All this was before Beethoven realized that they must leave the city, that the way to redemption lay in the empty spaces far beyond the enclosure, when he was still trying to piece some meaning out of these circumstances.
How foolish he had been then! He seemed years older now, though of course only a few days had elapsed. Conferring with the wretched Long, whom had he seen arriving in the same stunned and disastrous state that Beethoven remembered so well, he had felt not only sympathy but indeed a kind of necessity, a need to reach out and rescue this man from the horror embodied always in that first view of the Riverworld. As the peasant boy from Stockholm had done it for him before vanishing into the tablelands, so he had done it for Long, had soothed him, calmed him, eased the ferocity of the terror as his new situation first opened up before him, then conveyed him to a safer and more secluded space where Long could finally make some sense of what had happened to him.
Beethoven had not understood much of the Riverworld then, either, but what he knew he tried to impart in short, gentle phrases that would give Long the little material he
needed to somehow recover himself and move past that first point of terror.
Now here they were, and Long had slowly become acclimated.
“Son,” said Long, touching Beethoven gently on the top of the head, propelling him gently forward, “we’ll just stop and rest a spell now if you don’t mind.”
“But we are being followed! They’ll be here any moment.”
“I know,” said Huey, “but I feel a speech coming on. I just want to make a little address to the troops. I was a mighty fine speechmaker in my day, and now I think it is time to make my position known.”
They had finally come to the end of the forest. The trees had been thinning for the past mile, the scrub was sparser, and now Selous stared out across a large clearing. He stood, hands on hips, trying to make up his mind which way to go next. Far in the distance to his left was a small lake.
Suddenly he heard a savage, almost inhuman scream behind him. He whirled around instantly, just as Caligula was swinging a huge log at his head. He raised a hand, slightly cushioning the blow, but fell backward before the Roman’s onslaught.
“You’re a brave man!” muttered Caligula, pummeling him with both hands. “I will take your bravery unto myself!”
Selous tried to roll free of the blond man’s weight, but he was still dizzy from the blow to the head.
“Get off me!” he snapped. “You’re crazy!”
“As I ate my unborn son, so shall I eat your heart!”
Selous felt consciousness slipping away from him, and
124
Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg
then Caligula lowered his head to the Englishman’s chest and took a huge bite of it.
It was the horror of what would happen should he pass out more than anything else that seemed to provide Selous with a fresh burst of adrenaline, and he brought his knee up hard into Caligula’s groin. The Roman emitted a falsetto shriek, rolled over on the ground, and began screaming incoherently.
Selous, blood flowing down his torso onto his belly, leaped to his feet and examined himself as best he could. It really could use some stitches, but wounds seemed to heal magically on this world. Besides, he’d received worse from lion and leopard; if Caligula’s teeth weren’t septic, and there was no reason to assume they were, it would be only a temporary annoyance.
Still, it hurt like the devil, and he walked over to the fallen god and kicked him again, this time on the side of the head. There was no further reaction from Caligula, who was still howling and hugging his groin, and all he got for his trouble was a sharp shooting pain in his foot.
He searched around for the rope that he had been carrying coiled over his shoulder, found it where he had fallen, and brought it over to Caligula. Before the Roman could resist, Selous had tied his hands behind his back and then wrapped the rope a few times around his neck, giving him about a ten-foot slack.
Page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125