She dropped his hand and Richard stared at the whitened flesh, then threw her a glance of pure venom. “Hell, no. I figured there’d be plenty of time for that once we arrived. I brought a self-compensating compass, a computer sextant, all the charts I’d need. But I suppose all the stuff was confiscated. The only route I looked at was the one west to the Atlantic, to Bordeaux.”
Felice grunted in disgust. Claude persisted in a peaceable tone, “We know you must be experienced in navigation, son. There’s got to be some way we can orient ourselves. Can you locate the Pliocene polestar for us? That would be a big help.”
“So would a frigate of the Fleet Air Arm,” Richard grumbled. “Or Robin Hood and his merry men.”
Felice reached out for him again and he dodged back hastily. “Can you do it, Richard?” she asked. “Or are those stripes on your sleeves for good conduct?”
“This isn’t my home planet, dykey-doll! And the noctilucent clouds don’t make the job any easier.”
“A lot of volcanism,” Claude said. “Dust in the upper atmosphere. But the moon has set and there aren’t any ordinary clouds. Do you think you’d be able to get a fix as the glowing patches come and go?”
“I might,” Richard muttered. “But why the hell I should bother beats me… What I want to know is, what happened to my pirate outfit? Who put this coverall on me?”
“It was there,” Felice said sweetly, “and you needed it. Badly. So we obliged. Anything to help out a friend.”
Claude hurried to say, “You got all messed up in some fight you were in back at the castle. I just cleaned you up a bit and washed your other clothes. They’re hanging on the back of your saddle. Should be dry by now.”
Richard looked suspiciously at the smirking Felice, then thanked the old man. But a fight? Had he been in a fight? And who had been laughing at him with lofty contempt? A woman with drowning-pool eyes. But not Felice…
Amerie said, “Please try for the polestar if you feel well enough to manage it. We only have one more night of travel on this high north road. Then we’ll be angling off every which way and traveling in the daytime. Richard, it’s important.”
“Okay, okay,” he grouched. “I don’t suppose any of you Earthworms knows the latitude of Lyon.”
“About forty-five north, I think,” said Claude. “Around the same as my boyhood home in Oregon, anyhow, from the way I remember the sky over the auberge. Too bad we don’t have Stein. He’d know.”
“A rough guess is good enough,” Richard said.
The nun lifted her head. The sound of a horn came from outside in the fort’s yard. “Well, here we go again, Group. Good luck, Richard.”
“Megathanks, Sister. If we follow any escape plan tins kid dreams up, we’re gonna need it.”
They rode on through the night, traveling from beacon to beacon along the plateau trail with the river valley at their right and the scattered small volcanoes of the Limagne giving an occasional ruby pulse in the southwest. Constellations totally unfamiliar to the Earth natives of the twenty-second century crowded the sky of Exile. Many of those stars were the same ones that would be visible in the planet’s future; but their differing galactic orbits had twisted the familiar star patterns all out of recognition. There were stars in the Pliocene sky that were destined to die before the time of the Galactic Milieu; others that Milieu people would know were at this time still dark in their dust cloud wombs.
Richard viewed the Pliocene heavens with nonchalance. He’d seen an awful lot of different skies. Given plenty of time and a fixed base for observation, finding the local Polaris would be a snap, even with eyeball instrumentation alone. It was only the fact that they were moving on animal-back, and the need for a quick fix, that made the thing a bit tricky.
Now, if the old fossil-flicker was right about the rough latitude, and if they were on a near-northerly course on this trail as Claude thought they’d have to be, given the lay of the land, then the polestar should be about halfway between the horizon and the zenith somewhere in… there.
He had picked up a couple of stiff twigs from the litter back at the fort and now bound them together into a cross-sight with a hair from his mount’s mane. Each stalk was twice as long as his hand. He hoped the field wouldn’t be too limited.
Adjusting his position in the saddle to minimize the effect of the chaliko’s rocking gait, he memorized the constellations that had to be roughly circumpolar. Then he held the cross-sight at arm’s length and aligned the vertical axis with the straight track ahead (analog: two upright chaliko ears) and centered it on a likely star he had tentatively selected. He carefully noted the positions of five other bright stars within the quadrants of his sight and then relaxed. Three hours from now, when planetary rotation had made those six stars seem to change position slightly, he’d take another sighting His near-photographic memory would do an angular comparison within the field of the cross-sight, and with luck he would be able to discern the imaginary hub in the sky about which all those stars were turning. The hub would be the pole. It might or might not have a star on it or near it that could be dubbed Pliocene Polaris.
He would center the cross-sight anew on this point in the sky and try to verify the pole’s position before dawn with a two-hour shot. Failing that, he would check it tomorrow night with a good long time interval for maximum rotation.
Richard set his wrist chronometer’s alarm for 0330, glad that he hadn’t followed the impulse to throw the thing away back in Madame Guderian’s rose garden on that rainy morning when he had abandoned his universe… Less than twenty hours ago.
CHAPTER TEN
Even though he had been partially briefed by Creyn on what to expect, Bryan found the reality of the riverside city of Roniah nearly overwhelming. The party of riders came suddenly upon the place after wending their way through a dark canyon where the guards’ torches barely illuminated a narrow trail cut in buff sandstone. The caravan emerged onto a knoll overlooking the confluence of the Saône and the Rhône and saw the town below on the west bank, just south of the snout of forested crags where the two great rivers joined.
Roniah was built on a rise adjacent to the water. Twisting around the hill’s base was an earthern rampart crowned by a thick fortified wall. All along the top of this, glittering like lavish strings of orange beads, were closely spaced little fires. High, square watchtowers jutted out from the wall every hundred meters or so, and these, too, were outlined in pricks of fire all along their crenellated battlements, around the windows, and even up and down the corners and angles of the walls. A mauve city gate had almost every detail of its architecture picked out in small lamps. Leading to the gate was a colonnaded avenue half a kilometer long, every column of which was capped with a huge flaming torch. The midway was flanked with spangled geometrical patterns that might have been lamp-bordered lawns or flowerbeds planted in parterre designs.
From the caravan’s vantage point above the town, Bryan could see that Roniah was uncrowded, its mostly small houses laid out along wide curving streets. Since it was well past midnight, most of the dwellings showed no window lights, but along the edges of the roofs were little dots of fire; and the parapets that fronted the houses were also illuminated by thousands of the evenly spaced lamps. Closer to the riverside were a number of larger structures bearing slender towers of varying heights. The walls and major features of these buildings were outlined in light as elaborately as the city gate was, but instead of oil-lamp orange, the facades glowed with blue, bright green, aquamarine, and amber. Many of the towers had their windows ablaze.