John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith

Then the man behind me reached the deck and clamped the hammerlock on me again.

The one with my weapons definitely seemed to be the boss. I could see now that he wore a conical Norman helmet, and I was willing to bet he had a hauberk on beneath his cloak. A knight's outfit. But he was familiar with civilized weapons, because he turned and put both the sailors to sleep with my stunner. I hoped it was to sleep; if he'd reset it upward from the medium setting I usually kept it on, at this range they were probably dead. He hadn't needed to shoot them at all; they hadn't been about to do anything.

Meanwhile the guy behind me never paused, just kept walking across the deck and down the gangplank, pushing me ahead of him. The guy with the torch had started off ahead; the one with my weapons came along behind now. A little way along the wharf we came to several horses, watched by a fourth man. The guy in charge stepped in front of me and turned, stunner steady. Now, in the moonlight and torchlight, I could see his face.

"Brislieu, let go his arm." This time he spoke in Norman French. My arm was released.

"Arno!" I said. This was harder for me to believe than my first idea about Imperials. How had he learned to talk Evdashian? No wonder I hadn't recognized his voice! Then I recalled: The last day we'd been with him, he'd spent a couple of hours plugged into the learning program, absorbing Evdashian-just before the Federation corvette had blown up; a little before we'd left Fanglith. It was surprising he could speak it at all; that had been two and a half years earlier, and he'd never had a chance to use it, even once.

"I'd come here looking for you!" I told him. "But how did you find me? How did you even know I was back on Fanglith?"

He laughed softly. "Your French has gotten worse," he said, again in Norman French. "You've been speaking too much Provencal. We'll talk of how I found you, and of other things, when we're out of town." He gestured toward one of the horses. "That one is yours; get on. We have some twenty miles to ride. And do not try to escape. You'll be more comfortable sitting in the saddle than tied over it on your belly, and the scenery will be better that way."

I put a foot in the stirrup and swung up onto the horse-one of the heavy war horses that the Normans call destriers. Arno had swung into the saddle without letting the stunner move away from me. Then we rode off down the dirt street, the horses' iron-shod hooves thudding softly in the quiet night. I hadn't ridden since Normandy; the horse's smell and the roll of its gait felt good to me. At one point we encountered a street patrol, but they didn't pay any attention to us. I suppose they recognized Arno and Brislieu as Norman knights, and Normans were the masters here.

The wall around Reggio was higher and thicker than the one at Marseille. One of the gate guards opened a narrow gate for us, and before long we were in the moonlit countryside. Here Brislieu took the lead and Arno rode beside me, their squires sharing a horse behind us. After a few moments I repeated my earlier question:

"How did you find me?"

Arno chuckled. "Those who gain fame are easy to find. I had come to Reggio to arrange to ship horses to Palermo, and in an inn I heard a ship's captain tell a marvelous story, about a holy man who talked to his crucifix. Or actually to an angel, through his crucifix.

And either the crucifix or the angel talked back to him; I forget just how he told it."

Arno laughed again. "The angel sent down lightning from the sky, which struck and sank a corsair. And moments later the eye of GOD shown down as a shaft of golden light, to fall unerringly on the holy man. Then, later, when a plague of grippe sickened all others aboard, this holy man, who was named the Blessed Larn, was not touched by it.

"Later still, when a storm threatened to send one and all to their deaths, this Larn, who was from India incidentally, called on the angel again. Angel Deneen, he called her. And the water smoothed around them like a silver mirror, though at a little distance the waves heaved and tossed more savagely than before."

I could see Arno's grin in the moonlight. "Even allowing for exaggeration," he continued, "I might have "wondered if it was you, even if he had not named you. And indeed I did not catch your name clearly when first he said it, for not only was he speaking Provencal, but his mouth was full at the time. But your sister's name left no doubt."

He chuckled again. He'd changed since I'd seen him last; his mood was lighter. "Lightning from the sky. That was something you didn't show us before. Or was that the shipmaster's imagination?"

"He stretched things a little," I said, "but it was pretty much true."

He looked me over now as we rode. "You've grown," he said. "You were tall already; now you're as tall as Brislieu. Or very nearly. What brought you back to- our world?"

It was hard for him to say "our world," as if he'd never quite accepted that there were others. In spite of everything he'd seen.

I didn't answer right away-didn't know just how to start, although I'd thought before about what I'd say to Arno when I found him. The country air was a little chilly, an early spring night in a warm climate. Moonlight lay a shimmering path across the strait to our right; to our left it lit the rugged hills, and filled the ravines with inky shadow.

"What brought us to Fanglith?" I answered him in Evdashian, slowly and carefully, so that hopefully he'd understand. It seemed best that Brislieu and the others not know what I was saying. "Tyranny and death. The rulers who had driven us from our first home, our first world, have become even more tyrannical."

I paused to let him get that much of it, then continued. "It has named itself the Glondis Empire, and begun to conquer more worlds-including the world where we'd made our new home." I peered at Arno, trying to see his shadowed eyes. "Eventually I expect they'll come here to conquer yours."

He answered in Evdashian, thoughtfully. "Then why come you here, if they will someday follow?"

He still held my stunner in his hand, pointed at me.

"Not to hide," I told him. "We would find no satisfaction in hiding."

"Then why?"

What to tell him? The truth, I decided-the truth in its simplest terms. "We left our home world under gunfire," I told him, still in slow and careful Evdashian. "We were being shot at by powerful weapons. Three of us were killed-shot down as we ran to the sky boat. One was my wife; the Glondis Empire does not hesitate to kill women. We had planned to go to a certain world where we would be welcomed, to help build a rebellion. But our leader, the one of us who knew how to go there, was also killed.

"Your world was the one world we knew the way to, where we felt the Imperial sky navy had not gone yet, because you are so very far away here; much farther than other worlds with people on them."

I had no idea what Arno might be thinking. Maybe that I was crazy-possessed by a demon, as the abbot of St. Stephen's had thought that summer day. But Arno had seen our family cutter and ridden on it several times, which should make a lot of other strange and unlikely claims seem at least marginally possible.

"So we came here with more intentions than plans,"

I went on. "We will try to set ourselves up as supporters of some able and powerful man, and help him establish a kingdom on this world-a kingdom that is too strong for any power here to defeat-then help him form an empire that is not evil like the Glondis. And help him manage it; help him make this world so strong that if, or when, the Glondis Empire comes here, they will not be able to enslave you."

As I said it, it seemed to me that we could never make Fanglith that strong. It was too primitive!

"You came here in a sky boat again?" Arno asked very matter-of-factly.