The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Presently wooden trumpets blew and drums beat. Seeing the people streaming toward the great building, Burton decided to join-them. They congregated between the idol and the building. Burton stood behind the mob where he could hear the proceedings but at the same time examine the statue. A little discreet scratching with a flint knife revealed that it was adobe covered with a black paint. He wondered where the paint for the body, eyes, and gums had been obtained. Pigments were rare, much to the sorrow of artists.

The chief, or the head priest, was taller than the others though still half a head shorter than Burton. He wore a cape and kilt with blue, black, and red stripes and an oaken crown with six points. His right hand held a long shepherd’s staff of oak. He spoke from a platform at the building’s entrance, gesturing often with the staff, his black eyes fiery, his mouth-spewing a torrent of which Burton understood not one word. After about half an hour he got down from the platform, and the crowd broke up into various work parties.

Some of these went to the island to clear away the logs which had broken from the prow and piled onto the main body. Others went to the starboard rearside, where the V-shaped stem joined the main part. These lifted huge oars and fitted them to locks. Then, like a gang of galley slaves, working to a rhythm beat out on a drum, they began rowing.

Apparently, they were trying to bring the stern around so that the current would catch it on one side and then swing the entire raft. As soon as the vessel presented enough of its starboard side to the current, it would be turned around enough to be free of the island.

That was the theory, but the practice failed. It became apparent that the log jam would have to be cleared first and then leverage applied to push the front part from the beach.

Burton wished to talk to the headman, but he had gone around to the front of the idol and was bowing rapidly and chanting to it. Whatever Burton had learned or not learned, he knew that it was dangerous to interrupt a religious ritual.

He strolled around, stopping to look at the dugouts, canoes, and small sailboats in racks or on slides along the edge of the raft. Then he poked around the larger buildings. Most of these had doors which were barred on the outside. Making sure that no one was noticing him, he entered several.

Two were storehouses of dried fish and acorn bread. One was crammed with weapons. Another was a boatshed containing two half-finished dugouts and the pine framework of a canoe. In time the latter would be covered with fish-skin. The fifth building held a variety of artifacts: boxes of oak rings fpr trading, spiral bones and the unicornlike horns of the hornfish, piles of fish- and human-leather, drums, bamboo flutes, harps with hornfish guts for strings, skulls fashioned into drinking cups, ropes of fiber and fish-skin, piles of dried dragonfish intestines, suitable for sails, stone lamps for burning fish-oil, boxes of lipstick, face-paint, marijuana, ciga­rettes , cigars, lighters (all doubtless saved up for trading or tribute), about fifty ritual masks, and many more items.

When he went into the sixth building, he smiled. This was where the grails were kept. The tall grey cylinders were stacked in wooden racks, waiting for their owners. He counted three hundred and fifty. One grail for each of the approximately three hundred and ten raftspeople meant that there were thirty extra grails.

A few minutes’ inspection showed him that all but thirty were tagged. The others had cords tied around the handles of the tops, the other ends of which cords were connected to baked clay tablets bearing cuneiform writing. These were the names of their owners. He examined some of the incised marks, which looked like those he had seen in photographs of Babylonian and Assyrian docu­ments.

He tried to raise the lids of a number of the tagged cylinders but failed, of course. There was some sort of mechanism preventing anyone but its owner from opening it. There were several theories about the operation, one being that a sensitive device inside the grail detected the electrical field of the owner’s skin and then activated an opening mechanism.