Flesh (12 page)

Churchill did not know what she was talking about. He was only concerned about having offended her so much she wouldn’t see him again. It wasn’t lust alone that drew him toward her. He was sure of that. He loved this beautiful girl; he would have wanted her if he had just had a dozen women.

“Let’s go back,” she said. “I’m afraid this has killed your good spirits. It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have kissed you. But I wanted to kiss you.”

“Then you’re not mad at me?”

“Why should I be?”

“No reason. But I’m happy again.”

After they’d tied the craft to the slip, and were just beginning to walk back up the steps, he stopped her.

“Robin, how long do you think it’ll be before you’re sure?”

“I am going to the temple tomorrow. I’ll be able to tell you when I get back.”

“You’re going to pray for guidance? Or something like that?”

“I’ll pray. But I’m not going primarily for that. I want to have a priestess make a test on me.”

“And after this test, you’ll know whether or not you want to marry me?”

“Goodness no!” she said. “I’ll have to know you much better than I do before I’d think of marrying you. No, I have to have this test made so I’ll know whether or not I should go to bed with you.”

“What test?”

“If you don’t know, then you’ll not be worried about it. But I’ll be sure tomorrow.”

“Sure of what?” he said angrily.

“Then I’ll know if it’s all right for me to quit acting like a virgin.”

Her face became ecstatic.

“I’ll know if I’m carrying the Sunhero’s child!”

7

It rained the morning that Stagg was to lead the parade into Baltimore. Stagg and Calthorp were in a large open-walled tent and drinking hot white lightning to keep warm. Stagg was motionless as a model while submitting to the usual morning repainting of his genitals and buttocks, necessary because he wore the paint off at nights. He was silent and paying no attention to the giggles and compliments of the three girls whose only work was this daily redecorating of the Sunhero. Calthorp, who generally talked like a maniac to keep Stagg’s spirits up, was also glum.

Finally, Stagg said, “Do you know, Doc, it’s been ten days since we left Fair Grace. Ten days and ten towns. By now you and I should have worked out a plan for escape. In fact, if we were the men we used to be, we’d have been over the hills and far away. But the only time I get to thinking is in the mornings, and I’m too exhausted and wretched to do anything constructive. And by noon I just don’t give a damn. I
like
the way I am!”

“And I’ve not been much help to you, have I?” Calthorp said. “I get as drunk as you do, and I’m too sick in the morning to do anything but take a hair of the dog that bit me.”

“What the hell’s happened?” Stagg said. “Do you realize that I don’t even know where I’m going, or what’s going to happen to me when I get there? I don’t even know, really, what a Sunhero is!”

“It’s mostly my fault,” Calthorp said. He sighed and sipped some more of his drink. “I just can’t seem to get organized.”

Stagg looked at one of his guards, who was standing in the entrance of a nearby tent. “Do you suppose that if I threatened to wring his neck, he’d tell me everything I want to know?”

“You could try it.”

Stagg rose from his chair. “Hand me that cloak, will you? I don’t think they’ll object if I wear this while it’s raining.”

He was referring to an incident of the previous day when he had put on a kilt before going over to talk to the girl in the cage. The attendants had looked shocked, then summoned the guards. These surrounded Stagg. Before he could find out what they intended, a man behind him had torn off his kilt and run off with it into the woods.

He did not reappear all day, apparently dreading Stagg’s wrath, but the lesson had been taught. The Sunhero was supposed to display his naked glory to the worshiping people.

Now Stagg slipped the cloak on and strode on bare feet across the wet grass. The guards stepped out from their tents and followed him, but they did not come close.

Stagg halted before the cage. The girl sitting inside looked up, then turned her face away.

“You don’t need to be ashamed to look at me,” he said. “I’m covered.”

There was silence. Then he said, “For God’s sakes, speak to me! I’m a prisoner too, you know! I’m in as much of a cage as you.”

The girl clutched the bars and pressed her face against them. “You said, ‘For God’s sake!’ What does that mean? That you’re a Caseylander too? You can’t be. You don’t talk like my countrymen. But then you don’t talk like a Deecee, either—or like anyone I ever heard before. Tell me, are you a believer in Columbia?”

“If you’ll stop talking for a minute, I’ll explain,” Stagg said. “Thank God, you’re talking, though.”

“There you go again,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly be a worshiper of the foul Bitch-Goddess. But if you’re not, why are you a Horned King?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that. If you can’t, you can tell me some other things I’d like to know.”

He held out the bottle to her. “Would you like a drink?”

“I’d like one, yes. But I won’t accept one from an enemy. And I’m not sure you’re not one.”

Stagg understood her with difficulty. She used enough words similar to those of Deecee for him to grasp the main idea of her sentences. But her pronunciation of some of the vowels was different, and the tonal pattern was not that of Deecee.

“Can you speak Deecee?” he said. “I can’t keep up with you in Caseylander.”

“I speak Deecee fairly well,” she replied. “What is your native tongue?”

“Twenty-first-century American.”

She gasped, and her big eyes became even wider.

“But how could that be?”

“I was born in the twenty-first century. January 30, 2030
A.D.
... let’s see that would be...”

“You don’t need to tell me,” she replied in his native speech. “That would be... uh... well, 1
A.D.
is 2100
A.D.
So, Deecee style, you were born 70
B.D.
Before the Desolation. But what does that matter? We Caseylanders use the Old Style.”

Stagg finally quit goggling at her and said, “You spoke twenty-first-century American! Something like it, anyway!”

“Yes. Usually only priests can, but my father is a wealthy man. He sent me to Boston University, and I learned Church American there.”

“You mean it’s a liturgical language?”

“Yes. Latin was lost during the Desolation.”

“I think I need a drink,” Stagg said. “You first?”

She smiled and said, “I don’t understand much of what you’ve said, but I’ll take the drink.”

Stagg slipped the bottle through the bars. “At least I know your name. It’s Mary I-Am-Bound-for-Paradise Little Casey. But that’s all I ever got out of my guards.”

Mary handed back the bottle. “That was wonderful. It’s been a long dry spell. You said guard? Why do you need a guard? I thought all Sunheroes were volunteers.”

Stagg launched into his story. He didn’t have time to go into the details, even though he could tell by Mary’s expression that she comprehended only half of what he told her. And occasionally he had to shift back into Deecee because it was evident that Mary might have studied Church American at college but she hadn’t mastered it.

“So you see,” he concluded, “that I am a victim of these horns. I am not responsible for what I do.”

Mary turned red. “I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me sick to my soul.”

“Me too,” Stagg said. “In the mornings, that is. Later...”

“Can’t you run away?”

“Sure. And I’d run back even faster.”

“Oh, these evil Deecee! They must have bewitched you, it could only be a devil in your loins that could possess you so! If only we could escape to Caseyland, a priest could exorcise it.”

Stagg looked around him. “They’re beginning to break camp. We’ll be on the march in a minute. Then, Baltimore. Listen! I’ve told you about myself. But I still know nothing about you, where you come from, how you happened to be a prisoner. And there are things you could tell me about myself, what this Sunhero stuff is about.”

“But I can’t understand why Cal...”

She put her hand over her mouth.

“Cal! You mean Calthorp! What’s he got to do with this? Don’t tell me he’s been talking to you? He told me he didn’t know a thing!”

“He’s been talking to me. I thought that he must have told you so.”

“He didn’t say a thing to me! In fact, he said he didn’t know any more than I did about what’s going on! Why, that...”

Speechless, he turned and ran away from the cage.

Halfway across the field, he regained his voice and began bellowing the name of the little anthropologist.

The people in his path scattered; they thought that the Great Stag had gone amok again. Calthorp stepped out of the tent. Seeing Stagg running toward him, he scuttled across the road. He did not allow himself to be stopped by the stone fence in his path but put one hand on it and vaulted over. Once on the other side, he ran as fast as his spindly legs would carry him across a field and around a farmhouse.

Stagg screamed after him, “If I catch you, Calthorp, I’ll break every bone in your body! How could you do this to me?”

He stood for a moment, panting with rage. Then he turned away, muttering to himself. “Why? Why?”

At that moment, the rain ceased. A few minutes later, the clouds cleared, and the midnoon sun shone fiercely.

Stagg tore off his cloak and threw it on the ground. “To hell with Calthorp! I don’t need him and never did! The traitor! Who cares!”

He called to Sylvia, an attendant, to bring him food and drink. He ate and drank as he always did in the afternoon, and when he had finished, he glared wildly about him. The antlers, which had been flopping limply with every movement of his head, now rose stiff and hard.

“How many kilometers to Baltimore?” he roared.

“Two and a half, sire. Shall I call your carriage?”

“To hell with the carriage! I can’t be slowed down by wheels! I am going to run to Baltimore! I am going to take the city by surprise! I’ll be on them before they know it! They’ll think the Grandfather of all Stags hit them! I’ll ravage among them, lay them all low! It’ll not just be the mascots who’ll get it this time! I’ll not just take what’s handed to me! No Miss Americas only for me! Tonight, the whole city!”

Sylvia was horrified. “But, sire, things just... just aren’t done that way! Since time immemorial...”

“I am the Sunhero, am I not? The Horned King? I will do as I want to do!”

He seized a bottle from the tray she was holding and began to run off down the road.

At first he stayed on the cement. But even though the soles of his feet were by now as hard as iron, he found the pavement too rough, so he ran on the soft grass by the side of the road.

“It’s better this way,” he said to himself. “The closer I get to Mother Earth, the better for me and the better I like it. It may be superstitious nonsense that a man is refreshed by direct contact with the earth. But I’m inclined to believe the Deecee. I can
feel
the strength surging up from the heart of Mother Earth, surging up like an electric current and recharging my body. And I can feel the strength coming with such power, such overflowing power, that my body isn’t big enough to contain it. And the excess spurts from the crown of my head and flames upward toward the sky. I can feel it.”

He stopped running for a moment to uncap the bottle and take a drink. He noticed that the guards were running toward him, but they were at least two hundred yards behind. They just did not have his speed and strength. Besides his native muscle, he had the additional power given him by the antlers. He was, he thought, probably the fastest and strongest human being that had ever existed.

He took another drink. The guards were getting closer but they were winded, their pace slowing. They held their bows and arrows nocked, but he didn’t think they would shoot as long as he stayed on the road to Baltimore. He had no intention of straying from it. He just wanted to run along on the curving breast of Earth and feel her strength surge through him and feel the ecstasy of his thoughts.