John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

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 ship 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 Evdashian. "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 Evdashian, 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 Evdashian himself again, "I'll let you know if anything more happens."

I didn't tell him about our new passenger. 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 midships 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 Evdashian I told Tarel to take our passenger 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.

The rest of the trip took four days. Four days that started out miserably for everyone else aboard ship, because they all came down with diarrhea that night- every one of them-and had it for two or three days. The ship 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 ship, 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 ship, 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 passed. 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 passed. 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 shoreline at first, but as we got closer I could see an opening that the captain told me was the Strait of Messina.