Halfway across the River, Burton ordered The Hadji swung around again. The maneuver allowed the sailships to get much closer, but he had calculated for that. Now, sailing close-hauled again, The Hadji cut water between the two schooners. They were so close that he could clearly see the features of all aboard both craft. They were mostly Caucasian, though they ranged from very dark to Nordic pale. The captain of the boat on the portside shouted in German at Burton, demanding that he surrender.
`We will not harm you if you give up, but we will torture you if you continue to fight!' He spoke German with an accent that sounded Hungarian.
For reply, Burton and Alice shot arrows. Alice's shaft missed the captain but hit the helmsman, and he staggered back and fell over the railing. The craft immediately veered. The captain sprang to the wheel, and Burton's second shaft went through the back of his knee.
Both schooners struck slantingly with a great crash and shot off with much tearing up of timbers, men screaming and falling onto the decks or falling overboard. Even if the boats did not sink, they would be out of action.
But just before they hit, their archers had put a dozen flaming arrows into the bamboo sails of The Hadji. The shafts car tied dry grass, which had been soaked with turpentine made from pine resin, and these, fanned by the wind, spread the flames quickly.
Burton took the tiller back from the women and shouted orders. The crew dipped fired-clay vessels and their open grails into The River and then threw the water on the, flames. Loghu, who could climb like a monkey, went up the mast with a rope around her shoulder. She let the rope down and pulled up the containers of water.
This permitted the other schooners and several canoes to draw close. One on a course which would put it directly in the path of The Hadji. Burton swung the boat around again, but it was sluggish because of Loghu's weight on the mast. It wheeled around, the boom swung wildly as the men failed to keep control of its ropes, and more arrows struck the sail and spread more fire. Several arrows thanked into the deck. For a moment, Burton thought that the enemy had changed his mind and was trying to down them. But the arrows were just misdirected.
Again, The Hadji sliced between two schooners. The captains and the crew of both were grinning. Perhaps they had been bored for a long tine and were enjoying the pursuit. Even so, the crews ducked behind the railings, leaving the officers, helmsmen, and the archers to receive the fire from The Hadji. There was a strumming, and dark streaks with red heads and blue tails went halfway through the sails in two dozen places, a number drove into the mast or the boom, a dozen hissed into the water, one shot by Burton a few inches from his head.
Alice, Ruach, Kazz, de Greystock, Wilfreda, and he had shot while Esther handled the tiller. Loghu was frozen halfway up the mast, waiting until the arrow fire quit. The five arrows found three targets of flesh, a captain, a helmsman, and a sailor who stuck his head up at the wrong time for him.
Esther screamed, and Burton spun. The war canoe had come out from behind the schooner and was a few feet in front of The Hadji's bow. There was no way to avoid a collision. The two men on the platform were diving off the side, and the paddlers were standing up or trying to stand up so they could get overboard. Then the Hadji smashed into its port near the bow, cracking it open, turning it over, and spilling its crew into The River. Those on the Hadji were thrown forward, and de Greystock went into the water. Burton slid on his face and chest and knees, burning off the skin.
Esther had been torn from the tiller and rolled across the deck until she thumped against the edge of the fo'c'sle coaming. She lay there without moving.
Burton looked upward. The sail was blazing away beyond hope of being saved. Loghu was gone, so she must have been hurled off at the moment of impact. Then, getting up, he saw her and de Greystock swimming back to The Hadji. The water around them was boiling with the splashing of the dispossessed canoemen, many of whom, judging by their cries, could not swim. – Burton called to the men to help the two aboard while he inspected the damage. Both prows of the very thin twin hulls had been smashed open by the crash. Water was pouring inside. And the smoke from the burning sail and mast was curling around them, causing Alice and Gwenafra to cough.
Another war canoe was approaching swiftly from the north; the two schooners were sailing close-hauled toward them.
They could fight and draw some blood from their enemies, who would be holding themselves back to keep from killing them or they could swim for it. Either way, they would be captured. Loghu and de Greystock were pulled aboard. Frigate reported that Esther could not be brought back to consciousness. Ruach felt her pulse and opened her eyes and then walked back to Burton.
`She's not dead, but she's totally out' Burton said, `You women know what will happen to you. It's up to you, of course, but I suggest you swim down as deeply as you can and draw in a good breath of water. You'll wake up tomorrow, good as new.'
Gwenafra had come out from the fo'c'sle. She wrapped her arms round his waist and looked up, dry-eyed but scared. He hugged her with one arm and then said, `Alice! Take her with you!'
'Where?' Alice said. She looked at the canoe and back at him. She coughed again as more smoke wrapped around her and then she moved forward, upwind.
`When you go down.' He gestured at The River.'
`I can't do that,' she said.
`You wouldn't want those men to get her, too. She's only a little girl but they'll not stop for that'
Alice looked as if her face was going to crumple and wash away with tears. But she did not weep. She said, 'Very well. It's no sin now, killing yourself. I just hope. . .'
He said, `Yes.' He did not drawl the word; there was no time to drawl anything out. The canoe was within forty feet of them.
`The next place might be just as bad or worse than this one,' Alice said. `And Gwenafra will wake up ail alone. You know that the chances of us being resurrected at the same place are slight.'
`That can't be helped,' he said.
She clamped her lips, then opened them and said, `I'll fight until the last moment. Then. .'
`It may be too late,' he said. He picked up his bow and drew an arrow from his quiver. De Greystock had lost his bow, so he took Kazz's. The Neanderthal placed a stone in a sling and began whirling it. Lev picked up his sling and chose a stone for its pocket. Monat used Esther's bow, since he had lost his, also.
The captain of the canoe shouted in German, `Lay down your arms! You won't be harmed!' He fell off the platform onto a paddler a second later as Alice's arrow went through his chest. Another arrow, probably de Greystock's, spun the second man off the platform and into the water. A stone hit a paddler in the shoulder, and he collapsed with a cry. Another stone struck glancingly off another paddler's head, and he lost his paddle.
The canoe kept on coming. The two men on the aft platform urged the crew to continue driving toward The Hadji. Then they fell with arrows in them. Burton looked behind him. The two schooners were letting their sails drop now. Evidently they would slide on up to The Hadji where the sailors would throw their grappling hooks into it. But if they got too close, the flames might spread to them.
The canoe rammed into The Hadji with fourteen of the original complement dead or too wounded to fight. Just before the canoe's prow hit, the survivors dropped their paddles and raised small round leather shields. Even so, two arrows went through two shields and into the arms of the men holding them. That still left twenty men against six men, five women, and a child. But one was a five-foot high hairy man with tremendous strength and a big stone axe. Kazz jumped into the air just before the canoe rammed the starboard hull and came down in it a second after it had halted. His axe crushed two skulls and then drove through the bottom of the canoe. Water poured in, and de Greystock, shouting something in his Cumberland Middle English, leaped down beside Kazz. He held a stiletto in one hand and a big oak club with flint spikes in the other.
The others on The Hadji continued to shoot their arrows. Suddenly, Kazz and de Greystock were
scrambling back onto the catamaran and the canoe was sinking with its dead, dying, and its scared survivors. A number drowned; the others either swam away or tried to get aboard The Hadji. These fell back with their fingers chopped off or stamped flat.
Something struck on the deck near him and then something else coiled around him. Burton spun and slashed at the leather rope, which had settled around his neck. He leaped to one side to avoid another, yanked savagely at a third rope, and pulled the man on the other end over the railing. The man, screaming, pitched out and struck the deck of The Hadji with his shoulder. Burton smashed in his face with his axe.
By now men were dropping from the decks of both schooners and ropes were falling everywhere. The smoke and the flames added to the confusion, though they may have helped The Hadji's crew more than the boarders.
Burton shouted at Alice to get Gwenafra and jump into The River. He could not find her and then had to parry the thrust of a big black with a spear. The man seemed to have forgotten any orders to capture Burton; he looked as if he meant to kill. Burton knocked the short spear aside and whirled, lashing out as he went by with the axe and smashed its edge against the black's neck. Burton continued to whirl, felt a sharp pain in his ribs, another in his shoulder, but knocked two men down and then was in the water. He fell between the schooner and The Hadji, went down, released the axe, and pulled the stiletto from its sheath. When he came up, he was looking up at a tall, raw boned, redheaded man who was lifting the screaming Gwenafra above him with both hands. The man pitched her far out into the water.
Burton dived again and coming up saw Gwenafra's face only a few feet before him. It was gray, and her eyes were dull. Then he saw the blood darkening the water around her. She disappeared before he could get to her. He dived down after her, caught her and pulled her back up. A hornfish tip was stuck into her back.
He let her body go. He did not know why the man had killed her when he could have easily taken her prisoner. Perhaps Alice had stabbed her and the man had figured that she was as good as dead and so had tossed her over the side to the fishes.
A body shot out of the smoke, followed by another. One man was dead with a broken neck; the other was alive. Burton wrapped his arm around the man's neck and stabbed him at the juncture of jaw and ear. The man quit struggling and slipped down into the depths.
Frigate leaped out from the smoke, his face and shoulders bloody. He hit the water at a slant and dived deep. Burton swam toward him to help him. There was no use even trying to get back on the craft. It was solid with struggling bodies, and other canoes and dugouts were closing in.
Frigate's head rose out of the water. His skin was white where the blood was not pumping out over it. Burton swam to him and said, `Did the women get away?'
Frigate shook his head and then said, `Watch out!' Burton upended to dive down. Something hit his legs; he kept on going down, but he could not carry out his intention of breathing in the water. He would fight until they had to kill him.
On coming up, he saw that the water was alive with men who had jumped in after him and Frigate. The American, half-conscious, was being towed to a canoe. Three men closed in on Burton, and he stabbed two and then a man in a dugout reached down with a club and banged him on the head.
Chapter 15
* * *
They were led ashore near a large building behind a wall of pine logs. Burton's head throbbed with pain at every step. The gashes in his shoulder and ribs hurt, but they had quit bleeding. The fortress was built of pine logs, had an overhanging second story, and many sentinels. The captives were marched through an entrance that could be closed with a huge log gate. They marched across sixty feet of grass-covered yard and through another large gateway into a hall about fifty feet long and thirty wide. Except for Frigate, who was too weak, they stood before a large round table of oak. They blinked in the dark and cool interior before they could clearly see the two men at the table.
Guards with spears, clubs, and stone axes were everywhere. A wooden staircase at one end of the hall led up to a runway with high railings. Women looked over the railings at them.
One of the men at the table was short and muscular. He had a hairy body, black curly hair, a nose like a falcon's, and brown eyes as fierce as a falcon's. The second man was taller, had blond hair, eyes the exact color of which was difficult to tell in the dusky light but were probably blue, and a broad Teutonic face. A paunch and the beginnings of jowls told of the food and liquor he had taken from the grails of slaves.
Frigate had sat down on the grass, but he was pulled up to his feet when the blond gave a signal. Frigate looked at the blond and said, `You look like Hermann Göring when he was young.' Then he dropped to his knees, screaming with pain from the impact of a spear butt over his kidneys.
The blond spoke in an English with a heavy German accent. `No more of that unless I order it. Let them talk.' He scrutinized them for several minutes, then said, `Yes, I am Hermann Göring.'
`Who is Göring?' Burton said.
`Your friend can tell you later,' the German said. `If there is a later for you. I am not angry about the splendid fight you put up. I admire men who can fight well. I can always use more spears, especially since you killed so many. I offer you a choice. You men, that is. Join me and live well with all the food, liquor, tobacco; and women you can possibly want, or work for me as my slaves.'
`For us,' the other man said in English. `You forget, Hermann, dat I have gust as muck to say about disc as you.' Göring smiled, chuckled, and said, `Of course I was only using the royal I, you might say. Very well, we. If you swear to serve us, and it will be far better for you if you do, you will swear loyalty to me, Hermann Göring and to the one-time king of ancient Rome, Tullius Hostilius.' Burton looked closely at the man. Could he actually be the legendary king of ancient Rome? Of Rome when it was a small village threatened by the other Italic tribes, the Sabines, Aequi, and Volsci? Who, in turn, were being pressed by the Umbrians, themselves pushed by the powerful Etruscans? Was this really Tullius Hostilius, warlike successor to the peaceful Numa Pompilius? There was nothing to distinguish him from a thousand men whom Burton had seen on the streets of Siena. Yet, if he was what he claimed to be, he could be a treasure trove, historically and linguistically speaking. He would, since he was probably Etruscan himself, know that language, in addition to pre-Classical Latin, and Sabine, and perhaps Campanian Greek. He might even have been acquainted with Romulus, supposed founder of Roma. What stories that man could tell!
`Well?' Göring said.
`What do we have to do if we join you?' Burton said.
`First, I . . . we . . . have to make sure that you are the caliber of man we want. In other words, a man who will unhesitatingly and immediately do anything that we order. We will give you a little test.' He gave an order and a minute later, a group of men was brought forward. All were gaunt, and all were crippled.
`They were injured while quarrying stone or building our walls,' Göring said. `Except for two caught while trying to escape. They will have to pay the penalty. All will be killed because they are now useless. So, you should not hesitate about killing them to show your determination to serve us.' He added, `Besides, they are all Jews. Why worry about them?' Campbell, the redhead who had thrown Gwenafra into the River, held out to Burton a large club studded with chert blades. Two guards seized a slave and forced him to his knees.
He was a large blond with blue eyes and a Grecian profile; he glared at Göring and then spat at him.
Göring laughed. `He has all the arrogance of his race. I could reduce him to a quivering screaming mass begging for death if I wanted to. But I do not really care for torture. My compatriot would like to give him a taste of the fire, but I am essentially a humanitarian.'
`I will kill in defense of my life or in defense of those who need protection,' Burton said. `But I am not a murderer.'
`Killing this Jew would be an act in defense of your life,' Göring replied. `If you do not, you will die anyway
. Only it will take you a long time.'
`I will not,' Burton said.
Göring sighed. `You English! Well, I would rather have you on my side. But if you don't want to do the rational thing, so be it. What about you?' he said to Frigate.
Frigate, who was still in agony, said, `Your ashes ended in a trash heap in Dachau because of what you did and what you were. Are you going to repeat the same criminal acts on this world?' Göring laughed and said, `I know what happened to me. Enough of my Jewish slaves have told me.' He pointed at Monat. `What kind of a freak is that?' Burton explained. Göring looked grave, then said, `I couldn't trust him. He goes into the slave camp. You, there, ape-man. What do you say?'
Kazz, to Burton's surprise, stepped forward. `I kill for you. I don't want to be slave.' He took the club while the guards held their spears poised to run him through if he had other ideas for using it. He glared at them from under his shelving brows, then raised the club. There was a crack, and the slave pitched forward on the dirt. Kazz returned the club to Campbell and stepped aside. He did not look at Burton.
Göring said, `All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away. The escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery. My distinguished colleague will personally handle the club. He likes that sort of thing.'
He pointed at Alice. `That one. I'll take her.' Tullius stood up. `No, no. I like her. You take de oilers; Hermann. I giw you bot' off dem. But sye, I want her wery muck. Sye look like, wat you say, aristocrat. A . . . queen?' Burton roared, snatched a club from Campbell's hand, and leaped upon the table. Göring fell backward, the tip of the club narrowly missing his nose. At the same time, the Roman thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder. Burton kept hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius' hand.
R.W. I - To Your Scattered Bodies Go Page 13