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SEVEN

It was dad who woke me up. When I got up, I found that my behind and my thighs were pretty sore—sore enough that I walked funny for a while. I was glad we weren't going to ride horses again right away.

I'd been sleeping in my shorts and just got up and went outside that way. I was surprised at how cold it was; I wasn't used to being outside in high mountains. The temperature couldn't have been much above freezing, and the dew was the next thing to frost. All three horses were grazing peacefully, tethered to picket stakes driven into the ground. I wasn't sure what we'd do with them now. I supposed we'd have to take Hrolf with us; I doubted Arno would give him up.

I went over to where Arno was sleeping, rolled up in a large thick blanket. He must have been sleeping with one eye open because when I approached him, his head jerked up and he rolled out and got right up, quick as anything. I could hardly believe what I saw then: he'd even slept in his hauberk! He'd taken off his helmet and sword, and laid them beside him with his shield, but that was as disarmed as he was willing to get outside a castle's walls, I guess. He'd even kept on his mail collet to protect his neck.

I told him dad was fixing breakfast, then went back aboard the cutter while he went over to check out Hrolf.

They had one of our cutters, and didn't have any reason to think there'd been a second one. And if we were on foot without a cutter, then we didn't have a ship's radio either, so they didn't have to worry about message security on the police channel. So dad had finally overheard some meaningful radio traffic not long after I'd gone to bed, and some more later on. They had Deneen and the other cutter, all right. That was no news. Apparently the chasers were out two at a time now, and what he'd heard were exchanges between them and the corvette. The chasers were to stay out of sight except in capture situations, and to observe all travelers in the district.

Their commander wanted all of us caught, and most especially he wanted dad. But apparently he hadn't come up with any good ideas on how to do it, except to watch for us among the travelers on the ground.

If anyone came up with any ideas, he wanted to know about them. Meanwhile, he said, they'd stay around for "as long as twenty days if necessary." Then they'd leave with whatever prisoners they had, even if it was only Deneen. There seemed to be a set date that the corvette had to be back at the Federation capital on Morn Gebleu. Dad thought it might be for a show trial of prominent rebels.

I'd never realized that dad had been a prominent rebel. I'd always had the idea that he just went to secret meetings and helped put out an underground newspaper. Of course, he could be considered prominent because his family had been, but it seemed to me that it had to be more than that. He must have been something pretty hot if they still wanted him that much after he'd been gone for twelve years!

As long as they thought we were stranded here without a spacecraft, dad said, they wouldn't get too desperate. The worst the captain could expect, if he returned to Morn Gebleu without us, was a reprimand. From the Federation point of view, being stranded on Fanglith was the next best thing to our being dead. The biggest drawback to it was, they were cheated out of giving dad a public trial and execution.

If it wasn't that they had Deneen, we could just hide out here until they'd left. But that wasn't how it was. And whatever we did to get Deneen back, it had to be done in twenty Standard days.

Twenty days Standard was about 23.7 of the local days.

"You know a lot more about this planet than I do," Dad went on. "What do you think we ought to do next?"

"Well," I said, "I don't know how doable this is. But it looks to me as if the only way to get her back is to capture one of the chasers, so we can fly to the corvette without getting blown to pieces. Then one of us flies it out there, leading the cutter as if it were captured. But we have both of them filled with Norman warriors and take over the corvette. Then we erase the astrogation programs so no one can fly her back to civilization, turn over the corvette to the Normans to pay for their help, and leave with Deneen in the cutter. From there we can go someplace where no one will be looking for us. Maybe to Evdash. Then we'd take new identities and start over again."

By the time I'd finished saying it, I was feeling really hopeless, because each of the key steps in my plan seemed impossible. I mean, how would we go about capturing a chaser? And if we did, how would we ever manage to take over a corvette filled with armed political police, even with the Normans' help? Swords against blasters sounded totally insane.

But dad just nodded. "The degree of difficulty sounds pretty stiff," he said, "but probably no worse than anything else we could think of. Why don't we put it on 'simmer' for a while. We can play around with it after we eat."

So we ate breakfast and then talked. Bubba was there, too. He'd been hunting in the forest nearby—he preferred his breakfast fresh—but had come back when he picked up that we were awake and doing things.

Of course, I was the only one who could talk to everyone there, so whatever Arno said, or dad said, I had to interpret. Which isn't all that easy. It's one thing to understand what's being said and another to say it quickly in the other language without losing some of it or changing some meaning.

But actually I did most of the talking anyway. I explained to Arno about the corvette and the three chasers, without saying anything about other planets, of course. Then I told him that dad and I needed help to take control of the corvette and get my sister back—that if he could recruit thirty or forty knights and sergeants, we could probably use them. Their pay would be the corvette—I called it a sky warship—and its chaser craft.

It was hard to know what Arno was thinking, but his eyes sharpened at the part about them getting the warship when we were done. Now he sat there with his lips pursed, looking thoughtful. My eyes went to his right hand—his sword hand—resting relaxed and half open on his lap. It seemed too big for his body size. I could see a thick ridge of callus, hard and cracked, that ran from the end of his forefinger to the knuckle of his thumb. He looked like a hundred and eighty pounds of organic fighting machine.

Anyway, I kept up the sales talk. "The sky warship is much bigger than the cutter," I went on, "maybe bigger than any sea ship you've seen. With it, you could make yourself King of Sicily in a week—king of anywhere in Christendom you want. You could easily drive the Saracens out of the Holy Land. No fortress or army in this part of the world could stand against you, no matter how big it was. You wouldn't even have to kill very many if you didn't want to."

His eyes locked on mine. "If your people have such mighty ships," he said, "why haven't we heard of them before? With such power as that, why haven't you conquered our land?"

"The world is a lot bigger place than your people imagine," I told him. "A whole lot bigger. There are a lot of countries, and great distances, between my land and yours. My people have heard only the faintest rumors of Christendom, and they have more than enough trouble close to home. Although it would be a good idea for you not to let the warship return to its port after seeing your land."

All this was basically the truth. Here they used "world" to mean this planet and all of creation. Only, the way Brother Oliver had used the word, they seemed to think of them as practically the same thing.

For several seconds he just sat there, thinking. "And how will you get thirty or forty knights to the sky ship?" he asked. "This craft is too small to carry thirty or forty armed knights."

"We can take at least twenty-five in it," I said, "if we stand them in all the available space. Probably thirty. We also need to capture one of the small enemy sky boats that we call 'chasers.' We'll use dad as the bait, probably, and get one of them to come to us on the ground. It can probably take another three or four knights if we really crowd them in.

"Dad can fly it and I'll fly this one. He'll pretend to be one of the crew and say he captured the cutter. When we get up to the sky ship, they'll open the..." I paused. The Normans didn't have any word for hangar. They probably had one for hatch, but I didn't know what it was. "They'll open the side of the sky ship and we'll go right inside. Then we'll get out and capture it."

Just then, saying it, it felt to me as if it might almost be possible.

"How long will it take to fly to the sky ship?" asked Arno, probably thinking about his knights standing in the cutter too jammed together to sit down.

"The time it takes a man to walk a mile," I told him. Brother Oliver had explained the word they used for mile: it was one thousand double steps long—two thousand steps, actually—which made it pretty close to our Standard mile back home.

"And what weapons will we face?" Arno wanted to know.

"If we just went up and attacked them from outside with this cutter, they'd destroy us as easily as this," I said, and snapped my fingers. "It's a warship, and this isn't. The idea is to get inside and take them by surprise. They aren't used to close fighting, and they won't be prepared for it. And they have no idea of the strength and skill and valor of the Norman knight. But surprise is absolutely essential.

"Just a minute," I added, and summarized our conversation for dad and Bubba. "We better show him what a blaster can do," I went on. "He has to know what they could be up against. He already knows what a stunner can do, but we need to shoot up a tree or something for him, with your blast pistol."

Dad nodded and got up, and the rest of us followed him: Arno and Bubba and I. Dad aimed at a tree and pulled the trigger, and an energy charge burst against it with a flash, throwing bark and chunks of wood. Instantly he fired twice more, hitting another tree with one charge and gouging some gravel out of a boulder with the other.

Arno didn't look shocked or horrified the way I thought he might, but he did look pretty thoughtful. Then dad told me some other things Arno needed to know, more encouraging things, and I passed them on, translating.

"It's not as bad as it might look," I said to Arno. "They're not used to being attacked inside their ships, and Dad says their blasters should all be stored in the weapons locker unless they're expecting something like this. They just don't carry them aboard ship.

"We'll meet them at close quarters, and if we surprise them and then take them quickly enough, most of them won't even be carrying a stunner. If we surprise them and if we move fast. But they'll have a weapons locker on board, and if we're too slow, then we'll be in deadly trouble, because they'll have time to get out blasters."

He nodded, and unslinging his shield, he held it up in front of him. It was about three feet long and maybe twenty inches wide near the top, narrowing toward the bottom. "Shoot at my shield with your stunner," he said.

That made sense, but I felt a little uncomfortable aiming at it with him holding it. After making sure it was on low, I pressed the firing stud. He was still grinning at me over the shield, so I fired again.

"I can feel a little tingle in my left arm," he said. "That's all."

I could have fired at his lower legs, of course, and he'd have fallen, paralyzed to the hips at least, numb and weak all over. But it seemed doubtful that the political police would think of that in the brief heat of battle.

I borrowed the shield and examined it. It was heavier than I expected, made of some very hard wood that Arno called oak, and covered with layers of what seemed to be thick leather, also very hard. I wasn't sure what would happen if a blaster charge hit it. If it were only a pistol instead of a rifle, it would probably tear up the shield, and maybe the guy's forearm, but the shield still might save his life.

"How many men are there on a corvette, dad?" I asked.

I could see him adding in his head. "Probably thirty-five or so," he said, "including the chaser crews. But they'll be scattered on post in different parts of the ship. If we can take the bridge and the command officers quickly, we should be able to neutralize any further resistance."

Then his eyes fixed on mine. "And that brings up the matter of capturing a chaser," he said. "How do you propose we do that?"

I told him what I'd told Arno. We'd use Klentis kel Deroop to bait a trap. "Only, I'll be Klentis kel Deroop," I said, "instead of you. When they heard my voice speaking Provençal on the communicator, they thought it was yours. We can just leave it that way, so that I'll be the actual bait. You can be part of the jaws, along with the Normans. If the computer on this cutter has a linguistics program, it'll be easy for you to learn to talk to them." Then I went on to explain the rest of my plan to him, such as it was. He nodded thoughtfully. It was a long way from being a guaranteed winner, but it was simple. And under the circumstances, it seemed like the best we could do.

* * *

First, though, we needed to pick mom up, and that called for approaching the convent at night, which left us with a whole day to do something in. Although it would mean traveling by daylight, I wanted to go and look over Arno's home country and get a feel for it. But dad vetoed that. The chasers would have too much attention on the area we were in for us to travel by daylight. He wasn't even willing to do any unnecessary travel at night.

So we filled up the day doing other things. The computer did have a linguistics program, so I spent a while entering all the Norman French and Provençal I knew, plus the conversation I'd just recorded with Arno. Then we called Arno, who was fooling around with our modern fishing gear at the creek. He came in and talked at length, answering questions about Normandy and the Normans, mostly stuff I hadn't already recorded.

Finally evening arrived, and dad and I went to bed early with the learning programs on. We'd be getting up a couple of hours before dawn, and the nights were short at that latitude in that season.

* * *

The toughest part was getting La Rous and Lou Blonde into the cutter. Hrolf went right in, led by Arno, and we finally got the other two in by leading them up the ramp blindfolded. Then we hobbled all three. Next, using the infrascope and with Bubba guiding, we found the convent again. After that, we found a tiny opening in some forest a few miles away, where we could return to the cutter and hide out.

Then, dad put Arno and me down in a field about a mile from the convent. We took all three horses with us to the convent, the spare being for mom to ride. The sky was starting to get light in the east when Arno rapped on the gate with the hilt of his dagger.

Except that they made us wait until daylight to get in, we had no trouble at all. It helped that I was wearing the robe I'd been given at the monastery, and had the abbot's big silver cross hanging on my chest. They let us see mom, and the way that she and I reacted when we saw each other, there wasn't any question about us being mother and son. So they let her leave with us; it was as easy as that. And when we left, we looked like three locals, because mom was wearing a robe, too.

On the way back to the cutter, she and I filled each other in on what had happened. The bandits had taken her to the main bandit camp, where they'd apparently been heading when they saw the cutter sitting there. After dad had shot two of them with the blaster, they'd been about half scared of her, but they hadn't let go of her even for a minute. She must have looked really strange to them in a jumpsuit, and taller than most of them.

At the main camp, they told their leader all about it. She could tell when they told about the blaster, because one of them imitated the sound and threw himself on the ground with a big flourish. Some of the others began making the sign of the cross then, and the leader knocked one of the kidnapers down and started yelling.

They'd been lucky dad wasn't within hearing.

Then there was an argument for a while. Mom didn't understand the words, of course, but she got the idea from the way they looked at her, that they were arguing over whether to kill her or not. I suppose they figured that dad was a demon, and that she might call him in on them.

Maybe they decided not to risk making him any madder. Anyway, what they ended up doing was taking her down into the valley without even waiting for morning. Then they let her go, and for good measure, threw some rocks at her to drive her away. With enough luck, she might have run into dad when daylight came, but apparently she was in a different area.

From there on, her story wasn't very different from dad's, except, of course, she ended up in a convent instead of a monastery. They'd been kind of horrified there at a woman wearing a jumpsuit, but then they'd gotten her into nun's clothes, and everything was fine. They'd treated her well enough, and she'd begun to learn Provençal.

She asked me if we'd seen Cookie, and I had to tell her we hadn't. He'd either turned wild and gone off somewhere, or something had killed him. Otherwise, Bubba would have picked him up telepathically.

Bubba met us when we approached the forest, to make sure we found the cutter because we'd never been there, and because things look a lot different when you're on the ground. Arno and I waited while mom got down and hugged him. Bubba didn't have to jump around and act idiotic like some kinds of canids because he could talk. He just licked her face a couple of times, grinned like crazy, and told her how glad we were to have her back.

When we reached the opening where the cutter was, dad saw us and let out the ramp. I motioned Arno to stop, and we let mom go the last few yards alone while we got down and picketed the horses. I figured she and dad might feel a little emotional and not want anyone else there when she went aboard, especially someone like Arno who wasn't a member of the family.

Bubba looked at me, and I could tell he approved of my judgment. I felt pretty good about that. With an espwolf, you don't get approval automatically just because you're one of his humans. You have to deserve it.

Then dad came out on the ramp, grinning, and beckoned to us, and we went inside. He fixed us all something to eat, while he and mom told each other what had happened to them. But when we'd finished eating, dad turned the talk to business.

"All right, Larn," he said, "what do we do next? Explicitly."

I didn't answer right away. I looked at him, and I looked at how I felt about the question. "The next thing I want to do," I told him, "is let you make the decisions. I don't think it should be up to me."

His eyes were steady. "Why is that?" he asked.

Dad likes straight answers to straight questions. And when he looks at you like that—not mean or anything, but with his full attention, and his full intention—no putoffs are possible. Besides, you know he isn't going to blow up at you or act like you're a dummy.

"Because you're my dad and I'm just a kid," I told him. "You've got a lot more experience than I have."

He smiled a little, but I could tell he was holding back. He really wanted to laugh, but didn't want me to feel like he was making fun of me. He was remembering times I'd complained that he was treating me like a kid.

"That's true, as a generality," he said. "But on Fanglith, you're the one with the broadest experience. Besides, you've gone along on your own here this far and done an excellent job. It's foolish to replace a winning general, especially when he's been winning against odds."

"But I don't like being the boss," I complained. "Not when things like people getting killed are involved. Besides, Deneen was helping me."

He did laugh then, and I realized why. I was begging off because, I said, I was too young. Now I'd brought in my fourteen-year-old sister's smarts as part of the reason I'd done well so far. If her judgment had been that helpful, and it had been, then my age wasn't that big a deal.

"Look, Larn," he said, shifting gears, "let's consider this as an internship you'll be doing. You'll be working under the eye of an experienced decisionmaker—me—and I'll step in any time I think I need to. From my experience as a consultant, I'm admittedly better grooved in on making decisions under pressure, but in this case, you've got more and better data. You're also extremely bright. And you've got good sense, which basically means that you seldom enter much mental garbage into your decisions—odds and ends of ideas that don't belong there."

I laughed, a laugh that sort of sneaked up and surprised me. Dad stood there with one eye cocked.

"After the way I've been bobbling around on this decision, I'm surprised you haven't changed your mind," I said. "Okay, I'll do it. I guess I was actually enjoying being the boss when you weren't here. Then somehow or other I thought you should be taking care of me again, as if I were a little kid.

"But it would be nice to be playing just for fun, or maybe where the loser has to do pushups."

Then we started talking about details. Arno had told us that Normandy wasn't mountainous, so we could expect to have a harder time finding good hiding places there. Knights spent a lot of time there hunting on horseback, all through the forests and waste places. I certainly didn't want to draw any crowds that might be noticed from above. In fact, I didn't even want the locals to know about us, except selected locals that Arno was trying to recruit.

I asked Dad whether it would be safe to hover a few miles up. It seemed to me that Normandy was far enough from Provence that the political police might not be watching for us up there. We'd just be one small object, stationary except when we were going down or moving back up.

But he didn't feel good about it.

I recalled then that the corvette had said something about having detection gear to spot us and lock in on us with if we tried to leave the planet, and I asked if it could pick us up flying around down here.

"I doubt it," he said, "not near the surface. Gear like that would work by picking up disturbances in the local Q-matrix."

He could see I wasn't understanding him. "I guess," he went on, "I haven't paid enough attention to what they teach and don't teach in high school physics on Evdash. The Q-matrix is actually the energy field which we think of as space/time..."

"Oh!" I said. "In school we just called it the space-time matrix."

"Okay. Then you probably know it's disturbed by the operation of a ship's drive."

"I can see how it would be."

"Well, even in mass-proximity phase, a ship in powered motion can be quickly and accurately located at a considerable distance, even close to major nodes in the matrix, like a planet, simply because the drive operates by distorting the matrix."

"But in mass proximity phase, the distortion would be pretty slight," I pointed out.

"True. But not too slight for their instruments to pick up if we're far enough from the surface. Fortunately, in the boundary layer of a solid-crust planet, close to its interface with the atmosphere, the matrix is more or less irregular. Most over mountains and least over an ocean or sea because matric irregularity increases with surface irregularity."

I nodded. I could see where this was leading.

"All right," he went on. "So, close to the surface they can only detect us with other kinds of instruments, like radar and human eyes, that are actively scanning for us. I'm sure that's how they found Deneen—with radar or visually. And because they don't seem to know there's another cutter down here to find, we can hope they won't be scanning for one. We can't depend on that, but when we do have to fly around down here, we can feel a little less threatened.

"Actually, though, I expect their detection gear is just an accessory of their astrogation system. And the astrogation system will be on at all times to maintain the corvette's parking position. So they'll pick up our drive if we get far enough out that we show up as a moving anomaly against the background of matrix irregularity.

"Boundary layer irregularities in the matrix damp out rapidly with distance from the surface. For example, I'm sure that at fifteen or twenty miles elevation we'd be noticed instantly. I'm not sure that even five miles is safe, and I definitely wouldn't go as high as ten. But at two or three miles, I'm pretty sure the danger lies in being spotted by chasers watching the surface."

"And we don't know how big a danger that is," I said.

Dad nodded, pursing his lips thoughtfully. "If they think we're on foot or horseback, presumably wearing local clothing, they must feel that the chance of finding us is close to zero. They may just be going through the motions of a search, hoping, but not expecting much. Which means they might not be watching too sharply.

"But the fact remains that they have three chasers flying around down here, and we can't afford to be careless. So as your consultant and executive officer, I recommend that we stay below three miles at all times, fly mainly at night, and keep our speed under five hundred miles an hour. We'll blend with the natural irregularities better when we travel slowly."

Then, after we'd talked about some other things, mom set up the learning program for their sleeping room while Arno and I went out to talk and nap under the trees. Bubba went outside, too. He lay at the edge of the shade with his nose on his crossed paws and his eyes closed; he'd know and warn us if anyone came near, on the ground or overhead.

We'd get our rest during the day today; tonight we'd be on our way to Normandy. And meanwhile, I thought as I lay there in the sunshine, we had one kind of detection device that the political police didn't. We had an espwolf in the family. Espwolves would never associate with a group like the political police.

* * *

I hadn't been asleep very long when Bubba woke me up. As soon as he woofed in my ear, I scrambled to my feet, but he wasn't warning me of anyone coming, only of weather moving in. I became aware of the bumble of thunder not too far off. It wasn't just a thunderstorm approaching, he told me, but a whole line of them. That probably meant a major change of weather. How he knew was beyond me.

For a minute, I thought he was just warning me so I wouldn't get wet, but it was more than that. Sometimes we forget how smart an espwolf can be because Bubba doesn't say a whole lot. Talking is awkward for him. And also, he looks pretty much like an ordinary, if oversized, canid.

So he had to tell me what he had in mind.

"Very thick clouds," he said, "very close to ground. We fly near ground or in clouds, enemy no see us with their eyes. And thunderstorms make their instruments no see us, right?"

Who knows what Bubba had learned, eavesdropping on our minds while we did our school homework or read other stuff?

I woke Arno and told him to get the horses ready to load, then opened the cutter and yelled in to dad and mom to get ready to leave—that Bubba said a frontal storm was coming. Then I went and helped Arno. Mom came out to peer up at the sky while Arno and I brought the horses. All you could see was blue, but outside the cutter she could hear the thunder, too. Bubba explained to her what he had in mind.

It kind of overwhelmed mom to actually see the horses brought on board, crowding the control room. I mean, she could smell that they'd been inside before, but here they were in the flesh! It wasn't much trouble to get them up the ramp this time because we blindfolded them right away.

Then Arno and I went back out and sat on the ramp, listening to the thunder getting closer. Even with the trees crowding around pretty closely, it wasn't more than four or five minutes before we could see the clouds coming in on us, dark bluish-gray and sort of rolling along.

A couple of minutes more and the first drops came spattering down, big and hard and cold. The sky was rumbling and booming now, and we scurried into the cutter and closed her up. Dad had turned on the sound pickup, and we were deafened by a terrific bang of thunder as he took her up and off over the trees.

We were on our way to Normandy, our visibility blurred and limited by driving rain. Arno was our guide: all dad and I knew was that it was somewhere northwest, along the north coast. Pretty soon we came to a river that Arno called the Rhone, and turned north. Not long after that we didn't have a guide anymore, because things looked too different from the air. From the air, Arno didn't have any idea where the road to Normandy left the river. He'd only been through the region once before, and the roads all looked more or less the same—dirt, with wheel ruts, and just wide enough for wagons to go.

The country was at least seventy percent forest, with an irregular patchwork of farm fields. A few minutes up the Rhone, we passed a little town that Arno recognized, called Lyon. Actually it was a big town for this part of Fanglith, and had a large and impressive stone building that Arno called a church. He said the church was God's residence on Fanglith. But when I questioned him, he explained that God didn't live there physically, and that every church was his residence. I decided I didn't have the background to understand that, and dropped the subject.

At Lyon the river forked, and after that we didn't see any town big enough that he could look at it from the air and say, "Oh, that's so-and-so." I took the controls then because from our early scan of the planet, I had a rough sort of idea how the continent lay. Normandy, Arno had said, was on the north coast of France. And if I didn't know where the boundaries of France were, I did know that if I turned and headed west, I'd come to the ocean. Then I could follow the coast northward.

It took us about an hour to reach the ocean—Arno called it the Atlantic—and I kept worrying about coming out into sunlight, where we might be seen from above. We didn't, though. We were under solid cloud cover all the way, with me flying not far beneath the clouds. In places the rain would thin for a little way, and then we'd run into another heavy thunderstorm. The storm was beautiful and the country was beautiful; I wished I could slow down and enjoy it more. A lot of it was even more heavily wooded than it had been along the Rhone.

When we got to the ocean, it was south of us, not west. We'd flown out over a peninsula. Then I did slow down, and followed the coast northwestward until we came to the peninsula's end. From there I followed the coast briefly north and then northeast. Arno watched out the broad, curved, transparent front of the cabin, his eyes intent on the ground, his face expressionless. He hadn't said a thing since he'd admitted he was lost.

"Does anything look familiar yet?" I asked.

He shook his head, and I wondered if he'd even recognize home if he saw it from our angle. There weren't any good landmarks, like a big city or a big mountain. It was forest and more forest, wet and wind-whipped, featureless hills, a sameness of crude castles made of dirt and timber, with tiny soggy hamlets near them and surrounded by farm fields. We never saw one person; the rain had driven everyone under cover. On our left lay gray ocean marked with whitecaps.

Maybe, I thought, we'd have to put Arno down somewhere where he could ride out and ask directions.

After a little while the coast jogged north, then east again, and I stayed with it. There were more farm openings in the forest here, and we crossed a marshy district with drainage ditches and lots of farm fields. We even saw a couple of castles made of stone; we'd only seen one of those all the way across France.

"We're close," said Arno. "These castles are Norman-built." I slowed down some more so he could look things over better. In a few minutes we came to a river with a stone castle near its mouth. "There!" he said. "That river is the Orne! Follow it upstream!"

I did, slowing even more and dropping to about four hundred feet. It was raining furiously just then, the treetops thrashing in the wind, the light more like late evening than midday. Lightning kept stabbing the forest, and we could hear the thunder crash and boom. I slowed way down, as much to watch the storm better as to make it easier for Arno to spot landmarks. He named a castle, a village, another castle as we passed upstream over the valley. Then the valley got narrower and without farms, walled now by timbered hills.

Arno was actually starting to look excited. "There," he said, his finger jabbing, "that road! It goes to my father's castle!"

I turned to follow it. "That road" was a narrow dirt track that left a wooden dock by the river and curled its way through the forest, up into the hills. At that point I was flying about twenty miles an hour. I loved this country in storm, and I was sure I'd love it in sunshine, too. A little dell cut down out of the hills, a creek tumbling and splashing in its bottom, showing itself rainswollen here and there where the trees didn't hide it. Then the road topped out on a sort of low plateau with farms. At one end of a long farm clearing was the palisaded timber castle.

"That's it," said Arno. "The castle of my father."

Right away I reversed direction, backing down the slope a little, and stopped about fifteen feet above the treetops, parking there. "I don't want to be seen," I explained. "Or if we're seen, I want it to be so briefly that they decide they really didn't see anything after all. I want to choose when we make ourselves known, and not start any rumors about the Devil coming. Where should I put you down, Arno?"

"Find a place where the road is wide enough," he said, "and come down between the trees."

I found a place. "Before I put you down," I said, "let's make sure I know what you're going to do here. This first stop is mainly to find out where men may be available, right?"

"Yes. And perhaps to get my brother Charles. Then I'll probably go to see Rufus Shield-breaker. He has a big family, with many younger sons."

"Younger sons?" I said.

"Yes. Only the oldest son inherits. Younger sons must find their own place in the world. Many went with William the Bastard to help conquer England, but more than a few were returning when I left home. They did not like the restrictions that William was putting on them there; he would hold all the power in his own hands. At the same time, more and more are going to Italy these days, as I did, to join the Tancreds and others there. So it is hard to say from one season to the next exactly where men can be found. But there will be plenty."

"Where and when should I pick you up?" I asked.

"In the open on top of the hill, beside the road, in the hour before dawn. Travelers are few up here at any time, and at that hour, none."

"Make it earlier," I said, "so we can take you wherever you need to go next and be hidden again by daylight."

"In the second hour then," he said.

I landed. It was good to get the horses out. I had him take all three of them. He could leave ours with his father and get them back if we ever wanted them. The cutter was a smelly mess; it wasn't designed as a horse stable.

Arno rode off with his cloak over his armor and his hood up. The storm had slacked off for the moment, but it was still raining, and water was dripping from the trees. I kind of wished I was going with him, but I didn't trust him. He could easily decide to settle for our little cutter and take me hostage for it, instead of going for the corvette. Or some baron with his squad of knights might make the decision for him—just sort of take the project over and crowd Arno out. From our talks, I'd gotten the idea that Normans in general could be treacherous as well as rough. Arno had certainly shown that he could be, when he tried to take my stunner away from me that first day.

I didn't understand yet how much the Normans loved to fight, though, or how reckless they could be, or really, that big ambitions were not unusual among them. Most of the Norman nobility preferred playing for big stakes, even with big risks, rather than for little stakes with small risks. They'd definitely prefer a corvette to a cutter.

 

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Framed