“You are safe, now,” Bernal told Egarn. “You are as safe as anyone can be in these troubled times. That doesn’t mean there is no longer any hurry. It is too early to say whether Lant is planning a full-scale invasion or only a reconnaissance, but we must prepare for the worst. We will need some of your weapons as quickly as we can make them. Inskor will send for the best len grinders in Easlon, and they will do whatever you want.”
“Will he send for the Med of Easlon?” Egarn asked.
“Certainly not. What help would he be? One-namers will make your weapons for you. One-name scouts will use them. We won’t let Easlon’s peeragers know anything about them. Otherwise, you would quickly find yourself in the same kind of trouble we just rescued you from.”
Roszt and Kaynor were nodding their agreement.
“What we absolutely must do is crush the Lantiff,” Bernal went on. “If we don’t, we won’t have any future to plan for. A victory will buy time for us and give you a chance to tell your ideas to Arne and the League of One-Namers. They are the ones concerned with saving humanity.”
He spoke his farewell and vanished into the night.
Egarn watched him go with a feeling of emptiness. He had become fast friends with Roszt and Kaynor. The tall, gaunt scouts from the ravished Peerdom of Slorn were rootless exiles like himself and victims of the same tyranny he was fleeing from. There was a strong empathy between them; but Bernal was their leader. He had made the decisions, sternly kept them on the move, and finally led them to safety.
Now they could relax for the first time in more than a tenite. The scouts from Slorn were far better company than the dour Bernal, who had become increasingly tense and irritable as they faced one delay after another. Even Kaynor, who liked to complain, also liked to joke. Before sleeping, they sat by the fire and ate hot food—a rare treat—and Egarn listened contentedly while the other two discussed the lore of the trail and hazards faced alone in the land of an inexorable enemy. The tales fascinated him. So did the scouts. In his long years at the court of Lant, he had come to know many people well, but he had never met anyone like these refugees from Slorn.
“In my childhood, there were legends told of a Med of Lant who was a sorcerer,” Roszt said suddenly. “I suppose he was long before your time.”
Egarn said quietly, “I was his student.”
Roszt nodded understandingly. “Every med trains his successor from boyhood, or so it is said. I thought perhaps you were an exception because you don’t look like a Lantian. The sorcerer med traveled through all the neighboring peerdoms ransacking old ruins for books. He had a reputation for acquiring forgotten wisdom that extended far beyond Lant.”
“He was a great man,” Egarn said. “He not only acquired wisdom, but he was also wise enough to know when not to use it.”
Both Roszt and Kaynor seemed interested, so Egarn told them about the Old Med and his experiments. When he reached the point where things began to disappear or appear out of nowhere, he expected them to turn away with polite skepticism. Instead, they were fascinated.
“Where did the things come from?” Roszt asked.
Egarn described the Old Med’s experiment with the porkley and its astonishing result.
“Were you the man?” Kaynor asked.
Egarn changed the subject. “The Old Med made many discoveries. It was he who invented the weapon. Then—when we understood a little about what it would do—he destroyed it. He said, ‘This is far too dangerous for anyone to know about, even us.’ He was far wiser than I.”
Roszt’s mind was still fixed on the disappearances and appearances. “But where did you come from?”
“It took us many sikes to find out,” Egarn said with a wistful smile. “We worked on it together, experiment after experiment. Each of us knew half the answer, but there was no way either of us could explain his half so the other could understand. We experimented, and we searched through book after book of the Old Med’s collection. Finally the combination of my past and his present gave us the answer.”
“Gave you—what answer?” Kaynor asked blankly.
“I had traveled through time. That meant—”
He broke off. There was so little chance of their understanding him that he might as well have been talking to himself.
“Too bad you didn’t bring the Old Med’s machine with you when you escaped,” Roszt said. “You could have sent the four of us to Easlon without the trek across the mountains.”
“Could you have done that?” Kaynor asked.
“Yes. With time to experiment, I suppose I could have.”
“Could you send scouts into Lant from here and bring them back when they are ready to come? That would save tenites of weary travel each trip.”
“If he could send a few scouts, he could send an army,” Roszt observed. “That would give the Peer of Lant something to think about—an army that appeared out of nowhere, attacked her in the rear, and then vanished. It might even convince her to keep her own armies at home. What else can this machine do?”
“It can save humanity,” Egarn said.
“That’s what you were telling Bernal. How could it save humanity?”
Egarn looked at them uncertainly across the dying campfire. Their ugly faces were weathered like ancient rocks that had been exposed to the elements for eons, and their lank bodies were preposterously thin despite their hearty appetites. Their rough, leather clothing was worn and soiled from their long days and nights of travel. They seemed like the most unlikely audience possible for speculation about time travel, but Egarn had had no one to talk with for sikes—not since the Old Med died.
“If they start looking bored,” he thought, “I will plead exhaustion and totter off to bed. Either way, they will forget about it by morning.”
He told them of his plan to send someone more than three hundred years into the past to prevent a certain Johnson from inventing the Honsun Len. He was convinced, now, that the only sure way to accomplish this was to murder him, but he carefully avoiding mentioning that.
They listened attentively. They may have been simple men, but their perceptions were sharpened by the dangers they faced constantly, and they hated the Peer of Lant and her infamous deeds as much as he did.
When he finished, the two scouts were silent for a time. Then Kaynor said, “If someone traveled through time and kept this Johnson from inventing his len, what would happen to Lant, and the Ten Peerdoms, and everyone who lives here?” His gesture delineated the world as it was known to him. “What would happen to everything that is all around us right now? You say that without the Honsun Len, something decent would take its place. Where would it come from, and where would this go?”
“I don’t know,” Egarn said soberly. “Perhaps nothing at all would happen. Perhaps time has a momentum that would prevent wrenching it aside into some other path. Or we might change the past, and give humanity another chance, without affecting this doomed present at all. Perhaps every past has many possible futures and this is only one of them. I simply don’t know.” He paused. “Or perhaps ‘here and now’ might vanish the way the flame on a candle vanishes when it’s blown out.”
“And all the people with it?”
Egarn nodded. “It is the future of the human race that must concern us, not our own futures.”
Kaynor turned to Roszt. “It sounds like a job for for scouts,” he said.
“A job for us,” Roszt agreed.