The Excalibur Alternative

"No, but I can be confident that if I tell the sentry to inform any or all of them that I am... otherwise occupied they'll leave us in peace," he told her with a slow smile.

"Shocking! I am shocked that such thoughts could divert you from the requirements of your duty, My Lord!"

"Blame it on those garments our `Commander' has provided you, and not on any weakness on my part," he suggested, and she laughed like a flurry of silver harp notes. He supposed a proper husband should still find the tight-fitting, one-piece garment horrifyingly immodest and forbid his lady wife to display herself in public so revealingly clad. But the truth was that that shockingly immodest garment suited her tall, slender shapeliness amazingly well. Not all the women attached to the company were equally fortunate, although by now all of them had been forced to more or less adjust to it, since they had no option. But Sir George had decided, after a deplorably easy tussle with his conscience, that this was one i

"And what, My Lord, did you have in mind to occupy yourself with, if I might ask?" she demanded.

"Of course you may ask, My Lady," he told her with a grave courtesy only slightly undermined by the twinkle in his eyes. "However, I believe, all things being considered, that it would probably be simpler for me to demonstrate rather than attempt to explain."

"Would it indeed?" she purred.

"Oh, yes," he told her softly, rising and walking around the chessboard towards her. "Indeed it would."

"It seems a bit different today, M'lord."

"A masterful understatement, Walter," Sir George said dryly.

The two of them stood side-by-side beneath Sir George's ba

It was a large, sprawling formation. Computer had provided Sir George with regularly updated estimates of the maximum size of the force the native alliance could put into the field, but as the baron gazed out over that surging sea of hostile, four-armed warriors, he wondered if Computer had gotten his sums straight this time. According to Computer's current tabulation, the eight tribes which had come together, after a fashion, under the leadership of the senior war chief of the Laahstaar counted a total of approximately forty-one thousand warriors, of whom perhaps three-fourths could actually be brought to any field of battle. That should have meant that the maximum Sir George, his men, and their own native allies, led by the Sherhai, Naamaal, and Tairnanto tribes, could face would be some thirty-one thousand.

At the moment, it looked to Sir George as if at least twice that number of broad-footed natives were busy trampling the purple-bladed grass into dust as they headed for his own position. No doubt anxiety was making him count at least some of them more than once, but it still looked like an enormous force.

Well, of course it does! he told himself. The bastards are twice our size, after all. No wonder it looks as if there are twice as many of them!

"Well, M'lord, I'd best be getting over to Sir Richard." The master of horse looked at his commander for a moment, and his smile was crooked. "Do us all a favor, and try not to get yourself killed," he suggested.

"I was pla

"With all due respect to your lady wife, M'lord, it wasn't her I was thinking about just now," Ski

Sir George glanced upward at the air car, and grunted something between a laugh and an exasperated sigh.

"I take your point," he told his henchman. "Now take yourself over to Sir Richard and see to it that he doesn't let his enthusiasm get the better of him!"

"Don't you be worrying over that, Sir," Ski

"You're an evil man, Walter Ski

"Aye?" Ski

He laughed again, and then he and his gelding trotted off towards the mounted human force clustered about Sir Richard's personal standard. Sir George would have preferred to be over there in Satan's saddle himself, but he couldn't. Officially, the army of natives about him had been assembled by the demon-jester. It was even possible that the demon-jester himself actually believed that, but Sir George and all of his troops knew better. It was the baron, working through the translating offices of Computer, who'd truly put that army together. And it was also the baron to whom everyone in that army, natives as well as humans, looked for command.

Some of the friendly tribes shared generations of mutual enmity, with blood feuds as tangled as any Scottish clan might have boasted. Common need and the scent of advantage to be gained might have brought them together temporarily, but the mere thought of finding themselves under the command of one of their cherished enemies would have been intolerable. Sir George, on the other hand, was the chosen field commander of the "godlike" demon-jester, the strange, alien champion whose vastly outnumbered troops had completely destroyed the Thoolaas' power and killed almost five thousand of their warriors for the loss of only four of his own. He knew they considered him almost as unca

Personally, he could have done without the role of champion or the responsibilities which came with it, but he'd had no choice but to accept them both. And so he'd spent the last month (as nearly as Father Timothy could calculate it) combining the warriors of the three principal tribes allied with the demon-jester and the smaller bands of their vassal tribes into an army that, as of this morning, counted nineteen thousand natives and his own English. It hadn't been a simple task, yet in some ways it had been far easier than he had anticipated. The native leaders were as treacherous, scheming, and unscrupulous as the leaders of any feudal army Earth had ever boasted, but they had nowhere near the experience at translating their treacherous schemes into success. Sir George hadn't spent the last fifteen years of his life rising to command in the feudal armies of England without learning to deal with much more capable plotters. The graduate of a far more sophisticated school, he'd played the various combinations skillfully off against one another.

The hardest part had been keeping the demon-jester at arm's length while he did it. The baron still was far from clear about why the demon-jester and his guild were bothering with this world in the first place. So far as he could tell, the locals had absolutely nothing that should have attracted merchants who commanded the demon-jester's marvels and "technology," and even if they did possess some unsuspected treasure, the demon-jester's roundabout way of going after it seemed particularly stupid. There had to be some reason for the mysterious guild to be involved here, even if Sir George couldn't imagine what that reason was, but if the guild was determined to control trade with the natives here, why not simply move in with their superior weapons? A small force armed with the fire weapons the dragon-man guards carried could easily have defeated an army far larger than the one currently headed in Sir George's direction... even under the demon-jester's inept command. Well, perhaps not with the demon-jester in command, he amended. After all, the demon-jester had raised military incompetence to a level of art not even a Frenchman could have rivaled.