I was more than impressed. I was relieved, but also a little worried. I couldn't imagine what reason Isaac ben Abraham might have had for lying me out of trouble.
After that, the contest was an anticlimax for me. We were to calculate in rounds-the best of nine would win. In each round, ben Abraham would pose a problem and we'd both calculate the answer. Then I'd pose one. If we tied a round, each of us winning a half, then we were supposed to replay the round until one of us won both halves.
But of course I won right away. I didn't know what to expect from Isaac ben Abraham then, or his household guards. I only hoped I wouldn't have to use my stunner. But what he did was pay Carolus and Reyno what they'd won, weighing out the coins to satisfy Carolus that they hadn't been shaved. Reyno was practically dancing, and Carolus's usually sour face was actually smiling as he paid me my ten gold bezants.
Then ben Abraham had wine poured again. "And what will you do with your winnings, young Larn?" he asked.
"I'm not sure how much I can buy with ten bezants," I told him. "I'd like to buy food-fresh meat, cheese, fish, and flour. And dried fruit, if I can get any. And rent a donkey to take it to friends I know, who are hungry."
Carolus looked at me as if I was crazy, but didn't say anything. Ben Abraham looked at me as if he'd like to know what I was really all about. Reyno looked at me as if he didn't really see me; his thoughts were on the girl he might be able to marry now.
By evening I had a donkey loaded with freshly butchered beef, a huge round cheese, dried fish, dates, olives, and other foods I'd bought in the market. Plus two daggers, two short swords, and a set of cheap local clothes for all three of us. The short swords were way the most expensive: a bezant each. Except for a dagger that I'd fastened to my belt, all of it was loaded in two big baskets slung across the donkey's back. They almost hid the donkey.
And I also owned the donkey! I hoped I could bring him back to the market and sell him for what I paid for him. But if I simply had to let him loose, that would be okay too, because I still had two of my gold pieces left.
ELEVEN
I left the city gate just before it closed at sundown, and followed the road westward, leading my donkey by his rope halter, Off to my left was the sea, beautiful in sunlight, and a beach with no one on it. After a little while I turned off on a trail that wound its way down to it.
The beach seemed like the nearest decent landing place, except for the road itself. After unloading the baskets onto the sand, I tied the donkey to a bush a little way above the beach-far enough that the scout shouldn't scare him out of his wits. Then, when it was dark, I called Deneen to come get me. When they landed, Bubba trotted down the ramp and off into the brush above the beach without a word. He needed to get out and stretch his legs and hunt. Knowing Bubba, I had no doubt he'd catch fresh meat by dawn, when he was to meet us. And no way would he bother my donkey, or anyone's livestock. Well-not my donkey, anyway. But he was bound to be pretty desperate for a proper meal.
After Tarel and I got my purchases loaded into the scout, we took off, and Deneen parked us twenty-one miles above Marseille. There I loaded the contents of my recorder into the computer, and while Deneen and Tarel started putting the food away, I had the linguistics program analyze the language contents against the Provencal and Norman it already knew. It didn't take long-a few seconds. Then I had the computer copy it into the learning program. When that was done, I sat down in the copilot's seat, put on a learning skullcap, and proceeded to upgrade my knowledge of Provencal, running through all we knew of it now until I had it thoroughly.
That done, I took off the skullcap, got up, and went back to the little galley. Deneen was bloody to the elbows. "Next time," she said, looking up at me grimly, "see if you can get the meat cut up into pieces that'll fit into storage. This place doesn't have the facilities for cutting up forty-pound hunks of beef-especially tough beef!"
I could see what she meant. They were trying to work on a counter fourteen inches wide. And not only were they bloody, and the counter bloody, but blood was dripping onto the floor and had smeared the wall behind the counter. She and Tarel had taken off their shoes, and their feet were smeared red. So far, they'd gotten about a fourth of the beef cut and wrapped for putting away.
"Sorry," I said.
She held up one of the belt knives we'd had on Evdash. "This is the biggest thing we have to work with," she added, a little less hostile now. "It would help if you bring a butcher knife next time, even if you do bring the meat in smaller pieces. And we need rags to wipe blood with. We're trying not to use paper toweling; we're almost out of it."
She gestured at the large cleaning drum, where I could see the clothes I'd bought. "I put them in there on sanitize, in case they've got any of those mean little critters you got infested with our last trip here," She grinned then, sheepishly. "Oh, and let me thank you for bringing all these tasties, brother mine. You really did do good work getting them, and I honestly appreciate it. It's just that the meat needs a few improvements in preprocessing."
"Can I help in here?" I asked.
"There's not room for three at once. No, just stand there and admire us, and tell us what you have in mind to do next."
So I did. Before dawn I'd go back to my donkey. Then I'd return to Marseille and see if I could have a long talk with Isaac ben Abraham; I had the notion I could learn even more from him than I had from Brother Oliver two and a half years before. Certainly he could expand our knowledge of Provencal a lot. And if it was unusual to transport horses by sea, then, as a shipowner, ben Abraham might know of Arno. I had no idea how many shipowners there were in Marseille, or even if Arno had gotten this far with his horse herd. It was a long dangerous distance from Normandy.
"Then," I finished, "we may have enough information to plan intelligently."
"I'd like to go with you next time," Tarel put in. "I'd like to get a firsthand feel for what it's like down there."
I looked at that and felt uncomfortable with it, but I couldn't come up with any strong reason why he shouldn't. He was as old as I'd been the first time I'd landed alone on Fanglith, and he already knew quite a lot of the language. "All right by me," I answered. "It'll probably be safer with two of us. Tell you what: I'll help Deneen. You wash up and spend some time on the learning program, upgrading your Provencal. Then, after we try on our new clothes, we'd better get some sleep. We need to get down there before daylight."
Deneen set the scout's honker, and it woke us up an hour ahead of estimated daybreak. Then, twenty-one miles above Marseille, we ate a quick breakfast while watching for the first sign of dawn to touch the horizon, which, from our altitude, was four hundred miles east. That would give us roughly twenty minutes to get down and on the beach and let Deneen get away while it was still full night on the surface. When the first touch of dawn showed, far to the east, we hurriedly finished eating and stowed our dishes in the cleaner. Then Deneen dropped the twenty-one miles to the beach. As we slowed for landing, the infrascope showed what had to be Bubba lying a few dozen yards from the donkey- far enough, and no doubt downwind, not to upset it seriously. Except for those two, there was nothing large and warm blooded anywhere near.
When we landed and Tarel and I stepped down the ramp, Bubba was at its foot. "Catch anything worth eating?" I asked him.
He grinned-something he hadn't been doing a lot of. "Even rodents good after long time on ship's food," he woofed, then trotted up into the cutter.
Even without any overcast, we couldn't see far in the moonless night. The cutter was lost in darkness only seconds after the door closed.