No doubt, Thorsteinn was somewhere on the River and battling some foe while trying to get power over the foe or else battling to keep a foe from getting power over him. Power had been the main fuel of humankind on Earth. As on Earth, so here. So far. Until the Savior—Savioress?—grew up and worked God’s will on His creations.
Groa must have been ordered by Ivar to attach herself to Faustroll. She was to find out if his story was true. Though the king had seemed to accept Faustroll at face value, he would wonder if the fellow had been sent by Arpad to assassinate him. Groa would test him, probe him, and go so far as to lie with him if it was necessary. Perhaps, even if it was not necessary. She was a lusty woman. Then she’d report to Ivar later.
Davis sighed. What a life the afterlife was! Why couldn’t everybody live in peace and trust? If they could not all love each other, they could at least be tolerant.
They could not do this for the same reason they had not done so on Earth. It was the nature of Homo sapiens. Of most of men and women, anyway. But … their situation was so different here. It was set up so that none need work hard for food and housing and other necessities. If people could all be pacifists and honest and compassionate, they would need no government by others. The Frenchman was right, though Davis hated admitting it even to himself. Given a new type of people, anarchy could be workable here.
Obviously, Whoever had placed humanity here had designed the Rivervalley so that humans, not having to spend so much time working, had time to advance themselves spiritually. But only those who understood this would advance themselves, change themselves for the better, and go on to whatever stage the Whoevers had built for them.
The Whoevers, however, had to be God. For Davis, there was no doubt or mystery about the identity of the creator of this place. The big mystery was why He had prepared a halfway house for the once-dead instead of the heavenly mansion the Bible had described.
He admitted to himself that the Bible had been very vague about the specifics of the abode of the saved, the saints. It had been much more concrete about the abode of the damned.
He could only accept that God, in His infinite wisdom, knew what he was doing.
Why, as so many complained, had not God given them some reassurance? A sign? A beacon toward which they could go as a moth could fly to the flame? Though that was not the best of comparisons, now he considered it. Anyway, where was the sign, the beacon, the writing in the sky?
Davis knew. It was the birth of a baby to a virgin. In a world where men and women were sterile, one woman had been the exception. She had been impregnated with the Holy Spirit, and she had conceived. God had performed a miracle. The infant, so the story went, was female. At first, hearing this, Davis had been shocked. But, thinking about it calmly and logically, trying to overcome his preconceptions, he had concluded that he should not be upset, not kick against the pricks. On Earth, the Savior had been a male. Here, the Savior was a female. Why not?
God was fair-minded, and who was he to question the Divine Being?
“Davis!” a harsh voice said behind him. He jumped and whirled, his heart beating hard. Standing in the doorway was Sharkko the Shyster, the ever-egregious slave of whom he had dreamed last night.
“Hustle your ass, Davis! The Great Whore of Babylon wants you for a treatment! Right now!”
“I’ll tell the queen what you said about her,” Davis said. He did not intend to do so, but he wanted to see the loathsome fellow turn pale. Which he did.
“Ah, she won’t believe you,” the slave said. “She hates your guts. She’d take my word against yours any time. Anyway, I doubt she’d be insulted. She’d think it was a compliment.”
“If it wasn’t against my nature, I’d boot you in the rear,” Davis said.
The slave, his color now restored, snorted. He turned and limped down the hall. Davis left the room. He watched the man as he walked behind him. Though the man had been resurrected in his twenty-five-year-old body, his vision restored to 20/20, he was now a human wreck. His right leg had been broken in several places and reset wrong. His nose had not been reset after the bridge had been shattered. He could not breathe properly because of his nose and some ribs that had also lacked proper resetting. One eye had been knocked out and was not yet fully regrown. His face twisted and leered with a tic.
All of this had resulted from a beating by slaves whose overseer he had been. Unable any longer to endure his bullyings, kicks, and other unjust treatment, they had worked on him late one night and thus worked out their hatred of him. His hut had been too dark for him to identify his attackers, though he, and everybody else, knew his men were the malefactors. If you could fairly call them malefactors. Most people though the deed was justified self-defense.
Ivar thought so, too, after hearing testimony. He decided that Sharkko had broken the rules laid down by the king. These were mainly for the sake of efficiency, not of humanitarianism. But they had been disregarded, and Sharkko’s back was bloody from forty lashes with a fish-hide whip. Each of the overseer’s slaves had administered a stroke. Ivar, witnessing this, had been highly amused.
Sharkko had then been degraded to a quarry slave. But his injuries had kept him from doing well at the hard work, and he had been made a tower slave after six months. Ivar used him for, among other things, a human bench when he wished to sit down where a chair was unavailable.
The Shyster had been so named by a Terrestrial client who was now a citizen of Ivar’s kingdom. From what the client said, he had been cheated by Sharkko and had been unable to find justice in the court. The ex-client was among those who had beaten Sharkko.
The Shyster had been indiscreet enough to tell some cronies that he meant to revenge himself on all who had wronged him. Though Davis did not think that he had earned Sharkko’s hatred, he was among those named for some terrible retribution. The Shyster had not been so full of braggadocio that he had said anything about revenging himself on Ivar. He knew what would happen to him if the king heard about such a threat.
Sharkko, hunched over, dragging one foot and mumbling to himself, continued on down the hall. Sharkko was a veritable Caliban, Davis thought, as he followed the monster down the hall to a steep and spiraling staircase.
He felt unusually uneasy. It seemed to him that events were coming to a head, a big, green, and pus-filled boil on the face of this kingdom. The coming conflict between Arpad and Ivar, the arrival of the grotesque and disquieting Faustroll, the increasing tension between himself and the queen, and Sharkko’s hatred added up to a situation that could pop open—like a boil—at any time. He could feel it. Though he could not logically predict that the eruption would occur soon, he sensed it.
Or, perhaps, this was caused by his internal conflicts. He himself was ready to break open and out, much as he wanted to wait until the right moment for flight.
The virgin mother and the baby were waiting for him up the River. They did not know it, of course. But he was to play a strong part in the events that would bring on the revelation of the second Savior to this world. Though it might be egotistic to think so, he was sure of it.
He entered the large room where Queen Ann waited for him. She was on the osteopathic table that he had built. But, spread out naked there, she looked as if she were waiting for a lover. Her two attendants giggled when they saw him. They were blacks who had been slaves of an early-twentieth-century Arabian family on Earth. They had been free for only one year after their resurrection. Now they were slaves again.
They should be sympathizing with his plight. Instead, they were amused.
5
“Massage my inner thigh muscles,” Ann said. “They’re very tight.”
She kept talking softly while laughing loudly between sentences. Her remarkably bright and leaf-green eyes never left his face. Though he kept it expressionless, he longed to snarl at her, spit in her face, and then vomit on her. The Jezebel! The Scarlet Women! The Great Whore of Babylon!
“When you’re on your back, rotating
your pelvis, your legs up in the air for a long time, you put a strain on those muscles,” she said. “It’s almost an equal strain when I’m on top. Sometimes I have to rest between up-and-downs and hip gyrations. But then I squeeze down on him with my sphincter muscle and so don’t really get a rest. It is the sphincter, isn’t it, Doctor?”
He knew the human body so well he did not have to see what he was doing. His head turned away from her, his eyes half closed, he kneaded her flesh. How soft her skin was! What a muscle tone! Sometimes, when he was in that drowsy twilight state between dreaming and awakening, he knew his fingers were working on flesh. Not hers, of course. The reflex was caused by a digital memory, as it were, of the thousands of bodies he had treated while on Earth.
“Don’t get too close to the king’s personal property,” she said. “You touch it, and he might cut your hands off.”
If he did that, Davis thought, scores of the males in the kingdom would be without hands.
“You’re not much of a man,” she said. “A real man’s tallywhacker would be lifting that towel right off his waist, rip the Velcro apart.”
The slave girls giggled though they did not understand English. But they had heard similar phrases in Esperanto for a long time. They knew that she was saying something taunting and demeaning.
Davis envisioned closing his hands around the queen’s throat. It wouldn’t take long.
Then he prayed, Oh, Lord! Save me from such sinful thoughts!
“Perhaps,” he said, “I should massage your knees, too? They seem to be rather stiff.”
She frowned and stared hard at him. The she smiled and laughed.
“Oh! You’re suggesting …? Yes, do. I have spent a certain amount of time on my knees. But they’re on pillows, so it’s not so bad. However …”
Instead of flying into a rage, as he had expected, she was amused. She also looked somewhat triumphant, as if goading him into saying something insulting to her, even an innuendo, was a victory. However, she probably did not regard his comments as an insult. The bitch was more likely to think he had complimented her.
What did he care what she thought? To be honest with himself, he cared a lot. Unless she was stopped by Ivar, she could make his life unbearable, torture him, do anything with or to him. Davis had not heard any stories about her being cruel, except for her sexual teasing, which could not be ranked with torture or killing. But he had no guarantee that she might not become so. Especially in her dealings with him.
Ann Pullen was a fellow American, though a nauseating example as far as he was concerned. She had been born about 1632 in Maryland. Her family had been Quakers, but when it converted to Episcopalianism, she had gone to hell. Those were her own words. She had been married four times to tobacco plantation owners in Virginia and Maryland. She had survived them all.
No wonder, Davis thought. She’d wear any man out, if not from her incessant sexual demands and infidelity, then from her TNT temper and willfulness.
Mostly, she had lived in Westmoreland County, Virginia, which was between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. In her day, the area had many thick forests and large swamps but no roads. Travel was mainly by river or creek. Nor did the plantations resemble those of a later era. There were no beautiful many-pillared mansions and broad well-kept lawns. The owners’ houses were modest, the stables were likely to be made of logs, and chickens and hogs roamed the yards. Pig stealing was common even among the plantation owners. Cash was scarce; the chief currency was tobacco. The people were unusually hot-tempered and litigious, though no one knew why.
By her own testimony, Ann had once been sentenced to ten lashes on her bare shoulders because of her libelous and scandalous speeches against a Mister Presley. She also had once attacked her sister-in-law with bare hands.
It had been recorded in the Order Book of the county in A.D. 1677 that Ann Pullen had encouraged her daughter Jane to become “the most remarkable and notorious whore in the province of Virginie.” But Davis had to admit that, in the strict sense of the word, she was not a whore. She fornicated because she liked to do so and never took money.
The Order Book also said that Jane’s mother, Ann Pullen, had debauched her own daughter by encouragement to commit adultery and break the whole estate of matrimony.
The daughter’s husband, Morgan Jones, had enjoined more than once (as the court had recorded) any man from entertaining or having any manner of dealing with Jane or transporting her out of the county or giving her passage over any river or creek.
It was also recorded that Ann Pullen had declared that Jane had no husband at that time, Jones having died, and she (Ann) did not know why her daughter should not take the pleasure of this world as well as any other woman. Also, Ann did not care who the father of her daughter’s child was, provided one William Elmes would take her to England, as he had promised.
Ann was a feminist ahead of her time, a lone pioneer in the movement in the days when it was dangerous to be such. She had also been a libertine, though Davis thought that automatically went with the desire for female equality.
However, such Terrestrial attitudes should not apply on the Riverworld. Even he admitted that, though insisting that there were limits to that viewpoint. Ann had certainly overstepped them. With seven-league boots.
Ivar’s kingdom was basically Old Norse. Since women (though not female slaves) in the pre-Christian era had had many more rights than those in the Christian countries, they had even more rights on the Riverworld. In this state, anyway. Theoretically, Ann could divorce Ivar with a simple statement that she wished it, and she could take her property with her. Not half of the kingdom’s, that is, the king’s. Her grail, her towels, her artifacts, and her slaves were hers.
But divorce didn’t seem likely. Ivar was greatly amused by her, even when she became angry at him, and he reveled in her uninhibited and many-talented lovemaking. He knew that she had lovers, but he didn’t seem to care. He doubted that she would plot with a lover to assassinate him. She knew well on which side her vagina was buttered.
So Andrew Davis had to suffer the indignities she piled on him. Meanwhile, he dreamed of the divinely begotten infant far up the River. He also tried to think of foolproof ways to escape this land. And how to prevent capture by the other slave-holding states between him and his goal.
Doing his Christian duty, he had tried to pray for Ann. But he sounded so insincere to himself that he knew God would ignore his requests that she be forgiven and be made to see the Light.
When her treatment was over, he left the chamber as he always did. He was angry, frustrated, and sweating, his stomach was boiling, and his hands were shaking.
Oh, Lord, how long must I endure this? Do not, I pray You, continue to subject me to evil and the temptation to curse You as you did Job!
At high noon, the grailstone in the tower courtyard erupted in lightning and thunder. He left the room in which he had been waiting until this happened. To stand in the yard near the stone was to be deafened. Though his grail was full of excellent food and drink, he had no appetite. What he did not eat, he shared with his cronies at the table in the big hall. The cup of brandy and the pack of mingled tobacco and marijuana cigarettes he put aside. He could have kept half of the booze and the coffin nails for himself, but he would give them all to Eysteinn the Chatterer, Ivar’s chief tax and tribute collector.
Thus, he paid his taxes at a double rate. That enabled him halfway through the month to pour the daily quota of the liquor down a drain and to shred the cigarettes. He did this secretly because many would have been outraged at this waste. They would report to the king, who would confiscate the extra “goodies” and would punish him.
He had never, during his two lives, tasted any alcohol or smoked. In fact, on Earth, he had not even drunk ice water because of its unhealthy effects. He loathed having to contribute to the king and his vices. But, if he didn’t, he would suffer the cat-o’-nine-tails or become a quarry slave. Or both.
That evening,
shortly after sunset, he went to the great hall built near the bank. This was where Ivar preferred to eat supper, to drink, and to roister among his cronies and his toadies. (Davis admitted that he was one of the latter. But he had no choice.) The hall was built in the old Viking style, a single huge room with Ivar’s table on a platform and at the head of the floor-level tables. The platform had not been used on Earth among the semi-democratic Vikings. It was an innovation adopted by Ivar. The support poles were carved with the heads of humans, gods, beasts, and symbols from the old religion. Among these and often repeated were gold-mining dwarfs, dragons, the Earth-encircling Midgard serpent, stags, bears, valknuts, frost giants, Thor and his hammer, one-eyed Odin with, sometimes, his ravens Hugin and Munin on his shoulders, right-handed swastikas, runic phrases, and Skidbladnir, the magical ship that could be folded and carried in a bag after use.
Tonight, as usual, the men and women drank too much, the talk was fast and furious, boasting and bombast thundered in the hall, people quarreled and sometimes fought. Ivar had forbidden duels to the death because he had lost too many good warriors to them. But the belligerents could go at each other with fists and feet, and the king did not frown on gouging of eyes, crushing of testicles, ripping off of ears, and biting off of noses. Though it took three months, the eyes, noses, and ears would grow again, and the testicles would repair themselves.
Davis had grown used to these nightly gatherings, but he did not like them. Violence still upset him, and the air stank of tobacco and marijuana smoke and beer and liquor fumes. Also, the sickening odor of farts, followed by loud laughter and thigh-slapping, drifted to him now and then. Queen Ann, who was sitting on Ivar’s left, was one of the loudest in her laughter when this form of primitive humor erupted. Tonight she wore a towel around her neck, the ends of which covered her breasts. But she was rather careless about keeping them in place.