Fanglith - Return To Fanglith Part 8

I was standing by the rail beside a merchant pa.s.senger who'd been to sea a lot. "How can you tell they're pirates?" I asked him.

He looked at me as if I was dense. "Because they're using oars. Only wars.h.i.+ps and pirates use oars.

And because, by their lines, they're Saracens. Plus, they changed course toward us as soon as they saw us."

"What happens if they catch us?" I asked.

"They board us." He drew a short sword and tested its blade grimly with a thumb. "And it's not if, it's when. Our only chance is that some wars.h.i.+p, Pisan or Genoese, will show up. Don't hold your breath."

"What happens when they catch us?"

"We fight until either they kill us all or we surrender. Any of us taken alive will be held for ransom or made slaves. If you have no one to ransom you, you'll do well to die fighting."

"How much is the ransom?"

He looked me over, appraising my clothes. "More than you have," he said sourly, and turned away to watch the pirate s.h.i.+p again.

I watched, too-long enough to estimate that we had less than an hour, maybe half an hour, before they caught us. The sun was already down, the light beginning to fade a bit. If we could stay ahead of them long enough, I thought, maybe we could hide in the darkness. But no. I scanned the sky and there was the moon, half full now, pale in the early evening. The way they were closing the gap, they'd be close enough to see us by moonlight if they hadn't actually caught us before dark.

Of course, I could always use my blast pistol. I couldn't imagine them trying to board us after I'd fired a few charges into them. But that would make me a lot more conspicuous than I was ready to be-or rather, the wrong kind of conspicuous. Which didn't leave much for me to do but call in my one-s.h.i.+p s.p.a.ce fleet, the biggest in the system.

I went down the stern ladder below deck again, among the ingots. Three of the pa.s.sengers were down there, sitting near the ladder, talking quietly. I pa.s.sed them and sat down amids.h.i.+ps. They were watching me now, the strange foreigner with all the dumb questions, so when I put the remote in my ear, I made it look as if I was scratching. Fanglithans do a lot of that. Then I took my communicator off the belt inside my cape, palming it, and when I took it out, I pretended to raise my crucifix with the same hand and kiss it.

"Jav, this is Larn," I murmured in Evdas.h.i.+an. "Jav, this is Larn. Come in please. Over."

"Larn, this is the Javelin," It was Deneen's voice in my ear, also in Evdas.h.i.+an. "There seems to be a bogey chasing you. He's gaining on you. Over."

"Right," I answered. "They're pirates. I don't want to shoot them up myself if I can help it; I'm not ready for that kind of publicity. So here's what I want you to do. If we can stay ahead of them till it's pretty much dark, I'd like you guys to sink them with your heavy blaster. Got that?"

"Sure. If you can stay ahead of them till it's pretty much dark, we're to sink them with our number one blaster. What if they catch you while it's still fairly light? Are you going to take care of them yourself then, or do we step in?"

Apparently the three pa.s.sengers watching me could hear me faintly. Two of them crossed themselves and began to pray. They probably a.s.sumed that praying was what I was doing, and decided it was a good idea.

"I'm not sure yet," I answered. "I'll have to play it by ear. I'm going back up on deck in a minute to watch, but meanwhile, as it stands now, I don't want you to shoot them up till it's too dark for anyone down here to see what's doing the shooting. It's all right if they see something up there, but not what the something is. Got that?"

"Got it. Why don't you just call and tell us when to start?"

An idea had been just out of sight, nudging my mind. Now I saw it.

"Good idea. I'll call you in Provencal. And listen...."

When I finished explaining what I had in mind, I put my communicator back inside my cape and went up on deck. The other three had watched me the whole time, so I crossed myself before I left, and nodded at them soberly as I went to the ladder.

The pirate s.h.i.+p had gained quite a bit on us, and the evening seemed hardly any darker than when I'd gone below. It didn't look as if we'd stay ahead of them long enough. Besides which, there was no safety or hope ahead of us that I could see, and it occurred to me that our captain might decide to turn back and fight-get it over with.

So I went to him. He was manning the heavy steering oar himself, his eyes sternward toward the pirates.

"Captain," I said, "I've been praying to the Angel Deneen. She told me that if we stay ahead of the Saracens till darkness, they'll be destroyed with fire from heaven."

His eyes narrowed. I wasn't sure what he was thinking. "Can we?" I asked. "Stay ahead of them till dark?"

"It is in the hands of G.o.d," he said after a few seconds.

"Good," I told him. "We must leave it there, in the hands of G.o.d, and not defy him by turning to fight, for he will surely save us."

The captain scowled without saying anything more to me, as if he thought I was crazy. I leaned against the rail to watch the pirates gaining on us.

After a few minutes it seemed to me they weren't gaining on us as fast as they had been. I suppose their oarsmen were getting tired. And the light was noticeably less, though it was still more like daylight than night. Maybe it would get dark before they caught us.

"Larn."

It was the remote I'd left in my ear.

"There are more than forty pirates, not counting the guys who are rowing. And they look really tough. If you change your mind about when, we're ready to put them out of commission." I didn't take out my communicator and answer her; it wasn't the time or place for that. She'd have to a.s.sume I got it. But I nodded anyway, in case they had me in the viewer under magnification.

There were eleven in our crew, and ten pa.s.sengers including myself, just about all of us on deck now.

Several had short swords already in hand, but I doubt that any one of them would really qualify as a warrior. Gradually the distance shrank between the pirates and ourselves, and gradually it got darker. It began to look as if it might get dark soon enough after all. And looking upward I could see the scout; it had come down to maybe four or five hundred yards and was barely visible against the darkening sky.

You had to look for it-know it was up there-to see it.

The pirate s.h.i.+p was only about two hundred feet behind us. I stepped away from the rail a little and took out my palmed communicator, raising it as if I was lifting up my crucifix. Then I bellowed out as loudly as I could: "Don't be afraid! The Angel Deneen will save us! She has promised!"

Just about everyone on the s.h.i.+p looked at me. None of them looked actually scornful; stories about divine intervention were common on Fanglith. But none of them looked very convinced, either. And the pirate s.h.i.+p came on. After another couple of minutes I looked up again. I could sort of make out the Jav; she was maybe two hundred yards up now, and the pirates not more than eighty or a hundred feet behind. I switched on my communicator. "Angel Deneen!" I shouted. "Save us from the Saracens!"

A heavy-caliber blaster thudded once, and a hissing charge exploded into the pirate s.h.i.+p. We could hear them yelling back there. Then a spotlight speared down from above, drawing every eye, and someone up there- Tarel, I learned later-fired four more single rounds about a second apart. The pirate s.h.i.+p started to burn in the thickening dusk as we pulled away from her, but she apparently sank in a hurry, because the flames disappeared quickly, as if drowned.

FOURTEEN.

Moise: Even though the slave master had slowed the beat somewhat, I was so tired I thought I would die of it.

But he was pacing the walkway between us, and I still feared his whip more than death. Besides, I always felt that way when we were chasing some merchant s.h.i.+p, and hadn't died yet. A man can stand more than he thinks.

Ahead on the merchantman, I heard someone call out loudly. We were that close. Soon we would s.h.i.+p our oars and rest while the Saracens boarded her, but until then I had to keep on.

Cool as the evening was, sweat trickled into my eyes, and dripped from my nose and chin to fall on my bare thighs. I gasped for breath. Again I heard a shout from ahead, nearer now-and then the world exploded! My bench was torn loose, thrown back, and I fell on the feet and legs of the oarsman behind me, a Tuscan named Guittone. I had no idea what had happened. As I struggled to disentangle myself from Guittone's legs, there was another terrible sound, and more, and I felt water rising rapidly around me. Men were screaming, some of them calling to Allah to be merciful. None of them knew-none of them could have known-what had struck us, any more than I did then.

The s.h.i.+p sank quickly-indeed, had broken in two- the halves pulling apart, with one swinging to the left and one to the right. The half with the mast had turned onto her side. I was floating free of it, chained to my broken bench. Around me, many of my captors-ex-captors now-were clinging to wreckage or swimming toward one of the halves, and it seemed well to move away from them, although there was no place to swim to except into the near-night. The water was winter-cold. I managed to get my broken bench beneath me, then kicked and paddled away, careful not to overturn again. Minutes later I could not see any of them any longer, although distantly I could hear injured men calling for help.

Tarel: I hadn't liked shooting into the pirate s.h.i.+p, but it was necessary. There wasn't much question about what the pirates had in mind, but it bothered me to shoot at people who couldn't defend themselves against us.

There wasn't even anything they could try to do.

On the target screen I could see their s.h.i.+p almost as clearly as if it were daylight. It surprised me to see it break in two. I suppose it was partly because it was going along pretty fast, for such a primitive s.h.i.+p. The blaster bolts must have torn enough out of the hull that it acted like a scoop, and the pressure broke it where the explosions had weakened it.

Deneen turned off the spotlight, but I could still see with the target screen. Guys were swimming to the halves of the hull, which were still afloat, one full of water to the gunwales, the other on its side. Deneen felt the way I did-wanted to go down and rescue people-but it would be suicide to take pirates into the Javelin with us.

What she did instead was lift to about two hundred yards again, and we sat there watching, unwilling to just leave. Then I noticed that one guy was paddling away from the wreckage, which seemed peculiar. It occurred to me that he might have been a prisoner or something-maybe one of the oarsmen. They might have been slaves; there'd been a guy with a whip making sure they kept rowing.

"Deneen!" I started, and before I could get any more out, she said, "I see him." She's like that sometimes, as if she knows what you're thinking. We watched him paddle and kick until he was about a hundred yards from the others. Then he slowed down, as if he felt safer now, or maybe tired, and Deneen started to lower us toward him.

At twenty feet or so she hit the control for the door. It opened and I went over to it. We were behind the guy and he hadn't even seen us. It turned out he'd noticed the light on the water in front of him, from the open door, but of course, it never occurred to him what it might be. Meanwhile Deneen lowered us to five feet.

He wasn't more than a dozen feet from me, so I spoke to him in Provencal. "Let me help you." He turned, jerking as if he'd been stung, and the board he was on turned over, dumping him off. For a moment, when he surfaced, he just stared toward us as if he didn't see anything there. Then his eyes bugged out and his mouth sagged open.

"We'll take you out of the water if you'll let us," I told him.

He started talking in some language I couldn't understand, not as if he were talking to me, but more as if he were talking to himself. I'd never heard anyone pray before-hadn't even heard of praying until I'd gotten the concept from the computer when I was learning Provencal. Prayers are pretty important on Fanglith. Meanwhile, Deneen kept the Jav settling downward until we weren't more than twenty inches above the waves, which weren't very big. I reached out toward him. He shook off the shock of seeing us then, and started paddling the ten feet or so to me. I guess I didn't look as fierce or mean as the people who'd had him last.

I looked around for something I could reach out with that he could grab hold of. When I didn't see anything, I lay down on the deck, grabbed the edge of the doorway with my left hand, and reached out with my right. When he got to me, we grabbed each others' wrists and I pulled. There was a problem: He was chained to the broken bench he was on. I hoisted him partway in, then took hold of the chain and pulled the board in too. He just lay there on the deck then, looking around. I could imagine what it was like for him. The scout was so different, so completely unlike anything he'd ever seen or imagined or dreamed of, that he must have thought he was dead or crazy. In fact, he told me later that that was just how he felt. And Bubba's big wolf face was looking at him about thirty inches from his own.

Deneen: I wanted to follow the merchant s.h.i.+p and see what was happening, but Moise's feet were still sticking out the door. He was also bleeding on the deck-not heavily, but he was injured. I told Tarel to get him in.

Tarel took hold of him under the arms and pulled, and I closed the door. Then I lifted to a hundred yards and moved to a position above the merchantman.

It had changed its course from east to southeast, the direction it had been going before they'd spotted the pirates. It looked to me as if everyone aboard it was on deck now. "I called Larn and he answered right away, his voice soft and not too far from laughing.

"It worked like a charm," he told me in Evdas.h.i.+an. "They think I'm really something." Then, in Provengal, he called: "Thank you, Angel Deneen! Thank you for answering my request! You have saved us from the Saracen!"

"That's all right, brother mine." I said it in Evdas.h.i.+an, in case he'd switched on his speaker-which it turned out he had. "Do you need anything more just now?"

"No," he said, in Evdas.h.i.+an himself again, "I'll let you know if anything more happens."

I didn't tell him about our new pa.s.senger. I didn't have enough information yet to make it worthwhile, and didn't want to worry him. I just put the spotlight on the mids.h.i.+ps deck for a moment, centering on Larn- one last sign from the heavens. Then I switched it off and parked there, invisible from below. In Evdas.h.i.+an I told Tarel to take our pa.s.senger into the head, sluice him off in the shower, and do whatever seemed necessary for his wounds, so far as he could. I also told Bubba to stay with them in case the guy turned out to be dangerous after all. (Not that I needed to; Bubba would know, and he'd do whatever was needed.) Then Tarel could put our-guest? prisoner?-in one of the suits of navy fatigues we had on board, and feed him, and we'd see what we could learn about him.

Meanwhile, I made sure my stunner was set on medium-low. If I had to use it, I didn't want to endanger Tarel or Bubba. But for some reason, I had the distinct feeling that I wouldn't have to use it-that we had a new friend and ally on board, not an enemy.

FIFTEEN.

The rest of the trip took four days. Four days that started out miserably for everyone else aboard s.h.i.+p, because they all came down with diarrhea that night- every one of them-and had it for two or three days.

The s.h.i.+p didn't have any latrines of course, only buckets and the sea, and at times there was no time to wait for a bucket. I offered my thanks from a distance to the inventor of the immunoserum.

Lice and fleas, on the other hand, had no respect at all for immunoserum, or even for people who could call down angels and lightning from the sky, and foreigners seemed to taste as good as native Fanglithans to them. On Fanglith, though, people hardly thought of them as an affliction; in fact, they hardly thought of them at all. Everyone I'd seen seemed to have them, and apparently all the time.

Lice and fleas were like breathing and eating-a part of life.

Maybe Fanglithans would even miss their lice if they lost them; I'm not sure. I wouldn't. Itch! True, I was starting to get used to them, but life on Fanglith would have been a lot nicer without them.

Anyway, not getting diarrhea fitted my image as someone special-someone protected by an angel.

Where before some of the people on board had disliked me as a dumbbell full of foolish questions, now everyone was at least polite, including the captain. Some of them were in absolute awe of me, and at meals I even got larger portions than the others. But no one tried to hang around with me.

The day after the pirate incident, Deneen told me about the guy they'd rescued. He'd been a galley slave, forced to help row the pirate s.h.i.+p, and was about the same age as she and Tarel were. His name was Moise ben Israel, and like Isaac ben Abraham, Moise was a Jew, a member of a different religion and culture from Christians. His family had been moving from a city called Genoa to one called Amalfi, where Jews were not so badly treated. When the Saracens attacked the s.h.i.+p, his whole family had drowned or been killed.

Moise could read and write, spoke several languages, and knew a lot about how things were done on Fanglith. He seemed to be adjusting well to Deneen and Tarel and the cutter.

And Bubba approved of him-said he was a good guy. One thing Bubba didn't miss on was what people were like.

The next to last day was stormy-the wind behind us, the sky and sea two tones of gray. Big waves would loom above our stern, some of them fifteen feet high or higher. They'd raise us up as they caught us, then we'd seem to slide down their backside as they pa.s.sed. And there the next one would be, heaving itself above us from behind. To me it was exhilarating.

The captain had two men on the steering oar. As he explained it to me, it was important that we stay headed downwind. If we broached-came about sideways to the waves-we could easily turn over. He didn't seem worried, though, so I figured the danger wasn't great.

Some of the people prayed quite a bit though, including several of the crew, and they looked at me a lot, as if they hoped I'd pull off another miracle. The only miracle I could think of was to have Deneen pick me up if we foundered, and when the storm got a bit worse, I called her. They were keeping an eye on us, she told me, and if we foundered, Bubba could easily identify me among the people in the water.

While I was murmuring to her, of course, people were watching hopefully, soon after that, the wind started easing up. The waves stayed pretty big for a while, but it felt as if the danger had pa.s.sed. Judging from the sideways glances people gave me, I was getting the credit for it, which was fine with me. It was just the kind of notoriety I wanted.

The last day dawned to seas that were a lot smaller, and they got smaller yet through the day. In mid-afternoon we saw land ahead. It looked like a continuous sh.o.r.eline at first, but as we got closer I could see an opening that the captain told me was the Strait of Messina.

About then I noticed that some of the crew were starting to look a little nervous, and I asked one of them if something was wrong.

"Charybdis," he said.

"What is-Charybdis?"

He used a word that didn't mean anything to me, but his explanation, complete with hand motions (the Provencals are great for using their hands to help them talk), made it clear: Charybdis is a whirlpool. In the Strait of Messina. And it could, he told me, swallow a s.h.i.+p.

I asked the captain about that, and he nodded. "It could. But many s.h.i.+ps go through there every year, and only now and then does the whirlpool take one of them. Perhaps when there is a storm out of the north, or the s.h.i.+p has a careless master." He shrugged. "Or maybe with someone on board whom G.o.d has decided to strike down-perhaps a heretic. Some say there is a monster in it that takes a s.h.i.+p when she is hungry. But there are more monsters told about than exist, and I do not believe there is one in the whirlpool."

He crossed himself though, after he said it.

When we pa.s.sed through the strait, I kept watching for the whirlpool, but didn't see it. What I did see on both sides was rough, mountainous country without much forest, and to the southwest, on the Sicilian side, an incredible mountain in the distance. It was broad, climbing gradually up and up, with miles and miles of snow. The captain told me its name was Aetna.

It was starting to get dark when we landed in Reggio di Calabria, a town ruled by Normans. I was almost out of money, and the captain agreed to let me sleep on the s.h.i.+p that night. It brought the s.h.i.+p luck to have me aboard, he said; it would bring it still more to grant a boon to a holy man.

It took me a minute to realize that by holy man he meant me. And from what I understood of the concepts of holy, I felt a little embarra.s.sed. I'd tricked him, and everyone else on board, and didn't feel good about it.

I had the s.h.i.+p almost to myself. The other pa.s.sengers had left. The mate and another sailor sat on guard by the gangplank while two others, their relief, slept nearby on wool bales dragged up on deck. A lopsided moon shone down.

They'd dragged up more than enough bales for themselves, and as I lay down across a couple of extras, scratching and waiting for sleep, I thought about what I'd done. So I'd used trickery. It had been necessary; they'd never accept me for what I was. They wouldn't believe. Or if they did, they wouldn't understand. And if the word got around, I might get executed as a demon; that had almost happened at the Monastery of St. Stephen of Isere, my first time on Fanglith. What I'd done on this s.h.i.+p had helped the people on it-saved them from being killed or enslaved by the pirates-while what I hoped to do would keep them from being enslaved by the Empire.

Because if the Glondis Empire lasted long enough, it would come to Fangiith someday and subjugate it.

And that uncovered the unasked questions that had had me in the glums off and on lately. Did I actually believe we could turn this planet into a rebel world? And if the Empire came to Fanglith, would the Fanglithans be any worse off then they already were? Or might they actually be better off?

But enough of the old legend was obviously true that I could a.s.sume the rest was, too. The human population of Fanglith had started out mind wiped and naked, without as much as a knife or even a memory-a few thousand political prisoners dumped here 18,000 years ago by the Mad Emperor, Karkzhuk. And with that miserable start, it was impressive that they'd advanced this far. There was no reason to think they wouldn't someday be truly civilized, but if the Glondis Empire took Fanglith over, they'd make a slave labor pool out of it.