Farmer, Philip Jose – Riverworld 06 – ( Shorts) Tales of Riverworld

Tonight, as usual, the men and women drank too much, the talk was fast and furious, boasting and bombast thundered in the hall, people quarreled and sometimes fought. Ivar had forbidden duels to the death because he had lost too many good warriors to them. But the belligerents could go at each other with fists and feet, and the king did not frown on gouging of eyes, crushing of testicles, ripping off of ears, and biting off of noses. Though it took three months, the eyes, noses, and ears would grow again, and the testicles would repair themselves.

Davis had grown used to these nightly gatherings, but he did not like them. Violence still upset him, and the air stank of tobacco and marijuana smoke and beer and liquor fumes. Also, the sickening odor of farts, followed

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Philip Jose Fanner

by loud laughter and thigh-slapping, drifted to him now and then. Queen Ann, who was sitting on Ivar’s left, was one of the loudest in her laughter when this form of primitive humor erupted. Tonight she wore a towel around her neck, the ends of which covered her breasts. But she was rather careless about keeping them in place.

Mingled with the other smells was that of the fish caught in the River and fried in one end of the hall.

Davis sat at the king’s table because he was the royal osteopath. He would have preferred a table as far away as it could be from this one. That would give him a chance to sneak away after all were too drunk to notice him. Tonight, however, he was interested in watching and occasionally overhearing the conversation of Doctor Faustroll and Ivar the Boneless. The Frenchman sat immediately to the king’s right, the most favored chair at the table. He had brought an amazing amount of fish to the feast, far more than any other anglers. Once, during a lessening of the uproar, Davis heard Ivar ask Faustroll about his luck.

“It’s not luck,” Faustroll had said. “It’s experience and skill. Plus an inborn knack. We survived mainly on fish we caught in the Seine when we lived in Paris.”

“Paris,” Ivar said. “I was with my father, Ragnar, son of Sigurd Hring, when we Danes sailed up the Seine in March, the Franks not expecting Vikings that early in the year. A.D. 845, I’ve been told. The Prankish ruler, Charles the Bald, split his army into two. I advised my father to attack the smaller force, which we did. We

CROSSING THE DARK RIVER

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slaughtered them except for one hundred and eleven prisoners. These my father hanged all at once as a sacrifice to Odin on an island in the Seine while the other Prankish army watched us. They must have filled their drawers from horror.

“We went on up to Paris, a much smaller city then than the vast city others have told me about. On Easter Sunday, the Christian’s most holy day, we stormed and plundered Paris and killed many worshipers of the Savior. Odin was good to us.”

Ivar smiled to match the sarcastic tone of his voice. He did not believe in the gods, pagan or Christian. But Davis, watching him closely, saw the expression on his face and the set of his eyes. They could be showing nostalgia or, perhaps, some unfathomable longing. Davis had seen this expression a score of times before now. Could the ruthless and crafty hungerer for power be longing for something other than he now had? Did he, too, desire to escape this place and its responsibilities and ever-present danger of assassination? Did he, like Davis and Faustroll, have goals that many might think idealistic or romantic? Did he want to shed the restrictions of his situation and be free? After all, a powerful ruler was as much a prisoner as a slave.

“The One-Eyed One blessed us,” Ivar said, “though it may just have been coincidence that Charles the Bald was having serious trouble with other Prankish states and with his ambitious brothers. Instead of trying to bar us from going back down the Seine, he paid us seven thousand pounds of silver to leave his kingdom. Which we did, though we did not promise not to come back again later.”