The woman stared, startled, and drew back quickly as Gar raised his hand. “He won’t hurt you,” Gianni promised.
Warily, the woman stepped forward again, saying, “Just one.”
Gar’s hand lowered; he stroked her hair, then broke into a beatific smile. “Little, warm! Rabbit!”
The whole troop howled with laughter, the “rabbit” foremost among them as she caught Gar’s wrist and held his hand.
“Ho, rabbit!” one of the young men called. Another cried, “Rabbit, may I pet you, too?”
But one of the girls snapped, “Rabbit indeed! Tell him it’s mink or nothing, Esmeralda!”
“Aye!” cried an older woman. “And don’t let him dare try to hold you!”
So, laughing and chatting, they took a bemused Gar by the elbows and led him to a nearby brook, where they washed him, dried him, and put Gypsy clothes on his back—though, like Medallia, they had to improvise considerably. Gar was near panic the whole time, white showing all around his eyes, darting frantic looks at Gianni—but between Gianni’s soothing and the fact that he was so obviously enjoying the same attentions being heaped upon him, Gar managed to stay on the sane side of hysteria. Finally, with bread and soup in their bellies and the worst of their hurts bandaged, they set off beside the caravans, following the Gypsy men and with Gianni, at least, chatting up at the young women, who leaned out the windows of the caravans to trade banter with him. It was a nuisance to have them calling him “Giorgio” instead of “Gianni,” but only a nuisance, and if it helped the poor addle-brained giant to stay calm, Gianni decided, Giorgio he would be, until Gar’s wits came back to him.
They did indeed sleep under the wagons that night, but this time, they each had a blanket to shield them from the chill. The day’s events swirled through Gianni’s brain, the laughter and talk, the banter over the meals and the dancing afterward—he regretted deeply that he had been too bruised and weary to join in, for the girls had indeed looked very pretty as they swayed and whirled. Now, though, the caravans were drawn into a circle, and the whole tribe sat up chatting around the fire—but he and Gar, dog-tired, had crept away to sleep, the more so because the Gypsies had begun to talk in their own language, which Gianni couldn’t understand. But the sound of the low voices, the musicality of the women’s, lulled him, and he felt sleep coming even as he closed his eyes, felt the warm darkness closing around him once more, though his weary brain found energy for one last thought, one last burst of curiosity as to what the Gypsies were saying to one another …
Would you really like to know? asked a voice that he knew all too well, and a hand reached out of the darkness with a wand, a long slender stick with a knob on the end, a knob that reached above his view and touched lightly, must have touched his half-dreaming head, for Gianni found himself suddenly able to understand the Gypsies’ words.
“Yes, Medallia,” one of them was saying. “Surely coincidence, that! She wouldn’t set a spy upon us, would she?”
“What need, Giles?” a woman retorted. “She already knows all our plans.”
“Well, yes, Patty,” Giles said, “but she might be afraid we’d try to arrest her, or even to—”
“Stuff and nonsense!” Patty said. “AEGIS agents move against one of our own, just because she disagrees with us? Never!”
“Not just disagreeing,” another man said darkly. “There’s always the chance that she might try to undermine our efforts.”
“No, surely not, Morgan!” an older woman said, shocked. “She left because she can no longer be party to our efforts, as she said—not because she intends to fight them!”
“How can we be sure?” Morgan answered. “More to the point, how can she be sure that we wouldn’t try to stop her from trying to stop us? No, Rosalie, if I were her, I would definitely try to place a spy among us.”
“Well, yes,” Rosalie said, “but you always have been a little paranoid, Morgan. The point is that Medallia isn’t.”
Gianni wondered what “paranoid” meant.
“Oh, Medallia has her touches of paranoia, too,” said a third woman, “or she wouldn’t have seen menace in our plans, when we’re only trying to help these poor benighted natives.”
Poor benighted natives! Gianni felt a surge of indignation and hoped she wasn’t talking about himself and his fellow Pirogians. Besides, who were mere Gypsies to call city people “benighted”?
“The Gypsy disguise works well enough for us,” Morgan argued. “It allows us to go anywhere we want on Talipon, and we can always split off an agent to assume the costume of any city we want to infiltrate—let him go in to try to change their ways. Why should it be any less effective for Medallia?”
Disguise! They were not real Gypsies, then? Suddenly Gianni realized that he had never heard of Gypsies until he was eleven—only ten years ago. Were there any real Gypsies? Or were they all false?
“Medallia only wondered whether we were right at all, to try to lift this whole planet out of the Dark Ages,” Patty said stubbornly. “She could understand the benefits of the Renaissance that’s beginning here on Talipon, but she had real doubts about trying to bring these people into the modern world, with high technology and secular ideologies.”
Esmeralda nodded. “After all, their ancestors came here to escape all that.”
“No,” Morgan said, “she thought we were wrong to try to persuade the lords to band together—but how else are we ever going to talk them into stopping this constant internecine warfare?”
“That’s a worthy goal, yes,” Rosalie countered, “but isn’t it going to make even more bloodshed, persuading them to believe they have a common enemy?”
“How else can we ever get them to unite?” Morgan argued. “Oh, I know, Llewellyn—you still think we should try to quell them with a religious revival. But aristocrats see religion and life as being separate things, not all one!”
“You see? We can’t even agree among ourselves,” Rosalie sighed. “I mean, we can, but we keep developing doubts. Is it any surprise Medallia became fed up with the lot of us and just went her own way?”
“Not ‘just,’ ” Patty said darkly. “She thinks we’re wrong to try to make the lords see the merchants as their common enemy.”
Cold fear ran through Gianni’s entrails. Tell the lords that the merchants were their common enemy, so that they would all band together against the mercantile cities? It would be a bloodbath! No wonder they’d hired the Stilettos to “chastise” Pirogia!
“But she said that if we did that, we’d have to warn the merchants in time for them to disband and hide,” Morgan went on. “Or worse yet, to fight back! I tell you, I see her hand in this Pirogian merchant Braccalese, who came up with the idea of trying to persuade the merchant cities to band together!”
Suddenly, Gianni was very glad they knew him only as “Giorgio.” But how had they learned of Gar’s idea? And how had they come to think of it as Papa Braccalese’s inspiration? Worse—what would they do to Papa to stop him! Suddenly, Gianni was very intent on the rest of the conversation.
CHAPTER 8
A merchant’s league would undo everything we’re trying to accomplish,” Llewellyn agreed. “Worse—with the island divided into two power blocs, it might cause civil war!”
Oh, that was very nice. They didn’t want a civil war, they just wanted a massacre of merchants. Didn’t the fools realize that would be the fruit of their plans?
Apparently not. “We must not forget our goal,” Morgan counseled, “to bring peace to this whole strife-ridden planet, where tribal anarchy prevails in the North and warlord anarchy prevails in the South and East. Talipon with its merchant fleet can spread the idea of centralized government and bring the peace of abundance …”