Everard nodded. “Me too, from what you say. It could well have. A lot of medieval saints were pagan gods in disguise, and those that were historical often took on attributes of the gods, in folklore or in the Church itself. Midsummer fires were still lighted, though it was now the Eve of Saint John. Saint Olaf fought trolls and monsters like Thor before him. Even the Virgin Mary has aspects of Isis, and I daresay quite a few legends about her were originally local myths . . .” He shook himself. “You’re familiar with this. And it is straying kind of far. How was Edh’s life?”

  Floris looked beyond him and this year. Her words flowed slow. “She grew old in honor. She never married, but she was like a mother to the people. The island was low, a birthplace of ships, like her girlhood home, and the temple of Nehalennia stood on the edge of her beloved sea. I think—I can’t be sure, for how much can a goddess know of a mortal’s heart?—I think she became . . . serene. Is that what I am trying to say? Certainly as she lay dying—” The voice caught. “—as she lay on her deathbed—” Floris fought the tears and lost.

  Everard drew her to him, put her head on his shoulder and stroked her hair. Her fingers clutched at his shirt. “Easy, lass, easy,” he whispered. “Some memories will always hurt. You came to her that one last time, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled against him. “What else could I do?”

  “Sure. How could you not have? You eased her passing. What’s wrong with that?”

  “She—she asked—and I promised—”

  Floris wept.

  “A life beyond the grave,” Everard realized. “A life with you, forever in the sea-home of Niaerdh. And she went happily into the dark.”

  Floris tore from him. “It was a lie!” she yelled. She sprang to her feet, stumbled around the coffee table, paced back and forth on the floor. Sometimes her hands strained against one another, sometimes fist beat palm, over and over. “All those years were a lie, a trick, I was using her! And she believed in me!”

  Everard decided he had better stay seated. He poured himself a new drink. “Calm down, Janne,” he urged. “You did what you had to, for the whole world’s sake. And you did it lovingly. As for Edh, you gave her everything she could have wished for.”

  ”Bedriegerij—false, empty, like so much else I have done.”

  Everard ran the silky fire over his tongue. “Listen, I’ve gotten to know you rather well. You’re as honest a person as I’ve ever met. Too damn honest, in fact. You’re also a very kind person by nature, which matters more. Sincerity is the most overrated virtue in the catalogue. Janne, you’re wrong when you imagine there’s anything here to forgive. But go ahead anyway, put your common sense in gear and forgive yourself.”

  She stopped, confronted him, gulped, wiped the tears, and spoke with a gradually strengthening steadiness: “Yes, I . . . understand. I, I thought about this . . . for days . . . before I made my proposal to the Patrol. Afterward I s-s-stuck by it. You are right, it was necessary, and I know that many stories people live by are myths, and many myths were manufactured. Pardon this scene. It was quite a short while ago, on my world line, that Veleda died in the arms of Nehalennia.”

  “And the memory overwhelmed you. Sure. I’m sorry.”

  “It was not your fault. How could you have known?” Floris drew a long breath. The hands clenched at her sides. “But I do not want to lie more than I must. I never want to lie to you, Manse.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, half in fear, half in foreknowledge.

  “I have been thinking about us,” she said. “Thinking hard. I suppose what we did, coming together, was wrong—”

  “Well, ordinarily it would’ve been, but in this case it didn’t foul us up in our job. If anything, I felt inspired. It was damn wonderful.”

  “It was for me.” Still she grew inexorably more and more calm. “You came here today in hopes of renewing it, did you not?”

  He attempted a grin. “I plead guilty. You’re hell on wheels in bed, darling.”

  “You are no prutsener.” The faint smile died. “What further had you in mind?”

  “More of the same. Often.”

  “Always?”

  Everard sat mute.

  “It would be difficult,” Floris said. “You Unattached, I a Specialist field agent. We would spend most of our lives apart.”

  “Unless you transferred to data coordination or something else where you could work at home.” Everard leaned forward. “You know, that’s an excellent idea in itself. You’ve got the brains for it. Be done with all that risk and hardship and, yes, witness of suffering which you’re forbidden to prevent.”

  She shook her head. “I do not wish to. In spite of everything, I feel I am worth most in the field, my field, and will be until I am too old and feeble.”

  If you survive so long. “Yeah. Challenge, adventure, fulfillment, and the occasional chance to help. You’re that sort.”

  “I could come to hate the man who made me give them up. I do not wish this either.”

  “Well, uh—” Everard rose. “All right,” he said. It felt like bailing out of a plane. You gave yourself to your parachute. “Not much domestic bliss, but in between missions, something extra special and entirely our own. Are you game?”

  “Are you?” she answered.

  In midstride toward her, he halted.

  “You are aware of what my work can require,” she said. Her face had gone pale. It’s not a blushing matter, he thought at the back of his mind. “On this past mission, too. I was not all the time a goddess, Manse. Now and then I found it useful to be a Germanic woman far from home. Or I simply wanted a night’s forgetfulness.”

  The blood thudded in his temples. “I’m no prude, Janne.”

  “But you are a Middle American farm boy. You have told me so, and I have learned it is true. I can be your friend, your partner, your mistress, but never, down inside you, anything more. Be honest.”

  “I’m trying,” he said harshly.

  “It would be worse for me,” Floris finished. “I would have to keep too much from you. I would feel I was betraying you. That makes no sense, no, but it is what I would feel. Manse, we had better not fall more in love. We had better say good-bye.”

  They spent the next few hours together, talking. Then she laid her head on his breast, he hugged her for a minute, and he departed.

  IV

  Mary, mother of God, mother of sorrows, mother of salvation, be with us now and at the hour of our death.

  Westward we sail, but night overtakes us. Watch over us through the dark and bring us on into day. Grant that this our ship bear the most precious of cargoes, your blessing.

  Pure as yourself, your evenstar shines above the sunset. Guide us by your light. Lay your gentleness on the seas, breathe us forward in our faring and home again to our loves, carry us at last by your prayers into Heaven.

  Ave Stella Maris!

  The Stranger that is Within Thy Gates

  1987 A.D.

  Maybe returning to New York on the day after he left it had been a mistake. Even here, just now, the springtime was too beautiful. A dusk like this was not one in which to sit alone, remembering. Rain had cleared the air for a while, so that through open windows drifted a ghost of blossoms and green. Lights and noises from the streets below were somehow softened, turned riverlike. Manse Everard wanted out.

  He might have gone for a walk in Central Park, pocketing a stun gun in case of trouble. No policeman of this century would know it for a weapon. Better, when he had lately seen too much violence—any amount was too much—he could have strolled downtown along a safe route till he ended in one or another of the little taverns he knew, for beer and homely companionship. If he chose to get away altogether, he could requisition a time-cycle at Patrol headquarters and seek whatever era he chose, anyplace on Earth. An Unattached agent needn’t give reasons.

  A phone call had trapped him. He prowled the darkening apartment, pipe a-fume between teeth, and occasionally swore at himself. Ridiculous, this mood. Sure, a letdown after action was natural; but he’d already enjoyed two easy weeks back in Hiram’s Tyre, taking care of leftover details after his mission was done. As for Bronwen, he’d provided for her, rejoining her could only destroy the measure of contentment she’d found, the calendar said that tonight she lay twenty-nine hundred years dust, and there should be an end of the matter.

  The doorbell relieved him. He snapped on the lights, blinked in the sudden harshness, and admitted his visitor. “Good evening, Agent Everard,” greeted the man in subtly accented English. “I am Guion. I hope this is in fact not an inconvenient hour for you.”

  “No, no. I agreed to it when you rang, didn’t I?” They shook hands. Everard doubted that the gesture occurred in Guion’s native milieu, whenever and wherever that was. “Come in.”

  “You see, I thought you would wish to dispose of mundane business today, and then perhaps depart tomorrow for a holiday—ah, vacation, you Americans say, don’t you?—at some restful spot. I could have interviewed you when you got back, of course, but your memories would be less fresh. Also, frankly, I would like to get acquainted. May I invite you to dinner at a restaurant of your choice?”

  While speaking, Guion had entered and taken an armchair. He was of undistinguished appearance, on the short and slender side, dressed in a plain gray suit. His head was big, though, and when you looked closely you saw that the thinly carved face wasn’t really a dark white man’s—didn’t quite belong to any race presently living on the planet. Everard wondered what powers lay behind its smile.

  “Thanks,” he replied. Superficially the offer meant little. An Unattached agent of the Time Patrol drew on unlimited funds. Actually it meant a great deal. Guion wanted to spend lifespan on him. “Suppose we get the basic talking out of the way first. Care for a drink?”

  The request given, he went to the bar and mixed Scotch and soda for both. Guion didn’t object to his pipe. He settled down.

  “Let me repeat my congratulations on your accomplishments in Phoenicia,” his caller said. “Extraordinary.”

  “I had a good team.”

  “True. But it had first-class leadership. And you did the preliminary work solo, at considerable risk.”

  “Is that what you’re here about?” Everard demanded. “My debriefing was pretty damn thorough. You must have seen the records. I don’t know what further I can tell.”

  Guion stared into his lifted glass, as if the ice cubes were Delphic dice. “Possibly you omitted a few details you assumed are irrelevant,” he murmured. The scowl opposite him was fleeting but did not escape notice. He raised his free hand. “Don’t worry. I’ve no intention of intruding on your privacy. An operative who had no emotions about the human beings encountered on a mission would be . . . defective. Worthless, or downright dangerous. As long as we don’t let our feelings compromise our duties, they are, ah, nobody else’s affair.”

  How much does he know, or suspect? wondered Everard. A sad little romance with a Celtic slave girl, foredoomed by the abyss between their birthtimes if by nothing else; his arranging at last for her manumission and marriage; farewell—I’m not about to inquire. I might learn more than I want to.

  He hadn’t been informed what Guion was after, or why, or anything except that this person was at least of his own rank. Probably higher. Above its lowest echelons, the Patrol didn’t go in for organizational charts and formal hierarchies of command. By its nature, it couldn’t. The structure was much subtler and stronger than that. Quite likely none but the Danellians fully understood it.

  Nevertheless Everard’s tone harshened. When he said, “We Unattached have broad discretion,” he was not merely rehashing the obvious.

  “Of course, of course,” Guion responded with feline mildness. “I only hope to squeeze a few more drops of information out of what you experienced and observed. Then by all means enjoy your well-earned leisure.” Softer yet: “May I ask if your plans include Miss Wanda Tamberly?”

  Everard started. He nearly slopped his drink. “Huh?” Recovery. Grab the initiative. “Is that what you’re here for, to talk about her?”

  “Well, you recommended her recruitment.”

  “And she’s passed the preliminary tests, hasn’t she?”

  “Certainly. But you met her when she was caught up in that Peruvian episode. A brief but strenuous and revealing acquaintance.” Guion chuckled. “Since then, you have cultivated the relationship. That is no secret.”

  “Not heavily,” Everard snapped. “She’s very young. But, yeah, I consider her a friend.” He paused. “A protégée of sorts, if you like.”

  We’ve had a couple of dates. Then I went off to Phoenicia, and on my time line it’s been weeks . . . and I’ve returned to the same spring when the two of us were first together in San Francisco.

  “Yes, I’ll doubtless be seeing her again,” he added. “But she has plenty else to keep her busy. Doubling back up to September in the Galapagos Islands, that she was snatched out of, and home in the usual fashion, and several months to arrange twentieth-century appearances so she can leave without raising questions in people’s minds—Arh! Why the devil am I repeating what you perfectly well know?”

  Thinking aloud, I suppose. Wanda’s no Bronwen, but she may well, all unawares, help me put Bronwen behind me, as I’ve got to do. As I’ve had to do now and then before. . . .

  Everard wasn’t given to self-analysis. The realization jolted him that what he needed to regain inner peace was not another love affair but a few more times in the presence of innocence. Like a thirsty man finding a spring to drink from, high on a mountainside—Afterward, let him get on with his life, and she with her new one in the Patrol.

  Chill: Unless they don’t accept her, in spite of everything. “And why are you interested, anyway? Are you concerned with personnel? Has anybody expressed doubts about her?”

  Guion shook his head. “On the contrary. The psycho-probe gave her an excellent profile. Later examinations will be mainly for the usual purposes, to help guide her training and her earlier field assignments.”

  “Good.” A glow kindled in Everard and eased him. He’d been smoking too hard. The tart coolness of a draught eased his tongue.

  “I mentioned her simply because the events that caused your world line to intersect hers involved Exaltationists,” Guion said. The voice was most quiet, considering what it bore. “Earlier along yours, you had thwarted their effort to subvert Simόn Bolívar’s career. In the course of aiding Miss Tamberly—who defended herself so ably—you kept them from hijacking Atahuallpa’s ransom and changing the history of the Spanish Conquest. Now you have rescued ancient Tyre from them, and captured most of those who remained at large, including Merau Varagan. Wonderfully done. However, the task is not finished.”

  “True,” Everard agreed as low.

  “I am here to . . . feel out the situation,” Guion told him. “I cannot express precisely what I seek, even if I use Temporal.” His speech continued level, but he smiled no longer and something terrible stood behind the slanted eyes. “What is involved is no more amenable to symbolic logic than is the concept of mutable reality. ‘Intuition’ or ‘revelation’ are words equally inadequate. I seek . . . whatever measure of comprehension is possible.” After a silence in which the city noises seemed muted by remoteness: “We shall talk, in an informal fashion. I will try to get some sense of how your experiences felt to you. That is all. A reminiscent conversation, after which you will be free to go where you like.

  “Yet think. Can it be entirely coincidental that you, Manson Everard, have thrice been in action against the Exaltationists? Only once did you set forth with any idea that they might be responsible for certain disturbances. Despite this, you became the nemesis of Merau Varagan, who—I can now admit—roused fear in the Middle Command. Was this happenstance? Was it accidental, too, that Wanda Tamberly got drawn into the vortex—when she already, unbeknownst to herself, had a kinsman in the Patrol?”

  “He was the reason that she—” Everard’s protest trailed off. Within him shivered: Who is this, really? What is he?

  “Therefore we wish to know more about you,” Guion said. “Not prying into your personal lives, but hoping for a clue to what I can only, misleadingly, call the hyper-matrix of the continuum. Such knowledge may help us plan how to track down the last Exaltationists. They are desperate and revengeful, you know. We must.”

  “I see,” Everard breathed.

  A pulse beat through him. He scarcely heard Guion’s coda, “And beyond that necessity, perhaps, a larger meaning, a direction and an ending—” nor how Guion chopped it short, as though he had let slip out what should not. Everard was harking back, gazing forward, abruptly hound-eager, aware that what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt.

  Women and Horses and War

  1985 A.D.

  Here, where the Bear stars wheeled too low, night struck cold into blood and bone. By day, mountains closed off every horizon with stone, snow, glaciers, clouds. A man’s mouth dried as he gasped his way over the ridges, rocks rattling from beneath his boots, for he could never draw one honest breath of air. And then there was fear of the rifle bullet or the knife after dark that would spill his bit of life out on this empty land.

  To Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin, the captain appeared as an angel from his grandmother’s Heaven. It was on the third day since the ambush. He had tried to head northeast, generally down though it always seemed most of his steps were upward, the weight of the earth upon them. Somewhere yonder lay the camp. His sleeping bag gave him small rest; again and again terror snatched him back to a loneliness just as cruel. Careful with what field rations were in his kit, he took few bites at a time, and hunger pangs had now dulled. Nevertheless, little remained to him. He found plenty of water for his canteen, springs or the melt of remnant snowbanks, but had nothing to heat it. The samovar in his parents’ cottage was a half-remembered dream—the whole collective farm, larksong above ryefields, wildflowers to the world’s edge, he walking hand in hand with Yelena Borisovna. Here grew only lichen on rock, thinly strewn thorn scrub, pale clumps of grass. The one sound other than his footfalls, breath, pulsebeat was the wind. A large bird rode it, well aloft. Garshin didn’t know what kind it was. A vulture, waiting for him to die? No, surely the vultures feasted on his comrades—