The Fabulous Riverboat (11 page)

"Rather, I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!"

Sam became cold and brittle. Even when he felt the hand slacken its grip on his ankle, he did not move. He heard the death rattle and did not move or look down. Faintly, Bloodaxe spoke again. "I wait!"

There was another rattle, more drawn out, and the hand fell away. Sam forced himself to step away, not sure that he would not break into a dozen pieces. He looked at von Richthofen and said, "Superstition! A man can't look into the future!"

Von Richthofen said, "I don't think so. But if things are as you believe, Sam, mechanical, automatic, then the future is predetermined. If things are ready-made, why can't the future open up for a minute, lights blaze in the tunnel of time, and a man see down the track?"

Sam did not answer. Von Richthofen laughed to show that he was joking and clapped Sam on the shoulder.

Sam said, "I need a drink. Badly." Then he said, "I don't take any stock in that superstitious rot."

But he believed that those dying eyes had seen into the years ahead, and he was thereafter to believe.

An hour before dusk, King John's fleet arrived. Sam Clemens sent a man out to tell John that he wanted to discuss a possible partnership. John, ever willing to talk to you before knifing you, agreed to a powwow. Sam stood on the edge of the bank while John Lackland leaned on the railing of his galley. Sam, his terror unfrozen by a dozen whiskeys, described the situation and spoke glowingly of the great boat to be built.

John was a short, dark man with very broad shoulders, tawny hair and blue eyes. He smiled frequently and spoke in an English not so heavily accented it could not be easily understood. Before coming to this area, he had lived for ten years among late-eighteenth-century Virginians. A fluent linguist, he had disburdened himself of much of the speech patterns of his twelfth-century English and Norman French.

He understood well why it would pay him to team up with Clemens against von Radowitz. No doubt he had mental reservations about what he would do after von Radowitz was disposed of, but he came ashore to swear eternal friendship and partnership. The details of the pact were arranged over drinks, and then King John had Joe Miller released from his cage on the flagship.

Sam did not shed tears easily, but several trickled down his cheeks on seeing the titanthrop. Joe wept like a perambulating Niagara Falls and almost broke Sam's ribs in his embrace.

Von Richthofen, however, told Clemens later, "At least, with Bloodaxe, you knew fairly well where you stood. You've made a bad trade."

"I'm from Missouri," Sam replied, "but I never was much of a mule trader. However, if you're running for your life, a pack of wolves snapping at your heels, you'll trade a foundered plug for a wild mustang, as long as he'll carry you out of danger. You worry later about how to get down off of him without breaking your neck."

The battle, which started at dawn the next day, was long. Several times, disaster came close for Clemens and King John. The Englishman's fleet had hidden near the east bank in the early morning fog and then had come up behind the German fleet. Flaming pine torches thrown by John's sailors started fires on many of van Radowitz's boats. But the invaders spoke a common language, were well disciplined, had soldiered together a long time, and were far better armed.

Their rockets sank many of John's boats and blasted holes in the cheval-de-frise along the bank. The Germans then stormed ashore under cover of a hail of arrows. During the landing, a rocket exploded in the hole dug to get to the iron. Sam was knocked over by the blast. Half stunned, he rose. And he became aware of a man he had never seen before standing by him. Sam was sure that the man had not been in this area until this moment.

The stranger was about five feet seven inches tall and was stockily, even massively, built. Like an old red ram, Sam thought, though the stranger looked, of course, as if he were twenty-five years old. His curly auburn hair hung down his back to his waist. His black eyebrows were as thick as Sam's. His eyes were large, dark brown with chips of pale green. His face was aquiline and jutting-chinned. His ears were large and stood out at almost right angles from his head.

The body of an old red ram, Sam thought, with the head of a great horned owl.

His bow was made of a material that Sam had seen before, though it was rare. It was made from two of the curved horns that ring a Riverdragon-fish's mouth. The two were joined together to make one double recurved bow. This type was by far the most powerful and durable bow in the valley but had one disadvantage. It took extremely powerful arms to bend it,

The stranger's leather quiver held twenty arrows, flinttipped, the shafts carved laboriously from the fin bones of the Riverdragon and feathered with carved pieces of bone so thin that the sun shone through them.

He spoke in a German with a thick, non-Germanic, unidentifiable accent. "You look like Sam Clemens."

"I am," Clemens replied. "What's left of me. But how did you... ?"

"You were described to me by—" the stranger paused—"one of Them."

Sam did not understand for a moment. The partdeafness caused by the explosion, the yells of men killing each other only twenty yards away, other, more distant rocket explosions, and the sudden appearance of this man gave everything an unreal quality.

He said, "He sent ... the Mysterious Stranger ... he sent you! You're one of the twelve!" "He? Not he! She sent me!"

Sam did not have time to question him about this. He checked the impulse to ask the man if he was any good with the bow. He looked as if he could wrest from the bow the last atom of potentiality. Instead, Sam climbed to the top of the pile of dirt by the hole and pointed at the nearest enemy ship, its prow against the bank. A man standing on its poopdeck was bellowing orders.

"Von Radowitz, the leader of the enemy," Sam said, "He's out of range of our feeble bows."

Smoothly, swiftly, pausing only to aim briefly, not bothering to gauge the wind which blew always at this time of day at a steady six miles an hour, the bowman loosed his black arrow. Its trajectory ended in the solar plexus of von Radowitz. The German staggered backward under the impact, whirled to reveal the bloody tip sticking from his back, and fell backward over the railing and into the waters between boat and bank.

The second-in-command rallied his men, and the bowman drove a shaft through him. Joe Miller, clad in Riverdragon-leather armor, swinging his huge oaken club, ravaged among the Germans in the center of the line of battle. He was like an 800-pound lion with a human brain. Death and panic went with him. He smashed twenty skulls by the minute and occasionally picked up a man with his free hand and threw him to knock down a half dozen or so.

At different times, five men managed to slip behind Joe, but the black bone arrows of the newcomer always intercepted them.

The invaders broke and tried to get back to their boats. Von Richthofen, naked, bloody, grinning, danced before Sam. "We've won! We've won!"

"You'll get your flying machine yet," Sam said. He turned to the archer. "What is your name?"

"I have had many names, but when my grandfather first held me in his arms he called me Odysseus."

All Sam could think of to say was, "We've got a lot to talk about."

Could this be the man of whom Homer sang? The real Ulysses, that is, the historical Ulysses, who did fight before the walls of Troy and about whom legends and fairy tales were later collected? Why not? The shadowy man who had talked in Sam's hut had said he had picked twelve men out of the billions available. What his means were for choosing, Sam did not know, but he presumed the reasons were good. And the Mysterious Stranger had told him of one choice: Richard Francis Burton. Was there some kind of aura about the twelve that enabled the renegade to know the man who could do the job? Some tiger color of the soul?

Late that night, Sam, Joe, Lothar and the Achaean, Odysseus, walked to their huts after the victory celebration. Sam's throat was dry from all the talking. He had tried to squeeze out of the Achaean all he knew about the siege of Troy and his wanderings afterward. He had been told enough to confuse, not enlighten, him.

The Troy that Odysseus knew was not the city near the Hellespont, the ruins that Terrestrial archeologists called Troy VIIa. The Troy that Odysseus, Agamemnon and Diomedes besieged was farther south, opposite the island of Lesbos but inland and north of the Kaikos River. It had been inhabited by people related to the Etruscans, who lived at that time in Asia Minor and later emigrated to Italy because of the Hellenic invaders. Odysseus knew of the city which later generations had thought was Troy.

Dardanians, barbarophones, lived there; they were related to the true Trojans. Their city had fallen five years before the Trojan war to other barbarians from the north.

Three years after the siege of the real Troy, which had lasted for only two years, Odysseus had gone on the great sea-raid of the Danaans, or Achaeans, against the Egypt of Rameses III. The raid had ended in disaster. Odysseus had fled for his life by sea and had indeed gone unwillingly on a journey that took three years and resulted in his visiting Malta, Sicily and parts of Italy, lands unknown then to the Greeks. There had been no Laestrygonians, Aeolus, Calypso, Circe, Polyphemus. His wife was named Penelope, but there were no suitors for him to kill.

As for Achilles and Hector, Odysseus knew of them only as the principals in a song. He supposed both of them to have been Pelasgians, the people who lived in the Hellenic peninsula before the Achaeans came down out of the north to conquer it. The Achaeans had adapted the Pelasgian song to suit their own purposes, and later bards must have incorporated it in the Iliad. Odysseus knew The Iliad and The Odyssey, because he had met a scholar who could recite both epics from memory.

"What about the Wooden Horse?" Sam said, fully expecting to draw a blank with his question. To his surprise, Odysseus not only knew of it but said that he had indeed been responsible for it. It was a deception conceived in desperation by madness and should have failed.

And this, to Sam, was the most startling of all. The scholars had united in denying any reality to this story, saying that it was patently impossible. They should have been correct, since the idea did seem fantastic, nor was it likely that the Achaeans would be stupid enough to build the horse or the Trojans stupid enough to fall for it. But the wooden horse had existed, and the Achaeans had gotten into the city by hiding inside the horse.

Von Richthofen and Joe listened to the two talk. Sam had decided that, despite the Ethical's warning to tell no one about him, Joe and Lothar should know of him. Otherwise, Sam would be doing so many things that would be inexplicable to anyone closely associated with him. Besides, Sam felt that his taking others into the secret would show the Ethical that Sam was really running things. It was a childish gesture, but Sam made it

Sam said good night to all but Joe and lay down on the cot, Although very tired, he could not get to sleep. The snores issuing from Joe like a maelstrom through a keyhole did not help soothe his insomnia. Also, his excitement over tomorrow's doings made his nerves ripple and brain pulse. Tomorrow would be a historic day, if this world was to have a history. Eventually, there would be paper, ink, pencils, even a printing press. The great Riverboat would have a weekly journal. There would be a book which would tell of how the hole was deepened by exploding rockets captured from von Radowitz's ships. Perhaps the iron would be exposed tomorrow; it surely must.

And there was in addition his worries about King John, the jesting slyboots. God knew what that insidious mind was planning. It was doubtful that John would do anything treacherous until the boat was built, and that would be years from now. There was no need to worry yet, none at all. Despite which, Sam worried.

Sam awoke with a start, Ms heart beating as if some monster of his nightmares had kicked it. Wet air was blowing in through the interstices of the bamboo walls and the mat hanging over the entranceway. Rain crashed against the leaf-covered roof, and thunder boomed from the mountains. Joe was still snoring his private thunder.

Sam stretched, and then he cried out and sat up. His hand had touched flesh. Lightning from far away paled the darkness by two shades and gave vague shape to someone squatting by the cot.

A familiar baritone spoke. "You needn't look for the titanthrop to come to your aid. I've ensured that he'll not wake until dawn."

By this, Sam knew that the Ethical could see where no light was. Sam picked up a cigar from the little folding table and said, "Mind if I smoke?"

The Mysterious Stranger took so long replying that Sam wondered. The glow from the hot wire in Sam's lighter would not be bright enough to reveal the man's features, and probably he was wearing a mask or some device over his face. Did he dislike the odor of cigars, perhaps of tobacco in any form? Yet he hesitated to say so because this characteristic might identify him? Identify whom? The other Ethicals who knew that they had a renegade among them? There were twelve, or so the Stranger had said. If they ever learned that he, Sam Clemens, had been contacted by an Ethical, and learned of the Ethical's dislike of tobacco, would They know at once the renegade's identity?

Sam did not voice his suspicions. He would keep this to himself for possible later use.

"Smoke," the Stranger said. Although Sam could not see him or hear him move, he got the impression that he backed off a little.

"What's the occasion for this unexpected visit?" Sam said.

"To tell you I won't be able to see you again for a long time. I didn't want you to think I'd deserted you. I'm being called away on business you wouldn't understand even if I were to explain it. You're on your own now for a long time. If things should go badly for you, I won't be able to interfere even in a subtle way.