To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (12 page)

The passage took about thirty minutes. It caused anxiety in some—no doubt of Frigate and Ruach being worried—but it also exhilarated all of them. The boredom and the sullenness were, temporarily, at least, gone.

The Hadji
came out into the sunshine of another lake. This was about four miles wide and stretched northward as far as they could see. The mountains abruptly fell away; the plains on both sides resumed the usual mile width.

There were fifty or so craft in view, ranging from pine dugouts to two-masted bamboo boats. Most of them seemed to be engaged in fishing. To the left, a mile away, was the ubiquitous grailstone, and along the shore were dark figures. Behind them, on the plain and hills, were bamboo huts in the usual style of what Frigate called Neo-Polynesian or, sometimes, Post-Mortem Riparian Architecture.

On the right, about half a mile from the exit of the canyon, was a large log fort. Before it were ten massive log docks with a variety of large and small boats. A few minutes after
The Hadji
appeared, drums began beating. These could be hollow logs or drums made with tanned fish skin or human skin. There was already a crowd in front of the fort, but a large number swarmed out of it and from a collection of huts behind it. They piled into the boats, and these cast off.

On the left bank, the dark figures were launching dugouts, canoes, and single-masted boats.

It looked as if both shores were sending boats out in a competition to seize
The Hadji
first.

Burton took the boat back and forth as required, cutting in between the other boats several times. The men on the right were closer; they were white and well-armed, but they made no effort to use their bows.
A man standing in the prow of a warcanoe with thirty paddlers shouted at them, in German, to surrender.

“You will not be harmed!”

“We come in peace!” Frigate bawled at him.

“He knows that!” Burton said. “It’s evident that we few aren’t going to attack them!”

Drums were beating on both sides of The River now. It sounded as if the lake shores were alive with drums. And the shores were certainly alive with men, all armed. Other boats were being put out to intercept them. Behind them, the boats that had first gone out were pursuing but losing distance.

Burton hesitated. Should he bring
The Hadji
on around and go back through the channel and then return at night? It would be a dangerous maneuver, because the twenty thousand-foot-high walls would block out the light from the blazing stars and gas sheets. They would be almost blind.

And this craft did seem to be faster than anything the enemy had. So far, that is. Far in the distance, tall sails were coming swiftly toward him. Still, they had the wind and current behind them, and if he avoided them, could they outstrip him when they, too, had to tack?

All the vessels he had seen so far had been loaded with men, thus slowing them down. Even a boat that had the same potentialities as
The Hadji
would not keep up with her if she were loaded with warriors.

He decided to keep on running upRiver.

Ten minutes later, as he was running close-hauled, another large warcanoe cut across his path. This held sixteen paddlers on each side and supported a small deck in the bow and the stern. Two men stood on each deck beside a catapult mounted on a wooden pedestal. The two in the bow placed a round object which sputtered smoke in the pocket of the catapult. One pulled the catch, and the arm of the machine banged against the crossbeam. The canoe shuddered, and there was a slight halt in the deep rhythmic grunting of the paddlers. The smoking object flew in a high arc until it was about twenty feet in front of
The Hadji
and ten feet above the water. It exploded with a loud noise and much black smoke, quickly cleared away by the breeze.

Some of the women screamed, and a man shouted. He thought, there is sulfur in this area. Otherwise, they would not have been able to make gunpowder.

He called to Loghu and Esther Rodriguez to take over at the tiller. Both women were pale, but they seemed calm enough, although neither woman had ever experienced a bomb.

Gwenafra had been put inside the fo’c’sle. Alice had a yew bow in her hand and a quiver of arrows strapped to her back. Her pale skin contrasted shockingly with the red lipstick and the green eyelid-makeup. But she had been through at least ten running battles on the water, and her nerves were as steady as the chalk cliffs of Dover. Moreover, she was the best archer of the lot. Burton was a superb marksman with a firearm but he lacked practice with the bow. Kazz could draw the riverdragonhorn bow even deeper than Burton, but his marksmanship was abominable. Frigate claimed it would never be very good; like most preliterates, he lacked a development of the sense of perspective.

The catapult men did not fit another bomb to the machine. Evidently, the bomb had been a warning to stop. Burton intended to stop for nothing. Their pursuers could have shot them full of arrows several times. That they had refrained meant that they wanted
The Hadji
crew alive.

The canoe, water boiling from its prow, paddles flashing in the sun, paddlers grunting in unison, passed closely to the stern of
The Hadji.
The two men on the foredeck leaped outward, and the canoe rocked. One man splashed into the water, his fingertips striking the edge of the deck. The other landed on his knees on the edge. He gripped a bamboo knife between his teeth; his belt held two sheaths, one with a small stone axe and the other with a hornfish stiletto. For a second, as he tried to grab onto the wet planking and pull himself up, he stared upward into Burton’s eyes. His hair was a rich yellow, his eyes were a pale blue, and his face was classically handsome. His intention was probably to wound one or two of the crew and then to dive off, maybe with a woman in his arms. While he kept
The Hadji
crew busy, his fellows would sail up and engage
The Hadji
and pour aboard, and that would be that.

He did not have much chance of carrying out his plan, probably knew it, and did not care. Most men still feared death because the fear was in the cells of their bodies, and they reacted instinctively. A few had overcome their fear, and others had never really felt it.

Burton stepped up and banged the man on the side of the head with his axe. The man’s mouth opened; the bamboo knife fell out; he collapsed facedown on the deck. Burton picked up the knife, untied the
man’s belt, and shoved him off into the water with his foot. At that, a roar came from the men in the warcanoe, which was turning around. Burton saw that the shore was coming up fast, and he gave order to tack. The vessel swung around, and the boom swung by. Then they were beating across The River, with a dozen boats speeding toward them. Three were four-man dugouts, four were big warcanoes, and five were two-masted schooners. The latter held a number of catapults and many men on the decks.

Halfway across The River, Burton ordered
The Hadji
swung around again. The maneuver allowed the sailships to get much closer, but he had calculated for that. Now, sailing close-hauled again,
The Hadji
cut water between the two schooners. They were so close that he could clearly see the features of all aboard both craft. They were mostly Caucasian, though they ranged from very dark to Nordic pale. The captain of the boat on the portside shouted in German at Burton, demanding that he surrender.

“We will not harm you if you give up, but we will torture you if you continue to fight!”

He spoke German with an accent that sounded Hungarian.

For reply, Burton and Alice shot arrows. Alice’s shaft missed the captain but hit the helmsman, and he staggered back and fell over the railing. The craft immediately veered. The captain sprang to the wheel, and Burton’s second shaft went through the back of his knee.

Both schooners struck slantingly with a great crash and shot off with much tearing up of timbers, men screaming and falling onto the decks or falling overboard. Even if the boats did not sink, they would be out of action.

But just before they hit, their archers had put a dozen flaming arrows into the bamboo sails of
The Hadji.
The shafts carried dry grass which had been soaked with turpentine made from pine resin, and these, fanned by the wind, spread the flames quickly.

Burton took the tiller back from the women and shouted orders. The crew dipped fired-clay vessels and their open grails into The River and then threw the water on the flames. Loghu, who could climb like a monkey, went up the mast with a rope around her shoulder. She let the rope down and pulled up the containers of water.

This permitted the other schooners and several canoes to draw close. One on a course which would put it directly in the path of
The Hadji.
Burton swung the boat around again, but it was sluggish because of Loghu’s weight on the mast. It wheeled around, the boom swung wildly as the men failed to keep control of its ropes, and more arrows struck the sail and spread more fire. Several arrows thunked into the deck. For a moment, Burton thought that the enemy had changed his mind and was trying to down them. But the arrows were just misdirected.

Again,
The Hadji
sliced between two schooners. The captains and the crew of both were grinning. Perhaps they had been bored for a long time and were enjoying the pursuit. Even so, the crews ducked behind the railings, leaving the officers, helmsmen, and the archers to receive the fire from
The Hadji.
There was a strumming, and dark streaks with red heads and blue tails went halfway through the sails in two dozen places, a number drove into the mast or the boom, a dozen hissed into the water, one shot by Burton a few inches from his head.

Alice, Ruach, Kazz, de Greystock, Wilfreda, and he had shot while Esther handled the tiller. Loghu was frozen halfway up the mast, waiting until the arrow fire quit. The five arrows found three targets of flesh, a captain, a helmsman, and a sailor who stuck his head up at the wrong time for him.

Esther screamed, and Burton spun. The warcanoe had come out from behind the schooner and was a few feet in front of
The Hadji
’s bow. There was no way to avoid a collision. The two men on the platform were diving off the side, and the paddlers were standing up or trying to stand up so they could get overboard. Then
The Hadji
smashed into its port near the bow, cracking it open, turning it over, and spilling its crew into The River. Those on
The Hadji
were thrown forward, and de Grey-stock went into the water. Burton slid on his face and chest and knees, burning off the skin.

Esther had been torn from the tiller and rolled across the deck until she thumped against the edge of the fo’c’sle coaming. She lay there without moving.

Burton looked upward. The sail was blazing away beyond hope of being saved. Loghu was gone, so she must have been hurled off at the moment of impact. Then, getting up, he saw her and de Greystock swimming back to
The Hadji.
The water around them was boiling with the splashing of the dispossessed canoemen, many of whom, judging by their cries, could not swim.

Burton called to the men to help the two aboard while he inspected the damage. Both prows of the very thin twin hulls had been smashed open by the crash. Water was pouring inside. And the smoke from the burning sail and mast was curling around them, causing Alice and Gwenafra to cough.

Another warcanoe was approaching swiftly from the north; the two schooners were sailing close-hauled toward them.

They could fight and draw some blood from their enemies, who would be holding themselves back to keep from killing them. Or they could swim for it. Either way, they would be captured.

Loghu and de Greystock were pulled aboard. Frigate reported that Esther could not be brought back to consciousness. Ruach felt her pulse and opened her eyes and then walked back to Burton.

“She’s not dead, but she’s totally out.”

Burton said, “You women know what will happen to you. It’s up to you, of course, but I suggest you swim down as deeply as you can and draw in a good breath of water. You’ll wake up tomorrow, good as new.”

Gwenafra had come out from the fo’c’sle. She wrapped her arms round his waist and looked up, dry-eyed but scared. He hugged her with one arm and then said, “Alice! Take her with you!”

“Where?” Alice said. She looked at the canoe and back at him. She coughed again as more smoke wrapped around her and then she moved forward, upwind.

“When you go down.”

He gestured at The River.

“I can’t do that,” she said.

“You wouldn’t want those men to get her, too. She’s only a little girl but they’ll not stop for that.”

Alice looked as if her face was going to crumple and wash away with tears. But she did not weep.

She said, “Very well. It’s no sin now, killing yourself. I just hope….”

He said, “Yes.”

He did not drawl the word; there was no time to drawl anything out. The canoe was within forty feet of them.

“The next place might be just as bad or worse than this one,” Alice said. “And Gwenafra will wake up all alone. You know that the chances of us being resurrected at the same place are slight.”

“That can’t be helped,” he said.

She clamped her lips, then opened them and said, “I’ll fight until the last moment. Then….”

“It may be too late,” he said. He picked up his bow and drew an arrow from his quiver. De Greystock had lost his bow, so he took Kazz’s. The Neanderthal placed a stone in a sling and began whirling it. Lev picked up his sling and chose a stone for its pocket. Monat used Esther’s bow, since he had lost his, also.

The captain of the canoe shouted in German, “Lay down your arms! You won’t be harmed!”

He fell off the platform onto a paddler a second later as Alice’s arrow went through his chest. Another arrow, probably de Greystock’s, spun the second man off the platform and into the water. A stone hit a paddler in the shoulder, and he collapsed with a cry. Another stone struck glancingly off another paddler’s head, and he lost his paddle.

The canoe kept on coming. The two men on the aft platform urged the crew to continue driving toward
The Hadji.
Then they fell with arrows in them.