Return to Fanglith

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 ships 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 ship, 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 ship. Others were partially decked over, fore and aft, with the midships open, and a few were decked over from stem to stern.

We talked to some sailors about ships 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 ships' parts and gear. Mostly the men on different ships used the same terms, so I felt they were honest with us on that. I didn't have Evdashian equivalents for most of their terms, but I recorded brief descriptions of the parts in Evdashian-enough to serve as memory tags to go with the Provencal words.

Then we walked the streets of Marseille, 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 pass 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, coarse, 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 shortswords, 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 Marseille 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 infrascanner had charted when we'd been surveying for signs of Imperial forces.

The island we picked was beautiful-sandy beaches, old volcanic mountains green with forest, and narrow valleys that ran down to the ocean. From the air, there was no sign of people at all, or of large animals that might be dangerous.

The day was as beautiful, and as peaceful, as the island.

We landed where a small stream ran into a little inlet, and Deneen got out and walked on the solid surface of a planet for the first time since that night on Evdash when she'd run up the ramp in a fury of gunfire some sixty days earlier. The sky was a towering blue vault, and there were none of the bad smells of Marseille. Nor any threat-at least nothing evident and immediate. A volcano could erupt, of course, or a comet could strike the planet, but the odds were minute. There were no swordsmen or bowmen around, and no reason to expect, say, an Imperial corvette.

We did find the remains of a small stone hut, not a hundred feet from where we'd landed, its walls so tumbled that we didn't recognize it until we almost stumbled over it. A large and ancient tree had grown up within the square of fallen walls, hiding it from the air.

Even so, after an initial walk on the shore of the inlet, we set a watch schedule. One of us would stay in the ship. The radio monitor was set to detect any traffic on communication bands, and it would trigger the honker if it picked up anything.

I started out by insisting that the ship be kept closed, in case there was something dangerous we'd missed on our overflight scans. But Bubba hadn't picked up anything telepathically, either, so I backed down on that. We could even have activated an energy shield around the scout, but it would have been a needless drain on the fuel slugs.

I assigned myself the first watch, and after a half hour on the learning program, spent the time reading a long article in one of dad's library cubes, about naval tactics on primitive field worlds. None of the worlds discussed had been as primitive as Fanglith, but it was something interesting to do.

Then Tarel replaced me on watch. They'd hiked inland, so Deneen and I went for a walk on the beach, Bubba was hunting. He preferred his dinner fresh-caught. It was beautiful, with a light surf breaking, washing up on the sand, the forest lustrous green in the sun, the sky a deeper blue than I seemed to remember over the Entrilias Sea and Lizard Island.

We didn't talk much for a while, just walked. I should have been enjoying it, but walking on the beach made me think of Jenoor. I let myself slide into a silent swamp of "if only," and "we should have…"

I was aware enough, though, to know that Deneen had something on her mind, too. But I'm not much for asking personal questions unless I've got a good reason to, and besides, I was busy feeling sorry for myself. After a little bit it was Deneen who broke the silence.

"A seething for your thoughts," she said.

I shook my head. "No point in both of us being depressed."

She nodded, and we kept walking, right about where the larger waves reached. The biggest washed over our feet and wiped out our tracks behind us. "You know what?" she asked after a while.

"No. What?"

"Tarel told me he loves me and wants to marry me."

"When was that!?"

"Today. While we were hiking up the stream."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him maybe someday. I do like Tarel, a lot, but I definitely don't love him. And even if I did, the level of medical services on Fanglith has got to be near zero, we aren't set up to take care of babies on the Jav, and we don't have any anti-conception drugs."

I nodded. That was my little sister – look at the angles and avoid regrets. What would we have done if Jenoor had gotten pregnant? But we hadn't planned then to go to a planet as primitive as Fanglith. We'd expected to be on Grinder, wherever that was.

"How'd he take it?"

"He said he'd already seen the problems, but thought I ought to know what was going on with him."

I walked along a little troubled. It wasn't surprising that Tarel was interested in Deneen, and he was a good guy. I hoped this wouldn't get to be a problem for anyone. We definitely didn't need complications on a planet like Fanglith.

She broke that train of thoughts, too. "Do you know what's going on with Bubba?" she asked.

"No. What?"

"I don't know either. But something is. Now and then he gets absolutely glum, and that's not like him."

"I figured the lousy food's been getting to him," I said. "It had to be tougher on a carnivore than on us. He ought to be getting over it now."

"It's more than the food. He's got something on his mind."

"He's worried about Lady," I suggested. "And the pups."

"No, we talked about that, he and I. He feels they'll do okay wherever they are. And you know Bubba; he just files things like that. If you can't do something about something, don't worry about it, and he's the kind that can really make that work. "

Why are you bringing up these things? I wondered. I just want to enjoy this place for a couple of days. But I knew that wasn't fair. I hadn't been enjoying it; I'd been wallowing around feeling pathetic. I was the captain now, I reminded myself. Everyone's problems were mine, at least to a degree, and I needed to take responsibility for my crew and how they were doing.

We didn't talk any more about Tarel's proposal, if you could call it that. He didn't seem inclined to make a problem out of it. But she'd opened my eyes a bit by telling me.

Tarel had been attentive to Deneen, helping when it was her turn to fix meals or wash dishes. He really was a good guy, had been ever since we'd known him. Courteous and considerate, aware and intelligent… Even reasonably good-looking. And as I said before, surprisingly strong-one of those people who seems to have been born strong. I couldn't help but wonder what Deneen might have said if he wasn't so darned serious about things. He just very seldom laughed or

even smiled very widely.

As for Bubba, we didn't see much of him till just before we were ready to leave. He seemed cheerful enough when he got back, but he was different from the way he'd been at home on Evdash. There wasn't the sense of openness I'd always felt from him before. It was as if he was withholding himself a little, as if there was something he was keeping to himself. Sometimes it was really noticeable, particularly now that I was paying attention.

Our vacation lasted three days and two nights. The third night we spent parked above Marseille again. At dawn of the fourth day, a raw, breezy, overcast morning, I was waiting at the town gate.

Two hours later I was on one of Isaac ben Abraham's ships, heading east through a choppy sea, a following wind pushing us along. And briskly, considering how small our triangular sail was, and how blunt the ship's broad bow.

Somehow, I felt glummer than Bubba at his glummest, as serious as Tarel. And a little seasick from the ship's pitch and roll, although I got over that pretty quickly. Tomorrow maybe it'll clear up, I thought, and we'll have sunshine. Maybe I'll feel better then.