So, young Giulion Geoffrey faced his problem. This 'perfectly good woman' of The Barbarian's--was she in fact a good woman, a lady, and therefore entitled to aid in extremity from any and all gentlemen; or was she some camp follower, entirely worthy of being considered a spoil of combat? "Well, come on, lad," The Barbarian rumbled impatiently at this point. "Do you want that Dugald enjoying _her_ tonight along with everything else?" And that decided Geoffrey. He pushed himself to his feet, not liking the daggers in his chest, but not liking the thought of Dugald's pleasures even more. "Let's go, then." "Good enough, lad," The Barbarian chuckled. "Now let's see how quietly we can get across to the edge of that fire." They set out--none too quietly, with The Barbarian's heavy bulk lurching against Geoffrey's lean shoulder on occasion, and both of them uncertain of their footing in the darkness. But they made it across without being noticed--just two more battle-sore figures in a field where many such might be expected--and that was what counted. The noise and confusion attendant on the dividing of the spoils was an added help; they reached the fringes of the campfire easily. * * * * * It was very interesting, the way history had doubled back on itself, like a worm re-growing part of its body but re-growing it in the wrong place. At one end of the kink--of the fresh, pink scar--was a purulent hell of fire and smoke that no one might have expected to live through. Yet, people had, as they have a habit of doing. And at the other end of the kink in time--Giulion Geoffrey's end, Harolde Dugald's time, The Barbarian's day--there were keeps and moats in Erie, Pennsylvania, vassals in New Brunswick, and a great stinking warren of low, half-timbered houses on the island of Manhattan. If it had taken a few centuries longer to recover from the cauterizing sun bombs, these things might still have been. But they might have had different names, and human history might have been considered to begin only a few hundred years before. Even this had not happened. The link with the past remained. There was a narrow, cobbled path on Manhattan, with sewage oozing down the ditch in its center, which was still Fifth Avenue. It ran roughly along the same directions as old Broadway, not because there was no one who could read the yellowed old maps but because surveying was in its second childhood. There was a barge running between two ropes stretched across the Hudson, and this was The George Washington Bridge ferry. So, it was only a kink in history, not a break. But Rome was not re-built in a day. Hodd Savage--The Barbarian, the man who had come out of the hinterlands to batter on civilization's badly mortared walls--clamped his hand on Giulion Geoffrey's arm, grunted, jerked his head toward the cluster of nobles standing beside the campfire, and muttered: "Listen." Geoffrey listened.