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FOURTEEN

Moise:

Even though the slavemaster had slowed the beat somewhat, I was so tired I thought I would die of it. But he was pacing the walkway between us, and I still feared his whip more than death. Besides, I always felt that way when we were chasing some merchant ship, and hadn't died yet. A man can stand more than he thinks.

Ahead on the merchantman, I heard someone call out loudly. We were that close. Soon we would ship our oars and rest while the Saracens boarded her, but until then I had to keep on.

Cool as the evening was, sweat trickled into my eyes, and dripped from my nose and chin to fall on my bare thighs. I gasped for breath. Again I heard a shout from ahead, nearer now-and then the world exploded! My bench was torn loose, thrown back, and I fell on the feet and legs of the oarsman behind me, a Tuscan named Guittone. I had no idea what had happened. As I struggled to disentangle myself from Guittone's legs, there was another terrible sound, and more, and I felt water rising rapidly around me. Men were screaming, some of them calling to Allah to be merciful. None of them knew-none of them could have known-what had struck us, any more than I did then.

The ship sank quickly-indeed, had broken in two- the halves pulling apart, with one swinging to the left and one to the right. The half with the mast had turned onto her side. I was floating free of it, chained to my broken bench. Around me, many of my captors-ex-captors now-were clinging to wreckage or swimming toward one of the halves, and it seemed well to move away from them, although there was no place to swim to except into the near-night. The water was winter-cold. I managed to get my broken bench beneath me, then kicked and paddled away, careful not to overturn again. Minutes later I could not see any of them any longer, although distantly I could hear injured men calling for help.

Tarel:

I hadn't liked shooting into the pirate ship, but it was necessary. There wasn't much question about what the pirates had in mind, but it bothered me to shoot at people who couldn't defend themselves against us. There wasn't even anything they could try to do.

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.