The stranger thrashed and moaned as Marian Alston bent over him. His eyes were blue, and right now they were showing white all around the iris.

"I think you'd better back out of sight, Captain," Ian said. "I don't think he's ever seen a black person before, and this environment is strange enough as it is."

Alston nodded and stepped back with some difficulty; it was crowded in the little one-bunk sickbay. "I'll be on deck," she said. "Report when you've found out anything significant."

"And don't exhaust him," the doctor warned. "He's still weak as a kitten."

The stranger stopped his feeble struggling and let himself be pushed back into the bunk, although his eyes still flickered across bulkheads and porthole, electric lights and metal shapes-alien madness, terror building on strangeness. "He must think he's dead and among evil spirits or something," Doreen murmured.

Ian leaned forward. The sight of his bearded face seemed to reassure the stranger. Ian put a cup of water to his lips, and the man sucked greedily at it; the IV they'd just removed had pumped a good deal into his system, but it wouldn't have soothed the throat. He said something in a fast-moving language and sighed, wiping his mouth with the palm of one hand and then letting the arm flop back to the sheet.

Ian looked over at Doreen, who shook her head. Well, that was a long shot, he thought. "Give it a try anyway," he said.

"Ar… mane… spurantate?" Doreen said, leaning close and speaking slowly. Do you understand me? in Lithuanian, her mother's tongue.

That brought a puzzled frown and more of the gibberish, but in a different tone. "I think he almost understood that," Doreen said regretfully. I may have caught one or two words. I think."

Ian smiled at the stranger-Well, first things first, that's obvious, he thought-and pointed at himself.

"Ian. Ian Arnstein."

The narrow blue eyes frowned, then flew wide in understanding. "IanArnstein," he said, prodding a callused finger with a rim of dirt under the nail at the man who sat beside the bunk. "lanArnstein, p'tos."

Ian mimicked the gesture, pointing at the young man's bare chest. He nodded and rattled off a string of incomprehensible syllables. Ian sighed and made a rapid gesture through the air, then a very slow one. After a couple of repetitions the other got the idea and sounded out his name very slowly:

"Ohotolarix," Doreen said. "Ohotolarix son of somebody. I think," she added, making a note on her pad.

Ohotolarix nodded vigorously, smiling and revealing very white teeth-except for one missing at the front.

"Let's try him on the numerals," Ian said. "They're stable over time. You start."

Doreen leaned closer again and held up one finger. "Vienas," she said. Two fingers. "Du." Three. "Trys." Four. "Keturi." Five. "Pied."

"Eka!" Ohotolarix said. He held up one finger himself, then the rest in sequence. "Aonwos, duo, treyi, k'wethir, penkke!"

After a few tries the two Americans caught the pronunciation, and Doreen noted them down. He grinned at the woman, then glanced aside at Ian, looking a little abashed.

Which is a significant datum in itself, Ian thought. It was probably impolite to look at another man's woman, where this kid came from. Ian cleared his throat and went up the number scale; Ohotolarix seemed to have increasing difficulty, speaking slowly and counting on his fingers as they climbed.

Damn, he thought. This was going to take a while. In most of the fiction he'd read, there was some ingenious way around language difficulties-a Universal Translator or a wizard with a spell, or the side effects of a dimensional gate. Here he was, living it instead of reading it, and he'd have to trudge dismally through the basics instead. I should complain to the author. He smiled at the thought; back when he'd written those thud-and-blunder heroic fantasies, he'd had a nightmare about meeting his own characters in a dark alley and having them revenge themselves on him for what he'd put them through.

"Hundred," he said, slowly holding up ten fingers ten times.

"Simtas," Doreen echoed.

"Kweadas," came the reply.

"It's a centum language," Ian said to Doreen. "Western branch of the family."

"Show him the horse."

The picture was a photo of a drawing, rather than a photograph of the animal; they'd decided that would be more familiar. Awe stood out on Ohotolarix's face as he handled the glossy paper. Ian pointed to the animal.

"Horse?" he said.

"Hepkwos!" Ohotolarix said delightedly. "Hworze. Hepkwos!"

Next she held up a picture of a timber wolf. "Vilkos," she said.

"Wolkwaz!"

Ian ran his thumb down his list of words. Proto-Indo-European wlkwos, wolf, he read. Almost unchanged. God, we are a long way back.

The exchange went on until Ohotolarix dropped suddenly and irrevocably asleep, and the doctor chased them out of sickbay. Alston looked at them sharply as they came up to the quarterdeck.

"Well?" she said.

Doreen waved her notebook. "It's definitely an Indo-European language, ma'am. A lot of the words were very close to Lithuanian, and some of the inflections and syntax, even. He caught a few phrases I spoke right off-'give bread,' things like that. I think I could learn it in a couple of months-for very very simple things, in a week."

"That could be extremely useful," Alston said. "Anything else, Professor?"

Ian shook his head. "Not much. It's a highly inflected language, and if I knew more Mycenaean Greek… I think it might be an extremely early form of Celtic. Some of the sound shifts between what he speaks and what the references list as Proto-Indo-European forms suggest that it might be a sort of Proto-Celtic. I'm not a linguist, though- my knowledge is very general, and I'm not sure we're transcribing accurately. Hell, the language might just as well be Proto-Tocharian, or some subfamily that never got-"

"Anything else we can use, I meant, Professor," Alston said with heavy patience.

Ian reined himself in. "Apart from that, this guy's a wirtowonax, which I think means warrior, or possibly something like freeman or tribesman or citizen; and he's got a chief, or king, or panjandrum, a rahax, named Daurthunnicar. I'm probably playing hob with the inflections there, by the way. From sign language as much as anything, this Daurthunnicar and his warriors, and women and children and horses, were crossing a body of water. To fight someone, presumably. Our boy-his name's Ohotolarix, by the way-and his friends were caught by a squall and couldn't find the land again. I'd guess they paddled in circles until they dropped. Ohotolarix hates boats, incidentally, and loves horses."

"Oh, joy," Alston muttered. "We're sailing right into the middle of someone's war. Hell of a situation to trade in."

"Oh, I don't know," Ian said. His face slowly creased into a smile. "It might just be the best possible situation to trade in, if you know what I mean, Captain."

"They come," the scout whispered. "Back along their track, as we thought they would."

They could hear how hooves pounded dirt away down the forest trail, louder and louder as the invader war band neared. Human feet slapped the earth, wheels creaked, an axle squealed, a horse blew out its lips in a wet flutter of sound. The war-car held a near-nude adolescent driver and a warrior in leather armor and bone-strapped leather helmet. The ponies stamped and snorted, their breath visible in the early-morning chill as the blur of the eight-spoked wheels slowed.

Swindapa of the Star Blood line of Kurlelo slowly drew the sling taut between her hands. The early-spring leaves made scanty cover, but the band hidden here were all hunters with the Spear Mark tattooed on their chests; most of them were from lands overrun by the invaders, the Sun People, too. Thirty of them, more than enough for this. She was the only woman, but the others had allowed her along for the sake of her birth, and the weapons she had brought… and after she'd shown them what she could do with the leather strap she carried. These were desperate men who cared little for law or custom or the will of the Star Blood who had not protected their homes.