Times Without Number (22 page)

His brief had been short and pointed: he was to go to the barbour and
tour it from end to end, hunting for the least discrepancy that might
betray interference. Despite the noon-tide heat he did so, unchallenged
because he was garbed as an obviously wealthy minor noble and wore a
sword meant for use rather than show, with a dent or two in the guard
at its hilt. Protected from over-close scrutiny by his deliberately
arrogant manner, he maintained a slightly bored expression as he
walked, but in fact he was marvelling at the spectacle. Those galleons
with their high proud masts, those gun-ports ready to snort death,
those tidily drilled soldiers carrying their kit aboard by platoons,
all those hogsheads of pickled meat and barrels of water and biscuit,
all those great wagonloads of powder and shot -- real! Solid! Unchanged
from what they should have been!
Three hours passed, and at last he dared to let himself hope. Here,
at least, the effect of anything Two Dogs might have tried was not
apparent. Possibly he had failed in his endeavours; it was risky for
untrained traveliers to wander about the past -- perilous enough,
indeed, for the Society's hand-picked Licentiates. But that was being
over-optimistic. More likely, he'd realised that the Society would
hasten to patrol this weakest spot in the Empire's history and chosen
a second-best point of attack. But there was nowhere that offered a
satisfactory alternative. With this particular episode protected, the
Empire was like a man wearing good sound body-armour; immune to stabs in
the heart or belly or lungs, he need fear only injury, not certain death.
His spirits lightening as he reached this conclusion, and extremely
thirsty after his three-hour tour of the harbour, Don Miguel turned
into a humble wine-shop whose proprietor almost fainted to see such a
finely-dressed customer and fawned over him nauseatingly, uttering many
oaths concerning the quality of his wine and the cleanliness of his
premises. In fact the wine was nasty and the whole place was smeared
with grime, but Don Miguel was in no mood to worry over trifles.
"Of course, your honour, we've been so busy lately," the landlord
muttered as he strove vainly to mop enough dirt off a chair-seat to save
it marking Don Miguel's breeches. "All day and all night they've been
coming in, the soldiers and sailors, and not a few of their officers as
well . . . Wine, your honour! Here it comes -- let me pour it for you
. . ." He did so with an inept flourish. "Would you care for
tapas
?
We have good crayfish today, and mussels too!"
Thinking of the raw sewage that poured into the sea where the shellfish
grew, Don Miguel refused, but gulped the wine gratefully; lemon-juice
would have helped his thirst, and this was not
quite
so sour.
"Is your honour one of the officers sailing with the fleet, then?" the
landlord probed. Silence had overtaken his three other customers all of
them petty merchants, by their appearance, probably suppliers contracting
for provisions to stock the ships -- and he seemed a little nervous.
"No, but I came to look over the preparations and to drink to their good
fortune." Dun Miguel raised his mug cheerfully in the direction of his
fellow-customers. "How say you to that, my friends?"
"Why, your honour, no loyal Spaniard or good Catholic would do otherwise
than echo you!" answered the nearest of them, a beetle-browed fellow
with one shoulder higher than the other. "But let me ask your honour
this, first! Though of course the true faith is bound to triumph, are
you honestly sanguine of this venture?"
A tremor of apprehension prickled on Don Miguel's nape. He said,
"Indeed I am! Why in the world should we not foresee a great victory
for the Armada?"
"With a commander who's sick at the least lurching of his ship?"
The beetle-browed man swigged his wine and wiped his mouth with the back
of his hand. "I'm of a seafaring family myself, your honour, though now
I've been forced to work ashore thanks to this bad back of mine." He
jerked his high shoulder back and forth. "And I've been told all my life,
by my father and his father before him: a ship's crew is only as good
as the captain. And isn't the same thing true of a fleet?"
Don Miguel said faintly, "His Grace the Duke of Parma -- "
"Parma? What are you talking about?" Instantly the entire company was
alert: the beetle-browed man, his two companions, the landlord and even
the small boy armed with a jug and a greasy rag who stood hidden in the
shadows by the racked wine-barrels at the rear of the shop. "Parma's in
the Netherlands, your honour! Medina Sidonia's in charge of this fleet,
and a worse sea-commander could hardly be picked in the whole of Spain!"
With those words, Dun Miguel Navarro became the first man to realise
that the universe was crumbling about him, except always for Two Dogs,
and Two Dogs had desired it should be so.
The Duke of Parma in the Netherlands? This wasn't history! The Duke
of Parma, Spain's finest military commander of the century, took the
Armada to sea! Medina Sidonia -- who was he? A nonentity, an entry in
the footnotes of the history books! And the Netherlands were secured
permanently for Spain and its heir the Empire by that brilliant unorthodox
master of strategy, the Scottish Catholic Earl of Barton, who when the
Armada broke the English resistance at sea was prepared with his hundreds
of flat-bottomed barges to land an army of fifteen thousand men in Kent
and shatter the resistance on land as well.
Why in the name of all that was holy had they been persuaded to waste
Parma on a footling land-war?
He said after such a pause he fancied he had heard the grinding of Earth
on its axis, "And the Earl of Barton -- does he serve with Parma in the
Netherlands?"
By now the others in the wine-shop were exchanging puzzled glances, at
a loss to know how a finely-dressed gentleman could be so out of touch
with the news. Uncertainly the landlord said, "Perhaps, perhaps! It's
not a name I know."
"To me it sounds like an English name!" The beetle-browed man rose to
his feet. Moving away from his table, he went on, "Who are you, that you
ask such peculiar questions?" He had abandoned the formal "your honour."
"Ah . . ." Trying to appear calm, Don Miguel drained his wine-mug and
also rose. "I've been traveling. A long time. I just reached Cadiz and
welcomed the chance to see the fleet before it sailed. But now I have
pressing business. My score, landlord!"
"Not so quickly," the beetle-browed man snapped. "Landlord, we should
fetch a patrol, in my view. For all we know this fellow may be an
English spy."
"Nonsense!" Don Miguel tossed a gold coin towards the landlord. "But -- "
"You speak strangely. Doesn't he speak strangely?" The beetle-browed
man appealed to the others. "I think we ought to hold him until he's
been interrogated!"
Don Miguel's patience broke, and he darted for the door. The beetle-browed
man tried to stop him, hobbling to block the way, but as well as being
deformed he limped, and he was too slow -- Don Miguel slipped past him
and out into the street at a headlong run.
Although reason told him running could do little to speed his purpose.
X
Mind pounding faster than his feet, he outstripped even the shouts the
suspicious men in the wine-shop hurled after him on the way back to the
villa the Society had picked for its local base. This was what he had
wanted to say to the General Officers, and been unable to cast into
words that would gain their attention: that Two Dogs was devious and
brilliant, that he would strike where the Empire was most vulnerable --
but he would not do it in the way the Society most expected. Not for
him the crudity of the bludgeon. He preferred the delicacy of a scalpel.
And he'd found one. Before God he'd found one so sharp its wound would
kill before the feather-touch of the blade was felt!
He'd taken out of history a man about whom almost nothing was known.
Or to be exact, about whom little was known except legend . . .
As they learned the tales of El Cid or Roland and Oliver, all schoolboys
in the Empire could recount how the Earl of Barton had made his first
appearance on the world scene: a youth of twenty owning his clothes,
a horse and a sword, claiming to be related on the wrong side of the
blanket to the House of Stewart -- like countless others -- and determined
to revenge the extermination of his Catholic relatives in Scotland by
troops of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. Given his opportunity thanks
to the death of his general during a battle in which he rallied the
Catholic forces from almost certain defeat, he proved himself the finest
strategist of his age, and his troops developed an almost superstitious
loyalty to him. When Parma was recalled to command the Armada, he was
the obvious choice as deputy, and made sure for ever of the Netherlands
in sixteen weeks of whirlwind campaigning which laid the enemy low like
wheat before the reaper's scythe.
Take him away, and . . . who was left instead?
That
must
be the point at which Two Dogs had struck -- not here, by any
means as crude as poisonlng the water-barrels.
Surely, though, someone who had exerted such an influence on the
establishment of the Empire must have been the subject of exhaustive
study by the Society? Probably his movements from birth to death had been
secretly documented. All it would take would be half an hour's research,
and the Licentiates deployed here at Cadiz and over in England could be
dispatched instead to guard --
--
a man who already had never existed
.
For a second that realisation stopped him in his tracks, like a physical
blow. He grew briefly aware that the townsfolk were staring at him,
wondering what made a finely-dressed gentleman race through their streets
as though pursued by devils, and ignored them. Breaking anew into a run,
he struggled to discipline his mind back into the laboriously learned
techniques of five-dimensional thinking he had been drilled through as
a Probationer in the Society.
Two Dogs had almost certainly killed the Earl of Barton; he would have
wanted to make his work definitive. Perhaps he'd located the Earl as a
child, or on his way to join the Spanish forces in the Netherlands. It
didn't matter. At this juncture, June of 1588, the consequences of the
action were already being experienced. They must be welling down the
ages ahead of him like an incoming tide, along the curious skew-axis of
hypothetical or speculative time -- the medium in which existed improbable
alternative worlds such as Father Ramón had told him of. There was a
sort of inertia implicit in the process; the alteration of history was
a sluggish event because it was not an event -- it did not occur in
ordinary time.
Up ahead in the twentieth century, there might even yet be time apparatus
under the control of Red Bear and Father Terence, waiting to fetch back
Licentiates from Cadiz in the sixteenth century. If so, if only the
echo of the murder of Lord Barton had not "by now" durated to destroy
the Society altogether, he still stood a slim chance of warning them in
time and having Two Dogs killed before he could leave for the past --
if necessary having him shot off the back of the horse he'd ridden away
from his mine in California. That too would alter history, but at least
it would be altered back towards the unmodified version.
Whereupon there would once again be an Earl of Barton and everything
would revert to normal.
Perhaps!
He stormed up the final slope to the Society's rented villa and screamed
at the gate-keeper to hurry and let him in. Not waiting for the formalities,
he thrust past the man and shouted at the top of his lungs to everyone in
earshot, "There isn't an Earl of Barton in this world!"
The impact was immediate. Busy with a score of different tasks,
Licentiates and worried young Probationers dashed to the courtyard in the
centre of the house where the time apparatus stood, and heard the story
in fragments from Don Miguel as the technicians rapidly reversed their
equipment and arranged his return to the future. There was no point in
sending a message; a man would get there just as quickly and would be
more informative.
Don Miguel was almost crying with impatience when at last the settings
were correct and his surroundings suddenly looked as though they were
melting, indicating that he was being twisted in the continuum, that time
was becoming a direction along which the forces constrained within the
frame of iron and silver drove him like a metal rod between the closing
blades of a pair of scissors. The distorted outline of the cage bars
itself became more visible, more
convincing
, as he was hurtled forward.
No time apparatus could go further towards the future than the moment
at which it was energised, nor could an object or a person contained
within it. The mere fact that he had left Cadiz meant that, up ahead, at
"this" moment there still must be a Society of Time, for this was the
same apparatus as one in the Society's office at New Madrid; he merely
occupied it at a different moment.
A vast relief overcame him, yet did not completely dispel his anxiety. He
fretted and fumed at the length of the journey and wished there was room
for him to pace up and down; it was going to take some while to arrive,
because he was being displaced through space to New Castile as well as
towards the future, and inside the cage space was experienced as though
it were ordinary time.
Still, this gave him a chance to calm himself and order his thoughts. On
re-emerging into the twentieth century, he must speak clearly, concisely
and convincingly to the General Officers, because he might overtake the
onrushing tide of consequences stemming from Lord Barton's murder by only
a tiny margin -- by perhaps a mere hour or two! It all depended on how
long ago (meaning before the start of this trip from 1588) Two Dogs had
killed his victim. He might even not have departed for the past at the
time when Don Miguel returned to the present, in which case the paradoxes
would be giddying!
His legs ached after his frantic run from the harbour. He squatted
down on the floor of the cage and tried to make himself understand
the psychology of someone like Two Dogs, who didn't care if the whole
structure of history collapsed because he had been frustrated in his
ambitions. It wasn't so much like the tales and legends of the Red
Indians which he'd studied both as a child in school and more recently
as an adult while being briefed for the trip to Texcoco during which
he'd restored the stolen mask. It was more like the Teutonic and Norse
legends of the