"Light streamed through the Golden Gate. From their suite [Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly] saw cable cars go clanging down toward the waterfront, islands and the farther shore rising steep from a silver-blue bay, sails like wings of some wandering flock."
-Poul Anderson, "Death And The Knight" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 737-765 AT SAN FRANCISCO, THURSDAY, 8 MARCH 1990, p. 746.
But all is not as it seems. Everard must travel to France in October 1307 just before the suppression of the Knights Templar, a historically pivotal event. Anderson is restrained in his treatment of the Templars. They revere Abraham's jawbone and are not a front for the Patrol or for any esoteric magical or mystical tradition. Nevertheless, Anderson describes contemporary San Francisco, the setting of his three detective novels, before plunging Everard into yet another dangerous temporal mission, unfortunately his last to be written by Anderson. In Paris in 1307:
"'Let's go,' Everard said, and led them away." (p. 765)
He returns to his holiday with Wanda in 1990 but when after that?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Actually, Anderson seems to have once accepted a harsher view of the Templars, as we see in ROGUE SWORD. But, it's plain further research convinced him the Templars were not as bad as their enemies painted them and Anderson gives us a milder view of them in "Death And The Knight."
Ad astra! Sean
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