He stepped on the gas. “Hold tight, babe. We’re almost there. I think we can outrun ’em.”
They came down the exit ramp with the steering column moaning and howling like a banshee. Crow had to put all his weight on the wheel to make it turn. Braking, he left the timeless lands.
And came out in Rome.
One instant they were on the exit ramp surrounded by lifeless mountains. The next they were pushing through narrow roads choked with donkey carts and toga-clad pedestrians. Crow brought the truck to a stop, and got out to add fluid.
The truck took up most of the road. People cursed and spat at him for being in their way. But nobody seemed to find anything unusual in the fact that he was driving an internal-combustion engine. They all took it in their stride.
It was wonderful how the timelines protected themselves against anachronisms by simply ignoring them.
A theoretical physicist Crow had befriended in Babylon had called it “robust integrity.” You could introduce the printing press into dynastic Egypt and six months later the device would be discarded and forgotten. Machine-gun the infant Charlemagne and within the year those who had been there would remember him having been stabbed. A century later every detail of his career as Emperor would be chronicled, documented, and revered, down to his dotage and death.
It hadn’t made a lot of sense to Crow, but, “Live with it,” the physicist had said, and staggered off in search of his great-great-five-hundred-times-great-grandmother with silver in his pocket and a demented gleam in his eye. So there it was.
Not an hour later, they arrived at the Coliseum and were sent around back to the tradesmen’s entrance.
“Ave,”Crow said to the guard there. “I want to talk to one of the-hey, Annie, what’s Latin for animal wrangler?”
“Bestiarius.”
“Yeah, that’s it. Fella name of Carpophorus.”
Carpophorus was delighted with his new pets. He watched eagerly as the truck was backed up to the cage. Two sparsores with grappling-hooks unlatched the truck doors and leaped back as eleven nightmares poured out of the truck. They were all teeth and claws and savage quickness. One of their number lay dead on the floor of the truck. Not bad for such a long haul.
“What are they?” Carpophorus asked, entranced.
“Deinonychi.”
“‘Terrible-claws,’ eh? Well, they fit the bill, all right.” He thrust an arm between the bars, and then leaped back, chuckling, as two of the lithe young carnivores sprang at it. “Fast, too. Oh, Marcuswill be pleased!”
“I’m glad you like ’em. Listen, we got a little trouble here with our steering column…”
“Down that ramp, to the right. Follow the signs. Tell Flamma I sent you.” He turned back to the deinonychi, and musingly said, “Should they fight hoplomachi? Or maybe dimachaeri?” Crow knew the terms; the former were warriors who fought in armor, the latter with two knives.
“Horses would be nice,” a sparsore commented. “If you used andabatae, they’d be able to strike from above.”
Carpophorus shook his head. “I have it! Those Norse bear-sarkers I’ve been saving for something special-what could be more special than this?”
It was a regular labyrinth under the Coliseum. They had everything down there: workshops, brothels, training rooms, even a garage. At the mention of Carpophorus’ name, a mechanic dropped everything to check out their truck. They sat in the stands, munching on a head of lettuce and watching the gladiators practice. An hour later a slave came up to tell them it was fixed.
They bought a room at a tavern that evening and ordered the best meal in the house. Which turned out to be sow’s udders stuffed with fried baby mice. They washed it down with a wine that tasted like turpentine and got drunk and screwed and fell asleep. At least, Annie did. Crow sat up for a time, thinking.
Was she going to wake up some morning in a cold barn or on a piss-stained mattress and miss her goose-down comforters, her satin sheets, and her liveried servants? She’d been nobility, after all, and the wife of a demiurge…
He hadn’t meant to run off with anybody’s wife. But when he and some buddies had showed up at Lord Eric’s estates, intent upon their own plans, there Annie was. No man that liked women could look upon Annie and not want her. And Crow couldn’t want something without trying to get it. Such was his nature-he couldn’t alter it.
He’d met her in the gardens out by Lord Eric’s menagerie. A minor tweak of the weather had been made, so that the drifts of snow were held back to make room for bright mounds of prehistoric orchids.
“Th’art a ragged fellow indeed, sirrah,” she’d said with cool amusement.
He’d come under guise of a musician at a time when Lord Eric was away for a few years monkeying with the physical constants of the universe or some such bullshit. The dinosaurs had been his target from the first, though he wasn’t above boffing the boss’s lady on the way out. But something about her made him want her for more than just the night. Then and there he swore to himself that he’d win her, fair and without deceit, and on his own terms. “These ain’t rags, babe,” he’d said, hooking his thumbs into his belt. “They’re my colors.”
They stayed in Rome for a week, and they didn’t go to watch the games, though Annie-who was born in an era whose idea of entertainment included public executions and bear-baitings-wanted to. But the deinonychi were by all accounts a hit. Afterward, they collected their reward in the form of silver bars, “as many,” Carpophorus gleefully quoted his sponsor, Marcus, as saying, “as the suspension of their truck will bear.”
Marcus was a rich man from a good family and had political ambitions. Crow happened to know he’d be dead within the month, but he didn’t bother mentioning the fact. Leave well enough alone, was his motto.
“Why did we wait around,” Annie wanted to know afterward, “if we weren’t going to watch?”
“To make sure it actually happened. Eric can’t come in now and snatch back his dinos without creating a serious line paradox. As I read it, that’s considered bad form for a Lord of Creation.” They were on the streets of Rome again, slowed to a crawl by the density of human traffic. Crow leaned on the horn again and again.
They made a right turn and then another, and then the traffic was gone. Crow threw the transmission into second and stepped on the accelerator. They were back among the Mountains of Eternity. From here they could reach any historical era and even, should they wish, the vast stretches of time that came before and after. All the roads were clear, and there was nothing in their way.
Less than a month later, subjective time, they were biking down that same road, arguing. Annie was lobbying for him to get her a sidecar and Crow didn’t think much of that idea at all.
“This here’s myhog, goddamnit!” he explained. “I chopped her myself-you put a sidecar on it, it’ll be all the fuck out of balance.”
“Yeah, well, I hope you enjoy jerking off. Because my fucking ass is so goddamn sore that…”
He’d opened up the throttle to drown out what she was about to say when suddenly Annie was pounding on his back, screaming, “Pull over!”
Crow was still braking the Harley when she leaned over to the side and began to puke.
When she was done, Crow dug a Schlitz out of the saddlebags and popped the tab. Shakily, she accepted it. “What was it!” he asked.
Annie gargled and spat out the beer. “Another premonition-a muckle bad one, I trow.” Then, “Hey.
Who do I have to fuck to get a smoke around here?”
Crow lit up a Kent for her.
Midway through the cigarette, she shuddered again and went rigid. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks, and her eyes turned up in their sockets, so they were almost entirely white. The sort of thing that would’ve gotten her burned for a witch, back in good old sixteenth-c England.
She raised a hand, pointing. “Incoming. Five of them.”
They were ugly fuckers, the Basilisks were: black, unornamented two-rotor jobs, and noisy too. You could hear them miles off.
Luckily, Annie’s foresight had given Crow the time to pick out a good defensive position. Cliff face to their back, rocks to crouch behind, enough of an overhang they couldn’t try anything from above.
Enough room to stash the bike, just in case they came out of this one alive. There was a long, empty slope before them. Their pursuers would have to come running up it.
The formation of Basilisks thundered closer.
