Read Online The Corridors of Time by Poul Anderson - Free Book Online

and I can doubtless find a way.’
    Auri wiped away some tears and gave him an uncertain smile. ‘Thank you. I still wish you could remain – or come back in spring?
     But if you give me my life again—’ She gulped. ‘There are no words to thank you for that.’
    How cheaply one became a god.
    Trying to put her at ease, he turned the talk to matters that were commonplace for her. She was so surprised that he should
     ask about potterymaking, which was woman’s work, that she quite forgot her troubles, especially since she was reckoned good
     at fashioning the handsome ware he had admired. It led her to remember the amber harvest: ‘When we go out after a storm,’
     she said breathlessly, eyes alight, ‘the whole people, out on the dunes to gather what has washed ashore … oh, then is a merry
     time, and the fish and oysters webake! Why do you not raise a storm while you are here, Malcolm, so you may have the fun too? I will show you a place I know
     where the gulls come to your hand for food, and we will swim in the breakers after floating chunks, and, and everything!’
    ‘I fear the weather is beyond my control,’ he said. ‘I am only a man, Auri. I have some powers, yes, but they are not really
     great.’
    ‘I think you can do everything.’
    ‘Uh … um … this amber. You gather it mostly for trade, do you not?’
    The bright head nodded. ‘The inlanders want it, and the folk beyond the westward sea, and the ship people from the South.’
    ‘Do you also trade flint?’ He knew the answer, having spent hours watching a master at work: chips flew from his stone anvil,
     against his leather apron, with sparks and sulfury smell and deep-toned ring of blows, and a thing of beauty grew beneath
     the gnarled old hands. But Lockridge wanted to keep the talk light. Auri’s laugh was so good to hear.
    ‘Yes, tools we sell too, though only inland,’ she said. ‘If the ship calls somewhere else than Avildaro, may I go with you
     to see it?’
    ‘Well… surely, if no one objects.’
    ‘I would like to go with you to the South,’ she said wistfully.
    He thought of her in a Cretan slave market, or puzzled and lost in his own world of machines and sighed. ‘No, that cannot
     be. I’m sorry.’
    ‘I knew it.’ Her tone was quiet, with no trace of self-pity. One learned in the Neolithic to accept what was. Even her long
     isolation in the shadow of wrath had not broken her capacity for joy.
    He looked at her, where she sat supple and sun-browned with one hand trailing in the clucking water, and wondered what her
     destiny was. History would forget the Tenil Orugaray, they would be no more than a few relics dredged out ofbogs; before then, she would be down in dust, and when her grandchildren perished – if she lived long enough to have any,
     in this world of wild beasts and wilder men, storm, flood, uncurable sicknesses and implacable gods – the last memory of her
     gentleness would flicker out forever.
    He saw her few years of youth, when she could outrun deer and spend the whole light summer night giving and getting kisses;
     the children that would come and come and come, because so many died that every woman must bear the utmost she was able lest
     the tribe itself die; the middle years, when she was honored as the matron of the headman’s house, watched sons and daughters
     grow up and her own strength fade; age, when she gave the council what wisdom she had reaped, while the world closed in with
     blindness, deafness, toothlessness, rheumatism, arthritis, and the only time left her was in the half-remembered past; the
     final sight of her, grown small and strange, down into the passage grave through the roofhole that meant birth; and for some
     years, sacrifices before the tomb and shudders at night when the wind whimpered outside the house, for it might be her ghost
     returning; and darkness.
    He saw her four thousand years hence and four thousand miles westward: cramped over a school desk;