John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

I looked at that and felt uncomfortable with it, but I couldn't come up with any strong reason why he shouldn't. He was as old as I'd been the first time I'd landed alone on Fanglith, and he already knew quite a lot of the language. "All right by me," I answered. "It'll probably be safer with two of us. Tell you what: I'll help Deneen. You wash up and spend some time on the learning program, upgrading your Provencal. Then, after we try on our new clothes, we'd better get some sleep. We need to get down there before daylight."

Deneen set the scout's honker, and it woke us up an hour ahead of estimated daybreak. Then, twenty-one miles above Marseille, we ate a quick breakfast while watching for the first sign of dawn to touch the horizon, which, from our altitude, was four hundred miles east. That would give us roughly twenty minutes to get down and on the beach and let Deneen get away while it was still full night on the surface. When the first touch of dawn showed, far to the east, we hurriedly finished eating and stowed our dishes in the cleaner. Then Deneen dropped the twenty-one miles to the beach. As we slowed for landing, the infrascope showed what had to be Bubba lying a few dozen yards from the donkey- far enough, and no doubt downwind, not to upset it seriously. Except for those two, there was nothing large and warm blooded anywhere near.

When we landed and Tarel and I stepped down the ramp, Bubba was at its foot. "Catch anything worth eating?" I asked him.

He grinned-something he hadn't been doing a lot of. "Even rodents good after long time on ship's food," he woofed, then trotted up into the cutter.

Even without any overcast, we couldn't see far in the moonless night. The cutter was lost in darkness only seconds after the door closed.

Nothing had happened to my donkey while I was gone, but a lot had happened to the bush I'd tied him to. He'd eaten most of the tough little leaves and a lot of the smaller twigs. I untied his halter rope and we started up the slope from the beach. Looking off to my right, it seemed as if there was already a hint of gray dawn where the land met the eastern sky. By the time we got to the road, there was a distinct wash of gray along the horizon, and even with lots of stars still bright above us, we could see a little better.

It was pretty much daylight when we reached the city gate, and we squatted there with a few others, backs to the wall. Minutes later we watched sunlight touch the hilltops to the northwest, and heard the heavy gate bar being drawn back. We stood up, getting out of the way, heard the hinges groan, then the gates were pushed open by the gate guards.

It's not surprising that so many Fanglithans are burly and strong for their size. Just about everything seems to be done by muscle power, and lots of simple things, like opening the massive, timbered gates, are heavy labor. Of course, not all Fanglithans are husky and strong, by any means. Their genetics dictates that lots of them will have slim builds, and I suspect that most of them weren't properly nourished as children. That's probably why they're mostly short by our standards; at least it's a better explanation than genetics. Their parent stock hadn't been any different from our own, or not much different, anyway. They'd been mind-wiped

political prisoners dumped on Fanglith eighteen thousand or so years ago by the mad emperor Karkzhuk.

Another thing about Fanglithans – a surprising number have lost their teeth. They don't seem to have any idea of dental care, and that probably interferes with proper eating. I suspect that quite a few of them have chronic physical ailments that would be easily cured in high-tech societies, or wouldn't have happened in the first place.

Like I said though, a lot of them are husky and strong-looking, even if short, and that included the gate guards who watched us enter. But they saw nothing troublesome in Tarel and me, even as big as we were by their standards. We were dressed now in native clothes, and the shortswords and daggers on our belts weren't unusual.

We went first to the marketplace, where I sold my donkey back to the man I'd bought it from. He only offered me half what I'd paid him for it, and as a matter of form and principle, I dickered him up to two-thirds. He wasn't more than about five feet tall, but it didn't seem to bother him at all that Tarel and I, five-ten and six-one, were really big by Fanglithan standards – or at least by standards in Provence and Normandy.

From the marketplace we went straight to Isaac ben Abraham's. The armed servant at the door recognized me, but had us wait in the courtyard while he sent someone to notify his master. The man was back in a minute, and escorted us to ben Abraham's office.

The merchant's eyes, alert and wise, watched us in. "You are back quickly," he said, then chuckled. Ben Abraham's version of a chuckle was more of a deep rumble. "If your friend is another rapid calculator," he added, "I am not in the mood for more contests. What may I do for you?"

I'd thought a bit, in my bunk before I slept, of how I would answer that question – how I'd open the conversation to get us the kind of information we needed. "My lord," I said, "you are a learned man, while in this land I am ignorant of much I should know, as you no doubt noticed. Yesterday you saved me from possible trouble, with what you said about my 'Aramaic,' which I believe you knew was not Aramaic at all."

"Nor any other language I have ever heard," he answered. "Not Greek nor Italian nor Spanish nor Arabic. Nor Armenian nor Swabian, as far as that's concerned. Certainly not Hebrew, and definitely not Aramaic." He paused, his gaxe sharpening. "Your calculations were fast beyond belief. Are you Indian?"

"No, I'm not Indian, although I told Carolus the stonecutter that I was. Carolus doesn't care for things that feel mysterious to him, and I needed to tell him something he could accept. In fact, I'm from a land called Evdash, and so far as I know, no one in this part of the world has heard of it except from me.

"And that brings me to another matter. I have been in Provence before, and also in Normandy, two and a half years ago. At that time I had as a friend and ally a Norman knight named Arno de Courmeron. I would like to find him again. When we parted, I had provided him with a herd of war horses, and he intended to drive them south to Marseille…"

At that point, Isaac ben Abraham's bushy eyebrows arched. I decided he must know Arno, or at least have heard of him, unless he was reacting to what I'd said about providing Arno with a herd of war horses.

"… from where," I continued, "he intended to take them to Sicily by ship. Do you know anything about him?"

He nodded. "This Arno has come through twice-the first time, incredibly, with only two mercenaries to help him. It seemed impossible that three men could have brought forty war horses hundreds of dangerous miles from Normandy, with brigands and barons hungry for plunder all along the way."

Forty! Unless that was a rough approximation, he'd actually increased his herd after we'd left him. "When was the last time?" I asked.

"Late last summer. He had three knights and sergeants with him that time, and three villeins. And again, forty horses. All mares this time-all of the war horse breed."

"Did any stories follow him?" I wondered if he'd made a name for himself with the stunner and blast pistol we'd left him.

"None that I've heard. He came to me asking for transport. I'd hauled Norman war horses before, for William of Caen, and your Arno had heard of me. I built their stalls so the horses cannot fall in a storm and break their legs."

"What did you think of him?"

"Of Arno de Courmeron? A very hard man, like every other Norman I've met. And very young for what he was doing. By all reports, at his age-at any age- most Normans of noble birth think only of fighting and plotting. It is that or the clergy. A Norman knight turned merchant was new to me.