She sought and fetched forth one of the sleeping knights, and his name was Sir Mathurin d’Aux Lescaut, but he was called Romegas. She importuned him to teach her the management of arms, so that she could become a Valkyrie, and die in vain futility at the End of Days of Peace. He granted it.

Therefore for many days, even though the flowers were bright and the birds sang, Sir Romegas and my lost beloved stood drilling and exercising in the meadow, fencing and tilting and shooting both chemical firearm and energy lance, until the meadow was like a storm, for the firearm shouted like thunder, and the lance flashed like lightning.

One night I crept into her sleeping cloak, and wakened her with kisses, pleading that she foreswear her folly and return to the roundelays and reels and frivolous games with which all true Nymphs are wont to fritter our lives away. But she was displeased with me, because the knight had told her of some secret lore from the before time, and bound her with laws, and washed away her past with water from a sacred, secret stream. Now she served a man who had been tortured to death, and perhaps she wanted to torture herself, because she had vowed no more to disport herself in the love-play.

While I knelt weeping at her feet, she concocted a dram of the Nepenthe for me, so that I might quench my sorrow in the seethe of forgetfulness. But I dashed the clamshell of wine from her hand, and spoke and sang an angry word instead. I said I did not wish to forget my love for her.

She offered to kiss me a final time, a kiss of peace, but with this one caveat: Using the neurochemistry she knew, she could transfer my love for her to another, so that it would not be forgotten, but instead displaced. I would be infatuated with some other, but in a way I would still be true to her. She warned me once this was done to bind my eyes with a silk band and depart her camp, and not to peek until I heard once more the singing of the Nymphs at play around me, and whomever I first saw, I would love.

To please her, I agreed. As we kissed, she passed her influence to me through topically active transmitters in lip membrane, and chemical cues in the saliva. I was blind with weeping as I fled her, so I thought there was no need to obey her injunction to blindfold my eyes. I pushed the blindfold aside and covered my eyes with my hand, because I had to wipe my tears.

I struck a man made of metal, who caught me, laughing, by the arms, and he asked me gentle questions in a tongue I did not understand. He was broad as a bear and taller than any man of the Nymph race, and his voice was the voice of a man who is unafraid to kill and unafraid to die and unafraid to give commands. I opened my eyes and was lost.

His name was Sir Guiden von Hompesch zu Bolheim of the Order of the Knights of Saint John, of the Holy City of Jerusalem and of the Islands of Rhodes and Malta, and of Colorado, and he was the Grand Master of the Order that Romegas served; and he is a man from the dawn of the world, and there is none like him in the world, or in any age.

I am here for him, and I left all the world I knew to follow him past tomorrow and tomorrow through endless years.

My coffin would not have opened unless he was awake and alive upon the Earth, and he is not the only servant of the Judge of Ages, and not even the most deadly, but he is the oldest and most loyal.

Beware the Wrath of the Slumbering Knighthood of the Ages when it wakes!

I thank the Nature that gave me words to say these things.

8. Teardrop

Menelaus looked with surprise at the tear sliding down among the sweat droplets on the cheek of Preceptor Illiance, and he wondered what it meant.

9

The Dying Place

1. Opening the Tent

The next day dawned clear. Snow lay thick and even over the whole camp, and the trees wore dunce caps of white. The tall man cloaked and hooded in tent fabric crept to the tent of Soorm the Hormagaunt. He yanked on it, but the fabric was stiff as metal. The tall man looked left and right carefully. He saw nothing moving in the still, white world.

He pressed the hem of his cloak against the seams of the tent. There was a noise like paper ripping.

He stood, backed away, stooped, made a snowball, and threw it against the side of the Hormagaunt’s tent. A second splattered by the first. A moment later, a huge furry dark figure of Soorm emerged, snarling and blinking and lashing his scorpion-tipped otter tail. In the cold, the scales of his mismatched hands and elongated feet gleamed red.

“Who dares disturb my sleep?”

“You sound like the Judge of Ages. Call me Anubis.”

“Anubis it is.” Soorm blinked his goat eye and flattened his cuttlefish eye. “Too early it also is. The dogs haven’t blown reveille yet. How do you accomplish this trick of unlocking their metal cloth?” Soorm’s neck bristles stood and swayed. “Come to think of it—where do you sleep without freezing?”

“I get close enough to the Tomb entrance that the automatics spray me with napalm every few minutes until I am toasted on all sides, and then I sleep inside the shell of one of the Blue Men machines. But at least I am not locked in a tent. Shall we walk? Get dressed.”

“What is this thing, dressed, of which you speak, past-creature?”

“Pox! What the hell is it about the future? Why is everyone a nudist?”

“Nudist? I have fur. Like a cat, I am always dressed, and in impeccable attire emperors can but envy. All I need is a brush and a currycomb.”

2. Handholds

The two men crunched through the fresh snow up the slope. The Hormagaunt spread his toes, and his webbed feet acted like snowshoes, leaving only a light footprint on the surface of the snow. Menelaus had glowing lines of ink lighting his bare feet, and his each footprint gave off a hiss of steam as he trod. The sound of the rushing stream in the still, early-morning air was audible as they approached the steeply sided river channel.

Soorm said, “You don’t really sleep slathered in napalm, do you?”

“Of course not. I bunk with Mickey the Witch. The Blues don’t realize yet that I can jinx their smartmetal. I was joshing you.”

“So I suspected, but who knows what a posthuman driven insane by grief and ill-advised augmentation experiments might do?”

“Whoa. You think I am insane?”

“You have been granted superhuman life, and so you spend it in a Tomb, pining for a woman who will never return, and blasting and butchering those who disturb your rest? It seems insane.”

Montrose shrugged. “I got nothing better to do. Besides, I perform a public service. My Tomb system saves lives and preserves a past the Hermeticists would rather force mankind to forget.”

“You perform a service for mankind, but who does not fear and loathe you? Why such altruism? You are not repaid, nor thanked.”

Montrose shrugged. “You win. I must be insane. So are you, for helping me.”

“You know why I help you. I hate the Hermeticists.”

“You hate them for ruining your world, and creating the Locusts to replace you?”

“No. For creating my world. What race of man was ever more monstrous than the Hormagaunts?”

“I try not to hate ’em. The Hermeticists, I mean.”

“Why not? They took everything from you. Pastor used to boast that they used you as their beast of burden for mental tasks. It is your duty to hate them.”

“She still thinks of them as her fathers. She doesn’t hate them.”

“She, who?”

“She, the one this is all about.”

“You mean—? Then the Swan Maiden is not a myth!”

“She ain’t no maiden no more,” harrumphed Montrose. “I got interrupted on my wedding night, but not that interrupted.”