He strode across the bamboo mats and looked through the port window. Down there, about two hundred yards away, under the branches of the irontree, was a round, conical-roofed, two-room hut. Inside the bedroom would be Olivia Langdon Clemens, his wife—his ex-wife—and the long, lanky, tremendously beaked, weak-chinned Savinien de Cyrano II de Bergerac, swordsman, libertine, and man-of-letters.
“Livy, how could you?” Sam said. “How could you break my heart, the heart of Your Youth?”
A year had passed since she had shown up with Cyrano de Bergerac. He had been shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his seventy-four years on Earth and his twenty-one years on the Riverworld. But he had recovered from it. Or he would have recovered if he had not gotten another shock, though a lesser one. Nothing could exceed the impact of the first. After all, he could not expect Livy to go without a man for twenty-one years. Not when she was young and beautiful again and still passionate and had no reasonable hope of ever seeing him again. He had lived with a half dozen women himself, and he could not expect chastity or faithfulness from her. But he had expected that she would drop her mate as a monkey drops a heated penny when she found him again. Not so. She loved de Bergerac.
He had seen her almost every day since the night she had first come out of the mists of The River. They spoke politely enough and sometimes they were able to crack their reserve and laugh and joke just as they had on Earth. Sometimes, briefly but undeniably, their eyes told each other that the old love was vibrating between them. Then, when he felt that he had broken out with longing, just like the hives, so he told himself later, laughing while he felt like crying, he had stepped toward her, despite himself, and she had stepped back to Cyrano’s side if he happened to be there or looked around for him if he wasn’t.
Every night she was with that dirty, uncouth, big-nosed, weak-chinned, Adam’s-appled, but colorful, strongminded, witty, vigorous, talented, scary Frenchman. The virile frog, Sam muttered. He could imagine him leaping, croaking with lust, toward the white, blackly outlined, curving figure of Livy, leaping, croaking . . .
He shuddered. This was no good. Even when he brought women up here secretly—though he did not have to hide anything—he could not quite forget her. Even when he chewed dreamgum he could not forget her. If anything, she sailed into the drug-tossed sea of his mind more strongly, blown by the winds of desire. The good ship Livy, white sails bellying out, the trim cleancut curving hull …
And he heard her laughter, that lovely laughter. That was the hardest thing to endure.
He walked away and looked out through the fore ports. He stood by the oak pedestal and the big-spoked Riverboat’s wheel he had carved. This room was his “pilothouse” and the two rooms behind made up the “texas.” The whole building was on the side of the hill nearest to the plain. It was on thirty-foot stilts and could be entered through a staircase or ladder (to use a nautical term) on the starboard side or through a port directly from the hill behind the rear chamber of the texas. On top of the pilothouse was a large bell, the only metal bell in the world, as far as he knew. As soon as the waterclock in the corner struck six, he would clang the big bell. And the dark valley would slowly come to life.
16
Mists still overhung The River and the edge of the banks, but he could see the huge squat mushroom shape of the grailstone a mile and a half down the slope of the plain just by the water’s edge. A moment later, he saw a boat, toy-size, emerge from the mists. Two figures jumped out and pulled the dugout onto the shore, then ran off to the right. The light from the skies was bright enough for Sam to see them, though he sometimes lost them when buildings intervened. After going around the two-story pottery factory, they cut straight into the hills. He lost them then, but it seemed that they were heading for John Plantagenet’s log “palace.”