No one responded immediately; then a young man who was actually rather low in the serving-room hierarchy cautiously sidled into the room. He stared at all of them.

“Food and wine for my father’s guests!” snapped Geronde automatically. “Quickly, man!”

But the servant stood where he was, staring blankly at Sir Geoffrey.

“Yes, yes!” said Geronde impatiently. “That is your Lord, come home again. Now, fetch what I told you. Now!”

The servant turned and ran into the serving room and out of sight.

They stood looking around themselves and at each other awkwardly. The Great Hall at Malvern was almost as big as the Great Hall at Malencontri. But after the buildings they had all recently spent some time in, at this moment it appeared dark and bare, with primitive-looking furniture.

The table on the dais, the high table, had its top unfolded and laid out upon its trestles. But the two low tables stretching away at right angles from it on the regular floor level were trestles only, with their table tops folded and leaned against the wall. Only a few slitlike windows let the late afternoon light of a raw spring day into the room. The two Hobs, bereft of their smoke wafts, and therefore standing on the floor, looked like thin little dark-skinned rabbits. They gazed wistfully at the cold and empty mouth of the single wide fireplace in the Great Hall; for of course, with the castle’s Lady gone, there was no fire in it. The air of the hall was chill.

“Oh!” said Geronde suddenly, like someone waking up from a deep sleep into automatic courtesy. “Pray be seated, m’lady, sirs!”

They all mounted the dais and sat down in the padded chairs at the top table, which looked like-and, in many instances were-literally barrels, partly cut out to make a chair with a back and a seat inside. The middle chair at the table was politely left open for the host, but Sir Geoffrey quickly took a seat near one end; and, with a second’s hesitation, Geronde sat down in the middle chair.

They had barely seated themselves before not one but four servants were back, spreading a tablecloth, putting mazers in front of each person and pewter plates, with a large spoon on the side. Two other servants were starting to lay logs for a fire in the fireplace.

Brian and Jim had automatically reached for the knives at their belt, but Sir Geoffrey and Sir Renel, after automatic hand movements toward nonexistent belts, sat looking embarrassed.

“Eating knives for your lord and Sir Renel,” snapped Geronde.

One of the servants ran off toward the serving room.

“Stay!” said Brian to the servant who had just filled his mazer. He drained it and held it out for a refill, which was immediately given him.

“Sir Brian!” said Geronde sternly.

“Damn it to hell, Geronde!” said Brian. “I’m thirsty. After what we’ve just been through, you’d deny me a fast first cup? You have my promise to sip nobly and politely from now on.”

“Sirs,” said Geronde to Sir Geoffrey and Sir Renel, “do not stand on manners, I beg you. Drink!”

The two men rather hesitantly picked up filled mazers-which neither of them had touched in years and which they handled with unusual caution-and conveyed them almost reverently to their lips. Geronde herself set an example by drinking from her own mazer.

Angie, Jim was glad to see, was already drinking from hers. Encouraged by this, he drank almost as deeply of his first cup as Brian had done. With the taste of the wine, the last of a feeling of being out of place left him. He drank almost as deeply from his mazer as Brian had done-and almost choked. None of them had thought to water their wine, though there were water pitchers on the table. His mazer was already being refilled, even though it had not been emptied.

“There will be a good fire already going in the serving room, little ones,” said Geronde gently. “Take your guest there, Hob Malvern!”

“Yes, m’lady!” he said, and followed the Hobs into the serving room.

Those at the high table took to the food, when it arrived, gratefully; for in fact, no one there had eaten recently. But better than the food was the release of tension that came with the eating and drinking. Gradually, even Sir Geoffrey and Sir Renel relaxed enough to take part in the nearly forgotten pattern of the social conversation they had been used to back in their homeland.

They talked only to each other, however. At the other end of the table, Brian’s normal ebullience revived with the food and drink; and he led the conversation there into something very much like normal chatter between himself and Jim, Angie and Geronde. But there was still a certain constraint even in Brian’s talk, Jim observed.

Geronde’s hardness toward her father had not softened, and there was a consciousness of this among the others that added an uneasy note to the gathering, even though everyone pretended that it was not there; and the manners of the day caused Geronde to speak to her father-when she did speak-with the same respect she would have shown if he had never left home. As if he had always remained Lord of the castle and in the castle.

Sir Geoffrey replied in the same manner. But it was clear to everyone that he would happily have traded all this courtesy for one word from Geronde that would indicate that the antagonism in her had diminished a little, and that she might sometime forgive him for all those things of which she had found him guilty.

There was nothing worse, Jim thought, than a polite dinner party; where everybody was avoiding what was foremost on the minds of all here. He found himself feeling almost as wistful about the ill feeling between daughter and father as the Hobs had shown standing forgotten on the floor, before Geronde had sent them to the serving room fireplace.

This would have been a very happy, celebratory occasion, he found himself thinking, if the daughter-father feeling had not been present. But it was-like a ghost with them at the table. It pushed them all into formal manners that were not in key with what should have been a celebratory occasion. A little anger stirred in Jim that neither Angie nor Brian-nor yet even Geronde herself-had ever chosen to tell him of these deeps of resentment in her toward her father.

Perhaps they had not known, either; but it was hard to believe that people as close to her as Brian and Angie had not.

Jim could see that the unhappiness was pressing on them, too; and gradually, after everyone had taken the edge off his or her very real hunger, and begun to reach the point where food and drink did not have such a great deal of interest, talk began to slow at both ends of the table.

“But you must be tired!” said Geronde to Jim and Angie. “Will you stay overnight here”-she cast a glance down the table-“with my father’s permission, of course?”

“Oh. Certainly, certainly, stay, I pray you, m’lord, m’lady,” said Sir Geoffrey hastily. “I have scarcely had time to meet either one of you, and to thank you. I know it would pleasure me; and I am sure it would pleasure Geronde.”

Angie cast a meaningful glance at Jim. Under the manners of the period, it was his job to announce whether they would stay or go; and Angie was clearly signaling that she believed they would do no good by hanging around here. Jim’s guess was that she sensed that Geronde, herself, in spite of her invitation, would just as soon have all her visitors out of the way, so she could stop being hostess and be herself with her father- except, of course, when servants were present.

“You tempt us, Geronde,” Jim said. “But you know, with Angie as well as my self gone from Malencontri, we need to get back there. There’s something about your own roof, you know, that calls you back. Also, as you know, while our servants are pretty well trained now, they can’t compare to yours; and they’ve been on their own with both of us gone. Something’ll have gone wrong. I’ve no idea what-but something will have. It always does when neither Angie nor I are there. You understand?”

“I do indeed know the way of servants,” said Geronde. “Therefore, though I would love to have you, I will not press you to stay.”

She turned and looked down the table to Sir Renel.

“Sir,” she said. “You are welcome to stay here as our guest until you have reason to go someplace else, of course-“

“I’m afraid, Geronde,” interrupted Angie quickly, “that Jim and I are guilty of having hoped to invite Sir Renel to stay with us. Particularly, it would pleasure us to take him back with us now; and then after he is settled down a little bit, perhaps he can come back for a visit with you and Sir Geoffrey. Besides, you’ll feel a duty to entertain him; but I know how busy you’ll be getting ready for your wedding.”

Whatever insensitivity Sir Renel originally had to the attitudes and emotions of those around him, it had been burned away by his years as a slave.

“Indeed, m’lady,” he said to Geronde, falling back with remarkable ease and a certain amount of obvious relish into the formality of earlier years, “blithe I would be to stay with you and Sir Geoffrey. But also I was hoping to visit with Sir James and his lady wife. I am most interested in one whom Sir Geoffrey tells me has renown as a Dragon Knight. Also, as Lady Angela has mentioned, I would not be a burden to you with your present cares and needs.”

“Alas,” said Geronde, “it cannot be denied there will be certain pressures upon me”-she darted a glance down at Sir Geoffrey-“but I will indeed have much to do; and would enjoy seeing you with more freedom of time on my hands, and more of a chance to enjoy your company. I must sound like an ill hostess to you, but perhaps Lady Angela is right and it would be best that you return with her and Lord James to Malencontri.”

After a few more stilted verbal exchanges that fooled no one and were not intended to-Jim had heard their exact counterparts a number of times as he had been leaving social gatherings back in his own twentieth-century world-it was established that Sir Renel would not consider Geronde an ill hostess; and Geronde would not consider Sir Renel an ungrateful guest who was scorning Malvern’s hospitality, because of a preference for the company of Jim and Angie. Sir Renel would leave with Angie and Jim. But now Jim himself was beginning to feel more and more uncomfortable.

He could not shake the feeling that there was something wrong with all this, the three of them going off (four, counting their own Hob, of course, though indeed the little hobgoblin might be at Malencontri right now, having returned there on a waft of smoke from Malvern). There was something badly wrong about leaving Sir Geoffrey here alone, abject and despairing, and Geronde as hard toward her parent as only Geronde could be.

It was not right. They were all on their feet now, ready to go their separate ways.

“Hold on!” said Jim.

He had spoken without thinking, but his anger was now out in the open. It was aimed primarily at Geronde, but also at Sir Geoffrey and all the rest of them, including himself.

He was stared back at awkwardly. He had broken the glass curtain of sociability with which they were covering up an uncomfortable situation; and the two responses to that in their historical period were to challenge him on it, or pretend to ignore what he had just said. Ignoring it had become a little difficult. On the other hand, Brian was his closest friend, Geronde would be in a sense acknowledging the situation by saying anything, Sir Geoffrey owed him his freedom from something very like slavery and Sir Renel had literally been rescued from that state.

Jim was aware of all this, and of Angie moving closer to him and looking back at the rest of them with him, and he had no solution to the impasse he had created. But it did not matter. He was now in the full tide of his own emotion, and he charged ahead without bothering to sort out his words ahead of time.

“This is all wrong!” he said. “Sir Geoffrey, tell your daughter why, though you had the palace that she saw you in and the wealth to go with it, you couldn’t come back to her, much less bring back what you had with you. Tell her!”

“Tell her, man!” said Jim. “Tell her, or I will!”

Jerkily, moving like a jointed doll, Sir Geoffrey turned to face Geronde.

“I could not,” he said to her. “I was under a curse.”

“Hasan offered me the palace and all that went with it that you saw in Palmyra, Geronde,” said Sir Geoffrey. “That was to be my price for accepting the curse and lifting it off him on to myself. It offered, I thought, all I had been searching for. But he laughed when I accepted.”

Sir Geoffrey took a deep breath, and without raising his eyes went on.

“I had gathered as much already from what he had said, although he had not made it plain in words until then,” he said. “But I was sure I would find some way to get out from under the curse, you see; and manage to take much of what I now had back to England. Indeed, I doubted a curse that would hold a Muslim would have any effect on a Christian. I was wrong; but when I found out how wrong, I could not come back. I could never escape the curse-but I could not bring it back to you.”

He raised his eyes to Geronde.

“So,” she said cuttingly to him, “as you say, in the end you dared not.”

“Tell her what the curse was,” said Jim. “Geronde, you saw Ahriman. He was real enough. What would have followed Sir Geoffrey home would have been real enough too.”

“Tell her what the curse is,” said Jim. “She may think differently after she hears.”

Sir Geoffrey looked at him, the knight’s face drawn and old.

“Surely, I need not-“ He stopped.

“Name it,” said Jim. “Don’t you see that you’re going to have to name it, for Geronde to understand?”

Sir Geoffrey took a deep breath and straightened, stiffening. He looked back at Geronde.

“I could not bring it back to you, my daughter,” he said in a harsh voice. “The curse was leprosy.”

“Leprosy!”

In England, as Brian had told Baiju, lepers were not driven into a desert by men with clubs and sticks; but certainly, here too, they would be as surely put out, not only of the society of those they knew, but of their home and family-to wander, begging and ringing a bell to warn everyone out of their path. The horror of the disease as it was known in England during the Middle Ages was no less than it was in the Near East.

“That was why he would not come back, Geronde,” said Jim softly.

Geronde’s eyes moved. She stared at Jim for a second. She made a small choking sound, looked once more at her father for another second. Then she leaped up, whirled and ran, down from the dais and out through the doorway leading toward the stairs to the tower, where her own solar room was-leaving silence behind her.

After a long moment Angie spoke, her voice clear in the hall.

“Sir Geoffrey,” she said, “I think what’s been between your daughter and yourself will begin to heal, now. But it will take time, and you will have to prove yourself a different man.”