In fact, glancing about, I saw not one single gory scene of slaughter and mayhem. Not one single martyr was being pincushioned with arrows or being burned to death at the stake. Oh, the decorations were done in a fairly heavy-handed, polychromed medieval style, but there was an attempt to suggest that maybe they weren’t trying to make you worship a snuff movie.
In keeping with the general lack of metals, there weren’t any of the usual heaps of gold encrusting the bastion of humility and austerity that you see in mainland churches, but there was instead an incredible amount of color and, of course, embroidery. I suppose it was pretty, in an abstract sort of way.
I leaned back, waiting for the boring thing to get over with. I noticed in the service a lot of small differences from the mass that I was used to, and I thought at first that I must be attending some sort of Protestant ceremony, a thought that pleased me not at all. The Catholics, at least, have a certain amount of dignity about them.
Most of the service was in Latin, I think, and could have been in Swahili, for all that I could understand of it. There was a sermon in Westronese, but what with my still-poor understanding of the language and the lousy acoustics of the cave we sat in, I didn’t understand that, either. After what seemed like dozens of hours, the long, dreary, and infinitely boring show was finally over and we could leave.
FOURTEEN
I asked Roxanna how far it was to the place where the wreck of The Brick Royal was kept, and it turned out to be pretty much on our way home. I insisted on visiting it.
There were three guards on duty at the only door into the warehouse. One each from the duke, the archbishop, and the warlock. It gave me the feeling that the local triad of powers-that-be weren’t all that loving and trusting of one another. The guards wore various sorts of waxed leather armor, and carried carefully polished quarterstaves, but had nothing of metal on them except for small belt knives, with blades barely two inches long.
With Roxanna’s help, I managed to convince them that it was all right for me to see my own stuff, but they weren’t really happy about it. I had the feeling that they each wanted to immediately report our visit to their respective superior, but at the same time, they were each afraid to let the place be guarded only by the competition. But that was their problem, not mine.
The boat itself took up the center of the huge cave. It was pretty much lying on its side, since the massive, winged keel was still fastened on. I walked around it, inspecting.
There was an eighteen-inch hole in the bottom, near the keel, where the mast had punched through. This was much smaller than my memories of the wreck had made it seem. If Adam had a bag of concrete on board, and it hadn’t gotten wet, doing a patch job wouldn’t be that hard. The mast itself was surprisingly intact, as best I could tell, as was much of the rigging. Even the sails looked to be in reasonably good shape, and we had a spare set of sails around somewhere, the first ones I had purchased, made of Dacron. Crawling up on top, I saw that the cockpit had been gutted, but in a careful sort of way. The instruments had been removed, presumably for safer storage, but nothing was actually destroyed. The upper deck was cracked where the mast had come down across it, but the solar still and the solar cells seemed to be okay. The hole in the deck where the mast had gone through was a mess, of course, but I thought it was repairable. With a month or two of work, The Brick Royal could be made ready for sea again.
While I was looking over the ship, Roxanna and the servants were scrounging through the piles of stuff that had originally been on board. There was an awful lot of it, so much so that it was hard to see how we could have gotten it all packed into just the one boat. Roxanna had found the kitchenware, and was much taken by it.
“My lord! I had heard tales of your wealth, but the seeing of it confounds me! You ate with utensils of solid silver?”
“We used those for eating, but they’re not silver. Silver tarnishes. That stuff is all stainless steel. It’s harder and tougher than silver, and less expensive, too.”
“But there is so much of it, and all for just you two men?”
“Well, first place off, while you people get along just fine with one only single spoon each, a formal place setting in my country wants two forks, two spoons and a dinner knife, plus a steak knife if we’re digesting big slabs of meat, which is many times. Then too, please, we started out with more that fifty people in boat, but most them got tired of sailing beside an ocean after a few months. I think Adam said that we had a table service for eighty with us,” I said.
“How could that many people fit onto one boat?”
“It was pretty nicely crowded. Then, too, in my country, people don’t have so much living space as you do here. Wealthy people live in houses that are ten times smaller than your apartment.”
“Could . . . could we take some of this back with us, my lord?”
“Certainly. Take whatever it pleases you want. Just remember that half of it belongs to equal partner Adam,” I said.
“Well, we wouldn’t need half of it, but perhaps a service for ten?”
“Fine. Don’t forget some plates, bowls, cups, and some sort of thing. All around here it’s someplace. And let’s make up a likely similar set to send for the Adam and Pelitier sisters.”
It took me two hours to find what I was looking for. Adam’s coin collection. It was half mine now, and I needed the money. There were two iron safes that each had a key lock with the keys still in them. Apparently, Adam had been less worried about someone robbing him than he was about losing the keys. The silver was all loose in one hefty strongbox that I couldn’t begin to lift. The box was fireproof, and squeezed in on one side was a Manila envelope filled with passports, wallets, identification, and insurance papers. It was a good spot for all that currently useless stuff, and I left it in there. The gold was packed with each piece in a separate little plastic pouch to protect the finish of the beautiful coins, and then ten to fifty pouches, depending on the denomination, to the sturdy canvas bag. I took two bags of the gold, one for Adam and one for myself, and used four of the bags to hold a few fistfuls each of old silver quarters. Heavy stuff, it was all that I wanted to carry. I locked the chests and put the keys in my pouch, my present outfit not having any pockets.
Roxanna and the servants had the tableware sorted out by then, and had put some kitchen utensils in with them, which was fine by me. They were all ogling and talking about everything, even the plastic garbage bags that everything had been wrapped in. A minor case of culture shock, I suppose.
I did some scrounging myself, and in the course of things came upon the mirror-fronted medicine cabinet that had been on the wall of the boat’s head. The face that looked back at me was ghastly. I’d never tried to grow a beard before, and now I knew why. It was scraggly and thin, and had twice as many hairs on the right side as on the left. The mustache was almost as bad, and I promptly resolved to get rid of the thing, local fashions or no local fashions. A few more minutes were required to find my shaving kit, and with the medicine chest under my arm, I rejoined the group.
As I put my reavings along with theirs, Felicia looked at the medicine chest and screamed. Soon, they were all crowding around the mirror, mumbling about what an incredible piece of magic it was. I was the longest time getting them calmed down, trying in my poor Westronese to explain that it was only a simple device, with nothing unholy about it. They eventually relaxed, but they never believed that it wasn’t magic. In their eyes, I had become a mighty sorcerer.
“Well, you never look down on bowl of water? You never see face looked back?” I asked Roxanna.
“Yes, of course, but then water is magic, too.”
I shook my head and went back to scrounging. The local beds were narrow, hard, and lumpy, so when I came across one of the big, queen-sized air mattresses that married couples had used early in the trip, and a sleeping bag to fit it, I put the bag and mattress into the “take it home” pile. I thought a bit, and put a second set of bedding in Adam’s pile, since big people have even more trouble getting comfortable that us ordinary critters. Then I went back a third time and brought over enough air mattresses for our hosts and both sets of servants. They were people, too, no matter what the local mores said.