Witch Doctor - Wiz in Rhyme-3 by Christopher Stasheff Page B

glorious sunsets of my life. The only ones to beat it had been out in the Great Plains, where the landscape is mostly sky. Here, I was high enough up to have a lot of sky again, though not quite as much. Everything looked golden and rose, every mountaintop-and there were a lot of mountaintops. I wondered where I was-the Pyrenees? The Alps? Was I even in Europe?
    Or even on Terra?
    I shelved that thought, but it shook me enough so that I stopped contemplating the sunset, I turned back to the pass, saw its huge granite walls towering to either side, and decided I wanted to be through it before the light completely failed. I hurried, with a wary
    eye above me, glancing from side to side-I'd heard that mountain eers, historically, tended to be rather territorial. I'd also heard that they had reasons. But if they were watching, I guess they figured I was no threat, or was too small a fly to swat, because nothing happened. in fact, the only living creature I saw was a kind of mountain goat, who watched me for a while, then jumped into a shadow and disappeared. He was beautiful, but the experiences of the day made it seem rather spooky.
    So, as I came to the other end of the pass, I was wondering what I was going to do about being alone in a strange country, in what was promising to be an extremely dark night.
    I was very glad to see the camp fires below me.
    Not very far below, and I could tell they were camp fires, because of the tents. But the hallucination was still on-the men between the tents and the fires were wearing armor covered by long white tabards, and leading Percherons.
    l sighed, squared my weary shoulders, and started the downhill hike.
    One of the younger ones looked up, saw me, and called out,
    "Stranger!" He lugged out a sword the size of the Eiffel Tower and brandished it as he came toward me, demanding, "Friend or foe?"
    "Either one," I snapped-that sword got my back up. "Take your choice."
    He frowned at me-it wasn't one of the expected answers. But his buddies dropped what they were doing and came clustering around; I hadn't seen that much steel in one place since I'd crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. "Declare yourself," one of the older ones demanded. That was exactly what I had been trying not to do. "Saul Delacroix Bremener," I told them, and nothing more.
    "Saul Delacroix?" He frowned at his companions. "Named for the king or the apostle, and one of the cross."
    "But Paul was not of the cross," one of the others objected. "He never knew the Savior, in life."
    "Still, 'tis a goodly name," another said, then moved aside quickly as a tall, broad-bodied man with grizzled hair stepped through. He had a face like tanned leather and a jaw like a vise. The commander, at a guess.
    He looked me up and down and pronounced, "His attire is odd, but he has no horse or arms. He cannot be a gentleman; he must be a peasant." Then he turned away, dismissing me with a gesture. "Let him stay; but he must draw water and fetch wood for the fire." He glanced back at me. "See to it, fellow."
    The command did it. "Peasant" got to me, and the bit about menial labor made it worse-but the command made my anger turn cold and active.
    "Fetch it yourself," I snapped. "I may be a commoner, but I'm no serf-and I am a gentleman." Which was true, on a technicality-I was a scholar, after all. By their standards.
    "Oho!" A glint came into the commander's eye. "If you are a gentleman, then you are a gentleman-at-arms-for there is no other sort!
    " Great. To be a gentle man, you had to be capable of violence. oddly, the idea appealed to me; it fit into my configurational pattern of contradictory concepts. Hypocrite? Who, me? I just calls
    'em as I sees 'em.
    "Yet he is clearly not a knight, or he would wear a sword. Ho, Gilbert! You aspire to knighthood-prove yourself! Test this stranger for Me! I1
    A kid with only a small sword grinned and stepped up to me, dropping into a wrestler's crouch and beckoning.
    I was appalled. He was at least six