The Other Time Page 3

  Don didn’t bother to tell him that his particular vehicle was a horseless carriage and that, so far as he knew, it was a very long distance away in more than just space.

  He was under no misapprehensions about why he was being invited to join the expedition. The Captain-General wanted to hear more of this rich land far to the north. He was evidently capable of already planning beyond Tenochtitlan.

  Don Fielding hesitated. He was without food, transportation, or locally acceptable funds. He was without employment and without any idea whatsoever of how to acquire a position. In short, he had no alternative.

  He said, “You are much too kind, Don Hernando.” Cortes said briskly, “Very well, it is done. Gonzalo, see that Don Fielding is given quarters and provisions.” All this time, the girl, Dona Marina, as they called her, had remained quiet, her intelligent dark eyes taking Don in. She was evidently set back by his height. He towered more than a full foot over her. It occurred to Don that she didn’t speak Spanish and had been unable to follow the conversation. He opened his mouth to say something in Nahuatl, but then closed it again. No one present knew that he was acquainted with the language and he doubted that any of the Spanish spoke it. It wouldn’t hurt to keep the fact to himself; it might be an advantage on some occasion. He could use advantages.

  Instead, even as he turned to follow young Sandoval, he said to Fray Olmedo, “Padre, could you tell me the exact date?”

  The priest said, “Why, it is the tenth of August, in the year of Our Lord, 1519.”

  “I was afraid you’d say something like that,” Don Fielding said emptily.

  Chapter Three

  Don and Sandoval walked side by side, without benefit of guards this time. At the bottom of the steps they turned left and headed toward another large temple, this one with some strange constructions that looked like nothing so much as chimneys out in front. The temple itself was raised up on an extensive platform and to its right was a large rectangular building, obviously living quarters.

  Sandoval was saying, a mischievous element in his slight stammer as he glanced at Don from the side of his eyes, “And what did you think of our Captain-General? We come from the same town, you know, Medellin, in Spain.”

  Don said carefully, “I think him the type of man who succeeds in life.”

  The young dandy chuckled. “By my soul, that he is. Though hell should bar the way.”

  He gestured around the large courtyard at the various temples and the living quarters of the priests. “The Captain-General is a stickler for discipline and care. Upon reaching Cempoala and seeing the nature of this enclosure, he immediately marched the priests and their assistants out of here and the army took over. We are all quartered within the walls. None is allowed to leave without permission, and none alone, though these Totonacs are not a warrior people. It is no wonder that the Tenochas milk them of tribute. Besides Cempoala, there must be some fifty villages in this land. By my soul, I am unable to understand why the Great Montezuma does not annex the whole area outright.”

  “Because he doesn’t know how,” Don muttered.

  “I beg your pardon, Don Fielding?”

  Don said impatiently, “I told you that I was a scholar. One of the things I have studied is the governmental system of the Aztec Confederation.”

  The younger man looked at him. “The who?”

  “The nation you are about to move against. It is composed of three tribes occupying three cities in the Mexican valley, and all are of a common heritage. But having primitive institutions, they have no manner of assimilating new towns, towns with other heritages, into their society. They can defeat others and wrest tribute from them, but they don’t know how to bring them into their government.” Don grunted. “They could learn a few lessons from the Incas in that respect.”

  Sandoval shook his head and laughed. “A scholar you must be, Don Fielding, for I cannot understand aught you say. But here we are. Since you are a gentleman, I will quarter you with Diego de Ordaz, one of our captains of foot. An excellent soldier. During the battle of Ceutla, by my soul, he killed more Indians than the plague.”

  They ascended the stone stairs and entered the building through an archway. This opened into a patio surrounded by the many-roomed buildings to which Don was becoming accustomed. Sandoval led the way to one of them, brushed aside the mat curtain which served as a door. “Hola, Diego!” he called.

  The room, perhaps twelve feet square, was, as always in Indian architecture, windowless, and the door was the sole source of light. It was also fumitureless, unless a Spanish leather trunk, about the size of a footlocker, up against one wall, was to be counted. However, there were colorful mugs on the walls, and mats and bedding on the floor; all was spotlessly clean.

  On the bedding, in armor, was sprawled a husky, red-bearded Spaniard, his sword drawn in hand. He didn’t look comfortable, but he did look tough, Don decided.

  His eyes had shot open upon Sandoval’s call, and now he sat up, staring at Don Fielding.

  Sandoval laughed. “Your new roommate, Diego! Don Fielding. A mysterious stranger from a fabulously rich nation to the north!”

  The other growled, “Why not put him with the other prisoners?”

  Sandoval turned to Don. “See? There is no chivalry in this world. It is a wonder our brave Diego does not wish to throw you to the mastiffs.”

  Ordaz, like all the others before him, ran his eyes up and down Don’s outlandish clothing in extreme puzzlement. Obviously, this was no Indian, especially in view of the blue of Don’s eyes and relative lightness of hair and complexion, in spite of his suntan.

  Don attempted a bow, although he had never bowed before in his life, save in a grammar school play in which he had done a sloppy job of being Launcelot.

  “A pleasure to meet you, Don Diego,” he said in his best Spanish.

  The other was taken aback all over again. “By my beard,” he snorted. “You speak our tongue!”

  Sandoval said, still amused, “Don Fielding is a nobleman from a far land to the north where a ship from Puerto Rico was wrecked. Thus he was able to learn Spanish. It teems, so he tells us, in wealth. The Captain-General has added him to our expedition.”

  “By my beard!” the other repeated, astounded. Sandoval said, “He will eat in our soldier’s mess and be… in your charge. The Captain-General would know more of this United States from whence he comes. Perhaps, one day, we shall journey there.”

  “If you live to be four hundred, you might,” Don Fielding said under his breath. “And I wonder how this conquering army would react to a battle tank.”

  Diego de Ordaz had come to his feet and now returned his sword to its scabbard, after his eyes had automatically checked and found that Don was unarmed.

  It came to Don Fielding that this was not the day of the handgun. Matchlock arquebuses, yes; slow-loading muskets that took an age to operate and were, in actuality, less effective than the more common crossbows. Until he used it for the first time, these people would have no idea of what his modem little Beretta .22 automatic was. He had some forty-five shells all together. It behooved him to nurse them. In spite of the smallness of the caliber, a .22 rifle cartridge was deadly when accurately placed, and he was a fairly good shot.

  Sandoval said to him, “You have eaten?”

  “Not since yesterday.”

  “By my soul, you must hunger. Diego, will you take our new comrade to the kitchens? Undoubtedly, the Indian wenches will still have ample for Don Fielding’s needs. I must continue my patrol of the town.” He turned back to Don, took off his cap, and made another flourishing bow. “Your servant, Don Fielding.” There was a mocking twinkle in his eye. He turned and left.

  The husky redbeard said, “Come. We will see what we can find. This Indian food, you’ll discover, is less than civilized. I yearn for the oil and garlic, the meat and fruits, the wines of Spain. But at least it is filling.”

  He led the way through the mat-covered door and Don followed. They exit
ed into the patio and hence onto the terrace and to the left. The kitchens, so called, were out in the open. Long poles supported a thatch roof; otherwise there was no protection against rain or wind. The Cempoalans had obviously not advanced to the point that their buildings provided for fireplaces, not to speak of stoves. The Indian women had improvised rocks to support large pots which bubbled over the fires. Over others were flat ceramic pans.

  Ordaz, as they came up, called to a couple of them, “Food, you ugly wenches! Food!” He pointed at the pots and then at Don Fielding. “Food!”

  Undoubtedly, they couldn’t understand a word he said, but his gestures were obvious. One of them, a middle-aged drab, squatted down next to a pile of what looked like coarse dough, took up a handful of it, and began to pat out a tortilla. She was deft, and in moments it was round, paper-thin, and about a foot and a half across, the bread of the Mexican Indian. She put it on one of the flat pans over the fire and started another one.

  Ordaz took up a bowl and handed it to Don. He indicated one of the pots of stew. “Try this, Don Fielding. Not too bad. Fowl in a thick sauce containing various rare foods of this cursed land, including what they call chocolate and a ground nut unknown in Europe.”

  There were some wooden ladles. Don took one up and plunged it into the thick stew. It was, he discovered, an early version of turkey mole, the national dish of Mexico. The sauce was almost black in color and it turned out that the red-bearded Ordaz had been correct. It contained not only several kinds of peppers, both sweet and hot, but chocolate and peanuts as well. It was excellent.

  Don had delved into his pocket and come forth with his Swiss knife. He extracted the spoon, picked up the now-done tortilla from where it had been baking, and sat down on a block of worked stone which formed the first step of the platform of the house in which they were quartered. He began to eat. The tortilla was certainly the real article, complete with grit from the stone grinder. Don soon learned to chew carefully; some of that grit could chip a tooth.

  Diego Ordaz was staring at the knife. “By my beard!” he said. “Now that is a new one. May I see it, Don Fielding?”

  Don demonstrated the knife, including several of the blades and gadgets. It even had a small set of scissors.

  The other was delighted. “’Tis a small miracle. The most delicate craftsmen of Toledo produce no such thing. From whence comes this mechanism, Don Fielding?”

  It was no use telling him Switzerland. The question would then arise how Don had gotten it into his possession. He said, “From my own far land. We have highly trained craftsmen there.”

  Ordaz handed the knife back so that Don could continue his meal.

  The Spaniard said thoughtfully, “So you do. Tell me, Don Fielding, are your armies advanced to the point where they utilize swords of steel, armor of steel, arquebuses, and crossbows?”

  Don finished a leg of the stewed turkey and tossed the bone into a nearby wicker scrap basket. “Well, no,” he said deliberately. “Our armies are not armed with such weapons. Frankly, Don Ordaz, I was surprised to see them in the hands of your own army.”

  The other was not a devious man. He could not keep the gleam from his eyes. He said, “And tell me, Don Fielding, what do you use for money in this far land of yours? By my faith, these Indian dogs use none at all. They trade only by barter.”

  Don Fielding was well aware of the trend of the other’s thoughts, but the good food was working on him to the point where his spirits had risen.

  He said absently, “Why, in our land the currency is based on gold. Tons of gold which the government holds in reserve.”

  “Tons!” the Spaniard blurted. “You exaggerate to make your point, surely.”

  “No,” Don said, accepting another tortilla from the Indian woman who brought it over to him. “I meant tons. And our government is making every attempt to secure still more. They think they possess not enough.”

  “Your mines must be rich!”

  Don made an expression to indicate he was considering that. “Well, not so rich as they once were, since we have mined them so extensively.” He sighed deeply. “It is necessary for our government to import gold from still further lands so as to provide plenty for the rings, bracelets, and necklaces our women love.”

  The Spaniard’s eyes were narrow now and Don was reminded of Cortes, whose expression had also gone greedy when told that the United States, to the north, was the richest land in the world.

  Ordaz said, “Your women wear much jewelry, eh?”

  Don said idly, “Practically every adult woman wears at least a gold ring. It is a custom. And most often another ring, one set with a diamond. Part of the prestige of her husband is determined by the size of the diamond he buys her upon their betrothal.”

  The other’s eyes were bulging. “On your faith, Don Fielding?”

  “On my faith,” Don said, finishing the last of his turkey stew and folding up his knife. Suddenly the weariness hit him. The past two days had not been easy and he had slept hardly an unfitful moment the night before.

  He said, “If you will pardon me, I think I shall return to our quarters, Don Diego, and rest for a time.”

  Ordaz cleared his throat. “Very well. I will not disturb you. Indeed, it is necessary that I go to the Captain-General to report. Ah, that is, to see if he has any orders for me. I am in charge of the night watch.”

  He turned and hurried off in the direction of the Cortes command post.

  Don looked after him and cursed himself inwardly. Why had he felt it necessary to prod the other in that manner? Shooting off his mouth for the sake of amusement would get him nowhere. The cupidity of these mercenaries had already been whetted by what he had told Cortes and Sandoval; there had been no point in increasing it. That was the difficulty in having a sense of humor. He snorted inwardly as he came to his feet. A squad of Green Berets armed with automatic rifles would take the whole Spanish expeditionary force, had there been any chance of meeting between the two eras.

  He walked his way back to the room in which he was quartered with Diego de Ordaz, made a bed for himself out of three or four of the mats and rugs, and flaked out on it. However, in spite of his extreme weariness, or perhaps because of it, he didn’t find immediate sleep. There was too much on his seething mind.

  Assistant Professor Donald Fielding had been no more exposed to the concept of time travel than is the average man. It had simply never occurred to him to consider it seriously and he had never, as a social scientist rather than as a student of the physical sciences, delved into what serious material there was on the subject. He had never even heard of the theory of alternate universes, or spacetime continua, or considered the nature of time. It simply flowed, didn’t it? Everyone knew that.

  As a boy, he had read the usual time travel classics such as Wells’s The Time Machine and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, and he vaguely remembered a movie he had seen revived on television entitled Berkeley Square, in which Tyrone Power had mysteriously returned to the age of Doctor Johnson in London and attempted to introduce the steam engine, the locomotive, and the electric light. However, it had not even remotely occurred to him to find anything but entertainment in such stories.

  He tried to be logical in facing the reality of the situation in which he found himself, and couldn’t. There was no place from which to start in trying to think it all out logically.

  He must face the fact that somehow he had been transported, if that was the word, to the early sixteenth century. He had to accept reality. Here he was. He was existing in the camp of Hernando Cortes, immediately prior to that adventurer’s march inland toward what is now—he caught himself there—Mexico City and was then—he caught himself again—Tenochtitlan.

  He had come through time, or crossed the time barrier, or had been reincarnated backwards, or whatever had happened to him, and here he was.

  No, he had to reject that reincarnation bit. He was in possession of physical items such as his gu
n and wristwatch. So it wasn’t a matter of only his mind, or psyche, or whatever, crossing the void. He, clothing and all, had crossed it.

  Now that he thought about it, he vaguely remembered reading an article about two female English schoolteachers of the early twentieth century who had written a book claiming that they had been walking through the gardens of Versailles when suddenly they were thrown back into the time of Marie Antoinette. At the time he had thought it utter nonsense and hadn’t even finished the article. If they had written a book on the matter, in their own age, it meant that they had not only traveled into the past but had returned to their own present.

  Could that happen to him? That is, was it possible that he might slip back into his own era as easily and quickly as he had slipped into this one?

  He traced back his memories of the day before. That shimmering of the air, that supposed sun stroke. That must have been when it happened. No wonder he couldn’t find his Land Rover camper. It wasn’t there. And no wonder Coatepec hadn’t looked like the Coatepec he had known. Far from the modem village, complete with Pemex gasoline station and all the rest, he had found the original primitive Indian pueblo, a fairly large adobe community house with some six or seven hundred inhabitants.

  But what had happened? He simply didn’t know. One moment he had been in the latter part of the twentieth century. The next, he was in the early part of the sixteenth. How and why, he hadn’t the vaguest idea and he strongly suspected he never would.

  It occurred to him, sourly, that as a student of Mexican ethnology and archeology he had the most unrivaled opportunity of all time. But to what end? Who would ever know? And then the thought came to him that he could emulate Sir Boss in Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, that is, write it all down and stash it away somewhere where future generations could find it. But what good would that do him? Scholarship for scholarship’s sake? He grunted. All his instincts now told him, survive, survive; nothing else mattered. And he had a sneaking suspicion that survival was not going to be easy. He didn’t trust the gold-hungry Spanish, and since he was familiar with what was to happen in the next few months, he had no reason to believe that the Mexican Indians were going to have much regard for any white man in the near future.