Of Myths and Monsters Read online

  "Now Your Grace may be dead certain that each and every one of my royal clients and enemies on this island is or will shortly be fully aware of what has transpired—of how I was provoked by Lord Aonghus, of how I began to make preparations to gather all my hosts and go against him in his lands as a brave and honorable Ard-Righ would and must do, and most importantly of how the King of England and Wales, my blood cousin but confirmed ally of the royal overlord of Lord Aonghus, threatened to bring me to combat and certain defeat with his vastly larger and stronger host was I to strike at the vassal of his ally."

  "So, Your Grace must now see, the Ard-Righ thus retains his reputation of bravery, honor, and prudence. His army remains in the Kingdom of Connachta, his fleet continues to interdict her ports, sink her fishers, and raid her coasts. I am sure that I shortly will be entertaining a noble Mac Dhomhnuill who will come bearing word from Lord Aonghus that I obviously took offense at what he had sent off as a mere declaration of his God-given duty to defend his vassals, both old and new. He will send me some rich presents, offer me more galloglaiches as I need them at reduced prices, and promise that, in future, he will try to restrain Righ Roberto's obvious land-hunger."

  "I will treat the noble messenger with all of my renowned and lavish hospitality, then send him back to his master with equally rich presents—perhaps even a destrier of the leopard-horse breed—and a letter reaffirming my friendship and respect for him, taking him up on the offer of more galloglaiches and suggesting an exchange of hostages between our two realms as a seal of enduring amicability. Then I'll get back to business as usual, of course, here in Eireann."

  The gate guards of the palace compound seemed more than happy to gape the gates, raise the portcullis, lower the bridge over the wide, green-slimy moat, and see Bass Foster and his two squires go clattering across it and, finally outside the high, thick walls, Bass could see why.

  He had arrived, when summoned by three of Brian's Knights of the Silver Moon, with merely his squires, his bannerman, and a dozen or so bodyguards, all of whom still awaited him just where he had left them. But now there were far more men than that awaiting him. Somewhat impatiently awaiting him were three to four hundred men and almost all of his squadron officers, most of them dismounted but all of them fully armed, heavily armed. Certainly for the benefit and intimidation of the guards on walls and gate, many of the waiting men were carefully examining weapon edges and primings of pistols or long guns.

  A long, loud cheer rose from out that steel-sheathed throng at sight of their leader riding free and unharmed from out the Tara Palace. And another cheer, mostly a relief of long tension, grew up from the guards behind and above him. Several men tightened girths, mounted, and rode to meet Bass.

  On the ride back to their camp halfway between Tara and Lagore, Bass asked the big, gruff, jovial Reichsherzog Wolfgang, who rode just behind him, wearing his fluted three-quarter armor, his face red and steaming sweat, "What, pray tell, would you all have done had I not come out, had Brian decided to cast me into one of his cells or take off my head?"

  "Attack, mein freund," was the German's blunt answer. "Attack and either free you or avenge you in much red blood."

  "Attack a fortified palace complex without engines, cannon, or even infantry, Wolfie? Be serious—cavalry alone can't do that."

  "No?" spoke up another of Bass's officers. "And cavalry brigades cannot prize armed merchant ships, either, my lord, yet as I recall, you proved to King Arthur, England and Wales, indeed, to all the world that a cavalry brigade commanded by Your Grace could do and had done just that, some years back."

  "That was an entirely different set of circumstances, and you ought to know it, Sir Ali," snapped back Bass. "After all, you were there."

  "Bass, Bass, mein Freund" rumbled the Reichsherzog, "vat ve planned an accomplishment of renown would not haf been. Defenses of such a poorness as those of that palace to Irischers daunting may be, but not to any other. My good Kalymks stood behind, their fine crossbows unseen, vhile those before them kept on their pistols and swords the eyes of the guards. Other of my Kalmyks were vith ropes ready."

  "On command, each of the visible guards a quarrel would haf received to take to his heart, then the Kalmyks vould have the moat swum, loops of ropes over the merlons thrown, then all to the top of the wall would have climbed up, and, after any other guards cut down were, the bridge would have lowered und the grille raised up and the gates opened and everyone else to ride in would have to either free or avenge you."

  Bass believed it, all of it, for the uncle of the Holy Roman Emperor never lied, and he felt a shuddery feeling, a brief prickle of his nape-hairs. He still sometimes felt himself to be basically unworthy, undeserving of such degrees of loyalty.

  "Dammit!" he thought to himself. "This bunch would have done just what Wolfie outlined, too. They would've shot down those guards, climbed the walls, opened the grounds to the rest, then butchered every man, woman, and child in there had I been already executed, or they would have all died in the attempt. And goddammit, I'm not, truly not, the kind of man they all seem to think I am, the kind that a pack of howling, murderous savages like my galloglaiches can and do all but worship as a living deity, that is just not me, never was."

  "But now, God help me, it is. That's just the way they all see me—their own, personal, bloody-handed god-in-the-flesh, their chosen war-chief, battle leader—me, Bass Foster, who, in another world, deliberately passed up a promising army career, a direct appointment to West Point mine for the asking with graduation to come as a captain, not merely a second lieutenant. Bass Foster, who just passed up a lifetime sinecure like that because he said he was tired of killing—tired of doing it himself, tired of sending other men to do it, tired of ordering still others to their deaths. So how did that man of announced peace wind up as a widely hailed war-leader and very personal participant in this world of gory and seemingly never-ending chaos and death wrought by man on man, then?"

  "I never even tried to write science fiction on the world of my birth, but knowing me, even if I had, I could never in a million years have dreamed up a scenario so ridiculously farfetched and so utterly implausible as this one I've lived and am now living."

  It was not really all that many years past, although it now often seemed a lifetime ago to Bass, but still could he hear very clearly the voice of that state trooper shouting above the noise made by the rotor of the nearby helicopter and the rush of the rain on that dark and stormy night on the banks of the Potomac River.

  The uniformed man in the rain slicker and ten-gallon hat had made no secret of the fact that he thought Bass' decision to be one born out of insanity, alcoholism, or both together, but he was just too tired, harried, overworked, and hurried just then by the fast-approaching flood bearing down upon them from upriver to waste any further time in argument.

  "A'right, Foster, I ain't got no right to force you to abandon yore property, see, but I done done my job, I done tol' you the way she's stacked. The river's goin' to crest at least ten, fifteen foot above where she's at right now. And the way yore house is situated, it'll be at least two foot of water in yore top level, even if the whole house don't get undermined and come all to pieces, see. And thishere's the lastest round the chopper's goin' to make in thishere direction, too. And don't you figger you can allus change your mind and take to your boat, because it won't last in that river way she is and will be any longer than a wet snowball in hell. So you still sure you ain't comin' with us?"

  On receiving again Bass' same, firm negative reply, the trooper had blown up at the steady stream of rainwater cascading off the slightly canted tip of his nose and said, shrugging, "A'right, citizen, it's yore dang funeral . . . if'n we ever finds yore body to bury it, that is."

  He also remembered sitting at the picture window in the living room of his tri-level home, watching the rampant, widening, deepening, gray and swirling river tear away first his runabout boat, then his dock, sweeping both swiftly away downstream along with it
s other booty—animal, vegetable, and mineral.

  He recalled thinking then that that trooper had been right, he had indeed been some kind of fool to remain behind here. But too this was the only real property that he had ever been able to call entirely his, and the largest part of his net worth was sunk into it and its appurtenances, and he was dee-double-damned if he would leave his home and possessions to the ravages of wind and water, not to mention the packs of looters who were certain to flock from the slums of Washington, D. C., to descend on the affluent, abandoned homes just as soon as they could make it. Besides, he trusted less the dire pronouncements of "authorities" and "experts" than he did his own, unexplainable dead-certainty that he would, somehow, survive the coming disaster.

  Not that that inexplicable certainty had not been more than just a little shaken when he, hearing odd noises from above during a brief lull of the storm and the pelting rain, had climbed up to his low attic to find all three of his cats clinging tightly to crosspieces of the rafters and mewling feline moans of terror. More significantly, all three of them—the huge, rangy black tom, the older queen, and the younger silver Persian which had been Carolyn's last gift to him—were good hunters, merciless killers . . . yet they were peaceably sharing those rafters with several flying squirrels and a brace of soft brown house mice. That had been when he had started both to get truly worried and to call himself a fool, aloud.

  He had tried to telephone a neighbor, only to discover that the telephones all were dead, and when the lights had all gone out, he had not even bothered to check the circuit breakers. He had dragged an easy chair closer to the picture window, fetched a bottle of Jameson's Irish whiskey to keep him company, and then just sat, sipping neat whiskey and watching the inexorable rise of the angry gray water and reflecting upon his past life.

  Through his mind's eye, he had relived the joys and the sorrows, the wins and the losses, the victories and defeats which had studded and marked his forty-five, almost forty-six years of life. And, as the level of the river rose higher and higher, while that of the bottle sank lower and lower, his thoughts had turned finally to Carolyn.

  Dear, lovely, loving Carolyn. She and the deep love they two had shared for so tragically short an interlude had been the greatest win of his lifetime. Therefore, her murder at the hands of some junkie musician and his homosexual lover had been the greatest of his losses. That horrendous loss had completely disrupted his life, had driven him almost over the edge into insanity, and the constant longing for her was even now turning him into an alcoholic. He had grieved again for a while, then he had begun to feel that, somehow, his dead love was truly near to him, and, murmuring softly to her, he had fallen asleep in the chair, there before the window.

  The hot, bright sun on his face had awakened him, had blinded him when first he had blinked open his gummy eyelids to expose his bleary eyes.

  "Well, what the hell," he had groaned, "I was right, after all, and . . . Ugh, my mouth tastes like used kitty litter. Fagh!"

  Stumbling into the kitchen, he had flicked the light switch out of force of habit . . . and the tubes had flickered into life.

  "Well, good God Almighty," he had remarked, "those damn utility crews are really on the ball, for a change. Okay, so let's see if the phone works, too. Shit, still dead, only one miracle at a time, it looks like."

  With a pot of coffee perking merrily on the stove top, he had decided to walk outside and see if he could determine just how much damage his house and property had sustained. But he had taken only two steps out of his front door, looked in wondering, terrified disbelief, then reeled back inside to safety, to sanity. He had slammed the door, locked it, thrown the massive barrel bolt, drawn the drapes with shaking hands, sunk down into the familiar chair, and just sat, stunned.

  Drawing upon some hidden well of courage, he had at some length lifted an edge of the drapes enough to peer out and see . . . and see . . .

  He didn't think it could be called a castle or chateau, not really, although one wing of the apparently U-shaped stone house incorporated a tower at least sixty feet high and, from what he could see, the entire building and grounds seemed to be encircled by a reasonably high wall of dressed stones, pierced by at least one gate wide enough and high enough for a Sherman tank to easily negotiate. A creepy-crawliness had begun gnawing at Bass as he had gazed across his neat, manicured green lawn to behold, where the river had so recently swirled madly, part of an elaborate formal garden and, beyond both lawn and garden, the many windows of that huge house of archaic design, the windows staring back at him like the black, empty eye-sockets of some hideous, grinning skull.

  But Bass had not been long in discovering that he was not the only person of his world and time to be somehow transported to what seemed to be the English border country in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance. In all, there were seven men and three women, and of this initial number, the women had fared worst in this ruder, cruder, less comfortable, and far more dangerous world into which they had been willy-nilly thrust.

  The first to die had been a man, however, one of four truckers who had been transported, with their trucks, trailers, and loads intact, from Interstate 95 to a stretch of long, narrow, level lea all in the blinking of an eye and with hardly a bump. When one of the men had climbed down from his rig and approached two armored men on horseback to ask the location and how to get back to the interstate, he had been lanced through the chest for his trouble.

  The second death had been that of a middle-aged and alcoholic woman, wife of a chemistry professor of fifty-odd years, who had, himself, eventually gone mad. The third death had been that of a young hippie girl, who had the dangerous habit of swallowing anything that looked to be a drug and discovered too late that the pills of this period were quite often deadly in even small amounts.

  Since that death, there had been no more, although one other of the truckers had been severely and permanently injured in a great, raging battle between the English army and that of the Scots invaders. The third woman, who now was Bass's wife and the mother of his son, had become murderously insane and had had to be separated from her child and locked away in a convent of a nursing order.

  Knowledge and skills and materials from their own world had allowed the survivors of the group to vastly improve and to immeasurably help certain aspects of the world into which they had been so abruptly and surprisingly deposited.

  The professor had contributed much to the cause of the beset and beleaguered English and their king and had been ennobled quite early on, before his unfortunate traits of personal cowardice and a hectoring manner, plus symptoms of his encroaching emotional instability, had cost him all that his talents had earned and sent him riding off into an exile that had resulted in his full descent into madness.

  One of the truckers had developed new and better firearms and had carried on some of the projects originated by the madman after his departure. He had been aided in this by another of the truckers as well as by the male "hippie" who had been shocked back to normality by the hideous demise of his girlfriend. The third trucker, subsequent to his crippling combat injury, had begun the selective breeding of farm animals on the country estate of a churchman.

  Under the circumstances, deeply hidden traits in Bass had emerged and flowered. He had become a superlative cavalry commander, a warrior of some note, and a matchless leader of men. In the society into which he had been thrust, which was unlike the one he had departed—in which the military leader and combat expert was distrusted, derided, and held in contempt—such traits as he demonstrated were considered to be among the highest attainable attributes of a gentleman, and his feats had been rewarded by a shower of honors which had been conferred upon him by nobles and king alike.

  Only well after his arrival in the strange world did he find that he and his companions were not the first to be so deposited. Two men had preceded them, these having arrived nearly two centuries before from the twenty-first century. These two had been scientists, both
of whom had been the recipients of longevity treatments, and, although one had died in battle since that long-ago arrival, the other was not only still living but was the Archbishop of York, the second-most-powerful man in all of that version of England.

  The two scientists had made their arrival at precisely the same location as had Bass and the rest, and it was assumed that a malfunction of the projecting device—still squatting in the ground level of the old defensive tower there—was what had jerked Foster, the other six men, and the three women into the new and different world.

  For different it assuredly was from their own world of a comparable time and place. The date that Bass had been given some time after he had begun service with the royal army had been A. D. 1643, which had in his own world been in the late northern European Renaissance era; but conditions in this world were much closer to being late mediaeval than early Renaissance. Over a period of time, Bass had discovered that no really large, strong nations existed in this world, only small, relatively weak countries, and that this miserable, very feudal mess was to a very large extent a result of the constant meddling in lay affairs of the Church.

  The Church of this world exercised and was able to exercise far more real raw power than the Church of his world's history ever had owned. Part of the reason for this was the fact that there were no longer any Moslems in this world, a military alliance of Christians and Moslems against the Mongols at some time in the thirteenth century having gradually and miraculously become a merger of Islam and Christianity. The other source of inordinate power for the Church was her control of the sales of gunpowder worldwide. She had from the beginning of this lucrative trade tried to keep the formula a secret, referred to refined niter as "priests' powder," and savagely punished any layman or group who so far transgressed as to make their own, unsanctified gunpowder—tormenting them, torturing them, maiming and mutilating them before finally burning them alive, the cavities of their mangled bodies stuffed to nigh bursting with their own, unhallowed gunpowder. The England into which Bass and the rest had been thrust was not the same as the seventeenth-century England of his own world had been, consisting only of England and Wales, owning no suzerainty over either Ireland or Scotland. Moreover, it had been an England sorely beset—the king excommunicated, the entire kingdom under interdict, and, a crusade having been preached against it by Pope Abdul in Rome, hordes of bloodthirsty, loot-hungry foreign invaders massing against it on every hand.