On the target screen I could see their ship almost as clearly as if it were daylight. It surprised me to see it break in two. I suppose it was partly because it was going along pretty fast, for such a primitive ship. The blaster bolts must have torn enough out of the hull that

it acted like a scoop, and the pressure broke it where the explosions had weakened it.

Deneen turned off the spotlight, but I could still see with the target screen. Guys were swimming to the halves of the hull, which were still afloat, one full of water to the gunwales, the other on its side. Deneen felt the way I did-wanted to go down and rescue people-but it would be suicide to take pirates into the Javelin with us.

What she did instead was lift to about two hundred yards again, and we sat there watching, unwilling to just leave. Then I noticed that one guy was paddling away from the wreckage, which seemed peculiar. It occurred to me that he might have been a prisoner or something-maybe one of the oarsmen. They might have been slaves; there'd been a guy with a whip making sure they kept rowing.

"Deneen!" I started, and before I could get any more out, she said, "I see him." She's like that sometimes, as if she knows what you're thinking. We watched him paddle and kick until he was about a hundred yards from the others. Then he slowed down, as if he felt safer now, or maybe tired, and Deneen started to lower us toward him.

At twenty feet or so she hit the control for the door. It opened and I went over to it. We were behind the guy and he hadn't even seen us. It turned out he'd noticed the light on the water in front of him, from the open door, but of course, it never occurred to him what it might be. Meanwhile Deneen lowered us to five feet.

He wasn't more than a dozen feet from me, so I spoke to him in Provencal. "Let me help you."

He turned, jerking as if he'd been stung, and the board he was on turned over, dumping him off. For a moment, when he surfaced, he just stared toward us as if he didn't see anything there. Then his eyes bugged out and his mouth sagged open.

"We'll take you out of the water if you'll let us," I told him.

He started talking in some language I couldn't understand, not as if he were talking to me, but more as if he were talking to himself. I'd never heard anyone pray before-hadn't even heard of praying until I'd gotten the concept from the computer when I was learning Provencal. Prayers are pretty important on Fanglith. Meanwhile, Deneen kept the Jav settling downward until we weren't more than twenty inches above the waves, which weren't very big. I reached out toward him. He shook off the shock of seeing us then, and started paddling the ten feet or so to me. I guess I didn't look as fierce or mean as the people who'd had him last.

I looked around for something I could reach out with that he could grab hold of. When I didn't see anything, I lay down on the deck, grabbed the edge of the doorway with my left hand, and reached out with my right. When he got to me, we grabbed each others' wrists and I pulled.

There was a problem: He was chained to the broken bench he was on. I hoisted him partway in, then took hold of the chain and pulled the board in too. He just lay there on the deck then, looking around. I could imagine what it was like for him. The scout was so different, so completely unlike anything he'd ever seen or imagined or dreamed of, that he must have thought he was dead or crazy. In fact, he told me later that that was just how he felt. And Bubba's big wolf face was looking at him about thirty inches from his own.

Deneen:

I wanted to follow the merchant ship and see what was happening, but Moise's feet were still sticking out the door. He was also bleeding on the deck-not heavily, but he was injured. I told Tarel to get him in. Tarel took hold of him under the arms and pulled, and I closed the door. Then I lifted to a hundred yards and moved to a position above the merchantman.

It had changed its course from east to southeast, the direction it had been going before they'd spotted the pirates. It looked to me as if everyone aboard it was on deck now. 'I called Larn and he answered right away, his voice soft and not too far from laughing.

"It worked like a charm," he told me in Evdashian. "They think I'm really something." Then, in Provengal, he called: "Thank you, Angel Deneen! Thank you for answering my request! You have saved us from the Saracen!"

"That's all right, brother mine." I said it in Evdashian, in case he'd switched on his speaker-which it turned out he had. "Do you need anything more just now?"

"No," he said, in Evdashian himself again, "I'll let you know if anything more happens."

I didn't tell him about our new passenger. I didn't have enough information yet to make it worthwhile, and didn't want to worry him. I just put the spotlight on the midships deck for a moment, centering on Larn- one last sign from the heavens. Then I switched it off and parked there, invisible from below. In Evdashian I told Tarel to take our passenger into the head, sluice him off in the shower, and do whatever seemed necessary for his wounds, so far as he could. I also told Bubba to stay with them in case the guy turned out to be dangerous after all. (Not that I needed to; Bubba would know, and he'd do whatever was needed.) Then Tarel could put our-guest? prisoner?-in one of the suits of navy fatigues we had on board, and feed him, and we'd see what we could learn about him.

Meanwhile, I made sure my stunner was set on medium-low. If I had to use it, I didn't want to endanger Tarel or Bubba. But for some reason, I had the distinct feeling that I wouldn't have to use it-that we had a new friend and ally on board, not an enemy.

FIFTEEN

The rest of the trip took four days. Four days that started out miserably for everyone else aboard ship, because they all came down with diarrhea that night- every one of them-and had it for two or three days. The ship didn't have any latrines of course, only buckets and the sea, and at times there was no time to wait for a bucket. I offered my thanks from a distance to the inventor of the immunoserum.

Lice and fleas, on the other hand, had no respect at all for immunoserum, or even for people who could call down angels and lightning from the sky, and foreigners seemed to taste as good as native Fanglithans to them. On Fanglith, though, people hardly thought of them as an affliction; in fact, they hardly thought of them at all. Everyone I'd seen seemed to have them, and apparently all the time. Lice and fleas were like breathing and eating-a part of life.

Maybe Fanglithans would even miss their lice if they lost them; I'm not sure. I wouldn't. Itch! True, I was starting to get used to them, but life on Fanglith would have been a lot nicer without them.

Anyway, not getting diarrhea fitted my image as someone special-someone protected by an angel. Where before some of the people on board had disliked me as a dumbbell full of foolish questions, now everyone was at least polite, including the captain. Some of them were in absolute awe of me, and at meals I even got larger portions than the others. But no one tried to hang around with me.

The day after the pirate incident, Deneen told me about the guy they'd rescued. He'd been a galley slave, forced to help row the pirate ship, and was about the same age as she and Tarel were. His name was Moise ben Israel, and like Isaac ben Abraham, Moise was a Jew, a member of a different religion and culture from Christians. His family had been moving from a city called Genoa to one called Amalfi, where Jews were not so badly treated. When the Saracens attacked the ship, his whole family had drowned or been killed.

Moise could read and write, spoke several languages, and knew a lot about how things were done on Fanglith. He seemed to be adjusting well to Deneen and Tarel and the cutter.