Free The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson Page B

lucky.’
    ‘What’s goin’ on out there?’
    ‘The Yuthoaz are plundering Avildaro.’
    ‘Women – kids – no!’ Lockridge struggled to stand.
    She pulled him down. ‘Save your strength.’
    ‘But those devils —’
    She said with a touch of her old sharpness: ‘At the moment, your female friends do not suffer greatly. Remember the local
     mores.’ Empathy returned. ‘But of course they mourn for those they love, dead or fled, and they will be slaves….No, wait.
     This isn’t the South. A barbarian’s slave does not live so verydifferently from the barbarian himself. She suffers – unfreedom, yes, homesickness, the fact that no woman whatsoever has
     the respect among the Indo-Europeans that she had in this place. But spare your pity for later. You and I are in worse trouble
     than your little companion of yesterday.’
    ‘M-m-m, okay.’ He subsided. ‘What went wrong?’
    She moved around to sit on the floor in front of him, hugged her knees, and let the breath whistle out between her lips. ‘I
     was a
slogg,’
she said bitterly. ‘I never imagined Brann was in this age. He organized the attack, that is obvious.’
    He felt the shaken self-accusation in her, reached out and said, ‘You couldn’t have known.’
    Her fingers hugged his. They went limp again, and she said in a winter voice: ‘There are no excuses for a Warden who fails.
     There is only the failure.’
    Because that was the code of the service whose uniform he had worn, he thought suddenly that he understood her and they had
     become one. He drew her to him as he might have drawn his sister in her sorrow, and she laid her head on his shoulder and
     clung tight.
    After a while, when darkness was nigh absolute, she pulled herself gently free and breathed. ‘Thank you.’ They sat side by
     side now, hands clasped.
    She said low and fast: ‘You must realize the numbers in this war through time are not large. With powers such as a single
     person may wield, they cannot be. Brann is – you have no word. A crucial figure. Though he must take the field himself, because
     so few are able, he is a commander, a maker of planet-shaking decisions, a … king. And I am as great a prize. And he has me.
    ‘I do not know how he learned where and when I was. I cannot imagine. If he could not find me in your century, how could he
     hound me down to this forgotten moment? It frightens me, Malcolm.’ Her clasp was cold and close around his. ‘What contortion
     in time itself has he made?
    ‘He is here alone. But no more were needed. I think he must have come out of the tunnel under the dolmen earlier than wedid, sought the Battle Ax people, and made himself their god. That would not be hard to do. This whole inwandering of the
     Indo-Europeans – Dyaush Pitar’s, Sky Father’s, the sun’s worshippers, herdsmen, weaponmakers, charioteers, warriors, the men
     of clever hands and limitless dreams, whose wives are underlings and whose children are property – this was engineered by
     the Rangers. Do you understand? The invaders are the destroyers of the old civilization, the old faith; they are the ancestors
     of the machine people. The Yuthoaz
belong
to Brann. He need but appear among them, as I need but appear in Avildaro or Crete, and in their dim way they will know what
     he is and he will know how to control them.
    ‘Somehow he learned we were here. He could have brought his full force against us. But that might have warned our agents,
     who are still strong on this millennium, and led to uncontrollable events. Instead, he told the Yuthoaz to fall on Avildaro,
     swore the sun and the lightning would fight with them, and swore truly.
    ‘Having won’ – Lockridge felt her shudder – ‘he will send for a certain few of his people, and what else he needs, to work
     on me.’
    He held her close. Her whisper was frantic in his ear: ‘Listen. You may get a chance to escape. Who knows? The book of time
     was written when first the universe