(eng) L. Sprague de Camp by Lest Darkness Fall

Author:Lest Darkness Fall [Fall, Lest Darkness]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER IX

IF PADWAY WASN’T MISTAKEN, and if Procopius’ history had not lied, Thiudahad ought to pass along the Flaminian Way within the next twenty-four hours in his panicky flight to Ravenna. All the way, Padway had asked people whether the ex-king had passed that way. All said no.

Now, on the outskirts of Narnia, he was as far north as he dared go. The Flaminian Way forked at this point, and he had no way of knowing whether Thiudahad would take the new road or the old. So he and Hermann made themselves easy by the side of the road and listened to their horses cropping grass. Padway looked at his companion with a bilious eye. Hermann had taken much too much beer aboard at Ocriculum.

To Padway’s questions and his instructions about taking turns at watching the road, he merely grinned idiotically and said, “Ja, ja!” He had finally gone to sleep in the middle of a sentence, and no amount of shaking would arouse him.

Padway walked up and down in the shade, listening to Hermann’s snores and trying to think. He had not slept since the previous day, and here that whiskery slob was taking the ease that he, Padway, needed badly. Maybe he should have grabbed a couple of hours at Nevitta’s-but if he’d once gotten to sleep nothing short of an earthquake would have gotten him up. His stomach was jumpy; he had no appetite; and this accursed sixth-century world didn’t even have coffee to

lighten the weights that dragged down the eyelids.

Suppose Thiudahad didn’t show up? Or suppose he went roundabout, by the Salarian Way? Or suppose he’d already passed? Time after time he’d tensed himself as dust appeared down the road, only to have it materialize as a farmer driving an oxcart, or a trader slouching along on a mule, or a small half-naked boy driving goats.

Could his, Padway’s, influence have changed Thiudahad’s plans so that his course of action would be different from what it should have been? Padway saw his influence as a set of ripples spreading over a pool. By the mere fact of having known him, the lives of people like Thomasus and Fritharik had already been changed radically from what they would have been if he’d never appeared in Rome.

But Thiudahad had only seen him twice, and nothing very drastic had happened either time. Thiudahad’s course in time and space might have been altered, but only very slightly. The other higher-up Goths, such as King Wittigis, ought not to have been affected at all. Some of them might have read his paper. But few of them were literary and many were plain illiterate.

Tancredi had been right about the fact that this was an entirely new branch of the tree of time, as he called it. The things that Padway had done so far, while only a fraction of what he hoped to do, couldn’t help change history somewhat. Yet he had not vanished into thin air, as he should have if this was the same history that had produced him in the year 1908 A.

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