Adventure stories; Science fiction; Time travel -- Fiction
I took the weapon, stammered my thanks, and he inclined his head
gravely, then turned and sped from the roof, down through the building
to the battle in the street below, racing toward it with fierce haste.
D'Alord broke the silence that followed. "What a fighter!" he
exclaimed. "And now he is gone. Well, on, friends!"
So we rose again from the roof, above the body-choked streets, where we
knew the conquistadors of Cortez strove with the city's people. The car
rose high, and then raced east with the power opened to the last notch.
In the hours that followed, as we rocketed over the gray Atlantic at
a speed of nearly ten miles a minute, we were again speeding into the
past, back still farther, so that when the green, leg-shaped peninsula
of Italy lay beneath us, we had gone back to the First Century of the
Christian era, as nearly as possible to the year which Fabrius claimed
as his own.
We left him there, on a bare, grassy hilltop outside the city of Rome.
Before parting, he too unbuckled his heavy shortsword and handed it to
me. "Ixtil gave you his sword," he said, "and when it is your car that
has brought me back to my own world, I can do no less." He stepped back
and said simply, "_Vale!_" and then we had sped on into time and left
him.
We turned, now, in time, sped on to the first year of the Seventeenth
Century, and in space fled north till we hung over southern France. And
with D'Alord guiding our course from the window, exclaiming at every
familiar landmark on the ground below, we came finally to the little
village where he desired to be left.
"'Twas there I was stationed when the Raider seized me, curse him!" he
told us; "so set me down outside it."
Again the car came down to the ground, in a field beyond the village,
just at sunrise. D'Alord opened the car's door, then hesitated.
"_Sacré!_" he exclaimed. "When I was in the pit I was afire to get back
to my own time, but now I half wish that we could have stayed together,
comrades. But Kethra was right. Every man to his own time."
He drew and regarded his long, heavy sword. "It's for you, comrade,"
he told me. "Like Ixtil and Fabrius, it's all I can give you. Though I
don't think you'll need it to make you remember our fight on the stair,
eh?" His laugh rang out. "_Dieu_, what a fight was that!"
He grasped the hands of Denham and of Lantin and me, and with forced
gayety slapped us on the back, then sprang quickly out of the car, and
stood beside it. I closed the door, and our car rose swiftly above the
field. And looking down, I saw the receding figure of D'Alord, still
standing where we had left him, waving his hat toward us in a final
gesture of farewell, the wind of dawn blowing through his hair.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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