"Adams, Robert - Castaways in Time 05 - Of Myths and Monsters 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)

With a pot of coffee perking merrily on the stove top, he had decided to walk outside and see if he could determine just how much damage his house and property had sustained. But he had taken only two steps out of his front door, looked in wondering, terrified disbelief, then reeled back inside to safety, to sanity. He had slammed the door, locked it, thrown the massive barrel bolt, drawn the drapes with shaking hands, sunk down into the familiar chair, and just sat, stunned.

Drawing upon some hidden well of courage, he had at some length lifted an edge of the drapes enough to peer out and see . . . and see . . .

He didn't think it could be called a castle or chateau, not really, although one wing of the apparently U-shaped stone house incorporated a tower at least sixty feet high and, from what he could see, the entire building and grounds seemed to be encircled by a reasonably high wall of dressed stones, pierced by at least one gate wide enough and high enough for a Sherman tank to easily negotiate. A creepy-crawliness had begun gnawing at Bass as he had gazed across his neat, manicured green lawn to behold, where the river had so recently swirled madly, part of an elaborate formal garden and, beyond both lawn and garden, the many windows of that huge house of archaic design, the windows staring back at him like the black, empty eyesockets of some hideous, grinning skull.

But Bass had not been long in discovering that he was not the only person of his world and time to be somehow transported to what seemed to be the English border country in the late Middle Ages or early Renaissance. In all, there were seven men and three women, and of this initial number, the women had fared worst in this ruder, cruder, less comfortable, and far more dangerous world into which they had been willy-nilly thrust.

The first to die had been a man, however, one of four truckers who had been transported, with their trucks, trailers, and loads intact, from Interstate 95 to a stretch of long, narrow, level lea all in the blinking of an eye and with hardly a bump. When one of the men had climbed down from his rig and approached two armored men on horseback to ask the location and how to get back to the interstate, he had been lanced through the chest for his trouble.

The second death had been that of a middle-aged and alcoholic woman, wife of a chemistry professor of fifty-odd years, who had, himself, eventually gone mad. The third death had been that of a young hippie girl, who had the dangerous habit of swallowing anything that looked to be a drug and discovered too late that the pills of this period were quite often deadly in even small amounts.

Since that death, there had been no more, although one other of the truckers had been severely and permanently injured in a great, raging battle between the English army and that of the Scots invaders. The third woman, who now was Bass's wife and the mother of his son, had become murderously insane and had had to be separated from her child and locked away in a convent of a nursing order.

Knowledge and skills and materials from their own world had allowed the survivors of the group to vastly improve and to immeasurably help certain aspects of the world into which they had been so abruptly and surprisingly deposited.

The professor had contributed much to the cause of the beset and beleaguered English and their king and had been ennobled quite early on, before his unfortunate traits of personal cowardice and a hectoring manner, plus symptoms of his encroaching emotional instability, had cost him all that his talents had earned and sent him riding off into an exile that had resulted in his full descent into madness.

One of the truckers had developed new and better firearms and had carried on some of the projects originated by the madman after his departure. He had been aided in this by another of the truckers as well as by the male "hippie" who had been shocked back to normality by the hideous demise of his girlfriend. The third trucker, subsequent to his crippling combat injury, had begun the selective breeding of farm animals on the country estate of a churchman.

Under the circumstances, deeply hidden traits in Bass had emerged and flowered. He had become a superlative cavalry commander, a warrior of some note, and a matchless leader of men. In the society into which he had been thrust, which was unlike the one he had departed-in which the military leader and combat expert was distrusted, derided, and held in contempt-such traits as he demonstrated were considered to be among the highest attainable attributes of a gentleman, and his feats had been rewarded by a shower of honors which had been conferred upon him by nobles and king alike.

Only well after his arrival in the strange world did he find that he and his companions were not the first to be so deposited. Two men had preceded them, these having arrived nearly two centuries before from the twenty-first century. These two had been scientists, both of whom had been the recipients of longevity treatments, and, although one had died in battle since that long-ago arrival, the other was not only still living but was the Archbishop of York, the second-most-powerful man in all of that version of England.

The two scientists had made their arrival at precisely the same location as had Bass and the rest, and it was assumed that a malfunction of the projecting device- still squatting in the ground level of the old defensive tower there-was what had jerked Foster, the other six men, and the three women into the new and different world.

For different it assuredly was from their own world of a comparable time and place. The date that Bass had been given some time after he had begun service with the royal army had been A.D. 1643, which had in his own world been in the late northern European Renaissance era; but conditions in this world were much closer to being late mediaeval than early Renaissance. Over a period of time, Bass had discovered that no really large, strong nations existed in this world, only small, relatively weak countries, and that this miserable, very feudal mess was to a very large extent a result of the constant meddling in lay affairs of the Church.

The Church of this world exercised and was able to exercise far more real raw power than the Church of his world's history ever had owned. Part of the reason for this was the fact that there were no longer any Moslems in this world, a military alliance of Christians and Moslems against the Mongols at some time in the thirteenth century having gradually and miraculously become a merger of Islam and Christianity. The other source of inordinate power for the Church was her control of the sales of gunpowder worldwide. She had from the beginning of this lucrative trade tried to keep the formula a secret, referred to refined niter as "priests' powder," and savagely punished any layman or group who so far transgressed as to make their own, unsanctified gunpowder-tormenting them, torturing them, maiming and mutilating them before finally burning them alive, the cavities of their mangled bodies stuffed to nigh bursting with their own, unhallowed gunpowder. The England into which Bass and the rest had been thrust was not the same as the seventeenth-century England of his own world had been, consisting only of England and Wales, owning no suzerainty over either Ireland or Scotland. Moreover, it had been an England sorely beset-the king excommunicated, the entire kingdom under interdict, and, a crusade having been preached against it by Pope Abdul in Rome, hordes of bloodthirsty, loot-hungry foreign invaders massing against it on every hand.

CHAPTER
THE SECOND

Worst of the many problems besetting the English king and his army was that as they were in the bad graces of the Church, they had no way of obtaining gunpowder in any quantities or even the refined niter necessary to fabricate really strong powder.

Having for many years been a research chemist in the field of propellants in his own world, the professor, upon being apprised of the current local problem, had rigged a lab of sorts at Whyffler Hall, where he, Bass, and the others had been projected, and had there quickly produced a succession of formulae, each resulting in even stronger gunpowder than the product of Church powdermills. Making good use of the eighty-odd tons of nitrate fertilizer which had been the load of one of the trucks, the Whyffler Hall operation had produced enough top-quality gunpowder to carry the royal army until it had been able to defeat armies of invaders and capture full resupplies of gunpowder.

In the England of this world, the twenty-first-century man who eventually became the Archbishop of York had, through a succession of events, been able to save the threatened life of the eldest son of King Henry VIII Tudor through dosing the boy with longevity booster capsules, the formulation of which included extremely strong antibiotics. Therefore, the boy had lived to succeed his father as King Arthur II Tudor, while his younger brother, Henry Tudor, had died in Angevin of plague while at war against the French king.

Arthur II had reigned long and had been succeeded by his grandson, Richard IV Tudor, who was soon after his elevation wedded to a niece (which was a polite way of saying illegitimate issue) of the then Roman Pope. Not far into his reign, Richard had died, and, fearing instability, the great nobles had had his younger brother crowned as King Arthur III Tudor. Although, more than seven months after Richard's death, his wife, Angela, had given birth to a son, there was sufficient suspicion of her among the bulk of the English and Welsh lords that most of them held forth that the boy was not come of Tudor loins but was certainly a bastard begat on the adultress by one of her multitudinous lovers. Since by this time her papal "uncle" was deceased, all in England thought that that would be the end of that and good riddance to bad, foreign rubbish.

However, the new Pope Abdul had been an old friend of his predecessor and, like him, a Moor, and he would have not liked to see Angela rejected and ejected from her late husband's kingdom in any case. But also, he had looked forward to ruling England and Wales through her as a virtual satrapy, and so the crusade against the "English Usurper" had been pronounced.

At the moment of the arrivals of Bass and the others, the Regent Angela's forces had held the City of London and its immediate environs, while her opponent, King Arthur, had more or less held all the rest of England and Wales. He and his forces had, however, been severely crippled by their lack of gunpowder; Angela had had all of the gunpowder she ever could need, shipload after shipload of all sorts of supplies coming upriver to her from Italy and other places, but she was woefully short of men to use it in the field, her best troops-led by one of her rumored lovers, a papal knight-having been almost wiped out in a recent battle with Arthur's army. And so she and her supporters stayed mostly behind the strong walls of London and awaited the huge, strong force of Crusaders said to be on the way by sea from the Mediterranean lands, led by a world-famous condottiere hired on by Rome.

When the word had been bruited about that King Arthur had, by hook or by crook, secured quantities of gunpowder, his army had nearly doubled in size and, with them, he had marched out of his camp near York to defeat first a force of French and Flemish Crusaders on the banks of the Tees River, then marched clear across the country to shatter a force of Irish Crusaders near to the walled town of Manchester and hotly pursue them clear to the sea, the last, desperate actions being fought on the very sea sands between royal English and Welsh cavalry units and the bodyguards of Irish petty kings and high nobles that these might be taken off by waiting boats.

At length, the great force assembled of Crusaders and mercenaries from Italy, southern France, Savoy, Spain, North Africa, Dalmatia, Hungary, and dozens of other, smaller principalities had been landed in the south of England and had been met and soundly defeated by King Arthur's army-now benefiting not only from the changes wrought by the professor and by Bass and Buddy Webster, but by Pete Fairley's innovations on cannon and harquebuses.