“You were and are evil!” Dante cried. “Would a godly man make dogs out of men, no matter what their offence?”
Boniface screamed, “Down on your knees, Guelf pig, and confess that you have wronged me and be truly contrite! Then you may continue your journey to find your beloved Beatrice! Though you should be seeking the Truth and God, not a slut such as she!”
“A fig upon you!” Dante screamed. And he bit his thumb and stabbed it at Boniface.
“Dante empties himself; he confesses his guilt and sin. Continue to suffer your rightful punishment!”
Then the pope, slaves, henchmen, and dog pack left. Four guards stayed behind to make sure that he did not find some means of killing himself.
Tonight, as every night, it would rain so hard that he could lie down in the water and drown himself. To do that would be to commit an unforgivable sin, one that automatically damned a soul. Would that be a sin in this world? Here, when a man died, he rose to life twenty-four hours later, though far away from where he had died. Was it then a sin to kill himself? Logic said that it was not. Yet he could not be sure. What God forbade on Earth should also be forbidden in this world. Or had the commandments been changed somewhat here to fit the situation?
Unheeding the soft squishy stuff under his feet, he paced back and forth. His mind went from the unanswerable question of suicide here to the conflicts raging during his lifetime. When he was calm and logical, which was not often, he told himself that the bloody quarrels between Ghibellines and Guelfs and between Black Guelfs and White Guelfs over politico-religious issues no longer mattered.
The huge majority of resurrectees had never heard of these conflicts and would yawn if they did. Only in this area, where Italians of his era lived, did the hatred burn fiercely. Yet it should be forgotten. Far more important things stalked the Rivervalley and should be dealt with. If they were not, salvation would be beyond their reach.
But he could neither forget nor forgive.
At high noon, the grailstones thundered. The echoes from the mountains had just ceased when he heard the dogs coming toward him. Presently, the barking and the howling, mixed with the crack of the dog-tenders’ whips, were above and around him. Dante looked upward, shielding his eyes against the sun. He cried out and sank to his knees. He said then, “Beatrice!”
Boniface, standing naked by the edge of the pit, a leash in his hand, said, “Your long quest is over, sinner! Your beloved whore was brought in this morning by slave dealers! Here she is, a lovely bitch who must surely be in heat!”
Dante had averted his eyes, but he forced himself to look again. Once more, he cried out with horror.
She was naked and down on her hands and knees. She was weeping, her face so twisted that he should not have been able to recognise her. Something, some divine element, a sort of lightning flash between heaven and earth, had flashed from her to him. He had known instantly that she was Beatrice.
Boniface, grinning like a fox about to eat a chicken, pulled on her leash and kicked her, though not hard, in the ribs. She obeyed his orders to place herself parallel with the edge of the pit and very close to it. Then he gave the leash to a guard and got down on his hands and knees behind her.
“A bitch must be mounted from behind!” he shouted. She cried out, “Dante!”
A whip wielded by another guard cut her across her shoulders. She cried out again.
“Do not speak!” Boniface said. “You are a soulless dog, and dogs do not speak!”
He eased himself forward over her. She screamed when he penetrated her.
Dante was leaping upward again and again and yelping like a dog. But he could not jump high enough to grab the edge.
“Look, look, sinner!” Boniface cried. “I am no dog, yet I am humping doglike the bitch you love so much!”
Dante wanted to close his eyes but could not.
And then Beatrice heaved upward and lifted Boniface with her. Though the guard jerked savagely on her leash, he could not stop her. She was at this moment as strong as if an avenging angel had poured his holy fierceness into her. She turned around and grabbed Boniface. Both screaming, they fell into the pit, the leash jerking loose from the guards hand. She landed on top of the pope and knocked the wind out of him. Immediately, she began tearing at his nose with her teeth. She ceased biting when a spear cast by a guard from above plunged deep into her back.
She gasped, “Mother of…wish…die forever,” and died.
The guards shouted at Dante to stay away from the pope. He had pushed the woman’s corpse aside and was scrambling to his feet. Dante, crying out with grief and rage, jerked the spear from the beloved flesh and drove its point into the popes belly. Then he yanked it out and started to turn.
A guard who had just dropped into the pit ran toward Dante, his spear held level. But his feet slipped in the filth, and he fell hard on his face.
Dante raised the spear to stab the guard. He hesitated. If he spared the guard, he, too, might be spared. But the popes’ men would only do that to torture him and then, probably, cast him again into the pit.
As the guard, slipping in the filth, tried to get up, Dante cried out, “Beatrice! Wait for me!”
He rammed the spear butt against the log wall and pushed the blade into the pit of his stomach. Despite the agony, he kept on pushing until the blade was buried in him.
He was committing the sin of suicide. But it was the only way of escape. Someday, he would find out if it was unforgivable. If he eventually went to Hell because of his evil deed—if it was evil—he was willing to pay the full price.
Beatrice had been little more than an arms length from him. Then, within two minutes, she was gone.
But she could be found again.
Though he might have to search for a hundred years, he would find her.
Surely, God understood his great love for her. He would not be jealous because his creature, Dante Alighieri, loved Beatrice more than he loved his Creator.
Dante’s last thought dwindled into darkness. Forgive…didn’t mean tha…
UP THE BRIGHT RIVER
1
Andrew Paxton Davis leaned into the fifteen-mile-an-hour wind. But not too far. He was standing at the end of a fifty-foot-long yew wood gangplank. It was three inches deep and four and a half inches wide. Thirty feet of it was supported by a single forty-five-degree angled beam, the ocher end of which was attached to the tower structure. Beyond that, the remaining twenty feet formed a sort of diving board. Davis, having ventured out to its end, felt it bend under him.
The ground was three hundred feet below him, but he could clearly hear the roar and screams of the crowd and sometimes fragments of words from an individual. The upturned faces were mostly eager or malicious. Some expressed fear or sympathy for him.
Beyond the end of the board was a twelve-foot gap. Then the projecting end of another gangplank equally long and narrow, began. But his weight bent the end of the plank he stood on and made it five inches lower than the other.
If he could leap from one gangplank to the next he was free. The Emperor had promised that any “criminals” who could do so would be allowed to depart unharmed from the state. Attempting such a feat or refusing to do it was not, however, a choice. All major criminals were sentenced to the ordeal.
The people below were rooting for him or hoping he would fall. Their attitude depended upon which way they had bet.
Behind him, standing on the platform of the tower, the other prisoners shouted encouragement. Davis did not know two of them or what their crimes were. The others were his companions, if you could call them that, who had traveled far together and had been captured by the people of the Western Sun Kingdom. They were the Viking, Ivar the Boneless, the mad Frenchman, Faustroll, and Davis’s bane, the beautiful but sluttish Ann Pullen.
Davis had been chosen by the Emperor Pachacuti to jump first. He would just as soon be the last in line. If he refused to leap, he would be thrown off the cower by the guards.
Ivar shouted in Old Norse. Though the wind hurled his words away from his lips, they came from the chest of a giant. Davis heard them as if they were far away.
“Show them you are not afraid! Run bravely and without fear! Run with the fleetness of Hugi, the giant whose name means Thought! Then fly as if you wear the birdskin of Loki! Pray to your god that you will not bring shame to him by hesitating! Nor to us!”
Faustroll’s voice was shrill but pierced the wind. He spoke in English.
“It does not matter if you fail and fall, my Philistine friend! One moment of terror, quite cathartic for you and for us, and you will awake tomorrow as whole as ever! Which, if you will pardon my frankness, is not saying much!”
Anal Pullen either said nothing or her voice was snatched away by the wind.
What Faustroll said about him was, excluding the insults, true. He would die today; he would be resurrected at dawn. But he might be far down the River and have to start his journey all over again. That prospect made him quail almost as much as what he must do within the next twenty seconds. He had been given only two minutes to make the attempt.
“Ten feet, Andrew the Red!” Ivar had said when the Emperor pronounced sentence on him. “Ten feet! It is nothing! I will run on the board like a deer and will soar off its end like a hawk and land upon the other board like a lynx pouncing upon its prey!”
Brave words. Though Ivar was six feet six inches tall and was enormously powerful, he weighed over two hundred and thirty pounds. That was a lot of muscle and bone to lift. The heavier the runner, the more the wood would bend down. Not only would he have to leap across, he would have to leap up to attain the end of the other board.
Davis had an advantage in being only five feet six inches high and in weighing only one hundred and forty pounds. But the jumper’s degree of courage made a difference. He had seen men and women who might have crossed the gap if fear had not slowed them down.
No hesitation, he told himself. Do it! Get it over with! Give it all you have! But his stomach hurt, and he was quivering.
He prayed to God as he trotted back to the tower and as he turned around to face the gangplank. Fifty feet was not long enough for a good runway. In that distance, he could not reach maximum speed. Bur that was how it was. No evading it; no excuses. Still praying, he bent down in the starting crouch and then sprang outward with all his strength. The sickness and the quivering were gone, or he was unaware of them. He felt as he had when, in 1845, he was ten years old and competing in a jump across a creek with other farm boys near Bowling Green, Clay County, Indiana. The glory of his healthy young body and intimations of immortality had blazed then.
Now, his spirit and body had become one as they had been one when he had made that winning jump on Earth. He was an arrow aimed at the end of the board beyond the void. The shouts of his companions, the roar of the crowd, and the captain of the guards counting off the seconds remaining became one voice. His bare feet slapped on the wood as they had slapped on the dirt when she had won the contest with his schoolmates. But, then, he had faced only getting wet if he fell short.
The end of the gangplank was coming far more swiftly than he thought possible. Beyond it was the space he had to travel, a short distance in reality, a long, long one in his mind. And the beam was dipping. Only a few inches, but the slight deviation from the horizontal might defeat him.
He came down hard with his right foot and rose up, up, up. The void was below him. He thought, Oh, God, to whom I have been always faithful, deliver me from this evil! But a rapture, completely unexpected, shot through him. It was as if the hand of God were not only lifting him but enveloping him in the ecstasy few besides the saints knew.
It was worth the price of horror and of death.
2
Yesterday, Andrew Paxton Davis had also been high above earth. But he was not under any sentence and was not afraid of dying immediately. He was clinging to the railing of a bamboo platform, the crow’s nest as it were, while it swayed in the strong wind. He was seasick, though there were no seas on this world.
Bright in the early-morning sun, the city below him creaked as if it were a ship under full sail. He had ascended many staircases and climbed many ladders past many levels to reach the top floor of this sentinel tower, the highest structure of the gigantic skeletal building that was also a city. Though he had stood here for only two minutes, he felt as if he had endured an hour of watch on a vessel during a violent storm. Yet the view was certainly peaceful and undisturbed. The storm was within himself.
Northward, the River ran for thirty miles before turning left to go around the shoulder of the mountain range. That marked the upper border of this kingdom. Southward, twenty miles away, the River came from around another bend. That was the lower border of this small yet mighty monarchy. The Inca Pachacuti ruled both sides of the River within these borders, and he was disobeyed only at the risk of torture, slavery, or death.
Just past the edge of the City on the north was the Temple of the Sun, a flat-topped pyramid a hundred and fifty feet high and made of stone, earth, and wood. Below Davis was the Scaffolding City, the City of Many Bridges, the City Swaying in the Wind, the Airy Domain of Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, who had ruled on Earth from A.D. 1438 to 1471. The Peruvians of that time knew him as the great conqueror and Emperor Pachacuti.
The City that Pachacuti had built was like none known on Earth and was, perhaps, unique on the Riverworld. The view from the top level of the highmost sentinel tower would have made most people ecstatic. It made Davis feel like throwing up.
The Incan sentinel was grinning. His teeth were brown from chewing the grail-provided cocoa leaf. He had seen Davis here many times and was enjoying his plight. Once, the guard had asked Davis why he came here if the place always made him ill. Davis had replied that at least here he could get away from the even more sickening citizens of the City.
But, suddenly inspired, he had added, “The higher I get from the ground, the closer I am to the Ultimate Reality, the Truth. Up here, I may be able to see the Light.”
The watchman had looked puzzled and somewhat fearful. He had moved away from Davis as far as he could get. What Davis did not tell him was that it was not only the height and the swaying that made him nauseous. He was also sick with longing to see a child who might not be and may never have been. Rut he would not admit that that could be the reality. He was certain that, somewhere up the River, was a woman who had borne a baby in a world where no woman, so far, had conceived. Moreover, Davis was certain that the baby was of virgin birth and that it was the reincarnation of Jesus.
From below came, faintly, the voices of the people chattering away in Kishwa, Aymara, Samnite, Bronze Age Chinese, and a dozen other languages, the tinkling of windblown bundles of mica shards, the shrillnesses of whistles and flutes, and the deep booming of drums. All these floated upward, wrapped in the odor of frying fish.
Except for the temple and the city, the plains and foothills looked like most other areas along the River. The mushroom-shaped grailstones, the conical-roofed bamboo huts, the fishing boats, the large oar-and-sail war or merchant vessels, the people moving around on the plains bordering the River, were nothing unusual. But the city and the temple were extraordinary enough to bring men and women from far-off places up and down the River. Like Earth tourists, they were gawkers who had to pay a price for admission. Their dried fish; wooden, fishbone, flint, and chart tools and weapons; rings and statuettes; containers of booze, cigarettes, dreamgum, and ochre enriched the kingdom. Even the slaves enjoyed the bounty to some extent.
Presently, as Davis stood there, looking northward toward the invisible Light, the face of a man appeared just above the platform. He hoisted himself up from the ladder with powerful arms and stood erect. He towered over Davis and the sentinel. His shoulder-length hair was bronze-red; his eyes were large and light blue; his face was craggy yet handsome. He wore a kilt made of a blue towel, a necklace of colored fish bones, and a cap decorated with wooden piece
s carved into the semblance of feathers. His tanned humanskin belt held a large stone ax.
Despite his savage appearance, he, too, had a quest. During the flight from his former kingdom, he seemed to have been seized with a revelation. At feast, he had said so to Davis. What it was, he kept to himself. Davis had not been able to tell that the illumination or whatever it was had changed his character for the better. But Ivar was determined to travel to the end of the River. Where, Davis supposed, the Viking thought that he would find the beings who had made this planet and resurrected the dead of Earth. And they would reveal the Ultimate Reality, the Truth.
Ivar the Boneless spoke to Davis in the Old Norse of the early-ninth-century Vikings. “Here you are, Andrew the Red, the Massager, enjoying the view and your sickness. Have you seen the Light?”
“Not with my eyes,” Davis said. “But my heart sees it.”
“What the heart sees, the eye sees,” Ivar said.
He was now standing by Davis, his huge hands squeezing on the railing bar, his massive legs braced on the slowly rocking platform. Though he looked at the north of the Rivervalley, he was not trying to see Davis’s Light. Nor was he looking for his own Light. As always when here, he was planning an escape route while seeing the entire kingdom spread out before him. Being the general of one of the Inca’s regiments was not enough to detain a man who had been a king on Earth and in the Valley.
“We’ve tarried here far too long,” he growled. “The source of the River beckons, and we have many a mile to go.”
Davis looked anxiously at the sentinel. Though the Aymara did not understand Ivar’s language, he still might report to the Inca that the two had been conversing in a suspicious manner. Pachacuti would then demand that Davis and Ivar tell him what they had said. If he was not satisfied with their answers, he would torture them to get the truth out of them. Suspicion floated through this land like a fever-breeding miasma. Hence, it was full of spies.