Lennox answered the unspoken question. "I've nae seen guns like tha' ayther, lad. Nor such costumes." Half-admiringly: "Clever devils."

He even managed a bit of humor. "An' how is y'r Polish, Alexander Mackay? I do believe we are about to meet th'Umwa, an' I hope there'll be nae misunderstandings." He saw the men, almost simultaneously, do something peculiar to the rear stocks of their weapons. Their quick hand motions produced faint, metallic clicks. Lennox had no idea, precisely, what they had done. But he had not a doubt in the world that those bizarre weapons were now loaded, primed, and ready to fire. Arquebuses which made finger holes going in, and cannon holes going out. "I really hope there'll be nae miscommunication."

Mackay's face was sour. "I don't speak a word of Polish, Lennox."

The veteran sighed. "Tha's what I was afraid of."

As it happened, Polish was unneeded. The strange men in their strange costumes, carrying their strange weapons, proved to speak the most familiar language of all. English!

Well. Sort of.

"Worst accent I e'er heard," complained Lennox. But the complaint was not heartfelt. Rather the opposite, actually, especially after a dozen more of the strangers came out of the woods and joined in the conversation. All of them were armed, and all of them were clearly ready to kill. And most of them-God bless my soul!-claimed Scots ancestry. Within a few minutes, Andrew Lennox knew he would live to see another day. The encounter between Scots cavalryman and-Americans, they called themselves-was turning into something much like a family reunion.

Within a few hours, he was beginning to wonder. Not whether he would live, but what that day would bring. Anything, he thought.

A young woman from Sepharad had found her legends here. So, now, did a man from Scotland. And if his Highland legends lacked the sheer poetry of Sepharad, they had their own attractions. Faeries, indeed, had come to life in the world. Some grim, obscure, pagan part of Andrew Lennox's Calvinist soul took pleasure in the fact. Took pleasure, not so much that faeries existed, but that they were every bit as dangerous as the ancient tales had sworn.

Chapter 11

"-engines are the big problem," Piazza was saying. "Can't really convert diesel to natural gas, and we've got damned little diesel to begin with. You can run diesel engines on vegetable oil, of course." He chuckled ruefully. "But there isn't that much vegetable oil left in the supermarkets, and it'll take us till next year to start making any in quantity. So in the meantime-"

Mike tuned out the rest. He'd already had a preliminary discussion with Ed and knew what the gist of the proposal was going to be concerning the proper use of the town's diesel equipment.

Same as everything else. Gear down, gear down. Use our modern technology, while it lasts, to build a nineteenth-century industrial base. Still put us way ahead of the game, here in the seventeenth century. Steam engines, steam engines. The railroads are about to make a big comeback in the world.

Mike smiled slightly. Or is "comeback" the right word? Maybe I should say "come back around."

He saw Rebecca was looking at him, and his smile widened. She responded with a shy smile of her own, but looked away almost at once. Her attention was back on Piazza. Riveted to his words, by all appearances. Rebecca's hands were clasped in front of her and resting on the big "conference table" in the center of the room. As usual, she was perched on the edge of her chair.

Mike still counted that smile as progress. It was the first time Rebecca had given him so much as a glance since their conversation on the porch the night before. It was plain as day that she was floundering in a strange sea of new emotions and customs, with a weight of her own traditions that Mike could only guess at. In the world he had come from, romantic liaisons between Jews and gentiles were so common as to hardly cause notice. But the seventeenth century, in many ways, seemed as different as another planet.

Remembering a discussion he had had with Morris Roth, two days earlier, Mike felt his jaws tightening. Morris and Judith had spent hours in conversations with Rebecca, since she and her father had moved into their home. Many of those hours had been spent in Balthazar's room, gathered about his bed. Balthazar himself had been too ill to do much more than listen, but he had participated enough to make clear that Rebecca's view of things was fully shared by her widely traveled father. She was not-definitely not-some ignorant country girl filled with mindless fears and superstitions.

"They're worried about the Inquisition, Mike, more than anything else," Morris had told him. "The Inquisition has agents-Jesuits and Dominicans, mostly-attached to all of the Catholic armies. It seems that two years ago Emperor Ferdinand decreed something called the Edict of Restitution. According to that Edict, all property taken from the Catholic church by Protestants since the Reformation has to be turned back over. And the emperor insists on the forcible conversion of Protestants back to Catholicism. The Inquisition is there to carry out the order."

Mike had been puzzled. "All right. But I still don't understand what they're worried about. I always thought the Inquisition was aimed at heresy. Rebecca and Balthazar aren't heretics, Morris. They're not Christians to begin with."

Morris stared at him for a moment, before wiping his face with a hand. "I forget," he murmured. "We Jews live with our history so closely, we sometimes assume that everyone else knows it as well as we do."

He took away the hand and gave Mike a weary look. "The Office of the Holy Inquisition was set up in 1478 specifically for the purpose of ferreting out Jews, Mike. The Spanish forced all Jews to convert, starting in 1391. Dominican monks led mobs in pogroms on the Jewish quarters. Die or be baptized: those were the choices. A lot of Jews chose baptism. Conversos, they were called. Then the Spanish monarchy, with the Pope's blessing, set up the Inquisition to hunt down the ones who were still privately practicing Judaism. Those people were called marranos. 'Secret Jews.' "

Mike remembered the term. Rebecca had used it in the carriage to refer to herself, the first time he met her. "And then… ?"

Morris looked away. "Trial by torture. Auto-da-fй. That's where they gathered the Christians in a town in order to watch the festivities, complete with sermons and parades. All the heretics were brought out from the prisons. Secret Jews, mostly, along with secret Moslems-those were called Moriscoes-and whoever else had come under suspicion."

Roth shook his head. "The whole thing was insane, Mike. One of the reasons Christians in that era-this era, God help us-were so filthy was because it was dangerous to pay too much attention to cleanliness and personal hygiene. Who knows? You might be a secret Jew or a Moslem. Better to remain in an ostentatious state of Christian grime. And when disease comes, blame it on witches or the Jews."

Again, he wiped his face. "The ceremony-the auto-da-fй-would be climaxed by having the heretics burned alive at the stake." Sarcastically: "If you can call someone who's been in the hands of the Inquisition 'alive,' that is. Plenty of them died in the Church's torture chambers. Those-the corpses, I mean-would be burned at the stake so the Inquisition could legally inherit their property."

Seeing Mike's little start of surprise, Morris had chuckled harshly. "Oh yeah, did I forget to mention that? They have some peculiar notions about legal impartiality, in this day and age. The Inquisition is mostly financed by the seized property of the condemned. So you can just imagine how many verdicts of 'innocent' they ever handed down. Didn't take those holy men very long to become rich."