Poul Anderson - The High Crusade

A lift of excitement brought back impatience to Catherine. She pulled free of Sir Owain’s arms and snapped, “I’m not altogether a fool. My lord respected me enough to try to explain these things to me, however ill I listened. What news have you discovered?”

“Not discovered,” said Branithar. “Remembered. ’Tis an idea which should have occurred to me erenow, but there was so much happening — Well… “Know, then, my lady, that there are certain beacon stars, brilliant enough to be visible throughout the spiral arm of the Via Galactica. They are used in navigation. Thus, if the suns called (by us) Ulovarna, Yariz, and Gratch, are seen to form a certain configuration with respect to each other, one must be in a certain region of space. Even a crude visual estimate of the angles would fix one’s position within twenty or so light-years. This is not too large a sphere to find a given yellow-dwarf sun like your own.”

She nodded, slowly and thoughtfully. “Aye. Belike you think of bright stars like Sirius and Rigel…

“The major stars in the sky of a planet may not be the ones I mean,” he warned. “They may simply happen to lie close by. Actually, a navigator would need a good sketch of your constellations, with numerous bright stars indicated by color (as seen from airless space). Given enough data, he could analyze and determine which must be the beacon giants. Then their relative positions would tell him where they had been observed from.”

“I think I could draw the Zodiac for you,” said Lady Catherine uncertainly.

“It would be of no use, mistress,” Branithar told her. “You have no skill in identifying stellar types by eye. I admit I have little enough: no training at all, merely the casual hearsay about other people’s special crafts which one picks up. And while I did chance to be in the control turret once, while our ship was orbiting about Terra making long-range observations, I paid no special heed to the constellations. I have no memory of what they looked like.”

Her heart tumbled downward. “But then we’re still lost!”

“Not quite so. I should say, I have no conscious memory. Yet we Wersgorix have long known that the mind is composed of more than the self-aware portion.”

“True,” agreed Catherine wisely. “There is the soul.”

“Er… that’s not exactly what I meant. There is an unconscious or half-conscious depth in the mind, the source of dreams and — Well, anyhow, let it suffice that this unawareness never forgets. It records even the most trivial things which ever impinged on the senses. If I were thrown into a trance and given proper guidance, I could draw quite an accurate picture of the Terrestrial sky, as glimpsed by myself.

“Then a skilled navigator, his star tables at hand, could winnow this crop with his arts mathematic. It would require time. Many blue stars might be Gratch, for example, and only detailed study could eliminate those which are in an impossible relationship to (shall we say) the globular cluster assumed to be Torgelta. Eventually, however, he would narrow the possibilities down to that smallish region whereof I spoke. Then he could flit thither, with a space pilot to aid him, and they could visit all yellow-dwarf stars in the neighborhood until they found So!.”

Catherine smote her hands together. “But this is wonderful!” she cried. “Oh, Branithar, what reward do you wish? My lord will bestow a kingdom on you!”

He planted his thick legs wide, looked up into her shadowed face and said with the surly valor we had come to know:

“What joy would a kingdom give me, built from the shards of my people’s empire? Why should I help find your England again, if it only brings more Englishmen ravening hither?”

She clenched her fists and said with Norman bleakness, “You’ll not withhold your knowledge from One-Eyed Hubert.”

He shrugged. “The unaware mind is not readily evoked, my lady. Your barbarous tortures might set up an impassable barrier.” He reached beneath his tunic. Suddenly a knife gleamed in his hand. “Not that I would endure them. Stand back! Owain gave me this. I know well enough where my own heart lies.”

Catherine whirled about with a tiny shriek.

The knight laid both hands on her shoulders. “Hear me before you judge,” he said swiftly. “For weeks I’ve been trying to sound out Branithar. He dropped hints. I dropped hints in turn. We bargained like two Saracen merchants, never openly admitting that we bargained. At last he named that dagger as the price of spreading out his wares for me to see. I could not imagine him harming any of us with it. Even our children now go about with better weapons than a knife. I took it on myself to agree. Then he told me what he has now told you.”

The tautness shuddered out of her. She had taken too many shocks in all this time, with too much fear and solitude in between. Her strength was drained.

“What do you require?” she asked.

Branithar ran a thumb along his knife blade, nodded, and sheathed it again. He spoke quite gently. “First, you must obtain a good Wersgor mind-physician. I can find one with the help of this planet’s Domesday Book, which is kept at Darova. You can borrow it from the Jairs on some pretext. This physician has to work together with a skilled Wersgor navigator, who can tell him what questions to ask of me and guide my pencil as I draw the map in my trance. Later we will also need a space pilot; and I insist on a pair of gunners as well. These can also be found somewhere on Tharixan. You can tell your allies you want them to help search out technical secrets of the enemy.”

“When you have your star map, what?”

“Well, I shall not turn it freely over to your husband! I suggest that we go secretly aboard your spaceship. There will be a fair balance of power: you humans holding the weapons, we Wersgorix the knowledge. We will stand ready to destroy those notes, and ourselves, if you betray us. At long range, we can haggle with Sir Roger. Your own pleas ought to sway him. If he withdraws from the war, transportation home can be arranged, and our nation will undertake to leave yours alone hereafter.”

“If he won’t agree?” Her voice remained dull.

Sir Owain leaned close, to whisper in French: “Then you and the children … and myself… will nonetheless be returned. But Sir Roger must not be told this, of course.”

“I cannot think.” She covered her face. “Father in Heaven, I know not what to do!”

“If your folk persist in this lunatic war,” Branithar said, “it can only end in their destruction.”

Sir Owain had told her the same thing, over and over, all this time when he was the only one of her station on this planet, the only one to whom she could freely talk. She remembered scorched corpses in the fortress ruins; she thought how small Matilda had screamed during the siege of Darova, each time a shellburst rocked the walls; she thought of green English woods where she had gone hawking with her lord in the first years of their marriage, and of the years he now expected to spend fighting for a goal she could not understand. She lifted her face to the moons, light ran cold along her tears, and she said, “Yes.”

I cannot tell what drove Sir Owain to his treachery. Two souls had ever striven in his breast; his deepest heart must always have remembered how his mother’s people had suffered at the hands of his father’s. In part, no doubt, his feelings were truly what he claimed to Catherine: horror at the situation, doubt of our victory, love for her person, and concern for her safety. And in part there was a less honorable motive, which may have begun as an idle thought but waxed with time — what might not be done on Terra with a few Wersgor weapons! Reader of my chronicle, when you pray for the souls of Sir Roger and Lady Catherine, say a little word for unhappy Sir Owain Montbelle.