Return to Fanglith f-2

by John Dalmas

  A heavy-caliber blaster thudded once, and a hissing charge exploded into the pirate ship. We could hear them yelling back there. Then a spotlight speared down from above, drawing every eye, and someone up there- Tarel, I learned later-fired four more single rounds about a second apart. The pirate ship started to burn in the thickening dusk as we pulled away from her, but she apparently sank in a hurry, because the flames disappeared quickly, as if drowned.

  FOURTEEN

  Moise:

  Even though the slavemaster had slowed the beat somewhat, I was so tired I thought I would die of it. But he was pacing the walkway between us, and I still feared his whip more than death. Besides, I always felt that way when we were chasing some merchant ship, and hadn't died yet. A man can stand more than he thinks.

  Ahead on the merchantman, I heard someone call out loudly. We were that close. Soon we would ship our oars and rest while the Saracens boarded her, but until then I had to keep on.

  Cool as the evening was, sweat trickled into my eyes, and dripped from my nose and chin to fall on my bare thighs. I gasped for breath. Again I heard a shout from ahead, nearer now-and then the world exploded! My bench was torn loose, thrown back, and I fell on the feet and legs of the oarsman behind me, a Tuscan named Guittone. I had no idea what had happened. As I struggled to disentangle myself from Guittone's legs, there was another terrible sound, and more, and I felt water rising rapidly around me. Men were screaming, some of them calling to Allah to be merciful. None of them knew-none of them could have known-what had struck us, any more than I did then.

  The ship sank quickly-indeed, had broken in two- the halves pulling apart, with one swinging to the left and one to the right. The half with the mast had turned onto her side. I was floating free of it, chained to my broken bench. Around me, many of my captors-ex-captors now-were clinging to wreckage or swimming toward one of the halves, and it seemed well to move away from them, although there was no place to swim to except into the near-night. The water was winter-cold. I managed to get my broken bench beneath me, then kicked and paddled away, careful not to overturn again. Minutes later I could not see any of them any longer, although distantly I could hear injured men calling for help.

  Tarel:

  I hadn't liked shooting into the pirate ship, but it was necessary. There wasn't much question about what the pirates had in mind, but it bothered me to shoot at people who couldn't defend themselves against us. There wasn't even anything they could try to do.

  On the target screen I could see their ship almost as clearly as if it were daylight. It surprised me to see it break in two. I suppose it was partly because it was going along pretty fast, for such a primitive ship. The blaster bolts must have torn enough out of the hull that

  it acted like a scoop, and the pressure broke it where the explosions had weakened it.

  Deneen turned off the spotlight, but I could still see with the target screen. Guys were swimming to the halves of the hull, which were still afloat, one full of water to the gunwales, the other on its side. Deneen felt the way I did-wanted to go down and rescue people-but it would be suicide to take pirates into the Javelin with us.

  What she did instead was lift to about two hundred yards again, and we sat there watching, unwilling to just leave. Then I noticed that one guy was paddling away from the wreckage, which seemed peculiar. It occurred to me that he might have been a prisoner or something-maybe one of the oarsmen. They might have been slaves; there'd been a guy with a whip making sure they kept rowing.

  "Deneen!" I started, and before I could get any more out, she said, "I see him." She's like that sometimes, as if she knows what you're thinking. We watched him paddle and kick until he was about a hundred yards from the others. Then he slowed down, as if he felt safer now, or maybe tired, and Deneen started to lower us toward him.

  At twenty feet or so she hit the control for the door. It opened and I went over to it. We were behind the guy and he hadn't even seen us. It turned out he'd noticed the light on the water in front of him, from the open door, but of course, it never occurred to him what it might be. Meanwhile Deneen lowered us to five feet.

  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.

  FIFTEEN

  The rest of the trip took four days. Four days tha
t 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.

  About then I noticed that some of the crew were starting to look a little nervous, and I asked one of them if something was wrong.

  "Charybdis," he said.

  "What is-Charybdis?"

  He used a word that didn't mean anything to me, but his explanation, complete with hand motions (the Provencals are great for using their hands to help them talk), made it clear: Charybdis is a whirlpool. In the Strait of Messina. And it could, he told me, swallow a ship.

  I asked the captain about that, and he nodded. "It could. But many ships go through there every year, and only now and then does the whirlpool take one of them. Perhaps when there is a storm out of the north, or the ship has a careless master." He shrugged. "Or maybe with someone on board whom God has decided to strike down-perhaps a heretic. Some say there is a monster in it that takes a ship when she is hungry. But there are more monsters told about than exist, and I do not believe there is one in the whirlpool."

  He crossed himself though, after he said it.

  When we passed through the strait, I kept watching for the whirlpool, but didn't see it. What I did see on both sides was rough, mountainous country without much forest, and to the southwest, on the Sicilian side, an incredible mountain in the distance. It was broad, climbing gradually up and up, with miles and miles of snow. The captain told me its name was Aetna.

  It was starting to get dark when we landed in Reggio di Calabria, a town ruled by Normans. I was almost out of money, and the captain agreed to let me sleep on the ship that night. It brought the ship luck to have me aboard, he said; it would bring it still more to grant a boon to a holy man.

  It took me a minute to realize that by holy man he meant me. And from what I understood of the concepts of holy, I felt a little embarrassed. I'd tricked him, and everyone else on board, and didn't feel good about it.

  I had the ship almost to myself. The other passengers had left. The mate and another sailor sat on guard by the gangplank while two others, their relief, slept nearby on wool bales dragged up on deck. A lopsided moon shone down.

  They'd dragged up more than enough bales for themselves, and as I lay down across a couple of extras, scratching and waiting for sleep, I thought about what I'd done. So I'd used trickery. It had been necessary; they'd never accept me for what I was. They wouldn't believe. Or if they did, they wouldn't understand. And if the word got around, I might get executed as a demon; that had almost happened at the Monastery of St. Stephen of Isere, my first time on Fanglith.

  What I'd done on this ship had helped the people on it-saved them from being killed or enslaved by the pirates-while what I hoped to do would keep them from being enslaved by the Empire.

  Because if the Glondis Empire lasted long enough, it would come to Fangiith someday and subjugate it.

  And that uncovered the unasked questions that had had me in the glums off and on lately. Did I actually believe we could turn this planet into a rebel world? And if the Empire came to Fanglith, would the Fang-lithans be any worse off then they already were? Or might they actually be better off?

  But enough of the old legend was obviously true that I could assume the rest was, too. The human population of Fanglith had started out mind-wiped and naked, without as much as a knife or even a memory-a few thousand political prisoners dumped here 18,000 years ago by the Mad Emperor, Karkzhuk. And with that miserable start, it was impressive that they'd advanced this far. There was no reason to think they wouldn't someday be truly civilized, but if the Glondis Empire took Fanglith over, they'd make a slave labor pool out of it.

  Of course, the big question was whether we could accomplish anything here. What was needed was some kind of superman-someone out of an adventure thriller-not Larn Rostik kei Deroop.

  I shook off the crud of self-devaluation and looked up at the stars. Evdash was up there somewhere, I thought to myself, and then I thought of Jenoor, killed by the Empire, and started deliberately to build up a good hate to toughen my mind for the job we had here. But working up a hate was just a dodge, and I knew it. It didn't change the way things were; it was just a way of not looking at them. I needed to get my attention out of myself, so I took out my communicator; I'd talk with Deneen.

  I didn't use the remote. The guards would hear her voice, but that was the kind of thing they expected of me now. I was established as someone who communicated with the angels.r />
  Deneen:

  Moise was something else, and finding him could almost make me believe in fate. Virtually everything about us was new to him, including knowing what the stars really were, and the galaxy, and Fanglith itself. You'd never imagine how the Fanglithans had envisioned and explained their world and the universe. Yet he'd adjusted so quickly to us and to what we'd shown him, with so little confusion and not even a headache, that both Tarel and I were really impressed. Moise was not only very bright, he was very adaptable.

  I wonder if mental adaptability might not be the key to maximum success in this universe.

  You might think we'd have gotten bored, parked fifteen miles above the surface with "nothing much to do." Actually, we were as busy as we could be, including Moise, because after talking with him a while, I'd decided he'd make a good consultant, and perhaps a contact man on the surface. I wasn't sure about that yet.

  So Tarel and I had taken turns questioning him- picking his brain-and educating him. Recording all of it, of course, then running it through linguistic analysis and taking turns using the learning program. We were expanding our knowledge of the language and of Fanglith both.

  In turn, we educated him. Over the next Four days we described to him what the universe and galaxy were really like, gave him a course in the basic principles of technology, and let him know a little about ourselves. Not everything. But that we were refugees from a far world, and that we wanted to make a place for ourselves on Fanglith without attracting hostile attention from the people here.