The Dark Design (16 page)

Some of them groaned. Burton cursed. He too felt grief for Owenone, but he and his crew were beggars, dependent upon the charity of others. It was better to be dead than without a grail, and in the old days those who had lost theirs could, and often did, commit suicide. The next day they would wake up, far from their friends and mates, but at least with their own source of food and luxuries.

“Well,” Frigate said, “we can eat fish and acorn bread.”

“For the rest of our lives?” Burton said, sneering. “Which may be forever for all we know.”

“Just trying to look on the bright side of things,” the American said. “Though even that is pretty dim.”

“Why don’t we deal with things as they come up?” Alice said. “For the moment, I’d like my ribs seen to, and I’m sure poor Loghu would like her broken bone set and splinted.”

The man who had conducted them there arranged for treatment of the injured. After this was done and the pains of his patients had been eased with pieces of dreamgum, he went outside. Burton, Kazz, and Monat followed him outside. By then the sun was burning away the fog. Within a few minutes it would all be gone.

The scene was appalling. The entire V-shaped prow of the raft had broken up when its point had ridden up onto the beach and its port side had smashed into a corner of the spire. The docks and the boats of the Ganopo were smashed, buried somewhere in the pile of logs on the beach. The main part of the raft had also slid for at least 13 meters onto the shore. Several hundreds of the raftspeople were standing at the edge of the wreck, talking animatedly but doing nothing constructive.

To the left, logs were jammed against the sheer wall of the spire by the current. There was no sign of the
Hadji II,
or of Owenone. Burton’s hope that he might be able to retrieve at least a few grails was not going to be realized.

He looked around the raft. Even though it had lost its forepart, it was still immense. It had to be at least 660 feet or 201 meters long with a breadth at its widest of 122 meters. Its stern was also V-shaped.

In the center was the large, round, black object he had seen floating above the mists. It was the head of an idol 30 feet or over 9 meters tall. Black, squat, and ugly, it dominated the raft. It was sitting cross-legged, and its spine bore lizardlike crests. The head was a demon’s, its blue eyes glaring, its wide, snarling mouth displaying many great white sharkfish teeth.

These, Burton assumed, had been removed from a dragonfish and set within the scarlet gums.

In the middle of its huge paunch was a round hole. Inside this was a stone hearth on which a small pile of wood blazed. Its smoke rose within the body and curled out of the batlike ears of the idol.

Forward, near the edge of the raft, the watchtower lay on its side, its supports broken off at the base by the force of the collision. A body still lay near it.

There were some large buildings here and there with many smaller ones among them. A few of the smaller ones had collapsed, and one of the big constructions leaned crazily.

He counted ten tall masts with square-rigged sails and twenty shorter ones with fore-and-aft rigs. All of the sails were furled.

Alongside the edges were a number of racks holding boats of various sizes.

Behind the idol was the largest building of all. He supposed that this was the house of the chief or perhaps a temple. Or both.

Presently wooden trumpets blew and drums beat. Seeing the people streaming toward the great building, Burton decided to join them. They congregated between the idol and the building. Burton stood behind the mob where he could hear the proceedings but at the same time examine the statue. A little discreet scratching with a flint knife revealed that it was adobe covered with a black paint. He wondered where the paint for the body, eyes, and gums had been obtained. Pigments were rare, much to the sorrow of artists.

The chief, or the head priest, was taller than the others though still half a head shorter than Burton. He wore a cape and kilt with blue, black, and red stripes and an oaken crown with six points. His right hand held a long shepherd’s staff of oak. He spoke from a platform at the building’s entrance, gesturing often with the staff, his black eyes fiery, his mouth spewing a torrent of which Burton understood not one word. After about half an hour he got down from the platform, and the crowd broke up into various work parties.

Some of these went to the island to clear away the logs which had broken from the prow and piled onto the main body. Others went to the starboard rearside, where the V-shaped stern joined the main part. These lifted huge oars and fitted them to locks. Then, like a gang of galley slaves, working to a rhythm beat out on a drum, they began rowing.

Apparently, they were trying to bring the stern around so that the current would catch it on one side and then swing the entire raft. As soon as the vessel presented enough of its starboard side to the current, it would be turned around enough to be free of the island.

That was the theory, but the practice failed. It became apparent that the log jam would have to be cleared first and then leverage applied to push the front part from the beach.

Burton wished to talk to the headman, but he had gone around to the front of the idol and was bowing rapidly and chanting to it. Whatever Burton had learned or not learned, he knew that it was dangerous to interrupt a religious ritual.

He strolled around, stopping to look at the dugouts, canoes, and small sailboats in racks or on slides along the edge of the raft. Then he poked around the larger buildings. Most of these had doors which were barred on the outside. Making sure that no one was noticing him, he entered several.

Two were storehouses of dried fish and acorn bread. One was crammed with weapons. Another was a boat shed containing two half-finished dugouts and the pine framework of a canoe. In time the latter would be covered with fish-skin. The fifth building held a variety of artifacts: boxes of oak rings for trading, spiral bones and the unicornlike horns of the hornfish, piles of fish- and human-leather, drums, bamboo flutes, harps with hornfish guts for strings, skulls fashioned into drinking cups, ropes of fiber and fish-skin, piles of dried dragonfish intestines suitable for sails, stone lamps for burning fish-oil, boxes of lipstick, face-paint, marijuana, cigarettes, cigars, lighters (all doubtless saved up for trading or tribute), about fifty ritual masks, and many more items.

When he went into the sixth building, he smiled. This was where the grails were kept. The tall gray cylinders were stacked in wooden racks, waiting for their owners. He counted three hundred and fifty. One grail for each of the approximately three hundred and ten raftspeople meant that there were forty extra grails.

A few minutes’ inspection showed him that all but thirty were tagged. The others had cords tied around the handles of the tops, the other ends of which cords were connected to baked clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing. These were the names of their owners. He examined some of the incised marks, which looked like those he had seen in photographs of Babylonian and Assyrian documents.

He tried to raise the lids of a number of the tagged cylinders but failed, of course. There was some sort of mechanism preventing anyone but its owner from opening it. There were several theories about the operation, one being that a sensitive device inside the grail detected the electrical field of the owner’s skin and then activated an opening mechanism.

However, the untagged grails were of a different kind, called “freebies” by some English-speakers.

When over thirty-six billion of Earth’s dead had awakened whole and young along the immense stretch of The River, they had found a personal grail at their side. At the same time, each of the grailstones bore in its central depression one grail. This apparently had been provided by the resurrectors to show the new citizens just how their grails worked.

Each stone had vomited noise and light, and when the thunder and lightning had ceased, curious people had climbed onto the stones to look into the grails left there. The lids were raised, and the contents were revealed. Wonder of wonders, joy of joys! The hollow interior held snap-down racks on which were dishes and cups full of food and various goodies.

The next time the stones discharged, the private grails were on the stones, and these, too, supplied everything they needed and more, though human nature was such that many people complained because there wasn’t more variety.

The freebies had become very valuable; people bullied and thieved and killed to get them. If a person had a private grail and a freebie, he or she had twice as much food and luxuries as he or she was supposed to get.

Burton himself had never owned one, but here were thirty on racks before him.

The problem of the lost grails was solved—if he could get the headman to part with them. After all, his raft was responsible for the loss of the boat and the grails. He owed the crew of the
Hadji II.

So far, he and his crew had been treated decently. He could think of other groups he had met that would have done nothing for them except throw them overboard—after mass-raping the women and perhaps sodomizing the men.

However, there might be a limit to the raftspeople’s hospitality. The free grails were anything but free. This group might even have stolen these. However they got them, they would be saving them for emergencies, such as replacements for those they lost or as tribute if they ran into a particularly hostile and powerful group.

Burton left the building, barred the door after him, and walked around pondering. If he asked the chief to give him seven grails, he could be refused. That would make the man suspicious, and he would set up guards over this building. Not to mention the fact that he might get nervous having potential thieves around and would ask them, politely or otherwise, to leave.

Passing by the idol, he saw that the chief had stopped praying and was walking toward the island. Apparently, he intended to supervise the activities there.

Burton decided to ask him now about the grails. No use putting off the issue.

The man who sits on his arse sits on his fortune.

Mutu-sha-ili was his native name, meaning “man of god,” but to Esperanto speakers he was Metu
ael. In English, Methusaleh.

For a delirious moment, Burton wondered if he had met the model for the long-lived patriarch of the Old Testament. No, Metu
ael was a Babylonian, and he had never heard of Hebrews until he had come to The Riverworld. He had been an inspector of granaries on Earth, but here he was the founder and head of a new religion and commander of the great raft.

“One night many years ago, while a storm raged outside, I was sleeping. And a god came to me in my dream, a god named Rushhub. I had never heard of this god, but he told me that he had once been a mighty god of my ancestors. Their descendants, however, had abandoned him, and in my lifetime on Earth only a small village at the edge of the kingdom had still worshipped him.

“But gods do not die, though they may take other forms and new names, or even become nameless, and he had lived in the dreams of many people through many generations. Now he had decided that the time was come to leave the dreamworld. Thus, he told me that I must arise and go forth and preach the worship of Rushhub. I must gather together a group of the faithful and build a giant raft and take my people down The River upon it.