At the Narrow Passage Read online

  But the rifles had never arrived, for some reason that was never explained to me. The Krithian weapons supervisor Kar-hinter seldom took the time to explain anything that wasn't absolutely necessary. And we who were supposed to test the rifles in combat, we two Timeliner officers leading a company of American colonials, had sat in our dugout and waited and killed time and told dirty stories and played cards and drank gin when we could get it and shivered through the winter.

  Now it seemed that the Kriths had given up playing this particular game with us and were going to pull us out of here and give us another assignment. I wondered whether it would be in this Timeline.

  In a way I hoped it would be in another Line. I'd lost the little finger and part of the ring finger of my left hand during a fracas the autumn before, and I would have liked to have an opportunity to get new ones grafted on. But you can't do things like that in a Timeline as backward as this one was.

  At last I finished with my face and splashed away the remaining soap, inspected myself for cuts, found that I had been luckier than usual and hadn't cut myself -- I never had got used to shaving with a razor. I dried my face on a more or less clean towel Tracy had thrown on my bunk and drank about half the steaming cup of tea, scalding my tongue.

  "How soon's the colonel supposed to be here?" I asked.

  "Don't know. Anytime, I suppose."

  "No time for breakfast?"

  "I doubt it."

  I shrugged and then found my jacket, a tight-fitting woolen garment of the same sickening green as the pants, distinguished only by the captain's bars on its collar.

  "Hand me my pistol, will you, Tracy?" I asked as I buttoned my jacket.

  Taking the pistol belt from the peg where it hung, Tracy handed it to me.

  It was an awkward belt to wear and the pistol in the holster was big and ugly and efficient. The seven-shot, .62 caliber Harling revolver was the standard sidearm for Brittish officers There and Then, and it was a damned big pistol. I had grown to like the feel of it on my hip and hoped that whatever our next assignment was, I would be allowed to carry it. A .62 caliber slug is big and messy, especially when propelled by the 200 grains of powder in the standard issue cartridge. It certainly wasn't a sporting weapon. It had been designed to do just one thing -- kill men, and that it did very well.

  "How do I look?" I asked Tracy.

  "Halfway human."

  "That's an improvement, I take it?"

  Tracy nodded.

  "Any more tea?" I asked.

  "Yes, I think so. Want me to look?"

  "No. I'll . . ."

  "'Tention!"

  The voice was Tracy's. He was sitting so that he could see the dugout's "door" and could see the figure who was shoving the blanket aside and stepping into the man-made cave.

  As I snapped to my feet and turned, I saw him too. Colonel Woods.

  "As you were," Woods said gruffly.

  I relaxed, said, "Good morning, sir."

  "Morning, Mathers, Tracy," the colonel replied in the clipped fashion that I suppose was natural to him.

  Woods held the flap open until the other two men accompanying him came into the dugout. As I expected, one of them wore captain's bars and the other was a lieutenant. Our replacements.

  Colonel Woods quickly made the introductions. The captain was a tall, slender Floridian named David Walters. The lieutenant was a shorter, stockier man named Carl Boland. He was a Virginian, the same as I was supposed to be.

  "Spot of tea, Colonel?" Tracy asked once the three newcomers had seated themselves at the table -- in the three chairs. I guessed that left the box for me and Tracy would just have to stand.

  "No. Just had a cup," Woods answered. "No time, anyway. Must get back to headquarters."

  Walters and Boland accepted Tracy's offer, and he began to rummage around for two fairly clean cups.

  "Sorry to come in on you so abruptly, Mathers," Colonel Woods went on to say. "Orders y'know."

  "Yes, sir. Of course."

  "You and Tracy will have till noon to get your gear together and introduce Walters and Boland to your men. A signaler will come then to accompany you to brigade headquarters."

  "Brigade, sir?" I asked.

  Woods nodded, shrugged, then pulled a mimeographed sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me. "Orders just came round this morning."

  The orders were quite explicit. We were relieved of our commands as of 0900 and were to report to brigade at 1300.

  "Brigade is sending a man round for you," Woods said. "Understand that HQ's been moved or some such. You'll have to wait for him."

  "Yes, sir." Odd, I thought. Were we going to brigade at all? Probably not, but Woods wouldn't know that. He would never really know what became of us.

  I knew for a fact that Woods wasn't a Timeliner; he was exactly what he was supposed to be. He knew nothing, suspected nothing of the existence of the Kriths or of the fact that men from other universes were here helping him and his British Empire wage war against the Holy Romans.

  Nor did either Walters or Boland seem to be other than what they claimed. They gave no indications, and we Timeliners have a thousand secret ways of letting other Timeliners know of our presence.

  No, it appeared that the Kriths had given up on this one rather minor aspect of their master plan for this Line. They had something else in mind for Tracy and me. We'd learn what that was soon enough, I suspected.

  "Well, must be shoving off," Woods said abruptly, rising. He offered his hand to me. "Been nice knowing you, Mathers, Tracy. You'll both get good reports from me."

  "Thank you, sir," I said, shaking his hand.

  After briefly clasping Tracy's hand, Woods turned, ducked out under the flap that covered the dugout's door and vanished.

  I turned back to my replacement.

  "Well, Walters," I asked, "ready for me to show you around a bit?"

  3

  Kearns

  Long before noon I had completed all the introductions, said all my good-byes, and packed what gear I had.

  After a trip to the latrine, Tracy and I sat down on the bunks that had, a few hours before, been ours, and waited for the man to come who was to lead us to "brigade headquarters," whatever that might be this time.

  Walters and Boland, after saying their good-byes to us, had gone to mess, so Tracy and I were alone when the sergeant came into the dugout, snapped to attention and saluted.

  "Captain Mathers, sir?" he asked.

  I nodded. "This is Lieutenant Tracy."

  "I'm Sergeant Kearns, sir." Then he paused, his face relaxing. "Are we alone?"

  "Yes, we are."

  As I answered, Kearns deliberately placed the tip of his right thumb against the tip of his right ring finger. It was one of our signals. I replied by performing the same gesture with my left hand, though since most of my left ring finger was missing, I used the middle one. Tracy signaled with a similar gesture.

  " Ca kasser a Shangalis?" Kearns asked, which loosely translated means: "With your permission, I shall speak in Shangalis." It was actually an abbreviated form of the complete sentence "Retam ca kasser a rir nir paredispo Shangalis? "

  "Swen ro," I replied.

  The man who had called himself Kearns smiled, sat down on one of the vacant bunks and dug into his pocket for a cigarette.

  "You don't mind if I smoke, do you?" he asked, still speaking Shangalis.

  "No, not at all," I replied in the same language, the language that some believe to be the native tongue of the Kriths; I doubt it, though. There are too many Indo-European roots in the language, too many human words. It's probably something the Kriths picked up far to the Temporal East and carried with them as they moved West. At least it looks that way to me, but I'm certainly no language expert. I'm just a hired gun, but men who know more about such things than I do have come up with that theory, and since the Kriths have never denied it, I assume that it might well be true.

  "Care for a smoke?" Kearns asked, offering the
pack to me.

  "Might as well," I answered, accepting the offered pack and knocking one of the brown-paper cylinders out into my hand.

  Then I looked up abruptly, peering into Kearns' eyes. It wasn't a local brand, and by local I mean from this universe. It was a Toltec-Line weed, from a long way East.

  "I assure you that it's okay, Mathers," Kearns said suddenly, when he realized that I was staring at him. "I just got in this morning, and I'm supposed to be leaving as soon as I take you to the meeting place. Only you two will see them."

  I suppose that it was none of my business, Kearns' having brought in Outtime cigarettes. That wasn't my responsibility. The Kriths were running the show, and if they wanted to let Kearns do it, then it was their business. I told myself to forget it.

  While I passed the pack on to Tracy and then lit my own cigarette, I took the time to study unobtrusively this man who had come to take us to our meeting with the Kriths. He was tall and slender, what they called wiry in build, though quite strong-looking. He was rather dark, but there seemed to be enough north European blood in his veins to prevent anyone from wondering whether he really belonged in the British Army. And then there were some far more exotic types fighting in the trenches of France under the Union Jack: Amerinds from the Indian Nations of middle North America; dark-skinned Punjabis from East India; South Sea Islanders from the Polynesian Colonies and the Aussie Commonwealth; and a host of others. No, Kearns, whatever he was other than European, would go unnoticed among the motley crew that fought for the British Empire.

  His face was made of sharp angles, craggy planes like a half-finished piece of sculpture, and bore what appeared to be the scars of battles fought a long, long When from Here and Now. Still, there was something more to that face than just its simple ugliness, something strange and remote, something that seemed even more remote than just the cultural differences between him and me, though I could not guess from what Line he had originally come. I can't say that I instantly disliked the man, but there was something about him that put me on edge, and it was not until a very long time afterward that I even began to have an inkling of what it was.

  "What's this all about, Kearns?" I asked, still speaking Shangalis.

  "Damned if I know," he answered. "They just told me to come in and get you two."

  "Where are we going?" I asked. "I mean, where are you supposed to take us?"

  "The village a ways back," he said. "If you're both ready, we can go now."

  "I suppose I am. Tracy?"

  "Righto."

  "Sorry," Kearns said as he rose to his feet, "but you'll have to carry your own gear. I wasn't allowed to bring anyone else to help."

  "Okay," I said, hefting the haversack that carried all my worldly possessions, fifty pounds of nothing very much. A Timeliner learns to get along with very little more than himself and the clothes on his back. "Let's go."

  4

  Kar-hinter

  Around the village the land was flat, without trees, except near the river where the ground was too marshy for plowing and the poplars and willows, those that had survived the shelling of the bloody summer before, still grew as they pleased, now beginning to bud in anticipation of summer. I wondered how many of those few trees would still be standing when the next spring came. It was not a pleasant thought.

  The village itself stood not far from the Loire, a quiet, slowly winding river that must once have given a sensation of peace and gentleness to the now-ravaged countryside. I had been told that last spring the Loire had turned red with the mingling of British and Imperial German blood, and from the looks of the river's bank, craters that the winter rains and snows had not yet obliterated, I rather suspected that it was true.

  There were only two streets in the village, unpaved, crossing at right angles, one running from the ford of the river where a bridge must have stood at one time, though there were few traces left of it now, the other road paralleling the river, running a few hundred yards from its bank, back far enough to remain on solid, dry ground, curving away from the river at times and then back closer at others. The two roads met in the village, crossed, and then ran on their ways, leaving what had once been a sleepy little human habitation. But the spring and the summer of the year before had done their damage to the village, as well as to the country.

  The crossroads had been the center of life of the village, when it had had a life. A few buildings still stood, and there was enough left of some of them to tell what they had once been: the church, Roman Catholic, of course -- years of British protection and then occupation had never been able to make any fundamental changes in the religious views of the French, though they had accepted the British with good enough grace, considering: a blacksmith shop, half-burned to the ground, though the forge and anvil were still visible through the wreckage, and a few rusting tools; what had once been an inn, its sign still hanging on one hook, weather-worn and fading -- though the image of a wild boar was still fairly recognizable, the French words that had once been written below it were now nearly obliterated; a store of some sort, probably a general merchandise store, I guessed; a few other buildings that had lost their identity; and empty, broken-windowed houses.

  I suppose I must have paused for longer than I should have, looking at the ruins and speculating about their past -- a weakness of mine; I had once, very long ago, intended to be a historian -- and it was Kearns' harsh voice that finally made me realize that we had more urgent business to attend to.

  "Let's go," he said curtly. "Kar-hinter is waiting for us." It was the first time that Kearns had said the name of the Krith that we were to meet. I hadn't thought of asking before, assuming that he wouldn't know, and also knowing that it wouldn't make a hell of a lot of difference anyway.

  Kar-hinter, I repeated the name in my mind. He was the Krithian weapons supervisor for this Line, an old Krith who had been my chief on several assignments before, including the one I was just completing. He wasn't so bad to work for, even if he was a bit taciturn. I rather liked the old beast; well, better than I liked most Kriths, at least.

  Now I don't want you to get the idea that I disliked the Kriths then. I didn't. Not at all. Nor did I particularly like them as individuals. I admired them as a race and appreciated what they were doing, but they were, by and large, a rather repulsive-looking bunch that I had never really learned to like in all the years that I had been working for them. But Kar-hinter, well, he was okay. For a Krith.

  And please don't accuse me of racial prejudice or xenophobia, not until you've heard my story, at least.

  I obeyed Kearns' urgings and follow him through the village, my feet squelching in the mud that even by the middle of the day had not dried very much. It would take several warm, clear, sunny days for the mud that lay over the whole of the Touraine to become solid earth again.

  We passed through the center of the village and went on down the muddy road that led out of the town and toward the now-barren landscape beyond. Off in the distance, sheltered by two or three naked-limbed trees, stood a house that was virtually intact, its damages nearly repaired, the windows boarded over, smoke rising from the remains of a chimney.

  "That's it. Over there," Kearns said, apparently realizing that I had noticed the house.

  "Kar-hinter's there?" I asked.

  "Kar-hinter and a British general named Asbury," Kearns answered.

  It was then that I saw the British staff car parked beside the house, half-hidden by naked bushes that grew beside the house, by bare vines that in the summer must have covered the house with leaves and clusters of grapes. This was the wine country of France, or it was in other places and had been here once, when France had had the time to make wine, when foreign armies weren't ripping it apart.

  By this time you may have gathered that I wasn't altogether happy with the way I made my living. I had outgrown a lot of the misplaced idealism that had led me into it in the first place, but then it was a living, and the only one I knew. It was often a dirty, nasty job, bu
t, like they said, somebody had to do it.

  Two men in British uniforms flanked the house's front door, tommy guns held across their chests, standing ramrod-stiff and staring off into space like automatons. Each wore the double chevrons of a corporal, which meant something in the British Army. Men like them had built the Empire, I said to myself, almost admiring their stance, though I myself was not that kind of soldier. I sometimes wonder if I was ever any kind of soldier at all. But I got by. Most of the time. At least I'm still alive as of this writing, and that's saying something.