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SEVENTEEN

I was on watch, and it still wasn't daylight, when I caught sight of someone walking across the meadow toward us. It was Arno again, and he wanted in. Bubba assured me that there was no one else around, and that Arno didn't have any treachery in mind at the moment.

So I woke up dad, who put on his jumpsuit and clipped on his stunner. Then I lowered the cutter and let Arno aboard.

All he wanted was to learn Standard from the computer. Knowing Standard would be a big advantage to him because then he could talk with the prisoners when they woke up, and he'd be the only Norman who could. And he knew that the computer was what we'd used to learn his language, so he figured it could teach him ours.

I lifted to ten feet, and Dad adjusted the learning program so it would teach Evdashian from the Provençal/Norman mixture we had in the computer. Evdashian was close enough to Standard that the prisoners would understand it.

Arno sat in one of the seats with a learning program skullcap on his head, while dad adjusted its controls. I sat back with my stunner on my lap and music on my headset to keep an eye on Arno. Bubba was there to catch any evil intentions that might surface.

Our distrust didn't seem to bother Arno a bit. Maybe Normans are used to things like that. Meanwhile, I was feeling good about this. Standard would give Arno the added advantage he needed. We could leave by midmorning, with no bad feelings.

Pretty soon it started to get daylight, and after a while the sun came up. Mom got up and started breakfast, and then Deneen got up, and dad again. Arno just sat there with his eyes half shut, absorbing words and syntax.

Suddenly my eyes bugged out; the corvette was lifting! I yelled and pointed. Arno snatched off the skullcap and stared, half crouched as if he were going to leap after them.

Abruptly it surged on a low trajectory course westward. The last thing I noticed was that the gangway and the emergency door to the bridge were both still wide open on it. I called a warning and took off after them on a higher trajectory.

Dad's first thought was that one of the prisoners had gotten free and made it to the bridge. But I told him about the emergency door, and the piloting was terrible, so we decided that one of the Normans had started fooling around at the control console. They were doing about five hundred miles an hour when they passed out over the ocean.

"What do you think's going to happen next?" I asked dad.

He never answered. He didn't need to, because right then it happened: The corvette exploded! It was a terrific blast that tore it completely apart. It even jarred the cutter, which was more than half a mile above and behind.

I didn't have to ask, or guess, what had caused it. I was sure she hadn't carried explosives that could have done that. No, whoever had been flying her had pushed the wrong switch, and she'd tried to go into faster-than-light mode—within five miles of a planetary surface! It wouldn't have been safe to try that at half a million miles.

We circled, and watched in the viewer as pieces of corvette splashed into the water far below. Arno had his pistol half drawn when Deneen zapped him. We had the only flying craft on Fanglith now, his last chance at an empire. He'd realized that, but she'd outdrawn him.

Her stunner had been set on low, though—customary when clipped on your belt—so Arno wasn't unconscious, just helpless.

Then we had some talking to do. First, I explained to Arno, in a general way, what had happened to the corvette. After that, dad asked him where he wanted to be put down. Arno mumbled that he didn't want to be put down. If he couldn't have a sky ship, then he wanted to go to our country with us. He would swear fealty to us as our obedient vassal forever, so that we'd never have to worry about his trying to kill us or take over the cutter.

I felt really bad for Arno, and told dad I'd agree to his request. But dad said no. He didn't think Arno could survive or be remotely happy in a civilized world.

He explained to Arno just where our country really was—a world that circled a star so far away that you couldn't see it from here. The idea was totally strange to Arno, of course, but he seemed to get the general idea. And while he wasn't able to show much facial expression, zapped as he was, as far as I could tell by watching his eyes, it didn't shock him.

Arno really adjusted to facts very well. The problem was the adjustment of attitudes. He was a barbarian. The thing that made me feel so bad was that he was such a darn likable barbarian. And also, his dissatisfaction with Fanglith had grown out of his contact with us.

Dad pointed out to him that we'd kept our part of the bargain: We'd helped him get a sky ship of his own. He just hadn't been able to keep it, through no fault of his own or of ours.

Then an idea came to me. "Arno," I said, "when I met you, you were going to buy some warhorses, right? And take them to Italy or Sicily or somewhere where they were hard to get, and sell them to the Normans there for a lot of gold. Well, I know where there are more than thirty warhorses, and their owners will never be able to claim them now."

* * *

When he could move around some again, we put Arno down in the meadow in front of the hut. Then, from a couple of miles up, we watched him, mounted on Hrolf, round up the other horses and tether them in a string. It wasn't hard for him; Norman warhorses know a knight when they see and hear one, and do what they're told.

After that, he stripped off all their gear and put it in a pile. He'd have had a hard time explaining the saddles and so forth if he'd kept them.

We hadn't said anything about the little weapons stash we'd collected from the chasers. It just hadn't seemed like the right thing to do. But I'd given him a four-pack of recharges for his stunner and a belt magazine of energy cylinders for his blaster. I'd also explained to him that they wouldn't last forever—not long enough to make him King of Sicily. But surely they'd take him and his horse herd through any bandit gangs he ran into on his way to the Mediterranean.

The last thing we saw him do before he left, and before we kicked out of our parking coordinate, was hunt around in the meadow in front of the hut where the chasers had been. He was looking for any weapons that might have been dropped, I was sure. But we didn't see him pick anything up.

What he did have from our adventure together was the string of horses—probably as many as he could have bought. And he still had the purse of gold coins he'd come from Sicily with. That was a start on being a merchant, and with his intelligence and boldness, he might eventually end up buying and selling kings, or dukes at least.

I wished we could have said goodbye to the wolves. Their help had been vital to us, and they'd given it without asking anything in exchange. Bubba's wise eyes looked at me when I said it, his mouth grinning.

"Wolves all right," he said. "Have their own ways, their ... values. Don't need thanks. They know what they did, and they tell it mentally for long time, to cubs and the cubs of cubs."

At a million miles, we shifted into FTL mode and headed outsystem. It had been a fantastic experience, and a successful one. We were together again, and Cookie was the only casualty.

* * *

I'd changed a lot on Fanglith; I wasn't the same kid any longer. Neither was Deneen, although she wasn't as put off as I was by the idea of going back to middle school again. I got used to it okay though, when we got back. But she and I agreed that we didn't want to stay on Evdash when we finished.

She and I talked it over quite a bit before we brought it up to our parents. We both agreed that we wanted them to train us so we could do something effective toward making the Federation safe and decent again.

They kind of smiled at each other, and dad said they'd been training us for that since we were born, just in case that's what we wanted to do. Now, he said, it looked as if it was about time for a new phase of training.

He hasn't said any more about it since then, and we haven't either, to him. But this morning before we left for school, mom told us not to make any plans for this evening—that dad was bringing home someone he was sure we'd want to talk with.

Deneen says that's it, that tonight is when we start the new phase. She's probably right. She usually is.

 

 

THE END

 

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Framed