"Piper, H Beam - Lord Kalvan Of Otherwhen V2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

For a century or so, it had merely been a temple miracle, and then the propellant properties had been discovered, and Styphon had gone out of medical practice and into the munitions business. Priestly researchers had improved the powder and designed and perfected weapons to use it. Nobody had discovered fulminating powder and invented the percussion-cap, but they had everything short of that. Now, through their monopoly on this essential tool for maintaining or altering the political status quo, Styphon’s House ruled the whole Atlantic seaboard, while the secular sovereigns merely reigned.
He wondered if Calvin Morrison knew how to make gunpowder, and while he was wondering silently, the Chief did so aloud, adding, “If he does, we won’t have any trouble locating him. We may afterward, though.”
That was how pickup jobs usually were, on the exit end; the pickup either made things easy or impossibly difficult. Many of these paratemporal DPs, suddenly hurled into an unfamiliar world, went hopelessly insane, their minds refusing to cope with what common sense told them was impossible. Others were quickly killed through ignorance. Others would be caught by the locals, and committed to mental hospitals, imprisoned, sold as slaves, executed as spies, burned as sorcerers, or merely lynched, depending on local mores. Many accepted and blended into their new environment and sank into traceless obscurity. A few created commotions and had to be dealt with. “Well, we’ll find out. I’m going outtime myself to look into it.”
“You don’t need to, Vall. You have plenty of detectives who can do that.”
He shook his head obstinately. “On Year-End Day, that’ll be a hundred and seventy-four days, I’m going to be handcuffed to that chair you’re sitting in. Until then, I’m going to do as much outtime work as I possibly can.” He leaned over and turned a dial on the map-selector, got a large-scale map of Hos-Harphax and increased the magnification and limited the field. He pointed. “I’m going in about there. In the mountains in Sask, next door. I’ll be a pack-trader—they go everywhere and don’t have to account for themselves to anybody. I’ll have a saddle-horse and three packhorses loaded with wares. It’ll take about five or six days to collect and verify what I’ll take with me. I’ll travel slowly, to let word seep ahead of me. It may be that I’ll hear something about this Morrison before I enter Hostigos.”
“What’ll you do about him when you find him?” That would depend. Sometimes a pickup could be taken alive, moved to Police Terminal on the Fifth Level, given a complete memory obliteration, and then returned to his own time-line. An amnesia case; that was always a credible explanation. Or he would be killed with a sigma-ray needler, which left no traceable effects. Heart failure or “He just died.” Amnesia and heart failure were wonderful things, from the Paratime Police viewpoint. Anybody with any common sense would accept either. Common sense was a wonderful thing, too.
“Well, I don’t want to kill the fellow; after all, he’s a police officer, too. But with the explanation we’re cobbling up for his disappearance, returning him to his own time-line wouldn’t be any favor to him.” He paused, thinking. “We’ll have to kill him, I’m afraid. He knows too much.”
“What does he know, Vall?”
“One, he’s seen the inside of a conveyer, something completely alien to his own culture’s science. Two, he knows he’s been shifted in time, and time travel is a common science-fiction concept in his own world. If he can disregard verbalisms about fantasies and impossibilities, he will deduce a race of time-travelers. Only a moron, which no Pennsylvania State Police officer is, would be so ignorant of his own world’s history as to think for a moment that he’d been shifted into the past. And he’ll know he hasn’t been shifted into the future, because that area, on all of Europo-American, is covered with truly permanent engineering works of which he’ll find no trace. So what does that leave?”
“A lateral shift in time, and a race of lateral time travelers,” the Chief said. “Why, that’s the Paratime Secret itself.”
———«»——————«»——————«»———
THEY were feasting at Tarr-Hostigos that evening. All morning, pigs and cattle had been driven in, lowing and squealing, to be slaughtered in the outer bailey. Axes thudded for firewood; the roasting-pits were being cleaned out from the last feast; casks of wine were coming up from the cellars. Morrison wished the fireseed mills were as busy as the castle bakery and kitchen.
A whole day’s production shot to hell. He said as much to Rylla. “But, Kalvan, they’re all so happy.” She was pretty happy, herself. “And they’ve worked so hard.” He had to grant that, and maybe the morale gain would offset the production loss. And they did have something to celebrate—a hundredweight of fireseed, fifty percent better than Styphon’s Best, and half of it made in the last two days.
“It’s been so long since any of us had anything to be really happy about,” she was saying. “When we’d have a feast, everybody’d try to get drunk as soon as they could, to keep from thinking about what was coming. And now maybe it won’t come at all.”
And now, they were all drunk on a hundred pounds of black powder. Five thousand caliver or arquebus rounds at most. They’d have to do better than twenty-five pounds a day—get it up above a hundred at least. Saltpeter production was satisfactory, and Mytron had figured a couple of angles at the evaporation plant that practically gave them sulfur running out their ears. The bottleneck was mixing and caking, and grinding the cakes. That meant more machinery, and there weren’t enough men competent to build it. It would mean stopping work on the other things.
The carriages for the new light four-pounders. The ironworks had turned out four of them, so far—welded wrought iron, of course, since nobody knew how to cast iron, here-and-now, and neither did he, but made with trunnions. They only weighed four hundred pounds, the same as Gustavus Adolphus’s, and with four horses—the one prototype already completed could keep up with cavalry on any kind of decent ground. He was happier about that little gun than anything else—except Rylla, of course.
And they were putting trunnions on some old stuff, big things, close to a ton metal-weight but only six and eight pounders, and he hoped to get field carriages under them, too. They’d take eight horses apiece, and they would never keep up with cavalry.
And rifling-benches—long wooden frames in which the barrel would be clamped, with grooved wooden cylinders to slide in guides to rotate the cutting-heads. One turn in four feet—that, he remembered, had been the usual pitch for the Kentucky rifles. So far, he had one in the Tarr-Hostigos gunshop.
And drilling troops—he had to do most of that himself, too, till he could train some officers. Nobody knew anything about foot-drill by squads; here-and-now troops maneuvered in columns of droves.
It would take a year to build the sort of an army he wanted. And Gormoth of Nostor would give him a month, at most.
He brought that up at the General Staff meeting that afternoon. Like rifled firearms and trunnions on cannon, General Staffs hadn’t been invented here-and-now, either. You just hauled a lot of peasants together and armed them; that was Mobilization. You picked a reasonably passable march-route; that was Strategy. You lined up your men and shot or hit anything in front of you; that was Tactics. And Intelligence was what mounted scouts, if any, brought in at the last minute from a mile ahead. It cheered him to recall that that would probably be Prince Gormoth’s notion of the Art of War. Why, with twenty thousand men, Gustavus Adolphus, or the Duke of Parma, or Gonzalo de Cтrdoba could have gone through all five of these Great Kingdoms like a dose of croton oil. And what Turenne could have done!
Ptosphes and Rylla were present as Prince and Heiress-Apparent. The Lord Kalvan was Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Hostigos. Chartiphon, gratifyingly unresentful at seeing an outlander promoted over his head, was Field Marshal and Chief of Operations. An elderly “captain”—actual functioning rank about brigadier-general—was quartermaster, paymaster, drillmaster, inspector-general and head of the draft board. A civilian merchant, who wasn’t losing any money at it, had charge of procurement and supply. Mytron was surgeon-general, and the priest of Tranth had charge of production. Uncle Wolf Tharses was Chief of Chaplains. Harmakros was G2, mainly because his cavalry were patrolling the borders and keeping the Iron Curtain tight, but he’d have to be moved out of that. He was too good a combat man to be stuck with a Pentagon Job, and Xentos was now doing most of the Intelligence work. Besides his ecclesiastical role as high priest of Dralm, and his political function as Ptosphes’s Chancellor, he was in contact with his coreligionists in Nostor, all of whom hated Styphon’s House inexpressibly and were organizing an active Fifth Column. Like Iron Curtain, Fifth Column was now part of the local lexicon.
The first blaze of optimism, he was pleased to observe, had died down on the upper echelon.
“Dralm-damn fools!” Chartiphon was growling. “One keg of fireseed—they’ll want to shoot that all away tonight celebrating—and they think we’re saved. Making our own fireseed’s given us a chance, and that’s all.” He swore again, this time an oath that made Xentos frown. “We have three thousand under arms; if we take all the boys with bows and arrows and all the old peasants with pitchforks, we might get that up to five thousand, but not another child or dotard more. And Gormoth’ll have ten thousand—four thousand of his own people and those six thousand mercenaries he has.”
“I’d call it eight thousand,” Harmakros said. “He won’t take the peasants out of the fields; he needs them there.”
“Then he won’t wait till the harvest’s in; he’ll invade sooner,” Ptosphes said.
He looked at the relief-map on the long table. The idea that maps were important weapons of war was something else he’d had to introduce. This one was only partly finished; he and Rylla had done most of the work on it, in time snatched from everything else that ought to have been done last week at the latest. It was based on what he remembered from the US Geological Survey quadrangle sheets he’d used on the State Police, on interviews with hundreds of soldiers, woodsmen, peasants and landlords, and on a good bit of personal horseback reconnaissance.
Gormoth could invade up the Listra Valley, crossing the river at the equivalent of Lock Haven, but that wouldn’t give him a third of Hostigos. The whole line of the Bald Eagles was strongly defended everywhere, but at Dombra Gap. Tarr-Dombra guarding it, had been betrayed seventy-five years ago to Prince Gormoth’s grandfather, and Sevenhills Valley with it.
“Then we’ll have to do something to delay him. This Tarr-Dombra, say we take that, and occupy Sevenhills Valley. That’ll cut off his best invasion route.”
They all stared at him, just as he’d been stared at when he’d first spoken of making fireseed. It was Chartiphon who first found his voice.
“Man! You never saw Tarr-Dombra or you wouldn’t talk like that! Nobody can take Tarr-Dombra unless they buy it, like Prince Galtrath did, and we haven’t enough money for that.”
“That’s right,” said the retread “captain” who was G1 and part of G4. “It’s smaller than Tarr-Hostigos, of course, but it’s twice as strong.”
“Do the Nostori think it can’t be taken, too? Then it can be. Prince, are there any plans of that castle here?”
“Well, yes. On a big scroll, in one of my coffers. It was my grandfather’s, and we’ve always hoped that sometime—”
“I’ll want to see that. Later will do. Do you know if any changes have been made since the Nostori got it?”
None on the outside, at least. He asked about the garrison; five hundred, Harmakros thought. A hundred of Gormoth’s regulars, and four hundred mercenary cavalry to patrol Sevenhills Valley and raid into Hostigos.
“Then we stop killing raiders who can be taken alive. Prisoners can be made to talk.” He turned to Xentos. “Is there a priest of Dralm in Sevenhills Valley? Can you get in touch with him, and will he help us? Explain to him that this is not a war against Prince Gormoth, but against Styphon’s House.”
“He knows that, and he will help as much as he can, but he can’t get into Tarr-Dombra. There is a priest of Galzar there for the mercenaries, and a priest of Styphon for the lord of the castle and his gentlemen, but among the Nostori, Dralm is but a god for the peasants.”
Yes, and that rankled, too. The priests of Dralm would help, all right. “Good enough. He can talk to people who can get inside, can’t he? And he can send messages, and organize an espionage apparatus. I want to know everything that can be found out about Tarr-Dombra, no matter how trivial. Particularly, I want to know the guard routine, and I want to know how the castle is supplied. And I want it observed at all times. Harmakros, you find men to do that. I take it we can’t storm the place. Then we’ll have to get in by trickery.”
———«»——————«»——————«»———
VERKAN the pack-trader went up the road, his horse plodding unhurriedly and the three packhorses on the lead-line trailing behind. He was hot and sticky under his steel back-and-breast, and sweat ran down his cheeks from under his helmet into his new beard, but nobody ever saw an unarmed pack-trader, so he had to endure it. A paratimer had to be adaptable, if nothing else. The armor was from an adjoining, nearly identical time-line, and so were his clothes, the short carbine in the saddle-sheath, his sword and dagger, the horse-gear, and the loads of merchandise—all except the bronze coffer on one pack-load.
Reaching the brow of the hill, he started slowly down the other side, and saw a stir in front of a whitewashed and thatch-roofed roadside cottage. Men mounting horses, sun-glints on armor, and the red and blue colors of Hostigos. Another cavalry post, the third since he’d crossed the border from Sask. The other two had ignored him, but this crowd meant to stop him. Two had lances, and a third a musketoon, and a fourth, who seemed to be in command, had his holsters open and his right hand on his horse’s neck. Two more, at the cottage, were getting into the road on foot with musketoons.
He pulled up; the packhorses, behind, came to a well-trained stop. “Good cheer, soldiers,” he greeted.
“Good cheer, trader,” the man with his hand close to his pistol-butt replied. “From Sask?”
“Sask latest. From Ulthor, this trip; Grefftscharr by birth.” Ulthor was the lake port in the north; Grefftscharr was the kingdom around the Great Lakes. “I’m for Agrys City.”
One of the troopers chuckled. The sergeant asked, “Have you fireseed?”
He touched the flask on his belt. “About twenty charges. I was going to buy some in Sask Town, but when the priests heard I was passing through Hostigos they’d sell me none. Doesn’t Styphon’s House like you Hostigi?”
“We’re under the ban.” The sergeant didn’t seem greatly distressed about it. “But I’m afraid you’ll not get out of here soon. We’re on the edge of war with Nostor, and Lord Kalvan wants no tales carried to him, so he’s ordered that none may leave Hostigos.”
He cursed; that was expected of him. The Lord Kalvan, now? “I’d feel ill-used, too, in your place, but you know how it is,” the sergeant sympathized. “When lords command, common folk obey, if they want to keep their heads on. You’ll make out all right, though. You’ll find ready sale for all your wares at good price, and then if you’re skilled at any craft, work for good pay. Or you might take the colors. You’re well horsed and armed, and Lord Kalvan welcomes all such.”
“Lord Kalvan? I thought Ptosphes was Prince of Hostigos. Or have there been changes?”