The Excalibur Alternative
Page 21
"Not the Sharnhaishians, though. If they want a primitive world, they just send in their Romans. Just as primitive as the local barbarians, so the Council can't complain, and I'll say this for the Romans. They're tough. Never run into anything they couldn't handle, and the Sharnhaishians've used them to take dozens of backwater worlds away from the other guilds. Whole trade nets, cut to pieces. Strategic commodities sewn up, warehousing and basing rights snatched out from under us, careers ruined. And all because the Sharnhaishians acquired a few thousand primitives in bronze armor."
He fell silent for a long time, swirling sludge in his goblet and peering down into it, then looked back up more or less in Sir George's direction.
"But they're not the only ones who can play that game. They thought they were. The other guilds got together to complain to the Council, and the Council agreed to take the matter under consideration. It may even decide the Sharnhaishians have to stop using their Romans entirely, but that may take centuries, and in the meantime, Sharnhaishian is shipping them from one strategic point to another and taking them away from the rest of us. And they slipped someone on the Council a big enough bribe to get your world declared off-limits for all the rest of us."
Sir George stiffened, and hoped the demon-jester was too drunk to notice. He wasn't surprised that the other guild could have bribed the Council the alien was yammering about. Bribing a few key rulers was often more efficient, and cheaper, than relying on armies. Although if His Majesty had spent a little more money on his army and a little less on trying to buy allies in his first French campaign he might have been on the throne of France by its end!
But if the demon-jester was telling the truth, if the Council to which he referred had the authority to declare that contact with Sir George's home world was no longer permitted and had done so, then the demon-jester's guild must have violated that decree in order to kidnap Sir George and his troops. And if that was the case—if their servitude was unlawful in the eyes of what passed for the Crown among these creatures—then they were in even more danger than he'd believed.
"It took me two or three of your centuries just to figure out where your world was," the demon-jester went on, and now Sir George seemed to sense an air of pride. "Some of the other guilds recruited their own primitive armies, like the Hathori. But none of them have been able to match the Romans. Course they couldn't! And the Sharnhaishians knew that before the rest of us did, too. Reason they went and bought their damned Romans in the first place. They'd already tried the Hathori 'n found out what the rest of us had t' learn the hard way. I still remember the first time we sent the Hathori in against a bunch of natives."
The alien stared down into his goblet, and his ears flattened.
"Damned aborigines cut them to pieces," he said after a long moment. "Cost them a lot of casualties at first, but then they swarmed right over the Hathori. Butchered them one by one. I doubt we got one in twenty back alive at the end, but that wouldn't have happened against the damned Romans. Those aren't just warriors—they're demons that carve up anything they run into. So it occurred to me that what we needed were Romans of our own, and I managed to convince my creche cousin to convince his sector commissioner to speak to the guild masters for me. I needed all the help I could get, thanks to the Sharnhaishians and their Romans. Course, it helped that by then they'd done the same thing to dozens of other guildsmen, and not just in our guild, either. So they gave me a chance to reclaim my career if I could find where the Romans came from, get past the Council ban, and catch us some Romans of our own. And I did it, too."
This time his slap managed to connect with the table top again, though it was still soundless, and he threw himself untidily back in his chair.
"But we're not Romans," Sir George pointed out after a moment. He was half afraid to say another word, for if the demon-jester remembered any of this conversation at a later date and realized all he was letting slip, there would be one very simple way to rectify his error.
" 'Course not," the alien said. "Good thing, too, in a way. Surprised me, of course. I never expected to see so much change on a single planet in such a short period. Couldn't have been more than eight or nine hundred of your years between you and the Romans, and just look at all the differences. It's not decent. Oh," he waved a hand again, "you're still primitives, of course. Haven't changed that. But we got there in just the nick of time. Another seven or eight of your centuries or so, and you might actually have been using practical firearms, and we couldn't have that. Unlikely, I admit, but there you were, already experimenting with them." The demon-jester eyed Sir George. "I have to wonder how you stumbled on the idea so soon. Could the Sharnhaishians have slipped up and suggested it to you?"
"The idea of `firearms'?" Sir George frowned.
"Pots de fer, I believe you call them," the demon-jester said.
"Fire pots?" Sir George blinked in genuine consternation. "But they're nothing but toys, Commander! Good for scaring horses and people who've never before encountered them, perhaps, but scarcely serious weapons. Even bombards are little more than noisy nuisances against anyone who knows his business! Why, my bowmen would massacre any army stupid enough to arm itself with such weapons. Crossbows are more effective than they are!"
"No doubt they are... now," the demon-jester replied. "Won't stay that way, though. Of course, you've still got another thousand years or so to go before anyone develops truly effective small arms. Still, I suppose it's a fairly good example of why they passed the Prime Directive in the first place. If the Sharnhaishians hadn't somehow contaminated your world, you never would have come up with gunpowder at all. Not so quickly, anyway."
He took another deep swallow, and Sir George decided to stay away from the question of where gunpowder came from. He himself knew only a very little about the subject; such weapons had become available in Europe only during his own lifetime and, like most of his military contemporaries, he'd had little faith that they would ever amount to much as effective field weapons. Certainly such crude, short-ranged, dangerous devices would never pose any threat to the supremacy of his bowmen! Yet the demon-jester seemed to find their existence deeply significant and more than a little worrying. It was almost as if the fact that humans had begun experimenting with them was somehow threatening, and Sir George had no intention of suggesting that the Sharnhaishians hadn't had anything to do with the development. Besides, how did he know the rival guild hadn't?
"Anyway," the demon-jester said, the words more slurred than ever, "it's a good thing we found you when we did. Couldn't have used you at all if you'd been armed with firearms. Would've been a clear violation of the Prime Directive, and that would've gotten questions asked. People would've noticed, too, and the Council would've started asking questions of its own."
He leaned back towards Sir George again, and this time he patted the Englishman on the knee with what would have been a conspiratorial air from another human.
"As it is, nobody really cares. Just 'nother bunch of primitives with muscle-powered weapons, nothing to worry about. None of the Council's inspectors even know enough about humans to realize you and Romans are the same species, and if any of 'em ever do notice, we know where to put the bribes to convince them they were mistaken. Besides," another pat on the knee, "you're all off the books." Sir George frowned, puzzled by the peculiar phrase, and the demon-jester thumped his knee a third time. "No document trail," he said, the words now so slurred that Sir George found it virtually impossible to understand them even as words, far less to grasp the meanings of unfamiliar phrases. "Grabbed you outa th' middle of a storm. Ever'body on your stupid planet figures you all drowned. Would have 'thout us, too, y'know. But that means even if th' Council investigates, won't find any evidence of contact between us an' your world, because aside from picking you outa th' water an' grabbing a few horses in th' middle of th' night, there wasn't any. So we've got our own little army, an' 'less some inspector does get nosy, nobody'll ever even ask where you came from."
"S' take that, Sharnhaishian," he muttered. "Thought you'd wrecked my career, didn' you? But who's goin' to..."
His voice trailed off entirely, his eyes closed, and he slumped in his chair. His upper mouth fell open, and a whistling sound which Sir George realized must be his kind's equivalent of a snore came from it.
The human sat in his own chair, staring numbly at the demon-jester, until the door opened silently once more. He looked up quickly then and saw one of his masters' guards in the opening. The dragon-man beckoned imperatively with one clawed hand, and Sir George noted the way that its other hand rested on the weapon scabbarded at its side.
Could that be what the "Commander" actually meant by "firearms"? he wondered suddenly. Not even a true dragon could hurl hotter "fire" than they do... and they're certainly far more dangerous than any stupid fire pot!
The dragon-man beckoned again, its meaning clear, and Sir George sighed and rose. Of course they wouldn't leave him alone with the senseless demon-jester. No doubt they'd been watching through one of Computer's "visual sensors" and come to collect him the instant the demon-jester collapsed. But had they paid any attention to the demon-jester's conversation before he collapsed? And even if they had, had they guessed that Sir George might realize the significance of what the demon-jester had told him?
He hoped not, just as he hoped the demon-jester wouldn't remember all he'd let slip. Because if the others had guessed, or the demon-jester did remember, Sir George would almost certainly die.
After all, it would never do for the guild's pet army's commander to realize that if anyone from the Council—wherever and exactly whatever it was—did begin to question that army's origins, the entire army would have to disappear.
Forever... and without a trace that could tie the demon-jester's guild to a planet that the Council had interdicted.
-IX-
"Are you certain, my love?"
Lady Matilda Wincaster reclined against the cushion under the brightly colored awning and regarded her husband with a serious expression.
Despite years of experience with their bizarre tastes, the demon-jester clearly remained perplexed by, if not incredulous of, the English's powerful preference for camping in mere tents outside the vast starship. They'd been persistent enough in their desires that he'd been forced to accept that it was what they truly wanted, yet it was obvious that he found the entire concept utterly inexplicable. In many ways, Sir George suspected, the "Commander" found it even more difficult to understand because the English were such "primitives." Whereas the demon-jester might have been prepared for the notion that civilized beings such as himself might desire an occasional, rustic break from the rigors of civilization, the idea that barbarians who'd been given a taste of the better things life could offer might choose not to wallow in them was beyond his comprehension. No doubt that helped explain his obvious suspicion that the humans' often expressed desire for the open air was merely a cover for something much more devious. Sir George still remembered how long the expressionless commander had gazed at him back on Shaakun after his initial request that his people be allowed to remain outside the ship. The demon-jester had considered the request for over two full shipboard days before he elected to grant it, and when he announced his permission, he had also warned against any thought that the English might be able to slip away and hide from their masters. His technology could find them wherever they might attempt to hide, he'd said in his toneless voice, and punishment for attempted desertion would be severe.
Sir George had doubted neither warning, and he'd taken steps to impress both of them equally strongly on his subordinates.
Those steps had succeeded. In all the years of their servitude, not a single one of his men had tried to desert. Or not, at least, from their encampments. Three men had been hunted down by the demon-jester's mechanical remotes after becoming separated from the company's main body on the march or during combat operations. None of them had been returned to the ship alive. In at least one case, Sir George was as certain as he could be that the trooper in question had simply become disoriented and lost in the heavy fog which had enveloped the column that day, but the demon-jester hadn't cared about that. The man-at-arms had been absent without permission. That constituted desertion, and desertion was punishable by death. He'd had no desire to determine the circumstances of the particular case at hand. The dead man had only been a primitive Englishman, after all. And the demon-jester had probably seen it as an opportunity to administer yet another of his object lessons. He was a great believer in object lessons.
Over the years, at least some of the English had come to share more of the demon-jester's view of life in the open air. Despite the splendor of the creature comforts available in their tents and pavilions, the luxuries aboard ship, or even in one of the mothership's landers, were even more splendid, and none of the humans were so stupid as to reject them out of hand, despite their captivity. But a majority of them still nursed that inborn hunger for open skies and natural air... even the "natural air" of planets which had never been home to any of their kind. They preferred to sleep amid the fresh air and breezes, the sounds of whatever passed for birds on a given planet, and the chuckling sounds of running water. And even those who invariably returned aboard ship for the night enjoyed the occasional open air meal. Indeed, the picnic feasts often took on the air of a festival or fair from Earth, helping to bind them together and reinforce their sense of community.
And they were a community, as well as an army. In many ways, Sir George had often thought, they were fortunate that there were so few gently born among them. He himself was the only true nobleman, and even he was the grandson of a common man-at-arms. Aside from himself and Maynton, only Matilda and Sir Anthony Fitzhugh could claim any real high-born connection. After a great deal of soul-searching and discussions with Maynton, Fitzhugh, and Sir Bryan Stanhope—and, especially, with Matilda—he had decided to bestow the accolade of knighthood upon men who'd earned it in battle. He was careful not to abuse the practice, and his men knew it. That made the knighthoods he'd awarded even more valuable to them, and it had also given him a solid core of exactly one dozen knights.
The fact that all but three of them were men of common birth had not only told all of his troopers that any one of them could aspire to the highest rank still available to them but had also helped to bind the entire community even more tightly together. And not just among its male members. Just as three quarters of his knights had been born of common blood, so had the vast majority of the company's women, which meant that, especially with Matilda and Margaret Stanhope to lead the way, they had decided to overlook the dubious origins of many of the unwed camp followers who'd joined them in their involuntary exile. Most of those camp followers, though by no means all, had acquired husbands quite speedily. A few had chosen not to, and Father Timothy had agreed, under the circumstances, not to inveigh against them for continuing to ply their old avocation. There were a great many more men than women, and the one thing most likely to provoke trouble among them was that imbalance in numbers. No doubt Father Timothy would have preferred for all of the women to be respectfully wedded wives, but he, too, had been a soldier in his time. He understood the temper of men who still were, and he was able to appreciate the need to adapt to the conditions in which they found themselves forced to live.
As a result, not even those women who continued to follow their original trade were ostracized as they might have been, and a tightly knit cluster of families formed the core of the English community. The steadily growing number of children (both legitimate and bastard) helped cement that sense of community even further, and for all the bitterness with which Sir George chafed against his servitude, even he had to adm
it the awe he felt that not a single one of those children had perished in infancy. That was undoubtedly the most treasured of the "luxuries" their masters had made available to them. The strangest, however (though it was hard to pick the single most strange) was the fact that so few of those children's mothers remembered their births. It had caused some consternation and even terror and talk of "changelings" at first, but as time passed, the women had adjusted to the fact that their babies were almost always born during one of their sleep periods. The Physician had explained the process, pointing out that it only made sense to get such time consuming worries as pregnancies out of the way when they were asleep in stasis anyway. After an initial period of extreme uneasiness, most of the women had come to agree. Led in almost every case, Sir George had been amused (but not surprised) to note, by the women who had birthed the most babies the "old-fashioned" way.
He smiled even now, at the memory, but his attention was on his wife's question. One of the real reasons he'd initially requested freedom from the ship for his people had been amply confirmed over the years. He was absolutely positive now that anything which was said aboard the ship would be overheard and reported by Computer or one of their master's clever mechanical spies, and while he was perfectly well aware that those same spies could eavesdrop upon them outside the ship, as well—Computer could hear and relay his orders even through the thunderous clangor of battle and even when he spoke in almost normal tones, after all—he hoped it was at least a bit harder. And he rather suspected that even the most clever of mechanisms would find it more difficult to keep track of several hundred individual conversations out in the open against the background noise of wind and water than to listen for a single command voice even amidst the bedlam of war. The fact that he or one of his trusted advisers had managed to find at least one spot in each encampment where Computer would not, or could not, respond to them also suggested that it was possible for some freak of terrain or atmosphere to produce blind spots in Computer's own coverage. Sir George had taken careful note of the fact that most of those "blind spots" seemed to occur in dips or hollows, depressions which allowed the speaker to put a bank of solid earth or stone between himself and areas where he knew Computer could hear him.