Lupus Mortiferus had not survived a hundred combats in the Roman arena by giving up easily. He waited from the Kalends of the month until a single day remained before the Ides, either he or his slave following the strangers who had emerged from that wine shop on the Via Appia in the middle of the night. Lupus watched men, women, quarrelsome children, and puckish teens gawk at marble temples, enter brothels with erect-phallus signs poking out of the sides of dingy brick buildings, or file excitedly into the circus to watch the racing and the combats.
For all that time, nearly half the lunar month, Lupus bided his time and whetted the edge on his gladius as sharp as he whetted his desire for revenge. He endured stoically the jokes and jibes that still continued. A few of the jokesters took their jests to the grave, blood and entrails spilling on the sands of the arena while the crowd roared like a thousand summer thunderstorms in his ears.
And then, the waiting was done.
They left in the middle of the night, as before, slaves showing the way with lanterns. Following them was ridiculously easy. Lupus ordered his slave home and slipped from one shadowed shopfront to another, booted feet soundless on the stone paving of the sidewalk. Several of the young men had clearly drunk too much; they reeled, clutching at slaves or at one another, and tried to keep up. As the group approached the wine shop on the Via Appia, Lupus quietly insinuated himself into the group, hanging near the back.
A slave near the front called out something in a barbarous tongue. The group entered the wineshop by twos and threes. Lupus noted uneasily that the slaves assigned to guard the group were carefully taking count of those who passed into the shop's warehouse. Just when he feared discovery, one of the young men near him began to void the contents of his alcohol-saturated stomach. Lupus hid a grin. Perfect! Slaves converged on the boy, holding his head and trying to urge him forward. The sight and smell of the boy's vomit triggered a chain reaction amongst the drunken youths. Another boy spewed as he stumbled into the warehouse. Lupus took his arm solicitously, earning a smile of gratitude from a harried woman wearing a slave's collar.
Elated, Lupus dragged the sick youngster into a corner and let him throw up the wine and sweetmeats he'd obviously gorged on during the day. Yet another boy in the group began to throw up. Women in stylish gowns moved away, holding their breath. Frowns of disgust wrinkled painted lips and manicured brows. A little girl said very distinctly, "Yuck." Lupus wasn't certain just exactly what the word meant, but the look on her face was clear enough. Even the older men were giving the sick boys a wide berth. Lupus was pressed into the corner with the sick youngsters, ignored by everyone except the boy who clung to his arm and groaned.
Then the air began to groan.
It wasn't an audible sound, but it was exactly like the painful buzzing in his skull the last time he'd been close to this warehouse. Lupus swallowed a few times and tried to find the source of the noise that wasn't exactly a noise. A hush fell over the crowd, punctuated messily by the sounds of wretchedly ill boys and a few murmured words of encouragement from their slaves. Lupus glanced at a blank stretch of wall, wondering yet again why everyone had crowded into this particular warehouse—
The wall began to shimmer. Colors scintillated wildly through the entire rainbow. Lupus gasped aloud, then controlled his involuntary reaction. A quick glance showed him that no one had noticed the sweat that had started on his brow. That was a relief, but it still took all his courage to continue looking at the pulsing spot on the wall. Captivated by the sight, he couldn't look away, not even when a dark hole appeared in the scintillating, circular rainbows, his hindbrain whispering to run! The hole widened rapidly until it had swallowed half the warehouse wall. Lupus fought back once more the instinct to run, then swallowed instead and whispered softly, "Great war-god Mars, lend me a bit of your confidence, please."
People started stepping into it.
They flew away so fast, it was as though they'd been catapulted by a great war machine. Someone took the other arm of the boy Lupus was "helping" and pulled him toward the gaping hole in the wall. Lupus wanted to stand rock-still, terrified of that black maw that swallowed people whole down its gullet. Then, thinking of vengeance and his carefully sharpened gladius, he drew a deep breath for courage and moved forward in the midst of the half-dozen boys who were manfully struggling to overcome their illness. Lupus hesitated on the brink, sweating and terrified—
Then squeezed shut both eyes and stepped forward.
He was falling . . .
Mithras! Mars! Save me—
He went to his knees against something rough and metallic. Lupus opened his eyes and found himself kneeling on a metal gridwork. The boy who had gone through with him was vomiting again. Men hauling baggage stumbled past them, struggling to get around. Lupus hauled the kid to his feet and dragged him in the direction the others had taken, down a broad, gridwork ramp. Chaos reigned at the bottom, where several other of the boys were still holding up the line, vomiting piteously all over a young woman in the most outlandish clothing Lupus had ever seen. Everyone in line was trying to slide some sort of flat, stiff vellum chip into a boxlike device, but the boys were making a mess of the entire procedure. The young woman said something that sounded exasperated and disgusted and glanced the other way—
Lupus, who had no flat, stiff vellum chip to insert into the device, slipped quietly past and fled for the nearest concealment: a curtain of hanging vines and flowering shrubs that screened a private portico. Panting slightly and cursing the fear-borne adrenalin that poured through his veins the way it did just before a fight, Lupus Mortiferus took his first look at the place where the thief who'd stolen his money had taken refuge.
He swallowed once, very hard.
Where am I? Olympus?
He couldn't quite accept that explanation, despite the terrifying magic of a hole through a wall that sometimes existed and sometimes didn't. Atlantis, perhaps? No, that had been destroyed when the gods were young. If it had ever existed at all. Where, then? Rome was civilization in this world, although traders spoke of the wonders of the far, far east, from whence expensive silk came.
Lupus didn't know the name of the cities where silk was spun into cloth, but he didn't think this was one of them. It wasn't a proper "city" at all. There was no open sky, no ground, no distant horizon or wind to rustle through treetops and evaporate sweat from his skin. The place was more like an enormous . . . room. One large enough to hold the towering Egyptian obelisk on the spine of the Circus Maximus—with room to spare between its golden tip and the distant ceiling. The room was large enough that he could have laid out a half-length chariot-race course down its length, had there not been shops, ornamental fountains and ponds, decorative seats, and odd pillars with glowing spheres at the top scattered throughout its length, along with a riot of colorful Saturnalia and other, unfathomable, decorations from floor to ceiling. The delighted shrieking of young children brought home just how lost he was: a mere child of five clearly knew more about this place than he did.
Staircases of metal everywhere climbed up to nothing, or to platforms which served no sane purpose Lupus could divine. Signs he could not read scattered strange letters colorfully across the walls. A few areas were fenced off, leaving them inaccessible despite the seeming innocuous blankness of the walls behind them. The image of the wine shop's wall opening up into a hole through nothingness was so powerfully and recently embedded in his soul, Lupus shuddered, wondering what lay behind those innocent-seeming stretches of wall. People dressed as Romans mingled with others in costumes so barbaric and foreign, Lupus could only stare.
Where am I?
And where, in all this confusion of shops, staircases, and people, was the thief he sought? For one terrible moment, he shut his eyes and fought the urge to charge straight up the ramp and back through the hole in the wall. He managed to bring shuddering breaths under control only with difficulty, but he did control himself. He was the Death Wolf of the Circus Maximus, after all, not a milk-fed brat to fear the first strangeness life hurled his way. Lupus forced his eyes open again.
The hole in the wall had closed.
He was trapped here, for evil or good.
For just a second, terror overrode all other concerns. Then, slowly, Lupus gripped the pommel of his gladius. The gods he worshipped had answered his hourly prayers in their own mysterious fashion. He was trapped, yes.
But so was the thief.
All Lupus had to do was find a way to pass himself off as a member of this sunless, closed-in world long enough to track the man down, then he would wait for the next inexplicable opening of the wall and fight his way back home, if necessary.
The corners of his lips twisted into a mirthless smile.
The thief would rue the hour he had cheated Lupus Mortiferus, the champion Death Wolf of Rome. That decision holding hard-fought fear at bay, Lupus clutched the pommel of his sword and set out on his hunt.
Wherever populations of illegal refugees spring up without legal status inside an existing, "native" population, certain networks are formed almost as automatically as baby whales swim straight for the surface to gulp that first, essential breath of air. Almost by unconscious accord, mutual aid systems will emerge to help illegal aliens survive, perhaps in time even thrive, in a world they do not understand, much less control.
In the time terminals that had grown around those areas where gates formed in close-enough profusion to warrant building a station, this unwritten rule held as true as it did in the squalid streets of L.A. or New York, in the streets of every major coastal city, in fact, where refugees of The Flood which had followed The Accident, crowded together for safety, almost without hope of finding any, each and every pitiful one of them without papers to prove their identity or country of origin. Those uptime refugees struggled to survive under even worse conditions, sometimes, than refugees trapped forever on the time terminals. It didn't bear mentioning the living conditions of the tidal waves of refugees fleeing endless, senseless wars raging throughout the Middle East and the Balkans. Whole armies of them fled illegally across national borders, fleeing genocide at the hands of enemies, many of them dying in the attempt.
Men and women, children and strays, those who wandered into the terminals through open gates and found themselves trapped without uptime legal rights, without social standing, protected by the thinnest of "station policies"—because the uptime governments couldn't decide what to do about them—set up social systems of their own in courageous attempts to cope. A few went hopelessly mad and wandered back through open gates, usually unstable ones, never to be seen again. But most, desperate to survive, banded together in sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly knit confederations. Often speaking only the common language of gestures, they shared news and resources as best they could, sometimes even going so far as to hide from official notice any newcomers who might be exploited or injured by regulations and officialdom's sometimes harsh notice.
On TT-86, management under Bull Morgan made such extreme efforts necessary only rarely, but all downtimers shared a common bond few uptimers could really understand. It was the experience of being lost together. Like the Christian sects of Rome which had once met in the catacombs beneath the city or the cells of Colonial American patriots hiding out from British armies and meeting in any root cellar or thicket they could find, La-La Land's downtimer Council met underground. Literally underground, beneath the station proper, in the bowels of the terminal where machinery (which filled the air with chaos and noise) kept the lights running, the sewage flowing, and the heated or chilled air pumping; down where massive steel-and-concrete support beams plunged into native, Himalayan rock, the refugees created their culture of survival.
Amidst the noise and whine of machines they barely understood, they met in the cramped caverns of La-La Land's physical plant to bolster one another's courage, pass along news of critical importance to their standing, and share fear, grief, loss, and triumph with one another. A few had taken it upon themselves to hold special classes in uptime languages, while those most able to understand the world in which they were trapped did their best to explain it to those least able.
Uptimers knew about it, but most didn't pay much attention to the "underground society's" activities. On TT-86, management cared enough to provide an official psychologist on the payroll, whose sole duty was to help them adjust, but "Buddy" didn't really understand what it meant—emotionally, in the depth of one's belly—to be torn away from one's home time and become trapped in a place like the bustling time terminal that La-La Land had become over the years.
So downtimers turned to their own unofficial leaders in times of need or crisis. One of those unofficial leaders was Ianira Cassondra. Sitting waiting for Marcus to return to home to her, she spent a quiet moment bemused with the thought that her own history was, in many ways, more unlikely than the odd world in which she now led others through an unlikely existence. Ianira, born in Ephesus, the holy city of the Great Artemis Herself, had learned the secrets of rituals no man would ever understand from priestesses who followed the old, old ways. Ianira, secluded from the world as only a priestess of Artemis could be, was then, at sixteen, ripped from that world and sold into virtual slavery through the marriage bed—tearing her away from beloved Ephesus to the high citadel of Athens, across the Aegean Sea. Ianira, abandoned by her kinsmen, was left in the shadow of the dusty Agora where Athenian men met under blazing clear light to stroll amidst vendors of figs, olive oil, and straw baskets while they discussed and invented political systems that would change the world for the next twenty-six hundred years. Secluded from all that she knew, Ianira had tried to learn the mysteries of the patron goddess of her new home, only to be kept a virtual prisoner in her new husband's gyneceum.
Ianira the "Enchantress," who had once danced beneath the moon in Artemis' sacred glade, bow in hand, hair loose and wild, had prayed to her mother's ancient Goddesses to deliver her—and, finally, They had heard. One night, Ianira had fled the gyneceum and its imprisoning "respectability," driven by grief and terror into the night-dark streets of Athens.
Half bent on seeking asylum in Athene's great temple at the crowning height of the city—and half intent on throwing herself from the Acropolis rather than endure another night in her husband's home—Ianira had run on bare feet, lungs sobbing for air, her body weak and shaking still from the birthing chair in which she had so recently been confined.
And there, in those silent, dusty streets where men changed history and women were held in bondage, her prayers to Athene, to Hera, to Demeter and her daughter Proserpina, Queen of the Underworld, to Artemis and Aphrodite and even to Circe the Enchantress of Old, were finally answered. Pursued by an enraged husband, she ran as fast as she could force her flagging body, knowing all too well what fate awaited her if her husband caught her. Ianira's bare toes raised puffs of dust in the empty, moonlit Agora, where the columns of the gleaming white Hephestion rose on a hillock to one side and the painted Stoa where philosophers met to discourse with their disciples rose ghostlike before her in the haunted night.
Still bent on trying to reach the shining Parthenon above her, Ianira darted into an alleyway leading up toward the Acropolis and heard a beggar man seated on the ground call out sharply, "Hey! Don't go through there!"
A glance back showed her the figure of her husband, gaining ground. Terror sent her, sobbing, up toward Athene's great temple. She literally ran into the solid wall of a small cobbler's shop hugging the cliff face, staggered back—
—and saw it happen.
Inside the open doorway of the cobbler's shop, the dark air had torn asunder before her disbelieving eyes. Her gown fluttered like moth's wings as she faltered to a halt, staring at the pinpoint of light and movement through it. Dimly, she was aware of people crowding around her, her husband's curses at the back of the crowd. She hesitated only a moment. At the embittered, battered age of seventeen, Ianira Cassondra lifted her hands in thanks to whichever Goddess had listened—and shoved past startled men and women who tried to stop her. She stepped straight into the wavering hole in reality, not caring what she found on the other side, half-expecting to see the grand halls of Olympus itself, with shining Artemis waiting to avenge her defiled priestess.
She found, instead, La-La Land and a new life. Free of many of her old terrors, she learned to trust and love again, at least one man who had learned caution from harsher masters than she had yet found. And even more precious, something she had not thought possible, she had found the miracle of a young man with brown hair and a laughing heart and dark, haunted eyes who could make her forget the brutality and terror of a man's touch. He would not marry her yet. Not because she had left a living husband, but because—in his own mind—he was not honorably free of debt. Ianira had never met this man who owned Marcus' debt, but sometimes when she went into deep trance, she could almost see his face, amidst the most unlikely surroundings she had ever witnessed.
Whoever and wherever he was, waiting for Marcus to finish his days' labors, Ianira hated the hidden man with such a passion as Medea had known when she'd snatched up the dagger to slay her own sons, rather than let a replacement queen raise them like slaves. When—if—he returned, Ianira mused, she herself would find no barriers to taking up her own dagger and punishing the man who had treated her beloved so callously. It would not be the first time she'd offered the pieces of a sacrificial human male to ancient Artemis, she who was called by the Spartans Artamis the Butcher. She had thought herself long past the need for such bloody work; but when her family was threatened, Ianira Cassondra knew herself capable of anything. Quite a change from that time in her life when the thought of sleeping with a one-time slave would have been revolting to her—but the contrast between a year of "honorable" marriage and Marcus' tender concern for a stranger lost in a world the gods themselves would have found bewildering, had worked a magic Ianira could recognize. Sharing Marcus' bed, his fears and dreams, Ianira gave him children to ease the pain in his heart—and her own.
To her surprise, Ianira found she not only enjoyed the humble, mundane chores she had never before been forced to do, but also she enjoyed the surprising status and acclaim her abilities and personality had earned her. Odd to be so suddenly sought after—not only by other lonely downtimer men, but by tourists, uptimer students, even professors of antiquities. In this strange land, Ianira had discovered she could make many things, beautiful things: gowns, baubles and ornaments, herbal mixes to help those in suffering. After a few of these items had sold, demand was suddenly so great, she'd asked Connie Logan if she would please teach her to use one of the new machines for sewing, to make her gowns faster.
Connie had grinned. "Sure. Just let my computer copy down any embroidery or dress patterns you use and you've got a deal!"
Connie was a shrewd businesswoman. So was she, Ianira remembered with a smile. "The embroidery? No. The dress patterns? Yes, and welcome."
Connie shook her head and sighed. "You're robbing me blind, Ianira, but I like you. And if that Ionian chiton you're wearing is any example of what you can do . . . you've got a deal."
So Ianira used Connie Logan's workshop to create the chitons she was stockpiling toward a future business of her own. She'd spent her entire pregnancy with Gelasia sewing, making up little bags to hold dried herbs, learning to make the simple but beautiful kinds of jewelry she recalled so clearly from her home—and her now-dead husband's. And finally it paid off, when she got the permit from Bull Morgan to open a booth, which Marcus made for her in his free time. They painted it prettily and set up for business.
Which was good, if not as phenomenal as she'd once or twice hoped. But good, still, more than enough to pay for itself and leave extra for family expenses, including Marcus' debt-free fund. Theirs was an odd marriage—Ianira categorically refused to acknowledge the year of rape and abuse in Athens as a legitimate marriage, as she had not consented—but the odd marriage was filled with everything she could have wanted. Love, security, children, happiness with the kindest man she'd ever known . . . sometimes her very happiness frightened her, should the gods become jealous and strike them all down.
Marcus reeled in from work the night the Porta Romae cycled, far gone in wine he rarely took in such quantities, and shook his head at the supper she'd kept warm for him. Ianira put it away efficiently in the miraculous refrigerator machine, then noticed silent tears sliding down his cheeks.
"Marcus!" she gasped, rushing to him. "What is it, love?"
He shook his head and steered her into the bedroom, not even bothering to undress either of them, then held her close, nose buried in her hair, and trembled until he could finally speak.
"It—it is Skeeter, Ianira. Skeeter Jackson. Do you remember me laughing when he left for Romae, promising to give me a share of his bet winnings?"
"Yes, love, of course, but—"
He shifted a little, pressed something heavy inside a leather pouch into her hand. "He kept his promise," Marcus whispered.
Ianira held the heavy money pouch and just listened, holding him, while he wept for the kindness of an uptimer friend who had given him the means at long last to discharge his heavy debt and finally marry her.
"Why?" she whispered, not understanding the impulse which had driven a man universally regarded as a scoundrel to such generosity.
Marcus looked at her through eyes still flooded with tears. "He knows, I think, a little of what we have known. If he could only find what we have found. . . ." Marcus sighed, then kissed his wife. "Let me tell you." Ianira listened, and as Marcus' tale proceeded, vowed to store in her heart the story of Skeeter Jackson, who had, in his boyhood, stumbled through an open gate into an alien land.
"He was drunk that night," Marcus whispered to her in the darkness, so as not to waken their young daughters in the crib beside their shared bed. "Drunk and so lonely he started to talk, thinking I might understand. What he told me . . . Some of it I still do not understand completely, but I will try to tell it to you in his own words. He said it began as a game, because of his father . . ."
The game, Skeeter had recalled through a haze of alcohol and pain, had begun in deadly earnest. "It was my father's fault, or maybe my mother's. But you know, even when you're only eight, you can figure the score, figure it 'bout as accurately as any bookie making odds in New York. Dad, he bought the whole Pee-Wee League basketball team matching uniforms. Made sure our games got local TV coverage. Did the same for my Junior League baseball team. Spent a lot of money on us, he did. And you know what, Marcus? He never came to a game. Not one. Not a single, stinking, stupid game. Hell, it wasn't hard at all to figure the score. Dad didn't give a damn about me. Just cared 'bout how much prestige he could buy. How many customers his publicity would bring in, God damn him. He wassa good businessman, too. So rich it hurt your teeth just thinkin' about it."
Marcus, only vaguely comprehending much of what Skeeter said, knew that the young man was hurting nonetheless, worse than any resident he'd ever listened to on a late, slow night at the Down Time Bar & Grill. Skeeter stared into his whiskey glass. "Fill 'er up again, would you, Marcus? That's good." He drained half the glass in a gulp. "Yeah, that's good . . . So, it's like this, I started stealing things. You know, things at the mall. Little stuff at first, not because I was poor, but because I wanted something I got by myself. I guess I just got too goddamn sick of having Dad throw some expensive toy at me like a bone to some flea-bitten dog that had wandered in, just to keep it quiet."
He blinked slowly and gulped the rest of the whiskey, then just reached for the bottle and poured again. His eyes were a little unfocussed as he spoke, his voice a little less steady. "In fac', I was at th' mall the day it happened. After The Accident, you know, that caused the time strings, ever'body knew a gate could open up anywhere, but, hell, they usually cluster together, you know, like the TV said all my life, in one little area small enough to build a time station around 'em and let the big new time tour companies operate through 'em. But, my friend," he tipped more whiskey into his glass, "sometimes gates just open up, no warning, no nothing, in the middle of some place ain't no gate ever been seen before."
He drank, his hand a little unsteady, and entirely without his volition, the story came pouring out. He'd been careless, that time, they'd caught him shoplifting the big Swiss Army Knife. But he was little and blubbered convincingly and was slippery enough to dodge away the minute their guard was down. He'd considered, for a few moments after the guard grabbed him, letting the scandal hit the papers and television news programs, just to get even with his father. But Skeeter didn't want the game to end that way. He wanted to perfect it—then present his Dad with a scandal big enough to wreck his life as thoroughly as he'd wrecked Skeeter's, game after missed baseball and basketball and football game, lonely night after lonely night.
So away he dodged, into the crowded mall, with the angry guard hot on his heels and Skeeter whipping around startled shoppers, dodging into department stores and out again through different exits on upper levels, and skidding through the food court while the guard giving chase radioed for backup.
It was all great fun—until the hole opened up in the air right in front of him. The only warning he had was an odd buzzing in the bones of his head. Then the air shimmered through a whole dazzling array of colors and Skeeter plunged through with a wild yell, face flushed, hair standing on end, T-shirt glued to his back with sweat and his sneakers skidding on nothing.
He landed on stony ground, with a sky big as an ocean howling all around him. A man dressed in furs, face greased against a bitter wind, stared down at him. The man's expression wavered somewhere between shock, terror, and triumph, all three shining at once in his dark eyes. Skeeter, winded by the chase and badly dazed by the plunge through nothingness, just stood there panting up at him for endless moments, eye locked to eye. When the man drew a sword, Skeeter knew he had two choices: run or fight. He was used to running. Skeeter usually found it easier to run than to confront an enemy directly, particularly when running allowed him to lay neat traps in his wake.
But he was out of breath, suddenly and shockingly frozen by the bitter wind, and confronted with something a few thieving raids at the mall had not prepared him to deal with: a man ready to actually kill him.
So he attacked first.
One eight-year-old boy with a stolen Swiss Army knife was no match for Yesukai the Valiant, but he did some slight damage before the grown man put him on the ground, sword at his throat.
"Aw, hell, go on and kill me, then," Skeeter snarled. "Couldn't be worse'n being ignored."
To his very great shock, Yesukai—Skeeter learned later just exactly who and what he was—snatched him up by his shirt, slapped his face, and threw him across the front of a high-pommelled Yakka saddle, then galloped down a precipitous mountainside that left Skeeter convinced they were all going to die: Skeeter, the horse, and the madman holding the reins. Instead, they joined a group of mounted men waiting below.
"The gods have sent a bogda," Yesukai said (as Skeeter later learned, once he could understand Yesukai's language. He had heard the story recounted many times over the cook fires of Yesukai's yurt.) He thumped Skeeter's back with a heavy hand, knocking the breath from him. "He attacked brave as any Yakka Mongol warrior, drawing the blood of courage." The man who'd slung him over his saddle bared an arm where Skeeter had cut him slightly. "It is a sign from the spirits of the upper air, who have sent us the beginnings of a man to follow us on earth."
A few younger warriors smiled at the ancient Mongol religious tenet; grizzled old veterans merely watched Skeeter through slatted eyes, faces so perfectly still they might have been carved of wood.
Then Yesukai the Valiant jerked his horse's fretting head around to the north. "We ride, as I have commanded."
Without another word of explanation, Skeeter found himself bundled onto another man's saddle, thrust into a fur jacket too big for him, a felt hat with ear flaps tied under his chin—also too big for him—and carried across the wildest, most desolate plain he had ever seen. The ride went on for hours. He fell asleep in pain, woke in pain to be offered raw meat softened by being stored between the saddle and the horse's sweating skin (he managed to choke it down, half-starved as he was), then continued for hours more until a group of black-felt tents he later learned to call yurts rose from the horizon like bumps of mold growing up from the flat, bleak ground.
They galloped into the middle of what even Skeeter could tell was some kind of formal processional, scattering women and children as they smashed into the festive parade. Screams rose from every side. Yesukai leaned down from his saddle and snatched a terror-stricken young girl from her own pony, threw her across his pommel and shouted something. The men of the camp were running toward them, bows drawn. Arrows whizzed from Yesukai's mounted warriors. Men went down, screaming and clutching at throats, chests, perforated bellies. Deep in shock, Skeeter rode the long way back to the tall mountain where he'd fallen through the hole in the air, wondering every galloping step of the way what was to become of him, never mind the poor girl, who had finally quit screaming and struggling and had settled into murderous glares belied by occasional whimpers of terror.
It was only much later that Skeeter learned of Yesukai's instructions to his warriors. "If the bogda brings us success, I command that he be raised in our tents as a gift from the gods, to become Yakka as best he can or die as any man would of cold, starvation, or battle. If he brings the raid bad luck and I fail to steal my bride from that flat-faced fool she is to marry, then he is no true bogda. We will leave his cut-up body for the vultures."
There was no compassion in Yesukai for any living thing outside his immediate clan. He couldn't afford it. No Mongol could. Keeping the Yakka clan's grazing lands, herds, and yurts safe from the raids of neighbors was a full-time job which left no room in his heart for anything but cold practicality.
Skeeter had come to live in terror of him—and to love him in a way he could never explain. Skeeter was used to having to fend for himself, so learning to fight for scraps of food like the other boys after the adults had finished eating from the communal stew pot wasn't as great a shock as it might have been. But Skeeter's father would never have troubled himself to say things like, "A Yakka Mongol does not steal from a Yakka Mongol. I rule forty-thousand yurts. We are a small tribe, weak in the sight of our neighbors, so we do not steal from the tents of our own. But the best in life, bogda, is to steal from one's enemy's and make what was his your own—and to leave his yurts burning in the night while his women scream. Never forget that, bogda. The property of the clan is sacred. The property of the enemy is honorable gain to be taken in battle."
Boys, Skeeter learned, stole from one another anyway, sometimes starting blood feuds that Yesukai either ended cruelly or—on occasion—allowed to end in their own fashion, if he thought the wiser course would be to drive home a harsh lesson. Hardship Skeeter could endure. Fights with boys twice his age (although often half his size), nursing broken bones that healed slowly through the bitter, dust-filled storms every winter, learning to ride like the other boys his age, first on the backs of sheep they were set to guard, then later on yaks and even horses, these Skeeter could endure. He even learned to pay back those boys who stole from him, stealing whatever his enemies treasured most and planting the items adroitly amongst the belongings of his victim's most bitter enemies.
If Yesukai guessed at his little bogda's game, he never spoke of it and Skeeter was never reprimanded. He desperately missed nearly everything about the uptime home he'd lost. He missed television, radio, portable CD players, roller blades, skate boards, bicycles, video games—home versions and arcade games—movies, popcorn, chocolate, colas, ice cream, and pepperoni pizza.
But he did not miss his parents.
To be accepted into the Yakka clan, with its banner of nine white yak tails, as though he actually were important to someone, was enough, more than enough, to make up for a father who had abdicated all pretense of caring about his family. Not even the mother who—after her son had been missing for five years only God knew where, more than likely dead, the son who had been rescued by a time scout who'd given his life rescuing Skeeter—had welcomed him home with a cursory peck on the cheek, obligatory for the multiple media cameras. She had then, in her chilly, methodical way, calmly set about making lists of the school classes he'd need to make up, the medical appointments he'd need, and the new wardrobe that would have to be obtained, all without once saying, "Honey, I missed you," or even, "How did you ever survive your adventure?" never mind, "Skeeter, I love you with all my heart and I'm so glad you're home I could cry."
Skeeter's mother was too busy making lists and making certain he was antiseptically clean again to notice his long, still silences. His father's sole response was a long stare of appraisal and a quiet, "Wonder what we can make of this, hmm? TV talk shows? Hollywood? At least a made-for-TV movie, I should think. Ought to pay handsomely, boy."
And so, after two weeks of bitterly hating both of them and wishing them gutted on the end of Yesukai's sword, when Skeeter's father—in the midst of signing all the contracts he'd mentioned that first day—decided to send him to some University school to have his brain picked on the subject of twelfth-century Mongolian life and the early years of Temujin, first-born son of Yesukai—merely for the fee it would bring, Skeeter had done exactly what Yesukai had taught him to do.
He had quietly left home in the middle of the night and made his way to New York by way of a stolen car to continue his real education: raiding the enemy. The man and woman who'd given him life had become members of that enemy. He was proud—deeply proud—of the fact that he'd managed to electronically empty his parents' substantial bank account before leaving.
Yesukai the Yakka Mongol Khan, father of the one-day Genghis Khan, had begun Skeeter's formal training. New York street toughs furthered it. His return to La-La Land, a time terminal he recalled as a half-finished shell of concrete with few shops and only one active gate open for business, run by a company called Time Ho! was the journeyman's equivalent of completing his unique education.
So, when Skeeter said, "My father made me everything I am today," he was telling the bald-faced, unvarnished truth. The trouble was, he was never sure which father he meant. He possessed no such uncertainty about which man's values he'd chosen to emulate. Skeeter Jackson was a twenty-first century, middle-class, miserable delinquent who had discovered happiness and purpose in the heart and soul of the Yakka Mongol.
And so he smiled when he worked his schemes against the enemy—and that smile was, as others had sometimes speculated, absolutely genuine, perhaps the only "genuine" thing about him. 'Eighty-sixers had become the closest thing Skeeter now had to a family, a tribe to which he belonged, only on the fringes, true; but he never forgot Yesukai's lesson. The property of Clan was sacrosanct. And there was no greater pleasure than burning the enemy's yurts in the night—or, metaphorically, scamming the last, living cent out of any tourist or government bureaucrat who richly and most royally deserved it.
If others called him scoundrel because of it . . .
So be it.
Yesukai the Valiant would have applauded, given him a string of ponies for his success, and maybe even a good bow—all things that Skeeter had coveted. La-La Land was the only place where a latter-day Mongol bogda could practice his art without serious threat of jail. It was also the only place on earth where—if life grew too unendurable or the scholars caught up with him—he could step back through the Mongolian Gate, find young Temujin, and join up again.
"Y'know," Skeeter slurred, downing yet another glass of whiskey, "nights when m' luck's down and I got no one, sometimes I swear I'm gonna do just that. Walk through, next time th' Monglian—Mongolian—Gate opens. Haven't done it yet, Marcus. So far," he rapped his knuckles against the wet surface of the wooden bar, "m' luck always takes a turn for the better, jus' in time. But my Khan, he always said luck alone don't carry a man through life. Tha's why I work so damn hard. It's pride, don' you see, not jus' survival. Gotta live up t' Yesukai's standards. And genr'ally—" he hiccuped and almost dropped his glass, "—genr'ally it's fun, 'cause a' bureaucrats anna' damn arrogant tourists are a bunch a' idiots. Incomp'tent, careless idiots, don' even know wha's around 'em." He laughed a short, bitter laugh. "Let'm stay blind 'n deaf 'n stupid. Keeps the money coming, don't it?"
He met Marcus' gaze with one that was almost steady, despite the appalling amount of whiskey he'd consumed.
"If no one else unnerstan's, so be it. 'S not their life t' live. 'S mine." He thumped his chest, staining a Greek chiton of exquisite cut and embroidery when the remaining whiskey in his glass sloshed across the garment and puddled in his lap. "Mine, y'unnerstand. My life. And I ain't disappointed, Marcus. Not by much, I ain't."
When Skeeter began to cry as though his heart were breaking, Marcus had very gently taken the whiskey glass from his hand and guided him home, making sure he was safely in bed in his own apartment that night. Whether or not Skeeter recalled anything he'd said, Marcus had no idea. But Marcus remembered every word—even those he didn't quite understand.
When Marcus shared the precious story of Skeeter Jackson with Ianira, she held her beloved close in the darkness and made sacred promises to her Goddesses. They had given her this precious man, this Marcus who cherished not only Ianira herself, but also their beautiful, sloe-eyed daughters. They had given Ianira a man who actually loved little Artemisia and tiny little Gelasia, loved their cooing laugher and loved dandling them by turns on his knee and even soothing their tears, rather than ordering either beautiful child left on the street to die of exposure and starvation simply because she was female.
There in the sacred privacy of their shared bed, Ianira vowed to her Goddesses that she would do whatever lay in her power to guard the interests of the man who had given her beloved the means to discharge his debt of honor. When Marcus joined with her in the darkness, skin pressed to trembling skin, she prayed that his seed would plant a son in her womb, a son who would be born into a world where his father was finally a free man in his own soul. She called blessings on the name of Skeeter Jackson and swore a vow that others in the downtimer community would soon know the truth about the smiling, strange young man who made such a point to steal from the tourists yet never touched anything belonging to residents—and always treated downtimers with more courtesy than any 'eighty-sixer on the station, with the possible exceptions of Kit Carson and Malcolm Moore.
Ianira understood now many things that had been mysterious to her. All those cash donations, with no one taking responsibility for them . . . Downtimers had a champion they had not dreamed existed. Marcus, not understanding why she wept in the darkness, kissed her tears and assured her in ragged words that he would prove himself worthy of the love she gave so freely. She held him fiercely and stilled his mouth with her own, vowing he had proven his worthiness a thousand times over already. His response brought tears to her eyes.
In the aftermath of their love, she held him while he slept and made plans that Marcus would neither understand nor approve. She didn't care. They owed a debt which was beyond profound; Ianira would repay it as best she could. And the only way she could think to do that was to further the fortunes of the man who had given Marcus the means to purchase back his sacred honor.
Ianira kissed Marcus' damp hair while he slept and made silent, almost savage, decisions.