David Weber - The Excalibur Alternative

Although Sir George and his men might have spent eleven years awake and aware, the time had been less for their families. All of them were returned to their magical slumber between battles, of course, but their families weren't always awakened when the soldiers were. Much depended upon how long they would remain on any given world before their masters were satisfied with their control of it, and the demon-jester had also learned to dole out reunions as rewards... or to withhold them as punishment.

The result was that far less time had passed for Matilda and the other women than for Sir George and his troops, and for many years, Edward had been kept to his mother's calendar. But he was old enough now, or physically mature enough, at any rate, to take his place on the field as his father's squire, so now he woke and slept with the rest of the men. Sir George was glad to have the boy with him, yet he knew Matilda was in two minds. She didn't miss her son when she slept, but not even their alien masters could heal all wounds. They had lost men, slowly but in a steady trickle, ever since they'd been stolen away from hearth and home forever, and she didn't want Edward to become one of those they lost.

Nor did Sir George. But they had no choice; they fought and won for the demon-jester and his guild, or else they perished. That was their reality, and it was unwise to think of other realities, or how things might have been, or to long to return, however briefly, to the world of their birth.

He knew all that, yet for all his formidable self-discipline, he could never quite stop wondering how long had truly passed since he and his men had set sail for France and ended... here. What year was it, assuming that the years of Earth had any meaning so far from her?

He had no idea. But he suspected they were far, far away from the twelfth day of July in the Year of Our Lord Thirteen Hundred and Forty-Six.

The silent dragon-man stopped and stood aside as they approached the glowing wall, and Sir George glanced sideways at the creature. He'd seen more than enough of them over the years to know that they, like the wart-faced Hathori, were indeed flesh and blood, for all their oddness in human eyes, and not simply more of the guild's mechanical devices. But that was virtually all he knew of them, even now. Computer had been more than merely reticent about both the Hathori and the dragon-men, yet at least Computer had been willing to tell the baron what the Hathori were called. He'd been unable or unwilling to do the same for the dragon-men, but the baron was uncertain whether that was the result of a direct order from the demon-jester, or simply because the dragon-men had no name, even for themselves. If it were the latter, then the dragon-men were even more alien than any of the other creatures the English had met, yet he couldn't quite dismiss the possibility, for he'd never heard one of them so much as make a single sound. The wart-faces, yes. He hadn't learned a word of the Hathori's language of grunts and hoarse hoots, in large part because his masters clearly didn't want the English to be able to converse with them, but he and his men had been given ample proof that the wart-faces at least had a language... of sorts.

Of course, that was about all they had.

As the demon-jester's whip hand, the wart-faces had far more contact with the English than the dragon-men did. They were the prison guards, charged with driving and goading the English outside the ship as well as providing security within it, and they had all the imagination and initiative of the brutal, unthinking turnkeys they were. They appeared to perform their limited duties almost entirely by rote, and they had a pronounced taste for cruelty to help lend enthusiasm to their tasks. From odd bits the demon-jester and Computer had allowed to drop, Sir George had come to suspect that the demon-jester had originally hoped to use the Hathori as he had eventually used the baron's own English. If that had been the small alien's intent, however, it must have come to naught with dismaying speed.

There was no denying that, as individuals, Hathori made dangerous opponents. They were just as tough and physically powerful as they looked, and they appeared to be totally without fear... or any equivalent of the human emotion of compassion. There was no love lost between them and the English, which Sir George suspected was precisely what the demon-jester wished, and there'd been a few ugly incidents. Two wounded English archers had been killed by the Hathori—hacked to pieces, beyond any hope of resurrection even by the Physician—on the third world the English had been required to conquer. No one was entirely certain why. The best guess was that the wart-faces had thought the two wounded men were trying to flee the battle without cause, although one of them had barely been able to stand even with the assistance of his more lightly wounded companion. Sir George's men had been furious, and the baron's murderous rage had been even more terrible than theirs, if that were possible. But all the rage and fury in the universe had been insufficient to move the demon-jester to punish the Hathori in any way for their actions. Perhaps, Sir George had thought bitterly at the time, he'd believed that the wart-faces were too stupid to realize they were being punished for a specific mistake and feared that any penalty he inflicted would cause them to hesitate the next time something as unimportant as slaughtering a wounded Englishman came along.

Whatever his reasoning, the demon-jester's refusal to punish the killers had led to an even uglier sequel. The brother of one of the murdered men, apparently driven beyond the bounds of rational thought by grief and hatred, managed somehow to wrest the truncheon from the one of the Hathori detailed to guard the Englishmen aboard ship. The bludgeon, a one-handed weapon for one of the wart-faces, was a ponderous mace for a mere human, but it had crushed its previous owner's skull handily enough. The blood-spattered archer had turned upon the dead Hathori's companions, screaming in fury, and actually managed to wound another of them before the remaining wart-faces beat him to death.

The demon-jester might have declined to punish the Hathori for murdering wounded men who were only seeking medical attention, but he had quite a different attitude when it was one of his guild's guard dogs who died. The single individual actually responsible for the attack was already dead, but that hadn't dissuaded him from selecting an additional half dozen of Sir George's men at random and ordering their deaths as retribution.

One of those men had been Walter Skinnet.

The tough old warrior hadn't even turned a hair when his lot was chosen, and Sir George knew his master of horse would have been furious if he'd suspected the vehement, almost desperate manner in which the baron had implored the demon-jester to spare him. Not that Sir George had let that consideration stop him for even a moment. He was too honest with himself to pretend that his friendship and his duty to one of his own sworn men wouldn't have driven him to make the attempt under any circumstances, however ignoble it might have been to shift the death sentence to another. Yet however true that might have been, he'd also told the demon-jester no more than the exact truth when he argued that Skinnet and his skills and experience would be an irreplaceable loss.

But he might as well have spared himself the words and the bitter shame of humbling himself by literally begging for Skinnet's life. The demon-jester had been implacable, and he had rejected Sir George's arguments with cold logic.

"You may be entirely correct about his value, both to you and to my guild," his emotionless voice had piped. "Yet the example must be made. The selection was entirely random, and it is important for the remainder of your men to realize that in such circumstances any of them—regardless of rank, or even of their utility to the guild—may be called upon to pay the penalty for such actions. With that lesson before them, perhaps they will prove more assiduous in preventing such actions by others in the future."