That answered several questions. One of them had been whether or not sentiency extended to the insects.
Hank concluded that he could take off for Winkie country in ten days. Glinda told Ot that there was no need to spend more time with them. The hawk launched herself from the chair and flew through the open door.
"Why, Glinda," Hank said, "don't you just transport the Scarecrow and Woodman here? If Helwedo could whiz from one place to another in practically nothing flat, you must be able to do so. And if you can do that for yourself, why not others?"
Glinda stared at him for a moment before speaking. "You're still strange to our customs and laws," she said, "so I'll forgive you. However, in the future, remember this. No one asks a witch about her professional secrets."
"I beg your pardon," he said coolly.
"Granted. However, I don't mind telling you some things. One is that it takes an enormous amount of energy for the transportation via... how shall I name it? The word is not in the vocabulary of the people and the word itself has power. Only witches know it. This power does not come without hard payment, and it is used only when absolutely needed. I could bring those two here quickly after certain preparations. But it is not necessary.
"You, however, even if you'll take ten days to get ready and six for the trip, will have them here long before they could get here by ordinary means." Glinda stood up.
"You'll have all the blacksmiths and millwrights and labor and materials you need. You will begin at once. Be ready at four o'clock, though, to attend the funeral for the dead flier."
A half hour later, Hank met the dozen men summoned by Glinda. He spent two hours organizing them and making sure they understood exactly what he wanted. He helped them draw schematics and diagrams on paper made from rags. At fourteen o'clock, he went back to the castle. Lamblo came for him a half hour later. She wore a uniform he'd not seen before, all-black garments and a scarlet shako bearing a silver death's head emblem.
"I only put these on when I'm in the honor guard of a funeral," she said. "Sit down, Hank. I have to ask you some questions. I know the answers, but the forms have to be filled out."
He sat down. "Shoot."
"What? Oh, I see. Very well. What is your name?"
"My God! You know it!"
"That's a funny name," she said, and she giggled. Then, her face smoothing out, she said, "Just give me the right answers. It's required, and if you clown around, we might be late. Little Mother wouldn't like that."
"My name is Henry Lincoln Stover."
"Are you related to the dead man?"
"No."
He wondered what the reasons were for this interrogation. It was probably required by the government bureaucrats. Even Quadlingland had these.
"Are you a friend?"
"Of yours?"
She smiled slightly but said, "Of the dead man."
"No. I never heard of him before."
"Would you be willing to act as a bereaved?"
"You mean a mourner?"
"Yes."
Hank twisted one side of his mouth and looked sharply at her. "What is this? What do I have to do if I say yes?"
She told him.
He paled, and he said, "For God's sake! What kind of barbarism is that?"
"It's our ancient custom."
"Hell, I wouldn't do that for my Own mother!"
She shrugged and said, "Very well. The professional mourners will earn their pay."
She stood up. "Let's go."
Hank followed her. He felt uneasy, and his stomach seemed to be turning over. If he could have refused the invitation to attend the funeral, he would have done so. But then both his courage and finer sensibilities would be doubted by these people, not to mention by himself. Besides, his curiosity was driving him.
Lamblo's company met them at the north main entrance to the castle. They formed around Hank, and presently he was marching in their midst, his stride cut down so that their short legs could keep up with him. They went west on the road through the town. It was deserted. Apparently, everybody, including the animals and birds, was at the cemetery. This, like all burial places, was on the western edge of town and on a hill. West was where the souls of the dead went, the far west beyond the land of the living, somewhere out beyond the desert.
Hank had been told this late one night by Lamblo.
"There, so the priests and priestesses say, is another green land where God and His angels instruct the dead on their errors and faults. Then the dead are sent back in the form of amaizhuath (mind-lights) or fonfoz (firefoxes). They come back across the desert and possess the bodies of animals and birds and sometimes human beings or even inanimate objects." Hank had had a flash of that stormy night when he had seen the nude Glinda going through that weird ceremony or battle in the vast room of the sphinx and the shadows.
"How can they possess a body that's already possessed?"
Lamblo had said, "I don't know. They just do." She had looked very uneasy.
"What happens to the dispossessed soul?"
"It goes back to the land of God, where He and His angels explain what the soul did wrong. Then it is sent out again to the land of the living."
"Sounds like a game of musical chairs for spirits," he had said and then had had to explain what "musical chairs" meant.
"Do you believe what you've told me?" he had said. "Do you have a better explanation? Let's not talk about such things. Let's try the saitigzhuz-nyuh position."
God was called either Guth or Chuz. Hank thought that the Chuz came from Tius, and was related to the Old Norse god Tyr and Old English Tiw. An angel was anggluz, a word that had come from the Greek and indicated some early contact with Christianity. But, somehow, an angel had become confused with a slanchuzar, a semi-divine maiden something like the Old Norse Valkyrie.
The ancient confusion was also evident in the crosses on the gravestones in the cemetery. There was the simple cross, the Celtic cross, the saltire or X, and the swastika, called the thyunz-hamar, Thor's hammer, the symbol used worldwide on prehistoric and historic Earth.
Most graves had monuments, sculptures representing not only humans but many types of nonhuman life. Next to a woman's grave was a deer's.
Though he had been verbally prepared by Lamblo, he was still shocked when he saw the priests, priestesses, and the professional mourners. The holy men and women looked more like African witch doctors than anything else. They wore tall headdresses of varicolored long feathers; their faces were streaked with black and red paint, necklaces of bones and teeth flapped on bare painted chests, their naked genitals were shaven, and their legs were painted like black-and-red barberpoles. They danced like medicine men, shaking rattlegourds, ringing tiny bells, and whirling bullroarers. The mourners, men and women, were naked and gashing their naked flesh with stone knives.
He had stepped out of a quaint, even "cute," village into the Old Stone Age.
Lamblo ordered her troops to halt. Hank stopped also. The soldiers stepped aside for him, and Lamblo gestured with a sword that he should go on. Feeling numb, he walked towards the coffin, a limestone hemisphere. Its lid was off, and the charred body lay unclothed in the recess on top of the dome-shape.
Before it was a round open grave. Beyond it, Glinda sat on a marble throne, but an old black blanket protected her naked buttocks from the hard cold stone. She wore only a feathered headdress and was painted from neck to toes with alternating white-and-black stripes that spiralled around her. She held in her left hand a long wooden shepherd's staff.
Hank stopped before her and bowed, his eyes on the ground. He was embarrassed. The mourners howled, the crowd hummed like a dynamo, the gourds rattled, the bells rang, and the bullroarers roared.
"Look up!" Glinda cried. "Look up, stranger!"
Reluctantly, Hank raised his gaze. Glinda was half-smiling, and her blue eyes seemed amused. Did she know how shocked he was at this savagery and her nakedness?
"Look up, stranger!" she said, and she poin
ted the staff at the sky.
Hank obeyed. The sky was unclouded. What was he supposed to see, even if only symbolically? He glanced to his right and saw that everybody was also looking upward.
"Silence!" she shouted, and the wailing, humming, rattling, tinkling, and roaring ceased. But a baby held by a woman near the front of the crowd screamed.
"Face to the west!" Glinda cried. "Look west!"
He turned with everybody else except Glinda.
"There we all go!" she said. "Whether you live a day or a thousand years, you go there! Naked you came into this world; naked you go there! As it was, so shall it be!"
She paused, then said, "But it shall not always be thus!"
"It shall not always be thus!" the others shouted.
"There is an end even to endlessness!"
"There is an end!"
Silence for a minute. The baby was nursing now and quiet.
Glinda shattered the silence.
"The dead should not go home without blood!"
"Not without blood!" the crowd shouted.
"The dead man is a stranger! He is not of our blood! Yet even the stranger shall not go hungry! Is there no father or mother, no brother or sister to give him blood?"
"There is none!" the people yelled.
"Is there no one of his blood to give him blood?"
"There is one!"
"Then let him share his blood! The dead shall not go hungry!"
A priest and priestess ran up to Hank. The woman grabbed Hank's right hand and turned it over to expose the palm. The man raised a flint knife and slashed down. Hank cried out from the pain. He had not expected to be cut so deeply.
"Jesus Christ!"
"Turn towards the dead!" another priestess shrilled.
Hank was urged to face the coffin and then was pushed towards it. The crowd also moved to look at the red granite dome. The holy men and women began dancing again, the gourds rattled, the bells tinkled, the bullroarers hummed, the mourners began howling and cutting themselves.
The tiny priestesses pulled his hand so that it was above the ghastly face of the corpse. Then she turned it, and the blood dripped on the black charred skin and into the half-opened mouth.
Glinda rose from the throne and pointed the staff at the dead man and then to the west.
"Drink so that you may be strong! Go! Go west to your home!"
This is no place for an anemic, Hank thought. He looked at the blood and the corpse and hoped that he would not faint.
Glinda had opened her mouth to say something. Now she was staring, not at him but at the south. Those facing him on the other side of the coffin were also staring and crying out. Even in his numbness, he knew that this was not part of the ceremony. He turned to look out across the desert.
High in the sky, but falling, was a bright light.
It looked like a Very flare, the burning magnesium signal light he had seen so often in the night skies over the battlefields of France.
Before the still glaring though tiny light reached the ground, an object appeared above it. It came from a green cloud that looked no larger than Hank's hand. It twinkled, the sunlight bouncing off its silvery material.
"A parachute?" Hank murmured.
Almost immediately after it, another flashing object shot from the cloud and drifted down.
And then another light flared out.
The green cloud dwindled into the blue sky.
Glinda said something to the hawk perched above her on the right comer of the throne. It flapped off toward the descending light.
Hank wanted very much to leave at once for the desert, but Glinda had other ideas. That she could keep the curious crowd from stampeding for the desert showed her iron control of herself and her people. She said loudly that the ceremony would continue, and it did, though even Hank could see that it was being rushed. At Glinda's request, he said a prayer over the corpse, the "Our father," the lid was put on, and the heavy coffin was lowered by straps into the grave. Hank was then directed to bleed a few drops onto the coffin, and the shovelers started filling the hole. The holy people danced nine times widdershins around the grave, and then Glinda took off her feathered headdress and put on a long loose white robe.
A doctor bandaged Hank's hand. A few minutes later, he was on a chariot headed for the desert. When the procession was halfway down the cliff-road, the hawk lit on the railing of Glinda's vehicle. The two conversed, but Hank was not near enough to hear what they said.
When they were on foot and within half a mile of one of the fallen objects, they stopped. Lamblo, by Hank's side, said, "God save us!"
A glowing ball perhaps twelve feet wide appeared suddenly on a tall twisted rock spire. Glinda shouted an order, and a company of male archers trotted out ahead of the main body. The shimmering sphere, through which Hank could see the sky beyond it, rolled straight down, perpendicular to the ground, and then shot towards them. But it did not seem aware of them. Its path, if continued on a straight line, would have led it about thirty feet past them.
At the barked commands of a captain, the men raised their bows. Another order. The arrows sped into the ball, and it exploded like a French .75 shell. Hank jumped and blinked. The ball was gone, but the wooden shafts of the arrows were burning.
They proceeded warily but without incident until they got to the thing that had come from the green cloud. It was a large wooden box covered with small mirrors and attached to a huge collapsed parachute, painted silvery.
The cords of the chute were cut, the silver-painted leather straps were unbuckled, and the lid was opened. Hank looked inside it. Enclosed in thick insulation were other boxes. He removed and opened these. There was a movie camera, four canisters of movie film, a Kodak and ten rolls of film for it, two instruction manuals, tablets of writing paper with many pencils, pens, and bottles of ink, a pencil sharpener, a twelve-inch ruler, erasers, protractor, materials for developing film, an instruction book with procedures for using the developers, a flashlight, a stopwatch, and a large manila envelope. The envelope bore the emblem and title of the U.S. Army Signal Corps. Also on it, in large printed letters, was his name.
"Now how in hell...?" he muttered.
Before he could open the envelope, he heard a cry from around the spire. A hawk flew around it and announced that another box was being brought in. Hank decided not to open the envelope until he determined the contents of the second box.
Opened, the other container revealed a radio transmitter-receiver with headphones and extra batteries. There was also an envelope with his name. As it turned out, it contained an exact copy of the letter in the first envelope.
Glinda must have been curious about their find, but she wished to get her people out of the danger zone. A minute later, they were marching towards the green land. When they reached it, they loaded the boxes into a moose-drawn wagon. Hank did not open the envelopes until he was in a room on the first floor of the castle.
Glinda's first question was about the things in the boxes. He told her what they were and who or what had sent them. "Read the letter," she said. "Then give me the essence of it. Then read it aloud, translating for me."
There were six pages of single-spaced typing. Though the missive came out of the office of a Colonel Mark Sampson of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it was also signed by the General of the Armies and the chief of staff, John Joseph Pershing.
"Black Jack himself," Hank murmured. He had great respect for Pershing's abilities during World War I, but he also loathed him. It was, so he had heard, Pershing who had refused to permit American fliers to wear parachutes. The reason: they might abandon their craft during combat if they were in extreme danger. In other words, Pershing did not trust the courage of his aviators.
It was also Pershing who did not mind wasting thousands of soldiers to gain a position but who thought that whorehouses for his men were wicked and did his best to close them down. "A genuine prudish prick."
"What?" Glinda said.
"Not
hing. O.K. Here goes."
"O.K?"
"An American phrase. It means all right, fine, yes, hunkey dorey, copasetic."
"Hongkiidorii? Kopasetik?"
Hank read the letter to himself, but there was no silence in the room. Though the queen was evidently impatient to learn its contents, she wasted no time. She conferred with several people and birds, gave orders, dictated a short letter, and went once to the toilet. When she came out of it, she found that Hank had read all of the letter.
"First, there's not a word about how they were able to identify me," he said. "But it would not have been difficult."
He wondered if Intelligence agents had visited his parents. Probably not yet, since everything about this would be a top-secret priority. They would have thoroughly investigated Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln Stover, though.
And they surely would have notified President Harding about it. Perhaps a few cabinet officials, too.
"This is addressed to Lieutenant Henry L. Stover. I'm no longer an Army officer, and I'm not in the reserve. They're using the title for psychological reasons."
"Why?"
"They want me to do certain things because I'm an American citizen, and they're appealing to my patriotism. Reminding me that I was an officer and a soldier and should act like one."
"What certain things?"
"These will become apparent, Little Mother. They also omit any specific explanation of just how and why the green haze, the opening, was made. However, they do refer to the operation or experiment or whatever as Project Thor. That might mean that it has or had something to do with power transmission. Thor was the god of thunder and lightning to the Norse people."
It would not be easy to explain everything in the letter. There were just too many references lacking in this culture or in his vocabulary.
"I could be guessing wrong, but I think that possibly the Signal Corps was conducting an experiment to transmit... oh, hell! I'll have to make clear what the word electricity means."
Glinda surprised him by saying that she had some grasp of the concept. His mother had told her about it and had also described somewhat how lightning power was generated and transmitted and what it could do.
A Barnstormer in Oz Page 7