“And we’re not suggesting anything,” Adam said. “We’re saying that this is one tightly controlled little island, and if anything major is going down out here, it’s being done by you or the duke.”
“Or more likely yet, by the archbishop,” I added.
“But can’t you understand?” The warlock said, “I’m your friend! I’m on your side. I’m one of the good guys!”
“Then why aren’t you doing something about stopping the bad guys?” I asked.
I didn’t get an answer.
THIRTY-THREE
“So, Brother Bartholomew, is all in readiness?” the archbishop said.
“If you mean, have I done your dirty deed, the answer is yes, Your Excellency.”
“Good, good, my son. Consider that on this occasion, all you have done is to have some of the outsiders’ stolen property returned to them. If your soul still troubles you, go to confession when you are done here. Only, please go to the cathedral confessor, rather than the one in your order.”
“So that word of your deeds will not be bandied about the church? And if you must make me kill, why must you make me kill in such a long, drawn out, and painful manner?”
“Because it will be better if the deed takes place off our island. Bartholomew, you are becoming rude, undisciplined, and impertinent! Any more of that and you will be in line for some serious disciplining, boy! Now, be off with you!”
* * *
* * *
It was grey dawn again, twenty-four hours after the fire that killed The Brick Royal. Our ladies were lined up on the shore of the island, surrounded by their servants and employees, all of them looking tired. Getting ready to go had cost us all a night’s sleep. The small sails of The Concrete Canoe were drawing well, and Adam and I were at sea once more.
We weren’t exactly running away between two days, but early dawn was close enough. We were waving good-bye to our women on shore. All three of them had wanted to come with us, but that was plainly impossible. For one thing, there wasn’t much room on The Concrete Canoe, and most of what there was was taken up by food, three barrels of water, and the three crates of agricultural oddities that the chief gardener had given us. For another, well, they were all good, warm, and tolerant women. They were intelligent, learned, and competent. They were beautiful, loving, and sexy. But they weren’t tough women, and we had one hell of a tough trip ahead of us.
Because of good luck and absentmindedness, I had never gotten around to having the agricultural crates sent down to our warehouse, and thus they were saved from the disastrous fire. We’d managed to scrounge up a few pounds of Super-Hemp thread, and along with several changes of clothing and the strong nets that our fishermen had used; well, it would have to do. The huge drift net that Adam had ordered months before wouldn’t be done for weeks, and had to be left behind. Making a fuss and taking delivery before it was completed might have tipped our hand.
We were bugging out, and neither of us liked it. It isn’t easy to leave a fight unfought, and it isn’t easy to leave a woman you love behind, but it had to be done, so we were doing it.
Whoever the bastards were, they had tried to kill us, but they had failed, and they hadn’t stopped us from going ahead with our plans. Then they tried arson, and while that had worked all too well, they still hadn’t stopped us, although they sure had slowed us down. We were worried that their next attempt would have something to do with our ladies, a kidnaping attempt or some such, and we couldn’t let that happen. Our women were just too fragile, too naive, and too trusting of their world. Being exposed to reality’s raw side would be a soul-shattering experience for them.
We could see no practical way to guard and protect our ladies, not while we were there on the Western Islands, and the targets of some unknown organization’s hate. We were vastly outnumbered, and while they knew who and where we were, we knew absolutely nothing about them.
However, without us, the girls should be perfectly safe. We ourselves had to be the threat that the bad guys were reacting against. Nobody would have any reason to touch our ladies once we were gone. Still, just to be on the safe side, we had retained the services of the fishermen and of Adam’s porters, we had paid them each three years in advance, and we had made them each swear to defend Roxanna and the Pelitier sisters with their lives.
We’d left all the silver we had with the girls, which was enough to make them independently wealthy for life, even though it really wasn’t worth much to the two of us out in the real world. The gold we took back with us, since we’d need it in the weeks to come. Depending on the market, it was worth something like a hundred seventy-five thousand dollars, money that we’d need to prepare the way for our return.
Because we most definitely intended to return, even if we did have to sail across the Pacific Ocean in a twenty-foot open boat.
Once, before the fire, we’d owned a complete set of navigational charts, showing every square foot of salt water in the world. What with our electronic gear, we’d never used anything so crude as paper charts, except a few times to show people where we’d been and where we were going. Now that we really needed them, they were gone. Murphy’s Law still rules.
Our electronic navigation gear was gone, along with all of the radios, telephones, and faxes. We had no sonar, no radar, and no satellite weather hookups. Hell, we didn’t even have running lights!
We lacked even a pocket calculator, and the sole bit of electronics available to us was my wristwatch. Adam had lost his in the fire. We had debated fastening my watch to the binnacle, but we finally decided that leaving it on my wrist would keep its temperature more stable, and thus help maintain its accuracy. We did have a compass, mounted on the binnacle, and Adam’s antique brass sextant had survived the fire, though its mirrors were a bit scorched. Most importantly, the one man on the island that we were sure that we could trust, the chief gardener, Master Maimonides ibn Tibbon, had managed to obtain a Westronese ocean navigational chart for us, and he was able to give us a fix on our position. Thus, we knew where we were, and from that, we could figure out how to get to where we wanted to be.
Or perhaps I should say, we thought we knew where we were. The Western Islands drifted around one of the loneliest areas in all of the oceans, not too far from the equator and a few thousand miles west of South America. Get a globe, find the place where the manufacturer has chosen to put his company logo, and you’re likely to be near the spot where the Western Isles are.
Not that we had a globe. We had a strange, hand-drawn chart. The Westronese did not use degrees North and South for latitude, or East and West for longitude. They used hours west of a reference point (the original location of the islands off the coast of France), for longitude. If noon at your present location happened eleven and a half hours later than noon happened at the original location of the Western Isles, then your longitude was eleven and a half hours.
The distance from the North Pole to the South Pole was divided into twelve latitude hours, which were just a tiny bit shorter than the hours of longitude. This difference in length was due to the way that the spin of the Earth bulges the equator and flattens out the Earth at the poles, changing it from a perfect sphere into an oblate spheroid. Theirs was as rational a system as any, I suppose, except for the way that their fixed reference point no longer existed.
In medieval fashion, the world map that we were given had East at the top, at zero hours, and Europe at the bottom. What wasn’t medieval was that the rest of the world was now charted out in between.
The North Pole was stretched out to a vertical line on the left, while the South Pole was another line to the right. Their arrangement greatly distorted the areas around the poles, but then the Westronese never went near the Arctic or the Antarctic, so to them it didn’t matter. Theirs was a very pragmatic technology, with little foundation in the way of theoretical science. For the tropical waters that they were interested in, their maps were more than adequate.