"Adams, Robert - Castaways in Time 06 - Of Beginings and Endings 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Robert)

Over the years of increasingly harsh and regimented dictatorship, most once-honored holidays of all natures had been abolished and the average worker labored six-day, seventy-two-hour weeks, week after week, for twelve months of every year, paid less and ever less real income, the purchasing power of which at the best proved never enough to buy the needed amounts of the increasingly scarce and dear necessities of life. Not even the slightest surcease was available. Use of tobacco was illegal. Though rigorously discouraged and under constant surveillance, religious practice was allowed on one day each work week. Uses of alcohol, hallucinogenics, or narcotics invariably brought lengthy stays in government labor and reeducation camps if used other than under a physician's orders or, preferably, his direct supervision. Those adjudged insane or unable to work due to injury or physical impairment were killed. Only the elite-bureaucrats, military, higher echelons of police and overlapping internal intelligence departments, valued people sequestered away in certain government research projects such as Gamebird, or a very few others-were allowed to lead lives of anything save endless drudgery, mal-nourishment if not outright starvation, hopelessness, and unceasing terror.

However, within a five-day period-the last two days of an outgoing year and the first three days of the incoming one-designated the President's Birthday Celebration, most if not all strictures were eased nationwide. Government outlets gave away not only free foodstuffs to all comers, but tobacco, spirits of many sorts, items of footwear and clothing, and even supplies of hallucinogens. During these wild Days, public appearances in chemically altered states not only went unpunished but were aggressively encouraged. Travel, normally very much restricted, not only was eased during these Days but was free to those with proof of family elsewhere in the country if the round trip could be accomplished before the Days had ended. Many, drunk or spacey, went forth and about in odd attire or none at all, unnoticed and unremarked by any. There were always some killings and other violence during the Days, but usually the then-short-handed police ignored the smaller instances of violence-though they were always quick to put down mobs by deadly methods. The bodies, however slain, were just collected and delivered to the nearest rendering plant.

At the Gamebird Project, on the banks of the Potomac River, as at all the other projects run by the government, the resident workers were, though comparatively lavishly provided for and kept in luxury, sequestered, not allowed to leave the complex and grounds save in supervised groups for very necessary field trips or visits to their superiors elsewhere. Their families, if they had them, were supported and housed, but their only contacts with them through the year long were in the forms of letters (always and thoroughly censored, incoming and outgoing), videotapes (ditto) and the exceedingly rare vision-phone call. The Days represented the only chance available to the sequestered men and women for physical contact with their loved ones, and those with families invariably took advantage of the opportunity, knowing that their transportation would be assured and first-class. For this reason, the population of Gamebird during the Days dropped drastically, and for most who did stay on at the Project, there was no work and almost unlimited license. Travel about the various sectors of the vast complex, usually strictly forbidden without necessity and authorization from some lofty source, was permitted, while obvious drunkenness and odd behavior was expected.

For these many reasons, Harold Kenmore and Emmett O'Malley had felt that their best, indeed their only decent, chance to carry out their escape scheme would be upon one of the Days. Over their shirts and trunkhose, they had donned the coveralls issued them for outside work in cold or wet weather, filling the cargo pockets of these with precious metals, longevity-booster capsules, food concentrates, and other small items. Their parka pockets were likewise crammed full, then they slung on their baldrics, buckled their dagger-belts and slung their cloaks over all. They slipped their sheathed broadswords into place in the baldrics, rinsed out their mouths with grain alcohol, and splashed the rest of the stuff over their clothing before setting out from their quarters-arm in arm, singing a lewd song, and clutching a half-empty liquor bottle.

Descending to the lowest level of their part of the complex, they found the guard cubicle completely untenanted, so they just boarded one of the small electric rail cars and let it take them through the tunnel under the width of the river and into the lowest level of the southern segment of the Gamebird Project, wherein was located the experimental time-travel facility.

In the southern terminal, the guard cubicle was tenanted, but all three of the guards therein were snoring-one in a chair, two on the floor. Bottles in various stages of emptiness were scattered about the cubicle, and a pungent smell of burning rope hung thickly in the air. Emmett casually helped himself to the key to the lift, and the two scientists ascended swiftly to the level they sought, a little shocked at the ease of it all.

But that had all ended at the door to the facility itself. The guard on duty there had not been asleep or drunk or other than fully awake and alert. However, he had known Emmett by sight, had been aware of the man's relationship with the director, and had stayed unsuspicious long enough for Emmett to get in sufficiently close to deprive him quietly of consciousness.

Using the entry card his high-ranking sometime lover had given him, Emmett had let them into the huge room and, after positioning Harold on a silvery, circular plate set in the floor, he had raced about the room, going from one bulky device to the next one, pushing buttons, pulling levers, turning dials, and scrutinizing displays. At length, he had wheeled over a metal-covered console about four feet high by two feet or so square, centered it on the silvery disk, and begun to plug its thick cable into a larger device nearby, while Harold gazed blankly at the jungle of dials, knobs, buttons, gauges, and small levers of varying colors and sizes which covered the top surface.

Dr. Emmett O'Malley returned to stand beside Kenmore on the disk, and his big, freckled hands moved quickly and surely over the controls. A deep Х hum that seemed to come from everywhere and from nowhere had begun sometime while O'Malley had been back among the banks of devices and was increasing swiftly in loudness, even as a blue-green glow that did not seem to have a visible source became brighter and greener all about the chamber.

At almost the last moment in that world, Col. Dr. Jane Stone had appeared from out of the shadows, leveling at them a sonic weapon which could have been their deaths save that Emmett had preset the device to project them immediately, sufficient power had been achieved, and they had winked out of the furious woman's world even as her finger had tightened on the trigger.

The two escapees had arrived not in the past of their own world but in that of a parallel one, or so Harold Kenmore had come to believe after much study and the passing of many years. They had come to earth literally, arriving on the packed-earth floor of the lowest level of a stone defensive tower near to the bloody border between the kingdoms of England and Scotland. They had come early in the reign of King Henry VII Tudor, A.D. 1486 or 1487, in winter as in their own world, and soon after a party of Lowland Scot rievers had captured the first floor of that tower. A party of these ruffians were even at the moment of the scientists' corning in the process of brutally torturing and maiming an already wounded man in hopes that his screams of agony would bring down the remainder of the garrison from the floors above.

Infuriated by what they witnessed being done to the captive by the savage captors, Harold and Ken-more had used twenty-first-century weapons-heat-stunners, projectors which made use of sonics to cause conflagration or bring unconsciousness, depending entirely on the setting-to not only eliminate the torturers, but send the entire force of rievers spurring hard back toward Scotland, screaming mindlessly or praying, terrified at the sight of the two green-glowing man-shaped demons who had appeared from nowhere.

The tortured man, who had been lord of this place called Whyffler Hall-then an old-fashioned motte-and-bailey residence-fortification, though with a stone tower and a stockaded bailey-had died under his torture, and his widow, heirs, and retainers had assumed the two fortuitously arrived newcomers to be at least gentlemen due to the richness of their attire and the fine swords they bore and could use so well. And in those times it was well to have the strong arms and sharp blades of any fighters available, for the Lowlands to the north were all aboil and the border was all aflame from end to end.

In some hidden glen of the Highlands, a dark religion had been born, and had grown horrifically among the wild clansmen. Although its practitioners presumably had once been good, decent Christian folk and, indeed, still carried some of the hallmarks of the Faith-most notably, the Celtic Cross-their new and savage beliefs bore no relation to the worship of Christ or to that of any of the old pagan gods, either; for all that they called themselves Balderites, they did not reverence that pagan Norse deity, but rather a One who was female, had no name, and was referred to as Mother of All or, simply, the Mother.

And a singularly bloodthirsty mother she was, demanding of her followers no less than every drop of the blood of every man, woman, and child who did not immediately rush to join her minions when first they heard of her. In her name, declared her priests and her priestesses, all previous allegiances, all oaths and bonds of service and fealty were declared void; not even ties of kinship were or could be stronger than obedience to her murderous dictates. In her name, not even matricide, parricide, fratricide, so-roricide, filicide, mariticide, or other murders of near and distant kindred were wrong so long as these victims did not revere her.

Worse, the gory, lunatic religion had spread like wildfire even among the close-knit, interrelated Highland clans, tearing many apart and almost exterminating others in the fierce internecine fighting. Though many a Highland chief was slain, few of them or their immediate families became Balderites, but a few did, and under their wily, war-wise leadership, the hordes of blood-mad, ill-armed, but murderously determined men and women of the new religion swept over the hills and through the glens, killing, killing, ceaselessly killing. They slew the low and the high, male and female, withered ancients and suckling babes. The terrifying word of them flew before them, and the strong and able either fled or took to their keeps or mottes or fortified steadings with all their retainers, kindred, and kine, while the weak and helpless rushed to join immediately they came in proximity to the red-handed worshipers of the Mother.

Despite their numbers, few of these Highland Balderites were in any way well armed, and they lacked cannon or even more primitive siege-engines of any description, so if any keep, hold, motte, or steading could withstand their initial attack, could beat back the horde with casualties, the Balderites were as likely as not to move on in search of more helpless prey. Those Highland folk who survived their furious rush southward did so in one of three ways: by being swift, by being strong and determined, or by joining them. All others died, their lifeblood going to soak the ground and help to appease the insatiable bloodthirst of the Mother of All. By then in their thousands, the horde of fanatics swept against, lapped about the walls of Edinburgh itself, but fewer left than had arrived, so they did not long remain. However, their numbers were swelled in the Lowlands. The Chief of Grant brought all his kin and clansfolk to become Balderites; so too did the chiefs of Kerr, Hay, Mac Adam, Kennedy, and not a few smaller clans and septs.

From behind the stout walls of Edinburgh, the King of Scotland called upon his earls to raise an army, sent words of warning to the English border lords, and prayed speedy assistance against this heathen menace from everyone of whom he and his council could think-King Henry of England and Wales, Ard-Righ Brian VI of Ireland and all the other righs of that island, the Regulus of the Isles (which domain was just then in one of its phases of not being an actual part of the Kingdom of Scotland), the King of France, the King of Burgundy, the Holy Roman Emperor, the King of Aragon and Leon, the Caliph of Granada, the Grand Duke of Portugal, and the King of Denmark and Norway. He even dispatched a letter to Rome beseeching that a Crusade be preached against the Balderites. Then he hunkered down to await developments and troops.

While he crouched there, powerless to do aught but hold the walled capital without the aid of the earls and other magnates of the feudal kingdom, the Kennedy Clan and its septs, all fiery with the zeal of new converts, not only sent boatloads of slavering Balderites to carry the message of the Mother to the folk of Northern Ireland, but made so bold as to launch seaborne attacks against the islands and coastal lands held by the Clan MacLean and the Regulus of the Isles and that virtual if unnamed king's many dependent clans.

In the Irish Kingdom of Ulaid, already racked by civil war, the Balderites were able to establish at least a foothold, but the grim Northern Ui Neills to the west of them lined their rocky coastline with poles bearing Balderite heads, stakes on which rotted impaled Balderite bodies, and frames whereon were stretched flayed skins of Balderites.

The Regulus, Iain, already in cold fury against the Balderites because of the losses they had cost him in his mainland holdings, especially in the Inverness country, called upon his vassals at Lewis, Skye, and Uist for their famous, infamous, dreaded Scots-Dane axemen-those professional mankillers known in Ireland as galloglaiches-and remorselessly held his own at Islay against the Kennedys and the rest while he awaited the arrival of enough force to counterattack.

Meanwhile, guided by veteran rievers of Clans Grant, Armstrong, Kerr, and Hay, mobs of Balderites were religiously butchering both across the length and width of the Scottish Lowlands and pressing over the border into England. It had been one such group, that one just then being led by the very Chief of Grant, which had been sent off in shrieking terror by Drs. Harold Kenmore and Emmett O'Mai-ley.

That had not been the first Balderite incursion against Whyffler Hall, nor was it the last. Occasionally reinforced by trickles of harried survivors of other Balderite raids, the two twenty-first-century men and the Whyffler family and their retainers continued to hold the hall and its nearer environs for almost two more years before the new king, Henry VII Tudor, led his host north to the beleaguered border lands, scoured them clean of the Celtic hordes, then crossed the border to join with the combined forces of the Scottish earls near Edinburgh.

The pleas of the King of Scotland had been heeded. In Rome, the then-Pope had sent word to his bishops to preach a holy crusade against these savage pagans in Scotland, and even as King Henry's English-Welsh-Norman-Breton-Angevin host marched toward Edinburgh, ships were landing parties of crusaders along the east coast-descendants of Vikings from the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, Goths from Sweden, Frisians and Flemings, Burgundians, French, Leonese, Portuguese, Granadans, fighting men representing most of the small states that made up the Holy Roman Empire, a few Switzers, some Italians of various kinds, Castilians, Navarrese, Moors, and even a few scarred, black-skinned noble knights of the Kingdom of Ghana.

For all the awesome forces at their command, nonetheless, the two royal allies did not anticipate either a quick or an easily won victory, for they now faced an aggregation of fanatics who, while they might retreat before superior force, had never been known to yield or surrender under even pain of instant death for themselves or loved ones. By that point in time, the survivors of the rampage down from the Highlands-birthplace of the murderous heresy-now were not only well armed but were become veteran warriors-younger and elder, men and women. They were well supplied in all save gunpowder and the priests' powder necessary to its fabrication, and, thanks principally to the conversions of some of the Lowlander chiefs, they now held some castles and strongpoints around which they could rally in the face of attack.