Dreamthief's Daughter

"And where might such a place be?" I asked.

He shook his head. "Anywhere, " he said.

Oona was less uncertain. "That is one of many things we do not know, " she said. "There are two places he might go. Morn, whose stones he needs to harness the power of Chaos, or Bek."

Elric remounted his blind horse. The beast whi

With a touch of her staff Oona sent my horse racing back into the mist. The beast would have no trouble getting home. Taking my arm Oona led me forward until we stood smelling the summer grass of Bek, looking down at my ancient home and realizing, for the first time, that it had been turned into a fortress. Some kind of important SS operations center, I guessed.

We dropped to the ground. I prayed we had not been seen. SS people were everywhere. This was no ordinary establishment. It was thoroughly guarded, with machine-gun posts and heavy barbed wire. Two crude barbicans of wire surrounded the moat.

We crept down the hills away from Bek's towers. I was easily able to guide Oona through the dense undergrowth of our forest-land. I knew as many trails as the foxes or rabbits who inhabited these woods when Beks had cleared the land to build their first house. We had lived in harmony, for the most part, down all those centuries.

My home had become an obscenity, a shameful outrage. Once it had stood for everything Germans held to be of value-prudent social progress, tradition, culture, kindness, learning, love of the land-and now it stood for everything we had once loathed; intolerance, disrespect, intemperate power and harsh cruelty. I felt as if I and my entire family had been violated. I knew full well how Germany had already been violated. I knew the nature of that evil and I knew it had not been spawned from German soil alone, but from the soil of all those warring nations, the greed and fear of all those petty, self-serving politicians who had ignored the real desires of their voters, all those opposing political formulae, all those ordinary citizens who had failed to examine what their leaders told them, who had let themselves be led into war and ultimate damnation and who still followed leaders whose policies could only end in their destruction.

What was this will to death which seemed to have engulfed Europe? A universal guilt? Its utter failure to live up to its Christian ideals? A kind of madness in which sentiment was contrasted by action at every turn?

Night came at last. Nobody hunted us. Oona found some old newspapers in a ditch. Someone had slept on them. They were yellow, muddy. She read them carefully. And, when she had finished, she had a plan. "We must find Herr El, " she said. "Prince Lobkowitz. If I am right, he's living quietly under an assumed name in Hensau. Time has passed here. We are several years further on than when you left Germany. Hensau is where he will be. Or was, the last time I was in 1940." "What do you mean? You are a time traveler, too?"

"I once thought so, until I understood that time is a field, and the same event takes place over and over again within that field, all at the same time. How we select from that field gives us a sense of the multiverse's mortality. We are not really time-traveling but shifting from one reality to another.

"Time is relative. Time is subjective. Time alters its qualities. It can be unstable. It can be too stable. Time varies from realm to realm. We can leave this realm and find ourselves in a similar one, only separated by centuries. By this same process people sometimes believe they have discovered time travel. We escaped from Hameln in 1935, I believe. Five years ago. It is now the summer of 1940 and your country is at war. She appears to have conquered most of Europe."

The old newspapers gave no idea of what events had led to the current situation, but "brave little Germany" was now fighting alone against a dozen aggressive nations bent on taking back what little they had not already looted. According to the Nazi press, Germany for her part was merely demanding the land she needed for her peoples to expand-a region she was calling Greater Germany. A bastion against the Communist Goliath. Some European nations were already described as "provinces" of Germany while others were included in the German "family." France had reached a compromise, while Italy under Mussolini was an ally. Poland, Denmark, Belgium, Holland. All defeated. I was horrified. Hitler had come to power promising the German people peace. We had yearned for it. Honest, tolerant people had voted for anyone who would restore civil order and avert the threat of war. Adolf Hitler had now taken us into a worse war than any previous one. I wondered if his admirers were cheering him quite so enthusiastically now. For all our self-destructive Prussian rhetoric, we were fundamentally a peaceful people. What mad dream had Hitler invented to induce my fellow Germans to march again?

At last I slept. Immediately my head was filled with dreams. With violent battle and bizarre apparitions. I was experiencing everything my doppelganger was experiencing. Only while awake could I keep him out of my mind, and even then it was difficult. I had no idea what he did, save that he had returned to Imrryr and from there gone underground. A scent of reptiles...

Awake again, I continued to read all I could. Most of what I read produced fresh questions. I could not believe how easily Hitler had come to power and why more people were not resisting, though the blanket of lies issued by the newspapers stopped many decent people from having a clear idea of how they could challenge the Nazi stranglehold. Otherwise, I had to piece together the picture for myself. It left many questions.

I learned most of the answers when we eventually found our way to Lobkowitz's apartment in Hensau, traveling at night for almost a week, scarcely daring the woodland trails, let alone the main roads. I was glad to sleep during daylight hours. It made my dreams a little easier. The newspapers, once read, were used to wrap around Ravenbrand. Our weapons seemed scarcely adequate to challenge the armaments of the Third Reich.

Everywhere we saw signs of a nation at war. Long trains carrying munitions, guns, soldiers. Convoys of trucks. Droning squadrons of bombers. Screaming fighters. Large movements of marching men. Sometimes we saw more sinister things. Cattle trucks full of wailing human beings. We had no idea at that time the scale of the murders Hitler practiced on his own people and the conquered citizens of Europe.

We traveled extremely cautiously, anxious not to draw the attention of even the most minor authority, but Oona risked stealing a dress from a clothesline. "The Gypsies will be blamed, I suppose."

Hensau, having no railway station and no main road, was relatively quiet. The usual Nazi flags flew everywhere and the SS had a barracks nearby, but the town was mostly free of military people. We could see why Lobkowitz had chosen it. When we eventually stood before him, Oona in her rather flimsy stolen dress, we must have looked a wretched sight. We were half-starved. I was in rags. We bore incongruous weapons. I had not changed clothes for days and was desperately tired.

Lobkowitz laughed as he offered us drinks and told us to seat ourselves in his comfortable easy chairs. "I can get you out of Germany, " he said. "Probably to Sweden. But that's about the limit of the help I can give you at present."

It emerged that he was ru