The Witch Doctor: A Wizard in Rhyme, #3

CHAPTER ONE

What can you say about a friend who leaves town without telling you?

I mean, I left Matt sitting there in the coffee shop trying to translate that gobbledygook parchment of his, and when I came back after class, he was gone.  I asked if anybody'd seen him go, but nobody had—just that when they'd looked up, he'd been gone.

That was no big deal, of course.  I didn't own Matt, and he was a big boy.  If he wanted to go take a hike, that was his business.  But he'd left that damn parchment behind, and ever since he'd found it, he'd handled it as if it were the crown jewels—so he sure as hell wouldn't have just left it on the table in a busy coffee shop.  Somebody could have thrown it in the wastebasket without looking.  He was just lucky it was still there when I got back.  So I picked it up and put it in my notebook.  Tell him I've got his parchment, I told Alice.

She nodded without looking up from the coffee she was pouring.  Sure thing, Saul.  If you see him first, tell him he forgot to pay his bill this morning.

Saul is me.  Matt claimed I'd been enlightened, so he called me Paul.  I went along—it was okay as an in-joke, and it was funny the first time.  After that, I suffered through it—from Matt.  Not from anyone else.  Saul is me.  I just keep a wary eye for teenagers with slingshots who also play harp.

Will do, I said, and went out the door—but it nagged at me, especially since I had never known Matt to forget to pay Alice.  Forget to put on his socks, maybe, but not to pay his tab.

When I got back to my apartment, I took out his mystical manuscript and looked at it.  Matt thought it was parchment, but I didn't think he was any judge of sheepskins.  He certainly hadn't gotten his.  Well, okay, he had two of them, but they hadn't given him the third degree yet—and wouldn't, the way he was hung up on that untranslatable bit of doggerel.  Oh, sure, maybe he was right, maybe it was a long-lost document that would establish his reputation as a scholar and shoot him up to full professor overnight—but maybe the moon is made of calcified green cheese, too.

Me, I was working on my second M.A.—anything to justify staying around campus.  Matt had gone on for his doctorate, but I couldn't stay interested in any one subject that long.  They all began to seem kind of silly, the way the professors were so fanatical about the smallest details.

By that standard, Matt was a born professor, all right.  He just spun his wheels, trying to translate a parchment that he thought was six hundred years old but was written in a language nobody had ever heard of.  I looked it over, shook my head, and put it back in the notebook.  He'd show up looking for it sooner or later.

But he didn't.  He didn't show up at all.

After a couple of days, I developed a gnawing uncertainty about his having left town—maybe he had just disappeared.  I know, I know, I was letting my imagination run away with me, but I couldn't squelch the thought.

So what do you do when a friend disappears?

You have to find out whether or not to worry.

The first day, I was only a little concerned, especially after I went back to the coffee shop, and they said he hadn't been in looking for his damn parchment.  The second day, I started getting worried—it was midnight and he hadn't shown up at the coffeehouse.  Then I began to think maybe he'd forgotten to eat again and blacked out.  So I went around to his apartment to tell him off.

He lived in one of those old one-family houses that had been converted into five apartments, if you want to call them that—a nine-by-twelve living room with a kitchenette wall, and a cubbyhole for a bedroom.  I knocked, but he didn't answer.  I knocked again.  Then I waited a good long time before I knocked a third time.  Still no answer.  At three A.M. when the neighbor came out and yelled at me to stop knocking so hard, I really got worried.  The next day, when nobody answered, I figured, Okay, third time's the charm... so I went outside, glanced around to make sure nobody was looking, and quietly crawled in the back window.  Matt really ought to lock up at night; I've always told him so.

I had to crawl across the table—Matt liked to eat and write by natural light—and stepped into a mess.

Look, I've got a pretty strong stomach, and Matt was never big on housekeeping.  A high stack of dishes with mold on them, I could have understood—but wall-to-wall spiderwebs?  No way.  How could he live like that?  I mean, it wasn't just spiderwebs in the corners, it was spiderwebs choking the furniture!  I couldn't have sat down without getting caught in dusty silk!  And the proprietors were still there, too: little brown ones, medium-sized gray ones, and a huge man-eater with a body the size of a quarter and red markings like a big wide grin on the underside of its abdomen, sitting in the middle of a web six feet wide that was stretched across the archway to the bed nook.

Then the sun came out from behind a cloud, its light struck through the window for about half a minute, and I stood spellbound.  Lit from the back and side like that, the huge web seemed to glow, every tendril bright.  It was beautiful.

Then the sun went in, the light went away, and it was just a dusty piece of vermin-laden debris.

Speaking of vermin, what had attracted all these eight-legged wonders?  It must have been a bumper year for flies.  Or maybe, just maybe, they'd decided to declare war on the army of cockroaches that infested the place.  If so, more power to them.  I decided not to go spider hunting, after all.  Besides, I didn't have time.  I had to find Matt.

The strange thing was, I'd been in that apartment just three days before, and there hadn't been a single strand of spider silk in sight.  Okay, so they're hard to see—but three days just isn't time enough for that much decoration.

I stepped up to the archway, nerving myself to sweep that web aside and swat its builder... but the sun came out again, and the golden cartwheel was so damned beautiful I just couldn't bring myself to do it.  Besides, I didn't really need to; I could look through it, and the bedroom sure didn't have any place that was out of sight.  Room enough for a bed, a dresser, a tin wardrobe, and scarcely an inch more.  The bed was rumpled, but Matt wasn't in it.

I turned around, frowning, and scanned the place again.  I wouldn't say there was no sign of Matt—as I told you, he wasn't big on housekeeping, and there were stacks of books everywhere, nicely webbed at the moment.  But the pile of dirty dishes was no higher than it had been, and he himself sure wasn't there.

I stepped out into the hall and closed the door behind me, chewing it over.  No matter how I sliced it, it came out the same.  Matt had left town.

Why so suddenly?

Death in the family.  Or close to it.  What else could it be?

So I went back to my apartment and started research.  One of the handy things about having some training in scholarship is that you know how to find information.  I knew what town Matt came from—Separ City, New Jersey—and I knew how to call long-distance information.

Mantrell, I told the operator.

There are three, Sir.  Which one did you want?

I racked my brains.  Had Matt ever said anything about his parents' names?  Then I remembered, once, that there had been a junior attached to him.  Matthew.

We have a Mateo.

Yeah, that's it.  It was a good guess, anyway.

One moment, please.

The vocodered voice gave me the number.  I wrote it down, hung up, picked up, and punched in.  Six rings, and I found myself hoping nobody would answer.

'Allo?

I hadn't known his parents were immigrants.  His mother sounded nice.

I'm calling for Matthew Mantrell, I said.  Junior.

Mateo?  Ees not 'ere.

Just went out for a minute?  I was surprised at the surge of relief I felt.

No, no!  Ees away.  College!

My spirits took the express elevator down.  Okay.  I'll try him there.  Thanks, Mrs. Mantrell.

Ees okay.  You tell him call home, sí?

Sí, I agreed.  Goodbye.  I hung up, hoping I would see him indeed.

So.  He hadn't gone home.

Then where?

I know I should have forgotten about it, shoved it to the back of my mind, and just contented myself with being really mad at him.  What was the big deal, anyway?

The big deal was that Matt was the only real friend I had, at the moment—maybe the only one I'd ever had, really.  I mean, I hadn't known Matt all that long; but four years seems like a long time, to me.  Four years, going on five—but who's counting?

It's not as if I'd ever had all that many friends.  Let me see, there was Jory in first grade, and Luke, and Ray... and all the rest of the boys in the class, I suppose.  Then it was down to Luke and Ray in second grade, 'cause Jory moved away—but the rest of the kids began to cool off.  My wild stories, I guess.  Then Ray moved, too, so it was just Luke and me in third grade—and Luke eased up, 'cause he wanted to play with the other kids.  Me, I didn't want to play, I was clumsy; I just wanted to tell stories, but the other kids didn't want to hear about brave knights rescuing fair damsels.  So from fourth grade on, I was on decent terms with the rest of the kids, but nothing more.  Then, along about junior high, nobody wanted to be caught talking to me, because the in crowd decided I was weird.

What can I say?  I was.  I mean, a thirteen-year-old boy who doesn't like baseball and loves reading poetry—what can you say?  By local standards, anyway.  And in junior high, local standards are everything.  Made me miserable, but what could I do?

Find out what they thought made a good man, of course.  I watched and found out real quick that the popular guys weren't afraid to fight, and they won more fights than they lost.  That seemed to go with being good at sports.  So I figured that if I could learn how to fight, I could be good at sports, too.  A karate school had just opened up in town, so I heckled Mom until she finally took me, just to shut me up.  I had to get a paper route to pay for it, though.

It only took six months before I stopped losing fights.  When school started again in the fall, and the boys started working out their ranking system by the usual round of bouts, I started winning a few—and all of a sudden, the other guys got chummy.  I warmed to it for a little while, but it revolted me, too.  I knew them for what they were now, and I stopped caring about them.

It felt good.  Besides, I'd connected with karate—and from it, I got interested in the Far East.

One of the teachers told me I should try not to sound so hostile and sarcastic all the time.

Sarcastic?  Who, me?

So I learned to paste on the smile and sound cheerful.

Didn't work.  The other kids could tell.  All I succeeded in doing was acting phony.

Why bother?

Of course, things picked up a little in high school, because there was a literary magazine, and a drama club, so I got back onto civil terms with some of the other kids.  Not the in crowd, of course, but they bored me, so I didn't care.  Much.

So all in all, I wasn't really prepared for college.  Academically, sure... but socially?  I mean, I hadn't had a real friend in ten years—and all of a sudden, I had a dozen.  Not close friends, of course, but people who smiled and sat down in my booth at the coffee shop.

Who can blame me if I didn't do any homework?

My profs, that's who.  And the registrar, who sent me the little pink slip with the word probation worked in there.  And my academic counselor, who pointed out that I was earning a quick exit visa from the Land of Friendship.  So I declared an English major, where at least half of the homework was reading the books I'd already read for recreation—Twain, and Dickens, and Melville.  I discovered Fielding, and Chaucer, and Joyce, and had more fun.  Of course, I had to take a grammar course and write term papers, so I learned how to sneak in a few hours at the library.  I didn't take any honors, but I stayed in.

Then I discovered philosophy, and found out that I actually wanted to go to the library.  I started studying without realizing it—it was so much fun, such a colossal, idiotic, senseless puzzle.  Nobody had any good answers to the big questions, but at least they were asking.

My answers?  I was looking for them.  That was enough.

So I studied for fun, and almost learned how to party.  Never got very good at it, but I tried—and by my senior year, I even had a couple of friends who trusted me enough to tell me their troubles.

Not that I ever told them mine, of course.  I tried once or twice, but stopped when I saw the eyes glaze.  I figured out that most people want to talk, but they don't want to listen.  It followed from that, logically, that what they liked about me was that I listened, but didn't talk.  So I didn't.  I got a reputation for being the strong and silent type, just by keeping my mouth shut.  I also found out, by overhearing at a party, that they thought I was the Angry Young Man.

I thought that one over and decided they were right.  I was angry about people.  Even the ones I liked, mostly.  They wanted to take, but they didn't want to give.  They cared about fighting, but they didn't care about brains.  They spent their time trying to get from one another, and they didn't care about why they were here.

Oh, don't get me wrong—they were good people.  But they didn't care about me, really.  I was a convenience.

Except for Matt.

Matt was already working on his M.A. when I met him, and by the time I graduated, he was making good progress on his Ph.D.

So what was I going to do when I got my degree?  Leave town, and the one good friend I had?  Not to mention the only three girls who'd ever thought I was human.

No way.

So I started work on my master's.  Physics, of course.

How come?  From literature and philosophy?

Because I took Intro to Asia for a freshman distribution requirement, and found out about Zen—and learned about Shröedinger's Cat in History of Science.  Put the two together, and it made a lot of sense.

Don't ask.  You had to be there.

Then Matt ran into a snag on his doctoral dissertation.  Do you know what it's like to see a real friend deteriorating in front of your eyes?  He found that scrap of parchment, then got hung up trying to translate it.  Wasn't in any known language, so it had to be a prank.  I mean, that's obvious, right?  Not even logic; just common sense.

Matt didn't have any.

Now, don't get me wrong.  Matt's my friend, and I think the world of the guy, but I'm realistic about him, too.  He was something of a compulsive, and something of an idealist as well, to the point of...  Well, you know the difference between fantasy and reality?  Matt didn't.  Not always, anyway.

No, he was convinced that parchment was a real, authentic, historical document, and he wasted half his last year trying to decipher it.  I was getting real worried about him—losing weight, bags under his eyes, drawn and pale... Matt, not me.  I didn't have any spare weight to lose.  Him, he was the credulous type, one of the kind that's born every minute.  I'm one of the other kind, two born for every one of him.  I mean, I wouldn't believe it was April if I didn't see the calendar.  Forget about that robin pecking at the window, and the buds on the trees.  If I don't see it in black and white, it's Nature pulling a fast one.  Maybe a thaw.

So he had disappeared.

I thought about calling the police, but I remembered they couldn't do anything—Matt was a grown man, and there hadn't been any bloodstains in his apartment.  Besides, I hadn't been on terribly good terms with the local constables ever since that year I was experimenting with recreational chemicals.

Still, I gave it a try.  I actually went into the police station—me, with my long hair and beard.  Nobody gave me more than a casual glance, but my back still prickled—probably from an early memory, a very early memory, of my father saying something about the pigs loving to beat on anybody who didn't have a crew cut.  Of course, that was long ago, in 1968, and I was so little that all I remember of him was a big, tall pair of blue jeans with a tie-dyed T-shirt and a lot of hair at the top.  I hated that memory for ten years, because it was all I knew of him until Mom decided to get in touch with him again, and I found out he wasn't really the ogre I figured he must have been, to have left Mom and me that way.  Found out it wasn't all his idea, either.  And I had a basis for understanding him; by that time, I had begun to know what it was like to have all the other kids put you down.

I'm sorry, kid, he told me once.  I didn't know alienation was hereditary.

Of course, it wasn't—just the personality traits that led to it.  I wouldn't say I ever loved him, but at least I warmed to him some.  He had shaved and gotten a haircut, even a three-piece suit, by then, but it didn't fool anybody for very long.  Especially me.  Maybe that's why I wear chambray and blue jeans.  And long hair, and a beard—like my early memories of him.

And early memories stay with you longest and deepest, so I really felt as if I were walking into the lion's den.

The cop at the desk looked up as I approached.  Can I help you?

About then, he could have helped me out of there, and I might have needed it—but I said, I hope so.  A friend of mine.  He's disappeared.

Right away, he looked grave.  Did he leave any message?

I thought of the parchment, but what good is writing you can't read?  Besides, he wasn't the one who wrote it.  Not a word.

He frowned.  But he was over twenty-one?

Yeah, I admitted.

Any reason to think there might have been foul play?

Now, that question sent the icicle skittering down my spine.  Not that the idea hadn't been there, lurking at the back of my head, mind you—but I had worked real hard not to put words to it.  Now that the sergeant had, I couldn't ignore it any more.  Not really, I admitted.  It's just not like him to pick up and pack out like that.

It happens, the sergeant sighed.  People just get fed up with life and take off.  We'll post his name and watch for him, and let you know if we find out anything... but that's all we can do.

I'd been pretty sure of that.  Thanks, I said.  He's Matt Mantrell.  Matthew.  And I'm—

Saul Bremener.  He kept his eyes on the form he was filling in.  Three-ten North Thirteenth Street.  We'll let you know if we hear anything.

My stomach went hollow, and my skin crawled.  It doesn't always help your morale, finding out that the cops know you by name.  Uh... thanks, I croaked.

Don't mention it.  He looked up.  Have a good day, Mr. Bremener—and don't take any wooden cigarettes, okay?

Wooden, I agreed, and turned numbly about and drifted out of that den of doom.  So they remembered my little experiments.  It makes one wonder.

The sunlight and morning air braced me, in spite of the lack of sleep.  I decided they were nice guys, after all—they'd left me alone until they could see if it was a passing fad, or something permanent.  Passing, in my case.  So it was smart; they'd saved taxpayers' money and my reputation.  I wondered if there was anything written about me anywhere.

Probably.  Somewhere.  I mean, they had to have something to do during the slow season.  I began to sympathize with Matt—maybe blowing town suddenly wouldn't be such a bad idea.

Get real, I told myself sternly.  Where else would I find such sympathetic cops?

Back to the search.  Maybe they couldn't do anything officially, but I wasn't official.

So I searched high and low, called the last girl Matt had been seen with—back when I was a junior—and started getting baggy eyes myself.  Finally, I took a few slugs of Pepto-Bismol as a preventative, screwed my disgust to the nausea point, and went back into his apartment.

I scolded myself for not having moved that table; just lucky Matt hadn't left anything on it.  I laid my notebook down on the desk next to the phone and gave a quick look at the table, the kitchenette counter, and the miniature sofa.  Nothing there but dust and spider silk.

Then I went through that apartment inch by inch, clearing webs and squashing spiders.  Or trying to, anyway—I must have been dealing with a new and mutant breed.  Those little bug-eaters were fast!  Especially the big fat one; I took my eyes off it for a second to glance at the arachnid next door, and when I glanced back, it wasn't there anymore.

It wasn't the only thing that wasn't there—neither was any sign of where Matt might be.  I mean, nothing... until I turned and looked at the kitchenette table and saw the parchment.

I stared.  Then I closed my eyes, shook my head, and stared again.  It was still there.  I could have sworn I'd put it back in my notebook—so I picked up the notebook and checked.  Yep, the piece of sheepskin was still in it, all right.

That gave me pause.  Practically a freeze, really, while I thought unprintable thoughts.  Finally, slowly, I looked up and checked again.

It was on the table.

I looked down at the notebook, real fast, but not fast enough—it was back between the lined sheets.  I held my head still and flicked a glance over to the table, but it must have read my mind, 'cause it was there by the time I looked.  Then I laid down the notebook, real carefully, and stepped back, so I could see both the notebook and the table at the same time.

They each had a parchment.

Well, that settled that.  I gave up and brought the notebook over to the table.  I set it down beside the parchment.  Yep, they were both still there: Matt's parchment in my notebook, and a brand-new one where none had ever been before.  At least, a few minutes before—I had checked the table as I crawled across it.  I frowned, taking a closer look at the new parchment.

It was written in runes, and the paper was genuine sheepskin, all right.

How come runes?

Because runes are magical.

I tried to ignore the prickling at the base of my skull and told myself sternly that runes were just ordinary, everyday letters in somebody else's language.  Okay, so it was an old language, and a lot of the items written in it had been ceremonial, which was why they had been preserved—but that didn't mean they were magical.  I mean, the people who wrote them may have thought they could work magic... but that was just superstition.

But it was also something that made the scholar in me sit up brightly and smack his lips.  I mean, literature had been one of my undergraduate majors—justified an extra year on campus, right there—and although it wasn't my main field anymore, I was still interested.  I'd learned at least a little bit about those old symbols—and I knew Matt had a book around here that explained the rest.  I hunted around until I found it, blew the dust and webbing off, and sat down to study.  I looked up each rune and wrote its Roman-letter equivalent just above it.  I tried pencil first, but it just skittered off that slick surface, so I had to use a felt pen.  After all, this couldn't really be anything old, could it?

After three letters, I leaned back to see if it made a word.

H-e-y.

I recoiled and glared down at it.  How dare it sound like English!

Just a coincidence.  I went to work on the next word.

P-a-u-l.

I sat very still, my glance riveted to those runes.  Hey, Paul?  Who in the ninth century knew my name?

Then a thought skipped through, and I took a closer look at the parchment.  I mean, the material itself.  It was new, brand-new, fresh off the sheep, compared to Matt's parchment, which was brittle and yellow—several years old, at least.  Something inside me whispered centuries, but I resolutely ignored it and went on to the next word.

I wrote the Roman letters above the runes, refusing to be sidetracked, resisting the temptation to pronounce the words they formed, until I had all the symbols converted... though something inside me was adding them up as I went along, and whispering a very nasty suspicion to me.  But as long as I had another rune to look up, I could ignore it—even after I'd already learned all the runes again and was looking each one up very deliberately, telling myself it was just to make sure I hadn't made a mistake.

Finally, though, I had written down all the letter equivalents and I couldn't put it off any longer.  I stayed hunched over the parchment, my hands spread flat on the table, trying to grip into the plywood as I read the translated words.

H-e-y P-a-u-l g-e-t i-n t-o-u-c-h I-v-e l-o-s-t y-o-u-r a-d-d-r-e-s-s.

Or, to give it the proper emphatic delivery: Hey, Paul!  Get in touch!  I've lost your address!

I could almost hear Matt's voice saying those words, and I swear my nails bit into the plywood.  What kind of a lousy joke was this?  Friend?  You call that a friend?  First he leaves town without a word, and then he sends me this?

I was just realizing that he couldn't have sent it, when I felt the pain in the back of my hand.

Damn!  I snatched it back, saw the little red dot in the center, then the big fat spider standing there with that big wide grin painted on its abdomen, and so help me, it was laughing at me.  Anger churned up, but the room was already getting fuzzy.  Still, I tried to hang on to that anger, tried to lift a hand to swat... the blasted thing... had no right to...

But before I could even finish the thought, the haze thickened, wrapped itself around me like a cool blanket, rolled itself up, and bore me away to someplace dim and distant, and I almost managed to stay conscious.

CHAPTER TWO

When I came to, the mist was gone, and I felt amazingly well.  I mean, I had never felt that whole, that healthy, since I was a kid—and I hadn't been aware of it then, of course.  It was like waking up on an April day, with the air fresh and warming from the night's chill, and the sun painting the day in primaries as you watch, and knowing it's your birthday.

But it wasn't April, it was November, and I was inside Matt's apartment.  Only I wasn't.  I was out in the open—and it wasn't November any more, it really was April.  Either that, or it was Florida.

Florida, with mountains stabbing up from the horizon?  And not gently rounded mountains, like the Appalachians, but jagged granite obelisks, with snow on top?

Of course, they were off in the distance.  Close by, all I could see was a field of wheat, with two or three little hedges cutting it into odd shapes.  Whoever lived here, they could use some lessons in geometry.

I was just beginning to wonder how I'd come here, when I saw the knight.

Well, I knew about the Society for Creative Anachronism, of course, but I also knew they didn't go in for live-steel tilting, and this guy was carrying one of the most authentic lances I could have imagined.  Plus, he was riding a Percheron—and I don't know any SCA types who could afford the upkeep on a pony, let alone a beer-wagon bronc.  And, of course, there were the half-dozen men on foot behind him, all wearing more or less the same combination of brown and gray, with steel bands glinting on their hats and long spears in their hands.  They raised a whoop and pointed at me.  The knight turned to look.

He saw me and perked up right away, dropped the point of the lance to horizontal, aimed the warhorse at me, and kicked it into a gallop.

Must have been the long hair and the beard.  Mine, I mean.  Either that, or he had something against blue jeans and chambray.

His men raised another whoop and came pelting after him like children hearing the bells on an ice cream truck.  I just stood there, staring at all that scrap iron and horse meat thundering down at me, and trying very, very hard not to believe any of it.

Then I realized the tip of the lance had come close enough so that I could see it was sharp and made of steel, and I had to believe that much.  I jumped aside.  The rider tried to swerve, bellowing some nasty things, but his Percheron didn't have that tight a turning radius, and he went crashing into the underbrush.

Underbrush?

I whirled around and, sure enough, there it was, just stunted trees and bushes, a little thicket in the middle of all those fields, presumably where the ground was too poor to grow anything.  Or maybe around a creek.  I braced myself, hoping to hear a splash.

Instead, I heard a crack that filled my whole head, along with a piercing pain.  The scene went dark for an instant, then came back full of bright little shiny lights.  I would have fallen down, but a big rough hand was holding me up by the arm while a voice guffawed, He is nothing, only a scrap of skin and bone!  Here, Heinrich, you try him!

And I was spinning and staggering across the grass, dazed and amazed to realize I could understand the words, though I knew damned well they weren't English.

Then I slammed into something else meaty and with foul breath.  He slammed a fist into my gut.  I doubled over, my stomach trying to climb up my throat, and a huge bellow of laughter filled my ears.  Then something hard slammed into my bottom, and I heard another nasty laugh.  I moved my legs fast, just barely managing to catch up with my top half in time to keep from falling—but behind me, I heard an outraged shout.  'Twas not your turn, Rudolf!  Remember your place!

Then I slammed into another wall of leather and sweat that made an evil laugh and pushed me back far enough so that I could see the fist swinging at me.  Reflex finally took over, and I squirmed aside so that the fist hit my shoulder, not my head.  It spun me around enough so that I could see Heinrich belting Rudolf one.  Rudy went down to his knees and stayed there, rubbing his chin.  Behind them, the knight was sitting his horse with his visor up, nodding and laughing.

Then another tough snarled, My turn! and grabbed me.

But another clunk grabbed my other arm and yanked back.  I yowled, but I could still hear him bellowing, Take a lower place, Gustang!  I will not be forborne!  And he swung a quick left hook into Gustang's gut.

I couldn't believe it.  Not only were they beating up a total stranger, just for fun—they were fighting over me, too, about the pecking order.

But the wrangling had taken just long enough for me to collect a little bit of my wits, and it was the part that held the memory of my karate training.  What would I have told my teacher, if he'd been here?  Sorry, Sensei, I was watching the scenery?  Sure.

Time to remember I was a trained killer.  I'd never killed anything larger than a mouse, of course, and that was only with a trap—but that didn't change the training.

I spun around, slamming into the guy who had my arm and snaking my leg around his in the process, shoving and kicking back.  Down he went, and I spun to the next one, who was so surprised he was slow getting his guard up—only it wasn't a guard, he was just swinging at me, not even trying to block.  I ducked and kicked, and he went down.

The other four finally woke up to what I was doing and fell on me with an outraged roar.  I sidestepped, ducked, punched, whirled, and kicked, recovered and chopped.  The adrenaline was singing, and if I was bruised and groggy, I didn't realize it.  Two of them were down, and the other two hesitated, uncertain; at a guess, I decided they weren't used to having their toys play back.

Then the knight shouted and slammed down his visor; obviously time to restore a little order here.  His men relaxed, stepping back and leaving it to Papa.

All the outrage I felt boiled up as I saw the Percheron plodding forward and beginning to pick up speed.  This was no way to treat a stranger, at least one who hadn't even offered an insult!  As the huge beast lumbered into a trot, I shouted, What are you doing, jumping a stranger just going his way?  Are you out of your brains, have you nothing but hay?  Do you have any sanity?  Any common humanity?  You should feel what it's like to be crashed up this way!

The huge horse tripped.  It tumbled.  It hit the ground hard and rolled.  The knight bellowed in alarm, and just managed to kick free at the last instant.

I stared.

So did his men.

Then somebody hissed, Zabreur! and the knight began to kick his arms and legs—he was on his back, trying to turn over.

But he was out of action long enough for me to make some headway against his men.  I turned to them, advancing; if I tried to run, it would restore their self-confidence.

But that was very thoroughly shot.  They moaned and backed off fast, then turned, stumbling, and started to run.

I stared, thunderstruck.  They couldn't be that scared, just because the horse had hit a gopher hole and tripped!  Okay, so it was a lucky coincidence that I had just finished yelling something, but that shouldn't have scared them that much.

The knight didn't think so, either.  Hans!  Klaus!  You worthless, good-for-nothing blobs of dog meat!  Come back here and aid me, or I'll...  Then he caught sight of me limping toward him, frowning, curious, and I guess I must have looked pretty bad, being mussed up with my shirt torn and all, because he moaned and made some sort of sign.  You cannot prevail!  My master is an Earl of Evil!

Some force staggered me, making my head ring.  He must have thrown something I hadn't seen.  Anger surged, and my instinct sent me to kick his head in—but prudence took over at the last second, pointing out that I should get as far away from him as possible, and not add homicide to any other charges the local authorities might dream up against me.  This was especially true because he obviously was one of the local authorities.  I had laid off smoking grass for similar reasons, and it had apparently paid off, since I hadn't been arrested.  I slowed and nodded.  Right.  I love you, too, sweetheart.  Remind me to return the hospitality some day.  Then I turned and went away, walking fast—or as fast as I could; I seemed to have developed a limp.

I glanced back a couple of times, but no one was showing any great interest in following me.  That made me curious after a while, so I shinnied up a tree until I had a line of sight back to the little forest we'd been near.  I was on the other side of that woods now, but I could see the knight and his boys trudging off toward the castle way up high across the valley.  That was both good and bad—good, because it meant I had some time to find a hiding place, or get farther away; bad, because it meant they'd apparently decided I was too much to handle and were going back for reinforcements.

Of course, they could just be cutting their losses.  Maybe they were planning not to mention me to anybody again, but somehow, I doubted that.  Might have had something to do with that word somebody'd hissed when the knight went down—Zabreur.  My German was a little rusty, and that probably wasn't real German, anyway, but didn't the word mean male witch?

Possible.

I shinnied back down, turning thoughtful.  Chambray and blue jeans probably looked like luxury fabrics, to them—now that I thought about it, their cloth had looked pretty much homemade.  And my styles were certainly odd, by their standards.  The belt and boots alone would be enough to mark me as above peasant rank, and weird—tooled leather with a huge metal buckle, and high heels.  No, from their point of view, I was familiar enough to be real, odd enough to be special.

I set off uphill again, deciding I'd better stay alert.  The magician pose was a good idea; it could help protect me, and I sure didn't have anything else to do the job.  Well, no, I had a large clasp knife in my pocket—I like 'em big enough so that jackknife seems like an understatement.  I decided I'd better use it to help me make something better in the way of a weapon.  I stopped off at the next woodlot, hunted around, and found a fallen branch that was still pretty solid.  I whittled away twigs as I walked and, pretty soon, I had a serviceable staff.  I'd hung around with some SCA guys and learned a little about quarterstaves from them, but I'd learned a bit more from my sensei.  I wasn't an expert, mind you, but I was capable, and it was better than nothing.

I looked around me then, finally letting the scenery sink in, instead of just taking a quick glance to know which way to go.  There were rugged mountains in the distance, big hills nearby, with sheep grazing on the slopes and every more-or-less horizontal spot taken up by grain.  I couldn't have told you one cereal from another unless it came in a box, but this stuff looked too hairy to be wheat.

Finally, it hit: I wasn't in the Midwest any more.  In fact, I doubted I was even in America, and judging from what I'd seen of the locals, I wasn't even in the twentieth century.

Time travel?  Space zapping?  Impossible!  I had to be dreaming.

But those punches had sure hurt.  A dream, this wasn't.

Hallucination?

Possible.  But if it were, it would've had to have been the most detailed trip I'd ever heard of, and the most enduring.  Besides, I had sworn off all chemical experiences years before.

Flashback?

Again, possible, though I didn't think I'd taken anywhere near enough drugs, ever, to have caused a spontaneous trip to happen, and certainly not one that lasted this long.  Still, it was a possibility.  I closed my eyes and willed myself back to my apartment.

But there were no psychedelic patterns inside my eyelids, only darkness—well, redness; I was standing in sunlight.  I groped for my identity symbol, but my hands were empty, except for the staff.  In desperation, I put my left hand on my belt buckle and started tracing the patterns of the Native American symbols I could feel there.

Nothing happened.

I sighed and gave up, opening my eyes.  I was stuck here, wherever here was, and I was going to have to live by the local rules, whatever they were.  Denial wouldn't help, and it might be a quick road to disaster.  Whether that disaster was psychological or physical was kind of a moot point.  It would be very unpleasant, either way.

Unless there was some evidence to the contrary—and I couldn't see any—I had to assume that the knight and his bullyboys were genuine, not modern people putting on some incomprehensible show.  Those guys couldn't have been SCA members—they weren't polite, they weren't friendly, and their weapons weren't padded.  So, somehow, I'd landed in the middle of some sort of medieval culture, from what I could see of it—and if they thought I was a magician, that could explain a few things.

I wondered where I was.  I couldn't offhand think of any place on Earth that was still living in the Northern European Middle Ages.  Okay, there were some isolated islands where the living was still pretty limited—no TV, even—but so far as I knew, they didn't run to knights.

A medieval fair, being held to attract the tourists?  No; you don't beat up on tourists.

I sighed, deciding that I just didn't have enough information to figure out where I was, how I'd been brought there, or why.  I shelved it until I could learn more.  There were more immediate problems that needed tending to, such as survival.

I set off up-slope.  A few hundred yards later, I passed a berry bush, and I was amazed to realize I was hungry.  I stopped and stepped closer, inspecting the berries carefully, and decided that I couldn't be all that badly off, if I could still want food.  I'd tied in with a local back-to-the-basics group for a year or two, going out on field trips into the countryside to learn how to survive in the wild, or at least without grocery stores; I hadn't quit until they started talking about setting up a commune.  So I knew which plants were edible and which weren't, and the all-important rule: if you're not sure it's good to eat, don't touch it.  But these looked to be perfectly ordinary raspberries, so I took a chance, and a handful.  They tasted good, so I took another handful.

As I was munching, I noticed a very big spiderweb, glowing with the sunlight behind it—in fact, several of them; the neighborhood must have been saturated with flies.  The biggest web, though, had an eight-legger the size of a quarter, an exact double for the one that had stung me.  Anger rose, and my hand tightened on my staff—but I told myself that it couldn't be the same bug, and I turned away.

Bad year for spiders, folks.

The land was still sloping upward.  I decided I must be in the foothills of the mountains I'd seen in the distance.  After a little while, I came to a woodlot that went on and on.  I stayed on the fringe, just this side of the underbrush, and kept a wary eye on it—for all I knew, a dragon might have come charging out any second.  On the other hand, I wanted to be able to duck into it quickly, if Sir Overbearing and his boys decided to come hunting, after all.

Then, suddenly, the shock hit.  I stopped dead still, leaned on my staff, and waited for the feeling of desolation to pass.

It didn't.

I