Time Troopers by Hank Davis & Christopher Ruocchio

Author:Hank Davis & Christopher Ruocchio
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781982126032
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2022-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

HOUSE OF BONES

by Robert Silverberg

“Never volunteer” is an old rule among soldiers, and ignoring it had left this soldier irrevocably far from home and his own time. And then his new companions insisted he go on another mission, not technological this time, but apparently dangerous . . . “House of Bones” won the 1989 Locus Award for the year’s best short story.

After the evening meal Paul starts tapping on his drum and chanting quietly to himself, and Marty picks up the rhythm, chanting too. And then the two of them launch into that night’s installment of the tribal epic, which is what happens, sooner or later, every evening.

It all sounds very intense but I don’t have a clue to the meaning. They sing the epic in the religious language, which I’ve never been allowed to learn. It has the same relation to the everyday language, I guess, as Latin does to French or Spanish. But it’s private, sacred, for insiders only. Not for the likes of me.

“Tell it, man!” B.J. yells.

“Let it roll!” Danny shouts.

Paul and Marty are really getting into it. Then a gust of fierce stinging cold whistles through the house as the reindeer-hide flap over the doorway is lifted, and Zeus comes stomping in.

Zeus is the chieftain. Big burly man, starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time. Despite the Paleolithic cold, all he’s wearing is a cloak of black fur, loosely draped. The thick hair on his heavy chest is turning gray too. Festoons of jewelry announce his power and status: necklaces of seashells, bone beads, and amber, a pendant of yellow wolf teeth, an ivory headband, bracelets carved from bone, five or six rings.

Sudden silence. Ordinarily when Zeus drops in at B.J.’s house it’s for a little roistering and tale-telling and butt-pinching, but tonight he has come without either of his wives, and he looks troubled, grim. Jabs a finger toward Jeanne.

“You saw the stranger today? What’s he like?”

There’s been a stranger lurking near the village all week, leaving traces everywhere—footprints in the permafrost, hastily covered-over campsites, broken flints, scraps of charred meat. The whole tribe’s keyed. Strangers aren’t common. I was the last one, a year and a half ago. God only knows why they took me in: because I seemed so pitiful to them, maybe. But the way they’ve been talking, they’ll kill this one on sight if they can. Paul and Marty composed a Song of the Stranger last week and Marty sang it by the campfire two different nights. It was in the religious language so I couldn’t understand a word of it. But it sounded terrifying.

Jeanne is Marty’s wife. She got a good look at the stranger this afternoon, down by the river while netting fish for dinner. “He’s short,” she tells Zeus. “Shorter than any of you, but with big muscles, like Gebravar.

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