Of Quests and Kings Read online

  "But not for me, for some reason, be they drunk or sober—I seem to be completely safe from them, even if I've apprehended them in misdeeds and am in the very process of disciplining them. I've never had so much as one of them raise a hand to me, my gentleman, or their Irish officers. So I guess if anyone can prevent them from doing to the English countryside what Sherman did to Georgia, it's got to be me."

  Then, a bare three weeks prior to his planned day of departure for the march westward, with Sir Colum, his squires, one of Cromwell's captains, and some members of Bass's staff already out reconnoitering the projected line-of-march, Carey Carr stopped off at Norwich Castle on his journey to Greenwich with word that the Archbishop, Harold of York, would like to speak with him at some time prior to his leaving for Ireland.

  Lacking either the time or the energy for the hard, often long trip by road or the harder, though shorter, overland hell-ride, Bass, with Sir Ali—just returned from a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. Thomas of Becket—Don Diego—also just back from a trip of a personal nature, having to do, he solemnly averred, with the good of his soul—and a handful of bodyguards and servants, boarded one of the smaller ships of his personal fleet, sailed up to Hull, there borrowed horses from the resident royal garrison, and rode from there to York. That ride, on the long, narrow, rutted and holed bogs that passed for roads, took longer than had the ship passage up from Norfolk. The only thing that Bass was really looking forward to in Ireland was that folk all said that the Irish roads were mostly far superior to those of England or Wales.

  Late on the day of his arrival, in the spacious room that the old archbishop used for what he called in public his alchemical studies, the two men—one, of the twentieth century, one of the twenty-first century—spoke in a language that only one other person in the palace could have understood, the basic English of the United States of America of the last quarter of the twentieth century, for there were spies about and Archbishop Harold well knew it for fact.

  One more time, he had carefully explained and demonstrated to Bass the workings and care of two examples of twenty-first-century technology—heat-stunners, weapons that, while they could incapacitate humans in the blinking of an eye, would never kill them if utilized properly.

  Bass handled the two devices—the smaller looking a bit like one of the ball-point pens of his world and time, though about twice as thick, and the larger being about a third again thicker than the other, with a slight curvature of the butt end.

  Old Harold had used the larger to quickly bring a bit of iron in a stone mortar to red heat, several times interposing his withered old hand between the instrument and the iron. "You see, Bass, when set on 'Heat,' these devices will only harm flesh if it is within close proximity to or actually in contact with metal, so you must direct the heat beam at some metal object."

  "The 'Stun' setting I cannot easily demonstrate, unless you want me to show you what it feels like . . . and I somehow don't think that you would like it. Victims come out of it with a headache of inhuman proportions. Metal will not stop the stun beam, but there is no need to aim for metal, either. Directing the beam to the head will put your man down in a bare eye-blink of time, but should you not be able to direct it at the head, any available part of the body will do; it will just take a few seconds longer to do the job."

  "The one real drawback to these smaller examples of the heat-stunner is that they possess only a very narrow beam and a short range of effective use, perhaps ten feet in the case of the smaller, twice that or a little more for the larger."

  "The power charges, now." He thumbed back a sliding cover on the side of the larger device, exposing a cavity wherein nestled, end to end, two little cylinders of a brownish hue with shiny surfaces, each of them slightly less than an inch in length from one rounded tip to the other. "They are blue-black and shiny when fully charged, but as they slowly lose their charge, they become lighter in color and less shiny of surface. The forward one will, when weakened, draw from the rear one until it is emptied of charge, so if you note that the forward one is of a darker color than the rear one, don't be alarmed—it's only when the forward one begins to lighten that you should be ready to replace them with freshly charged ones."

  "Never, ever throw these cylinders away or lose them, for only a few hours' exposure to bright sunlight will fully recharge them. You can't break them, either deliberately or by mischance, and the only way to discharge them is to use them in the devices. The small unit holds one and, as you can see, the larger unit holds two."

  "How you carry these weapons is up to you, whatever proves easiest and most comfortable for your quick use, but I have always kept my small one, the one that I brought into this world and time nearly two hundred years ago, strapped to my left forearm." He drew up the voluminous sleeve of his fur-trimmed robe to show the arrangement.

  Bass nodded. "That looks as good as any other way to me, so long as I'm not in armor, of course. As for the bigger one, I'll have Nugai whip together a holster to go inside one of my bootlegs, I think. This little pouch of charges is flat enough—I can just have him stitch it inside a boot or in some other safe cranny. What are these other things you have over there? Do you intend them for me, Hal?"

  The old man shoved the largest of the indicated items into the center of the tabletop. "This, Bass, is the unbreakable water bottle you took from the body of Colonel Dr. Jane Stone. I boiled horsehide in wax and shaped it around the bottle so that now it bears a close enough resemblance to not matter to a contemporary canteen that no one should question you about it. It holds exactly a liter of liquid."

  "This lantern belt box, made of more of my cour boulli, contains the impermeable tubes of the emergency tablets she brought to this world and time on her ill-fated projection. They taste much better than they smell, incidentally, and each contains intensely concentrated food, vitamins, minerals, a powerful stimulant, and a mild general-purpose antibiotic. Never ingest more than three in any twenty-four-hour period, and always drink at least a pint of fluid whenever you do ingest one. The smaller reddish tube contains a much more powerful general-purpose antibiotic, twelve of them; actually, they are the longevity boosters, such as I used to save the life of the King's grandfather several times over, so long ago. The other small tube, the one that looks the color of old ivory, like the larger tubes, now holds a dozen pain capsules from my time and world. They will be effective against unbelievably intense pain for twelve, twenty, as much as thirty hours at a stretch, yet without so clouding the senses, such as does opium and its various derivatives, that a man cannot function normally."

  "If you will open that flat chest there at your side, you will see yet another of my handicrafts."

  Within the indicated leathern chest were what seemed to Bass to be patterns for a breast-and-back cuirass, plate spauldrons, and a velvet skullcap fashioned over something thin and rigid. On lifting out the two largest pieces, Bass recognized the dull, silvery-gray metal as that of which the projection device that had for so very long squatted in the ground level of Whyffler Hall's tower keep had been surfaced. Both the breastplate and the back-plate showed bright, shiny splashes that his soldier's eye immediately recognized for lead.

  Holding the thin, light pieces in his hands, he raised his eyebrows questioningly at the archbishop and asked, "Who shot the balls and why, Hal?"

  "One of my guardsmen, Bass, with an eight-bore caliver and at a range of under forty feet, and before you ask, yes, the weapon was fully charged. The balls struck the plates squarely and knocked each of them spinning for the full length of my inner garden and clanged them against the stone wall, but as you can clearly see, they were neither holed nor damaged in any way. I made two sets—I'm now wearing one, have been all day, and in relative comfort, as compared to a shirt of mail, such as I wore from the first attempt to assassinate me until I fashioned these."

  "The sets are easy to put on or take off, alone, with no assistance. They are quite light in weight, as you can tell yourself, yet tou
gh enough to stop anything short of a ball from a small cannon. That cap contains another piece of the same metal. I sized them from some of your clothing out of chests in Krystal's effects at my country palace, so they should fit, but try them on before you sail back to Norfolk. I can easily make any necessary adjustments. That done, you will be as well prepared for this new campaign the King has ordered as I can make you."

  "Now, those matters aside, my old friend, I think that you should ride out tomorrow and pay your respects to your lady wife. Wait, wait!" He raised a hand. "I know, she's become almost impossible, and I, like you, am not any longer certain that her mind is still properly balanced. She is not the Krystal I first met, years ago, she is not the Krystal to whom I married you, she has changed drastically from even the Krystal of last year."

  "The Krystal who was projected here was friendly to almost everyone, great or small, egalitarian to an extreme, kind, generous, and of a forgiving nature. On the other hand, Dame Krystal, Duchess of Norfolk, is seldom seen to smile, now she either snarls or sneers; she has not a good word for anyone and is become extremely conscious of her rank in the social hierarchy. She throws insults at anyone and everyone and has driven all of her old friends from her, not wishing to have by her anyone who does not always and immediately agree with her in everything. She is both cruel and vindictive toward all those less powerful than she is become as your lady wife."

  "Are you aware that when one of your son's little playmates bloodied Joe's nose in a childish scuffle, Krystal tried to have one of your Irish knights behead him on the spot? When he quite properly refused to carry out the execution of the child, she threw a screaming tantrum that brought half the folk in the palace to that spot, then ordered the knight from out her sight, gathered her son and her ladies, and stayed in the wing she and they inhabit for the rest of the day, having the servants bring in food and drink."

  "When Buddy Webster was informed of the incident, he forthwith moved the child and his entire family to my more distant estate, in the West Riding."

  "Good!" said Bass vehemently, his face dark with rage. "Have you tried talking any sense back into her swollen head, Hal?"

  The old man shook his head slowly. "Alas, my friend, I seldom even can squeeze out the time to get out to the country palace for so much as a single day. I've spoken to her but the once since you left here for Norwich. That was when she made to rail at me for not affording her the deference she thinks herself due. We had . . . ahhh, words."

  "I did send Mr. Rupen Ademian, whom you met, out to talk with her: that was after she had Jenny Bostwick flogged. She refused even to receive him, noting that, emissary of mine or not, he was not a nobleman, not even a gentleman, and that her ladies all agreed with her that to receive him in audience would demean her."

  "I was right all along, Hal," Bass growled. "The woman's flipped out, she's become nutty as a fucking fruitcake! No, Hal, I'll not go out to see her, not now. I'd probably beat her to death or close to it. I've arranged for little Joe to enter fosterage, you know, and I want you to have him taken away after I've had time to get out of England. Yes, I'm a coward, so there! Isn't there some convent, maybe of a nursing order, that you can have her locked away in until I can get this Irish business done and get back?"

  CHAPTER 5

  Even as Bass sat talking with Harold of York, two other men met and talked in an out-of-the-way, benighted place in the countryside beyond the walls of York. Except for a clear difference in age, both the elder and the younger were so alike in appearance as to seem two peas from the same pod. They had met before in similar locations, and this latest meeting concerned some of the same topics earlier discussed. The mounts upon which they had ridden to this spot grazed placidly a few rods distant.

  Speaking in a tongue that would have been incomprehensible to even Bass or Harold, the younger remarked, "That is not much of a horse, Elder One. That beast you rode before was far better."

  The man addressed shrugged. "This horse and those of the others of the party of Foster Bass were borrowed from the garrison at Hull. Yes, this one is rough-gaited, but still does it serve the purpose."

  "Now, anent other matters, Younger One: Since last we met, I have journeyed long and far, both in distance and in time, both upon the nearer continent and the farther. No, I have yet to find just to where and to when the twentieth-century musicians were projected or exactly how the mistake could have occurred."

  "But I journeyed also to Our Place, in the east, and conferred with experts on the projectors themselves, as well as with those whose task it is to monitor units assigned to field personnel. We now concur in the belief that the ill-guided journeying was possibly not your fault, for the devices revealed that your unit was subjected to a substantial amount of abuse at critical moments of the activation; such degrees of abuse might very well, I am told, have caused slight slippages in the settings, and even minute deviations can, as we both know well, create extreme variations."

  "Therefore, you should expect the imminent arrival of a 'merchant from the east.' You will know him, of course, and he will attune a replacement projector to you, as well as issue you replacements for all the items lost with your original projector. He will also explain and demonstrate some improvements recently developed in the projectors. With these improvements, you need no longer physically conceal any of your equipment, for now you may summon your storage casket at will."

  "As for the matter of the now-lost projectees, copies of the records from the monitoring devices will be journeyed back to our world and time with the next shipment of metals and chemicals. With the more sophisticated equipment and interpreters there available, it is to be presumed that the exact error will be quickly found and corrected. Perhaps it has already been corrected and this is why my own hurried searches have been fruitless."

  "At one point, in this last series of searches, I was momentarily certain that I had located the missing party of projectees, but then I realized that there was one too many of the projector auras in the group my device had detected."

  "Who could that group have been, Elder One?" the Younger One asked with deference. "More accidental displacements wrought by one of those primitive projectors such as brought him once known as Kenmore Harold to this place?"

  "No," replied the Elder One. "These auras were not the greenish auras of those unsophisticated contraptions, rather were they as pale as any of ours, invisible to the unaided vision. Until I journeyed to Our Place, indeed, I had thought that they might represent some special mission of ours, but no such mission exists, I found in the east. Now I and the directors are of the opinion that those invisible-auraed ones must have been of Them."

  The Younger One exhibited shock. "Them, Elder One? Why must They haunt us in whatever time or world we visit? Do we not hide our true selves and activities from the indigenes diligently, never take enough of any one mineral to make our visits obvious, eradicate all traces of our visits when we are done at the sites and also do all within our powers to undo damages wrought by those fools who came from earlier times, such as that from which this current problem resulted?"

  "How can we intelligently question Their motives, Younger One?" was the reply. "They are as far and even farther beyond us in all ways as are we beyond the indigenes of this world and time. We may only be certain of one thing concerning Them, and that is that They do indeed have reasons for being wherever or whenever They appear to us or on our sensors. All that we can do is follow meticulously the dictates They promulgated, for resistance would be unthinkable. We are as but lowly worms to Them, and They could crush us, even our world, effortlessly, were we in the slightest disobedient to Their directives."

  "But such matters aside, for now. Upon the return of the party of Foster Bass to Norfolk, we all are bound for the next big island west, the one the indigenes call Ireland. When and as I can, I will make use of my own newer-model projector to contact you, projecting message holders to the receiver within your equipment casket, so you should be certain t
o check the receptacle daily, at least, for I will be projecting them in normal time. Should matters alter drastically in any way, here, you must message me immediately, setting the message holder for alarm. I only say this last because I somehow do not think that we have experienced all that we eventually will of the primitive projectors and the savage humans who operate them."

  * * * *

  "London is fallen, Your Grace." These were the words Bass was given when, the day after his return from York, Captain Sir Egbert d'Arcy one of Richard Cromwell's officers, was granted audience.

  "Angela actually surrendered the city, Sir Egbert?" asked Bass wonderingly. "Surely she knows that she can expect no parole or even quarter from His Majesty, not after all she has seen done to him and his?"

  "No, your Grace, the city was surrendered by a deputation of the soldiers and the citizens. The Regent and her bastard both are dead. It is bruited about that she rendered the bastard senseless with a draught and had a Ghanian mercenary, her sometime lover, run the lad through with his sword, then do the same for her, after sharing with her a goblet of wine, which meant that he too was shortly dead, as the wine was laced with a quick-acting poison. His cries and gasps and thrashings about it was that caused the outer guards to force the doors and find them all three either dead or in the final throes."

  "Thus cheated of his long-anticipated vengeance," said Bass, "I would imagine that the King has the London gutters running blood, by now. Once I heard His Majesty swear that he meant to erect either a gibbet or a block at every place two streets intersected throughout the length and width of the city, when once it fell."