Chapter 2: Vacation in Paradise

Tanda Havra slid through the tent flap like a soft vagrant breeze and stepped outside into the brisk air of the early morning, the sun still behind the wall of mountains to the east. She took a deep breath and sighed with contented pleasure.

She was a young woman in her mid-twenties, medium tall, with dusky skin, black hair and brown eyes so dark that they were almost black.

She'd thought her husband demented when he'd proposed this trip to her. "A belated honeymoon," he told her. Then he had to describe what a honeymoon was and that had been just one more thing to add to the very, very long list of things about her husband that were out of this world.

Of course, Tanda was, in all ways, just as much from another milieu as he was. Except she was here on purpose and he was here by accident.

By rights, he should have been dead. That he lived was the result of two acts of fate. The first one was that the paratemporal conveyor that had brought him and six others to this place and time hadn't been one operated by the Paratime Police, and secondly she, a cultural anthropologist on loan to the Paracops from the University of Dhergabar, had discovered him and his wards.

Not that she was actually a citizen of the Home Time Line, as they called it. No, she was from a very primitive version of Earth, one where civilization had only slowly developed. Her world, in fact, could best be described as "undeveloped." She'd been born into a Stone Age village, where the most dangerous weapons were stone knives and spears with stone points. They'd mastered fire but not bows and arrows. They didn't even have spear throwers.

She'd learned to hunt as a young girl. She was relatively tall, thin and dark, while the rest of her village were short, fair-skinned and heavy. It was no secret that a raiding party had come through nine moons before she'd been born and that her mother had been raped by some of the raiders.

After Tanda's mother died bearing Tanda, her father had turned his face from his daughter and she'd had to fend for herself. She'd done so, right up until the final break when he'd turned his back on her at the village fire. That hadn't turned out like her father had hoped, because the Old Women of the village had laughed at him.

So she'd taken a job offer with a party of traders who had been passing through her village. That had led her to where she was today. She'd been gathered in as a possible recruit by Home Time Line traders. For most of those recruited, they would spend a few years at menial labor, doing jobs that those of the Home Time Line wouldn't do for themselves, then be returned home, relatively wealthy -- but shorn of their memories of their experiences.

For Tanda it had been different. She was, literally, one in a million, a genius for her time. She'd galloped through all of the classes they'd let her take, until one day she was a University of Dhergabar graduate cultural anthropologist. Only later did she learn that if she'd ever shown any interest in a technical field, she'd have lost her memories and been returned home at once.

But she hadn't.

While she was a beginning university student, a Paracop conveyor had picked up a hitchhiker on Fourth Level, Hispano-Columbian Subsector. That man had been a local policeman, who was subsequently, entirely inadvertently, deposited in a time line of the Fourth Level, Styphon's House Subsector. That is if you want to call beating a Paracop to the draw inadvertent.

Calvan Morrison had been ripped from his home time line and dropped into a time line where civilization was about where his had been around 1620, roughly three hundred years before he'd been born. He'd landed in a place called Hostigos, a princedom in the kingdom of Hos-Harphax.

Styphon was the god, his priests told people, who could control the demons in fireseed -- gunpowder. The priests of Styphon had spent a few hundred years building a rat's nest of kingdoms, princedoms, duchies and baronies, all at war with each other. Plots generated plots; bloodletting started blood feuds. It was hell, if you had to live there, but heaven if you had a monopoly on firearms and gunpowder.

Styphon had tried to move into Hostigos, ruled by Prince Ptosphes. Prince Ptosphes had considered his options and come to the reluctant conclusion that the alternatives were slavery or death. He chose to resist, coming under Styphon's Ban: that is, no man could sell fireseed or fireseed weapons to Hostigos except on pain of death.

Everyone who had been put under Styphon's Ban had buckled -- or died. Certainly no one expected a minor prince of a minor principality of a minor kingdom in one small corner of the world to successfully resist.

When Calvan Morrison showed the Hostigi how to make fireseed without the priests of Styphon, he became Lord Kalvan. He won battle after battle, defeating one powerful enemy after another. Finally he'd taken control of most of the kingdoms of the Hos-Harphax and had been declared a Great King himself.

More wars, more battles and Styphon was thrown down as well as the other jealous Great Kings. All were forced to either bow to Kalvan on bended knee -- or die. Kalvan went from a corporal in the Pennsylvania State Police to a Lord, and thence to Great King and finally High King within two years.

She'd been caught up in that almost from the very first. The Paratime Police wanted to catch the man who'd shot one of their cops; thousands of man-hours of labor had been expended tracking down where Calvan Morrison had exited the Paratime conveyor that had accidentally picked him up. They'd found the location, then the Deputy Chief of the Paratime Police, Verkan Vall, went in person to do his duty: kill the man who knew the Paratime Secret.

Home Time Line was undoubtedly correct, Tanda thought. The knowledge that men walked the world from another time and place without the knowledge of their fellows would shatter most civilizations.

Home Time Line was like a giant leech, sucking sustenance from every place it went. They were fairly benign with most inhabited time lines, mostly buying art and grains, but on time lines that had no people they were rapacious -- they did what they wanted and took all that they wanted. But always, always, they watched and monitored every time line with people present.

For a long time Tanda had simply accepted that as the way things were; she'd been conditioned, she eventually learned, never to think about it. It turned out that such conditioning was quite robust -- until the world started to turn to shit around you, and then a person's will to survive rapidly broke down the conditioning. That had happened to her.

She'd been co-opted as a student to study an adjacent timeline to Kalvan's. That timeline had quickly become a very dangerous place to be, and after a few moons she'd been pulled out and placed on Kalvan's timeline itself.

Tanda had been fascinated with what happened when a primitive culture, like the one she'd been born into, met a more advanced culture. Sometimes the primitive culture imploded and died in a few years. Other times the primitive culture survived; sometimes, it even thrived. It was something she wanted to learn: what made the difference between life and death for entire peoples.

After the Peace of Hostigos had settled over Hostigos and the rest of the known world, she'd gotten a permanent posting with the Lost Ruthani, remnants of the original inhabitants of this continent, before the Zarthani had come. The Zarthani had been Indo-European migrants who, for some unknown reason, had decided to move east, instead of west. They'd crossed the Bering Straits, traveling quickly through the cold regions and eventually arrived in what Kalvan would have thought of as the Pacific Northwest.

There they'd begun to war with the Ruthani tribes. That war had lasted for more than two thousand years now. First the Zarthani had triumphed because they had iron swords and iron armor. They went on to develop better bows, then steel, then crossbows.

The Ruthani had been capable warriors, but had no technology with metals except gold and copper, the softer, more pliable metals. The continual wars spurred the Zarthani to one technical innovation after another. The Ruthani had trouble trying to adopt to the simplest technology of their attackers, although they used weapons and armor that they stole from the bodies of their enemies, they had no understanding at all of what it took to make their own.

Eventually the descendents of the Zarthani occupied much of North America south of the Cold Lands and north of the southern deserts. They followed the big rivers east and south, eventually reaching the Great Eastern Ocean.

The Ruthani were relegated to the less habitable places that the Zarthani hadn't wanted to bother with. That consisted of the lands east of the coastal strip in the Northwest, and the fringes of the Cold Lands to the north, and in the southwestern deserts.

In the west were the remnants of the old city-states of Zarthan, under a man who called himself King, but who was nominally first-among-equals. The current king had been bequeathed a legacy of gradually more desperate fights to survive that had resulted in more unity in the city states than ever before.

The Lost Ruthani, the people she had been living with, were remnants of the original native tribes that had been pushed into the southwestern deserts, caught there between the Zarthani to the east, west and north and the Mexicotal to the south.

The Mexicotal were protected by hundreds of miles of trackless desert; no man rode south and survived. The Lost Ruthani were also protected by the desert, but it was a precarious existence, caught as they were between two millstones.

Kalvan cast down Styphon, and in the last days of their power in the east, the survivors of Styphon had gathered themselves together, led by a few of their younger, more ambitious priests, and traveled to Zarthan on the Great Western Ocean.

Tanda has been content, living a simple village life. She was a tribal herbalist, living in a village called Mogdai, in what Calvan knew as central Arizona.

She'd known war was brewing. It had been no secret that the priests of Styphon were conspiring with the King of Zarthan and the God-King of the Mexicotal to once again go to war against High King Kalvan.

It had seemed insane, on the face of it. The Mexicotal were a seriously sick race. Priests, nobles and soldiers lived off the fruits of the labors of millions of serfs and slaves. Their gods treated the Mexicotal with special blessings: their lands grew not just one crop a year, but in many places they harvested two and sometimes three crops a year. The God-Kings of the Mexicotal kept the population in check by the simple expedient of taking a few people every moon-quarter up atop one of their pyramids and cutting out their living hearts.

As popular as that was, cutting out the hearts of prisoners or foreigners was even more so. Had it been a handful it would have been repugnant. But there were hundreds of Mexicotal cities, thousands of towns and tens of thousand villages. All had pyramids; all had sacrifices four times a moon. Two million people a year died on the pyramids, they'd learned.

Tanda had thought she was safe. The Paracops were in overall charge with the local operation farmed out to University of Dhergabar scholars. They would observe and when the soldiers began to march they'd pass a warning and Tanda would have had plenty of time to escape. Or so she'd thought.

Except there was one thing that most Home Time Line people seemed to have in common: arrogance. The second most common attribute was greed. Thus, the representative of the University in Zarthan was collecting the money for non-existent spies and pocketing it. The scholar who was Tanda's boss was merely incompetent and cheap: his recon probe had stopped working and he hadn't fixed it, or let anyone know that there was a problem.

Sure, she was supposed to feel good about the fact that her boss had his memories wiped and was happily cleaning toilets down on the Fifth Level, in a mine office somewhere, and that the scholar in Zarthan had been taken out and shot.

But the fact remained she'd had a finger-width's warning. Ten minutes. She'd gathered herself and a young woman who occasionally helped her with her herb gathering and they had run to offer to help fight for the village.

She was, after all, Tanda Havra: that meant Kills from Behind in the local language. When she'd learned what her name meant here, she'd shaken her head ruefully. Who would have thought that the words her people used would have any existence here? Or be so different in meaning?

One thing led to another as she'd fought to escape the village. The village elders had elected to die in defense of the village, even though they had to know it was a futile gesture. The few remaining old people and young children were sent away, with Tanda to protect them.

She'd been away from the party, hunting, when some Mexicotal soldiers had captured the party. When she learned that, she dropped the deer she'd killed with her knife, stalked into camp and killed one of the soldiers. Tazi, girl of Mogdai village, had knocked one of the soldiers down and Ulnai, boy of Mogdai, had put his knife into the soldier many times, until he was dead.

The third soldier, his fireseed weapon empty, turned and ran -- off a cliff in the dark.

She'd realized more soldiers were coming and went to meet them, intent on giving the survivors of Mogdai a chance to escape. She'd seen a man she thought was an officer, and lunged at him with her knife held low for a killing stroke.

She laughed, deep and hearty, at the memory. It had been a fair fight! A fair fight! A draw, though! He'd knocked her knife away, but she'd used the time to wrap her fingers around his throat. She didn't know to this day if she would have lived long enough to kill him. Instead, a soldier had screamed for her to surrender to the High King.

She'd let go... and a heartbeat later realized just how many rifles had been aimed at her. Honestly, the man she would eventually marry would likely have survived if she hadn't lifted her hands away from his throat... and she'd have died.

But that wasn't what happened.

It wasn't just an ordinary Hostigi patrol she'd found: the patrol had found something on their own: a man, a woman, and five girls. She'd known almost at once they were from Out Time, because the man she'd attacked carried a repeating rifle, where none existed on the Kalvan Time Line. In fact, a lot of the gear the party carried didn't belong on the Aryan-Transpacific time line.

Tuck had already mislaid the woman and the woman's daughter. Everything Tanda had heard about what had happened since young Lieutenant Gamelin's patrol had met the strangers had screamed "time travelers" to Tanda. Sure enough, she contacted her base and found out that was the case. Except they hadn't been brought by the Paracops, but by someone else. No one knew what had happened to the woman and her daughter, but the consensus was that they were dead.

Worse, it was clear that the efforts by the unknowns to retrieve the man, Tuck, and the four remaining girls ended the instant Tanda joined the group. Which meant that the others knew her cover as well.

She sighed.

It had been a busy three quarters of a year after that. There had been battles -- lots and lots of battles. People near and dear to her had died in those battles... and tens of thousands of their enemies. Tuck's style of combat was a mixture of raids and ambushes and sometimes both at once. He fought against enemies who assumed their enemies would meet them on a battlefield, line up in nice neat lines and slug it out. Tuck's tactics had been devastating.

Her orders were clear: she was supposed to have killed Tuck and the girls the first chance she had. That had been the end of her conditioning, even if she hadn't known it at the time. Verkan Vall, now the Chief of the Paratime Police, had explained it to her personally. "Conditioning will convince you to do something you accept. As soon as your conscience starts talking to you in opposition to that conditioning, the conditioning starts to break down. The more your conscience talks, the faster the breakdown."

He'd smiled benignly at her, making her want to beat him to death. "Think of it as a final fail-safe, so that you can't be ordered to do something truly against your will."

It was all history, now. She'd fallen in love with Tuck within days of their meeting. When he'd given a grand and wonderful name to the daughter of a village woman who had died birthing the girl, she relaxed to the inevitable. She smiled at the thought. Not that she hadn't made him work to find out what she'd decided!

The first rays of the sun speared through the low-hanging clouds, revealing more and more around her, including the cascade of water off a cliff that was thousands of feet tall. This was Tuck's idea of "scenery."

She knew she still resented so much of what the Paracops and Home Time Line people had done to her. They lied, they misdirected, and they didn't mention things they didn't feel she had any need to know. She'd heard tales of the Great Canyon of the Muddy River. When Tuck had said they were going to see it, she had yawned. She'd seen plenty of canyons!

He'd insisted on a blindfold and walked her to the edge and held her arm, as she took off the blindfold and looked down. If they'd been alone, she'd have taken him then and there. The view had been primal, striking her at a level she didn't even understand. Unsurpassed beauty!

And now, here, in the lands of the King of Zarthan, existed a mountain valley of equally unsurpassed beauty. She'd seen plenty of mountain valleys, too, but absolutely nothing like this one. Even Lady Inisa, lent to her by Queen Elspeth as a companion, had stood gaping in wonder when they first looked into this valley.

Here and now, Tuck appeared next to her. He grinned. "Pretty, isn't it?"

"This place should be preserved at all costs," Tanda told him.

"Freidal has seen this place. He agrees it's pretty, for sure. However, when it comes to preserving things at all costs, he has other priorities."

Tanda nodded, understanding. She'd never truly understood it; she suspected a great many nobles didn't understand it either. But true nobles, men like Freidal, her husband, men like the High King and Count Tellan of Outpost -- knew their greatest duties to the people they ruled were two-fold: to keep them safe and treat them fairly.

King Freidal ruled about two million people in the loosely allied city-states of Zarthan. The recent wars had brought them closer than at any time in a thousand years, but it was an uneasy relationship. Even now, though, the threat of the God-King was doing yeoman work to keep the disparate groups close knit -- now, all men knew just how many lived in the Heartlands of the God-King. Two hundred million people, plus ten million soldiers and another million in what had once been their Northern Regime.

Tanda smiled. The Northern Regime had fallen to her husband -- well, half of it anyway, a quarter had risen in the High King's name and the High King had taken the last of the four relatively large towns in the north. No one knew for sure exactly how many of the God-King's soldiers fell in the war, but the number was probably at least one and a half million.

It was enough to make a person dizzy!

Tanda saw Tuck glance at the tents around them. A half dozen sentries walked the outer perimeter of the camp, another half dozen were gathered around the fire, drinking the local tea to keep off the early morning chill.

"Care for a walk, Tanda?"

She nodded, curious.

Four men fell in behind them as they walked from their perch on a small rise about a mile from where that tremendous fall of water splashed into a basin. From the vegetation it was clear that if the wind blew very much, quite a lot of water soaked everything within range.

Tuck walked steadily and when a vagrant breeze set that awesome stream of water drifting their way, he took her hand but kept walking. They went another hundred yards, their guards still in tow; everyone now soaked to the skin.

Tuck turned to the senior lieutenant of the guard. "Lady Tanda and I want some privacy. We'll be there, do you understand?" He pointed at a small promontory a hundred yards ahead, barely visible in the misting drizzle from the waterfall.

The guard looked at his Duke bleakly. He had no choice, of course, no matter how dangerous on the face of it this was. Tanda walked further with Tuck. The spray went from a fine mist to a heavy drizzle. It was cold and uncomfortable.

He stopped and lifted his head towards the place where the water went off the cliff above them, quite invisible in the spray. "Do you think they can hear us?"

Tanda grimaced, knowing who "they" were, when Tuck talked like this.

"Tuck, my former boss is an honorable man. He said they would never monitor us, without telling me first. The sky is still blue, the grass is still green."

"The water won't mess up the equipment? The sound of the waterfall won't mess up the pickup?"

She shrugged. "Tuck, I was never permitted to learn about such things. You probably know the answers better than I do. Assume that yes, they can hear us just fine."

"Well, if you're listening, if you're smart, you'll never act on what you hear, because then I'll know you for the lying sons-of-bitches I think you are."

He sighed. "They won't interfere?"

"Of course not. Would you?"

"I don't know. I'd like to think good-hearted people anywhere would lend a hand to someone in need."