The second night after he'd ridden away with his four recruits, Arno told us he wanted me to come with him. He wanted to show me to some new prospects he'd lined up to join us, and he wanted me to give a demonstration of our weapons. Also, he wanted dad to fly over the castle low enough to give them a good look at the cutter. In daylight. Then he'd tell them that the warship was much bigger, with much more powerful weapons.
"Why by day?" I asked. "If he hovered at fifty or sixty feet at night, they could still get a good look at him."
"By night," he said, "some might think the Devil had sent it. The Devil prefers the darkness." He grinned. His grin could take you by surprise because he usually didn't show how he felt. "You're lucky you fell in with Normans," he went on. "If we were Franks or Lombards or Britons or Saxons—maybe even Swabians—we'd know you were from the Devil. But Normans are willing to look and take a chance."
His grin widened. "Besides, the Devil is not a fool. He leaves Normans alone. There are those who would say we're bad enough without him. If he bothered us, we'd flay and quarter him and feed the pieces to the hogs."
If that was supposed to be funny, it didn't make me laugh. I hoped they didn't decide I was the Devil.
The castle he wanted to take me to belonged to a baron named Roland, who was interested in the project. Roland had just inherited his fief from his father, who'd been killed fighting river pirates on the Orne. Now that Roland was the baron, with knights and sergeants of his own, he was looking for adventure. Specifically, adventure that would make him richer and more powerful.
Arno was sure he could bring Roland in on our project, once the baron saw a blaster in action and a cutter in flight. And Roland would automatically bring in with him five knights and five sergeants that were his personal men—landless knights with money fiefs. Add these to Arno's own men—they were up to six now—and Arno said he could easily get the rest of the thirty or forty.
I felt uncomfortable about visiting a castle. All we needed was to have Deneen a prisoner of the Federation and me a hostage in a Norman castle. But I couldn't very well refuse to cooperate with Arno in recruiting because we depended on him for troops, and the days were slipping by.
Dad must have realized what was going on with me. "Larn," he said, "I have a suggestion."
"Go ahead," I said. I could use all the help I could get.
He looked at Arno and then at me. "If you go, I'd like to arrange a demonstration against the castle gate. At noon today." He turned to Arno again. "Even this little boat has power you haven't seen yet, and it's not built or intended for fighting. It has none of the attack weapons you'll have when you've captured the warship. But even so, I can destroy the castle gate with it. And that should not only impress this Roland, it should make him think twice about treachery toward us."
I had no idea how dad intended to destroy a castle gate. The biggest weapon I knew of on board was his blast rifle. It had quite a bit more power than a blast pistol, but there was no way it could take out a castle gate, or probably even make a hole in it. But dad wouldn't have said what he'd said if he didn't have a plan he felt confident about.
Meanwhile, Arno was looking at dad, but what he was seeing was inside his own Norman mind, I was willing to bet. I could almost see it, too—a mental picture of himself in a big fancy hall, wearing rich robes and being crowned Emperor of Christendom, with thousands of knights cheering and holding their swords overhead.
So I agreed to go with Arno. We would set up the people at the castle—the baron and his knights—to expect to see a sky boat around midday. Arno said that if they were expecting it, and if they already knew it was simply a magic boat with people running it instead of demons, they wouldn't jump to any weird conclusions about the Devil being in on the deal. Especially, he said, since they'd have seen me by then. He said anyone would know that I wasn't a demon.
Arno also said that the priest who lived at the castle and took care of its religious services was no fool. His loyalty was to the baron as well as to God, and if the baron went for the project, the priest wouldn't object to it unless I wore horns and breathed fire.
The fly-over would be a signal to Arno and the baron. When the call came that the cutter was flying over, we'd all go out where we could watch, and see what would happen.
Arno had brought a horse for me, and before long I was riding beside him through the darkness. I don't know what there is about it, but on Fanglith or out camping on Evdash, it seems as if the quietest part of the whole night is the hour before it first starts to get light. I could hear hardly a sound except the soft thudding of our horses' hoofs on the dirt road, and some distant animals, probably small, that made a sort of "greep greep" noise. The "greep greep" sound reminded me of pond hoppers on Evdash. Off to the northwest I could see a bank of clouds that might mean more rain, but most of the sky was clear, and the moon was high in the east, about half full.
After about a mile, we rode past a farm hamlet where a canid began to bark, and then two more canids. About that time I could see the castle in the darkness, not far ahead. I'd seen it before, from overhead, but hadn't paid much attention to it. It hadn't seemed important to me then.
As we got close to it, I began to make out some details. Its outer wall was the usual palisade of logs set in the ground, probably deeply. Outside the palisade was a big ditch, fairly deep, with shallow, stagnant-smelling water in it. The palisade itself turned out to be about fifteen feet high. There were a lot of the greep greep sounds coming from the ditch. A bridge crossed it, to the gate, and when we clopped our horses out onto it, the nearer greep greep noises stopped.
Two armed men were waiting and let us through the gate, and we helped them close it after us. Inside the palisade was a good-sized area that I would have called a courtyard but the Normans call a bailey. It was mostly open, but had some buildings in it that seemed to be barns and sheds made of squared logs. They were mostly backed up against the palisade.
The main building, the manor house, was in the middle, on top of a steep mound, surrounded by another palisade. It was a square building with a small wing, and looked more impressive than most manor houses I'd seen, partly because it stood on the mound, but also because it had two tiers of narrow windows indicating two stories plus the loft. The shape of the mound was so uniform that I was pretty sure it was man-made, too. They'd probably used the dirt from the ditch to make it with.
When we'd climbed the steps to the house, there was a man, a servant with a torch, waiting, who let us in. Arno took the torch from him, and we went on by ourselves, up a narrow inside stairway to the second floor and along a hall to a room.
It turned out that knights in this castle lived more comfortably than the monks where dad had been. Here they'd put Arno in a room by himself, with a real bed which I would now share with him, smell and all. It even had a mattress filled with some soft stuff.
I'd never seen Arno take off his hauberk before. He wore a kind of knee-length dress beneath it, made of what seemed to be soft leather. I suppose it was to keep the chain-mail hauberk from rubbing the skin raw.
I lay there for several minutes thinking that I might not be able to go to sleep. Everything was too strange, and I'd already slept about six hours. But the next thing I knew, Arno was telling me to get up. When I opened my eyes it was daylight, and I was scratching.
Arno, with his armor back on, took me downstairs to have breakfast in the "great hall." It was damp and smelly, and several big rangy dogs lay around as if waiting to be fed. For some reason, the floor was strewn with long coarse grass.
Around a long table sat the baron and his ten warriors, plus Arno's six, and a man who was dressed like a monk. I guessed right away that he must be the priest Arno had mentioned. Counting Arno and the baron, that made eighteen knights and sergeants—an awful lot of deadly warriors in one room. They ranged from short and stocky, about five feet two, to Brislieu at about six feet two. But they all looked hard and strong, and reckless, as if they wouldn't hesitate to do anything.
The youngest two probably weren't more than about fifteen years old, but they seemed to be considered as much men as any of the others. The oldest might have been forty or as much as fifty. It was hard to judge, because he had no teeth, or no front teeth anyway, and might have looked older than he really was. He looked as if he'd kill anyone the baron told him to, without even blinking.
Arno introduced me to them, and we sat down while servants brought in our food. I could hardly believe how dirty the servants were. The only thing dirtier than their clothes were their hands. I was glad I'd taken a broad-spectrum anti-infectant when Deneen and I arrived at Fanglith.
The food included a mush that seemed to be made of some kind of ground seeds. They put something they called honey on it—a kind of sweetener—that was pretty good. There was also roast meat, hard bread, cheese, and a stew of vegetables. Basically, it wasn't bad, except that it seemed to be poorly prepared. Honey was the best of all.
People ate with their fingers and their daggers, so I pitched in and did the same thing. Not having a dagger, I used my belt knife. We washed the food down with beer, about the same on Fanglith as the beer on Evdash except that it was warm and kind of sour, and it seemed to be weak, as well. Dad made his a lot better.
When we first went in and Arno had introduced me, the men had looked me over openly. The baron's men didn't look as if they thought much of me, I suppose because I didn't wear armor or carry a sword. And maybe because I didn't look like someone who could knock down a horse with his fist.
The priest, though, looked at me very suspiciously, his lips thinned and his eyes narrowed. I realized right away that I needed to be especially careful with what I said in front of him. He'd never chop me down with a sword, I was pretty sure, but if he decided I was a demon, I was really in trouble. He'd seen the abbot's cross hanging from my neck, I'd noticed that, but he didn't seem as impressed by it as I might have hoped.
Then we'd all gotten busy eating, and nobody said much. When we were pretty much finished, the baron looked at Arno.
"So this is one of the sky men," he said. "What can he do?"
"He'll show you," Arno replied. "Call in a serving man."
The baron looked at him as if he were trying to figure out what in the world he had in mind. "Otis!" Roland bellowed, and a fat, red-faced servant came hurrying in.
Arno turned to me. "Sir Larn," he said, "be so kind as to demonstrate your amulet on this villein."
Be so kind! I looked at poor Otis. He wouldn't think I was so kind. He'd never done anything to me and probably never would, but I was supposed to do something to him. Mentally, I asked him to forgive me; at least this wasn't going to be fatal or actually damaging.
Getting up from the table, I said, "Otis, go back five paces and get down on your knees." I figured the demonstration would be more effective if he was farther away from me.
I could feel the baron's eyes on me, puzzled. Otis backed off and got down on his knees, looking worried, as I turned to the baron. "I don't want him to injure himself when he falls," I said.
Then I pulled the stunner off my belt, turned the intensity control to intermediate, and zapped poor Otis. He fell right over. Everybody but Arno and I stared at him.
"Is he dead?" the baron asked.
I was afraid things might get ticklish if I said the wrong things here. The baron had to be satisfied without offending the priest. I'd just have to remember all I'd learned from Arno and the monks and do the best I could. I decided that the simplest way to handle the situation was to relax and wing it.
"No," I answered, "he's not dead. He could be, though. I can kill a man, or put him to sleep, or just paralyze him. Otis will wake up after a while with a headache. I see no point in killing an honest servant and a Christian."
He looked at me for several seconds, his thick black eyebrows bunched up in a frown. "Come with me," he said, getting up. "Come with me, all of you." We trooped after him out into the bailey and to the stable, where the stablekeeper met us at the door.
"Bring out Man Stomper!" the baron ordered.
The stablekeeper was probably an old knight. Instead of kind of cringing, like the servants I'd seen, he stood straight, wore a dagger on his belt, and had a look of self-respect. He paused for just a second, then nodded.
"Yes, my lord," he said, and went limping off to one of the stalls. I wondered what Man Stomper would be like. What the stablekeeper led out to us didn't look ferocious. It wasn't even a warhorse. If I had to guess, I'd say he was probably a hunting horse.
"Stand back, Rainulf," said the baron, and the stablekeeper backed away from the horse. Then the baron turned to me. "Do to the horse what you did to Otis," he said.
I didn't know if the stunner would knock out something that big or not, so when I drew it, I turned it to high, and adjusted the beam to narrow. Then I pointed it at Man Stomper's head at a distance of about fifteen feet, and pressed the firing stud. He went down as if someone had hit him with a giant hammer. Rainulf stared at him amazed, then knelt and turned back one of the horse's eyelids. After that he felt its throat as if looking for a pulse.
"The beast is dead," he said. He sounded impressed and not too happy.
The baron pursed his lips, then nodded. "No one has ever been able to ride him anyway," he said. "It serves him right for being so difficult." Then he turned abruptly and led us back into the manor, where we sat down at the table again.
No one said anything right away, but I could almost hear the wheels turning. Arno looked like the felid that got into the cream. The baron passed the beer pitcher around the table and everyone but me had some. I felt bad, about the horse especially. I wouldn't mind zapping some political police, but I didn't feel at all good about Otis and Man Stomper.
For the first time since they brought Otis to me, I looked at the priest, just for a moment. He didn't look quite as suspicious as he had. And the hostility that I'd felt from him, along with the suspicion, didn't come through as strongly.
The baron took a long swig of his warm beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and belched loudly. Then, turning to the priest, he said, "Father Drogo, show the sky lord the castle. Let him witness the lads in training, and whatever else he'd like to see." He laughed. "See if he can recite his catechism, if you'd like."
He glanced around at the others. "The rest of you find something to do. I will talk with Arno privately."
They nodded, all of them looking pretty serious. Whatever scorn they'd felt for me before I'd zapped poor Otis had disappeared, and killing Man Stomper had established for certain that I was someone to respect. Which told me what these guys considered important. But I reminded myself that they were the only kind of people here who could possibly help us recover Deneen.
I left with Drogo and got the grand tour. First he showed me where the unmarried knights and sergeants lived—a single room with wooden beds and shapeless mattresses like the one I'd shared with Arno the night before. I'd begun to wonder if the mattress was the source of the itching that was troubling me. Maybe some kind of insect. I'd noticed the others scratch occasionally at their legs while sitting around the table, and I wondered what they did about itches under their hauberks.
Some villeins had already dragged Man Stomper away when we got to the stable. Rainulf didn't seem to like me very much, so we didn't stay there long. After visiting the smithy, which was also where weapons were made, we went to watch the kids training to be knights. There were five pages and six squires training at the time. The drills and exercises they were doing told me something about how the knights got so hard and strong-looking. I'll bet they weren't any harder on Federation marine recruits in training than the Normans were on these kids, and a couple of them couldn't have been more than seven or eight years old!
Even the littlest ones wore armor, and carried shields and practice swords. They ran with them, rolled, tumbled, and went through fighting drills, swinging, thrusting, jumping, parrying, ducking, and dodging. They also sparred with one another, beating on each other's shields and at any exposed body part. Their drill instructor shouted occasional directions or chewed them out, or stopped them to demonstrate or make corrections. He was scarred and gray, with a noticeable limp, probably a veteran of many battles.
The scars on Arno's face and hands, that I'd supposed he'd gotten in battle, he could easily have come by on the drill ground of some castle before he was ten years old.
We also watched a couple of the younger squires work on their horsemanship. The things they had to do, I wouldn't have believed if I hadn't seen. They were practicing running toward their horses from the side and springing into the high-backed saddles with a sword in one hand and a shield on the other arm, wearing their calf-length hauberks. They must have just about killed themselves when they were first learning.
Finally Drogo took me to the chapel, which was a small wing on the manor house. The floor seemed to be of thick boards or maybe split logs, without grasses spread on it. Benches were lined up for sitting on, probably enough for all the nobility at the castle, including the families of the married warriors. I doubt, though, that it would accommodate the servants at the same time. At one end was a little stand about chest high to Drogo, with a big cross carved on it, and near it a table. Otherwise, there wasn't much there.
"Your name again?" the priest asked.
"Larn," I said. "Larn kel Deroop. The kel Deroops are an old and noble family in the land I came from."
"Um." He examined me again with his narrow eyes. "Do nobles not wear armor in your country?"
"No. My people are mostly peaceful. There is little need for armor. I have never seen men in armor there."
He didn't say anything right away. "Then why ... that?" he asked, at last, pointing to the stunner on my belt.
"As in any land," I said, "certain men are evil. It is sometimes necessary to protect one's self, although I had never carried one of these until I came to this land and saw how violent men are here."
He nodded thoughtfully, and it seemed to me then that I was winning his tentative approval.
"And what gods do you worship in your land?"
My relief of a moment before evaporated. I realized that this was the number one question. If I answered this one wrong, I'd blow it all, at least as far as Drogo was concerned. He knew the difference between simply wearing the cross and being a fellow Christian. And Arno might easily have been overoptimistic about Drogo going along with whatever Roland liked. His enmity or disapproval still might decide Roland against us; I could even end up dead here.
"Father," I said, "in my land, the poor unfortunates believe in no god at all. Once upon a time they believed in false gods. But then they learned that they were false, and abandoned them, and never learned about the true God. I have learned a little about him, from some good monks, and about his son, the Christ." I looked down at the cross on my chest and raised it with a hand. "It was the abbot of Saint Steven at Isere who gave me this to keep me safe on my quest."
The way he looked at me still wasn't hostile, but I could see that he wasn't satisfied yet that I was okay. "What are you here for?" he asked me.
"To rescue my sister," I told him.
"I have heard about that. It is not what I meant. What brought you here before they captured your sister?"
I told him the story I'd told Arno about being refugees separated from our parents, and that we'd come hunting for them. "And while I found our parents, who were being sheltered by the children of God, I lost my sister."
He didn't answer right away, just looked at me with his intent eyes. I tried not to squirm. Finally, he said, "And what will you do if you get your sister back?"
The hairs on the back of my neck crawled. Careful, I told myself. There was more to this question than just curiosity, and it felt as if his eyes could see right through me. "We will hunt for a land less warlike and dangerous than this one. If we do not find such a place, perhaps we will return to Normandy or Provence."
His eyes weren't on mine any longer. They were aimed off across the chapel, but they didn't seem to be looking at anything there. After a few seconds he nodded slowly. Then, without saying anything, he led me to the door. It felt as if he wasn't really satisfied, but didn't know what else to ask. As he reached for the door handle, it was pushed open from outside, and a little boy came in, apparently a page on errand duty.
He stared at me for a moment. It wasn't as if he was awed or impressed by this strange foreigner, although I'll bet he'd heard all kinds of rumors. He just looked curious—curious and alert. "Father," he said, "his lordship wants you to bring the sky man to his apartment, right away." Then he turned and ran off down the corridor.
Roland and Arno were waiting for us, and Roland got right to the point. He wanted to see dad's demonstration and he wanted to see me use my blast pistol.
For dad's demonstration, he'd have to wait till noon. But I provided him with an immediate demonstration of the blast pistol, and I sure as heck didn't disappoint him. In fact, I made about the best impression I could have. As quick as he asked it, I grabbed and drew my pistol like someone in a holodrama, and blew apart the pitcher on the table—blew it to slivers. Without pausing, I next blew a hole in his door and then set fire to a big fur that was hanging on the wall.
The whole thing took three seconds; then I stood there like Dirty Dirk Degbar in The Marauders of Melfan. The baron stared at me for three seconds, then ran over and pulled the fur off the wall. He put out the fire in it by wiping it around in the water that had been in the pitcher.
Arno was looking at me with a little smile. After that, he asked me to leave while he had another private talk with the baron. I didn't go back to Father Drogo; he might have more questions for me. Instead, I went out to the drill ground—not the one in the bailey, but outside the outer palisade, where Drogo had mentioned that the men worked out. There I watched the knights and sergeants training, some on foot and some on horseback. I don't see how any of them survive to middle age.
It was just before the noon meal when dad flew over the castle at about two hundred feet, blowing his warning siren. I turned at once and trotted back in through the gate. He started to circle, and a minute later the knights and sergeants galloped across the bridge, while the gate guards closed the gates behind them. Meanwhile, the whole place came outdoors and into the bailey to stare up at the circling cutter, including the women, little children, and servants. And, or course, Father Drogo was there. Everyone was standing well back near the gate in the inner palisade.
I told Roland to have his people keep well away from the outer gate. Roland, puzzled, gave the order. From his expression, I realized that Arno hadn't told him just what the demonstration was going to be. Then I walked out away from the crowd and waved my arms to get the attention of the cutter. It gave a sort of little bob of recognition, and I clapped a fist into the other palm overhead.
The cutter made a big turn out away from the castle, and I couldn't see just what happened next, except that, at the end of the turn, it was flying slowly back in toward us, toward the gate. Then the palisade cut it off from view. After a few seconds it floated in over the bailey with the door open in the cutter's side.
So far nothing had happened. It swung back around the way it had come, making a half circle outside. It was higher now, though, and I could see dad at the door, which meant that mom was flying it. He pointed his blast rifle, and an instant later there was a big explosion at the gate. The gate burst inward, broken, to hang at an angle from one of its hinges.
It took a lot more than rifle fire to do something like that. The only thing I could think of was that dad had some explosives on board and had made a bomb. He'd come in slow and close, and tossed it out to roll against the gate, or close to it. Finally, he'd detonated it by shooting into it.
It was more evidence suggesting that dad, back in the Federation, had been more of a revolutionary than he'd ever told us kids about. I'd always thought of revolutionaries—the kind of revolutionaries that used bombs—as angry and violent people, at least a little bit crazy. Dad had always seemed mild and rational. His kind of revolution would be a revolution of ideas. But I guess he could be selectively violent if the situation called for it.
By the time our ears had stopped ringing, the cutter had flown out of sight. The servants who had run outdoors were on their knees, making the sign of the cross in front of them. Some of the knights were crossing themselves, too, but not on their knees. The baron was staring with his mouth clamped shut and his forehead creased.
I looked at Father Drogo. He looked thunderstruck.
Then we went back inside to talk some more. I took it for granted that Roland would now agree to join us.