"And I have heard it said that those who go to Italy are the worst of them all. Their overlord in Italy, Robert of Apulia, is even called Guiscard, 'the Cunning,' and wears the name with pride."
I wouldn't understand all of ben Abraham's words until I'd run them through the linguistics program aboard the scout, but I understood enough to make my stomach knot.
"You may wish to enlist the help of the Normans," ben Abraham went on, "but the Normans help mainly themselves. To whatever they can take."
I nodded, feeling his black eyes on me, remembering the Norman Baron, Roland de Falaise, his utter lack of honesty, his attempt to have me clubbed to death by trickery. Even Arno had tried treachery against me, twice. Though he'd also saved my life, not to mention helping us rescue Deneen from the political police and capture the Federation corvette. Which the Normans, with the recklessness ben Abraham had just mentioned, had then blown apart, along with thirty of their own knights.
Yet ben Abraham made the Normans seem even more dangerous than I remembered them, mainly by showing them to me as a culture, not as a few dozen warriors. And by letting me see them through someone's eyes besides my own.
But I had to start somewhere, and Arno seemed like a good somewhere.
"I thank you for your warning," I told ben Abraham. "I have experienced some of what you described. It is why I wish to find Arno; I know him well enough that I believe I can work through him." I hope, I added to myself.
"I would not dissuade you," ben Abraham said. "Only, make sure you know what you're dealing with. Your own ambitions are not less than any of theirs, and I sense in you a strength of your own that I suspect can be formidable, though not brutal. Yours is an ambition of a kind that dukes with armies have undertaken and failed with, but every kingdom was begun by someone, and often against great odds."
It was really embarrassing to hear him say it. It made me feel like a huge fraud-I was only Larn kel Deroop- but this was no time to correct his impression of me.
"Thank you," I said, and moved the conversation on to other things-mainly the geography, peoples, and princes of the Mediterranean. There wasn't any question that ben Abraham was the smartest man I'd met on Fanglith-the best informed and least given to statements that sounded like runaway imagination and superstition.
And a born teacher who'd obviously rather instruct a couple of young strangers like Tarel and me than attend to business. A couple of times his secretary looked in at us, as if he had questions that needed answering, but ben Abraham frowned him back from the door.
I recorded all of it. I'd feed it to the computer that night and receive it back through the learning program, the words analyzed and defined. I have a darned good memory, and good logic circuits of my own. But for linguistics analysis, the computer was parsecs ahead of me, and the learning program would help me remember it.
Finally it was lunchtime, and Tarel and I ate with ben Abraham as his guests. Then I arranged passage for myself to Reggio di Calabria, in Italy, on one of ben Abraham's ships, which was leaving in four days. Reggio was just across the Strait of Messina from the Sicilian port where Arno had taken his horse herd.
When I'd paid my fare, I had just one gold piece left, plus the silver I'd gotten when I sold my donkey that morning.
Ben Abraham walked us to the courtyard, and as we shook hands, I asked him one last question. "My lord," I said, "yesterday you told Carolus the stonecutter an untruth, to shield my own. Why?"
His face was serious when he answered. "I am a Jew," he said. "And in the lands of Christendom, any non-Christian is always in at least some small risk of his life for being what he is. It seemed to me that you might be in serious risk of yours unless I spoke for you."
Our eyes held for a moment before I thanked him for his courtesies and help. As Tarel and I walked away, it seemed to me that I was alive only through the risks, large and small, of strangers-certainly on Evdash, and perhaps now, here in Marseille. And by Father Drogo and Pierre the tanner in Normandy, as far as that was concerned-men who had no reason beyond their own ethics to have helped me.
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.