One of the two blinked at him in confusion, “But there is no wine of ecstasy. We must have the wine before we work, and enter the pleasure-trance, or else the delight is less. Why did we come awake in a day when there is no wine?”

Montrose shouted, “Stoop and haul and help, or I will beat you bloody, and that delight will be even less! We are captives of a band of Tomb-robbers, and they will kill us each separately unless we couple together!”

Neither of the beautiful men moved, but in the rain, Montrose saw first one, and then another, of the long-haired Chimera soldiers from the fifth millennium stoop and help people from other eras and centuries to their feet. One of the Chimera girls snapped out an order, and the slaves, muttering and cursing, began also to help the woozy and pick up the unconscious. One of the scarecrow-thin crones from the fourth millennium, seeing this, scowled and shrieked, and slapped the hugely fat black man next to her, until he, with a moue of resignation and the shrug of a philosopher, picked up two unconscious people and slung them under his meaty arms like packages, and lumbered forward with their four feet dragging in the mud behind him. Then other men from the same era did likewise. Soon all the prisoners of the pit, conscious or not, were moving or being moved toward the trench entrance.

5. Dampened Spirits

Stepping into the shower out of the rain was no real transition. Montrose was under the liquid before he paid it any attention. Something crackled in his implants as the stuff sluiced over him. He wondered what molecular mechanisms or microbe-sized machines were hidden in each water drop, and what frequencies they were using to coordinate. On the other hand, it was possible that the crackling noise came from the tent cloth, if it was smarted up and seeking system connections. Or the smartcloth—if that is what it was—could have been just probing the prisoners for tools or communication gear. Such as, come to think of it, the implants in his body.

Again, his thinking speed, crystal clear memory, various cognition tricks, and his ability to juggle vast realms of data: none of that could stop this. Without instruments, without tools, he could not even detect, much less counteract, any microscopic machines or weapons that might be even now worming through his outer skin layers seeking his bloodstream and nerve clusters. For all his gifts, he was as helpless as a goldfish in a toilet bowl.

He muttered in English. “Damn, but I hate nanotech!”

One of the Locusts shyly reached up and curled his thin, clammy fingers around Montrose’s elbow. “We sense information-bearing lasers focused on all our throats, picking up throat vibrations.”

Montrose was aware of the danger, but he had been given only a few minutes. In that time he had gathered two allies, or, counting the Locust unit as three separate people, four. It was not enough. This was out of the seventy or so coffins he had seen stacked in the looting yard. They would need all to ally, all to act as a group, if there was to be any hope of escape or defense.

And Montrose was responsible for all of them.

6. Surrender

He said to Prissy in Iatric: “If the Blues are looking for historians and translators among the Thaws, maybe we can get something from them in return. Have you noticed anyone aside of you and me that knows dead languages? You must have seen at least one translator hauled away. Who was it?”

“A muscular man covered with markings. He fought them until a dog-man bit his crotch.”

“Ouch. Did he have a marking like a two-headed eagle on his face?”

There was no time to answer, because just this moment, the crowd of naked bodies ahead of them parted, and the crowd behind, shoving, pushing them forward. There were shouts and commotion, cries of joy and cries of woe. The prisoners were being moved from the showers into a wider area, lit with many lanterns, where dog things with pikes and truncheons were struggling with the crowd. Little Blue Men, six of them, were standing on little disks or platforms held in midair by long metal serpentine arms.

The walls were still mud and lumber. This was an area where several trenches intersected. To one side were angular machines, evidently digging automata, whose shovel blades showed many dints and scars of work. The area was covered over with a tarp or circus tent, and the rain was drumming on the metallic fabric, but at last there was no water falling on him.

Some of the dog things were passing out one-piece overalls made of soft, dull fabric. This was the source of the joyful noise, as cold or shamefaced prisoners were pulling on garments. Other of the dog things were yanking prisoners to the left or right, and beating those who resisted with their pikestaffs. And this was the source of the noise of woe.

Dogs came, brandishing their pikes, growling and coughing, gestured for Montrose to part from his companions, each to go to a different part of the floor.

Montrose struggled to stay near the three dwarfs and the Iatrocrat. With his implants silently to the Locusts, and aloud to Prissy Pskov, he said, “Do not to resist. The Blues don’t mean to hurt us yet.”

“They will torment us to discover where we have buried our treasures,” she said. Prissy cowered behind him, her hair spines flexing and standing erect on her scalp like the comb of a cock in battle.

“I think they are looking for something else.”

Prissy was touching him gingerly on the shoulder, and she shivered because her people made to touch a taboo. Her hand was warm, almost hot, compared to the shower water still drenching him, and his shoulder immediately began to itch with allergic reaction, so he did not think their taboo was all that unreasonable.

“I will do as you say,” she murmured. “For the lore of my people says there is a figure buried beneath the Earth, who guards tombs such as this, and to despoil them is to wake a great cry. ‘My time, is it yet? My bride, is she nigh?’ And if the answer is wrong, he destroys all.”

“I think that only happens on his good days,” muttered Montrose.

But there was no more talk, for the dogs had shoved her to one side and him to another. He saw the woebegone faces of the three Locusts, small as the faces of children, from an era where no person ever laid violent hands on another, bewildered and lost as they were dragged away.

3

The Warrior-Aristocrats

1. Two Chimerae

It was twilight, and the dusk was cold. A hooded figure stood in a high place at the brink of a deep pit, staring downward.

He was not dressed in the overalls the Blue Men had passed out. Instead, he wore an impromptu robe of metallic cloth. Despite the fineness of the cloth, the garb was crude. He wore two long sheets, flung over either shoulder, crossed and tied at the waist by a line of cord. Flaps of material hung fore and aft, leaving his sides free. His arms were hidden in overlapping tiers of the cloth. The cloth was metallic, bronze hued, and shot through with silver strands in a regular pattern of hexagons; the reverse was shiny black. This originally had been a tent and a groundcloth; the belt was tent line.

It was Menelaus Montrose. He had drawn the hood flap of his garment up, hiding his features: albeit it was not clear from whom or from what he hid.

Behind him, out of the trees, came two upright shapes that moved as gracefully and silently as hunting cats. The pair were darker shadows against the rattling shadow-mass of twigs and leafless branches of the wood, and the red and distant brightness of the air did not illume them until they stepped across the snow. Then, by the unearthly poise of their motions, Menelaus saw that they were Chimerae, warrior-aristocrats who ruled the Earth between A.D. 4500 and A.D. 5900.