I was beginning to realize that I was more bashed up than I had thought.
"All right. I'll carry you if you carry the lantern."
"Deal."
I counted eight of them still on the floor as we limped home. One must have snuck out.
"Treet, I think somebody around here doesn't like us anymore."
"You think that this was a hit of some kind? Bullshit! It was a mugging. Our sin was hubris. We deserved worse than we got. We've been strutting around these islands with two-hundred-year's pay in our pouches like a couple of oil-fed Arab assholes. With that kind of money on us, we were sure to get mugged. Maybe most of the people here are peaceful, but every place in the world has an underworld, and you know it!"
"Bullshit right back at you. Those guys weren't thugs. Their clothes were too clean, and they didn't have any calluses on their hands. They were students or office workers or some such. What's more, they didn't know jack shit about fighting, or a couple of old farts like us couldn't have taken out so many of them like that."
"Maybe you're right. They could have been young priests or something. Anyway, it was kind of fun, towards the end, there. Thugs or not."
"You got some strange ideas about fun, Treet. They had to be part of some kind of a political outfit. The islands don't have an underworld," Adam said, shaking the blood out of his eyes.
"How do you know that?"
"Because nobody in this whole place puts locks on their front doors. They mostly don't even have front doors," Adam said.
"You've got a point there."
"Did you notice that all those guys used clubs, instead of knives or guns like hoods in the States would use?"
"It figures, considering the way everybody here always wears what amounts to bulletproof clothing," I said. "Then there's the fact that I've seen darn few decent knives since I got here, and no firearms but our own."
"Yeah. Just another case of technology modifying human behavior," Adam said as he staggered home.
We got to my place, pushed aside the heavy curtains that did duty for a door, and got through the zigzag hallway that gave some additional privacy before Roxanna caught sight of us.
She stared at the two of us for a second and then screamed, and I mean the full-lunged, movie-heroine-being-eaten-again-by-the-monster, 130 dB ear bone smashing air-raid siren variety of noise.
Painful. My ears hurt worse than the rest of me.
Adam's women were still at my place, and they came running. Once assembled, all of them, servants included, promptly went into hysterics right along with Roxanna. You'd think that they'd never seen someone come home bloody before.
I don't know. Maybe they hadn't.
"Roxanna!" I shouted above their noise, "Stop acting like a silly little girl! It doesn't suit you, and anyway, I thought you were made of better stuff than that! Get hold of yourself!"
Adam wearily put me down and we stood there bleeding while they took a few more minutes to calm themselves down. Finally, they managed it, and the decibel level dropped below 110.
"Better," I said. "It's pretty sad when the injured have to tend to the healthy before they can get any help themselves. Now, Roxanna, send someone out for whatever passes for a doctor around here. And send somebody else for the police. I want to report an assault with the intent to murder."
That last statement of mine got them all to screaming again. We continued with our standing and bleeding for a while longer, and I added shaking my head to our repertoire. These people were so admirable in so many ways, but they were just not the sorts you wanted on your team when you had an emergency going on.
Eventually, the same lady doctor who patched us up last time arrived. Adam's head was sewn up, this time with the aid of some novocaine from our first-aid kit, and then she went over both of us, tending to dozens of abrasions, lacerations, and contusions. We were even more bashed up than I had thought.
I got my nose reset, and was given something that was supposed to save the teeth that had loosened up during the ruckus. There was a bump on the back of my head the size of half a grapefruit. It was so big that when I put my hand on it, my fingertips couldn't reach my skull. We both got rubbed down with something that was supposed to help bruises, and towards dawn, we were finally permitted to go to bed.
I had to be led there, since by that time, both of my eyes had swollen shut.
THIRTY-ONE
Our much-needed rest lasted for about eleven minutes, at which time the duke arrived, with two sleepy guards in tow.
"I'm sorry to have to get you both out of bed, but then your actions have forced me to be up for hours, so I'm probably being more than fair. Now then, we'll have a formal hearing, and quite possibly several full legal trials before this mess is settled, but for now I want to hear your versions of what happened this night."
Adam gave him a straightforward explanation of what had happened, and I confirmed his statement.
"So you say that you were attacked without provocation, you admit to carrying and using concealed firearms, and you admit to leaving dead and wounded men in a public walkway without even attempting to render them any medical assistance?"
"Yes, Your Grace. As to the wounded, well, please remember that we were badly wounded ourselves, and that their friends who had run off had to be close by. We assumed that as soon as we were gone, they would obtain the necessary help," Adam said.
"True enough, to the extent that they got their associates to a medical woman as soon as the two of you had left. That doesn't excuse you from your legal duties, however. But then you don't know your legal obligations here, do you?"
"I suppose not, Your Grace. But please consider that they also left the scene without rendering aid to us," Adam said.
"That has already been made self-evident. Well. I think that I can tell you that you needn't worry overmuch about the upcoming trial. Even though you were responsible for at least four deaths, the evidence is pretty clear that you were deliberately attacked. Your other crimes were, at worst, misdemeanors which will probably be payable with fines that you can easily afford."
"Thank you, Your Grace," Adam said. "We are much relieved."
"You may be, but I am not! I am not used to this sort of crime in my domains. I am profoundly embarrassed that my subjects should behave in this manner. It is unconscionable, that nineteen healthy young athletes should, with weapons in their hands, feloniously fall on two middle-aged foreigners who were in poor physical condition, and who had only recently gotten out of their sickbeds after very serious injuries.
"And it is infuriating, that my young athletes should then have the incredible effrontery to lose the bloody bedamned fight! They had four of their number killed outright, and at least nine others crippled or maimed, probably for life, some of whom may yet die!"
"It doesn't say much for your selective-breeding program, does it, Your Grace," Adam said.
"No it doesn't, dammit! In fact, it calls into question the efficacy and morality of over fifteen hundred years of controlled marriages, of which, up until now, we were so proud!
"Don't you realize that our athletes, drawn from a population of only twelve thousand, regularly outperform the records of your Olympic champions? They do it in track and field, where things are easily measurable. Physically, we are a superior people! And mentally, why, you yourself, Treet, have commented about how intelligent our people are! Yet the two of you made hash out of the best we breed!
"Surely, there is nothing physically outstanding about either of you two. Quite to the contrary, I should say, judging by your appearances. Yet you won when you had no chance of winning! I mean, that gun of yours only killed one man. You smashed all the others, almost ripped them apart, with your bare hands!"
"And feet, Your Grace," Adam said. I heard his bed creak and guessed he was propping himself up. "It's much easier to kill a man with your feet. The big difference is that I grew up in Detroit, and Treet wasn't too far away from there. Your people grew up in what amounts t
o a safe little small town where nobody ever thought much about fighting."
"Physical condition is only a small part of combat effectiveness," I said from flat on my back. "Knowledge of the warrior's arts is equally necessary, and the most important thing of all is the martial spirit. The killer instinct. The eagerness to kill and the willingness to die."
"The martial spirit? The willingness to die?"
"Yes, Your Grace. The true warrior lives every minute of his life ready to die at that instant, if need be." Between the antipain drugs we'd been given and the glorious high of knowing that we had won a rough fight over impossible odds, I suppose I was getting insufferably pompous. Then again, I was just quoting my old Karate master.
"Hmmm. Would you teach us these arts?"
"Are you really sure that's a good idea, Your Grace?" Adam asked.
"No. No, I'm not."
"Neither am I."
* * *
A week went by before I felt like moving around and getting busy again, and Adam took four days longer than me to get himself mobile. Somehow, big people always seem to take longer to heal than us little guys do. Maybe it's simply that there is more body tissue on them in need of fixing, or maybe it's that when somebody Adam's size falls down, he falls a lot harder than ordinary people do.
Or maybe Adam just likes being waited on hand and foot by two lovely women.
I split my time between getting the boat fixed, and helping out with the island-scraping project. We only had the one diesel powered compressor, and it did double duty. During evenings and lunchtime, it filled the compressed-air bottles that the two "deep" workers used, the ones who went down to a hundred feet or so, and worked their way up, decompressing as they went.
For use during mornings and afternoons, we had cobbled up a whiffletree of hoses that went to the mouthpieces of the snorkel rigs and, at low pressure, the pump could handle the needs of a dozen men. We didn't have the pressure regulators needed to give each man an independent air supply, so the workers had to stay in a row, and maintain exactly the same depth to breathe. You breathed in turn, rose a bit in order to inhale, and kept your tongue on the pipe at all other times.
The workers got used to it quickly enough, and before long were trading jobs with the SCUBA twins, for fun, the experience, and to even out the risk of the bends. Eventually, we got two complete fourteen-man teams trained, and work went on even on Sundays, once we had the bishop's written permission.
We had some two thousand gallons of diesel fuel on The Brick Royal, in four integral fuel tanks built into the ferrocrete hull, enough to keep the compressor going for many months.
The problem was getting it out. With the ship on her side, draining out fuel to serve the compressor and occasionally the genset was not a simple task. We spilled a fair amount of the smelly stuff on the floor of the warehouse until we worked out a safe way to do it. Once we had the fuel out of one of the big tanks we were forced to store most of what we had removed in plastic containers. Not what an American Fire Safety Board would approve of, but like the song goes, it's what you do with what you got that counts. Anyway, we figured that diesel fuel has a fairly high flash point, and that the risk of fire wasn't all that great.
With the ship itself, we had the damage cut away, and the metal reinforcement sewn in by the time Adam was up and about. I had held off with doing the concrete replacement work myself, since Adam had supervised the original construction and, for the most part, I hadn't even been there. I'd been out playing salesman, and it's always best to put the most experienced man in charge. It was just as well that I'd waited for him, since, as it turns out, I would have screwed it up if I had started out alone.
It seems that new concrete doesn't stick at all well to old concrete, but not to worry. Adam had brought along a can of incredibly expensive epoxy that was guaranteed to glue old concrete to wet cement. Now, the very thought of gluing something to a semiliquid like wet cement confused me, to say the very least. How can you glue a solid to a liquid?
Hell, how can anyone possibly glue anything to a liquid?
When I start hearing something like that, all of my "bullshit" indicators let loose. Inside my head, the lights start flashing, the fireworks go off, and the little American flags come out from the back of the machine and start waving.
"Naw," I said. "Absolutely no way possible."
"You're just not thinking about it right," Adam said. "A liquid is a liquid because the molecules in it don't stick to each other in a permanent way, they just sort of slide around, right? In a setting liquid, like concrete or epoxy, the molecules attach themselves to each other either chemically or mechanically or both. The molecules of this particular epoxy can attach themselves to the molecules of both wet concrete and hardened concrete. What's so hard to believe about that?"
"Somehow, it just doesn't ring right."
"It's the truth," Adam said. "I have it on the advice of four—count 'em, four—separate, independent experts that this stuff works, and that it's well worth the ridiculous price you incidentally paid for it."
"I paid for it? I don't remember any such thing on any bill of materials."
"Of course not. Who could possibly remember the technical, chemical name of any complex epoxy? Some of those words run to maybe forty, fifty letters. It's easier to remember the names of some of those ancient Mexican gods. I just slipped it in with some of the paints and lubricants we also needed for the boat, and you signed it."
"Adam, you shouldn't do that sort of thing to your boss."
"Yeah, but I'm your partner now. Don't it make you feel glad?"
"I'll feel gladder if the stuff actually works. Have you ever used it before?"
"Nope. But then I never had to fix a broken concrete boat before, either. Relax, Treet. Uncle Adam will make it all better."
The actual cementing was done in a day, and then Adam got busy with the rest of the boat. The engine had to be drained, flushed out, and cleaned, and everything that salt water had touched had to be inspected, thoroughly cleaned and often repaired. We planned to convert The Brick Royal from a rather spacious motor sailer to a tiny cargo ship of the same size, and that involved removing a lot of furniture, bulkheads, and decking inside.
I let Adam handle it while I set about getting our cargo together. The most exciting product the Westronese had was their high-strength fiber, Super-Hemp, we'd decided to call it. I'd hoped to be able to buy a few tons of the stuff, but no such luck. The clothing, fishnets, and other fabrics made from Super-Hemp were so indestructible that very little replacement was required. This meant that very little hemp needed to be grown, and so very little of it was on the market. Even less than usual, since a lot of it had been bought up to make Adam's drift net.
I ended up touring every market square on the Islands, offering twice the going price, and still coming home with only a few hundred pounds of the stuff. Then I went out buying finished thread, finished cloth, and was eventually reduced to buying used clothing before I had enough to fill the smallest forward hold in The Brick Royal.
I got home one day to find that a delivery had been made to me there rather than to the warehouse, probably by mistake. The chief gardener, Master Maimonides ibn Tibbon, had come through on his promise of samples of all the other products that we'd agreed might have some commercial value in the outside world.
There were three crates of the stuff, each product in its own numbered envelope or cloth bag. Four handwritten books came with them, describing each product in English, telling how it was used, and what the approximate costs of production were. Judging from the different handwritings involved, at least twenty different experts had been involved in preparing the notes on the various sorts of vegetable products. It was a remarkable effort, and showed that they were giving us all the support they could. Somebody out there didn't like us, and it was good to know that we had some friends as well.
In return, we gave Maimonides some one thousand nine hundred pounds of various kinds of plant seeds
, mostly peas and beans, everything we had that was growable from Adam's emergency food supplies. Each side went away convinced that they had come out far ahead of the other side. To put it another way, a good deal was had by all.
THIRTY-TWO
One of the duke's couriers came by and delivered a formal proclamation concerning the upcoming court case of those people who had attacked us. Since neither Adam nor I had as yet any command of written Westronese, we had Roxanna read it to the group.
It seems that for some unexplained reason, there wasn't going to be any trial. It seems that those men who had been killed while attacking us were now dead, and thus were outside the duke's jurisdiction. Those of our opponents who had survived were sufficiently maimed and crippled that additional punishment was deemed unnecessary. Indeed, they had already been punished far worse than the law would normally allow. No mention was made of the six attackers who were not seriously injured.
The crimes that Adam and I had committed, carrying and using a concealed weapon, and the failure to give aid to the wounded, would be fined at the rate of two pounds of silver each, but since we had already gifted the crown by this amount, the debt would be considered paid.
"It looks like a standard coverup job," I said. "Everything is left just where it stands, and the courts put their stamp on it."
"Yeah. That business of fining us an amount equal to the amount we'd already given says something, though," Adam said.
"Like what?"
"The duke is letting us off, but he's saying that he doesn't owe us any more favors."
"Wonderful. A score of hoodlums tries to kill us, and we're supposed to be grateful for being let off. Not that the same sort of horseshit hasn't happened often enough in the States. Anyway, we gave the duke a lot more than just the four pounds of silver," I said. "He got a couple of pounds of gold, and three or four big boxes of other things."
"Around here, silver is money. The gold and the rest of that stuff isn't. People think differently about social gifts as opposed to money. Gifts are friendly. Money is serious."
The Fata Morgana Page 22