The wall around Reggio was higher and thicker than the one at Marseille. One of the gate guards opened a narrow gate for us, and before long we were in the moonlit countryside. Here Brislieu took the lead and Arno rode beside me, their squires sharing a horse behind us. After a few moments I repeated my earlier question:
"How did you find me?"
Arno chuckled. "Those who gain fame are easy to find. I had come to Reggio to arrange to ship horses to Palermo, and in an inn I heard a ship's captain tell a marvelous story, about a holy man who talked to his crucifix. Or actually to an angel, through his crucifix.
And either the crucifix or the angel talked back to him; I forget just how he told it."
Arno laughed again. "The angel sent down lightning from the sky, which struck and sank a corsair. And moments later the eye of GOD shown down as a shaft of golden light, to fall unerringly on the holy man. Then, later, when a plague of grippe sickened all others aboard, this holy man, who was named the Blessed Larn, was not touched by it.
"Later still, when a storm threatened to send one and all to their deaths, this Larn, who was from India incidentally, called on the angel again. Angel Deneen, he called her. And the water smoothed around them like a silver mirror, though at a little distance the waves heaved and tossed more savagely than before."
I could see Arno's grin in the moonlight. "Even allowing for exaggeration," he continued, "I might have "wondered if it was you, even if he had not named you. And indeed I did not catch your name clearly when first he said it, for not only was he speaking Provencal, but his mouth was full at the time. But your sister's name left no doubt."
He chuckled again. He'd changed since I'd seen him last; his mood was lighter. "Lightning from the sky. That was something you didn't show us before. Or was that the shipmaster's imagination?"
"He stretched things a little," I said, "but it was pretty much true."
He looked me over now as we rode. "You've grown," he said. "You were tall already; now you're as tall as Brislieu. Or very nearly. What brought you back to- our world?"
It was hard for him to say "our world," as if he'd never quite accepted that there were others. In spite of everything he'd seen.
I didn't answer right away-didn't know just how to start, although I'd thought before about what I'd say to Arno when I found him. The country air was a little chilly, an early spring night in a warm climate. Moonlight lay a shimmering path across the strait to our right; to our left it lit the rugged hills, and filled the ravines with inky shadow.
"What brought us to Fanglith?" I answered him in Evdashian, slowly and carefully, so that hopefully he'd understand. It seemed best that Brislieu and the others not know what I was saying. "Tyranny and death. The rulers who had driven us from our first home, our first world, have become even more tyrannical."
I paused to let him get that much of it, then continued. "It has named itself the Glondis Empire, and begun to conquer more worlds-including the world where we'd made our new home." I peered at Arno, trying to see his shadowed eyes. "Eventually I expect they'll come here to conquer yours."
He answered in Evdashian, thoughtfully. "Then why come you here, if they will someday follow?"
He still held my stunner in his hand, pointed at me.
"Not to hide," I told him. "We would find no satisfaction in hiding."
"Then why?"
What to tell him? The truth, I decided-the truth in its simplest terms. "We left our home world under gunfire," I told him, still in slow and careful Evdashian. "We were being shot at by powerful weapons. Three of us were killed-shot down as we ran to the sky boat. One was my wife; the Glondis Empire does not hesitate to kill women. We had planned to go to a certain world where we would be welcomed, to help build a rebellion. But our leader, the one of us who knew how to go there, was also killed.
"Your world was the one world we knew the way to, where we felt the Imperial sky navy had not gone yet, because you are so very far away here; much farther than other worlds with people on them."
I had no idea what Arno might be thinking. Maybe that I was crazy-possessed by a demon, as the abbot of St. Stephen's had thought that summer day. But Arno had seen our family cutter and ridden on it several times, which should make a lot of other strange and unlikely claims seem at least marginally possible.
"So we came here with more intentions than plans,"
I went on. "We will try to set ourselves up as supporters of some able and powerful man, and help him establish a kingdom on this world-a kingdom that is too strong for any power here to defeat-then help him form an empire that is not evil like the Glondis. And help him manage it; help him make this world so strong that if, or when, the Glondis Empire comes here, they will not be able to enslave you."
As I said it, it seemed to me that we could never make Fanglith that strong. It was too primitive!
"You came here in a sky boat again?" Arno asked very matter-of-factly.
"Yes. There's no other way."
"And you have a supply of the weapons you had before?"
"A small supply." Suddenly I felt a light surge of excitement. I was onto something after all.
"And if we're successful in setting up a kingdom here, we can go back to our own part of the sky and find a world where more such weapons can be gotten, and bring them."
And experienced rebels with assorted skills, to help build a technical base here, I told myself. That might possibly work; it just might.
We kept riding through the night, his eyes on me, and I knew he had to be digesting what I'd said. Maybe planning something, too. What had Isaac ben Abraham said about the Normans? "They have an extreme restlessness, a recklessness…" Something like that. And also something about "treacheries bloody and outrageous."
Then Arno quit pointing the stunner at me, clipping it on his belt without saying anything.
"Where are we going?" I asked, in Norman now.
"To the castle of Roger of Hauteville, at Mileto, some twenty miles south of here."
"Will I meet Roger?"
"Roger and his elder brother Guiscard, the duke, are on Sicily, where they captured Palermo three months ago. Palermo is Sicily's greatest city-one of the world's greatest-and beautiful beyond words. I fought there. I led a squadron. Then the duke dubbed Roger the Count of Sicily. Roger will rule the island for him, though Guiscard, as duke, will keep Palermo as his own.
"Roger has said he will keep his castle at Mileto, where we are going now. It is no stronghold such as Normans build here, but its walls are thick, and he has no lack of men to defend it. And he controls the country far around.
"He has given me my own fief outside Palermo, where I am having a castle built of stone, atop a rocky hill. I have my own liege knights and sergeants there now, looking to it."
Arno had obviously come a long way in less than three years. He was peering at me as if trying to see what I thought of all this, but the moon was on the wrong side; my face was shadowed. "It is good land," he went on. "Much of it is lowland, nearly flat, with a mountain stream that carries water the year round. But there is no great marsh, and therefore, it is said, no fever. And because the lower slopes are northerly, the pasturage grows thicker and stays green longer."
"So you're going to remain a warrior after all," I said, "instead of becoming a merchant."
"Not so. I have become a baron, but I am also a merchant who raises destriers for our knights and sergeants. That's why I am here in Calabria just now, instead of on my own fief. I've been grazing my breeding herd on the count's land here until I should have my own. In town today I arranged to have them shipped to Palermo. Late tomorrow a ship will come to the wharf at Mileto, and we will load them."