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.

The nobles were between him and the fire, and almost none of them were
more than silhouettes. Here and there, a man faced toward the fire at
such an angle that Geoffrey could make out the thick arch of an eyebrow,
the jut of a cheek, or the crook of a nose. But it was not enough for
recognition. All the nobles were dressed in battle accoutrements that
had become stained or torn. Their harness had shifted, their tunics were
askew, and they were bunched so closely that the outline of one man
blended into the mis-shaped shadow of the next. The voices were hoarse
from