Part 7 (1/2)

I'd thought a bit, in my bunk before I slept, of how I would answer that question how I'd open the conversation to get us the kind of information we needed. ”My lord,” I said, ”you are a learned man, while in this land I am ignorant of much I should know, as you no doubt noticed. Yesterday you saved me from possible trouble, with what you said about my ”Aramaic,” which I believe you knew was not Aramaic at all.”

”Nor any other language I have ever heard,” he answered. ”Not Greek nor Italian nor Spanish nor Arabic. Nor Armenian nor Swabian, as far as that's concerned. Certainly not Hebrew, and definitely not Aramaic.” He paused, his gaxe sharpening. ”Your calculations were fast beyond belief. Are you Indian?”

”No, I'm not Indian, although I told Carolus the stonecutter that I was. Carolus doesn't care for things that feel mysterious to him, and I needed to tell him something he could accept. In fact, I'm from a land called Evdash, and so far as I know, no one in this part of the world has heard of it except from me.

”And that brings me to another matter. I have been in Provence before, and also in Normandy, two and a half years ago. At that time I had as a friend and ally a Norman knight named Arno de Courmeron. I would like to find him again. When we parted, I had provided him with a herd of war horses, and he intended to drive them south to Ma.r.s.eille ...”

At that point, Isaac ben Abraham's bushy eyebrows arched. I decided he must know Arno, or at least have heard of him, unless he was reacting to what I'd said about providing Arno with a herd of war horses.

”.. . from where,” I continued, ”he intended to take them to Sicily by s.h.i.+p. Do you know anything about him?”

He nodded. ”This Arno has come through twice-the first time, incredibly, with only two mercenaries to help him. It seemed impossible that three men could have brought forty war horses hundreds of dangerous miles from Normandy, with brigands and barons hungry for plunder all along the way.”

Forty! Unless that was a rough approximation, he'd actually increased his herd after we'd left him.

”When was the last time?” I asked.

”Late last summer. He had three knights and sergeants with him that time, and three ville ins And again, forty horses. All mares this time all of the war horse breed.”

”Did any stories follow him?” I wondered if he'd made a name for himself with the stunner and blast pistol we'd left him.

”None that I've heard. He came to me asking for transport. I'd hauled Norman war horses before, for William of Caen, and your Arno had heard of me. I built their stalls so the horses cannot fall in a storm and break their legs.”

”What did you think of him?”

”Of Arno de Courmeron? A very hard man, like every other Norman I've met. And very young for what he was doing. By all reports, at his age at any age- most Normans of n.o.ble birth think only of fighting and plotting. It is that or the clergy. A Norman knight turned merchant was new to me.

”What is your interest in him?” ben Abraham asked then. ”Or in any Norman? You do not seem warlike.”

I didn't try to think an answer, just let the words come. ”My own land, Evdash, has been conquered by the evil Glondis Empire-an empire that could someday come even to Christendom and try to enslave it. I hope to build a kingdom here that is wise and just, and powerful, that can defeat Glondis when the time comes. It seems to me that the Normans could help, and Arno de Courmeron is the Norman I can best work with.”

Ben Abraham's face had gone unreadable. He nodded. ”There is something about you that is different,”

he said. ”I have no idea what it is. You have a power that is not force, and perhaps you can do what you say. But I will tell you something that perhaps you do not realize. ”I have talked with more than a few Normans-even with the steward of Robert Guiscard, whom the Bishop of Rome now has anointed Duke of Sicily as well as Apulia. And I deal with many people from almost every part of the known world. I am always interested in people, and what they have to say, and my home and table are not unknown. So they talk to me-merchants, s.h.i.+p's captains, traveling n.o.bles. And sometimes I travel, for trade. I once spent two weeks in the court of the Saracen Lord of Palermo; many wise men are his guests, and hold long discourse there. I have talked with the secretary of the Bishop of Rome, and shared wine with the Lombard mayor of Amalfi. I have dined with merchant princes in Byzantium, and discussed commerce with the steward of Philip the Fair, the Prankish king, in his castle at Paris.

”All of these have had much experience with Normans, and I would like to describe for you the impression I have gained from them. The Normans are more than adventurous: They have an extreme restlessness, and a recklessness that often leads them to victory, although sometimes it takes them to their own destruction. They have a thirst for power that seems beyond quenching. There is no people in the known world who exceeds them in their love of fighting-not even the b.l.o.o.d.y Vikings, from whom the Normans drew their founders and their name. They have a courage that is frequently foolhardy, and a craftiness that leads often into treacheries both outrageous and b.l.o.o.d.y.

”And I have heard it said that those who go to Italy are the worst of them all. Their overlord in Italy, Robert of Apulia, is even called Guiscard, 'the Cunning,” and wears the name with pride.”

I wouldn't understand all of ben Abraham's words until I'd run them through the linguistics program aboard the scout, but I understood enough to make my stomach knot.

”You may wish to enlist the help of the Normans,” ben Abraham went on, ”but the Normans help mainly themselves. To whatever they can take.”

I nodded, feeling his black eyes on me, remembering the Norman Baron, Roland de Falaise, his utter lack of honesty, his attempt to have me clubbed to death by trickery. Even Arno had tried treachery against me, twice. Though he'd also saved my life, not to mention helping us rescue Deneen from the political police and capture the Federation corvette. Which the Normans, with the recklessness ben Abraham had just mentioned, had then blown apart, along with thirty of their own knights.

Yet ben Abraham made the Normans seem even more dangerous than I remembered them, mainly by showing them to me as a culture, not as a few dozen warriors. And by letting me see them through someone's eyes besides my own.

But I had to start somewhere, and Arno seemed like a good somewhere.

”I thank you for your warning,” I told ben Abraham. ”I have experienced some of what you described.

It is why I wish to find Arno; I know him well enough that I believe I can work through him.” I hope, I added to myself.

”I would not dissuade you,” ben Abraham said. ”Only, make sure you know what you're dealing with.

Your own ambitions are not less than any of theirs, and I sense in you a strength of your own that I suspect can be formidable, though not brutal. Yours is an ambition of a kind that dukes with armies have undertaken and failed with, but every kingdom was begun by someone, and often against great odds.”

It was really embarra.s.sing to hear him say it. It made me feel like a huge fraud-I was only Larn kel Deroop- but this was no time to correct his impression of me.

”Thank you,” I said, and moved the conversation on to other things mainly the geography, peoples, and princes of the Mediterranean. There wasn't any question that ben Abraham was the smartest man I'd met on Fanglith-the best informed and least given to statements that sounded like runaway imagination and superst.i.tion.

And a born teacher who'd obviously rather instruct a couple of young strangers like Tarel and me than attend to business. A couple of times his secretary looked in at us, as if he had questions that needed answering, but ben Abraham frowned him back from the door. I recorded all of it. I'd feed it to the computer that night and receive it back through the learning program, the words a.n.a.lyzed and defined. I have a darned good memory, and good logic circuits of my own. But for linguistics a.n.a.lysis, the computer was pa.r.s.ecs ahead of me, and the learning program would help me remember it.

Finally it was lunchtime, and Tarel and I ate with ben Abraham as his guests. Then I arranged pa.s.sage for myself to Reggio di Calabria, in Italy, on one of ben Abraham's s.h.i.+ps, which was leaving in four days.

Reggio was just across the Strait of Messina from the Sicilian port where Arno had taken his horse herd.

When I'd paid my fare, I had just one gold piece left, plus the silver I'd gotten when I sold my donkey that morning.

Ben Abraham walked us to the courtyard, and as we shook hands, I asked him one last question. ”My lord,” I said, ”yesterday you told Carolus the stonecutter an untruth, to s.h.i.+eld my own. Why?”

His face was serious when he answered. ”I am a Jew,” he said. ”And in the lands of Christendom, any non-Christian is always in at least some small risk of his life for being what he is. It seemed to me that you might be in serious risk of yours unless I spoke for you.”

Our eyes held for a moment before I thanked him for his courtesies and help. As Tarel and I walked away, it seemed to me that I was alive only through the risks, large and small, of strangers-certainly on Evdash, and perhaps now, here in Ma.r.s.eille. And by Father Drogo and Pierre the tanner in Normandy, as far as that was concerned-men who had no reason beyond their own ethics to have helped me.

TWELVE.

When we left Isaac ben Abraham, there still were hours to wait before calling Deneen back down. It seemed to me we might as well spend it learning something, so Tarel and I walked down to the waterfront to see what we could see.

The s.h.i.+ps weren't much, they looked even smaller up close than they had in large magnification from a few miles above. The ones we looked at had a mast, though on some of them it was lying in the bottom of the s.h.i.+p, or in a few cases, on the deck or the dock or the beach. Most of them weren't decked over, though; all they had as decks amounted to flooring in the bottom of the s.h.i.+p. Others were partially decked over, fore and aft, with the mids.h.i.+ps open, and a few were decked over from stem to stern.

We talked to some sailors about s.h.i.+ps and the places they'd been sailors who spoke Provengal, Their talk of places was a bit of this and that, and a lot of it sounded- umm, more or less imaginative. I got the impression that part of the time they were lying on purpose, as if they were trying to see how much we'd believe. We (mainly me-Tarel didn't say very much) also questioned them about the names of different s.h.i.+ps' parts and gear. Mostly the men on different s.h.i.+ps used the same terms, so I felt they were honest with us on that. I didn't have Evdas.h.i.+an equivalents for most of their terms, but I recorded brief descriptions of the parts in Evdas.h.i.+an-enough to serve as memory tags to go with the Provencal words.

Then we walked the streets of Ma.r.s.eille, asking questions of artisans and shopkeepers. By late afternoon we were more than ready to eat dinner and leave. The inn we stopped at looked better than others we'd seen, but it wouldn't begin to pa.s.s a health department inspection on Evdash; they'd board it up and burn it down. It was even worse than the dining hall in Baron Roland's castle in Normandy. The food was edible-a vegetable stew, a chunk of roast beef, coa.r.s.e, dark, smelly bread, and smellier cheese. It was the dirt and grease that bothered us most, and again I was thankful for the immunoserum we'd taken.

Some of the customers there didn't look very savory, either. But we were bigger than any of them, and we wore short swords so no one bothered us. If they had, I'd have tried first to bluff our way out of it, using our stunners only if we couldn't avoid it. Hand-foot art wasn't promising. Being as big as we were, we'd hardly be attacked with less than swords, and it seemed to me that using our own swords would be suicidal. We had no training, no technique.

In a sense, our swords were a lie, because we weren't the swordsmen they implied. But in another sense, they told a truth in a way these people could accept: We were armed and deadly, our weapons more dangerous than swords in anyone's hands. I just didn't want to use them. We left the city a little before the gates closed at sundown. There was also a small gate by the main west gate, no wider than an ordinary door, where we could have been let out after the big gate was closed and barred. But neither of us had any desire to see what Ma.r.s.eille was like after dark. Together we backtracked the same route we'd walked that morning, ending on the beach, where we took off our shoes and leggings and waded until it was starting to get dark. It was starting to cloud up, too, the thin sickle of moon low in the west adding little or no light to the evening, even when there wasn't any cloud in its way. I'd call Deneen down as soon as it was full night, then feed my recording to the computer when we were aboard.

We'd have three days to use the learning program, and to relax on the surface in some place remote from people. Somewhere we could set the scout down and not be seen. An awful lot of Fanglith was like that.

And that's what we did the next morning-or rather, what Deneen did. At daybreak she headed north to find the place we'd first landed, in the high mountains. But the ground in that district was buried deep in snow, so she headed westward to islands the infra scanner had charted when we'd been surveying for signs of Imperial forces.