John Dalmas: Return to Fanglith

It was me Moise spoke to instead of to Gunnlag. "I already told him your offer to Arno. He said he wants the same offer. He will go to Palermo with them, but then he wants to go with you to your land. He thinks it must be very different from any land where he has been before. He would like to see it, and fight there. He will swear himself to you if you'd like."

I could see dad looking doubtful at that, and I could understand why. But I knew these men, and I felt some loyalty to them after all we'd gone through together.

"Tell Gunnlag I'll be glad to receive his oath. And after he and Arno have gotten their wounded and gone to Palermo, I will take him with us."

Moise turned to Gunnlag and talked to him in Greek. Gunnlag grinned through his beard, then sobered as he turned and spoke Greek at me.

"He wants to know how you swear a pledge in your land," Moise said.

"Tell him to repeat after me," I said, "and we'll shake hands on it afterward."

Again Moise spoke to Gunnlag in Greek. The Varangian nodded, and looked at me expectantly.

I, Gunnlag Snorrason…" I began in Norman.

Moise said it in Greek, and Gunnlag repeated after him.

"… being under no duress… do pledge by my God and the blessed Jesu…"

Gunnlag looked especially sober when he repeated the last of that.

"… to serve Larn kel Deroop faithfully until my death… or until we agree to cancel this pledge… And in the event of the death of Larn kel Deroop… to serve such member of his family as is present with us then… on the same basis."

When we'd said it all, we shook hands. In the background, dad blew quietly through pursed lips. I'd taken on a big responsibility. Gunnlag knew nothing about the kind of place we were going, or how to live or get along there. But from the little I knew of him, he'd changed lands and careers several times before, and things new and different were like food and drink to him.

Moise broke my thoughts. "Sire," he said to me, and I turned to him. "I, too, would like to go with you."

"Moise, you might not like the world we're going to."

"I believe I would, sire. Tarel has told me something of the worlds among the stars, and of your quest to free them. Here my family is dead, and I have no place, I would like to help you."

Somehow it was a lot harder for me to agree to take Moise than Gunnlag, the seasoned Norse mercenary and occasional pirate. Moise was really a different case, and besides, he made it seem so idealistic. And I guess it is idealistic, but we knew what we were getting into, more or less.

But who was I to decide what he should do with his life? Besides, I'd come here to recruit, among other things.

"Tarel," I said, "you're the one who talked to him about it. If he's willing to pledge himself to you, and you're willing to accept it, he can come along."

Tarel looked flustered. Behind Gunnlag and Moise, I could see dad start to grin. He saw me watching, grinned wider, and winked at me.

Tarel nodded and talked it over with Moise. They shook hands on it; the pledge had been made.

Ten minutes later, with the destrier finally having let himself be caught, Arno was in the saddle, with Gunnlag up behind him, and they started down the road to the Varangians.

I piloted to Deneen's island with dad sitting beside me. The others mostly napped. We talked off and on, and dad never questioned my decision to take Arno and Gunnlag, or Moise, with us when we left Fanglith. It was as though he'd go along with it, if I thought it was the thing to do.

I wasn't surprised, but it made me feel good anyway.

The island was quite a bit west of Sicily-about a twelfth of a planetary circumference-so there was still a lot of night left there when we arrived. We could have landed right then, but if we'd wakened Deneen, there'd have been at least an hour more of talk. And we all needed sleep-it had been a long day, and a long, intense night. So we bunked down on the cutter. Only Bubba, Lady, and the pups had any conversation from one craft to the other-silent, of course.

Then we overslept sunrise by more than an hour. By the time we landed, Deneen was walking back to the Jav from tending her fish traps. Bubba hadn't said anything to her-let her be surprised, he'd decided. And when she first saw us, at a distance, she was scared. That's when Bubba told her who we were. Close up, of course, she recognized our family cutter easily. There were lots of hugs and some tears when we all got together.

Then mom and Deneen fixed breakfast on an open fire. The high point was Deneen's fish. Mom contributed powdered milk, two kinds of algae bars, and whole-grain crackers. On the cutter they'd been living mostly on condensed rations.

Even with the not-so-great cuisine, it was a party.

After breakfast, mom had Deneen power up the Jav and checked its computer for the medical manual and inventory. Then she went into the dispensary and came out a while later with powder that presumably would kill fleas, and some greasy stuff for lice. At least they killed known equivalents on other worlds. The wolves had been scratching; they'd already gotten fleas from us. After a swim and a scrub, dad used clippers on Tarel, Moise, and me, down to the skin. Then we smeared each other. I can see how the grease might kill bugs: It not only stung and burned, it reeked. After half an hour we scrubbed again, and like the wolves, got powdered. Then we put on clean jump suits.

Meanwhile, Deneen had thrown our clothes, and the pallets we'd used the night before, into the Jav's sterilization chamber. When the sterilization cycle was finished, she checked crystallization and turned off the power again. An hour with the power on hadn't set things back too badly.

Then we all strolled over to the ancient hut we'd found on our first trip, and sat around on the tumbled stone walls, dad and mom on one side, the rest of us on another. The espwolves lay in the grass between us.

The first thing I wanted to hear was what had happened to Jenoor. When she'd finished telling us about her rescue, mom and dad wanted our story of the past few months. That took a while, and when we'd finished, dad grinned at us.

"I guess you're probably tired of sitting now. Your mother and I can tell our stories later,"

"Dad," Deneen said, "that's not funny. Give! Now!"

He laughed. "All right. When the Federation went Imperial, the underground on Evdash made some contingency plans: what to do when the Empire grabbed Evdash. Your mother and I, having a cutter, accepted the responsibility of getting Dr. Boshner off the planet. So when we left home, we headed for an estate in the mountains west of the capital, to pick him up."

Dr. G.K. Boshner was a tall, white-haired man who was Evdash's most famous refugee. He'd been head of the opposition party in the Federation senate when the Glondis Party threw out the constitution, and part of the Glondis justification for it involved making a lot of accusations against Dr. Boshner. He'd been lucky to get off Morn Gebleu alive, thirty years ago.

"In planning," dad went on, "we assumed that the Imperials would block off-planet escape attempts as soon as they arrived. It would be relatively easy for them. So our plan called for moving Dr. Boshner to a remote hiding place where he could be kept until off-planet patrols were relatively relaxed. By that time, hopefully, something might even be 'arranged' with naval personnel."

Dad glanced around at us, smiling wryly. "But there was one thing we hadn't been prepared for: how quickly the Imperials would take over the national police. I mean, the first day! Even when we heard it on the radio, we hadn't realized how widely Glondisan sympathizers had infiltrated the force. We assumed it would take a few days for the occupation administration to take extensive control.