To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (13 page)

Burton looked behind him. The two schooners were letting their sails drop now. Evidently they would slide on up to
The Hadji
where the sailors would throw their grappling hooks into it. But if they got too close, the flames might spread to them.

The canoe rammed into
The Hadji
with fourteen of the original complement dead or too wounded to fight. Just before the canoe’s prow hit, the survivors dropped their paddles and raised small round leather shields. Even so, two arrows went through two shields and into the arms of the men holding them. That still left twenty men against six men, five women, and a child.

But one was a five-foot-high hairy man with tremendous strength and a big stone axe. Kazz jumped into the air just before the canoe rammed the starboard hull and came down in it a second after it had halted. His axe crushed two skulls and then drove through the bottom of the canoe. Water poured in, and de Greystock, shouting something in his Cumberland Middle English, leaped down beside Kazz. He held a stiletto in one hand and a big oak club with flint spikes in the other.

The others on
The Hadji
continued to shoot their arrows. Suddenly, Kazz and de Greystock were scrambling back onto the catamaran and the canoe was sinking with its dead, dying, and its scared survivors. A number drowned; the others either swam away or tried to get aboard
The Hadji.
These fell back with their fingers chopped off or stamped flat.

Something struck on the deck near him and then something else coiled around him. Burton spun and slashed at the leather rope which had settled around his neck. He leaped to one side to avoid another and yanked savagely at a third rope and pulled the man on the other end over the railing. The man, screaming, pitched out and struck the deck of
The Hadji
with his shoulder. Burton smashed in his face with his axe.

By now men were dropping from the decks of both schooners and ropes were falling everywhere. The smoke and the flames added to the confusion, though they may have helped
The Hadji
’s crew more than the boarders.

Burton shouted at Alice to get Gwenafra and jump into The River. He could not find her and then had to parry the thrust of a big black with a spear. The man seemed to have forgotten any orders to capture Burton; he looked as if he meant to kill. Burton knocked the short spear aside and whirled, lashing out as he went by with the axe and smashed its edge against the black’s neck. Burton continued to whirl, felt a sharp pain in his ribs, another in his shoulder, but knocked two men down and then was in the water. He fell between the schooner and
The Hadji
, went down, released the axe, and pulled the stiletto from its sheath. When he came up, he was looking up at a tall, rawboned, redheaded man who was lifting the screaming Gwenafra above him with both hands. The man pitched her far out into the water.

Burton dived again and coming up saw Gwenafra’s face only a few feet before him. It was gray, and her eyes were dull. Then he saw the blood darkening the water around her. She disappeared before he could get to her. He dived down after her, caught her and pulled her back up. A hornfish tip was stuck into her back.

He let her body go. He did not know why the man had killed her when he could have easily taken her prisoner. Perhaps Alice had stabbed her and the man had figured that she was as good as dead and so had tossed her over the side to the fishes.

A body shot out of the smoke, followed by another. One man was dead with a broken neck; the other was alive. Burton wrapped his arm around the man’s neck and stabbed him at the juncture of jaw and ear. The man quit struggling and slipped down into the depths.

Frigate leaped out from the smoke, his face and shoulders bloody.
He hit the water at a slant and dived deep. Burton swam toward him to help him. There was no use even trying to get back on the craft. It was solid with struggling bodies, and other canoes and dugouts were closing in.

Frigate’s head rose out of the water. His skin was white where the blood was not pumping out over it. Burton swam to him and said, “Did the women get away?”

Frigate shook his head and then said, “Watch out!”

Burton upended to dive down. Something hit his legs; he kept on going down, but he could not carry out his intention of breathing in the water. He would fight until they had to kill him.

On coming up, he saw that the water was alive with men who had jumped in after him and Frigate. The American, half-conscious, was being towed to a canoe. Three men closed in on Burton, and he stabbed two and then a man in a dugout reached down with a club and banged him on the head.

T
hey were led ashore near a large building behind a wall of pine logs. Burton’s head throbbed with pain at every step. The gashes in his shoulder and ribs hurt, but they had quit bleeding. The fortress was built of pine logs, had an overhanging second story, and many sentinels. The captives were marched through an entrance that could be closed with a huge log gate. They marched across sixty feet of grass-covered yard and through another large gateway into a hall about fifty feet long and thirty wide. Except for Frigate, who was too weak, they stood before a large round table of oak. They blinked in the dark and cool interior before they could clearly see the two men at the table.

Guards with spears, clubs, and stone axes were everywhere. A wooden staircase at one end of the hall led up to a runway with high railings. Women looked over the railings at them.

One of the men at the table was short and muscular. He had a hairy body, black curly hair, a nose like a falcon’s, and brown eyes as fierce as a falcon’s. The second man was taller, had blond hair, eyes the exact color of which was difficult to tell in the dusky light but were probably blue, and a broad Teutonic face. A paunch and the beginnings of jowls told of the food and liquor he had taken from the grails of slaves.

Frigate had sat down on the grass, but he was pulled up to his feet when the blond gave a signal. Frigate looked at the blond and said, “You look like Hermann Göring when he was young.”

Then he dropped to his knees, screaming with pain from the impact of a spear butt over his kidneys.

The blond spoke in an English with a heavy German accent. “No more of that unless I order it. Let them talk.”

He scrutinized them for several minutes, then said, “Yes, I am Hermann Göring.”

“Who is Göring?” Burton said.

“Your friend can tell you later,” the German said. “If there is a later for you. I am not angry about the splendid fight you put up. I admire men who can fight well. I can always use more spears, especially since you killed so many. I offer you a choice. You men, that is. Join me and live well with all the food, liquor, tobacco, and women you can possibly want. Or work for me as my slaves.”

“For us,” the other man said in English. “You forget, Hermann, dat I have yust as muck to say about dis as you.”

Göring smiled, chuckled, and said, “Of course! I was only using the royal I, you might say. Very well, we. If you swear to serve
us
, and it will be far better for you if you do, you will swear loyalty to me, Hermann Göring, and to the one-time king of ancient Rome, Tullius Hostilius.”

Burton looked closely at the man. Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient Rome? Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by the other Italic tribes, the Sabines, Aequi, and Volsci? Who, in turn, were being pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful Etruscans? Was this really Tullius Hostilius, warlike successor to the peaceful Numa Pompilius? There was nothing to distinguish him from a thousand men whom Burton had seen on the streets of Siena. Yet, if he was what he claimed to be, he could be a treasure trove, historically and linguistically speaking. He would, since he was probably Etruscan himself, know that language, in addition to pre-Classical Latin, and Sabine, and perhaps Campanian Greek. He might even have been acquainted with Romulus, supposed founder of Roma. What stories that man could tell!

“Well?” Göring said.

“What do we have to do if we join you?” Burton said.

“First, I…we…have to make sure that you are the caliber of man we want. In other words, a man who will unhesitatingly and immediately do anything that we order. We will give you a little test.”

He gave an order and a minute later, a group of men was brought forward. All were gaunt, and all were crippled.

“They were injured while quarrying stone or building our walls,” Göring said. “Except for two caught while trying to escape. They will have to pay the penalty. All will be killed because they are now useless. So, you should not hesitate about killing them to show your determination to serve us.”

He added, “Besides, they are all Jews. Why worry about them?”

Campbell, the redhead who had thrown Gwenafra into The River, held out to Burton a large club studded with chert blades. Two guards seized a slave and forced him to his knees. He was a large blond with blue eyes and a Grecian profile; he glared at Göring and then spat at him.

Göring laughed. “He has all the arrogance of his race. I could reduce him to a quivering screaming mass begging for death if I wanted to. But I do not really care for torture. My compatriot would like to give him a taste of the fire, but I am essentially a humanitarian.”

“I will kill in defense of my life or in defense of those who need protection,” Burton said. “But I am not a murderer.”

“Killing this Jew would be an act in defense of your life,” Göring replied. “If you do not, you will die anyway. Only it will take you a long time.”

“I will not,” Burton said.

Göring sighed. “You English! Well, I would rather have you on my side. But if you don’t want to do the rational thing, so be it. What about you?” he said to Frigate.

Frigate, who was still in agony, said, “Your ashes ended in a trash heap in Dachau because of what you did and what you were. Are you going to repeat the same criminal acts on this world?”

Göring laughed and said, “I know what happened to me. Enough of my Jewish slaves have told me.”

He pointed at Monat. “What kind of a freak is that?”

Burton explained. Göring looked grave, then said, “I couldn’t trust him. He goes into the slave camp. You, there, apeman. What do you say?”

Kazz, to Burton’s surprise, stepped forward. “I kill for you. I don’t want to be slave.”

He took the club while the guards held their spears poised to run him through if he had other ideas for using it. He glared at them from under his shelving brows, then raised the club. There was a crack, and the slave pitched forward on the dirt. Kazz returned the club to Campbell and stepped aside. He did not look at Burton.

Göring said, “All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away. The escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery. My distinguished colleague will personally handle the club. He likes that sort of thing.”

He pointed at Alice. “That one. I’ll take her.”

Tullius stood up. “No, no. I like her. You take de oders, Hermann.
I giw you bot’ off dem. But sye, I want her wery muck. Sye look like, wat you say, aristocrat. A…queen?”

Burton roared, snatched a club from Campbell’s hand, and leaped upon the table. Göring fell backward, the tip of the club narrowly missing his nose. At the same time, the Roman thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder. Burton kept hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius’ hand.

The slaves, shouting, threw themselves upon the guards. Frigate jerked a spear loose and brought the butt of it against Kazz’s head. Kazz crumpled. Monat kicked a guard in the groin and picked up his spear.

Burton did not remember anything after that. He awoke several hours before dusk. His head hurt worse than before. His ribs and both shoulders were stiff with pain. He was lying on grass in a pine log enclosure with a diameter of about fifty yards. Fifteen feet above the grass, circling the interior of the wall, was a wooden walk on which armed guards paced.

He groaned when he sat up. Frigate, squatting near him, said, “I was afraid you’d never come out of it.”

“Where are the women?” Burton said.

Frigate began to weep. Burton shook his head and said, “Quit blubbering. Where are they?”

“Where the hell do you think they are?” Frigate said. “Oh, my God!”

“Don’t think about the women. There’s nothing you can do for them. Not now, anyway. Why wasn’t I killed after I attacked Göring?”

Frigate wiped away the tears and said, “Beats me. Maybe they’re saving you, and me, for the fire. As an example. I wish they had killed us.”

“What, so recently gained paradise and wish so soon to lose it?” Burton said. He began to laugh but quit because pains speared his head.

Burton talked to Robert Spruce, an Englishman born in 1945 in Kensington. Spruce said that it was less than a month since Göring and Tullius had seized power. For the time being, they were leaving their neighbors in peace. Eventually, of course, they would try to conquer the adjacent territories, including the Onondaga Indians across The River. So far, no slave had escaped to spread word about Göring’s intentions.

“But the people on the borders can see for themselves that the walls are being built by slaves,” Burton said.

Spruce grinned wryly and said, “Göring has spread the word that
these are all Jews, that he is only interested in enslaving Jews. So, what do they care? As you can see for yourself, that is not true. Half of the slaves are Gentile.”

At dusk, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, de Greystoke, and Monat were taken from the stockade and marched down to a grailrock. There were about two hundred slaves there, guarded by about seventy Göringites. Their grails were placed on the rock, and they waited. After the blue flames roared, the grails were taken down. Each slave opened his, and guards removed the tobacco, liquor, and half of the food.

Frigate had gashes in his head and in his shoulder which needed sewing up, though the bleeding had stopped. His color had much improved, though his back and kidneys pained him.

“So now we’re slaves,” Frigate said. “Dick, you thought quite a lot of the institution of slavery. What do you think of it now?”

“That was
Oriental
slavery,” Burton said. “In
this
type of slavery, there’s no chance for a slave to gain his freedom. Nor is there any personal feeling, except hatred, between slave and owner. In the Orient, the situation was different. Of course, like any human institution, it had its abuses.”

“You’re a stubborn man,” Frigate said. “Have you noticed that at least half the slaves are Jews? Late-twentieth-century Israeli, most of them. That girl over there told me that Göring managed to start grail-slavery by stirring up anti-Semitism in this area. Of course, it had to exist before it could be aroused. Then, after he had gotten into power with Tullius’ aid, he enslaved many of his former supporters.”

He continued, “The hell of it is, Göring is not, relatively speaking, a genuine anti-Semite. He personally intervened with Himmler and others to save Jews. But he is something even worse than a genuine Jew-hater. He is an opportunist. Anti-Semitism was a tidal wave in Germany; to get any place, you had to ride the wave. So, Göring rode there, just as he rode here. An anti-Semite such as Goebbels or Frank believed in the principles they professed. Perverted and hateful principles, true, but still principles. Whereas big fat happy-go-lucky Göring did not really care one way or the other about the Jews. He just wanted to use them.”

“All very well,” Burton said, “but what has that got to do with me? Oh, I see! That look! You are getting ready to lecture me.”

“Dick, I admire you as I have admired few men. I love you as one man loves another. I am as happy and delighted to have had the singular good
luck to fall in with you as, say, Plutarch would be if he had met Alcibiades or Theseus. But I am not blind. I know your faults, which are many, and I regret them.”

“Just which one is it this time?”

“That book.
The Jew, The Gypsy, and El Islam.
How could you have written it? A hate document full of bloody-minded nonsense, folk tales, superstitions! Ritual murders, indeed!”

“I was still angry because of the injustices I had suffered at Damascus. To be expelled from the consulate because of the lies of my enemies, among whom….”

“That doesn’t excuse your writing lies about a whole group,” Frigate said.

“Lies! I wrote the truth!”

“You may have thought they were truths. But I come from an age which definitely knows that they were not. In fact, no one in his right mind in your time would have believed that crap!”

“The facts are,” Burton said, “that the Jewish moneylenders in Damascus were charging the poor a thousand percent interest on their loans. The facts are that they were inflicting this monstrous usury not only on the Moslem and Christian populace but on their own people. The facts are, that when my enemies in England accused me of anti-Semitism, many Jews in Damascus came to my defense. It is a fact that I protested to the Turks when they sold the synagogue of the Damascan Jews to the Greek Orthodox bishop so he could turn it into a church. It is a fact that I went out and drummed up eighteen Moslems to testify on behalf of the Jews. It is a fact that I protected the Christian missionaries from the Druzes. It is a fact that I warned the Druzes that that fat and oily Turkish swine, Rashid Pasha, was trying to incite them to revolt so he could massacre them. It is a fact that when I was recalled from my consular post, because of the lies of the Christian missionaries and priests, of Rashid Pasha, and of the Jewish usurers, thousands of Christians, Moslems, and Jews rallied to my aid, though it was too late then.

“It is also a fact that I don’t have to answer to you or to any man for my actions!”

How like Frigate to bring up such an irrelevant subject at such an inappropriate time. Perhaps he was trying to keep from blaming himself
by turning his fear and anger on Burton. Or perhaps he really felt that his hero had failed him.

Lev Ruach had been sitting with his head between his hands. He raised his head and said, hollowly, “Welcome to the concentration camp, Burton! This is your first taste of it. It’s an old tale to me, one I was tired of hearing from the beginning. I was in a Nazi camp, and I escaped. I was in a Russian camp, and I escaped. In Israel, I was captured by Arabs, and I escaped.

“So, now, perhaps I can escape again. But to what? To another camp? There seems to be no end to them. Man is forever building them and putting the perennial prisoner, the Jew, or what have you, in them. Even here, where we have a fresh start, where all religions, all prejudices, should have been shattered on the anvil of resurrection, little is changed.”