“I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat, and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!”
Even when the hand had slackened, Sam had been too cold with horror to move away. Death rattled in the throat of the sinister shadow, and still Sam was frozen on the outside, though vibrating inside.
“I wait!”
Those were Erik Bloodaxe’s last words, echoing yet in his dreams down the years.
Sam had scoffed at the prophecy—later on. No one could see into the future. That was superstitious rot. Bloodaxe might be up-River, but, if he was, it was due to chance alone. There was a fifty-fifty probability that he was down-River. Moreover, even if the Norseman was waiting for revenge, he wasn’t likely to have an opportunity to wreak it. The boat only made three stops a day, except for some occasional shore leaves of a week or so. Very probably Bloodaxe would be standing on the bank when the riverboat traveled by. Run or paddle or sail though he might, Erik could not catch up with the swift vessel.
Believing this did not, however, keep Bloodaxe out of Sam’s nightmares. Perhaps this was because, deep within him, Sam knew that he was guilty of murder, therefore, he should be punished.
In one of those sudden shifts of scene the Supervisor of Dreams so slickly contrives, Sam found himself in a hut. It was night, and rain and lightning and thunder were like a cat-o’-nine-tails against the back of darkness. The flashes in the sky faintly illumined the interior of the hut. A shadowy figure squatted near him. The figure was cloaked; a huge dome on its shoulders covered its head.
“What is the occasion for this unexpected visit?” Sam said, repeating the question he’d asked during the Mysterious Stranger’s second visit.
“The Sphinx and I are playing draw poker,” the Stranger said. “Would you like to sit in?”
Sam awoke. The luminous digits of the chronometer on the wall across the cabin read 03:33. What I tell you three times is true. Gwenafra, beside him, groaned. She muttered something about “Richard.” Was she dreaming about Richard Burton? Though she had only been about seven when she had known him, and had been with him for only a year, she still talked of him. Her child’s love for him had survived.
There was no sound now except for Gwenafra’s breathing and the far-off chuff-chuff of the great paddlewheels. Their cycling sent slight vibrations throughout the ship. When he had his hand on the duraluminum frame of the bed, he could feel the faint waves. The four wheels turned by the colossal electrical motors were driving the vessel toward his goal.
Out there, on both banks, people were sleeping. Night lay over this hemisphere, and an estimated 8.75 billion were abed, dreaming. What were their shadowy visions? Some would be of Earth; some, of this world.
Was the ex-caveman turning restlessly in his sleep, moaning, dreaming of a sabertooth prowling outside the fire in the entrance? Joe Miller often dreamed of mammoths, those hairy curving-tusked leviathans of his time, food to stuff his capacious belly and skin to make tents and ivory to make props for the tents and teeth to make enormous necklaces. He also dreamed of his totem, his ancestor, the giant cave bear; the massive shaggy figure came to him at night and advised him on matters that troubled him. And he dreamed sometimes of being beat with clubs on the soles of his feet by enemies. Joe’s eight hundred pounds plus his bipedal posture caused flat feet. He could not walk all day like the Homo sapiens pygmies; he had to sit down and ease his aching feet.
Joe also had nocturnal emissions when dreaming of a female of his kind. Joe was sleeping with his present mate, a six-foot seven-inch beauty, a Kassubian, a Slavic speaker of the third century A.D. She loved Joe’s massiveness and hairiness and the grotesque nose and the gargantuan penis and most of all his essentially gentle soul. And she may have gotten a perverse pleasure from making love to a not-quite-human being. Joe loved her, too, but that didn’t keep him from dreaming amorously of his Terrestrial wife and any number of other females of his tribe. Or, like humans everywhere, of a mate constructed by the Master of Dreams, an ideal living only in the unconscious.
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