The Fabulous Riverboat (2 page)

A voice from below the poopdeck muttered. It was so deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men's necks rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time.

The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight, creaked so loudly it could be heard above the song of wind through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind of wooden joints, shouts of crew, hiss of water against the hull.

The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was as large as a half pony of beer and was all bars and arches and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled the eyes, smallseeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged and flaring-nostriled. Instead, it was the monstrous and comical travesty of the human nose that the proboscis monkey shows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee's or comic-strip Irishman's. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out by the convex jaws beneath.

His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe's look like pretzels. Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs and arms seemed short, they were so out of proportion to the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level with Sam Clemens' chin, and his arms, extended, could hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm's length in the air for an hour without a tremor.

He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty's sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by Homo sapiens. Long rusty-red hair, thicker than a man's, less dense than a chimpanzee's, was plastered to the body by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink of a blond Nordic.

He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary through the wavy, rusty-red hair that began an inch above the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed huge human-seeming teeth.

"I vath thleeping," he rumbled, "I vath dreaming of Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabajving—vhat you call mammothth. Thothe vere the good old dayth."

He shuffled forward, then stopped. "Tham! Vhat happened! You're bleeding! You look thick!"

Bellowing for his guards, Erik Bloodaxe stepped backwards from the titanthrop. "Your friend went mad! He thought he'd seen his wife—for the thousandth time—and he attacked me because I wouldn't take him in to the bank to her. Tyr's testicles, Joe! You know how many times he's thought he saw that woman, and how many times we stopped, and how many tunes it always turned out to be a woman who looked something like his woman but wasn't!

"This tune, I said no! Even if it had been his woman, I would have said no! We'd be putting our heads in the wolfs mouth!"

Erik crouched, ax lifted, ready to swing at the giant. Shouts came from middeck, and a big redhead with a flint ax ran up the ladder. The helmsman gestured for him to leave. The redhead, seeing Joe Miller so belligerent, did not hesitate to retreat.

"Vhat you thay, Tham?" Miller said. "Thyould I tear him apart?"

Clemens held his head in both hands and said, "No. He's right, I suppose. I don't really know if she was Livy. Probably just a German hausfrau. I don't know!" He groaned. "I don't know! Maybe it was her!"

Fishbone horns blared, and a huge drum on the middeck thundered. Sam Clemens said, "Forget about this, Joe, until we get through the straits—if we do get through! If we're to survive, we'll have to fight together. Later..."

"You alvayth thay later, Tham, but there never ith a later. Vhy?"

"If you can't figure that out, Joe, you're as dumb as you look!" Clemens snapped.

Tearshields glinted in Joe's eyes, and his bulging cheeks became wet.

"Every time you get thcared, you call me dumb," he said. "Vhy take it out on me? Vhy not on the people that thcare you the thyit outa you, vhy not on Bloodakthe?"

"I apologize, Joe," Clemens said. "Out of the mouths of babes and apemen... . You're not so dumb, you're pretty smart. Forget it, Joe. I'm sorry."

Bloodaxe swaggered up to them but kept out of Joe's reach. He grinned as he swung his ax. "There shall soon be a meeting of the metal!" And then he laughed and said, "What am I saying? Battle any more is the meeting of stone and wood, except for my star-ax, of course! But what does that matter? I have grown tired of these six months of peace. I need the cries of war, the whistling spear, the chunk of my sharp steel biting into flesh, the spurt of blood. I have become as impatient as a penned-up stallion who smells a mare in heat; I would mate with Death."

"Bull!" Joe Miller said. "You're jutht ath bad ath Tham in your vay. You're thcared, too, but you cover it up vith your big mouth."

"I do not understand your mangled speech," Bloodaxe said. "Apes should not attempt the tongue of man." "You underthtand me all right," Joe said.

"Keep quiet, Joe," Clemens said. He looked upRiver. Two miles away, the plains on each side of The River dwindled away as the mountains curved inward to create straits not more than a quarter mile wide. The water boiled at the bottom of the cliffs, which were perhaps 3,000 feet high. On the cliff-tops, on both sides, unidentified objects glittered in the sun.

A half mile below the straits, thirty galleys had formed three crescents. And, aided by the swift current and sixty oars each, they were speeding toward the three intruders. Clemens viewed them through his telescope and then said, "Each has about forty warriors aboard and two rocket-launchers. We're in a hell of a trap. And our own rockets have been in storage so long, the powder's likely to be crystallized. They'll go off in the tubes and blow us to kingdom come.

"And those things on top of the cliffs. Apparatus for projecting Greek fire?"

A man brought the king's armor: a triple-layered leather helmet with imitation leather wings and a nosepiece, a leather cuirass, leather breeches and a shield. Another man brought a bundle of spears: yew shafts and flint tips.

The rocket crew, all women, placed a projectile in the swivable launching tube. The rocket was six feet long, not counting the guide stick, built of bamboo, and looked exactly like a Fourth of July rocket. Its warhead contained twenty pounds of black gunpowder in which were many tiny chips of stone: shrapnel.

Joe Miller, the deck creaking beneath his 800 pounds, went below to get his armor and weapons. Clemens put on a helmet and slung a shield over his shoulder, but he would not use a cuirass or leggings. Although he feared wounds, he was even more frightened of drowning because of the heavy armor if he fell into The River.

Clemens thanked whatever gods there were that he had been lucky enough to fall in with Joe Miller. They were blood-brothers now—even if Clemens had fainted during the ceremony, which demanded mingling of blood and some even more painful and repulsive acts. Miller was to defend him, and Clemens was to defend Miller to the death. So far, the titanthrop had done all the battling. But then he was more than big enough for two.

Bloodaxe's dislike of Miller was caused by envy. Bloodaxe fancied himself as the world's greatest fighter and yet knew that Miller would have no more trouble dispatching him in combat than Miller would with a dog. And with a small dog at that.

Erik Bloodaxe gave his battle orders, which were transmitted to the other two ships by flashes of sunlight off obsidian mirrors. The ships would keep sails up and try to steer between the galleys. This would be difficult because a ship might have to change course to avoid ramming and so lose the wind. Also, each ship would thrice be subjected to crossfire.

"The wind's with them," Clemens said. "Their rockets will have more range until we're among them."

"Teach your grandmother to suck..." Bloodaxe said and stopped.

Some bright objects on the cliff-tops had left their positions and now were swooping through the air in a path that would bring them close above the Vikings. The Norsemen shouted with bewilderment and alarm, but Clemens recognized them as gliders. In as few words as possible, he explained to Bloodaxe. The king started to relay the information to the other Vikings but had to stop because the lead galleys fired off the first volley of rockets. Wobbling, trailing thick black smoke, ten rockets arced toward the three sailships. These changed course as quickly as possible, two almost colliding. Some of the rockets almost struck the masts or the hulls, but none hit and all splashed unexploded, falling into The River.

By then the first of the gliders made its pass. Slimfuselaged, long-winged, with black Maltese crosses on the sides of its slim and silvery fuselage, it dived at a 45degree angle toward the Dreyrugr. The Norsemen archers bent their yew bows and, at a command from the chief archer, loosed their shafts.

The glider swooped low over the water, several arrows sticking out of the fuselage, and it settled down for a landing on The River. It had failed to drop its bombs on the Dreyrugr. They were somewhere below the surface of The River.

But now other gliders were coming in at all three ships, and the enemy lead galleys had loosed another flight of rockets. Clemens glanced at their own rocket-launcher. The big blond crew-women were swiveling the tube under the command of small dark Temah, but she was not ready to touch the fuse. The Dreyrugr was not yet within range of the nearest galley.

For a second, everything was as if suspended in a photograph: the two gliders, their wingtips only two feet apart, pulling up out of the dive and the small black bombs dropping toward the decks of their targets, the arrows halfway toward the gliders, the German rockets halfway toward the Viking ships, on the downcurve of their arcs.

Clemens felt the sudden push of wind behind him, a whistling, an explosion as the sails took the full impact of air and rolled the ship over sharply on its longitudinal axis. There was a tearing sound as if the fabric of the world were being ripped apart; a cracking as if great axes had slammed into the masts.

The bombs, the gliders, the rockets, the arrows were lifted upward and backwards, turned upside down. The sails and masts left the ship, as if they had been launched from tubes, and soared away. The ship, released from the push of sail, rolled back to horizontal from an almost 90degree angle to The River. Clemens was saved from flying off the deck in the first slam of wind only because the titanthrop had seized the wheel with one hand and clutched him with the other. The helmsman had also clung to the wheel. The rocket crew, their shrieks carried upRiver by the wind, mouths open, hair whipping, flew like birds from the ship, soared and then splashed into The River. The rocket tube tore loose from its pedestal and followed them.

Bloodaxe had grabbed the railing with one hand and kept hold of his precious steel weapon with the other. While the ship rocked back and forth, he managed to stick the axhandle in the holster and then to cling to the railing with both hands. It was well for him that he did, because the wind, screaming like a woman falling off a cliff, became even more powerful and within a few seconds, a hot blast tore at the ship, and Clemens was as deafened and as seared as if he were standing near a rocket blast.

A great swell of Riverwater lifted the ship high. Clemens opened his eyes and then screamed but could not hear his own voice because of his stunned ears.

A wall of dirty brown water, at least fifty feet high, was racing around the curve of the valley between four and five miles away. He wanted to close his eyes again but could not. He continued to gaze with his lids rigid until the elevated sea was a mile away. Then he could make out the individual trees, the giant pines, oaks, and yews scattered along the front of the wave, and, as it got closer, pieces of bamboo and pine houses, a roof somehow still intact, a shattered hull with a half mast, the sperm-whale-sized, dark-gray body of a Riverdragon fish, plucked from the five-hundred-feet depths of The River.

Terror numbed him. He wanted to die to escape this particular death. But he could not, and so he watched with frozen eyes and congealed mind as the ship, instead of being drowned and smashed beneath hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, rose up and up and up on the slope of the wave, up and up, the dirty brown wreckagestrewn cliff towering above, always threatening to avalanche down upon the ship, and the sky above, now turned from bright noon-blue to gray.

Then they were on the top, poised for a downward slide, rocked, dipped, and went down toward the trough. Smaller, but still huge waves fell over the boat. A body landed on the deck near Clemens, a body catapulted from the raging waters. Clemens stared at it with only a spark of comprehension. He was too iced with terror to feel anymore; he had reached the limits.

And so he stared at Livy's body, smashed on one side but untouched on the other side! It was Livy, his wife, whom he had seen on that Riverbank.

Another wave that almost tore nun and the titanthrop loose struck the deck. The helmsman screamed as he lost his grip and followed the woman's corpse overboard.

The boat, sliding upward from the depths of the trough, turned to present its broadside to the wave. But the boat continued to soar upward, though it tilted so that Miller and Clemens were hanging from the stump of the wheel's base as if they were dangling from a tree trunk on the face of a mountain. Then the boat rolled back to horizontal position as it raced down the next valley. Bloodaxe had lost his grip and was shot across the deck and would have gone over the other side if the ship had not righted itself in time. Now he clung to the port railing. On top of the third wave, the Dreyrugr sped slantwise own the mountain of water. It struck the broken forepart of another vessel, shuddered, and Bloodaxe's grip was torn loose by the impact. He spun along the railing, hit the other railing on the edge of the poopdeck, shattered it, and went on over the edge and below to the middeck.

Not until morning of the next day did Sam Clemens thaw out of his shock. The Dreyrugr had somehow ridden out the great waves long enough to go slanting across the plains on the shallower but still rough waters. It had been shot past hills and through a narrow pass into a small canyon at the base of the mountain. And, as the waters subsided from beneath it, the boat had settled with a crash into the ground.