuries ahead.
(Hey, Wanda, how’re you doing, gal, a hundred years ago?)
The Empire would expand, generation by generation, till it embraced and remade Europe, and surely had profound impact on the Orient. Just how didn’t matter. Everard guessed at an Anglo-Imperial alliance that partitioned France, whereafter the Empire ingested the British Isles, the Iberian peninsula, perhaps everything clear to Russia and maybe a part of that too. Its mariners would reach America, though surely much later than 1492; this history also lacked a Renaissance and a scientific revolution. Its colonies would spread vigorously westward. But all the while, the dry rot that arises in every imperium would be eating the heart out of it.

As for the Church, well, it wouldn’t die, nor even break up in a Reformation, but it would become a creature of the state, and probably share the death agonies.

Unless a crippled Patrol could uproot this destiny, without sowing something worse.

At the palace stables Everard dismounted and turned his horse over to a groom. Like a walled city within the city, the compound loomed hard by. The mews were inside but he, self-acknowledged (falsely) as inexperienced, had no hawk to care for. The forecourt seemed full of bustle. To avoid it, he walked around to the rear gate. Steel dimly ashine in the waning light, its guards recognized him and let him by with a genial greeting. They were good joes, whatever they’d done in the past. War was war, throughout the ages. Everard had been a soldier too.

The gravel of a path scrunched softly beneath his boots. A formal garden stretched fragrant to right and left. He heard a fountain splash. As clear sounded the strings of a lute. Hidden from Everard by hedges and bowers, a man lifted his voice in song. Most likely a young lady listened, for the words were amorous. The language was southern German. The troubadours were gone with the Provençal civilization that the Albigensian Crusade destroyed; but no few minnesingers crossed the Alps to seek Frederick’s court.

The palace sprawled ahead. Medieval heaviness was a bit relieved by wings added more recently. Many windows shone. They hadn’t the brightness of electric lamps behind plate glass—this world might well never know that—but a dull yet warm flame-glow seeped through small leaded panes. When Everard entered, he came into a hallway illuminated down its length by bracketed lamps.

Nobody else was in view. The servants were taking a light supper in their quarters, prior to making things ready for the night. (The main meal was early in the afternoon. Frederick himself, and therefore his entourage, ate once a day.) Everard mounted a staircase. Although the emperor honored him by giving him a room here, naturally it lay offside and he shared it with his man.

He opened the door and went in. The space was small, its furniture hardly more than a double bed, a couple of stools, a clothes chest, and a chamber pot. Novak rose and snapped to attention. “At ease,” Everard said in American English. “How often must I tell you, your Middle European
Ordnungsliebe
isn’t necessary around me?”