Of Quests and Kings Read online

  Shrugging, Foster replied. "Most likely they do, but if they're of the type of which I'm thinking, the adoption of a military advance matters far less to them than does the weight of their private purses. Probably you could gain instant, official approval of the primers if you were to go back to the King's Camp and slip each of those officers a brace of gold onzas."

  "In a pig's asshole!" snorted Sir Peter. "Bass, I'll be fucked if I'll pay a passel of crooks extra to do their goddam jobs right!''

  Bass just shook his head. "Pete, I know it goes against the grain with an honest man like you, but that's the way affairs are conducted in this world, I've found, especially in proximity to the King or to other high-ranking nobles and churchmen. I don't like it either, but I'm sure as hell having to learn to adapt to it and to other things I don't like. This world is very different from our world, the time and place from which you and I and Buddy and the others came, but it would appear that we're going to live out the rest of our lives here in this different world, for better or for worse, so we're just going to have to learn to live as do the people who were born here. We have only three options: die, as did Arthur Collier and Susan Sunshine, go mad, as did Bill Collier, or adapt to our surroundings and live. And you strike me as the survival type, Pete."

  Sir Peter Fairley cracked his big, scarred knuckles, his firm jaw set, then he relaxed. "Well, most likely you're right, Bass, and I'm just too stubborn for my own fucking good. But I couldn't go back and bribe them bastards now, even was I a mind to. I only had a few more then twelve hunnerd of them primers to start with, and I used up some down to the King's Camp and then nearly half a gross more of them today out on that big ship, and the rest of them is all promised now to Walid Pasha and Ed Alfshoot and Sir Lem and it'll take months to make up another big batch of them. My smiths up in York—and it seems like I never can get enough good ones, as many as I need—has got more important things to do, mostly, than make and temper lots of little-bitty steel springs, and then too, Bass, you just wouldn't believe the prices merchants is getting anymore for copper ingots."

  Bass nodded again. "And, of course, you can't use iron or steel tubing because of the danger of accidental sparking and premature explosions of the gunpowder. But . . . let me think for a minute, yes. Pete, how about using steel tubes faced with tin? To the best of my knowledge, tin is still being mined in Wales and Cornwall, in this world, so it wouldn't have to be imported like most of the copper is. Tin isn't ferrous—it won't spark."

  Fairley slammed a work-hardened palm onto the tabletop, a broad smile lighting up his face. "Now, goddammitall. Bass, that's a first-class idea, one I never would of thought up in a million years. Sure thing, and we can do better than just facing the tubes, too. Buddy and me, 'bout a year ago, we had the batt'ries out our old rigs and out your Jeep pickup, too, brought down to York. We worked out a bicycle recharger for them and I've been doing some electroplating here and there, already. I could tin-plate them tubes. Thanks a whole lot, Bass. Is it anything I can do for you, now?"

  Foster squirmed in his chair, then said hesitantly. "Pete . . . it's Krys, my wife . . . Have you seen her, spoken to her, lately? I . . . her letters get worse and worse, and I . . . I'm worried about her, frankly."

  "You got you a right to be, buddy," replied Pete, grimly, "'cause it ain't none of it I've seen or heard about good. I think Krys is done flipped her lid."

  CHAPTER 3

  His Holiness Abdul, Pope of Rome, lay dying. Despite the ever-present risk of fire, the streets closest to his favorite palace had been buried in straw in order to mute the sounds of shod horse hooves and steel-rimmed wheels. Grim-faced, swarthy Moors of His Holiness's picked guards stalked those streets armed with pikestaves, clubs, and short, thick whips of rhinoceros hide to enforce quiet and quell any outbreak of noise or loud talk that might possibly disturb their master. Their ways were cruel, and they were feared and avoided.

  Cardinal Prospero Sicola was summoned, searched, but courteously, for weapons, then ushered into the bedchamber of the dying prelate, where the hot air was thick with the reeks of incense and illness. He thought that Abdul already was beginning to look like a corpse—the dry skin drawn tight over the big bones of the face giving his profile an unmistakable raptorial cast.

  Upon hearing Sicola's soft tread, Abdul opened his too-bright eyes but did not otherwise move where he sat half propped against a mound of cushions, with his one hand resting upon his chest and his other beneath the gold-stitched silken coverlet.

  "Is Your Holiness awake, then?" asked Sicola softly.

  "Yes, Brother Prospero," came the reply in a weaker voice than Sicola ever before had heard from the often sickly old man. "We are awake and still extant, though for how much longer is in the hands of our Lord. That merchant-banker, d'Este, must have dug really deep this time and hired on a master poisoner; we have been poked, probed, poulticed, pilled, purged, bled, even clystered, and none of it to any salubrious effect upon our holy person. Apparently your latest regicidal plot upon our life has succeeded."

  Not until he had knelt and kissed the pontiff's ring did Sicola make reply, arising to stand beside the high, wide, intricately carven bedstead. He said sadly, "Your Holiness should have accepted my terms and, after secretly stepping down, retired to live out the remainder of his life in comfort and serenity at that small monastery near Tunis. But allow me to assure Your Holiness that if your suspicions of poisoning be true—and your very own physicians seem to think otherwise—neither I nor Cardinal d'Este had aught to do with it, nor I doubt me did any of our close associates, else I would surely have heard of it, and I swear upon my hope of salvation that I have heard no such thing."

  "Consider, Your Holiness, you are a very elderly man, nor have you been in truly good health for some years now. Death is the eventual end of all mortal creatures, that is God's plan and His way. He—"

  With a brief flash of his old fire, Abdul snorted. "Don't preach homilies to us, you whey-skinned, snub-nosed Frank bastard! We have thought more and more in recent years that mayhap the sainted Mahmud al-Qaleefah did err by helping Islam to be merged with, polluted by, and befouled by the brimming cesspool of baseless superstitions and myths called Christianity. The Veiled Men of the Mountains and the other small, persecuted bands of folk who still cleave unto pure, untainted Islam are, we are beginning to think, the only remaining True Believers. Allah is God, Brother Prospero. Jesus called Christ was but another of the great prophets, only a man, like Moses or Mohammed, of flesh and blood. But, alas, the pattern is irrevocably set and we all must go down to Gehenna together. Who can unscramble an egg? We never were able to conceive of a method to set the thing again right, to undo the well-meaning sins wrought by St. Mahmud and those who succeeded him in his aims."

  "You think us a backslider, Brother Prospero—no, don't bother to try to deny it, you do, we know. You look upon us in horror, you see before you an apostate Pope. But fear us not, we are dying. But ere long, you and all of the other pretenders may—nay, will—wish old Abdul still alive."

  "You spoke at our last meeting but one of Rome being in need of a 'Wind of Change' to sweep away the host of supposed errors and mistakes wrought by us and our predecessor." The old man gasped a rattling gurgle of laughter, then spoke on. "Well, Brother Prospero, lying here with grim death nibbling at us constantly, we have seen snatches of what the near future holds for Rome and for those who, fit to do so or not, would rule her and hers."

  "You and the rest of the malcontents will get your 'Wind of Change,' right enough. You'll all get more wind than you bargained for—a whirlwind of death and destruction looms over you even now, and it will commence its work even before our holy body is cold. You may outlive us, briefly, but we know that we shall enjoy the last laugh, Brother Prospero."

  * * * *

  Whilst the dying pontiff was conversing with his declared enemy, up the street beyond the tightly sealed window of the death chamber a Moorish guards sergeant and five of his minions were stal
king along, seeking out men or women or children to beat. They did not hear the well-oiled hinges of the shutters covering a window above them, and by the time they heard the contrabasso thrrruuumm of the crossbow, its thick, stubby bolt had torn through the back and the front of a mail hauberk and the thickness of the body between them, then sped on to penetrate yet one more layer of mail and lodge finally in the hipbone of that man-at-arms.

  Whirling about at the first noise from behind his patrol, the sergeant saw the two men go down, screaming in agony and surprise, even as the shutter was slammed shut.

  Roaring his rage, the sergeant led his remaining three Moorish Guards in battering down the strangely unbarred street-level door to the house, then charged in with them, clubs and whips discarded, scimitars and pistols out and ready.

  Presently, four gashed, headless, swarthy-skinned bodies, all stripped of anything of value, were thrown out the doorway. Slowly, a gaggle of men and women and children gathered in the street to further mutilate the bodies, revile them, spit upon them, and shower them with bits of dung from beneath the straw. Some followed the man with the bolt in his hip as he crawled away from the site of the ambush. Not a few of these folk bore signs of recent abuse inflicted by whip and club and pikestave, and they took thorough, sickening revenge upon their onetime oppressor before someone finally deigned to grant him the mercy of death.

  Neither group dispersed until the thud-thud-clank-jingle of armed and running men announced the imminent arrival of approaching troops.

  Dying Pope or no dying Pope, loud were the cries of rage and outrage when the new-come Moors saw the bodies—by then, all of them hacked, mutilated, and despoiled. Louder still were their howls when they entered the vacant houses and found the four severed heads, lined up neatly on a bench built into a wall, their slit-off penises jammed into the beard-fringed mouths. After searching and thoroughly wrecking the empty house, the section of Moorish Guards departed, seeking first reinforcements, then men to kill.

  True to the dying Abdul's vision, the Roman storm had commenced.

  * * * *

  "That I ever met Carolyn at all was the purest coincidence." Rupen continued his tale to the archbishop. "While the guest of a wealthy arms collector at a fashionable downtown-Richmond club, I had happened to meet a man who had been a fellow GI Bill student at the city college twenty-odd years before. When, in the course of our conversation, he learned that I was vice president of Confederate States Armaments, he told me that he was just then teaching history courses at that same city college and asked if I might visit one of more of his classes to show off some of my reproductions and tell of how they were made, loaded, and used. Being, at that point, brandy-jovial, I agreed to do so."

  "Since by then we were stocking a wide variety of long guns, and single-shot pistols and more than a dozen different cap-and-ball revolvers, taking examples of every item was out of the question, and I limited my burden on the first such visit to four long guns—one flintlock musket, one cap-lock rifle-musket, a flintlock fuzzee, and a cap-and-ball revolving carbine—and four handguns—a flintlock horse pistol, a cap-lock derringer, a Colt-type dragoon revolver, and a Remington-type Army-caliber revolver, along with a big briefcase full of accessories."

  "So well received was my demonstration that day, so warm was my reception by both students and faculty, that when I was asked to return and do it again I agreed to do so. My initial demonstration and talk had been in a classroom to about thirty students and a few stray faculty members; for my second appearance, I was requested to bring a larger selection of weapons and to be prepared to do a two-hour demonstration. Not until I arrived on campus did I find out that this one was to be in the largest lecture hall and that my audience was to number in hundreds and include not only students and faculty but also quite a few alumni and plain citizens."

  "By the conclusion of that one, I had given out all of my business cards and, actually, sold many of the demonstration weapons on the spot, along with most of the accessories, so when the college offered me an honorarium, I politely declined to accept it . . . and this raised my stock with them through the roof."

  "When I arrived at the lecture hall for my third demonstration, this time with Bagrat and two of my nephews, Al and Haigh, it was to find the hall and all of its approaches being picketed by a long-haired, scruffy, ragged, very smelly agglomeration of a type of scum peculiar to that period—'hippies,' they were called. This particular batch were bearing signs and shouting slogans and singing off-key songs protesting the then-ongoing war in Southeast Asia. Although I could not imagine just what a demonstration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reproduction weapons and tools had to do with the protracted modern war clear on the other side of the globe, it was clear that the only way I would get the station wagon into the parking lot under the lecture hall would be to run its three-plus tons over some of the unwashed young lunatics who were stretched full-length, in several ranks, across the width of the driveway ramp. Bagrat, Al, and Haigh were in favor of doing just that, but I drove instead, to the administration building, and we ended up carrying everything into the lecture hall through a tunnel connecting the two buildings, thus avoiding any confrontation with the mob of protestors entirely."

  "When I asked just what the hell was going on outside the lecture hall, my old friend and sometime fellow student, Paul Czemik, just shook his head. "These peacenik hippies and pseudo-hippies and out-and-out bums, alkies and dopers mostly, will protest at the drop of a frigging hat, Rupen, you know that. What set this off? Me, probably. Your demonstrations have been such a big hit that a reporter from the student newspaper interviewed me and asked about your background. I told him you were a retired infantry officer, a major, that your late father had been an important defense contractor and that your brother, Kogh Ademian, was president and chairman of the board of Ademian Enterprises, the international arms dealers."

  Rupen groaned. "And that was all published in the college paper? Hell, Paul, I'm lucky the little bastards didn't drag me out of the car and lynch me."

  Professor Czemik looked rueful. "Open mouth, insert foot, leg, thigh, and asshole. I'm sorry, Rupen, I should've realized this bunch of freaks we have for students these days would blow it up out of all proportion. The way the published article read, you were either here recruiting for the Green Berets, preaching the joys of high explosives and napalm, or both at once."

  * * * *

  "Well, Hal." Rupen went on to the archbishop, "when the protesters realized that we'd bypassed them and gotten into the lecture hall, along with a fair portion of our audience, despite them, they went wild, turned so ugly that the security guards who had been outside all came inside, secured all of the doors, shuttered all of the ground-level or easily accessible windows, and rang up the city police."

  "By the time the first city cops arrived on the scene, the so-called protest was well on the way to becoming a full-blown riot. And while that mess was in process of being cooled down, a bunch of real revolutionaries occupied most of the administration building, barred and barricaded all the entries and exits, then threatened to set fire to it unless some score of 'nonnegotiable demands' were met at once. The long list of demands was delivered via bullhorn, and most of them were ridiculous to begin; not the college administration, not the city mayor, not the state governor, not even the president could have fulfilled those demands, especially not in the short time which the revolutionaries were allotting . . . and those fledgling Marxists knew the facts of the matter as well as did anyone else."

  * * * *

  Rupen approached Czemik and a gaggle of faculty members huddled together in whispered consultation. "Paul, I've got to get my station wagon out of that administration building parking facility, at once."

  "Mr. Ademian," said the dean of students, Bancroft, "the college has full insurance—any damages to your vehicle will be fully covered, never you fear."

  Rupen shook his head. "You don't understand, sir. I don't give a damn about the car its
elf; it's insured, too, and it's a company car, anyway, not mine. But I don't think that you, I, any of us want that gang of hoodlums in there to get their grubby hands on a certain wooden box that's in the back of the wagon, covered by an old GI blanket. We were going out to my brother's home from here today to make ready for a shooting match this weekend coming, so within that box are a dozen one-pound canisters of black powder and six or seven tins of percussion caps."

  Bancroft stared, open-mouthed, at Rupen for a long moment, then sank into a nearby chair, moaning, his face in his hands. "Oh, my sweet Jesus God! Do you know what you've done, Mr. Ademian? That group in there are most of them foaming fanatics—they're perfectly capable of blowing up the building, just to prove a point!"

  "Mr. Bancroft," said Rupen wryly, "don't worry about your precious building, hear? A measly ten pounds of black powder wouldn't put much of a dent in reinforced concrete, steel girders, and brick. But the danger is that they just might have along someone who knows how to make antipersonnel bombs, and I don't want to load down my conscience with that responsibility."

  He, Bagrat, the two nephews, and Paul Czemik, along with two of the security guards—unarmed, save for billy clubs and transceivers—arrived before the vertically sliding fire door to the tunnel that connected directly to the underground parking facility for the now-occupied administration building.

  Before helping his partner raise the door, one of the guards said, "Mr. Ademian, sir, the little fuckers prob'ly done closed the door leads out onto the street by now, but if it ain't too big and wide a car you got, you could just drive 'er straight through this tunnel here. We does it at night with two-wheelers and jeeps all the time."

  In the opened doorway, Rupen told his pudgy, out-of-shape younger brother, "Bagrat, you stay here, you and Al. If Haigh and I can't get our wagon and get it out of there, four wouldn't be able to do any better."