2

Repp Sprinkle was probably the most cowardly soldier that had ever walked the earth, and that's a kindly description. His captains threatened, his comrades sneered, but nothing could dissuade him from running in the exact opposite direction to everyone else whenever someone should yell, "CHARGE!"

In this particular war, he couldn't really be blamed for shying away. Agraphia had never had a war before, mostly because no one else was around to fight, so when the country split into four and began violently feuding over a mystical chalice, it came as a bit of a shock for more than just the historians. Brother fought against brother. And that brother fought against a third brother, who was also simultaneously fighting his cousin, who was also fighting the first brother. Family trees were getting chopped. It was very messy at first, because the Agraphians didn't have a lot of battle experience, but when the lesson involves being at the safe end of a pointy steel object, one either learns fast or falls out of the picture.

The war, as might be expected, became stagnated very quickly. For Repp Sprinkle this was incredibly bad news, since every day it became more and more likely that, someday, he would actually have to fight someone. So he hatched a plan. He had heard a story once, when he was a boy, about a man that went to sleep for thirty years, then woke up to find everything changed – his king was gone, his country was gone, and his friends were either dead or completely different. Repp decided that this sounded like a pretty good deal, especially since his current friends were all soldiers anyway. He would sleep through the war. If anyone asked, later, he could just say that a witch had cast a spell on him. No one ever asked questions if you said there was a witch involved.

So he sidled out of camp one day, while everyone else was getting their daily rations, and settled down in an abandoned barn. The hay was damp and smelled a bit too much like cow, but it wasn't the worst bed he'd slept in since being forced to enlist. His absence wasn't noticed until two weeks later, after the great Battle of the Seven Heads, but everyone just assumed he'd been caught in the chaotic mess of the milieu, or else had run away for good.

It was close to sunset over the wheat field. The sky was lazy pale blue, and golden light engulfed the tall waving grains. Near the northern end of the field it sloped up toward the edge of the forest, and somewhere in there stood the remains of an old barn built before the war. At the bottom of the field there stretched a long fence that spanned the dirt road leading to the farmer's house, and on one of its wooden posts a girl was sitting complacently, practicing her fiddle. She was stunningly beautiful, in stark contrast to the weathered creature that was currently approaching her on the dirt road.

He was filthy, not so much a dirty human as a clump of dirt with some human under it. His clothes had been reduced to rags, and his face was lost in a mess of overgrown thick brown hair, shot with streaks of white, which quite possibly had held a squirrel nest at some point. Bits of hay stuck out of it at odd angles. The man's smell preceded him, a combined force of the odors of cow and of a man that hadn't bathed in thirty years.

He stumbled along slowly, as if not used to using his limbs, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. The sun was blindingly bright to him, but the peaceful serenity of the pastoral landscape seemed to fill him with bliss. "Pardon me, ma'am," he said to her in a very gritty voice, and then paused to clear his throat for a minute.

"Yes?" she said, continuing with her fiddling completely unperturbed.

"Do you think you could tell me what year it is, please?" he inquired politely.

"It's the three hundred and forty-first year since the coming of the Greeniad King," she said as the fingers of her left hand danced over the neck of the fiddle.

"Why thank you ever so much," the man replied, his smile widening. "And I have just one more question for you, if you'll be so kind."

"Question away," she said.

"Who won the war?" he asked. "Which side, I mean – you may not remember it. You're a bit young, but there were four sides…"

"What do you mean, 'won'?" the girl asked. "The war's still going on."

It took a minute for this to sink into his brain, but as it did, a peculiar thing began to happen to his face. It was beginning to slide slowly downward, like a raw egg that has been thrown at a wall will slowly drip to the floor. His face landed in a frown of deep discontent.

"Bloody hell," he said with wonder.

"Pretty much," the girl replied.

He was silent for many more moments. "Say," Repp said finally, "Do you know where a man could find a drink around here?"

Agraphia had started out as a little kingdom on the edge of things, one of the ones that never produce anything more interesting than your average mad philosopher or senile wizard. Slowly, over the course of the millennia, the cultural center of the world moved even further away, almost as if it were trying to distance itself from an embarrassing relative. Eventually Agraphia was off the edge of most respectable maps, so far away from everything that it took a year of travel through a wretched wilderness to get within sight of it.

But here and there over the great rounded hump of the world, there are Portals – little gateways through space that allow one to travel from one point to another without as much difficulty as there should be. It so happened that one of these Portals was open over a nasty patch of dense forest in the woody southwestern corner of Agraphia, where hardly anyone ever bothered to walk except ghosts, witches, and the Herbist. No one was aware of it, not even the most learned of the learned sages and wizards. So if any of those sages had been there in that patch of dense forest on the afternoon that Tristan the Knight dropped out of the sky, they would have been in for a surprise.

If any of them had been watching, they would have seen a brief flash of red light against the clear blue sky, just about where the top of the canopy was, and the sudden presence of a man wearing nothing but some strategically placed leather and metal and an expression of astonishment.

He had just enough time to collide with a few branches on his way down and feel surprised before he hit the bottom and was out cold.

The Herbist, who had been muttering to himself as he gathered his plants, scratched his chin. "Weather just keeps getting stranger," he said with a shrug.