“Let’s get back with the others,” I said. “I’ll help carry the load.”
He looked a little stunned. Maybe he was just surprised, or perhaps he was literally stunned from the blow to his head. He tied the bundles together neatly and quickly with a rope, and I took the larger of the two and slung it across my shoulder.
We stepped back on the road, and the people near us quickened the pace, or slowed, to give us a wide berth.
“What’s the matter?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone else give you a hand?”
He looked confused. “Hand?”
Idioms don’t translate that well. “Help. Aid.”
He grunted philosophically. “They are Sons of Israel, whose false temple is Jerusalem. The true temple was at Gerizim. It was destroyed by Yohanan Girhan called Hyrcanus a hundred winters ago, and now the Holy One wanders the Earth without a home.”
Now it was my turn to look confused. This did not refer to anything I knew from history books or Bible stories. “What, ah, is your kindred?” I used the word genus, which is vaguer, and could mean anything from race to nation to species.
“Ah! I am the son of Sahir, of the sons of Pincus, of the line of Issachar. And how should this servant address his master?”
I was not used to Middle Eastern exaggerations of politeness, so it took me a moment to realize he was asking my name.
“Jonathon, son of Jacob,” I said. It seemed odd to me that, though I was born in a hemisphere not discovered yet, three millennia away, my name and the name of my father sounded normal here. “At your service, sir.” I finished, and realized that his form of courtesy was not so alien after all.
We shook hands. Or rather, when I extended my hand, he wrapped his fingers around my wrist, which was almost the same.
“Why do you walk the road?” He asked.
“I am lost.”
“You must be very lost,” he said wryly.
“I am seeking Bethlehem of Judea,” I said.
“You mean ‘Bethlehem’?” My ear could detect no difference of pronunciation, but it seemed I said it wrongly. “It is but a short walk hence. This is the road. Where are you from?” He was looking at my blond hair.
“I am from the farthest north.”
“I have heard of your land! No wonder your hands are softer than a woman’s. It is so peaceful there, so unwarlike, that men kill themselves out of boredom, merely to idle away the time! Yes? I thought Farthestnorth just a story.” He had heard me as if I had said Farthest North as one word, which in his tongue was Hyperborea.
I grunted, thinking of deaths from drunk drivers and drug overdoses and heart disease caused by obesity. Indirectly, these were all forms of suicide by self-indulgence, which was another word for boredom. “Do you know, there could be some truth to that story.”
“I am northern too, but not so far as Hyperborea. That is why the sons of Israel were pleased to see the Romans fall on me. They walk apart from us, so that any watching Romans know we are easy prey.”
“That is cowardly,” I said. But anger was mingled with pity when I said it. I was from a nation that had never been conquered, dropped down in the middle of a land that had been conquered by practically everyone.
Ben Sahir assumed a wry, philosophical expression. “If it lets them move along the roads without being robbed, who can say a dark word of them? We treat these Jewish swine the same when they are in Shomron.”
Now I understood. “You are a Samaritan! Are you good?”
“Ah. None is good save God alone. When the Romans savage the sons of Israel who walk our roads, we stand aside and look on. Better them than us. And what else can we do? When you fight the Romans, these trees grow fruit.” He nodded at a group of bloodstained and offal-stained crosses topping the rise by the roadside ahead. There were ten crosses together, empty at the moment. But the number of crows hovering in the air, and strutting proudly along the ground, fearless of man, was ominous.
“Men should not treat each other so,” I said.
“As for that, it will be the way the world is until the he comes, the Christ.”
That last almost made me stumble. “What do you know of the Christ?”
He rolled his eyes. “Is that not the word in Greek? We call him Messiah.”
“That is the word. What do they say of him?”
“Those who count the generations say the world enters a new age soon.”
“What does that mean? Count the generations?”
“Count the years to the new age. From Father Abraham to David the King fourteen generations, and from King David to the Babylonian Exile fourteen, and it has been fourteen generations since then, so as history waxes and wanes like the moon, the time of waxing is nigh, and the Messiah will be born. He will smite the Romans and the heretical Southerners, and rebuild the one true Temple at Gerizim. The greatest conqueror of all time!” Ben Sahir shrugged. “Of course, those who count the generations also said the Messiah was due three generations ago, but then others said we should omit Ochoziah, Joas, and Amasiah from the king lists, because of their wickedness, and that God adds another generation of waiting for every evil generation. You know how astrologers argue. We wait, and they give a date, and it rolls by, and nothing changes, and the Romans hang out more fruit for the crows to eat. I will believe in the Messiah when I see him with these eyes, not before.”
“You think he is coming to throw out the Romans? Is that all?”
“Isn’t that enough? No human power can defeat them. Should we hope for something even greater? Not just to restore our kingdom, but also to conquer theirs? Ah! Strange and wondrous indeed if all the Roman world bent the knee and served the God of Abraham! But that will never happen. Never.”
“Don’t be so sure…” I muttered.
“Be that as it may,” said ben Sahir, “My father says the Greeks were worse than the Romans. The Greeks did not enforce their own laws. And they use their slave-boys as girls.”
“Uh? Greeks here?”
“You must be from very far north. It was only fifty or sixty years ago. Hyrcanus and Aristobulus fought for the throne when the Queen died, and Pompey the Great aided Hyrcanus, and the rule passed to the Herodians, and Romans, who came as guests, did not leave, but stayed as masters. And it is not as if all the Greeks living here suddenly vanished, or went home.
“Before that, it was Alexander the Great,” he said. He half-smiled, but his voice was infinitely weary. “Before that, Cyrus the Great. And before that, Nebuchadnezzar the Great. All the great men of history march through our land to tread upon us.
“There is rebellion in the air,” he continued. “The Romans can smell it. They have conquered everyone, so they know the smell of mutiny growing ripe. Why do you think they declared tax-gathering time? Never before have we been ordered to march the roads to the houses of our fathers and pay the tax there. It is not Roman law. Come, you are learned man, I can tell from your outlandish accent! You make the mistakes learned men make, you learn the language from books. Why do you think they are taxing us this way, now, at this time? Forcing everyone out of hearth and home?”
I shook my head. I was already sorry I had volunteered to carry his load. The sun was declining to the west, and it was cooler now, but my legs were aching and blisters were developing. What I would have given for a bottle of insect repellant! None of the short and wiry people around me seemed to be having trouble. Call it the soft living of the Hyperboreans. I was too out of breath to ask.
“You might think it was to scatter any whispering groups of young men daydreaming of the days of Maccabaeus,” he said. “I think it is to show us. To show us we are whipped dogs. To show us they could march us to Egypt, if they wished, or off the edge of the world.”
After that, I had no more breath for talking, and we trudged on in silence.
Ben Sahir’s ‘short walk’ turned out to be almost farther than my aching legs could carry me.
As we neared the village, the Romans had more corpses on d
isplay, but these must have been of people of a higher class than traitors and slaves, because instead of crucified bodies, they displayed severed heads hanging by their hair from the wooden poles of a small fortress surrounded by a ditch outside the town. The fortress had a distinctly Old West look to it, which I did not expect, being made of sharpened logs set upright, with a dry-moat around it.
It was called a village, but it had at one time been larger, because I could see the ruins of walls half toppled over, and naked gate posts with no gate but an ox yoke lashed across the top. The huts and hovels, some of stone, some of mud, some of timber, occupied less than one-fourth of the land inside the crumbled line of the ruined walls.
I should mention the climate was not what I expected. Perhaps I had seen too many Hollywood Biblical dramas, and so I was thinking everyone would be dressed in burnooses, and the land would be desert. They were dressed more like Greeks, in tunics and cloaks. I was surprised at the number and size of the trees, and size of the fields both cultivated and fallow. Maybe it was a climate cycle, or maybe the Romans would cut down all the trees one day soon to make more crucifixes, but at the moment, there were trees, and many houses made of wood. The rooftops were flat, and many had little tents or sails on the top of them. I was not sure what they were used for.
Ben Sahir parted ways with me, explaining that, if I ate pork, I could not stay at the same inn as the “clean” people.
But he gave me a few coins, and pointed at a large house done in a clearly Greek style, as if it had been yanked up from Athens and dropped down here, with decorative amphorae and statues of gods and goddesses on the roof eaves.
There were before the doors also stones decorated with gods with wings for ears at the ground level, but these had been defaced by some vandal. Or maybe it was an art critic, because I saw the broken stone penises, large and erect, which the vandals had hammered away from the stone. There was a wooden sign nearby with two severed hands, a left and a right, nailed to it, and some inscription in Latin and Greek and Aramaic I was too tired to puzzle out. Probably a pragmatic Roman epigram on keeping one’s art criticisms to oneself.
Something in the sight of the careful craftsmanship of the obscene statues seemed to me to be as grotesque and inhuman as all the images of torture and conquest, but on a subtler level. What kind of world would adore as sacred such demeaning images, and maim and kill to preserve them?
I stepped into the common room, which was crowded, practically packed shoulder to shoulder, but everyone stepped out of my way when I approached a man standing on a chair, whom I took to be the landlord here.
He was arguing and cursing with knot of bellowing men around him, or perhaps it was an impromptu auction, because all the men were waving fistfuls of money, or something that looked like necklaces of beads, small coppery nuggets of uniform size. I did not know anyplace from history books in this quarter of the world that used beads for money, but maybe some things slipped through the cracks of history, or were not written down, or not remembered.
For some reason, the shouting fell silent when I walked up. Maybe they thought I was a giant. I mentioned before how no one here was as tall as my shoulder, and some were shorter than my elbow. Also, while I was not exactly stout, I was certainly well-fed, and so I was broader than everyone here.
I showed the landlord the coins ben Sahir had given me. I had no idea of their value. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.” I said, “There is no room in the Inn. Do you have a stable out back, where you put little kids with glowing halos? Or shepherds who hear voices from heaven, and three wise men from the East?”
He said, “There is room for you, stranger. For strangers like you. We have a room set aside.” He whistled, and a little kid with straight black hair that gleamed as if oiled can trotting out of a short door leading to some sort of enclosed yard where they were cooking a fatted calf over an open pit. (I should mention all the doors were short, and I barked my head on the ceiling beams more than once.)
The kid wore a dirty smock and an iron ring around his neck. The bellhop, or rather, slave-boy, did not look me in the eye, but beckoned, and I followed. He led me across the courtyard—in this style of building, all the windows face inward, toward a common courtyard, and there are no windows in the outer walls to tempt robbers. Of course, a motivated robber could just shoulder his way through the walls, which were thin boards roughly cut, daubed with just enough plaster to keep out the wind. Stupid as it sounds, I was repeatedly surprised at how rude and handmade everything looked.
The bellhop showed me to a room the size of a closet, which stank with the rich, ripe odor of the many previous inhabitants, and pointed to a straw mat crawling with lice. The room was also equipped with a ewer of water, unless I was mistaken and it was the chamber pot.
“Presidential suite, eh?” I said to myself in English. I showed the bellhop the coins which the landlord had not taken. In Greek I said, “Do I pay now? Pay later?”
I was shocked when he replied in English. His accent was odd, clipped, almost as if he were used to speaking at a much faster rhythm of syllables. “The natives deem it bad luck to take money from time travelers.”
I spun on him and made to grab him by the throat. But his metal collar made a loud popping noise, I got a shock to my hand and arm like I had grabbed an electric eel. I stumbled backward and sat down heavily, breathing deeply and hoping the dancing black spots in my eyesight would not overwhelm me.
The little noises from the rooms to either side, voice and motions, fell silent, as if the Inn were holding its breath.
“You are late Twentieth Century, or Early Twenty-First.” The kid said in his flat, strangely-accented voice. “Wristwatches and telephonics of that design were not made after the Endarkening. And you have made several temporal disturbances which no one, not even a Revisionist of the Second Age would have made. You are a pre-Nebogipfel chrononaut. A rare find!”
I realized that the people in the room to either side were not holding their breath, or, at least, not willingly. The silence was deeper. I could see over his shoulder where the cook pit in the courtyard was. The reflections of the flames on the wall should have been leaping. Instead, they were frozen. Little bugs in their clouds were as still as a photograph. It was as if someone had hit the pause button on the video of the universe.
“Who are you?” I managed to say.
“I am a mote of the Cosmic Sculpture of the Sixth Era of Time Travel.”
“So, everyone in that common room knew I was a time traveler?”
“Of course. Bethlehem, at the time of the retrograde motion of Jupiter and Saturn in conjunction? This is the most thickly investigated spot of all history. But no one has ever found and killed such an early chrononaut of your strata.”
“Killed? Wait a minute! I have not done anything to you–”
“Have you not?” And now the flat, unemotional accent, if anything, grew even flatter and more monotone, and the kid’s eyes, which suddenly looked very old and very wise indeed, bored into mine. “The man whose burdens you carried was fated to be helped by someone coming a moment later down the road, whose daughter, by that happenstance, he would met and wed, from whose bloodline sages and sacerdotes would spring, and military leaders, including the founders of an Antarctic Republic in the Forty-Second Century, after the time of the Great Thaw, and the discoveries of polar zodiacal energy will enable the founding of colonies on other worlds. All of that line and its manifold accomplishments you obliterated with your thoughtless blundering. Millions of lives have been lost, or changed. You have no instruments for detecting temporal potentialty! You do not know who is important, and who is not, who is crucial to history, and who is not.”
With this, be pulled the collar off his neck, so he held a C-shaped bend of metal, looking like a horseshoe magnet. He pointed the ends at me. “You, for example, have no potential at all. You will never return to your life, and have no effect on history. Therefore nothing remains but to–”
The room was no bigger than a closet, and mote-boy, Cosmic or not, was no taller than my waist. I made a lunge for him, grabbed him by both arms, and smashed his head into the walls. To my surprise, it worked. I was sure he would zap me with some hidden superweapon if I moved. To my bigger surprise, the wall broke instead of the kid’s head. The boards were thin and the plaster, or maybe it was mud, was less than a half-inch thick. His head went all the way threw up to the neck.
The biggest surprise of all was when I yanked him back inside, and realize I was holding a dead body. The top of his skull had been burned away, his face blackened, as if his head had been thrust into a lightning bolt. I could smell cooked brains. I was confused. This was not something merely smashing a head through a thin board could do.
The pause button on the universe unpaused. Firelight in the distance started flickering, and noise of man and bird and beast started up again with a roar. I grasped the semicircle of folding metal the kid had been wearing as a necklace, thinking there was a gun in it, some futuristic laser gizmo which had accidentally gone off. But there was no button, no trigger, no muzzle, nothing I could see.
But I heard a noise in the air above. It sounded like something larger than bird, moving. I stuck my head through the hole—hardly the first stupid and impulsive thing I’d done that day&—and saw only a shadow. It was manlike, but larger than a man, and it held a long wand or tube in its hands as it disappeared into the clouds of sunset. It seemed to be riding a horse, or perhaps a flying motorbike. Even as I saw the figure, I was not sure if it had not been a trick of my eyes, a shape in the cloud. Another time traveler, from some era after the Sixth? Someone who did not like the way these events turned out?
Professor Mandic had mentioned that, in order to avoid paradoxes, or minimize them, the time travelers would wait to the last minute. That meant something was happening now that the Mote kid had been trying to stop.
It was then that I heard singing. They were not the Mormon Tabernacle choir, but they were better than an average dozen men from my time would have been, because we only sing on Sundays, if that. Whenever we want song, we don’t have to do it for ourselves, we snap on a radio. Even people from my grandmother’s day were all better singers (so she had insisted once) then the folks of my generation.