Sword of the Bright Lady Page 3

  “No,” Christopher said heavily, “I do not understand.”

  “You are far from home, then,” Krellyan said with genuine compassion. “Helga says they found you unconscious on their doorstep, like a heap of abandoned rags. Do you know how you arrived in this state?”

  Christopher shrugged helplessly.

  “Tell me what you do know.”

  “Nothing. I went for a walk, and then I was here. One minute I was at home, and then I wasn’t, and I have no idea how or why.” Christopher gripped the stone cup fiercely, but it was not an anchor.

  Krellyan sighed. “You did not enter any mysterious doorways? Or pass through unfamiliar arches or portals?”

  “No, I didn’t. I just walked. In the open. There wasn’t any warning at all. Well,” he had to admit his guilt, “I wasn’t paying attention. One minute there was sand, and the next there was snow. But I didn’t see or feel anything. When I tried to go back, there wasn’t anywhere to go back to.”

  “I accept your innocence.” Krellyan smiled. “I have never passed through a gate myself, so I doubt I would recognize one either.”

  “You haven’t?” Christopher cried. A terrible fear overwhelmed his bafflement over talk of portals and doorways. “Then how can you send me home?”

  “I do not recognize your dress, your speech, or your names. I have no idea where to send you back to, even if I could.”

  Steadied by the priest’s calm rationality, driven by a curiously stronger than normal urge to tell the whole truth, Christopher’s fear spilled out before his conscious mind could silence it. “I don’t think it’s on this planet.”

  In the plain wooden room, with its rustic beams and paneling, its stacked firewood and wrought-iron pokers, its creaking floorboards of knotted pine, the concept was absurd.

  Krellyan raised his eyebrows. “You claim to be from another plane? Which one?”

  Christopher struggled not to let confusion set in. Which one? What the hell did that mean? How many were there, anyway? But wait—if there were more than one, then space travel must be routine. There was hope!

  “It’s called, um, I mean, we call it Earth.” Christopher was rewarded with a flash of recognition. Krellyan knew that name, despite his frown.

  “I do not believe you are from the elemental plane of Earth. You are clearly human and not in any guise, at least as far as I can detect.”

  “Earth is full of humans,” Christopher argued back. “That’s where we come from! Send me there!”

  “No. The plane of Earth is extremely hostile to human life and populated only by elementals.”

  “You mean there’s a place you call Earth that isn’t Earth? I mean, isn’t my world?” That sounded like they didn’t know how to get to Earth. His Earth, that is. The fear began creeping back.

  Krellyan had his own concerns, though. “You mean to claim you are from the ancestral home of mankind?”

  “Yes, I do. And so are you.” Christopher knew enough about biology to know that convergent evolution was a fantasy. And these people were plainly human. “You—or your ancestors—had to have come from Earth at some point. Judging by your technology, I would guess the last millennium or so. By the way, we’ve made a lot of progress since then.” On the other hand, Earth didn’t have interstellar space travel, or universal translators, so maybe bragging was premature. “Send me there.”

  Emotions struggled on Krellyan’s naturally placid face. “I cannot. That plane has never been found, despite centuries of searching. Most consider it legend or possibly no longer extant.”

  Christopher’s hands trembled on the stone cup, splashing what was left of the tea. “But I just came from there.”

  “To be perfectly honest, I do not believe you. Peace.” Krellyan raised his hand to forestall Christopher’s outburst. “I know you tell the truth as you know it. I do not know what magic can fool both my spells and your mind, but the alternative is absurdly improbable. It seems far more likely that you are a pawn being used by my enemies, although I cannot guess to what end.”

  “I’m not a pawn. I’m not your enemy—that I know of,” he finished lamely. Maybe he had been brainwashed, like the nonsense you saw in movies. Maybe he would hear a code word and turn into a zombie-like assassin.

  He’d never believed in that crap, but then, he hadn’t believed in magic spells either. He wasn’t sure he did even now.

  “Do you have a lot of enemies?” Christopher asked, to break the silence. The guy seemed thoroughly nice. But then, that probably wasn’t a bar against having enemies on any planet.

  “More than enough for my purposes,” Krellyan said ruefully. “But our problem right now is your enemy. Ser Hobilar charges you with assault.”

  Christopher shrugged. “Then I charge him with attempted rape.”

  “Rape? Is that what you thought? I am certain Ser Hobilar does not deserve such a charge. Did you see him offer any violence to the girl?”

  “Well, no,” Christopher admitted. “But she did not want to go with him. And—”

  Krellyan cut him off. “Agreed: she has no love for Hobilar. But his rank entitles him to certain privileges. One of which is protection from assault, except at the hands of a noble.”

  “He drew on me! What was I supposed to do, stand there and let him kill me?”

  “That might have been easier to fix,” Krellyan said. Anticipating Christopher’s fountain of outrage, he continued. “Had the knight wrongfully slain you, he could have been charged for your revival.”

  Christopher blinked.

  “Are you saying,” Christopher said as slowly and clearly as he could, “that if he had killed me, you could have . . . revived me?” He could not contain his incredulity. “Brought me back from the dead ?”

  Krellyan looked alarmed. “Yes, of course that is what I am saying. I find your amazement to be utterly incomprehensible. Are you not aware that priests outside your own lands possess equivalent powers?”

  “Um, priests in my, uh, lands, don’t possess any powers. None. All they can do is talk and con people out of their money.”

  The two men stared at each other in mutual incomprehension.

  Krellyan let out a breath. “This we must first establish, or I fear our conversation will be utterly in vain. You have no ranked priests?”

  “Actually, I don’t understand that either. I thought you meant noble birth, but that doesn’t seem to make any sense when we’re talking about priests.”

  “You,” Krellyan said slowly, a mirror of Christopher’s incredulousness, “don’t know what ranks are?”

  “No. I obviously don’t have any idea what you mean by it.”

  “You do not know what tael is?” he asked with rising intensity.

  “Tail?” Christopher tried to match the sound. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that term before.”

  Startled, Krellyan rattled off words, watching Christopher’s face with growing concern. “Iron. Gold. Hats and beer. All of these ordinary nouns are translated by the spell for you, but tael has no translation. And you are compelled to truth, so you cannot be lying. Indeed, who would ever think to lie such an absurdity, such a tremendous folly? You do not know what tael is. How can this be?”

  Christopher was a bit nettled by Krellyan’s astonishment. “Maybe we don’t have any where I come from.”

  Krellyan gaped at him. “Impossible. And yet . . . if the plane of Man is without tael, then it would explain why it remains hidden. Almost I believe you—but it is impossible.”

  “You still haven’t told me what it is.”

  “Tael is the source of rank, and rank binds powers to one’s command. Powers such as this translation spell or whatever rogue conjuration sent you here.” He paused for a correction. “In the case of divine magic, we prefer to assert that we are bound to the god, who works through us. Admittedly, the results are indistinguishable.”

  That sounded relevant to a man in Christopher’s position. “So, if I had a bunch of this stuff, could I fi
nd my own way home?” Krellyan began to shake his head, but Christopher pressed on. “Where does tael come from?”

  “Ultimately? The source of all tael ? Some say the gods, others say the gods were made from tael. But I suspect you mean, where does one obtain enough tael to gain a rank,” Krellyan said with an iron smile.

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “From the dead brains of sentient creatures.” Krellyan looked at him carefully.

  Christopher was sorry he’d asked.

  “My chief source of tael comes from the deaths of my people. Do you find this disturbing?”

  “It depends,” Christopher said warily, “on how they died.”

  Krellyan smiled, some private expectation confirmed. “Of course it does. In my lands, they are natural deaths. But let us return to the issue at hand. Do you now understand your crime? You possess no rank, yet you attacked a ranked individual. You have no powers, but you challenged one who does.”

  “And I kicked his ass,” Christopher said. “I suppose that makes it worse.” He almost asked what powers the vile Hobilar might command but remembering the ineffectiveness of his first two blows seemed answer enough.

  “Yes, actually,” Krellyan agreed. “No doubt wounded pride will drive Ser Hobilar to press his case. Had he given you a sound thrashing, probably nothing more would have come of the matter.”

  “But the girl would have—”

  “You did the girl no favors. Now her paramour is shamed that he too is not a law breaker, Hobilar is furious and even more relentless, and her father is placed in a delicate position in town.”

  Christopher cringed. “I guess I owe her an apology.”

  Krellyan smiled wanly. “Don’t bother. I am certain she does not see it as I do. Her juvenile assessment of the issue is likely more in accordance with yours.”

  This world wasn’t so different from his, after all.

  “It is obvious that you were unaware of our laws. That is no defense, yet perhaps I can induce Hobilar to mercy. After that, I have little to offer you. Without the key to your home—wherever it is—you cannot return. We can give you a little charity while you learn our language and customs. Then you must forge a new life and make your own living. If you have no trade skills, there is always room in the fields.”

  “But—”

  “There can be no buts. Whatever accident brought you here is beyond my power to repair. Yours is not the only tragedy I cannot undo, nor is it the worst.”

  The invisible burden Christopher had seen when he first walked into the room returned now to the priest’s shoulders. Any further argument Christopher could hope to make was buried under that weight.

  “Thank you,” he said, because it was the right thing to do, even though he didn’t feel particularly thankful.

  Krellyan seemed to agree. “It is little enough. But it is what we have to give. Karl will show you to a room for the night; in the morning, I will deal with Hobilar and you will return to Burseberry village, under the care of Pater Svengusta. When you do learn to speak, I advise you to not discuss your fantastic origins. You must set aside your past; talk of other planes will only make you a stranger in your new home.”

  Krellyan started to say something else, but it came out in their foreign tongue. Seeing Christopher’s confusion, he stopped talking and spread his hands in apology.

  The interview was over. Christopher stood, awkward and uncertain, until the young soldier beckoned with one hand. Christopher followed Karl through the halls to a different room. Smaller and unheated, it contained little more than a narrow bed and an end table. At least the blankets were clean, if not plentiful.

  A few minutes later Helga joined him in the room, bearing a tray of dishes. Chicken soup, apparently, with onions and some mushy vegetable he could not identify, and a side of the yellow bread. It struck him as rather plain, but Helga devoured it. The quality ceased to matter after the first bite: he was famished, and all that mattered was quantity. When he reached for the last slice of bread, he realized he had not been counting. He did not know if he had already eaten his half. But Helga shyly passed, and he wolfed it down.

  Then she began to undress, shedding cloak, boots, and dress into a pile in the corner of the room. Christopher crawled to the farthest side of the bed and pressed himself up against the wall, unprepared for this kind of behavior in a church. But when she put out the light and joined him on the bed, all she was interested in was her share of the blanket.

  He lay in the dark, unable to stop himself from wishing the priest’s words to be untrue. Those who were swept away by the tsunami or buried by the earthquake wished it to be untrue, too, and just as futilely. At least he still had his life.

  But without his wife it did not seem so valuable of a commodity. It had taken him most of it to find her the first time. They had met late in life yet still early enough to hope for children, grandchildren, even golden anniversaries. Meeting her had been like waking from a stale dream, discovering purpose and meaning in the mundane boredom of existence. I will come home , he promised her. There was a way to get here. There will be a way to get back. I will not stop searching until I find you again.

  The words echoed emptily in the cavern of his grief, until sleep came like mercy.

  3.

  VISIONS

  The walk home did not seem as long. They dressed him in cast-offs, gray and brown tunic and leggings with many patches, and fed him a good breakfast—porridge, of course, but livened with sorely appreciated chunks of bacon. Thus fortified, the cold was held at bay. In the morning light the land looked ordinary and Christmas-card pretty.

  Helga was radiant and happy, prattling away despite his mute incomprehension. When they reached the chapel she chattered at Svengusta, who laughed at her remarks and made sympathetic eyes at him. Christopher suspected she had been told to talk to him a lot, the quicker to teach him the language.

  The old man finally retreated, leaving Christopher to Helga’s care. He found some peace in splitting a cord of firewood stacked outside the back wall of the chapel. Once that was done he had to go and ask Helga for another chore. The work made him feel better; it also nourished a terrible worry. What kind of living could he make in a medieval society? He was too old to work in the fields; such backbreaking labor would kill him quickly. He was literate, but he had not seen any paper, even in the church, and in any case he wasn’t literate in their language. His profession was mechanical engineering, and he was damn good at it, but he was not a blacksmith. The ax he had been using might represent the height of their manufacturing abilities, and its simplicity defeated him.

  When Helga sent him off to fill buckets with snow for their water barrel, he began to wish he had paid more attention in his civil engineering classes. But those were long ago, and he doubted a civil engineer could accomplish anything without metric tons of concrete. Underground sewage systems were probably too large of a step forward. On the other hand, they had all those gas lights, so they must be able to make pipes.

  Bending over a clean snowdrift a dozen yards from the chapel, at the edge of the forest, he was wondering why they burned gas for light but not for heat, when he went sprawling face-first into the snow.

  Someone had kicked him, hard, and was now laughing. Christopher surged to his feet, furious. His anger congealed into sickening fear when he saw his attacker. An armored knight, clad in steel from head to toe, stood half-hidden behind a large kite-shaped shield. From underneath the helmet Hobilar’s eyes blazed with cruelty. His sword tip waved lazily in front of Christopher’s face, dismissive and threatening in the same motion.

  Hobilar spoke. All Christopher heard was the brutality of the school-yard bully.

  “Helga!” Christopher shouted for help, his voice slipping out of his control and into panic. Hobilar grinned in amusement, and privately Christopher agreed with him. What help would a peasant girl be against this monster?

  Anger at his own foolishness broke his paralysis. He threw his bucket at
Hobilar’s head.

  The knight blocked it with an easy motion of his shield, but Christopher was already running. Hobilar and his sword were between Christopher and the chapel, so he fled into the forest, cutting at sharp angles around the trees and ducking under low branches. Hobilar followed madly, lagging behind only due to the weight of his armor.

  When Hobilar slipped to one knee, Christopher took his best option. He reversed and ran straight for the chapel door. Helga, white-faced and sobbing, held it open for him. He flew past her, struggling to stop before he face-planted into the fireplace, turning just in time to see her throw the door closed and drop the bar.

  With no time to spare: Hobilar slammed into the door with all his armored weight, shaking the entire wall. The wooden bar was not meant to withstand such abuse; the wall bracket splintered. Christopher threw himself against the door to hold it closed before Hobilar recovered.

  Now they struggled with the door between them, Hobilar’s fury matched by Christopher’s terror.

  “Get Svengusta!” Christopher shouted at the girl. She fled out through the hallway to the main room.

  Hobilar, enraged, continued to push, shouting insults. Christopher had the advantage. He could brace a leg against the bed frame. Eventually Hobilar stepped back from the doorway. The silence was more terrifying because Christopher could do nothing against it. Had Hobilar remembered the front door? If so, Christopher’s best option was to wait here, then flee out the back when Hobilar came in the front.

  Fighting was out of the question. Hobilar’s helmet guarded his one weak spot. Christopher was no Musashi.

  The door rattled, and splinters flew into Christopher’s face. Hobilar had come back with the ax from the woodpile. Christopher held as long as he could, but the door rapidly disintegrated under the assault. He had no choice; he staggered back, suddenly aware of his short breath and flagging legs, retreating to the main hall.

  He heard Hobilar finish with the door and step through it without haste. Christopher found his bokken, gripped it in sweating palms. The priest’s words had been so reasonable that Christopher had forgotten what kind of world he was in. Now he was caught unready, too tired to run, too weak to fight.