Also, there was wine instead of sour beer, and when the eating had slowed down a little, there was storytelling. One of the knights, Rollo, wanted me to tell about India, but I could see that getting awkward. I wasn't sure I could lie fast enough, or convincingly enough, or

keep my lies consistent. So I told him I could speak of it only in my own language. Rollo decided that was an insult, and challenged me to fight-he'd drunk at least three or four big cups of wine, while I'd been getting through the evening on just one.

I wanted to avoid a fight if at all possible, for two reasons. Make that three reasons. Even if the fight started without weapons, I wasn't sure it would stay that way. Second, I didn't want them to know about hand-foot art; it was my secret weapon. And third, I don't like to fight. But Arno handled the situation; he got up and said it was unseemly to ask a holy monk to fight. And when the marshal of the house troops agreed with him, Rollo didn't push it.

Meanwhile it had gotten dark outside, and the lighting was poor, of course-a dozen of the crude oil lamps. Some of the troops went to their sleeping places and lay down; I decided that was a good idea and followed their example. After an hour I was still awake, still listening. The stories were interesting, and I was following the Norman with only a little trouble now and then where I lacked a key word or concept. The lamps had burned low or out, all that was left of the hearth fire was embers, and the last three or four men finally gave it up for the night.

I remember thinking that I wished Deneen would call. Minutes later I was asleep.

The reason she hadn't called was too much mental activity in the hall, which made it impossible for Bubba to read my thoughts. I'd been asleep long enough that the lamps and hearth fire were entirely dark when the remote spoke in my ear.

"Larn! Larn! Wake up. I've got something important to tell you."

Something important to tell me? The thought that hit me was that they'd detected an Imperial cruiser.

"Not that bad," she said. "A complication, not a catastrophe."

"What complication?" I thought to them.

"I was doing a routine check of ship's systems a while ago, and the fuel slugs have serious peripheral crystallization."

I thought I knew what could have caused it, or at least contributed to it: prolonged and constant operation in mass-proximity mode. I knew for sure what would happen if it wasn't reversed: It would get worse. And the further crystallization advances, the faster it advances, until beyond some critical point, you can't activate FTL mode anymore. If that happened to us, we could be stuck on Fanghth forever.

"A shutdown should reverse it," I thought back at her.

"According to the systems manual," she answered, "it will have to be about a six- to ten-day all-systems shutdown. The only alternative is to head outbound and go into FTL. Eight or ten hours at FTL would decrystallize it, but that's too iffy."

Even a day at FTL sounded better to me than a six-to ten-day shutdown. "What's iffy about it?" I asked.

"We'd need to get out about 700,000 miles before I'd try FTL. Fanglith's a little more massive than Evdash. That's 700,000 miles in mass proximity mode, with crystallization accelerating all the way. The computer says it's marginal whether we could go FTL when we got out there. The crystallization might have gone too far. So I plan to go back to the island we visited. It's the safest place I know of on Fanglith, and we'll get along okay there. After six days, if the reversal isn't complete, maybe then I'll take her out and go FTL to finish it.

"Now what I need to know is, do you want me to pick you up and take you with us? I don't like leaving you with no one to bail you out if things come apart down there."

To my surprise, I wasn't even tempted. "No," I told her, "I'm pretty safe here, for Fanglith. I doubt if anyone around here is interested in messing with Arno, and he doesn't want anything to happen to me. And as far as the ship ride to Palermo is concerned, we'll be following the Norman-controlled coast all the way. I don't think we have anything to worry about; just get that crystallization reversed.

"Anything else to report?" I added.

"No, that's it. I'll say goodbye now and we'll be on the island before daylight. I'll be in touch again in six or eight days. Ten at most." She stopped then for a moment, a stop that I knew was just a pause.

"Larn?"

"Yeah?"

"I just want you to know that besides being my brother, you're also my best friend."

Well I'll be darned, I thought. "Thanks, sister mine. That goes both ways." And I meant it.

With that she cut off, and I could picture her accelerating westward toward the island coordinates. I lay there savoring our conversation for a minute or two before I went back to sleep.

PART FOUR

The sirocco began to die down late the next morning. The locals said we were lucky, that usually it lasted longer, just before dusk the ship arrived from Reggio, probably the biggest ship I'd seen close up on Fanglith, with a taller, heavier mast than usual and a square sail instead of the usual triangular one. Tomorrow, Arno said, we would leave.

The next morning we met with the captain in a steel-gray dawn. The wind was out of the north now, and chilly instead of gritty. It would be best to lie at the dock a while, he said. The wind would make the Strait of Messina hard to navigate northbound. But Arno was a Norman and the captain wasn't. We would start this morning, Arno insisted, and if we had too much trouble, we could put in at Reggio or Messina. Roger had his own docks in both ports, which we could use without fee; Arno had a letter of authorization.

The captain shrugged and agreed. He was Greek, and his French quite broken, but I got the idea that it wasn't a big deal to him either way-sail or lie at the dock. We started loading the horses.

Most of the deck could be taken up in sections, like a mosaic of hatch covers. Each horse stall in the hold was just wide enough for a destrier, with a sort of leather sling so the horse couldn't fall in rough weather and maybe break a leg. The horses were loaded in-you could almost say they were inserted in their stalls- with a block and tackle fastened to a boom. That seemed to be the reason, or a reason, for the taller, heavier mast: It served as part of the boom rig for loading the horses.

When all sixty horses had been loaded, we cast off- Arno, Brislieu, and three sergeants, along with their squires, myself, and the ship's crew. The crew kept giving me sideways looks and plenty of room; Arno had spread the word that I was a holy monk from India. I didn't know whether he had some purpose in this or if it was his sense of humor.

The breeze was brisk, but nothing like a storm. The captain took us around the point of land just west of Mileto and we entered the wide, lower end of the long, funnel-shaped strait. The wind picked up a bit then, and he tacked northwestward across it. An hour later, though the clouds were breaking up, it was blowing considerably harder, and the ship was pitching pretty badly. Arno agreed that we should turn southwest and make for a little bay north of Taormina, the harbor of Taormina still being held by Saracens. But before long they decided that Catania was a better choice. It was considerably farther, but safer; we wouldn't have to sail across the wind.

Then, around mid-afternoon, the wind began to slack off markedly, and Arno had us turned north again. I was beginning to get a better idea of how hard it could be, with sailing rigs as crude as ours, to travel by sea with nothing more than wind power. I'd be willing to bet that sport sailors back on Evdash had a lot fewer problems with wind direction than the Fanglithans did.