A Feast Unknown

by Philip José Farmer

  “The old gentleman, a Mister Bileyg, had a white beard that reached to his navel, and a patch over his right eye. And he was the biggest boned man she had ever seen.”

  Caliban frowned and said, “What are you talking about, Grandrith?”

  “That man was our grandfather,” I said. “The evidence may be peculiar, to say the least. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But it tells the truth. Our grandfather was one of the Nine! The man we knew as XauXaz! Which, if you know your Primitive Germanic, means the High One!

  “And the name he used when he visited Grandrith was Bileyg. That’s Old Norse for One-Whose-Eye-Deceives-Him. Which is to say, One-Eyed!”

  “What?” he said. Apparently, his reputedly wide and deep knowledge did not encompass Germanic linguistics. Or Germanic mythology.

  “The man we knew as one of the Nine, XauXaz, must have been born in the Old Stone Age,” I said. “I don’t know how old he was. Perhaps 30,000. Perhaps 20,000. Who knows what his history was? At one time, he and two others, perhaps his brothers, who were also part of the Nine that then existed, went to lower Sweden. They were present when the Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans, changed to what we call Common Germanic. The dialect that became the ancestor of all the Germanic tongues of today, English, High and Low German, Norse.

  “In some way, perhaps because they had lived so long and knew so much, they became gods. Not actual gods, you know, but they were worshipped as such.

  “What I’m saying is that XauXaz, and Ebnaz XauXaz and Thrithjaz—who died before we came along—High, Equally High, and the Third, were the old Germanic male trinity, later accounted as brothers. And, by the way, Iwaldi, that dwarf, gnome, or whatever, was contemporary with them. And he ruled his people, who dug deep into the earth and lived underground.

  “Common Germanic died out, of course, but the three continued to speak it among themselves as a sort of code. Sometime in man’s history, they ceased to appear among men as gods. They shucked their role and retired to whatever identity the Nine required of them.”

  Caliban shook his head as if he were wondering about my sanity.

  I said, “Our father got the elixir from the Nine. He was a Servant, as we are. As I was,” I amended. “And then the same thing happened to him that happened later to us. The side effect of the elixir is to make the user mad, if only for a short time. Its effect is psychic, as well as physical. Something deeply disturbing, no matter how repressed, ruptures the surface, thrusts up from under. The particular form of the psychosis depends upon the character of the particular individual, of course.

  “Take me, Caliban, or should I call you Doc, since I’m your brother? Take me. I had always thought my attitudes towards killing was very healthy. And I’d always thought my attitude towards sex was extremely healthy. But somewhere in me was a linkage between the two. Something in me equated the act of coitus with killing, the thrust of the penis with the thrust of the knife, orgasm with the bliss of the knife, as Nietzsche called it.

  “And take you, Doc. Brother. You have always, up until now, with one fatal exception, avoided killing. You never did it even to those most deserving being killed, if you could possibly avoid it. But you wanted to kill, Doc. And you equated coitus with killing. Down there, deep down there.

  “And take our father, Doc. He went mad and was locked up in the castle. And he got loose and fled to London to hide in the big city. There his psychosis took the form of the grisly murders of prostitutes. Why, I don’t know.

  “He raped my mother. Which is why I was born. Later, he went to America. Something happened, the tide of evil reversed, siphoned off, as it were. He took the name of Caliban and devoted his life to good. Trying to make up in some measure for what he’d done in England, I presume.

  “Note the name Caliban. Another name for a savage. Shakespeare’s monster in The Tempest, and a literary archetype of the savage. An anagram of cannibal. It was to remind our father of what he had been.

  “He raised you to devote your life to good. You were trained to become a superman of good. You were taught to hate evil and to fight it. But you were to love the evil-doer, not hate him. Hate the sin, not the sinner. Which is an extremely difficult, perhaps almost impossible, thing to do. This attitude has to lead to all sorts of conflict.

  “You took a super-Boy Scout oath. You were reared by our father to be a physical and mental Ubermensch, though the development would not have been so successful if you had not been genetically superior. You have the bones and muscle of an Old Stone Age man because your grandfather was an Old Stone Age man.

  “I suspect that our family is rather inbred, or at least has had more than a number of Paleolithic fathers and mothers. How do we know how many times Grandfather XauXaz, or his brothers, dropped in to resupply the archaic genes? Castle Grandrith may have been the Three’s breeding farm.

  “And you, Doc, like me and a number of others, were approached by the Nine. And you sold your soul, as we all did, for immortality.”

  “What soul?” Caliban said. The sneer was in his voice; his face had adopted its customary expressionlessness. But his green, gold-flecked eyes looked peculiar. I could not tell whether they were doubtful or murderous.

  “A manner of speaking,” I said. “You know well what I mean.”

  “You really think, then, that our grandfather, who may also be our great-great-grand-father and great-great-great-ancestor a number of times over, was the man-god known to the primitive Germanics as Wothenjaz and to later Germanics as Woden or Othinn or a dozen other names?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And I believe that the Nine are keeping the seat of our dead grandfather in the family. They made sure we would be trained to be what we are. Perhaps, I am their Wild Man of the Jungle candidate and you are their Man of the Metropolis candidate. It pleases them to pit us against each other. Perhaps, in the Old Stone Age, it was brother against brother in the ceremonial battle to the death for the chieftainship. Who knows? But they don’t care who gets killed.”

  “I think you’re trying to talk me to death,” Caliban said.

  Trish called, “Doc! Listen to him! He makes sense!”

  “Not to me he doesn’t,” Caliban said in a low voice. “And even if he did, one of us has to die.”

  “I’m not fighting for a seat at the table of the Nine,” I said.

  He grinned slightly and said, “You’re giving up?”

  “I’ve eaten their shit long enough,” I said. “I think our father decided that, too, and they killed him.”

  “I tracked down his murderers,” Caliban said. The green-and-gold eyes seemed to pulse. “I did not kill them but I turned their traps for me against them, and they died. If I had to do it again today, I would kill them with my bare hands.”

  “How do you know they weren’t agents of the Nine?” I said.

  He had been inching forward now. He halted, and he shuddered. His bronze face, where it wasn’t splashed with blood, had darkened with fury. His face twisted as if it were metal under great heat.

  “You lie!” he screamed.

  His penis rose so swiftly it looked as if it were being hauled up on a string. It swelled like a cobra, the blue veins pulsed, and the great red glans glistened.

  I knew then that there was no talking him out of it. The fight was inevitable. I knew this deep down, and, perhaps, I had hoped deep down that it would take place. Whatever my true hopes, my penis rose also, though more slowly, and when fully erect, it looked pale and small against his.

  He watched the organ swell and then he said, “I’m going to tear your balls and cock off, big brother!”

  He sprang forward, swiftly as a tiger, and lashed out with one hand at my testicles. The other went up to catch whichever hand I extended for defense.

  41

  I intercepted the hand and without flinching, which he had hoped I would do so he could throw me off balance if he missed my genitals. He came up swiftly then, though I almost threw him over, because he was crouche
d to one side and so off-balance.

  We were again in the stance we had had when on the bridge. He glared down at me, six foot seven against my six foot three and his 300 pounds against my 240. I am a big wide man, thick-boned as a Cro-Magnon, as I have said, and greatly muscled, but my proportions are such that I do not look like a shot-putter. Alone, with no other humans by me for comparison, I look more like the Apollo Belvedere, although somewhat more broad-shouldered and deep-chested.

  Caliban’s proportions were also such that he did not look so massively constructed if he stood alone. But next to me, he seemed to be muscled with pythons. And I’m sure that we looked to Trish like a male African lion straining against an American mountain lion.

  For what seemed minutes, we strained against each other. Both of us were bleeding from a dozen wounds and profusely from several. We had become weakened by the loss of blood and the energy expended. Our breathing was labored.

  We strove. And then, slowly, oh, so slowly, but steadily, his arms were pushed back. His eyes widened slightly, and he breathed more harshly. The muscles of neck, shoulders, chest, and arms ridged. Blue veins pushed up the sweating bronze skin on his temples.

  He bent forward and caught my nose in his teeth and bit. I jerked it out of his teeth, but it cost me a pain that seemed to run through my nose and split my brain. It shot down through the pit of my belly and down my legs, as if it were a streak of lightning. Part of it was torn off, and blood spurted.

  Somehow, he jerked one hand loose and grabbed my testicles. It was done quickly, as savagely and powerfully as the swipe of a tiger’s paw. Another sear of pain struck, like a spear head, between my legs. I screamed then, and I reacted half-unconsciously. We both were standing there with each other’s ripped-off testicles in our hands.

  Blood spurted from the torn skin and veins and arteries between his legs. I felt a warmth shooting down my leg but did not look down because that would have been fatal. There was not much time left before I became weak with shock and pain, and loss of blood.

  I cast his testicles in his face and leaped. He dropped mine and tried to grab both my hands again, but this time I caught one of his hands and with the other made my own swipe. The penis, amazingly, was still huge and hard, though it was deflating. It twisted like a spigot in my grip; he screamed; I yanked with all my strength; the flesh tore like a piece of silk; the member, spurting blood at one end and jism at the other, was in my hand and before his face.

  I dropped it; he stepped forward as if to pick it up. Then I was on his back and had a full-Nelson on him. He fell forward and crashed upon his face. The wind went out of him. Despite this, he still had enough vitality to resist my pressure. His neck muscles became as hard as wood. I could feel my own strength flapping away, like a sick bat into the night.

  Yet, my penis was still hard and throbbing. It was up against his buttocks, which also felt as hard as oak.

  I applied pressure with my hands against the back of his neck in a surge, knowing that if he could withstand that, he might yet win. Blackness was closing in on the edges of my consciousness.

  His skin began to gray, even as the bones of his neck creaked like a ship’s mast against the force of the wind.

  I heard, faintly, a cry of protest from Trish. Caliban grunted once as if he were trying to force something out from him. His neck bent, and then the bones snapped.

  I spurted over him with only a vague awareness of it. The black rushed in as the fluid rushed out, and shortly thereafter I cared as little as Caliban about the world.

  42

  The awakening was partial and blurred. I felt some pain, though it was everywhere, but so little that I realized—later—that I was drugged. The lights overhead were high and hexagonal. Dimly, I knew I was in bed in the atom-bomb shelter.

  “Clio,” I said but could not hear myself say it.

  A head, framed in a bronze halo, blacked out the lights. It was smiling and weeping at the same time.

  “Trish,” I said. “Where’s Clio?”

  Another head, haloed in gold, appeared beside the bronze.

  It leaned down and kissed me.

  “Go back to sleep, dear.”

  I obeyed.

  When I awoke again, I was still drugged. The pain had increased, however. It was wired throughout my body but centered from beneath my penis.

  I turned my head. I was in the shelter. It was 80 feet wide, 60 long, and 30 high. Portable screens divided it into rooms, with the exception of a cement-block cube which housed the fuel cells and the converters. The air system was based on that used in manned space craft. There were supplies enough to last us six months. I had been against building it because we were so seldom in England. Clio had insisted that we construct it, and now I was glad that she was so stubborn.

  I had many questions, but I asked first, in a weak voice, if she was all right. She told me to keep quiet and eat. She spoon fed me, and then I felt strong enough to put some questions to her. She began a lengthy account, during which, despite my intense curiosity, I fell asleep again.

  On awakening the third time, I found Clio gone and Trish taking care of me. She said my wife had left the shelter to talk to the contractors about rebuilding Catstarn Hall.

  I said, “I’m sorry, Trish. I tried to talk some sense into him. You heard me.”

  “I heard,” she said. She shuddered. “I hope I never have to go through anything like that again if I live to ten thousand.”

  “Have you been contacted by the Nine yet?” I said.

  She started and then said, slowly, “Yes. In the first place, we would have had worldwide publicity about this if the Nine hadn’t pulled the strings of some highly placed puppets in the government. They clamped down on all reporters and police investigations, claimed security demanded it, and that was that. Oh, yes, the servants were told to be quiet, and threatened with severe penalties if they talked.”

  “The bodies?”

  “We took care of . . . you . . . set up the intravenous and the blood. I didn’t know Clio had had some medical training. Without her I’d have been lost. Then I drove like hell to Keswick and got Doctor Hengist, who is one of us. He’d already phoned to Whitehall before I got there. I’d phoned him I was coming. There were soldiers up here on the heels of the people from Cloamby and Greystoke.”

  “All those bodies,” I said.

  “The three of us worked like mules. We dragged every one of the bodies, except for those in the hall, of course, every one of the bodies outside and in here into a room in the castle and shut it up. That included dear old Jocko and Porky, too, but we’ll give them a decent burial later, out on the hill by that big boulder. They’d like that.”

  There were tears in her eyes. For a moment, I did not realize that she was talking about the two old men.

  “We washed off the blood as well as we could and covered up what wouldn’t come off. Some high muckamuck is supposed to fly up here and make a complete report for the government, but he hasn’t shown up yet. We’ll tell him that a gang of criminals tried to kidnap us so they could force the location of the gold, which is nonexistent, of course, from us. We’ll hint that the whole thing was a Communist plot. The only bodies for him to look at will be those in the crashed copter and in the ashes of the hall.”

  “What about the cars and the men on the road?” I said. “And the landing at Penrith, and so on?”

  “We don’t know anything about that.”

  She hesitated and then said, “We found out—we weren’t officially notified—that one of the Nine is coming, too. One of Doc’s friends dropped in—he’s important enough to get through the military cordon—and he told us we’re going to get a surprise visit.”

  “What about it? Why so alarmed?”

  Clio entered then. I said, “What’s so frightening about this visit from the Nine?”

  “Who’s scared?” she said.

  “I’ve lived with you long enough to know you,” I said. “Besides, I can smell the fear fro
m both of you.”

  “Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “We were going to wait until you were stronger before we told you! But there’s really not time now to put it off!”

  Trish said, “Doc is alive!”

  43

  It was a shock, but I felt glad. Perhaps, now that he was alive, he would have felt the same sense of the madness drained off which I had experienced. The third time I awoke, even with the pain, I felt an exultation. This resulted, not from the inflooding of sensation but from the departure of a sensation. I knew that the physical linkage between my sexual behavior and killing was gone. It was as if I were a bottle uncorked and turned upside down and emptied of a black stinking decayed fluid.

  The shock of being castrated by Caliban may have done it. And perhaps—I hoped it was so—the shock of what I had done to him had had a similar effect on him.

  I would not be absolutely certain that I was back to normal until my testicles had regenerated. That should not take much longer than the month required after the ritual excision of one testes. And it should take much less time than the six months required to regrow my right leg below the knee. I had lost this when the RAF bomber of which I was pilot crashed after a mission over Hamburg.

  Trish said that Doc was sleeping on a bed behind a screen at the other end of the room. He would live. That is, until the Nine found out he was not dead.