The Magic Labyrinth (33 page)

That only meant that one of the two, possibly both, had completely mastered the tongues. Or it meant that both were innocent and what they claimed to be.

Twenty-two days after he’d passed through the strait in an area where there weren’t more than fifty people to a grailstone, Burton was approached by a tall skinny woman with big eyes and a big mouth. Her white teeth shone in the black African face.

She spoke in Esperanto affected heavily by a backwoods Georgia accent. Her name was Blessed Croomes, and she wanted to go on the boat as far as it would go. Then she’d go on foot to the headwaters.

“That’s where my mother Agatha Croomes went. I’m looking for her. I think she must have found the Lord and is now living at His right hand, waiting for me! Hallelujah!”

It was difficult to stop her flow of talk, but Burton finally said, loudly and sternly, that she had to answer his questions.

“Okay,” she said, “I’ll listen to the wise. Are you wise?”

“Wise enough,” he said, “and mighty experienced, which is the same thing if you’re not stupid. Let’s start at the beginning. Where were you born and what were you on Earth?”

Blessed told him that she was born a slave in Georgia in 1734 in the house of her master. Come early, caught her mother in the kitchen while she was helping prepare the evening meal. She’d been raised as a house slave and baptized into the faith of her father and mother. After her father had died, her mother had become a preacher. She was a very devout and very strong woman who scared her flock, though they also loved her. Her mother had died in 1783 and she in 1821. But both had been resurrected near the same grailstone.

“Of course, she wasn’t an old woman anymore. It was strange seeing my old momma a young woman. That didn’t make no difference to her, though. She was as holy and righteous and filled with the spirit as when she’d lived on Earth. Why, I tell you, when she preached in church there she had white folks come for miles around to listen to her. Most of them were white trash, but she converted them, and then they got in trouble…”

“You’re wandering again,” Burton said. “That’s enough of your background. Why do you want to go with me?”

“Because you got that boat that can travel faster than a bird.”

“But why do you want to go to the end of The River?”

“I would have told you if you hadn’t interrupted me, man. You see, my mother being here didn’t shake her faith at all. She said that we were here, all of us, because we were sinners on Earth. Some worse than the others. This was really Heaven, the outskirts of it anyway. What sweet Jesus wanted was that the real believers should go up The River, the sweet Jordan, and find Him at the end. He was up there, waiting to embrace those who truly believed, those who’d go to the trouble of seeking Him out. So she went.

“She wanted me to come with her, but I was scared. I wasn’t sure anyway that she knew what she was talking about. I didn’t tell her that. It would’ve been like hitting her in the face, and nobody has guts enough to do that. Anyway, it wasn’t just that that kept me from going with her. I had a mighty sweet man, and he wouldn’t go with her. He said he liked things fine as they were. So I let my pussy do the thinking for me, and I stayed with him.

“But things went bad with me and my old man. He started chasing other women, and I got to thinking that maybe this was a judgment on me for not obeying my momma. Maybe she was right, maybe Jesus was waiting for the truly faithful. Besides, I really missed my momma even if we do go around and around like wildcats sometimes. So I lived with another man for a while, but he wasn’t any better than the first. Then, one night while I was praying, I saw a vision. It was Jesus Himself, sitting on His diamond and pearl throne with the angels singing back of Him, all in a blaze of glorious light. He told me to quit sinning and to follow my mother’s footsteps and I’d get to Heaven.

“So I went. And here I am. It’s been many years, brother, and I’ve suffered like one of God’s own martyrs. I’ve gotten bone-weary and flesh-sick, but here I am! Last night I prayed again, and I saw my mother, only for a second, and she told me to come with you. She said you weren’t a good man but you weren’t bad either. You were in between. But I would be the one to bring you to the light, save you, and we’d go together to Kingdom Come and sweet Jesus would wrap His arms around us and welcome us to the glory throne. Hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah, sister!” Burton said. He was always willing to throw himself into the form of a religion while laughing at its spirit.

“It’s a long long trip yet, brother. My back hurts from paddling my canoe against the current, and I hear that it’s foggy and cold most of the way from now on and not a living soul to be seen. It’ll be very lonely there. That’s why I’d like to go with you and your friends.”

Burton thought,
Why not?

“There’s room for just one more,” he said. “However, we don’t take pacifists since we may have to fight. We don’t want any deadweight.”

“Don’t you worry about me, brother. I can fight like an avenging angel of the Lord for you, if you’re on the side of good.”

She put her few possessions on the boat a few minutes later. Tom Turpin, the black piano player, was happy to see her at first. Then he found out she’d taken a vow of chastity.

“She’s crazy, Captain,” he told Burton. “Why’d you take her on? She’s got that good-looking body and she’ll drive me crazy her not letting me touch her.”

“Perhaps she’ll talk you into taking the vow, too,” Burton said, and he laughed.

Turpin didn’t think that was funny.

When the boat pulled out after a four-day, not a two-day, leave as planned, Blessed sang a hymn. Then she shouted, “You needed me, brother Burton, to complete your number. You were only eleven and now you’re twelve! Twelve’s a good, a holy number. The apostles of Jesus were twelve!”

“Yaas,” Burton said softly. “And one of them was Judas.”

He looked at Ah Qaaq, the ancient Mayan warrior, a pocket-sized Hercules gone to pot. He seldom offered to start a conversation, though he would talk fluently if he was cornered. Nor did he draw back if someone touched him. According to Joe Miller, X, when visiting Clemens, had not wanted to be touched, had, in fact, acted as if Clemens were some sort of leper. Clemens had thought that X, though soliciting the help of the Valleydwellers, felt that he was morally superior and that if one touched him he was somehow fouled.

Neither Ah Qaaq nor Gilgamesh acted as if they must keep others at a proper distance. In fact, the Sumerian insisted on being very close when conversing, almost nose to nose. And he touched the other speaker frequently as if he had to have flesh contact also.

That insistence on closeness could be overcompensation, though. The Ethical might have found out that his recruits had noted his dislike for near proximity and was forcing himself to get close.

Long ago, the agent, Spruce, had said that he and his colleagues loathed violence, that doing it made them feel degraded. But if that were so, they had certainly learned to be violent without showing any repulsion. The agents on both boats had fought as well as the others. And X, as Odysseus and Barry Thorn, had killed enough to satisfy Jack the Ripper.

Possibly, X’s avoidance of touch had nothing to do with a personal feeling. It might be that a touch by another human being could leave some sort of psychic print. Perhaps psychic wasn’t the right word. The
wathans,
the auras that all sentient beings radiated, according to X, might take a sort of fingerprint. And this might last for some time. If so, then X would not be able to return to the tower until the “print” had vanished. His colleagues would see it and wonder how he’d gotten it.

Was that speculation too bizarre? All X had to tell his questioners was that he’d been on a mission and had been touched by a Valleydweller.

Ah! But what if X was not supposed to have been in The Valley? What if he had an alibi for his absences but it didn’t include a visit to The Valley? Then he could not explain satisfactorily why his
wathan
bore a stranger’s print.

This speculation, though, required that an agent’s or Ethical’s prints be different from those of resurrectees and instantly recognizable as such.

Burton shook his head. Sometimes, he got almost dizzy trying to think through these mysteries.

Deciding to abandon the wandering of the mental maze, he went to talk to Gilgamesh. Though the fellow disclaimed any of the adventures attributed to the mythical king of Uruk, he liked to boast of his unrecorded exploits. His black eyes would twinkle, and he would smile when he told his wild tales. He was like the American frontiersmen, like Mark Twain, he exaggerated to an incredible extent. He knew his listener knew he was lying, but he didn’t care. It was all in fun.

The days passed, and the air became colder. The mists hung more heavily, refusing to dissipate until about eleven in the morning. They stopped more frequently to smoke the fish they caught by trolling and to make more acorn bread. Despite the thin sunshine, the grass and the trees were as green as their southern counterparts.

Then the day came when they arrived at the end of the line. There were no more grailstones.

From the north, borne by the cold wind, came a faint rumbling.

They stood on the forward deck, listening to the ominous growling. The now ever-present twilight and the mists seemed to press upon them. Above the soaring black mountain walls the sky was bright, though not nearly as bright as in the southern climes.

Joe broke their silence.

“That noithe ith the firtht cataract ve’ll come to. It’th big ath hell, but it’th only a fart in a vindthtorm compared to the one that cometh from the cave. But ve got a long hard vay to go before ve get to that.”

They were robed and hooded in heavy clothes and looked like ghosts in the thin fog. Cold moisture collected on their faces and hands.

Burton gave orders, and the
Post No Bills
was tied to the base of the grailstone. They began unloading, finishing in an hour. After they had set all their grails on the stone, they waited for it to discharge. An hour passed, the stone erupted; the echoes were a long time stopping.

“Eat hearty,” Burton said. “This will be our last warm meal.”

“Maybe our last supper, too,” Aphra Behn said, but she laughed.

“Thith plathe lookth like purgatory,” Joe Miller said. “It ain’t tho bad. Vait until you get to hell.”

“I’ve been there and back many times,” Burton said.

They made a big fire of dried wood they’d been carrying in the boat and sat with their backs to the base of the stone while it warmed them. Joe Miller told some of his titanthrop jokes, mostly about the traveling trader and the bear hunter’s wife and two daughters. Nur related some of his Sufi tales, designed to teach people to think differently, but light and amusing. Burton told some stories from the
Thousand and One Nights.
Alice told some paradoxical tales which Mr. Dodgson had made up for her when she was eight years old. Then Blessed Croomes got them to singing hymns, but she became angry when Burton inserted slightly off-color lines.

All in all, it was fun, and they went to bed feeling cheerier. The booze also helped to raise their spirits.

When they arose, they ate breakfast over another fire. Then they loaded up with their heavy burdens and started off. Before the stone and the boat disappeared in the mists, Burton turned for a last look. There were his final links with the world he’d known, though not always loved, so long. Would he ever see a boat, a grailstone again? Would he soon never see anything?

He heard Joe’s lion-thunderish voice, and he turned away.

“Holy thmoke! Look at what I got to carry! I got three timeth ath much ath the retht of you. My name ain’t Thamthon, you know.”

Turpin laughed and said, “You’re a white nigger with a big nose.”

“I ain’t no nigger,” Joe said. “I’m a packhorthe, a beatht of burden.”

“Vhat’th the differenthe?” Turpin said, and he ran laughing as Joe swung a gigantic fist at him. The towering backpack unbalanced him, and he fell flat on his face.

Laughter rose up and bounced off the canyon walls.

“I’ll wager that’s the first time the mountains have made merry,” Burton said.

After a little while though, they became silent, and they trudged onward looking like lost souls in a circle of the Inferno.

They soon came to the first cataract, the little one, Joe Miller said. It was so broad that they couldn’t see the other end, but it had to be ten times the width of Victoria Falls. At least, it seemed so. It fell from the mists above in a roar that made conversation impossible even if they shouted in each other’s ears.

The titanthrop led the way. They climbed upward past the waterfall, spray now and then falling over them. Their progress was slow but not overly perilous. When they had gotten to perhaps two hundred feet up, they stopped on a broad ledge. Here they let down their burdens while Joe climbed on up. After an hour, the end of a long rope fell through the fog like a dead snake. They tied the packs, two at a time, to the rope, and Joe pulled them bumping and swinging into the mists. When all the packs were on top of the plateau, they worked their way carefully up the cliff. At the top they resumed their burdens and walked on, stopping frequently for rests.

Tai-Peng related stories of his adventures in his native land and got them to laughing. They came to another cataract and quit laughing. They scaled the cliff beside it, and then decided to call it a day. Joe poured some grain alcohol over wood—a frightful waste of good booze, he said—and they had a fire. Four days later, they were out of wood. But the last of the “small” cataracts was behind them.

After walking for an hour over a stone-strewn gently sloping-upward tableland, they came to the foot of another cliff.

“Thith ith it,” Joe said excitedly. “Thith ith the plathe vhere ve found a rope made out of clothth. It vath left by Ekth.”

Burton cast his lamp beam upwards. The first ten feet was rough. From there on up, for as far as he could see, which wasn’t far, there was a smooth-as-ice verticality.

“Where’s the rope?”

“Damn it, it vath here!”

They went out in two parties, each going in opposite directions along the base of the cliff. Their electric lamps were beamed ahead of them, and they traced their fingers along the stone. But each returned without finding the rope.

“Thon of a bitch! Vhat happened?”

“I’d say that the other Ethicals found it and removed it,” Burton said.

After some talk, they decided to spend the night at the base of the cliff. They ate vegetables which the grails had provided and dried fish and bread. They were already sick of their diet, but they didn’t complain. At least, the liquor warmed them up. But that would be gone in a few days.

“I brought along a few bottleth of beer,” Joe said. “Ve can have one last party vith them.”