The Excalibur Alternative

by David Weber

  "Of course," she said quickly, and her expression was contrite. Indeed, it might have been a little frightened, and Sir George reached across the chessboard to touch her cheek lightly. Matilda, he knew, was concerned that the demon-jester might regard a subordinate who was too competent as a threat. Given the strange-looking little alien's ruthlessness and contempt for his unwilling human troops, there was little doubt in her mind—or Sir George's, for that matter—that if any one of them did become a threat in the demon-jester's eyes, that person would die quickly.

  Sir George understood his wife's fears, and he wasn't about to discount or ignore them, yet he had become more and more convinced that it was virtually impossible for the demon-jester to conceive of any circumstances under which Sir George or any other human could pose a genuine threat to such a superior and civilized being as himself.

  Oh, he took endless precautions to assure his own security and that of the ship. No human could open any of the hatches or doors which would have permitted them to move beyond the portion of the ship to which they were confined. None of them were permitted weapons aboard ship, and the armed wart-faces who watched over them there (and who, Computer had finally informed Sir George, were properly called Hathori) were a constant reminder that disobedience or rebellion meant death. Even here, in their isolated encampment, a full score of heavily armored, ax-armed Hathori wandered about, or stood glowering from the small hill above the camp upon which a "landing shuttle" from the ship rested. The English weren't unarmed now, and after what they'd done to the Thoolaas, even creatures as stupid as the Hathori obviously were must have realized that they could be killed any time Sir George or his men took it into their heads to kill them. But that was fine with the demon-jester. The Hathori weren't truly there as jailers; they were there as an alarm or a forward picket. If any of the humans were so foolish as to attack them, the demon-jester's vengeance would be sudden and complete, and they knew it as well as he did.

  Yet for all those precautions, or perhaps because of them, the demon-jester never truly believed that any of his barbaric, unwilling mercenaries could truly threaten him. Even if they'd tried to, his precautions would surely thwart any rebellion, and because of that he was far more casual and careless about what those humans might be thinking or doing than Sir George would ever have allowed himself to be in the other's place.

  Not that it was likely to make a great deal of difference in the end, of course, because however routine they might have been, the demon-jester's security measures were effective. Dangerous as it was even to let himself dream about it, Sir George had been unable to keep himself from searching daily for any means by which he might escape or overthrow the demon-jester, and so far he'd found absolutely nothing to suggest either might be possible. It was the more galling because it was only the demon-jester's "technology" and the unswerving loyalty of Computer which made that true. Without those advantages, the demon-jester, his ship's crew, his Hathori, and probably even the perpetually silent dragon-men would have stood precious little chance against Sir George's veterans. But he had those advantages, and the baron was not about to let himself forget that.

  "Meanwhile," he went on in a tone of determined cheer, "the tribes which favor accepting our—or, rather, the `Commander's'—terms seem to be falling into line. Two of them have made their minds up already and sworn everlasting fealty and perpetual loyalty to the `Commander' and the guild." He rolled his eyes, and Matilda covered her mouth with a hand to stifle a giggle. "At least four others appear to be strongly inclined to the same direction, and Computer and the `Commander's' mechanical envoys are negotiating with still more."

  "And the other side?" Matilda asked.

  "It seems likely that the Laahstaar and Mouthai will be able to attract more of the local tribes than we will," Sir George admitted with a shrug. "Computer and I are still attempting to make some sort of estimate of what that will probably mean in terms of numbers when we finally bring them to battle, but the situation is still too unresolved. At the moment, I would estimate that we and our allies will be outnumbered by something like three to two. It might be somewhat higher than that, but not, I think, by too much."

  "That seems quite a large enough advantage for them," Matilda said tartly, and he smiled.

  "I would prefer for the advantage to be on the other side myself," he acknowledged. "Especially since the Laahstaar, at least, seem to have taken what happened to the Thoolaas to heart. They'll be much more cautious than the Thoolaas were, I think... or they'll attempt to be, at any rate. It's always easier for a commander to decide to be prudent and cautious than it is for him to convince his troops to be the same, though. Once battle is actually joined, it's the troops who matter, and these creatures are so accustomed to charging to the attack that I think it will be next to impossible for any chieftain to convince them to adopt a defensive stance.

  "But whatever the size of the force they manage to put together in the end, they'll definitely need some weeks to hammer out questions of command, organization, and precedence. It will be worse than putting together an English army, love, though I never thought I would hear myself say anything could be worse than that! And while they're busy getting themselves sorted out, Rolf, Walter, and I will be busy sorting out our `allies.' By the time we have their dart-throwers properly trained and massed to support our archers, I feel confident that we'll be able to handle whatever the Laahstaar and Mouthai can put into the field against us."

  "But with what losses among our own folk?" Matilda asked softly, and her glorious blue eyes were dark. Sir George smiled at her as reassuringly as he might. He knew she was genuinely concerned about the possible loss of any of their men, but he also knew who her greatest fear was reserved for.

  "Men die in battle, Matilda," he said quietly. "Even with allies among the natives, it seems likely that some of our men will die in this one. But not many, I think." Her eyes burned into his, and he met her gaze steadily. "I am speaking the truth, love," he told her. "Before we faced the Thoolaas I hadn't fully realized just how good the new armor and weapons provided by the `Commander' truly are. The most poorly armored of our footmen are as well armored as any knight serving under King Edward in France, and all of our horse are better armored than any one I ever saw on a field of battle on Earth. Our weapons are superior to those of the natives, and so is our training, and I'm confident that our losses will be low, unless some evil chance leads to our complete defeat, and that seems most unlikely."

  "I know that here," she said, touching her forehead. "But here—" she touched her breast "—confidence comes harder. You're a good husband and a good man, George, and I love you. Yet I think sometimes you don't really understand how hard it is to watch the one you love ride into battle and know you cannot ride with him."

  "Probably not," he agreed, reaching out to cup her cheek once more. "I understand enough to know how little I envy you that burden, though," he went on, "and I would do anything I could to ease it for you. Yet the choice of whether or not to ride off to war is even less mine here than it was in England, and at least we know that our `Commander' regards us as a `valuable asset' to be expended as sparingly as possible." He smiled and reached for a lighter note. "And you won't be shut of me so easily as all that, My Lady! Even if I were to fall, the Physician and his arts would be like to restore me to you, anyway."

  "That isn't the funniest jest you ever made, George," she told him, and his smile faded before the look in her eyes.

  "You're right," he said. "It wasn't. Forgive me."

  "Oh, of course I do, foolish man!" she said, reaching up to capture his hand and squeeze it firmly. "And it was foolish of me to take it wrongly, when I know you meant it only to reassure. Yet..."

  Her voice trailed off with something very like a shudder, and Sir George's hand squeezed hers back while he nodded in understanding. The demon-jester had been correct; eleven dead men had been returned to them from the Physician, and the company's reaction to that uncanny fact might have b
een disastrous. The baron suspected that only the warning the demon-jester had so casually given him had prevented the troops' reaction from being even worse than it was, yet it had been bad enough.

  The resurrected men themselves had no memory of what had happened to them from the moment they were struck down. Not any clear ones, at any rate. They'd been slow, almost stupid, for the first day or so after their return—in some ways like men who had drunk too much wine, and in others like some shambling parody of one of the demon-jester's mechanical devices. It had been difficult for them to recognize their own names when they heard them, and their efforts to reply to questions had been clumsy and wandering, like those of someone whose wits were wanting.

  All of the wounded who had been treated by the Physician had recovered from their injuries with miraculous speed. Few of them had any truly clear memories of how their wounds had been healed, but the one or two who did spoke of being shut into a close-fitting crystal cabinet which enveloped all but their heads and which had filled rapidly with something very like the cleansing vapor of the ship's communal baths. But this vapor had been different—stronger, denser, almost like a liquid rather than a gas—and it had burned and tingled as it flowed over them. It hadn't been pain, they'd all agreed, with varying degrees of certainty. It had only been... different. A sensation they couldn't truly describe, and which Sir George hoped he could avoid discovering from personal experience.

  Yet whatever it was, and however it worked, it had left its mark upon the wounded men, for the portions of their bodies which had borne the wounds had emerged a deep red in color. Not the color of blood, but rather the deep, lobster-like shade of Englishmen foolish enough to expose their skins to the blazing sun of Spain or the Mediterranean. Yet for all of its darkness, there'd been no pain, no sensitivity to the touch, and the red shade itself had faded quickly over the next day or two.

  Their eleven Lazaruses had been the same shade of red, but they had been red all over, and the color had faded much less rapidly. Logically, Sir George supposed, that should have been reassuring, especially to men who'd carried the same tint upon their own skins as a result of wounds which they had survived, but it hadn't been. Instead, it had only added to the sense of supernatural dread which seeing dead men walking had evoked in almost all of his troopers.

  No, he thought. Be honest. That dread had been evoked not just in his troopers, but in himself, as well, despite the demon-jester's forewarning. Things might have turned ugly indeed, he conceded, if not for Father Timothy. Thank God he'd been wise enough to take the priest aside and warn him the instant he could! Timothy had been no less shocked than he was. In fact, his shock was probably worse, for he had always been taught—and taught others—that miraculous cures and healing were gifts from the power of God, and no one could ever have mistaken the demon-jester for one of the Lord's saints!

  Fortunately, Timothy had been given the better part of two days to prepare himself. He'd spent the vast majority of that time in prayer and fasting, seeking divine guidance, and when he emerged from his vigil, his eyes had been calm and confident. When all of the troopers had shrunk back from the returned men, some making signs against evil or even, in one or two cases, reaching for weapons, Timothy had rounded upon them like some broad shouldered, white-bearded bear of God. The power of his voice when he denounced their fears and exhorted them to accept God's miraculous acts, however bizarre the circumstances under which those acts had been accomplished, would have done any true bear proud, and the frightened soldiers who'd cringed before the inexplicable had looked unmistakably like small boys who had incurred the wrath of an irate tutor as the priest's familiar, homey thunder broke upon them.

  Yet for all that, there was still that lingering sense of the uncanny. The unspoken question—fear—of whether or not the men who had returned to them were truly the ones who'd been taken from them in the first place. Were they the same men? Or were they changelings? The same flesh but animated by... something else?

  Sir George truly believed Timothy was right. Of course he did! After all, God could act through whomever He chose, even a demon-jester who was a parody of anything upon His Earth. But still...

  "I trust Timothy," he told Matilda firmly. "If he says these resurrections are miracles of God, to be accepted as such, who am I to argue with him? Yet even though I trust him and believe he's correct, my emotions have yet to catch up with my faith and my intellect, I fear." He smiled at her. "You aren't the only one who continues to find the entire affair uncanny, My Lady! If I didn't find it that way, no doubt I wouldn't be so clumsy as to try to turn aside my own concerns with an ill chosen jest."

  "I fear we will have a great many other equally `uncanny' things to which to adjust before we're finished," she told him, giving his hand a final squeeze. Then she released it, and leaned back in her camp chair, sipping from her goblet.

  "You've always had a gift for understatement, my love," he told her wryly, and she snorted.

  "Say rather than I've always had a gift for blurting out the first thought to come into my head, and you'd be closer to the mark!"

  "Hardly that, although it has occurred to me upon occasion that your father probably had no idea what he was about to unleash upon an unwary world when he encouraged you to learn to read."

  "Oh, I think he had a very clear idea what would happen," she told him with a chuckle whose sadness had dimmed as passing time dulled the knifelike edges of her loss. "I think he was more than pleased to have a daughter to spoil as his youngest child, and I don't think he worried himself too much over the handful he was about to bestow upon whatever unfortunate husband he finally found me!" She snorted again. "In fact, he probably thought it was only fair that whoever wed me wind up with a wife as hardheaded as his own!"

  "Now there you're probably absolutely correct," Sir George agreed, and it was his turn to chuckle. But then his chuckle faded into something softer and warmer as he let his eyes rest upon his wife.

  He knew how unhappy she was to have been able to bear only one child. She'd miscarried twice before Edward's birth, and lost two more children after that, and the thought that she was barren, unable to provide him with the additional heirs needed to safeguard the succession of his hard-won lands and titles, had been both her greatest regret and the cause of her greatest sense of failure. Well, Sir George shared her sadness, just as he had shared her grief with each child they'd lost. And, yes, he too had spent sleepless nights, especially when some childish ailment had left Edward feverish and restless, worrying over how many hopes and plans, how much of the future, resided in one fragile child. There were so very many ways a child could die before attaining his majority, and every one of them had gone through the baron's mind at one time or another.

  Yet for all of that, he had never once seriously considered taking another woman to his bed to bear the additional sons and heirs many another noble would have considered absolutely essential. He was only human, and here and there, especially when he was in the field, far from home and feeling his loneliness and mortality, there had been moments of temptation. Strong moments, some of them, for he was a vigorous man, and one women had always found attractive. But they'd been only moments, never more than that. Some of his peers had made jokes about his chastity and fidelity, but only his closest friends had dared to do so to his face, for Sir George Wincaster had a temper, and very few men had ever desired to meet him with a weapon in hand.

  For the most part, though, there had been an edge of begrudging admiration in the humorous comments that had come his way—the admiration of men who saw someone doing something they themselves could never accomplish... and which, despite a nagging suspicion that they ought to want to accomplish it, they had no true desire to emulate. Yet the truth was that it had never been that difficult for him. Partly that was because he was a man who took his sworn word seriously, and what oaths had he ever sworn more solemnly than the ones he'd taken upon his wedding day? But much as he would have liked to believe that it was hi
s iron sense of honor which had kept him true to his wedding vows, he knew there were two other reasons which had at least as much to do with it. One was the fact that, in all his travels, he had never met a woman he found more beautiful than the one who had consented to become his wife. But the second, and by far the more important, was that however unmanly some might think it, he loved his wife more than he loved life itself, or even his honor. He could be as clumsy and as maladroit as the next man. He could hurt her with thoughtlessness, or carelessness. He could even, however fleetingly, be angry with her, and lash out with hurtful words when he was. But the one thing he simply could not do was to knowingly and deliberately betray or hurt her. That he would die before doing.

  Something of his thoughts must have showed in his expression, for Matilda's eyes softened, and he inhaled deeply as her beauty smote him once again. Not everyone, he knew, would have called her beautiful. She was tall for a woman, taller than many men, with a strong nose and chin which spoke all too accurately of a strong-willed, stubborn character. Just as many would have considered her overly tall, she had broad shoulders for a woman and long, strong fingers, not the dainty, white hands of a "proper" noblewoman, and she moved with the athletic stride of a lifelong horsewoman. Her gowns had always seemed too confining for someone with her energy, and the magnificent golden spill of her hair was too often confined in a tight bun which kept it out of her way as she lost herself in one of her precious books, or her daily journal, or the endless sketchbooks she had filled since her father imported an Italian drawing master when she was thirteen. She had an oval face, and a figure so slender that at twenty-nine she might well have been taken for someone ten years younger... and any denizen of Castle Wickworth could have added that she had the Devil's own temper. Yet they would also have told anyone who asked that it was a temper which was roused by injustice or falsehood or acts of unthinking stupidity, not one born of vindictiveness.