The Overlords of War

Chapter 32

About once every decade he dismounted, approached a passer-by, and asked, “What year is this?”

Some fainted. Others fled. Some few vanished. Those must know how to travel in time. But he always found some willing to inform him. They looked at the man and the Monster without surprise, and smiled. An old man, a boy, a Urian, a woman.

A question burned on Corson’s lips: “Do you know who I am?” For their smiles and their readiness to cooperate smacked too much of a miracle. They must know who he was. They were so many guides, beaconing his way. But they simply gave him the date and, if he tried to engage them in further conversation, managed to divert him adroitly into a dead end. Even the child. He was unfit to match wits with these people. In six thousand years culture had advanced a long way. He had not soaked up enough of it. He was still a barbarian, even though he knew some things that they did not.

When he saw the Urian, he almost made the blunder of jumping back into time. But the great bird made a sign of peace to him. He wore a white toga with fine embroidery on it, and said with a grimace that Corson took to be a smile, “What are you afraid of, my son?”

At first he had looked like Ngal R’nda. Now Corson realized the resemblance was solely due to his great age.

“I seem to recognize you,” the Urian said. “In a time of trouble you appeared from nowhere. I was fresh from the egg then, but if I recall aright I took you to a bath and gave you food before escorting you to a secret ceremony. Things have changed since then, and for the better too. I am glad to see you again. What do you wish to know?”

“I’m looking for the Council,” Corson said. “I have a message for them. Maybe several messages.”

“You will find them on the seashore, about thirty or forty kilometers from here. But you will have to wait a hundred and twenty years or so.”

“Thanks,” Corson said. “But I won’t have to wait at all. I can travel in time.”

“I presumed so,” the avian said. “It was a manner of speaking. It is a fine animal that you have there.”

“I call him Archimedes,” Corson said. “As a souvenir of something that happened long ago.”

As he was on the point of remounting, the Urian checked him.

“I trust you hold no grudge against us for what happened. It was a mischance. Tyranny always engenders violence. And beings like ourselves are pawns in the hands of gods. They impel us to battle for the pleasure of the spectacle. They love the dance of fire and death. You resolved the situation with much tact. Someone else might have provoked a bloodbath. All we Urians are most grateful to you.”

“All… including you?” Corson asked in disbelief.

“The Old Race and the humans. All who live on Uria.”

“All who live on Uria,” Corson repeated thoughtfully. “That’s good news.”

“Good luck on your journey, my son,” the old Urian said.

So, Corson said to himself, peering through the time fog which rose from the ground to engulf him and his pegasone, the humans and the natives have become reconciled. Splendid!

The Urians must have managed to exorcise the demons of war. Their species was not doomed, as he had imagined.

By now he was getting to know the planet well. The location of the beach reminded him of something. That was where Antonella had taken him. By coincidence?

He decided to make a detour via Dyoto. It was an irrational impulse, an urge to make a sort of pilgrimage. He locked the pegasone to the present at the top of a hill, and looked skyward in search of that pyramidal cloud of a city seemingly balanced on its twin vertical rivers.

The sky was empty.

He reconfirmed his position. There was no possible doubt. Up there, a hundred and fifty years ago, a colossal city had reared to heaven. It had not left a trace.

He looked down, into a hollow made by the convergence of three grassy valleys between wooded hillsides. A lake filled it. Corson narrowed his eyes to see better. In the middle of the lake a sharp peak pierced the surface; elsewhere ripples broke around obstacles a few centimeters underwater. Among the vegetation on the shore he recognized other geometrical ruins.

The city had fallen and the vertical river had given birth to the lake. Underground canals were still supplying it and the overflow escaped by a little brook running along the lowermost valley. Dyoto had been destroyed. The force which had upheld its buildings over a kilometer in the air had failed. It had all happened long ago, perhaps a century, to judge by the density of the vegetation.

Sadly Corson recalled its lively streets, the swarms of floaters which poured from it like bees from a hive, that store where he had stolen food, that mechanical voice which had so courteously reprimanded him. And he thought of the women he had met there.

Dyoto was dead like so many other cities overwhelmed by the tempest of war. Perhaps at the bottom of that lake reposed the body of Floria Van Nelle, who had by chance introduced him to the strangeness of this world.

The old Urian had been lying. His smile had been false. The war had occurred and the humans had lost. It must be so, if their cities were in ruins.

He hoped Floria had not had time to realize what was happening. She was unprepared for this or any war. If she had survived for a while, it would have been as a plaything for Veran’s mercenaries, or worse still as a victim of the pitiless crusaders serving whoever had taken Ngal R’nda’s place.

So he had failed.

With an effort he resisted the impulse to jump back into the past. He remembered his dream of a city being destroyed and the cry of its inhabitants, who, too late, were foreseeing their doom. Sweat ran down his face. He could not go back now; he had an appointment in the future which he could not escape. Up there, with the Council if it proved still to be in existence, he would have to discuss the problem and find out whether the lumbering wagon of history might yet be diverted down another road. Then there would be time to come back and discover what had gone amiss.

And even if he could accomplish nothing more, he could kill Veran. A cracked bell rang in his head. If he killed Veran he himself would die. This collar would pierce his neck with poisoned spikes. He was not even supposed to think of fighting Veran without killing himself. He could not quit now.

He suppressed his lust for vengeance. Exhausted, he remounted the pegasone and urged it onward.

It went forward sullenly, and for the first time Corson noticed how gray everything was around him. In the impenetrable fog of the centuries, where nights and days were intermingled, he felt the pegasone escape from his control. His fingers tugged on its tendrils, but in vain. The beast, whether from fatigue or under the command of another will, threatened to lock into the present. Disheartened, he let it do so.

The sound of the sea, a slow and regular rhythm. He was on a long beach which the setting sun had gilded. That struck him as odd. Left to their own devices pegasones normally preferred to synch with daylight because of their appetite for energy. But this time his mount had been drawn to twilight.

He opened his eyes wide. Stretched out on the sand before him were three naked bodies, motionless. He took off his helmet, feeling the moist air on his face, and stared at them. Three naked bodies, dead for all he could tell—could this be all that remained of the Council of Uria? One man, two women, like the victims of a dreadful shipwreck, tossed ashore by the tide.