Of Chiefs and Champions Read online

  "Don't worry, Papa," the younger man assured him. "Mama's all right now. See, I looked for you first at home and I talked to her. I put this metal cap back on my head and it told me how to repair her brain and . . ."

  Kogh gulped. "You did surgery on . . . on your mother? How the fuck . . .?"

  Arsen shook his head. "No, Papa, nothing so primitive as what you're thinking about, that wasn't necessary. She didn't feel a thing. I did it all with sound waves, using a little device that's inside the carrier there. It's the same thing I'm going to do for you, before I leave, because I can tell that you're skating very close to a breakdown, too."

  When he had done the necessary work on his father, Arsen and Kogh repaired to another building of the Ademian complex, where, with tools and parts available, Arsen rapidly assembled a very simple and very low-powered projector—what the informer assured him was an adequate Class Two projector, capable of projecting payloads of any size or description so long as their weight did not exceed 27.3030 kilos on any single projection. Thus equipped, Kogh led the way to certain other buildings and helped his son fill his "order," then told him what specific buildings in other locations of Ademian Enterprises held the certain items he still lacked.

  Back in his office at last, alone now, Kogh filled another glass with ouzo, put the rim to his lips, then carefully set the drink back on the bar untouched. Striding over to the desk, he depressed a switch and said to the voice that answered, "Yes, this is Kogh Ademian. Please notify my driver that I'm ready to leave, now. Yes, I'll be going to my home."

  John the Greek was the last of the sound band members that Arsen led into the now-crowded tomb, its interior brightly lit, despite the westering sun, by several camp lanterns.

  "Where the hell did all this stuff come from?" demanded John, waving at the clutter piled in the middle of the floor of the old crypt.

  Arsen smiled, holding and fingering the buttons of a peculiar silvery box some eight inches long and an inch and a half square. "Most of it from various Ademian Enterprises warehouses, John, but some from other places, too. You understand, I dislike having to steal, but if that's what it takes to survive, I'll do it, and you can lay money on it I will, buddy."

  John's "explaining" done, Arsen had Mike Vranian borne in, placed on an air mattress, and covered with a blanket while he put the shiny metal cap on his head. At length, he took the cap off and stowed it away, then spoke to Lisa Peters.

  "Your diagnosis was accurate, as far as it went, honey. He's got a very mild concussion. He'll have a knot as big as a fucking egg and a humongous headache when he wakes up, but nothing aspirin can't handle."

  "Now, let's go out and see if I can get through to that shaggy stinkpot bastard John's got hog-tied. I don't want his carcass in here until he's had a good wash and been powdered for fleas and lice and whatever other fellow travelers he has about him."

  When dinner had been eaten, the camp stoves turned off, and the empty cans and containers stowed in a garbage bag, Arsen said, "I suggest we all bed down in here for the night. Yes, it'll be some crowded, but at least we won't be an offering for bugs and snakes and whatever other critters roam around here at night. That screen panel will stop the bugs, and those four pieces of rod I installed around the door will effectively discourage anything bigger that tries to come in here. I showed you all how to temporarily deactivate them, but if you do have to go out there tonight, take along a light and a gun and don't go alone, and for God's sake, remember to reactivate the fuckers and put the screen back in place when you come back in. Anybody want another beer before they get any warmer?"

  Once Arsen had operated on the mind of Simon Delahaye, he and the others had little trouble in persuading the man to wash in a pool just downhill from a spring Arsen had found by rising above the trees in the carrier, nor had the broken gentleman objected to a shower or five of DDT powder, commenting that he liked its "perfume." Then they had found a pair of jump boots and a set of fatigues that fitted him—the boots and socks almost perfectly, the fatigues, T-shirt, and shorts after a fashion.

  Before Arsen, with his new, arcane knowledge and abilities, had "rearranged" the seventeenth-century warrior's mind and processes of thinking, he had been convinced that he had fallen amongst coven of godless witches and wizards, his life and immortal soul forfeit because he had coveted and taken possession of the hellish property of the coven. He still seemed of the opinion that the group were practitioners of magical arts, but now he thought of them as holy, God-fearing witches and wizards.

  After probing the man's thoughts very deeply, Arsen went so far as to give him the sword he craved, his big knife, and some of the other cutlery from out the casket. Arsen's reasoning was that, of them all, the sometime-Captain Simon Delahaye knew exactly how to make effective use of the long, clumsy piece of sharp steel, and with M-16s, shotguns, high-powered hunting rifles, .45 automatics, machetes, and K-Bar knives available, none of them wanted to burden himself down with an unfamiliar and unwieldy archaic weapon anyway.

  They all slept soundly, exhausted by the fear and emotion of the day before, and awakened late. While three of the women were making coffee and picking through the groceries in search of something with which to break their fast, Simon Delahaye fished the last six cans of beer from out the water in the cooler and, popping the tops one at a time, poured the blood-warm liquid down his working throat with seemingly great relish. Arsen had to look away, the very thought of breakfasting on warm beer gagging him.

  Mike Vranian was awake and hungry, but all he had been given so far had been a single-serving bottle of orange juice and a couple of aspirin tablets. Now he lay wincing while Lisa first checked him out again, then began to lave off the side of his head with alcohol and sponges from the big first-aid kit Arsen had managed to acquire somewhere.

  Probing gently at the source of the blood with an alcohol-soaked bit of sponge, she remarked, "It's a typical impact wound for the scalp, Mike, about an inch long and straight as if done with a scalpel. It should've been sutured last night, but it's too late now. And besides, this kit lacks a suturing set."

  "Thank God for small fucking . . . ow . . . favors," exclaimed Mike. "See over my cheekbone? I been sewed up before and I didn't like it, not one damned bit. And when they sewed up my arm, too . . . goddammitall, Lisa, you trying to stick your fucking finger inside of my fucking head the hard way, or something?"

  "Lie still!" she snapped. "And shut your filthy mouth. I'm trying to help you—God alone knows why I should, though. I know damned good and well that once you're on your feet again, you'll go back to pestering Rose. She doesn't want just any man, especially not a foul-mouthed little slug like you, she wants her bridegroom; she misses George in a way you could never understand, since the only person you've ever loved is yourself. It's been all that I and the other girls could do to keep her sane, and you haven't helped one bit."

  "I'm serving you fair warning, Mike, you start up putting the make on Rose Yacubian again or try to do to her what you tried to do to her back in that castle, and you'll wish you'd died at birth. I'll geld you, Mike, I'll cut out your testicles. And please don't convince yourself that I don't mean every word I say; I don't ever threaten often, and when I do threaten, I never make false threats."

  After Vranian, Lisa went to work on Delahaye's knot, where Arsen had kicked the man's head the day before. Although she knew that her gentle ministrations must have hurt him at least as much as she had hurt Mike, the spare man never flinched and the smile never left his scarred lips. However, she looked up barely in time to prevent her patient from drinking of the plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol.

  After they all had breakfasted on pan-fried corned-beef hash, buttered toast and jam, juice and coffee—Arsen nearly strangling when he happened to think of the reactions of the management of that supermarket when they found the fact of missing stock from a closed and securely locked store, three ancient gold coins, and a note that read: "Sorry, but I dislike shopping during business hours.
A starving Armenian"—John had started the conversational ball rolling.

  "Okay, Arsen, whatever you and that . . . hell, I can't think of any word that describes that . . . that . . . that thing with all the buttons in English, Latin, ancient Greek or modern Greek, either. But anyway, what you did to us with it has obviously worked; we can accept it and all the other things without going flako trying to figure it all out in our minds. So, okay, fine, they're here, we've—you've—got them and they all worked for us. But Arsen, where the hell does this kind of stuff come from, huh?"

  "Look, I try to keep abreast of devices of a dental nature and of a medical nature, and in order to do that adequately, I have to keep pretty well up on science in general, and I'm here to tell you, none of these things or anything vaguely approaching them and what they do and can do is even being experimented with as far as I know anywhere today. So where does this astounding, amazing, fantastic kind of technology come from? Can you tell me, can your devices tell me that?"

  Speaking for all to hear, but looking John straight in the eye, Arsen said, "Since a part of what-all the instructor put into my head was to the effect that the carrier and the various grades of projectors can travel through time, I would therefore assume these to be the fruits of some future, either in our universe—the one we came from—or in the one to which we were projected, this one."

  "And now, here's a real shocker that I didn't tell you last night, wanting you all to eat and sleep and get over the trauma of yesterday, first. We're not in England anymore. I learned that from the devices in the carrier. We're in—hang on to your hats, folks—North America, somewhere around the eighty-seventh degree of latitude . . . I think. That would place us somewhere in what, in our world, is south-central Virginia or north-central North Carolina."

  "But when I was up in the sky yesterday afternoon, looking for water to wash Simon in, all I could see was the tops of the trees in all directions—no farms, no clearings much bigger than this one is, no roads of any kind. I saw what might be a river a long ways east of here and a line of hills to the far west, and that was it—no towns, no cities, not even a house of any kind. We know, now, from Simon that this stone mausoleum was projected here from somewhere near York, back in England, and for all I've seen so far, it may well be the only thing like it on this whole fucking continent. We may be the only people here, too, for that matter."

  While his companions sat digesting their breakfasts and what he had just told them, Arsen excused himself, crawled inside the carrier, and took it back up into the clear blue sky. Which direction? At last he decided on east, toward that river and, eventually, the Atlantic coast. He'd read somewhere that more settlements of all kinds were on oceans or rivers than ever were elsewhere.

  He set the craft to travel just far enough above the treetops to avoid them, knowing that the carrier would automatically correct its height for changes in land elevation. He activated all six of the vision screens and watched them all in turn. The measurements of distance sped past. Once, he saw movement, fingered the magnification into focus, and witnessed two huge, shaggy-haired things that looked like nothing so much as elephants, but with impossibly long, very cursive tusks. (Mammoths? In North America?) Another flash of movement later, farther on, showed him a brownish bear with a black cub, both of them hard at work tearing apart the soft, rotted bole of a tree trunk on the ground in a tiny glade. But that was all . . . until he saw the black smoke rising high enough for wind currents to disperse it. There seemed to be a lot of it, rising up from several points nearby one another, just beyond the river that now was close and rapidly coming closer. Forest fire?

  He swept closer, lower, and on middle magnification he saw pure horror.

  CHAPTER THE FIRST

  The room looked to have no doors, nor did it own windows; not even a single tall, narrow arrow slit pierced the solid stone walls. The floor was of the same gray granite, likewise the high, vaulted ceiling. A thick, richly hued carpet of Persian weaving lay upon that stone floor. Centered on the carpet was a table of dark oak and an armed and backed chair of the same wood. Light was provided by thick candles of purest beeswax burning in high, freestanding holders and backed by reflectors of polished brass. With these exceptions, the only furnishings of the seemingly inaccessible chamber were the chests.

  The chests lined the walls along all four sides of the chamber, and others hung on thick-linked chains from the ceiling. The chests were of many sizes and shapes and woods and ages. The lids of some of the oldest of them had been made to hold the cushioned mattresses atop which the chiefs and lords of ancient times had been wont to sleep. Some were decorated with the heads of nails and tacks, others had lids or sides covered in plates of copper, brass, bronze, and silver sheets with the decorations applied to the metals. Even the plainest were reinforced at corners and other points of stress with iron and bronze. A few of the smallest were encased in cour bouilli, with enameled disks of metals sunk into the wax-boiled leather as decoration and mark of ownership of the personage for whom the chest had been originally wrought.

  A single chest gaped open, and a tray taken from out it reposed on the tabletop. Jewels sparkled and ruddy gold gleamed from out the declivities of various sizes and shapes sunk into the dense, rich samite lining the tray. Beside the tray lay a ring of wrought iron on which were strung a score and a half of keys, each of them fitting a chest lock somewhere in the chamber.

  A big, thick-bodied man sat in the single chair before the table and the lined tray of jewels. This room was his treasure store, the repository of the painfully collected loot of generations of his larcenous, murderous, bloody-handed, barbaric, and regal forebears.

  His dark hair and beard were streaked liberally with strands of gray, and the beard had been trimmed and teased into a triple fork, the trendy new Spanish mode, but his ruddy cheeks and his long upper lip were all clean-shaven, the ancient, Celtic custom of his race. His hair was held in place by a thin fillet of beaten gold set with tiny garnets, and his bull neck was encircled by an antique torque of solid gold weighing a troy-weight pound and cunningly wrought by long-dead craftsmen to resemble the serpentine bodies and fearsome heads of two orks—the rarely seen beasts that haunted loughs and the deeper rivers.

  The seated man was, to knowing eyes, clearly a veteran warrior. His face and hands both were scarred where the skin had yielded to sharp edges and split under mighty blows. Where the backs of his big hands and thick fingers were coated with coarse hair, the palms and gripping surfaces of them were thick-cased in leathery callus come of grasping sword hilt, axe haft, lance shaft, and the reins of fierce and powerful horses.

  Arms and legs were thick and muscle-corded, the shoulders almost hulking, hips nearly as wide as the shoulders, and waist as the deep chest. The flattened thighs told of a lifetime in a saddle. Gray-green eyes, sparkling with intelligence, peered from beneath shaggy brows.

  Some called this man Brian the Burly, but his proper name was Brian O'Maine Ui Neill. He bore the titles Ard-Righ, Righ, and Ri—he was the ri or chief of the southern Ui Neills, righ of that land called Mide in some dialects, Meath in others, and he was the reigning ard-righ of the entire island of Eireann or, as strangers and foreigners called it, Ireland. He was not the first Brian to bear these titles, own these lands; indeed, he was the eighth such, having succeeded his sire, who had been Brian VII.

  For time beyond reckoning before the time of this Brian's sire, Ard-Righ had in truth been little more than an honorific dating from the time before the coming to Eireann of Christianity, when the Old Religion still had held sway and the High Kings had fulfilled both the functions of priests and kings, sacred in their persons, awesome in their power over lesser rulers and the common folk. But after the lands had all succumbed to the new religion, the sanctity of the High Kings had fled and the power slowly had ebbed away until, at last, they were become only umpires of a sort between the rest of the always-warring kings, living off the produce of their personal lands and really ruling o
nly their own clansfolk.

  Brian VII, however, had set out to change all of the then-existing order. First, he had brought the independent port and city of Dublin beneath the sway of the Crown of Mide, then conquered for good and all the lands along his marches the ownership of which had long been disputed. He had then set his clerks and learned men to poring over all the old records and musty tomes in the ancient palace at Tara, seeking out any slightest claim he might lay to lands beyond his own borders, even while he was storing weapons and military supplies of every sort, acquiring horses, and hiring on fighting men. He had spent at least half of his every remaining year of life at war, in the field at the head of his troops. And he had bequeathed his son and heir his own land-hunger, desire for power, taste for war and conquest, and the wealth and forces with which to appease his appetites. The land that he left his successor, though still called Mide, was five times as large as the Mide that his sire had left to him, and as he had proven a good ruler, a generous and just overlord to the folk he had subdued, that land was satisfied with his rule and at peace.

  The Mide of Brian the Burly was a rich land. The tilled fields produced abundant crops of corn—wheat, barley, rye, and oats—hay, turnips, cabbages, onions, and other common vegetables, as well as the more recently imported starchy vegetable called by the Spanish (those who had discovered it in the lands across the great ocean) potato. Scattered quarries produced fine building stone and clay pits, the raw material for brick and tile and pottery; gold dust and rarer nuggets could be harvested from the beds of the little streams that came down from the uplands to feed the creeks that in turn fed the River Liffey, which itself teemed with fat fish. The seacoasts gave shellfish, crabs, seaweed, and sand for the glass-making industries; fishers sailed out from those same coasts to bring back the bounty harvested from the open sea. Sleek cattle and fine, spirited horses grazed the meadows and leas of the lowlands, and sheep the higher elevations. Sleek swine ran half-wild in the oak forests, battening on acorns and roots. Orchards gave apples and pears for ciders, bees made honey for mead, even the bogs provided berries, wild herbs, and peat to supplement the wood and charcoal and sea-coal shipped into Dublin from other lands. The wealth of the land and the things that it did produce made possible the purchase of those things that it did not and could not produce.