The Merry Men of the Riverworld

Wildside Press
www.wildsidepress.com

Copyright ©1992 by John Gregory Betancourt; "Introduction" copyright 1994 by John Gregory Betancourt

First appeared in "Tales of Riverworld", 1992

When you're a kid, reading science fiction is the ultimate escape. You get to explore strange new worlds, boldly go where even television shows can't take you, and meet all sorts of fascinating characters in incredible situations. It's Wonderland.

When you've been writing the stuff for years, though, that initial gosh-wow feeling starts to fade. You become tired, a little jaded, a little unimpressed. Your uncle is an Martian? Aren't they all. Alien fleets are massing near Jupiter? Don't they always. The galaxy's collapsing? It happens a thousand times a year. That's when you have to go back to Wonderland.

When I was asked to write a story set in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld, at first I was thrilled and excited. Here was a trip to Wonderland already scheduled with the bus parked adn waiting at my door. The books in the Riverworld series—
To Your Scattered Bodies Go, The Fabulous Riverboat, The Dark Design, The Magic Labyrinth
, and
The Gods of Riverworld
—are filled with that magic, that sense of wonder, that draws children like moths to its flame.

It was great. I reread the series, picked up the themes I liked, and and refilled myself with that sense of wonder, I wrote the best story I could, full of swashbuckling action, heroic escapes, and favorite historical characters.

It seems critics and fans alike thought “The Merry Men of Riverworld” among the best non-Farmer Riverworld stories in the collection. I hope you agree.

—John Betancourt

The man in green paused dramatically at the top of the rocky cliff, one hand shading his eyes against the sun. His shoulder-length hair, the color of wheat, ruffled faintly in the breeze. He carried a yew longbow and had a quiver of bamboo-fletched arrows slung across his shoulder. With the sun on his face and a thick, dark forest at his back, he cut quite a striking figure.

Below, the River wound like an endless silver ribbon as far as he could see. On its far bank, half a mile up, stood a town—a ramshackle accumulation of forty or fifty log houses. Smoke rose from clay-brick chimneys, and men and women dressed in brightly colored robes moved among the buildings.

He heard a woman's low voice singing a tune he didn't recognize in a language he didn't know. His men would have warned him if there was any danger, but he still didn't like surprises. He'd speak to Will or Tuck about it later.

Slowly, he dropped his right hand from his eyes. In a single movement he whirled, drew his bow, and notched an arrow.

It was a half-naked woman with skin the color of chocolate, and she was carrying a bundle of bamboo. She dropped the bamboo in a clattered heap, her mouth gaping in surprise and fear. Her hair was long and black, Robin saw, and she wore a grass skirt. Her naked breasts were small and deeply tanned.

“Ya linya!” she breathed. “Me ton fevin!”

Putting down his bow, Robin leaped onto a low boulder and looked her up and down. His voice was low, powerful, when he asked, “Do you speak the king's English?”

The woman started to back away.

Robin gave a whistle. The woods around them suddenly erupted with motion—two dozen men from the trees, from the bushes, seemingly from the very air itself. All wore green and carried longbows.

“I am Robin Hood,” he said. “Welcome to Sherwood, m'lady!”

Screeching in terror, the woman turned and fled into the trees. Robin threw back his head and laughed.

“Sir Robin!” said the tall man he called Little John. “On the River—”

Robin turned to follow his friend's gaze.

Coming around a bend in the river was one of the strangest looking riverboats he'd ever seen. They had encountered three others on the River, but this one—

It was huge, easily two hundred feet from pointed prow to broad, flat stern, with a large wheel on either side and a third wheel churning water at the rear. Its three tall decks had intricate woodwork, and twin smokestacks rose from a central pilot's cabin. Sunlight glinted off glass windows and what looked like brass railings. Several dozen men did various tasks on the upper two decks, while sword-bearing guards maintained a vigilant watch on the lowest.

“Incredible,” Robin said. He stared, looking thoughtful.

“What do you think?” a portly Friar Tuck asked.

“I've never seen anything like it,” Will Scarlet said.

“Who could have built it?” asked Little John

“A better question is, where did they get the metal,” said Mutch. He'd been a civil engineer in the last life and tended toward practical questions. “Did you see those windows? That was glass! Real
glass
!”

“I think,” Robin said, sitting down, “we're going to wait for the riverboat's return. Will, Ben—scout the hill. There should be a grailstone on the other side. If the natives are peaceful, we'll spend the night here.”

“Yes, Robin,” Will Scarlet said. He and Ben Taylor slipped into the forest like shadows.

While Robin stared out across the River, deep in thought, the rest of his men began setting up camp: clearing the area, gathering wood, building a circle of stones to hold their fire. After a minute Robin opened his pack, took out a small square of cigarette paper, a tiny clay jar with a stopper, and a carved fishbone pen. He opened the jar, dipped his pen into a thin grayish ink, and began to write. His script was tiny, meticulous.

When he finished, he wrapped the paper around an arrow's shaft, tied it in place with human-hair string, and returned the arrow to his quiver. Now it was just a matter of time.

The natives turned out to be surprisingly friendly, considering the language barrier. They were a shy people, quiet and simple in their ways, all living in grass huts around a grailstone. They allowed Robin and his men to fit their grails into the unused slots in the grailstone, then clustered at the far side of the village to keep a wary vigil.

Robin counted twenty-five men and thirty women. He noticed each man kept a long, bone-tipped spear close at hand, though none made a hostile move.

“Polynesian,” Friar Tuck suggested, “or from another of the Pacific Islands.” He had been a sociologist before being recruited into the merry men: one of the reasons he'd joined was to see more of the people resurrected along the River's banks. “Probably never saw a white man in their natural lives...”

Nodding, Robin collected his grail from the grailstone after the charge had come. “Do you think they'll attack?”

Tuck hesitated. “They were a friendly people. But I wouldn't want to press our luck.”

“Come on, then,” Robin told the rest of his men. “Back to the River. We shouldn't push our welcome by eating in front of them.”

He led the way back to the cliff. Will Scarlet was standing guard, keeping an eye out for the riverboat.

“No sign of it,” he reported.

Robin nodded slowly. “I'm sure they're on a scouting mission this time,” he said. “They'll be back.”

“In such a craft?” Little John said, his bushy black eyebrows coming together in a frown. “They could go to the ends of the River. Why should they return here?”

“Any of a dozen reasons.” Robin hunkered down and opened his grail. There were thin crispy wafers, little packets of what looked like peanut butter, strips of some dried, cured meat, and a little flask of brandy ... as well as the usual tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum.

Robin took a chew of the meat and continued, “First, that riverboat's one of the most valuable pieces of equipment on the River—but it burns wood. They'll have to put ashore whenever they run low. I'm betting they only stop at prearranged safe bases, and if they're scouting new territory they won't stop at all. They'll head home when they start to run low on fuel. Maybe two days, maybe three. Second, they didn't have enough people on board for an extended journey. If it were my riverboat and I were going far, I'd pack it with armed men. Every petty tyrant on the River will try to steal it, given half a chance.”

“Shades of Robert Fulton...” Little John murmured.

“Unless you're wrong,” Will Scarlet told Robin.

Robin flashed a dazzling grin. “Of course,” he said. “If it hasn't returned in a week, we'll push on.”

In the old days, before the Resurrection, Robin had been a classically trained actor named Edmond Hope Bryor. He'd played minor parts on stage for twenty-two years, since the age of six, before his big move to Hollywood and the silver screen. After three tragic love stories, eight forgettable westerns (critics admired the horses more than his acting talent), and one gangster movie where a young Spencer Tracy shot him in the end, he made the great leap to the enfant terrible of acting: television.

Cast as Robin Hood for the fledgling Dupont Network's twice-a-week Robin Hood and His Merry Men would have made Edmond Bryor a hero to tens of thousands of children. He'd known that when he signed onto the project. He'd also known he was going nowhere fast in movies, just as he'd gone nowhere fast on stage.

Only Diablo, the ill-tempered white stallion the producer insisted he ride, threw him on the first day of shooting Robin Hood and His Merry Men. Edmond had no real memories after that, just a vision of the sound stage floor rushing up to meet him. A broken neck, he assumed; instant death or close to it.

In three years of wandering the River's banks, he hadn't met anyone he'd known in the old life to verify his suspicions. It was just as well, he often thought; he'd given up his old life and assumed a new one: that of Robin Hood. It was the role he was born to play, a childhood dream he'd never truly outgrown.

As the only son of two Thespians, he'd been molded to their ideals, with elocution lessons, dance lessons, and music lessons instead of play-time. He knew it had warped him in subtle ways. Awakening on the River, he'd decided to start over again, to live the sort of life he'd always wanted for himself, full of adventure and romance. And so his wanderings began.

He assumed the name Robin Hood and began journeying up the River, righting any wrongs he found, on the pretense of searching for King Richard the Lionhearted. Play-acting, yes, but it was curiously satisfying. Along the way he'd found others willing to share that quest, and he'd filled his band of merry men from their numbers. It seemed his dream was contagious. He'd even talked a politics-weary Abraham Lincoln into abandoning a new political career and assuming the role of Little John. They'd been fast friends ever since.

Two night later, a light hand touched Robin's shoulder. He was awake instantly, gazing up into Mutch's stoic face.

“You were right,” Mutch said. “It's come back.”

Robin leaped to his feet and ran to the cliff, as close to the edge as he dared stand. The riverboat was easy to spot; its windows shone with a clear yellow light, like beacons in the darkness. What kind of lamps, he wondered, did they have on board? What kind of people could civilize a world so quickly?

“Build up the fire,” he said.

The others obeyed, throwing wood onto the embers, fanning them until a huge bonfire blazed.

By the time the riverboat drew even with the cliffs, Robin had his bow strung and his special arrow notched. He'd had two weeks of intense archery training for his television show; the producers had planned to bill him as the greatest archer of the twentieth century. To his surprise, he'd found he had a talent for it, and he'd honed that talent to perfection in three more years of practice along the River.

He aimed, then let his arrow fly. For an instant his eyes lost it in the darkness, then he saw it hit the pilot house's door with a thunk audible all the way across the water. The door opened. A short, broad man was silhouetted for an instant. He saw the arrow and its note, grabbed them, and slammed the door closed. The riverboat's paddlewheels continued their steady chugging.

“They didn't stop,” Tuck said.

“They will,” Robin said.

“What if they don't understand English?” he persisted.

Mutch said, “The riverboat is an American invention. They will speak English.”

Little John asked, “What did you tell them, Sir Robin?”

“I'm sure you'd approve—the truth.”

He inclined his large head. “Ah, but which one?”

Robin smiled. “Mine.”

The riverboat slowed, but did not stop. It almost seemed as if some debate raged within. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. Finally it began to turn, the huge rear paddlewheel coming to a halt. It began to drift slowly downRiver with the current, away from them.

“What does that mean?” Friar Tuck demanded.