“It is not good to question what the gods send until you look into it,” he said. “I have known priests who were given the truth in dreams by Odin and Heimdall, yet they had no hearts for battle and spoke lies except when they spoke for the gods. So we will dig for the iron. If there is iron, good. If not . . . then we will take up the matter where we left off.”
Sam sighed with relief and wished he could quit shaking. His bladder and bowels pained him with their urgency to evacuate, but he did not dare to excuse himself at that moment. He had to play the role of the man who had the upper hand. Ten minutes later, unable to bear it any longer, he walked off toward his hut.
X, the Mysterious Stranger, had said that digging could take place anywhere near the tenth grailstone upRiver from their present position. However, the would-be diggers first had to straighten out the locals on who was running things. A Chicago gangster of the 20’s and 30’s, Alfonso Gilbretti, had allied himself with a Belgian coalmine and steel-mill magnate of the late nineteenth century and a Turkish sultan of the mid-eighteenth. This triumvirate had followed the by-now classical pattern of organizing a nuclear gang from those who had been merciless exploiters of their fellow men in crime, business, and other terrestrial activities. Those who objected to the newly self-constituted rulers had been disposed of the day before, and the gang had determined what share of the grails’ output each “citizen” would pay for “protection.” Gilbretti had picked out a harem of five women, of whom two were willing and one had died already because she had tried to break his head with a grail when he entered her hut the night before. Clemens knew all this because of the grapevine. He
ealized that the Vikings would be faced with two hundred toughs and at least a thousand of the so-called militia. Against them would be forty men and twenty women. But the locals were armed only with bamboo spears with firehardened tips while the invaders had Riverdragon-armor, flint axes and flint-tipped spears and arrows. And there was Joe Miller.
Bloodaxe announced from the ship what the Norsemen intended to do. If the locals wanted to participate, they could do so under the rulership of the Norsemen. However, no one would have to “contribute” any of his grail output and no woman would be taken by force.
Gilbretti hurled a spear and a Sicilian oath at Erik. The Norsemen escaped the effects of both and threw his ax. Its edge buried itself in Gilbretti’s chest, and Bloodaxe was down off the ship and on the land and racing after his precious iron weapon, a flint-studded club in hand, before anybody could move. After him came Joe Miller and thirty men. The women shot arrows while a crew launched the last rocket into the toughs. It struck exactly on target, near the rear ranks of the closely arranged Gilbrettians. About forty were either killed, wounded or stunned.
Within seventy seconds, the Belgian magnate and the Turk were dead, their heads pulped by Joe’s ax, and the others were either casualties or running for their lives.
None got away. The militia saw their chance to get revenge and either beat or stabbed most of them to death. The ten left alive were spread-eagled, and burning bamboo splints were thrust into them. Sam Clemens stood the screaming as long as he was able. He did not want to make himself unpopular by cutting the fun too short and so he tried to ignore the spectacle. Lothar von Richthofen said that he certainly understood the desire to hurt by those who had been hurt. But he would not put up with this barbarity a moment longer. He strode up to the nearest sufferer and silenced him with a single chop of his axe. He then ordered the others done away with immediately. Erik Bloodaxe might have interfered with this order, since he thought it proper that one’s enemies should be put through some torture to teach them and others a lesson. But he had been stunned by a piece of the rock-shrapnel thrown by the rocket explosion and was out of the picture for a while. Reluctantly, the militia obeyed, although in their own fashion. They threw the nine survivors into The River, where the fire was certainly put out but not the pain of the splinters themselves. Some thrashed around for several minutes before drowning. And this was strange, since they could have killed the agony in their bowels by killing themselves, knowing they would be alive again and whole again in a short time. Such was the drive of their instincts for survival, they fought to keep their heads above water as long as possible.