The Fabulous Riverboat Paperback - 1998

Excerpt

1

"Resurrection, like politics, makes strange bedfellows," Sam Clemens said.
"I can't say that the sleeping is very restful."

Telescope under one arm, he puffed on a long, green cigar while he paced
back and forth on the poop deck of the Dreyrugr  
(Bloodstained). Ari Grimolfsson, the helmsman, not understanding English,
looked bleakly at Clemens. Clemens translated for him in wretched Old
Norse. The helmsman still looked bleak.

Clemens loudly cursed him in English for a dunderheaded barbarian. For
three years, Clemens had been practicing tenth-century Norse night and
day. And he was still only half intelligible to most of the men and women
aboard the Dreyrugr.

"A ninety-five-year-old Huck Finn, give or take a few thousand years,"
Clemens said. "I start out down The River on a raft. Now I'm on this idiot
Viking ship, going upRiver. What next? When will I realize my dream?"

Keeping the upper part of his right arm close to his body so he would not
drop the precious telescope, he pounded his right fist into his open left
palm.

"Iron! I need iron! But where on this people-rich, metal-poor planet is
iron? There has to be some! Otherwise, where did Erik's ax come from? And
how much is there? Enough? Probably not. Probably there's just a very
small meteorite. But maybe there's enough for what I want. But where? My
God, The River may be twenty million miles long! The iron, if any, may be
at the other end.

"No, that can't be! It has to be somewhere not too far away, within
100,000 miles of here. But we may be going in the wrong direction.
Ignorance, the mother of hysteria, or is it vice versa?"

He looked through the telescope at the right bank and cursed again.
Despite his pleas to bring the ship in so that he could scan the faces at
a closer range, he had been refused. The king of the Norseman fleet, Erik
Bloodaxe, said that this was hostile territory. Until the fleet was out of
it, the fleet would stay close to the middle of The River.

The Dreyrugr was the flagship of three, all alike.
It was eighty feet long, built largely of bamboo, and resembled a Viking
dragon boat. It had a long, low hull, an oak figurehead carved into a
dragon's head, and a curled-tail stern. But it also had a raised foredeck
and poop deck, the sides of both extending out over the water. The two
bamboo masts were fore-and-aft rigged. The sails were a very thin but
tough and flexible membrane made from the stomach of the deep-dwelling
Riverdragon fish. There was also a rudder controlled by a wheel on the
poop deck.

The round leather-and-oak shields of the crew hung over the sides; the
great oars were piled on racks. The Dreyrugr was
sailing against the wind, tacking back and forth, a maneuver unknown to
the Norsemen when they had lived on Earth.

The men and women of the crew not handling the ropes sat on the oarsmen
benches and talked and threw dice and played poker. From below the poop
deck came cries of exultation or curses and an occasional faint click.
Bloodaxe and his bodyguard were shooting pool, and their doing so at this
time made Clemens very nervous. Bloodaxe knew that enemy ships three miles
up The River were putting out to intercept them, and ships from both banks
behind them were putting out to trail them. Yet the king was pretending to
be very cool. Maybe he was actually as undisturbed as Drake had supposedly
been just before the battle of the Great Armada.

"But the conditions are different here," Clemens muttered. "There's not
much room to maneuver on a river only a mile and a half wide. And no storm
is going to help us out."

He swept the bank with the telescope as he had been doing ever since the
fleet set out three years ago. He was of medium height and had a big head
that made his none-too-broad shoulders look even more narrow. His eyes
were blue; his eyebrows, shaggy; his nose, Roman. His hair was long and
reddish brown. His face was innocent of the mustache that had been so well
known during his terrestrial life. (Men had been resurrected without face
hair.) His chest was a sea of brown-red curly hair that lapped at the
hollow of his throat. He wore only a knee-length white towel secured at
the waist, a leather belt for holding weapons and the sheath for his
telescope, and leather slippers. His skin was bronzed by the equatorial
sun.

He removed the telescope from his eye to look at the enemy ships trailing
by a mile. As he did so, he saw something flash in the sky. It was a
curving sword of white, appearing suddenly as if unsheathed from the blue.
It stabbed downward and then was gone behind the mountains.




Sam was startled. He had seen many small meteorites in the night sky but
never a large one. Yet this daytime giant set his eyes afire and left an
afterimage on his eyes for a second or two. Then the image faded, and Sam
forgot about the falling star. He scanned the bank again with his
telescope.

This part of The River had been typical. On each side of the
mile-and-a-half-wide River was a mile-and-a-half-wide grass-grown plain.
On each bank, huge mushroom-shaped stone structures, the grailstones, were
spaced a mile apart. Trees were few on the plains, but the foothills were
thick with pine, oak, yew, and the irontree. This was a thousand-foot-high
plant with gray bark, enormous elephant-ear leaves, hundreds of thick
gnarly branches, roots so deep and wood so hard that the tree could not be
cut, burned, or dug out. Vines bearing large flowers of many bright colors
grew over their branches.

There was a mile or two of foothills, and then the abruptness of
smooth-sided mountains, towering from 20,000 to 30,000 feet, unscalable
past the 10,000-foot mark.

The area through which the three Norse boats were sailing was inhabited
largely by early nineteenth-century Germans. There was the usual ten
percent population from another place and time of Earth. Here, the ten
percent was first-century Persians. And there was also the ubiquitous one
percent of seemingly random choices from any time and any place.

The telescope swung past the bamboo huts on the plains and the faces of
the people. The men were clad only in various towels; the women, in short
towellike skirts and thin cloths around the breasts. There were many
gathered on the bank, apparently to watch the battle. They carried
flint-tipped spears and bows and arrows but were not in martial array.

Clemens grunted suddenly and held the telescope on the face of a man. At
this distance and with the weak power of the instrument, he could not
clearly see the man's features. But the wide-shouldered body and dark face
suggested familiarity. Where had he seen that face before?

Then it struck him. The man looked remarkably like the photographs of the
famous English explorer Sir Richard Burton that he'd seen on Earth.
Rather, there was something suggestive of the man. Clemens sighed and
turned the eyepiece to the other faces as the ship took him away. He would
never know the true identity of the fellow.

He would have liked to put ashore and talk to him, find out if he really
was Burton. In the twenty years of life on this river-planet, and the
seeing of millions of faces, Clemens had not yet met one person he had
known on Earth. He did not know Burton personally, but he was sure that
Burton must have heard of him. This man--if he was Burton--would be a
link, if thin, to the dead Earth.

And then, as a far-off blurred figure came within the round of the
telescope, Clemens cried out incredulously.

"Livy! Oh, my God! Livy!"

There could be no doubt. Although the features could not be clearly
distinguished, they formed an overwhelming, not-to-be-denied truth. The
head, the hairdo, the figure, and the unmistakable walk (as unique as a
fingerprint) shouted out that here was his Earthly wife.

"Livy!" he sobbed. The ship heeled to tack, and he lost her. Frantically,
he swung the end of the scope back and forth.

Eyes wide, he stomped with his foot on the deck, and he bellowed,
"Bloodaxe! Bloodaxe! Up here! Hurry!"

He swung toward the helmsman and shouted that he should go back and direct
the ship toward the bank. Grimolfsson was taken aback at first by Clemens'
vehemence. Then he slitted his eyes, shook his head, and growled out a no.

"I order you to!" Clemens screamed, forgetting that the helmsman did not
understand English. "That's my wife! Livy! My beautiful Livy, as she was
when she was twenty-five! Brought back from the dead!"

Someone rumbled behind him, and Clemens whirled to see a blond head with a
shorn-off left ear appear on the level of the deck. Then Erik Bloodaxe's
broad shoulders, massive chest, and huge biceps came into view, followed
by pillarlike thighs as he came up on the ladder. He wore a
green-and-black checked towel, a broad belt holding several chert knives
and a holster for his ax. This was of steel, broadbladed and with an oak
handle. It was, as far as Clemens knew, unique on this planet, where stone
and wood were the only materials for weapons.

He frowned as he looked over The River. He turned to Clemens and said,
"What is it, sma-skitligr? You made me miscue when you screamed like
Thor's bride on her wedding night. I lost a cigar to Toki Njalsson."

He took the ax from its holster and swung it. The sun glinted off the blue
steel. "You had better have a good reason for disturbing me. I have killed
many men for far less."

Clemens' face was pale beneath the tan, but this time it was not caused by
Erik's threat. He glared, the wind-ruffled hair, staring eyes, and
aquiline profile making him look like a kestrel falcon.

"To hell with you and your ax!" he shouted. "I just saw my wife, Livy,
there on the right bank! I want ... I demand ... that you take me ashore
so I can be with her again! Oh, God, after all these years, all this
hopeless searching! It'll only take a minute! You can't deny me this;
you'd be inhuman to do so!"

The ax whistled and sparkled. The Norseman grinned.

"All this fuss for a woman? What about her?" And he gestured at a small
dark woman standing near the great pedestal and tube of the
rocket-launcher.




Clemens became even paler. He said, "Temah is a fine girl! I'm very fond
of her! But she's not Livy!"

"Enough of this," Bloodaxe said. "Do you take me to be as big a fool as
you? If I put into shore, we'd be caught between the ground and river
forces, ground like meal in Frey's mill. Forget about her."

Clemens screamed like a falcon and launched himself, arms out and
flapping, at the Viking. Erik brought the flat of the ax against Clemens'
head and knocked him to the deck. For several minutes, Clemens lay on his
back, eyes open and staring at the sun. Blood seeped from the roots of the
hair falling down over his face. Then he got to all fours and began to
vomit.

Erik gave an impatient order. Temah, looking sidewise with fright at Erik,
dipped a bucket at the end of a rope into The River. She threw the water
over Clemens, who sat up and then wobbled to his feet. Temah drew another
bucket and washed off the deck.

Clemens snarled at Erik. Erik laughed and said, "Little coward, you've
been talking too big for too long! Now, you know what happens when you
talk to Erik Bloodaxe as if he were a thrall. Consider yourself lucky that
I did not kill you."

Clemens spun away from Erik, staggered to the railing, and began to climb
upon it. "Livy!"

Swearing, Bloodaxe ran after him, seized him around the waist, and dragged
him back. Then he pushed Clemens so heavily that Clemens fell on the deck
again.

"You're not deserting me at this time!" Erik said. "I need you to find
that iron mine!"

"There isn ..." Clemens said and then closed his mouth tightly. Let the
Norseman find out that he did not know where the mine--if there was a
mine--was located, and he would be killed on the spot.

"Moreover," Erik continued cheerfully, "after we find the iron, I may need
you to help us toward the Polar Tower, although I think I can get there
just by following The River. But you have much knowledge that I need. And
I can use that frost giant, Joe Miller."

"Joe!" Clemens said in a thick voice. He tried to get back onto his feet.
"Joe Miller! Where's Joe? He'll kill you!"

The ax cut the air above Clemens' head. "You will tell Joe nothing of
this, do you hear? I swear by Odin's blind socket, I will get to you and
kill you before he can put a hand on me. Do you hear?"

Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then he called, in a
louder voice, "Joe! Joe Miller!"