As I'd expected, when it started to get dark, travelers began to leave the road to spend the night in woods or meadow. I was looking for a language teacher, one whom I hoped wouldn't try to knife me or anything.
I picked one of the robed men who was traveling alone. I suppose he could have been carrying a weapon beneath his robe, but somehow it seemed to me that he, and the other robed men I'd seen, weren't that kind. Beneath a robe didn't seem to be a good place to carry a sword anyway. It would be too slow to get it out.
Really, it looked as if they belonged to some kind of organization, maybe some nonmilitary group. They might even live by nonviolent rules, like the urso-felid mystics of Fylvikh. I hoped.
We watched him walk back into a meadow that had a brook running through it. He walked back a hundred feet or so from the road and sat down next to the brook to eat something that seemed to be bread and cheese.
When he was done eating, he got up on his knees, held his palms together, bowed his head, and just knelt there for quite a while. I had no idea what that was about, unless it was some kind of meditation, like on Fylvikh. After that he did some scratching. Then he pulled up his hood and lay down, shifting around some, probably trying to avoid lumps and stones. A couple of times he sat up and seemed to pick up pebbles that he'd been lying on. Finally, with his head resting on the little sack he carried, he lay quiet.
By then it was dark enough that I switched to infrascope to watch. An infrascope isn't great on detail, but it requires very little light. Before long he was motionless.
I waited until it was totally night. That gave him time to get to sleep, which I figured wouldn't take long if he'd been walking all day. Then we dropped down under cover of darkness, and Deneen let me out about a hundred yards from him, at the back edge of the meadow. When she'd lifted again, I walked along the creek toward him with my stunner in hand. It wasn't terribly dark. Fanglith only had one moon, but it was about half full and gave enough light to see by.
I saw him again at about a hundred feet, and set my stunner on low and broad beam. At fifty feet that shouldn't actually paralyze him, just make his physical reactions a little sluggish. It also ought to put him more deeply asleep. At worst, he might have a little headache for a while when he woke up.
That is, if the Gunner Makloon stories I'd read back home were accurate in things like that.
I aimed and pressed the firing stud.
When I got to him, I hit him on the head with the handle of my belt knife, just hard enough, I hoped, to leave a lump. Even through his hood, hitting him like that was hard to do—a lot harder than zapping him with the stunner beam. When he woke up, he was supposed to connect the bump with the unconsciousness, and explain me to himself as someone who'd chased away an attacker.
If he figured it out differently than that, well, I was a lot bigger, and I had the stunner. I'd just have to be alert.
Meanwhile, he smelled bad. He really needed a bath.
As he was only about ten feet from the brook, I cupped my hands together and dribbled cold water on his face. He groaned and moved a little, and I raised his head with a hand. "Are you all right?" I asked in Evdashian. I didn't have to put worry in my voice; it was there on its own. And it would tell him one, that I was a friend, and two, that I was a foreigner who didn't know the local language. I really was his friend, too, although I'm sure he wouldn't have thought so if he'd known what I'd done to him.
He said something to me, the tone rising at the end as if it were a question. Playing it straight, I said back to him in Evdashian, "A robber attacked you. I chased him away." He wouldn't understand the words, but it ought to sound right to him.
He sat up, took a drinking bag from his sack, and had a drink. Then he pushed his hood back, felt the place where I'd hit him, and said something as if to himself. In Evdashian I asked him how he felt.
He looked at me, clearly recognizing now that I didn't speak his language. I reached out, carefully tapped his head with one finger, and said "head" in Evdashian. He just looked at me. I didn't want him to give me the word for hurt or headache, so I tapped my own and said "head" again.
"Ah!" he said. "La testo!"
"La testo!" I repeated. The pickup clipped to my utility belt would be passing on everything that was said to the recorder in my daypack. I reached toward his drinking bag and, after hesitating for a moment, he handed it to me. I'd thought it would be water, but to my surprise, the contents were sour. I decided it must be wine from whatever local fruit they used.
"Wine," I said in Evdashian, and sloshed the liquid in the bag.
"Lou vin," he answered.
"Drink," I said and, without the winebag, pretended to drink.
"Ah-ha!" he said. "Beure!" He beamed at me. He realized now that I wanted him to teach me, and he was ready to enjoy it. So holding my left forearm across in front of me, I walked the fingers of my right hand along it. "Walk," I said. From there we did "run" and "jump" and other things like that, and then parts of the body and counting on fingers. "Me" and "you" were easy. His name was Robert, and he was eighteen of the local years old.
Deneen and I had already figured out how old we were in Fanglith years. When you have a ship's astrogational instruments to play with, you might as well have fun with them. We'd computed planetary mass from its measured gravity, and did the same for its moon. Then, from their combined masses and their sun's mass, and their distance from the sun, we'd figured the approximate length of the Fanglith year, assuming a perfectly circular orbit. Next, of course, we'd gotten a simple conversion factor from Fanglith years to Standard years, and vice versa, and figured how old we were in Fanglith years.
Robert was impressed at how young I was, considering my size.
By that time he'd given me quite a lot of words. I probably didn't remember more than a third of them, but they were all on record, and I could use some of them in little sentences, like "I jump," and "you walk."
So I pointed at him and said, "You talk, long." He wasn't sure I meant what I said, so I pointed at him and said it again, and worked my mouth as if I was talking. He shrugged and began to talk, while I nodded to encourage him. After a couple of minutes though, he stopped, probably because I wasn't talking back to him, and because he knew I wasn't understanding it anyway. He wouldn't have understood what the recorder was about, even if I'd shown it to him.
I was pretty eager to find out what the computer would make of all this anyway, so I decided it was time to leave. I took a food bar out of my pocket and handed it to him. "You eat," I said. Then I unwrapped it, figuring the wrapper would be a problem to him. He took a bite, chewed slowly, then nodded and smiled.
"Good," he said slowly in his language. "It tastes very good." I understood the whole sentence, even though "tastes" was a new word for me. It just about had to mean what it meant.
I began to back away, my hand raised as if I were leaving. "Goodbye, Robert," I said in Evdashian.
He raised his hand and waved it a little from side to side. Then he made a sign with it—up and down, then side to side. His face had gone sober. "Adieu," he said. "Adieu, Larn. Mercie, moun ami."
I turned away and walked to the road and along it so he wouldn't be left with a big mystery about why I'd leave and start back away from the road toward the forest. I was probably a big enough mystery to him already. I walked along the road until I was out of his sight behind some roadside trees. Then I went back into what seemed to be a pasture because of the animal dung in it. I knew Deneen would be watching with the infrascope. When I stopped, she came down and picked me up.
Within a few minutes the computer did whatever it did to what I'd gotten on the recorder. It came out with a 58-word vocabulary and some of the basics of their grammar. Some of the words were from the long talk; the computer had figured out approximately what they meant. It also had some possible meanings for some of the others—meanings that had to be confirmed—plus a list of other words it wanted defined. And it gave me a list of questions to ask in the Fanglith tongue to learn the local equivalents of some Evdashian words.
When I went to bed that night, it was with the computer murmuring my first language lesson through the skullcap used with the computer's learning program. Deneen had hers on, too. It works fine for straight memorization.
While I lay there waiting to go to sleep, I realized I was feeling a little sad, and looked it over to see why. It was because of Robert. As briefly as I'd known him, I'd come to think of him as a friend, and I was sure I'd never see him again.
Over the next four evenings we learned a lot more of their language, which was called Provençal. I learned particularly much on the third of those evenings. That was the night I talked with a man called Brother Oliver, who was pretty high-powered mentally.
As soon as Brother Oliver realized I was a foreigner whose Provençal was quite limited, he tried another language on me that he thought I might know. It was called Latin, and quite a lot of people in different countries knew it. But of course I didn't, so we went back to Provençal. There we had at least some common ground.
He was a teacher at heart, and really liked to talk. It didn't matter to him that most of it I didn't understand, though he probably thought I understood more than I did. I'd say something now and then to help keep him going, and of course recording the whole thing. He talked most of the night, and Deneen and I found out most of what it meant only after the computer had worked it over and given us a translation.
Brother Oliver was a good guy, too.
I learned more than Provençal from him. I learned that he and the other robed men I'd been learning from had dedicated their lives to a "religion"—a set of beliefs and practices based on the idea of a being called "God," who was immensely superior to human beings in intelligence and power.
Some of the felid worlds had had religions, too. The religion here not only included belief in a being of supreme power. These people also believed in different levels of beings of intermediate power, between the supreme being and ordinary people. Two of those levels were called angels and saints.
Their particular religion centers on a being of what seems to be next to highest rank, although I'm not really clear on this. Even their system of numbering the years is dated from his birth, and this was their year 1069. His name was Christ, and the religion was named "Christianity" after him. Latin is the special language of Christianity.
It was all very novel to me.
Anyway, after the computer had finished working over the recording, and we'd spent a few hours on the language program again, Deneen and I had what seemed to me like a pretty good basic knowledge of the language. We just needed to expand on it and practice with it. So as far as we could, we talked it aboard ship.
The man I talked to the next night wasn't as interesting or as bright as Brother Oliver, but he filled in some holes in our vocabulary. And I got some very valuable information from him, besides.
Some things Brother Oliver had said made me wonder if the locals might not respond badly to people who flew around in the sky. So I checked it out with Brother Girard the next night. I told him that the day before, just at dusk, a thing like an iron boat had come out of the sky, and a man had gotten out of it. I'd watched from the woods, I said, and after a few minutes the man and his iron boat had gone back into the sky and disappeared.
Brother Girard made a motion in front of himself that I'd learned was "the sign of the cross." This was believed to give the person a certain amount of protection against evil, and you could also use it to help keep other people safe.
"You're lucky he didn't see you," said Girard. "Very lucky. For that was either the Devil or one of his demons. If he had seen you, you would be dead by now, and your soul very likely in Hell."
I asked what would happen if such a thing came down where there were a lot of people—say, at a castle.
"Ah!" he said. "The knights would undoubtedly attack it. That is their duty, and besides, knights are very prone to attack things. If it was the Devil himself, everyone there would surely be killed by him, unless they were marvelously pure in heart." He crossed himself again. "But if it was only a demon, the knights might be able to destroy it."
I'd already concluded that the brothers, and probably a lot of the other people on Fanglith, were likely to exaggerate. Even quite a bit of what Brother Oliver had told me sounded pretty imaginative. But Deneen and I agreed afterward that we'd better keep on being careful not to let people see the cutter.
After Brother Girard, I thought we might be ready to make contact with the monastery and the convent, and get our parents out. But the linguistics analysis program wasn't satisfied. It insisted we needed to talk with someone whose principal orientation wasn't religion. We needed to expand our vocabulary into areas I hadn't gotten into much yet.
My stomach felt a little nervous about that. From what we'd seen and heard, the Brothers of Saint Benedict—monks, they were called—were the least violent people in that part of Fanglith. And apparently the best informed. But if the computer said we needed to contact someone besides the Brothers of Saint Benedict, then I decided I'd better do it.
I'd just have to pick the right person, time, and place, stay alert, and be ready to use my stunner.