Flesh (21 page)

Two tall-masted schooners, sailing out of the dawn mists, were on the Deecee brigantine before the lookout had time to cry a warning. The sailors aboard
The Divine Dolphin,
however, had no doubt about the identity of the attackers. The simultaneous shout, “The Karelians!” arose; then all was confusion.

One of the pirate vessels ran up alongside
The Divine Dolphin.
Grappling hooks from the Karelian ship secured the two ships tightly. In an incredibly swift time, the pirates were aboard.

They were tall men who wore nothing but brightly colored shorts and broad leather belts bristling with weapons. They were tattooed from head to foot, and they brandished cutlasses and big clubs with spiked knobs. They shouted ferociously in their native Finnish, and they swung cutlass and club as if berserk, sometimes felling their own men in their fury.

The Deecee were caught by surprise but they fought bravely. They did not think of surrender; that meant being sold into slavery and worked to death.

The crew of the
Terra
were among the defenders. Though they knew nothing of swordplay, they slashed away as best they could. Even Robin seized a sword and fought by Churchill’s side.

The second schooner closed in on the other side. The Karelians from her swarmed aboard and attacked the Deecee before they could turn around to face them. Gbwe-hun, the Dahomeyan, was the first casualty among the starmen. He had killed a pirate with a lucky stroke and wounded another before a cutlass wielder from behind cut off the Dahomey’s sword arm and then lopped off his head. Yastzhembski went down next, bleeding from a gash across his forehead.

Suddenly, Robin and Churchill were struggling in the folds of a net thrown over them from a yardarm. They were beaten unconscious with fists.

Churchill awoke to find his hands tied behind him. Robin was on the deck beside him, also tied. The clang of blade on blade had ceased, and even the shrieks of the wounded were still. The badly wounded Deecee had been thrown overboard, and the badly wounded Karelians refused to cry out.

The pirate captain, a Kirsti Ainundila, stood in front of the captives. He was a tall dark man with a patch over one eye and a scar running across his left cheek. He spoke in a heavily accented Deecee.

“I have been through the ship’s log,” he said, “and I know who you are. So there is no use lying to me. Now! You two”—he pointed to Churchill and Robin—“are worth a huge ransom. I think that this Whitrow will pay much to get his daughter and son-in-law back unharmed. As for the rest, they will fetch a fair price on the block when we get back to Aino.”

Aino, Churchill knew, was a Karelian-held city on the coast of what had once been North Carolina.

Kirsti ordered all the prisoners taken below and chained to the bulkhead. Yastzhembski was among them, since he had been judged fit to recover from his wound.

After they had been chained and the pirates had left, Lin spoke up.

“I see now that it was foolish to think we could go back to our homelands. Not because we’ve been captured, but because we no longer have homelands. We’d be no better off there than here. We’d find our descendants as alien and hostile as Churchill has found his.

“Now, I’ve been thinking for some time of a thing that we forgot because of our desire to get back to Earth. That is, what happened to the Earthmen who colonized Mars?”

“I don’t know,” Churchill said, “but it does seem to me that if the Martians weren’t wiped out for some reason or other, they would have sent spaceships to Earth long before this. After all, they were self-supporting. They had their own ships.”

“Apparently something prevented them,” Chandra said. “But I think I know what Lin is getting at. There are radioactive minerals on Mars. The means for making ore should still be there even if the people no longer are.”

“Let me get this straight,” Churchill said. “You are proposing that we take the
Terra
there? We
do
have enough fuel to get us to Mars, but there’s not enough to get us back. Are you suggesting we use the equipment in the Martian domes to make more fuel? And then leave for the stars once more?”

“We found one planet where the aborigines are not advanced enough, technologically, to fight us,” Lin said. “I mean the second planet of Vega. It had four large continents, each about the size of Australia, each separated by a large body of water. One of the land-masses is inhabited by humanoids who are, technologically speaking, at the level of the ancient Greeks. Two are inhabited by Neolithics. The fourth is uninhabited. If we can get to Vega, we can colonize the fourth continent.”

They were all silent for a while.

Churchill could see that Lin’s proposal had its points; the biggest objection was that they had no means of carrying it out. First, they must get free. Then they must seize the
Terra
—and it was so heavily guarded that the starmen, who had discussed it after being released from their Washington prison, had discarded the idea.

“Even if we can seize the ship,” he said, “and that’s a big
if,
we must get to Mars. That’s the biggest gamble of all. What if conditions there are such that we can’t get fuel?”

“Then we hole in and start making equipment,” Al-Masyuni said.

“Yes, but assuming that Mars gives us what we want, and we do reach Vega, we have to have women. Otherwise the race dies out. That means I have to take Robin, willy-nilly. And it also means that we have to abduct Deecee women.”

“Once they come out of deep-freeze on Vega, there’s not much they can do about it,” Steinborg said.

“Violence, abduction, rape,” Churchill said. “What a way to start a brave new world!”

“Is there any other way?” Wang said.

“Don’t forget the Sabine women,” Steinborg said.

Churchill did not reply to that but brought up another objection. “We are so few that in a short time our descendants would be highly inbred. We don’t want to found a race of idiots.”

“We kidnap children as well as women and take them along in deep-freeze.”

Churchill frowned. There seemed to be no way to get away from violence. But then it had always been so throughout man’s history.

“Even if we take infants who are too small to talk and therefore will not remember Earth, we still have to take along enough women to raise them. And that brings up another problem. Polygamy. I don’t know about the other women, but I do know that Robin will strongly object.”

Yastzhembski said, “Explain to her it’s only temporary. Anyway, you could be the exception, the monogamous one, if you wish. Let us have all the fun. I suggest we raid a Pants-Elf village. I’ve been told that the Pants-Elf women are accustomed to polygamy, and from what I heard, they’d welcome having husbands who’d pay attention to them. They sure as hell can’t like the so-called men they got now.”

“All right,” Churchill said. “Agreed. But there’s one thing that really bothers me.”

“What’s that?”

“How do we get out of this immediate mess?”

There was a gloomy silence.

Yastzhembski said, “Do you think Whitrow would put up the money to ransom all of us?”

“No. It’s going to strain his purse to get Robin and me out of this tight-fisted pirate’s hands.”

“Well,” Steinborg said, “at least you’ve a way out. What of us?”

Churchill stood up and began banging his manacles against each other and shouting loudly for the captain.

“Why are you doing that?” Robin said. She had not understood more than a few words of the conversation so far because it had been conducted in twenty-first-century American.

“I’m going to try to talk the captain into some sort of a deal,” he replied in Deecee. “I think I’ve a way out. But it depends on how glibly I can talk and how receptive he is.”

A sailor stuck his head through the hatch and asked what the hell was going on.

“Tell your captain I’ve a way for him to make a thousand times more money than he expects,” Churchill said. “And enough glory to make him a hero.”

The head disappeared. Within five minutes, two sailors came down into the hold and unlocked Churchill.

“See you,” he said to the others as he left. “But don’t wait up for me.”

He did not know how true his joking words would be.

The day passed, and he did not return. Robin was close to hysteria. She speculated that the captain had gotten angry at her husband and had killed him. The others tried to calm her down with the reasonable argument that a good businessman like the Karelian would not destroy such a heavy investment. Nevertheless, despite their reassurances, they were worried. Churchill might have inadvertently insulted the captain and therefore forced him to murder Churchill to save his face. Or he might have been slain trying to escape.

Some of them dozed off. Robin stayed awake to murmur prayers to Columbia.

Finally, close to dawn, the hatch opened. Churchill came down the ladder, accompanied by two sailors. He staggered and almost fell down, and once he hiccupped loudly. After he had been chained, the others could understand his behavior. His breath stank of beer, and he slurred his words.

“Been drinking like a camel about to go on a caravan,” he said. “All day, all night. I outtalked Kirsti, but I think he outdrank me. Found out a lot about these Finns. They were spared more than other people during the Desolation, and afterwards they exploded all over Europe, just like the ancient Vikings. They mingled with what was left of the Scandinavians, Germans, and the Baltic peoples. They now hold northwest Russia, the eastern part of England, most of northern France, the coastal regions of Spain and North Africa, Sicily, South Africa, Iceland, Greenland, Nova Scotia, Labrador, and North Carolina. God knows what else, because they have sent expeditions to India and China...”

“Very interesting, but some other time,” Steinborg said. “How did you come out with the captain? Make a deal?”

“He’s a pretty shrewd fellow and awfully suspicious. I had a hell of a time convincing him.”

“What happened?” Robin said.

Churchill told her, in Deecee, not to worry, that they’d all be out soon. Then he switched back to the language of his birth.

“Have you ever tried to explain antigravity generators and antimatter propulsion to a man who doesn’t even know there are such things as molecules or electrons? Among other things, many other things, I had to give a lecture in basic atomic theory, and...”

His voice trailed off, and his head dropped. He was asleep.

Exasperated, Robin shook him until he struggled up from his befuddlement.

“Oh, it’s you, Robin,” he mumbled. “Robin, you won’t like this little scheme I’ve cooked up. You’ll hate me...”

He went back to sleep. This time all her efforts to arouse him were in vain.

14

“I wish I
could
get the belt off,” Mary Casey said. “It’s very cumbersome and irritating. It chafes my skin so I can hardly walk. And it’s not very sanitary, either. It has two small outlets, but I have to pour water down it to clean myself.”

“I know that,” Stagg said impatiently. “That’s not what’s bothering me.”

Mary looked at him and said, “Oh, no!”

His antlers had lost their floppiness and were standing stiff and erect.

“Peter,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, “please don’t. You mustn’t. You’ll kill me.”

“No, I won’t,” he answered, almost sobbing—but whether from his desire or from agony at not being able to control himself, she could not tell.

“I’ll be as gentle as possible. I promise it won’t be too much for you.”

“Once is too much!” she said. “We’ve not been married by a priest. It would be a sin.”

“No sin if you don’t do it willingly,” he said hoarsely. “And you’ve no choice. Believe me, you’ve no choice!”

“I won’t do it,” she said. “I won’t! I won’t!”

She continued protesting, but he paid no attention. He was too busy concentrating on getting the belt open. It presented a problem that only a key or a file could solve; since neither was available, it looked as if he would have to be frustrated.

But he was under the stress of a thing that did not acknowledge rationality.

The belt was composed of three parts. The two parts that went around the waist were made of steel. It was hinged at the back so it could be put on open and then snapped shut with a lock in front. The third part was made of many small links and was fastened to the belt by a second lock. Its chain mail effect allowed a certain amount of flexibility. Like the band around the waist, it was padded with thick cloth on the inside to prevent chafing and cutting. However, the whole contrivance was necessarily tight. Otherwise, the wearer could have slipped out of it or have been pulled out, with force and a little lost skin. This belt was a very snug fit, so tight that Mary complained about breathing.