“But it’s nothing like what the preachers said it would be. Which isn’t, of course, surprising. And maybe it’s just as well. Who’d want to fly around on aerodynamically unstable wings or stand around all day playing harps badly and screeching out hosannas?”
Lothar laughed and said, “Ask any Chinese or Indian coolie if this isn’t a hell of a better world than the last world. It’s just us spoiled modern Westerners who grumble and look for first and latest causes. We didn’t know much about the operation of our Earthly cosmos, and we know less about this. But we’re here, and we may eventually find out who put us here and why. Meanwhile, as long as there are beautiful and willing women—and there are—cigars, dreamgum, wine and a good fight, who cares? I’ll enjoy this valley of bright shadows until the good things of life are once more taken from me. Lust to lust until it’s dust to dust.”
They were silent after a while, and Clemens could not get to sleep until just before the rains. He got down under the mushroom until the downpour ceased. Back on top of the stone, he shivered and turned for several hours, although he was covered with long heavy towels. Dawn came with Miller’s ponderous hand shaking him. Hastily, he climbed down off the stone and got a safe distance from it. Five minutes later, the stone gave forth a blue flame that leaped thirty feet into the air and roared like a lion. At the same time, the stones across the river bellowed.
Clemens looked at Lothar. “Somebody repaired the break.”
Lothar said, “I’ve got goose pimples. Who is somebody?” He was silent for a while, but before they had reached the west bank, he was laughing and chattering like a guest at a cocktail party. Too cheerful, Clemens thought.
“They’ve never shown their hand before, that I know of,” Sam said. “But this tune I guess they had to.”
5
The next five days were occupied in getting the ship down to the bank. Two weeks more were spent in repairing the Dreyrugr. All that time a watch was kept, but no one came into the area. When the ship was finally launched, still minus masts and sails, and was rowed down The River, there was not a live human in sight.
The crew, accustomed to seeing the plains thronged with men and women, were uneasy. The silence was unnerving. There were no animals on this world except for the fish in The River and earthworms in the soil, but the humans had always made enough noise.
“The hyenas’ll be here soon enough,” Clemens said to Bloodaxe. “That iron is far more precious than gold ever was on Earth. You want battle? You’ll get enough down your throat to make you vomit.”
The Norseman, swinging his ax, winced at the pain in his ribs. “Let them come! They’ll know they’ve been in a fight to bring joy to the hearts of the Valkyrie!”
“Bull!” Joe Miller said. Sam smiled but walked to a position behind the titanthrop. Bloodaxe was afraid of only one being in the world, but he might lose his never easily controlled temper and go berserk. However, he needed Miller, who was worth twenty human warriors.
The ship traveled steadily for two days during the sunlit hours. At night, one man steered and the crew slept. Early in the evening of the third day, the titanthrop, Clemens and von Richthofen were sitting on the foredeck, smoking cigars and sipping at the whiskey their grails had given them at the last stop. “Why do you call him Joe Miller?” Lothar asked.
“His real name is a rattling jawbreaker, longer than any technical term of a German philosopher,” Clemens said. “I couldn’t pronounce it when I first met him, I never did. After he learned enough English to tell me a joke—he was so eager he could hardly wait—I decided to call him Joe Miller. He told me a tale so hoary I couldn’t believe it. I knew it’d been around a long time; I first heard it, in a slightly different form, when I was a boy in Hannibal, Missouri. And I was still hearing it, much to my disgust, for the hundred thousand’th time, when I was an old man. But to have to listen to that story from the lips of a man who’d died one hundred thousand years, maybe a million, before I was born!” “And the story?”