Greatlander

"Yer hewmn!" Damon Ryan, wakes in the wreckage of his ship, to the sight of Nicodemus, harper, unwilling mystic, outcast, staring down at him in disbelief. The amazement is mutual. Deep in uncharted space, his ship out of power, Damon hadn't expected to survive, much less find another member of his own species. So begins the partnership that threatens the very premise on which the Land was founded. Two very different people from unimaginably different cultures, one technological and wholly egalitarian, the other medieval, hierarchical, reflexively distrustful of change. But, in the irrevocably stranded spacer, Nicodemus recognizes a man more exiled than himself. All they can salvage from the wreckage is a little gold Damon carried for currency and his infocom, a wrist computer he dismisses as a toy. Although the spacer thinks of his accident as no more than the downside of random chance, Nicodemus believes he discerns the hand of the god. Damon will masquerade as his servant, while they seek how to fit him in to a society that frowns upon a masterless man. Yet as they travel the Land and the power of the infocom becomes apparent, Nicodemus begins to wonder: is it the man the god sent, or his machine?