Flesh (13 page)

He ran faster, now and then giving great bounds into the air and uttering strange cries. They were sheer delight, exuberance, and nameless longings and their fulfillment. They were spoken in the language of the first men on Earth, the broken chaotic feeling-toward-speech the upright apes must have formed with clumsy tongues when they were trying to name the things around them. Stagg was not trying to name things. He was trying to name feelings. And he was having as little success as his ancestors a hundred thousand years before.

But he was, like them, gaining joy from the effort. And he was gaining a consciousness of something never before experienced, something new to his kind and perhaps to every creature in the world.

He ran toward a man, woman, and child who had been walking on the road. They stopped when they saw him, and then, recognizing him for what he was, fell on their knees.

Stagg did not stop but raced past them. “I may seem to be alone!” he cried at them. “But I am not! Earth comes along with me, your Mother and mine! She is my Bride and goes with me wherever I go. I cannot get away from Her. Even when I traveled through space to places so distant it takes light-years to get there, She was with me. And the proof is that I am back and now have carried out my eight-hundred-years-old promise to marry Her!”

By the time he had finished speaking, he was far past them. He did not care if they heard or not. All he wanted was to talk, talk, talk. Shout, shout, shout. Burst his lungs if he must, but scream out the truth.

Suddenly, he stopped. A large red stag grazing in a meadow beyond a fence had caught his eye. It was the only male of a herd of hind, and, like those deer bred for milk and meat, the stag had a distinctly bovine quality. Its body was thick, its legs short, its neck powerful, its eyes stupid but lustful. It was probably a thoroughbred male, highly prized as a stud.

Stagg leaped over the fence, though it was five feet high and composed of hard stone that would not have yielded if he had tripped. He landed on his feet and then ran toward the stag. The stag bellowed and stood his ground. The hinds ran off toward a corner of the field and there turned to see what was going to happen. They barked like dogs in their alarm, setting up such a clamor that the owner came running from a nearby barn.

Stagg ran up to the big male. The beast waited until the man was about twenty yards away. Then it lowered its antlers, bugled a challenge, and charged.

Stagg laughed with joy and ran very close. Timing his steps exactly, he leaped into the air just as the great branched horns swept the air where he had been. He drew up his knees so the horns would miss him, and then extended his legs so his feet landed beyond the base of the antlers and on the back of the neck. A second later, the stag reared his head, hoping to catch the man with his horns and throw him high in the air. The stag succeeded only in acting as a springboard for the man and propelling him along the line of his back. The man landed on the stag’s broad rump.

There, instead of jumping down to the ground, he somersaulted backwards, intending to come down on the stag’s neck. However, his feet slipped, and he rolled off the beast and fell on the ground on his side.

The stag wheeled and trumpeted another challenge and lowered his antlers and charged again. But Stagg was on his feet. As the beast lunged, Stagg jumped to one side, caught one of the big ears in his hand, and swung himself onto its back.

During the next five minutes, the amazed farmer watched the naked man ride the bucking, rearing, wheeling, snorting, bugling stag and stay on its back despite all its furious maneuvers. Suddenly, the stag stopped. Its eyes were bulging, saliva dripping from its open mouth, through which wheezed a tired breath, its sides pumping agonizedly for more air.

“Open the gate!” shouted Stagg to the farmer. “I’m going to ride this beast into Baltimore in style, like a Horned King should!”

The farmer silently swung open the gate to the field. He was not going to object if the Sunhero appropriated his prize stag. He would not have objected if the Sunhero had wanted his house, his wife, his daughter, his own life.

Stagg rode the beast onto the road toward Baltimore. Far ahead, he saw a carriage racing toward the city. Even at the distance he could perceive that it was Sylvia, going ahead to warn the people of Baltimore that the Horned King was arriving ahead of schedule—and doubtless to relay the Horned King’s boast that he would ravish the entire city.

Stagg would have liked to race after her and arrive on her heels. But the deer was still breathing heavily, so he allowed it to walk until it could regain its breath.

Half a kilometer from Baltimore, Stagg kicked the beast in the ribs with his bare heels and shouted in its ears. It began trotting, then, under its rider’s continued urgings, to gallop. It raced between two low hills, and suddenly was on the main street of Baltimore. This led straight for twelve blocks to the central square, where a large crowd was hastily being assembled. Even as Stagg crossed the city limits, a band struck up
Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,
and a group of priestesses began to march toward the Sunhero.

Behind them, the mascots who had been lucky enough to be chosen as the Sunhero’s brides ranged themselves in a solid body. They looked very beautiful in their white bellshaped skirts and white lace veils, and their breasts were edged in white frilly lace. Each carried a bouquet of white roses.

Stagg allowed the big deer to slow to a trot so it could reserve its strength for the final spurt. He bowed and waved his hand at the men and women who lined the street and cheered frantically. He called to the teen-aged girls who stood by their parents, the girls who had failed to get first place in the Miss America contest.

“Don’t cry! I won’t neglect you tonight!”

Then the blare of bugles, thunder of drums, shrilling of syrinxes swelled and filled the street. The priestesses marched toward him. They were clad in gowns of light blue, the color reserved for the goddess Mary, patron deity of Maryland. Mary, according to the myth, was the granddaughter of Columbia and the daughter of Virginia. It was she who had formed a fondness for the natives of this region and had taken them under her protection.

The priestesses, fifty strong, marched toward Stagg. They sang and threw marigolds before them and occasionally gave long shuddering screams.

Stagg waited until he was about fifty meters from them. He kicked the animal in the ribs and beat on its head with his fists. It bugled and reared, and then began galloping straight toward the group of priestesses. These stopped singing to stand in astonished silence. Suddenly, perceiving that the Sunhero did not intend to pull up his mount, that it was not slackening speed but was increasing it, they screamed and tried to scatter to one side. Here they found that the number of the crowd formed an impenetrable body. And when they turned and tried to outrun the galloping stag, they knocked each other down, tripped over each other, got in each other’s way.

Only one priestess did not stampede. She was the Chief Priestess, a woman of fifty who had kept her virginity in honor of her patron goddess. Now she remained, as if bolted by her courage to the ground. She held out one hand as she would have held it out to bless him if he had arrived in normal fashion. She tossed her bouquet of marigolds at him, and with the other hand, which held a golden sickle, she described a religious symbol.

The marigolds landed in front of the hoofs of the stag, were trampled, and then the Chief Priestess was knocked down to the ground and her head split open by a flying hoof.

The impact of the priestess’ body scarcely checked the onslaught of the stag, which weighed at least a ton. It rammed head-on into the solidly packed mob of struggling, writhing women.

The animal stopped as if it had run into a stone wall, but Stagg continued.

He rose over the lowered neck and antlers and floated through the air. For a moment, he seemed to be suspended. Beneath was the group of blue-clad priestesses, splitting into two from the crash of the great body, flying in all directions, some of them soaring away on their backs, others upside down, several describing cartwheels. There was a severed head spinning by him, a head that had been caught under the chin by the tip of the antler and ripped off.

He was past the blue ruin and descending upon a field of white veils and red mouths behind the veils, of white flaring bell-shaped skirts and bare virginal breasts.

Then he had fallen into the trap of lace and flesh and disappeared from view.

8

Peter Stagg did not awake until the evening of the following day. Yet he was the first of his group to rise, except for one. That was Dr. Calthorp, who sat by his captain’s bedside.

“How long have you been here?” Stagg said.

“In Baltimore? I followed right on your heels. I saw you charge that deer into the priestesses—and everything that went on afterwards.”

Stagg sat up and moaned. “I feel as if every muscle in my body has been strained.”

“Every muscle has been. You didn’t go to sleep until about ten in the morning. But you ought to feel more than muscle-ache. Doesn’t your back hurt much?”

“A little. Feels like a slight burn in my lower back.”

“Is that all?” Calthorp’s white brows rose high. “Well, all I can say is that the antlers must be doing more than pouring out philoprogenitive hormones into your bloodstream. They must also be conducive to cell-repair.”

“What does all that mean?”

“Why, last night a man stabbed you in the back with a knife. Yet it didn’t slow you down much, and the wound seems to be almost healed. Of course, the knife didn’t go in more than an inch. You’ve got some pretty solid muscles.”

“I have a vague memory of that,” Stagg said. He winced. “And what happened to the man afterwards?”

“The women tore him apart.”

“But why did he stab me?”

“It seems he was mentally unbalanced. He resented your intense interest in his wife, and he stuck a knife into you. Of course, he was committing a horrible blasphemy. The women used tooth and nail to punish him.”

“Why do you say he was mentally unbalanced?”

“Because he was—at least, from this culture’s viewpoint. Nobody in his right mind would object to his wife cohabiting with a Sunhero. In fact, it was a great honor, because Sunheroes usually devote their time to nobody but virgins. However, last night you made an exception... of the whole city. Or tried to, anyway.”

Stagg sighed and said, “Last night was the worst ever. Weren’t there more than the usual number mangled?”

“You can hardly blame the Baltimoreans for that. You started things off on a grand scale when you trampled those priestesses. By the way, whatever inspired that move?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed a good idea at the time. But I think it might have been my unconscious directing me to get revenge on the people responsible for these.”

He touched his antlers. Then he fixed a stare on Calthorp.

“You Judas! Why have you been holding out on me?”

“Who told you? That girl?”

“Yes. That doesn’t matter. Come on, Doc, spill it. If it hurts, spill it, anyway. I won’t harm you. My antlers are an index of whether I’m in my right mind or not. You can see how floppy they are.”

“I began to suspect the true pattern of events as soon as I started understanding the language,” Calthorp said. “I wasn’t sure, however, until they grafted those antlers on you. But I didn’t want to tell you until I could figure out some way of escape. I thought you might try to make a break and would get shot down. I soon began seeing that even if you ran away in the morning, you’d be back by evening—if not sooner. That biological mechanism on your forehead gives you more than an almost inexhaustible ability to scatter your seed; it also gives you an irresistible compulsion to do so. Takes you over completely—possesses you. You’re the biggest case of satyriasis known to history.”

“I know how it affects me,” Stagg said, impatiently. “I want to know just what kind of a role I am playing? Toward what goal? And why is all this Sunhero routine necessary?”

“Wouldn’t you like a drink first?”

“No! I’m not going to drown my sorrow in liquor. I’m going to accomplish something today. I would like a big cold drink of water. And I’m dying to take a bath, get all this sweat and crud off me. But that can wait. Your story, please. And make it damn quick!”