Goring said, “All the slaves will be assembled tonight, and they will be shown what will happen to them if they try to get away. The escapees will be roasted for a while, then put out of their misery. My distinguished colleague will personally handle the club. He likes that sort of thing.”
He pointed at Alice. “That one. I’ll take her.” Tullius stood up. “No, no. I like her. You take de oilers; Hermann. I giw you bot” off dem. But sye, I want her wery muck. Sye look like, wat you say, aristocrat. A . . . queen?” Burton roared, snatched a club from Campbell’s hand, and leaped upon the table. Goring fell backward, the tip of the club narrowly missing his nose. At the same time, the Roman thrust a spear at Burton and wounded him in the shoulder. Burton kept hold of the club, whirled, and knocked the weapon out of Tullius” hand.
The slaves, shouting, threw themselves upon the guards. Frigate jerked a spear loose and brought the butt of it against Kazz’s head. Kazz crumpled. Monat kicked a guard in the groin and picked up his spear.
Burton did not remember anything after that. He awoke several hours before dusk. His head hurt worse than before. His ribs and both shoulders were stiff with pain. He was lying on grass in a pine log enclosure with a diameter of about fifty yards. Fifteen feet above the grass, circling the interior of the wall, was a wooden walk on which armed guards paced.
He groaned when he sat up. Frigate, squatting near him, said, “I was afraid you’d never come out of it” “Where are the women?” Burton said.
Frigate began to weep.
Burton shook his head and said, “Quit blubbering. Where are they?”
“Where the hell do you think they are?” Frigate said. “Oh, my God!”
“Don’t think about the women. There’s nothing you can do for them. Not now, anyway. Why wasn’t I killed after I attacked Goring?”
Frigate wiped away the tears and said, “Beats me. Maybe they’re saving you, and me, for the fire. As an example. I wish they had killed us.”
“What, so recently gained paradise and wish so soon to lose it?” Burton said. He began to laugh but quit because pains speared his head.
Burton talked to Robert Spruce, an Englishman born in 1945 in Kensington. Spruce said that it was less than a month since Goring and Tullius had seized power. For the time being, they were leaving their neighbors in peace. Eventually, of course, they would try to conquer the adjacent territories, including the Onondaga Indians across the River. So far, no slave had escaped to spread word about Goring’s intentions.
“But the people on the borders can see for themselves that the walls are being built by slaves,” Burton said.
Spruce grinned wryly and said, “Goring has spread the word that these are all Jews. That he is only interested in enslaving Jews. So, what do they care? As you can see for yourself, that is not true. Half of the slaves are Gentile.” At dusk, Burton, Frigate, Ruach, de Greystoke, and Monat were taken from she stockade and marched down to a grailrock. There were about two hundred slaves there, guarded by about seventy Goringites. Their grails were placed on the rock, and they waited. After the blue flames roared, the grails were taken down. Each slave opened his, and guards removed the tobacco, liquor, and half of the food.
Frigate had gashes in his head and in his shoulder, which needed sewing up, though the bleeding had stopped. His color had much improved, though his back and kidneys pained him.
“So now we’re slaves,” Frigate said. “Dick, you thought quite a lot of the institution of slavery. What do you think of it now?”
“That was Oriental slavery,” Burton said. “In this type of slavery, there’s no chance for a slave to gain his freedom. Nor is there any personal feeling, except hatred, between slave and owner. In the Orient, the situation was different. Of course, like any human institution, it had its abuses.”
“You’re a stubborn man,” Frigate said. “Have you noticed that at least half the slaves are Jews? Late twentieth-century Israeli, most of them. That girl over there told me that Goring managed to start grail-slavery by stirring up anti-Semitism in this area. Of course, it had to exist before it could be aroused. Then, after he had gotten into power with Tullius” aid, he enslaved many of his former supporters.” He continued, “The hell of it is, Goring is not, relatively speaking, a genuine anti-Semite. He personally intervened with Himmler and others to save Jews. But he is something even worse than a genuine Jew-hater. He is an opportunist. Anti-Semitism was a tidal wave in Germany; to get any place, you had to ride the wave. So, Goring rode there, just as he rode here. An anti-Semite such as Goebbels or Frank believed in the principles they professed. Perverted and hateful principles, true, but still principles. Whereas big fat happy-go-lucky Goring did not really care one way or the other about the Jews. He just wanted to use them.”
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