Her Majesty's Wizard Read online

  Martial law, obviously-which meant the town had been recently conquered. But by whom? The soldiers certainly spoke the same language as the civilians-with even the same accent, as far as Matt could tell. It must be civil war, then, which, in a medieval society, meant one of two things-a dynastic dispute, like the Wars of the Roses, or a usurpation.

  Why wasn't the sergeant scared of a self-confessed wizard, though? Possibly he was a skeptic and knew any kind of magic was just so much hogwash. But, considering that even most of the best-educated among the medieval set believed wholly in magic, that didn't seem too likely. Which left the probability that he wasn't afraid because he knew he was backed by a more powerful wizard or sorcerer.

  That shouldn't have bothered Matt at all, because magic was just so much hogwash.

  But where had all those beggars come from?

  The captain was the tall, dark, and handsome type, with some indefinable air of the aristocrat about him. Maybe it was the velvet robe over the gleaming chain mail.

  "There is something of the outlander about you," he informed Matt.

  Matt nodded. "I am an outlander."

  The captain lifted his eyebrows. "Are you indeed? From what country?"

  "Well, that all depends on where I am."

  The captain frowned. "How could that be?"

  "It's not easy, believe me. Where am I?"

  The captain turned his head a little to the side, eyeing Matt warily. "How could you come here and not know where you've come?"

  "The same way you don't know where you've come to when you're going to the place you're coming to, but you don't know how you're going or where you're coming to till you've come to the place you were going to, so by the time that you get there, you don't know whether you're coming or going."

  The captain shook his head. "I don't."

  "Neither do I. So where am I?"

  "But..." The captain knit his brow, trying to figure it out. Then he sighed and gave up. "Very well. You're in the town Bordestang, capital of Merovence. Now, where do you come from?"

  "I don't know."

  "What?" The captain leaned forward over the rough planks of the table. "After all that? How could you not know where you've come from?"

  "Well, I'd know where it was if I were in the right place, but I'm in the wrong place, so I don't know where it is. Or rather, I know where it is, but I don't know what it's called here. That is, if it's there."

  The captain squeezed his eyes shut and gave his head a quick shake. "A moment, now. You mean to say you do not know our name for your homeland?"

  "Well, I suppose you could say that."

  "Easily answered." The captain sat back, looking relieved. Matt looked over his shoulder at the semicircle of soldiers surrounding him. The sergeant was watching him narrowly. Matt tried to hide a shiver as he turned back to the captain.

  "Tell us where your homeland is," the captain urged, "and I'll tell you our name for it."

  "Well, I suppose that's a fair deal." Matt nodded judiciously. "Only one trouble-I left my map at home. So I can't tell you which way my homeland is, till I know a little better where this country is."

  The captain threw up his hands. "What must I do? Describe the whole of the continent to you?"

  "Well, that would help, yes."

  For a moment, Matt thought he'd pushed it too far; the captain's face turned awfully red. His brows came down, and his temples whitened. But he managed to absorb it; his face slowly eased back to its normal color, and he exhaled, long and slowly. Then he stood up and went to a set of shelves over against the undressed planks of the left-hand wall. The shelves were made of undressed planking, too; so was the whole place, for that matter. It had a very improvised air about it. Yes, definitely the war hadn't been overlong.

  "Here." The captain took down a huge parchment volume and came back to the table, leafing through the book. He laid it down open, turning it to face Matt. Matt stepped forward to look-and gulped.

  He was staring at a map of Europe-with a few modifications. It looked like Napoleon's and Hitler's dream world-the English Channel was gone. There was a narrow neck of solid land between Calais and Dover. Denmark was joined to Sweden, and the pebble of Sicily was clinging to Italy's toe.

  Something was definitely wrong here. Matt wondered how Australia and New Zealand were doing, or the Isthmus of Panama.

  He looked up at a sudden thought. "What's the climate like, there` ?" He laid a finger on London. "Warmish in winter? Lots of rain? Heavy fogs?"

  The captain gave him an extremely strange look. "Nay, certainly not. 'Tis a frozen waste in winter, and the snows pile up half again the height of a man."

  That settled it. "Are there, uh, ice fields that never melt anywhere there?"

  The captain perked up. "Aye, so they say-in the mountains of the north. Then you've been there?"

  Glaciers in the Highlands! "No, but I've seen some pictures." No question about it, there was an Ice Age going on. Whether it was nature's clock that was off or history's didn't really matter; it still added up to just one thing.

  Matt wasn't in his own universe.

  The wind off those Scottish glaciers blew through Matt's soul, chilling him to the id. For a moment, he was very much lost and very, very alone, and the warmly lighted windows of a summer campus dusk were very far away.

  "We are here." The captain laid a fingertip on a spot about a hundred miles east of the Pyrenees and fifty miles north of the Mediterranean. "Do you know where you are now?"

  Matt shook off the mood. "No. I mean-for all intents and purposes. I think so."

  "Ah, good." The captain nodded, satisfied. "Then where is your homeland?"

  "Oh, somewhere along about-here." Matt-stabbed a forefinger down, about two feet to the left of the map.

  The captain stared, and his face darkened. "I have tried to aid you in every way I can, sirrah, and this is how you repay my courtesy!"

  "No, no, I'm serious! There really is a land out there, about three thousand miles to the west! I was born there. Although," Matt added as an afterthought, "I expect it's changed a good deal since I've-been gone. In fact, I think I'd scarcely recognize it."

  "There have been rumors," the sergeant said darkly.

  "Aye, of an ever-warm land where the wild grape grows, ruled by a saintly wizard and filled with fabulous monsters!" the captain snapped. "A land seen by dreamers, grown out of the dregs in their wine cups! Surely your are not foolish enough to believe in such!"

  "Oh, the tale could stand to go on a diet, I'm sure." Matt smiled slightly, suddenly very calm. "But, even with the climate the way it is, they should still have warm winters in Louisiana; and wild Concord grapes are a bit tart, but really very good. They do grow wizards there, or they did, when I left. We didn't call them that, of course-but you would."

  The room was suddenly very quiet, and Matt was sure that he had their fullest attention.

  The captain licked his lips and swallowed. "And you are such a one."

  "Who, me?" Matt looked up, startled. "Lord, no! I scarcely know what an atom is, let alone how to split one!"

  The captain nodded. "Atoms I have heard of-'tis a sorcery of an ancient Greek alchemist."

  Matt couldn't quite keep his lip from curling. "Democritus was scarcely an alchemist."

  "He knows of such matters," the sergeant breathed.

  "Knows them by name," the captain agreed.

  Matt stared, aghast. "Hey, now! You can't think that I-"

  "Do you know how to change lead into gold?" the captain rapped.

  "Well, not really. Just the broad outline. It takes a cyclotron, you see, and..." Matt's voice trailed off as he looked around at all the flinty stares. He never had learned when to lie ...

  The captain turned away in a whirl of velvet. "Enough! We know he's a sorcerer; we need know no more!"

  "Wizard!" Matt squawked. "Not a sorcerer!"

  The captain shrugged impatiently. "Wizard, sorcerer-it adds to the same sum; 'tis greater t
han any authority I claim."

  The sergeant raised an eyebrow, and the captain nodded. "Take him to the castle."

  CHAPTER 2

  They loaded him down with chains, at least one of which Matt was certain was silver, and heaved him into an oxcart for the trip uptown, literally; it was uphill all the way. They wound through curving alley streets, constantly on the upgrade, through a melange of domestic architecture ranging from about 600 to 1300 A.D. This wasn't out of the ordinary in a European town; what bothered Matt was that some of the seventh-century shops looked almost as new as the fourteenth century ones. He gave up trying to make sense out of the historical periods; apparently every universe had its own sort of sequence.

  Which reminded him that he was about as far from home as a man could get. What had that parchment fragment said? "Cross the void of time and space ... ?" He had a sudden, vivid image of the chaos that would result as an infinite number of time tracks crossed and put the thought behind him with a shudder.

  Enough. He was in a universe other than his own; let it stand at that. It was one where the Ice Age had stayed late, or humanity had come early, for starters-and how many snarls would that make, in history's long yarn? Starting with England still being connected to France, it could make quite a few. Sure, the Britons probably wouldn't have built a wall across that narrow neck of land that connected Calais to Dover, but the Romans would have done so; the Brito-Romans had probably built such a wall to keep the Goths out, as Rome started to decline. If there had been a Rome here.

  Assume there had been; the language had some root words that resembled Latin cognates. And the captain had mentioned ancient Greece. The histories seemed to run a rough parallel; so there probably had been a Mediterranean empire corresponding to Rome.

  Okay. As Rome declined, the Brito-Romans probably would have built the wall, and it probably would have been every bit as effective as Hadrian's Wall-which is to say, in the long run, that the analog-Goths simply ignored it. And the Danes had probably come sailing in as merrily as in Matt's world.

  So England would have had its familiar potpourri of peoples and cultures, but with the pace possibly accelerated. Would that also apply to the English doing the conquering?

  It was possible. Henry II had made a fair bid for conquering as much of France as he hadn't inherited or married. And Canute was king of Norway, Denmark, and England all at the same time, but he ruled from England. If an ambitious Englishman had started moving in this universe, he might have taken the whole ball, of wax, since he didn't have to worry about naval supply lines.

  That could explain the English-language influence in southern France. Maybe Canute had done it. He was the one who'd commanded the sea not to roll in ... For a giddy moment, Matt found himself wondering if that might not be a better explanation of the lower waterline than glaciation; after all, magic seemed to work, in this universe ...

  He jerked himself out of the morass of mysticism; that way lay dragons. Magic was just superstition and an interesting academic study; it didn't really work anywhere. There was a perfectly logical explanation for the sudden appearance of so many beggars! If he could just find it...

  He gave his head a shake, forcing the flood of speculation. into the back of his mind, and found himself looking upward, along a twisting hill road, at a square, forbidding granite castle. In spite of the medievalisms he'd been seeing all morning, a cold-air movement coiled itself around his backbone. That castle looked so damned military, so real...

  The iron teeth of the portcullis seemed to bite down at him as the guards rolled him over the drawbridge. With a sudden ache, Matt wished with every ounce of his being that he were no place else than his own sloppy kitchen back in his off-campus, hole-in-the-wall apartment. Home ...

  They took him through a series of drafty corridors that seemed to grudge giving up an ounce of the winter's cold. Some had narrow, arrow slit windows; some had an occasional torch; some had nothing. The stairways they marched him up were broad enough for an army, which was probably what they were designed for, but just as dark, and possibly colder.

  The guards turned left suddenly and trundled him though a huge oaken door into a fifteen-by-twenty study with two large windows to let sunlight in through actual glass. How come no arrow slits? Matt took a peek and saw a courtyard-with soldiers drilling.

  But the rest of the room was reassuring, though only by comparison. The two side walls were hung with huge tapestries, one showing the seige of a castle and the other showing a stag brought to bay; and most of the floor space was occupied by a brilliant purple-and-red Moorish carpet. So Spain had fallen to North Africa, which meant this universe had had its Mohammed, and probably also its Charles Martel and its Roland. In fact, that last hero might be more probable here than at home.

  The furnishing was surprisingly sparse-a tall writing-desk and stool at the side, and a large, heavy table with an hourglass-shaped chair centered in front of the window.

  The soldiers chained him to a wrought-iron torch sconce and left him there, with a certain fugitive haste that indicated the sergeant's casual attitude towards sorcerers was either rare or faked. Matt was alone for a few moments' thought. He looked around the study and decided he didn't like it. After the gloom of the castle halls, it was definitely too cheery. It was a setup.

  A man slammed through the door. He was six feet tall and more, swaggering and swag-bellied, with small, close-set eyes in a pouchy face, a mouth two sizes too small, and a pig snout of a nose. He wore red, pointed shoes, bright yellow hose, a knee-length purple robe, and a crown.

  Matt looked for some woodwork to fade into.

  A slab of hand cracked across his chops. "Show respect, trickster! Look at your king when you're in his presence!"

  Matt looked, though the view was a trifle blurry. Through the haze, he saw the door behind the king swing open and a half dozen guards file in. Through pain and fear percolated the random thought that their presence might explain some of the king's blustering.

  The king paced back and forth in front of Matt, strutting a little, sure he had Matt's full attention. "So this is the mighty sorcerer from the fabled Western world over the sea? Men must grow small and weak there. What magics could this work? Certainly nothing to fear."

  The slab hand cracked out again, rocking Matt's head back against the stonework. "Answer, sorcerer!"

  Matt blinked, trying to bring the room into focus. "Uhhhh ... I ... wasn't aware I'd been asked."

  "You mock me," the king snarled, balling up a fist.

  "No, no!" Matt cried in panic. "Nothing but respect intended, I assure

  The fist slammed into his belly, and Matt folded, eyes bulging in agony. All he could manage was a gurgle.

  "Why will you not answer?" The open hand slapped under his jaw. Matt rocked back again. "Damned impertinence!" the king grunted, and the slap exploded against Matt's temple. The room went dark, shot with pinpoints of light. Behind them, Matt heard the king's gargling laugh. "Is this the fearful sorcerer who conjured an army into the midst of the town? Where is his power now? Let him only come up against a real man with some meat on him! Then his spirit quails, and the cowardice that first made him seek sorcery comes to the fore once again. Bewitch me, churl! Do you dare, when you must face a strong man?" The king sneered, and the back of his hand smashed into Matt's face.

  Through the darkness and the ringing, Matt felt blood seep from his nose, and fury broke. He called out:

  "Then he swung aloft his war-club, Shouted loud and long his war-cry, Smote this gross and brutal kinglet In the middle of his forehead!"

  The king's head jerked back, yanking his body with it. He sailed backward five feet and slammed into the ranks of the guards. They bent to pick the king up off the floor, slapping his face lightly and calling for brandywine.

  Matt stared. Vaguely, at the back of his mind, somebody was saying, "Oh, my. Did I do that?"

  Somebody shoved a portable wineskin into the king's mouth. He gagged; his body jackk
nifed, and brandywine sprayed over the room. He spent a minute or so in diligent coughing; then he looked up, and his tiny, red-rimmed eyes fixed on Matt with a look that read like a death warrant.

  Matt shrank back as the slob-king climbed to his feet with a slow, building potential for murder. He'd blown it, Matt realized; he should have pulled a follow-up spell while the king was out.

  What was he thinking? He wasn't a sorcerer!

  But that might be just the stall he needed-the unexpected. He summoned every iota of what little cold contempt he could manage. "Learn the lesson, royal Lord, and address me correctly as wizard! I'm not a sorcerer!"

  "But I am," purred a velvet voice from the doorway.

  It was highly instructive to watch the king backpedaling hastily. He looked up at the new arrival, startled, wary, and fearful. The arrogant bully suddenly turned into an intimidated pussycat who was trying to remember he was a warrior.

  The self-proclaimed sorcerer glided into the room with a soft whispering of velvet, a tall, lean customer in a floor-length black robe and black conical hat, both embroidered with blood-red arcane symbols, pentagrams, runes, and others Matt didn't recognize. He was swarthy and handsome, with black eyebrows, moustache, jawline beard, and wavy black hair. With his mouth, he was Smiling-polite, urbane, and as treacherous as California bedrock.

  He looked the king up and down sadly, clucking his tongue. "A shame, Astaulf -- it bit back! Will you never learn to leave things magical to those who can govern them?" He glanced at Matt. "'You seem harmless enough-but 'tis well to be sure." His forefinger darted out, stabbing at Matt while he intoned a short, rhyming chant in an arcane tongue.

  Matt doubled up shrieking as hot irons stabbed into his belly. He would have kept yelling, but his diaphragm tied a knot in itself, and he ran out of breath.

  King Astaulf was pulling himself up by the nearest guard. "I can govern small sorcerers well enough, Malingo -- they fear a strong man, even if he has not their Power. How was I to know that this stranger was not such a weakling?"