The Year Of The Ransom by Poul Anderson

Author:Poul Anderson [Anderson, Poul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sci Fi & Fantasy
Publisher: Walker & Company
Published: 1988-01-24T13:38:59+00:00

22 July 1435

He lets go of me. I drop a few inches to the ground, lose my footing, fall. Bounce up again. Scramble back from him. Stop. Stare.

Still in the saddle, he smiles. Through the blood racketing in my ears, I hear: “Be not afraid, seńorita. I beg your pardon for this rough treatment, but saw no other way. Now, alone, we can talk.”

Alone! Look around. We’re close to water, a bay, see those outlines against the sky, got to be Academy Bay near Darwin Station, only what became of the station? Of the road to Puerto Ayora? Matazarno bushes, Palo Santo trees, grass in clumps, cactus between, sparse. Empty, empty. Ashes of a campfire. Jesus Christ! The giant shell, gnawed bones of a tortoise! This man’s killed a Galapagos tortoise!

“Please do not flee,” he says. “I would simply have to overtake you. Believe me, your honor is safe. More safe than it would be anywhere else. For we are quite by ourselves in these islands, like Adam and Eve before the Fall.”

Throat dry, tongue thick, “Who are you? What is this?”

He gets off his machine. Sweeps me a courtly bow. “Don Luis Ildefonso Castelar y Moreno, from Barracota in Castile, lately with the captain Francisco Pizarro in Peru, at your service, my lady.”

He’s crazy, or I am, or the whole world is. Again I wonder if I’m dreaming, hit my head, caught a fever, delirious. Sure doesn’t feel that way. Those are plants I know. They stay put. The sun’s shifted overhead and the air’s less warm, but the smells baked out of the earth, they’re like always. A grasshopper chirrs. A blue heron flaps by. Could this be for real?

“Sit down,” he says. “You are taken aback. Would you like a drink of water?” As if to soothe me: “I fetch it from elsewhere. This is a desolate country. But you are welcome to all you want.”

I nod, do as he suggests. He picks a container off the ground, brings it in reach of me, steps off at once. Not to alarm the little girl. It’s a bucket, pink, cracked at the top, usable but scarcely worth keeping. He must have scrounged it from wherever it got tossed out. Even in those shacky little houses in the village, plastic’s cheap.

Plastic.

Final touch. Practical joke. ‘Tain’t funny, God. Got to laugh anyway. Whoop. Howl.

“Be calm, seńorita. I tell you, while you behave wisely you have nothing to fear. I will protect you.”

That pig! I’m no ultrafeminist, but when a kidnapper starts patronizing me, too much. The laughter rattles down to silence. Rise. Brace muscles. They shiver a bit.

Somehow, regardless, I am no longer afraid. Coldly furious. At the same time, more aware than ever before. He stands in front of me as sharp as if a lightning flash lit him up. Not a big man; thin; but remember that strength of his. Hispanic features, all right, of the pure European kind, tanned practically black. Not in costume. Those clothes are faded, mended, grubby; vegetable dyes.

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