"What? Who are you? I can't understand you."

She could understand him all right. She wanted him to give me the communicator. But from his expression, he wasn't about to.

"You understand me so good as you must. I am Arno of Courmeron."

She did something with the switch, and the communicator made clicking noises, sharp and rapid.

"Larn, can you hear me?" she said. "What's going on there? Whose voice was that? Over."

He wasn't very happy with that either, but he held it out where I could talk into it.

"Hi, Deneen." I was speaking Evdashian too, slowly, so that Arno could more or less follow what I said. "That was Arno of Courmeron. And I didn't find him; he found me. He'd heard about me in an eating place, and surprised me when I was sleeping; he and three other Normans. He's got my stunner and blast pistol and communicator.

"Don't worry, though. Everything is all right so far. He and I are talking about things we might do together. Right now we're going to where he's staying."

Arno was watching me intently. I'd need to throw in some words he didn't know so he wouldn't understand what I had to say next, "I'll activate the remote if the opportunity presents. You palpitate the switch additionally after I enunciate the appellation of our telepathic quadruped."

I paused. It was desirable that Arno did understand what I said next, so this time I spoke simply. "Arno is holding me prisoner, sort of. He doesn't fully trust me and I don't fully trust him, but I think he and I can work something out together. Meanwhile, you follow us from above. You can use magic to know whether I've been harmed or not." Magic Arno accepted, more or less, while technology was foreign to him. I paused now for emphasis. "If I'm harmed," I continued, "you know what to do. And take good care of Bubba."

As soon as I said "Bubba"-the "appellation of our telepathic quadruped"-the speaker not only gave another series of clicks, but a loud squeal. I don't know how she did the squeal part.

"Here," I said to Arno. "I need to fix it."

He hesitated, then moved his horse closer so I could look the communicator over. Reaching, I switched it to remote. "There," I said. "That may fix it, or it may make it worse.

"Deneen," I added, "my communicator is acting up again. Same old problem-clicking noises. I've adjusted the gummox. If you can hear me, transmit again and let's see if it's working now. Over."

Both Arno and I looked at the communicator as if watching would help it work. Of course it didn't make a sound that he could hear. "Deneen," I said, "we do not receive you. Transmit again please. Over."

Her voice murmured in the privacy of my ear canal. "Well, brother mine, was that quiet enough for you? Cough if your remote is working. Over."

I coughed, cleared my throat, then looked at Arno, and he at me. "The amulet refuses to talk for now," I said in Norman, shaking my head. "I've had trouble with it before. It will work for a while, and then for no apparent reason it quits."

Of course Arno, being a Norman, was suspicious. I could read it in his face, even by moonlight.

I shrugged. "It will probably work all right later. Will it be all right for me to put it to rest? No use running down the power cell." The last two words were in Evdashian, of course. "That which gives it power," I added in Norman.

To him it was all magic. I could almost smell his distrust as he nodded. "Do what you must," he said, "as long as I keep the amulet."

"If you insist," I answered, and reaching again, switched off the transmitter. The remote would continue to function.

As we started down the road, the remote murmured again. "Larn, I'm getting ready to give him a demonstration. You might want to prepare him so he won't think he's being attacked."

I had this natural urge to answer, but didn't. "Arno," I told him, "if I know Deneen, we can expect her to do something to prove her power to you. I'm sure she won't harm anyone, because we'd like to be your allies. But it may be pretty noisy, so be ready."

He nodded, saying nothing. It wasn't more than half a minute later that a spotlight caught us. Brislieu, taken by surprise, stopped his horse and drew his sword, glancing upward for a moment. Arno was too smart to look at the lamp even briefly; it would make his pupils contract. He looked only at the illuminated area of the ground. Their squires halted behind us; I don't know what they made of all this.

Then the light switched off.

Nothing more happened for a long minute. I sat holding the reins tight, waiting. If what I suspected happened next, my horse might easily start bucking; the average saddle gorn at home would have. Then the light came on again. This time it wasn't an intense and narrow beam, but spread to flood a grove of trees planted in rows not far from the road. I tensed, almost sensing Tarel at the weapons controls.

The dull "thud thud thud" of the heavy blaster punctuated the night, a series of twelve or fifteen shots in maybe six seconds. Energy bolts hissed, trees burst, fragments of wood whirred and plunked around. The horses, well trained, jerked and danced but settled down quickly. Then it was quiet, and the floodlight showed shattered stubs where the nearest trees had been, two hundred feet away.

After a moment it switched off again; only the dark was left. I wondered if any locals had seen what had happened, and what they'd make of it if they had.

The light came back on, its beam narrower again, to shine on a steep, rocky slope about a quarter mile away. Our eyes went to it. The blaster thudded again- one, two, three, four-the bolts slamming one after another into the bedrock. Shards flew, and above the target point a large slab broke loose to slide crashing to the foot of the slope.

Then once more it was dark.

"I think she's done now," I said quietly in Norman. "We have much more powerful weapons this time than before. And we are harder. We have seen our friends killed, and we are looking for allies."

As I said it I had a kind of feeling I'd never had before, a sort of dry emptiness that marked some kind of change in me. It wasn't especially bad, but it wasn't good either. There was a certain flavor of regret to it, but not a heavy sadness or anything like that. And with it came a sense of strength as well. I didn't think I'd ever be awed by Normans again. Impressed by them maybe, but not awed.

"Let us go on," Arno said, also in Norman. "We have miles to ride yet." His voice was quiet. He sounded more than just impressed; he sounded as if he had things to think about.

A Norman sergeant, wearing helmet and hauberk, let us into Count Roger's castle at Mileto. I'd never been in a Norman-built stone castle, so I couldn't compare this with one of them. But it was a lot different from the timber castles that were usual in Normandy. The stone defensive wall was so thick that the small gate we went through was like an inky tunnel.

The grounds inside were like a big country estate with a wall around it. Arno told me it had been built for a Byzantine governor. There were no lights, not even a lamp by a door, and the moon was all but down, hidden by a hill. But even by simple starlight, the buildings were graceful, more beautiful than any I'd seen before on Fanglith.

I couldn't tell how many buildings there were. Quite a few. Some had wings, and courtyards of their own. There were gardens with privacy walls, and trees for fruit and shade. I could smell something in flower. But the walls had corner towers, one much larger than the others, to remind me that war was a way of life on Fanglith.

Arno had told me that Judith of Evreux, Roger's wife, really loved the place. I could understand that, especially if her father's castle in Normandy was like the castles I'd seen there. Arno didn't say so, but I got the idea that he liked this better, too.