Chapter 24: The Greater Evil

My sweet Nevianne is a game little girl – relatively little, anyway. I do like that about her, both the fact that she’s game and her size. We had an operation to put together, Palégos being the target, with a limited time to do it. There I was, trying to get everything into place. There she was, bustin’ her lovely butt to try and keep up with me. I was used to that pace, or I had been, when I had been in the Army. She was brand new to it.

I simply hadn’t been thinking. I was capable of time travel, fergawshsake. When I had the fact that she needed a rest rubbed in my face, all I had to do was bump us a few weeks ahead or behind when we were. We could rest and relax for a week or two, then return to when we had been and pick up when we had left off. We could take a year off if we wanted; we just didn’t.

“You really intend to take a week off?” my true love asked, looking at me suspiciously. I don’t think she really believed me.

“Sure,” I assured her. “Want to go exploring?”

“Exploring where?” she asked. “This is as far as I’ve ever been from home! This is exploring to me.”

“It’s a vacation spot,” I agreed, “but we haven’t been vacationing here. I was about to suggest we go back and visit the Archbishop and his lovely wife. As I think about it, though, why don’t we go to Gades in lovely Iberia? Maybe we’ll see the Emperor! I’ve never been anywhere here either. We’re both equally well traveled. Who knows? Maybe we’ll see something to give us an idea.”

“And how would we get there?” she asked. “We don’t have airy planes here.”

“But I’ve been to Rome. And to Germania. I had a Eurail Pass and three weeks of leave to burn. I stopped in Britain once too.”

“Really? What’s a ‘Eurail Pass?’”

“Truly. It’s ... ummm ... I’ll have to show you. Let’s go to Rome and see the sights, and then we’ll take a boat to Massilia and get drunk on their wine.” Massilia was famous for its Marsala wine. To me, it was cooking wine, but Nevy had had some once and she had loved it. “Maybe we ould hit the beach at Nicaea. Then we can come back here and get back to work.”

She wanted to agree, but then she shook her head reluctantly. Duty first. She was that kind of a girl. “We can’t,” she sighed, “much as I would love to, much as you would. If we did, you would be thinking about the Wizard at least every other minute. It wouldn’t be fair to either of us.”

I grumbled and made pouty faces and sulked until she poked me and warned me my face was going to stay that way and then I’d be sorry.

I shot a couple passenger pigeons for dinner. We popped to Centumcellae, where we bought a few potatoes, then to Flumen Martii, where we bought a container of seafood stew. It was thick and creamy with fish and various kind of shellfish and bits of crab and lobster. It was really a dinner in itself; we could put off eating the squab until later. We ended up giving the birds away rather than letting them go to waste.

Instead of heading back to our camp, we got a room at a nice hospitia (hotel) that overlooked the river. We ate in our room and then we went to the baths, emerging well scrubbed and wearing clean clothes. We explored the shops and bought more clothing and a bag to carry them in. Then it was back to our room, to sleep in a decent bed, after quite a bit of messing around. I decided Mister Wizard had to meet his expiration date soon. I couldn’t hold out much longer. Neither could my beloved.

We had a hearty Saxon breakfast the next morning: Ale doused with honey, warm, crusty bread, creamy white butter, and crisp, spicy sausages. I wished I had my phone with me; the scene of South River, with its boats and the sun on the water was beautiful, almost as beautiful as the girl sitting across from me. I’m not sure which I’d have taken more pictures of. It would have been lots of each, to be sure.

“You realize the Wizard’s not the problem, don’t you?” I asked as Nevy bit into a sausage that squirted hot grease across the table at me.

“Sorry!” she said, embarrassed as what didn’t squirt dripped down her pretty chin. She blotted at it with a cloth. It left a red mark because the sausages were fresh from the fire and the grease was hot. “I would call the Wizard a problem, my love.”

“As it happens, there are lots of wizards around,” I reminded her. “Witches too, for that matter. Some of them just haven’t been given the opportunity to indulge their little quirks. There’s only one Legate.”

“Ahah. This is true,” she agreed, holding the next sausage down and cutting it instead of gnawing it. The Empire still hadn’t gotten around to inventing the fork.

“We should write the Duke a letter,” I suggested. “How’s the Imperial post? How long would it take to get to Burgundia?”

“Probably a six weeks?” she guessed. “Maybe seven or eight, depending on the winds. What would you say in your letter?”

“That Agus needs a new legate. What if we mailed it from the capital of Burgundy?”

“From Divio (Dijon) itself? A day. Or you could drop it at the palace itself.”

“I’ve been to Lyon, but that’s still a good hundred and seventy or eighty miles, if I recall.”

“Lyon?” she asked.

“Lugdunum. I don’t think we want to spend four or five days on the road.”

“We could go by broom,” she suggested. “Or by magic blanket.”

“Do you think they’ll have hotels as nice as this one?” I asked as we walked back to our room.”

“Probably better,” she assured me.

Nevianne

The way my lord sweetheart popped back and forth between reality streams and times was disconcerting to a poor country witch like me. I had never thought of such a thing, much less considered that it was possible. True, I was the one who had taught him to shift locations, but I never could have, had he not shown me that it could be done in the first place. I guess that meant that we made a good team, learning from each other. If we kept going at the rate we were, I wasn’t sure there was a limit to what we could do. Having once been to “Lyon,” going to Lugdunum was a casual trip for him, like going to the beach for an afternoon. I had already resigned myself to the thought that I would never be able to switch reality streams or times by myself. I comforted myself with the thought that he would never be able to summon a demon, and that soon enough I wouldn’t either. There were times when I couldn’t think of much besides messing around, even though sometimes our messing around left me so exhausted I was sure I’d never want to again.

I had grown up using Latin almost as much as I used Saxon. It and Greek and Amazigh were the official languages of the Empire. In Lugdunum, I could barely understand the language. The natives sounded like they had a mouthful of marbles, and I know we sounded like a pair of rustics. We had left early in the morning, directly after breakfast, and now it was six hours later by the sun, around two bells. We couldn’t find a blanket that was quite big enough – neither of us liked the idea of flying without turning the sides up – so we settled on a carpet. It was a very nice carpet, deep sea blue with gold-colored Greek-style scalloped edging. There was a beautifully done picture of Neptune in the middle. We still have it in our house at Mauch Chunk, as a wall hanging because it’s much too nice to walk on. Even though we were able to charm our money to make it multiply, we were still terribly overcharged, so we didn’t want to discard it. Money is money, and it’s always best not to waste it. We unrolled it right on the cobblestones in front of the rug shop and Jack thumbed his nose at the shopkeeper before we took off. The fellow was sure he’d sold us a magic rug and could have gotten even more for it.