The Excalibur Alternative

by David Weber

  There was no denying that, as individuals, Hathori made dangerous opponents. They were just as tough and physically powerful as they looked, and they appeared to be totally without fear... or any equivalent of the human emotion of compassion. There was no love lost between them and the English, which Sir George suspected was precisely what the demon-jester wished, and there'd been a few ugly incidents. Two wounded English archers had been killed by the Hathori—hacked to pieces, beyond any hope of resurrection even by the Physician—on the third world the English had been required to conquer. No one was entirely certain why. The best guess was that the wart-faces had thought the two wounded men were trying to flee the battle without cause, although one of them had barely been able to stand even with the assistance of his more lightly wounded companion. Sir George's men had been furious, and the baron's murderous rage had been even more terrible than theirs, if that were possible. But all the rage and fury in the universe had been insufficient to move the demon-jester to punish the Hathori in any way for their actions. Perhaps, Sir George had thought bitterly at the time, he'd believed that the wart-faces were too stupid to realize they were being punished for a specific mistake and feared that any penalty he inflicted would cause them to hesitate the next time something as unimportant as slaughtering a wounded Englishman came along.

  Whatever his reasoning, the demon-jester's refusal to punish the killers had led to an even uglier sequel. The brother of one of the murdered men, apparently driven beyond the bounds of rational thought by grief and hatred, managed somehow to wrest the truncheon from the one of the Hathori detailed to guard the Englishmen aboard ship. The bludgeon, a one-handed weapon for one of the wart-faces, was a ponderous mace for a mere human, but it had crushed its previous owner's skull handily enough. The blood-spattered archer had turned upon the dead Hathori's companions, screaming in fury, and actually managed to wound another of them before the remaining wart-faces beat him to death.

  The demon-jester might have declined to punish the Hathori for murdering wounded men who were only seeking medical attention, but he had quite a different attitude when it was one of his guild's guard dogs who died. The single individual actually responsible for the attack was already dead, but that hadn't dissuaded him from selecting an additional half dozen of Sir George's men at random and ordering their deaths as retribution.

  One of those men had been Walter Skinnet.

  The tough old warrior hadn't even turned a hair when his lot was chosen, and Sir George knew his master of horse would have been furious if he'd suspected the vehement, almost desperate manner in which the baron had implored the demon-jester to spare him. Not that Sir George had let that consideration stop him for even a moment. He was too honest with himself to pretend that his friendship and his duty to one of his own sworn men wouldn't have driven him to make the attempt under any circumstances, however ignoble it might have been to shift the death sentence to another. Yet however true that might have been, he'd also told the demon-jester no more than the exact truth when he argued that Skinnet and his skills and experience would be an irreplaceable loss.

  But he might as well have spared himself the words and the bitter shame of humbling himself by literally begging for Skinnet's life. The demon-jester had been implacable, and he had rejected Sir George's arguments with cold logic.

  "You may be entirely correct about his value, both to you and to my guild," his emotionless voice had piped. "Yet the example must be made. The selection was entirely random, and it is important for the remainder of your men to realize that in such circumstances any of them—regardless of rank, or even of their utility to the guild—may be called upon to pay the penalty for such actions. With that lesson before them, perhaps they will prove more assiduous in preventing such actions by others in the future."

  There had been no moving him from his determination to drive his "lesson" home, and he'd followed through on the sentence. He had compelled the remainder of the English, including their women and children, who'd been awake at the time, to watch as the Hathori executed each of the chosen victims one by one. The men had died as well as anyone could, with Skinnet setting the example for them all, and the lesson that the Hathori were as inviolate as the demon-jester himself had certainly gone home among their surviving companions. But along with that lesson had come a fresh, colder, and far more deadly hatred of the demon-jester and the wart-faces alike, and Sir George wondered if the demon-jester recognized the bitter depth of that hate. If he did, he gave no sign of it, so perhaps he didn't. Or perhaps he simply didn't care. Perhaps, despite all evidence to the contrary, he still believed the English were no more than the Hathori themselves: brutal, incurious enforcers, smart enough to obey orders, but with no interest in anything beyond their orders.

  That would have required even more arrogance—or stupidity—than Sir George had thought even the demon-jester capable of, yet the better he'd come to know his "Commander" the less he was prepared to dismiss the possibility. Anything was possible where the contemptuous "Commander's" prejudices were concerned, but the baron had also concluded that the limitations of the Hathori were the true reason the demon-jester had required the services of his own Englishmen. As individuals, the wart-faces were formidable killing machines, but they lacked the cohesion, the disciplined intelligence and ability, to fight as soldiers. Surely even the demon-jester must be aware, if only intellectually, that there were enormous differences between his pet Hathori and the English he had compelled to serve him, however little he showed it.

  But whatever the wart-faces' shortcomings, it was clear that the eternally silent dragon-men were a very different proposition. Computer might have declined to answer questions about them, but the demon-jester had never once mentioned them directly in any of the conferences and conversations to which he summoned Sir George, and that simple omission all by itself carried an unmistakable significance. Surely there was some reason the demon-jester never so much as spoke of them, yet neither Sir George nor any of his closest advisers had been able to determine what that reason was. They were simply always there, looming in the background in their one-piece red and blue garments, as inscrutable and ominous as any cathedral gargoyle. Despite their greater height, they ought to have looked far less impressive than the armored, ax-wielding Hathori, but Sir George and his men never permitted themselves to forget the deadly lightning weapons sheathed at their belts as they guarded the demon-jester and the crew of the huge vessel.

  Now the dragon-man who had accompanied Sir George this far returned the baron's glance with impassive silver eyes, motionless as a lizard on a stone and with the same sense of poised, absolute readiness. The glowing wall sealed the English into their own portion of their ship-prison, and none of them had yet been able to discover how the portal through it was opened or closed. They'd discovered a great deal about other controls in their quarters, ways to turn any number of clever devices on and off, and Sir George and Father Timothy were certain that the glowing wall must be controlled in some similar, or at least comparable, fashion, yet they'd never been able to detect how it was done.

  Which was as well for their masters, Sir George thought grimly, and nodded to the dragon-man as he stepped past him into the corridor beyond the wall. As always, the towering creature didn't react in any way to the human gesture, but somehow Sir George felt certain the dragon-men recognized it as an acknowledgment and a courtesy of sorts. Whatever else they were, they were obviously capable of thought, or the demon-jester's guild would have replaced them with more of its clever mechanical devices. Equally obviously, it regarded both the Hathori and the dragon-men much as it did the English: as more or less domesticated, moderately dangerous, useful beasts of burden, although the demon-jester clearly placed greater faith in the loyalty of the dragon-men.

  Sir George had often wondered how the dragon-men regarded the English. Did they, like the demon-jester's kind, consider them primitives and barbarians, beneath their own notice? Certainly they possessed and used more o
f the wondrous tools of their masters, but that didn't seem to make them their masters' equals or full members of the starship's crew. So did they see the English as companions in servitude, instead? Or did they cling to the need to look down upon the humans as a way to make themselves appear less wretched by comparison?

  It seemed unlikely to make a great deal of difference either way, as neither Sir George, nor Father Timothy, nor any other human had ever discovered a way to communicate with them. Not even Matilda had been able to suggest a method which might have succeeded. Of course, their masters gave them precious little opportunity to experiment, but it was impossible to completely eliminate all physical contact between humans and dragon-men. Not if the dragon-men were to be useful as guards against the humans, at any rate. Most of the other humans had completely abandoned the task, but Father Timothy continued to try. The Dominican insisted that the dragon-men were far more intelligent than the Hathori, and that with intelligence must come at least the potential for communication. He was determined to someday discover a way to communicate with them, and Sir George shared his confessor's hopes for eventual success... although he lacked the priest's patience and dogged faith that he would ever achieve it.

  Not even Father Timothy, on the other hand, still sought to communicate with the Hathori.

  Sir George snorted at his own cross-grained nature as he followed the guiding light down the empty passageway. He shared Sir Timothy's hopes yet lacked the other's faith, a contradiction if ever he'd heard of one. Yet he couldn't quite turn off that tiny sprig of hope, and he often found himself dreaming of the dragon-men. Indeed, he'd dreamed of them more often during the last few periods of wakefulness than in quite some time.

  His thoughts broke off as the guide light reached another hatch and stopped. It bobbed there imperiously, as if impatient with his slow progress, and he grinned. Such guides were necessary, for the constantly changing internal architecture of the ship could be bewildering, especially to one who spent almost all of his time aboard it locked into the portion assigned to the English. Sir George had been told by the demon-jester that the guide lights were only another of the endless mechanisms available to his masters, without any intelligence of their own, and he supposed he believed the alien. Yet he sometimes wondered, especially at times like this, when the lights twitched so impatiently, scolding him for dawdling and eager to be off about some fresh business of their own.

  He stepped through the indicated hatch, and the light whisked off with a final bob and dodge. He watched it go, then stepped back and turned as the hatch closed.

  The chamber was probably the same one to which the lights had guided him the last time the "Commander" summoned him, although they'd followed nothing remotely like the same path to reach it and its appearance, as usual, had changed completely between visits. This time, it was octagonal, with hatches in each wall, and perhaps fifteen feet across. Unlike the forest glades or the undersea vistas the demon-jester seemed to prefer for most of his meetings, this time the chamber was sparsely furnished, almost bare, with unadorned bulkheads of the ubiquitous bronze alloy. A glowing table at its center supported its sole decoration, one of the marvels the demon-jester called a "light sculpture." Sir George had no idea how the things were made, but they always fascinated him. All were beautiful, though the beauty was often strange to human eyes—so strange, sometimes, as to make one uneasy, even frightened—and almost always subtle. This one was a thing of flowing angles and forms, of brilliant color threaded through a cool background of blues and greens, and he gazed upon it in delight as its soothing presence flowed over him.

  There are times, he thought dreamily, when I could almost forgive them for what they've done to us. Our lives are longer, our people healthier, than they ever would have been at home, and they can create such beauty and wonders as this. And yet all the marvels we've received are nothing but scraps from the table, dropped casually to us or—worse!—given only because it benefits them for us to have them. To them, we are less important, although not, perhaps, less valuable, than the things they build of metal and crystal, and—

  "Your men fought well. But then you English always do, don't you?"

  Sir George turned from the light sculpture. He hadn't heard the hatch open, but one rarely did aboard this ship. The main hatches, big enough for a score of mounted men abreast, yes. Not even their masters seemed able to make something that large move without even a whisper of sound, but the smaller hatches within the ship proper were another matter.

  Not that most of his men would know that from personal experience. Only he, Sir Richard, Sir Anthony, and—on very rare occasions—Matilda had ever been permitted inside the portion of the vast ship reserved for the full members of the demon-jester's crew. Even then, they must submit to the humiliation of a search before they passed the glowing wall between their section of the ship and the rest of its interior.

  Now he cocked his head, gazing at the demon-jester, and tried to gauge the other's mood. Despite the years of his servitude, he still found the task all but hopeless. That was immensely frustrating, and his inability to accurately evaluate the other's mood had become no less dangerous with the passage of time. But the "Commander's" piping voice remained a dead, expressionless thing, and the three-eyed face remained so utterly alien as to make reading its expression impossible. Certainly Sir George had never seen anything he could classify as a smile or a frown, nor had whatever translated the "Commander's" language into English become any better at communicating nuances of emotion. Father Timothy and Dickon Yardley had concluded that the upper of the demon-jester's two mouths was exclusively a breathing and speaking orifice, but Sir George had yet to hear a single sound emerge from it. Unlike the dragon-men, the demon-jester obviously did speak, but no human had ever heard his actual voice. From something Computer had once said in passing, Sir George had concluded that the demon-jester's apparent silence wasn't yet another security measure, however. From what Computer had said, the "Commander's" voice was simply pitched too high for human ears to hear.

  Sir George had often wondered how much the artificiality of the voice he actually heard was responsible for how expressionless it sounded. He supposed it was possible that the demon-jester truly was as much a stranger to emotion as his translated voice suggested, but it seemed unlikely. The pompous superiority of the words he chose in their conversations seemed ample proof that the alien was capable of feeling contempt and disdain, if nothing else.

  There were a great many questions the baron had never been able to answer about the exact nature of the demon-jester's translator, but he'd long since concluded that the "Commander's" failure or refusal to learn the language of his captive troops was another indication of his sense of utter superiority to them. Surely if whatever translated his words into English was capable of that feat, then it ought to be equally capable of making the demon-jester's own voice audible to humans, and in the demon-jester's place, Sir George would certainly have done just that. The "Commander's" decision not to was a foolish one, indeed, unless whatever translated his words into English did a far better job of communicating nuance and emotion when it translated English into his own language.

  But however ridiculous the demon-jester might still look, and despite the foolishness of any decisions the "Commander" might make, Sir George's responsibility for the lives of the men and women who looked to him for leadership made it absolutely imperative that the baron never, ever make the mistake of underestimating him. And that was the true reason he found his continued inability to read the "Commander's" mood so maddening. He must watch his words with this creature far more closely than he'd ever watched them with any other commander, yet even after all this time, he was never quite free of the fear that he would choose the wrong one simply because he'd misunderstood or misinterpreted the "Commander." Of all the many frustrations of his servitude, that constant uncertainty was far and away the worst.

  Still, he knew he'd made some progress over the years. He couldn't have sp
ent so many hours conferring with the creature without gaining at least some small insight into his moods and attitudes. It would have been a great comfort to be able to feel certain that those insights were accurate and not dangerous misinterpretations, but at least the demon-jester appeared to take some pains to choose his words with care, as if seeking to make his meaning completely clear through what he said since he couldn't communicate fine shades of meaning by how he said it.

  And, of course, there's also the fact that, as he never seems to tire of telling us, we're valuable to him and to his guild.

  Sir George would never be so stupid as to assume that that value would preserve any human foolish enough to anger or appear to threaten their masters. Sir John Denmore's fate on that very first day would have been enough to prevent that even without the other deaths which had reinforced the lesson over the years. Two men who'd left their encampment without orders, fishnets in hand, unable to resist the allure of sunbaked golden beaches on a beautiful world of blue skies and deep green seas. Another who'd simply refused one day to leave the ship. Skinnet and the other five men executed for the wart-face's death. Another who'd gone berserk and attacked the dragon-men and the "Commander" himself with naked steel... .

  All of them, and a handful besides, had perished for fatal transgressions against the demon-jester's decrees, slaughtered as helplessly as Sir John, and with as little apparent emotion on his part. Yet the "Commander's" actions and normal attitude, as well as Sir George could read the latter, were those of a being well pleased with his investment... and aware that his own masters were equally pleased. He would shed no tears (or whatever his kind did to express sorrow) over the death of any single human, but he valued them as a group and so took pains to avoid misunderstandings which might require him to destroy any of them.