Flesh (5 page)

“Yes? From some of the positions they were in, I’d say they certainly weren’t going to fertilize anything.”

Calthorp smiled. “Columbia is also the goddess of erotic love.”

“I have the feeling,” Stagg said, “that you’re trying to tell me something. But you’re taking a very indirect route. I also have a feeling that I won’t like what you’re trying to tell me.”

At that moment they heard the clanging of a gong in the room they’d just left. They hurried back to see what was going on.

They were greeted by a blast of trumpets and roll of drums. In marched a band of musician-priests from the nearby Georgetown University. These were fat well-fed fellows who had castrated themselves in honor of the Goddess—and, incidentally, to get a lifelong position of prestige and security. Like women, they were dressed in high-necked, long-sleeved blouses and ankle-length skirts.

Behind them walked the man known as John Barleycorn. Stagg didn’t know his real name; “John Barleycorn” was evidently a title. Nor did Stagg know Barleycorn’s exact position in the government of Deecee. He lived in the White House, on the third floor, and seemed to have much to do with the administration of the country. His function was probably similar to that of the Prime Minister of ancient Great Britain.

The Sunheroes, like the monarch of that country, were more figureheads, binders of loyalty and tradition, than actual rulers. Or so it seemed to Stagg, who had been forced to guess at the meaning of most of the phenomena that flashed and buzzed by him during his imprisonment.

John Barleycorn was a very tall and very thin man of about thirty-five. His long hair was dyed a bright green, and he wore green spectacles. His long ski-slope nose and his face were covered with broken red veins. He wore a tall green plug hat. Around his neck hung a string of ears of corn. His torso was bare. His kilt was green, and the sporran hanging from his belt was made of stiff cloth shaped like the leaves of corn. His sandals were yellow.

In his right hand he carried his emblem of office, a large bottle of white lightning.

“Hail, man and myth!” he said to Stagg. “Greetings to the Sunhero! Greetings to the ramping, snorting stag of the Elk totem! Greetings to the Father of His Country and the Child and Lover of the Great White Mother!”

He took a long swig from the bottle, smacked his lips, and passed it to Stagg.

“I need that,” said the captain, and swallowed a mouthful. A minute later, after choking, gasping, and weeping great tears, he returned the bottle.

Barleycorn was elated. “You gave a splendid performance, Noble Elk! You must have been visited by the special potency of Columbia Herself to be so stricken by the white lightning. Indeed, you are divine! Now take me, I am only a poor mortal, and when I first drank white lightning, I was affected. Still, I must confess that when I first assumed office as a lad I was able to feel the holy presence of the Goddess in the bottle and to be affected as much as yourself. But a man may become hardened even to divinity, may She pardon my saying so. Have I ever told you the story of how Columbia first liquified a lightning bolt and then bottled it? And how She gave it to the first man, none other than Washington himself? And how disgracefully he behaved and thereby incurred the wrath of the Goddess?

“I have? Well, to business, then. I am preceding the Chief Priestess herself to give you a message. To whit and to-whooooo! Tomorrow is the birthday of the Son of the Great White Mother. And you, the child of Columbia, will be born tomorrow. And then what has been will be.”

He took another drink, bowed to Stagg, almost fell on his face, recovered, and staggered out of the room.

Stagg called him back. “Just a minute! I want to know what has happened to my crew!”

Barleycorn blinked. “I told you that they were in a building on the campus of Georgetown University.”

“I want to know where they are now—at this moment!”

“They are being treated very well. Anything they want they may have, except their freedom. And they will get that day after tomorrow.”

“Why then?”

“Because you, too, will be released. Of course, you won’t be able to see them then. You’ll be on the Great Route.”

“What is that?”

“It will be revealed.”

Barleycorn turned to leave, but Stagg said, “Tell me, why is that girl being kept in a cage? You know, the one with the sign that says: ‘Mascot, Captured in a Raid on Caseyland.’”

“That, too, will be revealed, Sunhero. Meanwhile, I suggest that it is unbecoming in a man of your importance to lower himself by asking questions. The Great White Mother will explain everything in due time.”

After Barleycorn had left, Stagg said to Calthorp, “What nonsense is he trying to cover up?”

The little man frowned. “Wish I knew. After all, my chances for an examination into the social mechanisms of this culture have been rather limited. It’s just that there is...”

“There’s what?” Stagg said anxiously. Calthorp was looking very gloomy.

“Tomorrow is the winter solstice. Midwinter—when the sun is weakest in the northern hemisphere and has reached its most southerly station. On the calendar we knew, it was December twenty-first or twenty-second. As near as I can remember, that was a very important date in prehistoric and even historic times. All sorts of ceremonies connected with it, such as... ahhh!”

It was more a wail than an exclamation of sudden remembrance.

Stagg became even more alarmed. He was about to ask him what was wrong, but he was interrupted by another blast from the band. The musicians and the attendants faced the door and fell on their knees.

They cried in unison, “Chief Priestess, living flesh of Virginia, daughter of Columbia! Holy maiden! Beautiful one! Virginia, soon to lose to the raging stag—heedless, savage, tearing male—your sanctified and tender fold! Blessed and doomed Virginia!”

A tall girl of eighteen walked haughtily into the apartment. She was beautiful, though she had a high-bridged nose and a very white face. Her full lips were red as blood. Her blue eyes were piercing and unflinching as a cat’s. Her curling honey-colored hair fell to her hips. She was Virginia, graduate of Vassar College for Oracular Priestesses and incarnate daughter of Columbia.

“Hello, mortals,” she said in a high clear voice.

She looked at Stagg.

“Hello, immortal.”

“Hello, Virginia,” he answered. He felt the blood spurting through his flesh and the ache building up in his chest and loins. Every time he met her, he experienced this almost irrepressible desire for her. He knew that if he were left alone with her, he would take her, no matter what the consequences.

Virginia gave no sign that she was aware of her effect upon him. She regarded him with the cool unfaltering stare of a lioness.

Virginia, like all mascots, was clothed in a high-necked and ankle-length garment, but her garment was covered with large pearls. A large triangular opening in the dress exposed her large but upthrusting breasts. The areola of each was rouged and circled by two rings of blue and white paint.

“Tomorrow, immortal, you will become both Child and Lover of the Mother. Therefore, it is necessary that you prepare yourself.”

“Just what do I have to do to prepare myself?” Stagg said. “And why should I?”

He looked at her and ached through his whole body.

She motioned with one hand. Instantly John Barleycorn, who must have been waiting around the corner, appeared. He now carried two bottles, the white lightning and some dark liquor. A priest-eunuch offered him a cup. He filled it with the dark stuff, and handed it to the priestess.

“Only you, Father of Your Country, may drink this,” she said, giving the cup to Stagg. “This is the best. Made from the waters of the sticks.”

Stagg took the cup. He looked at it dubiously, but he tried to be nonchalant. “Real mountain hooch, hey? Well, here goes. Never let anybody say that Peter Stagg couldn’t outdrink the best of them. Aaourrwhoosh!”

The trumpets blew, the drums beat, the attendants clapped their hands and whooped.

It was then that he heard Calthorp protesting. “Captain, you misunderstood! She didn’t say sticks. She said
Styx.
Waters of the S-T-Y-X! Get it?”

Stagg had gotten it, but there was nothing he could do about it. The room whirled around and around, and darkness rushed in like a great black bat.

Amid the trumpets and the cheering, he fell headlong toward the floor.

3

“What a hangover!” Stagg groaned.

“I’m afraid they do,” said a voice that Stagg faintly recognized as Calthorp’s.

Stagg sat up and then yelled from the pain and the shock. He rolled out of bed, fell to his knees from weakness, struggled to his feet, and staggered to the three full-length mirrors set at angles to each other. He was naked. His testicles were painted blue; his penis, red; his buttocks, white. He did not think about that. He could think about nothing except the two things he saw sticking at a 45-degree angle from his forehead for a foot and then branching out into many points.

“Horns! What’re they doing there? Who put them there? By God, if I get my hands on the practical joker...” and he tried to pull the things from his head. He yelled with pain and let his hands drop to his side while he stared into the mirror. There was a stain of blood at the base of one of the horns.

“Not horns,” Calthorp said. “Antlers. I like to be specific. Antlers—and not the hard, dead, horny kind, either. They’re fairly soft, warm and velvety, as a matter of fact. If you will put your thumb there, you can feel an artery pulsing, just under the surface. Whether they will later become the hard dead antlers of the mature—pardon the pun—stag, I don’t know.”

The captain was scared and looking for something at which to get angry.

“All right, Calthorp!” he roared. “Are you in on this monkey business? Because if you are, I’ll tear you limb from limb!”

“You not only look like a beast, you’re beginning to act like one,” Calthorp murmured.

Stagg could have struck the little anthropologist for his ill-timed humor. Then he saw that Calthorp was pale and his hands were shaking. His attitude was a cover-up for his very real fright.

“All right,” Stagg said, calming down somewhat. “What happened?”

Voice trembling, Calthorp told him that the priests had carried his unconscious body toward his bedroom. But a mob of priestesses had rushed in and seized him. For a terrible moment Calthorp had feared that Stagg would be torn apart by the two factions. However, the fight was a mock one, a ritual; the priestesses were supposed to win the body.

Stagg had been carried into the bedroom. Calthorp tried to follow, but he was literally thrown out.

“I soon got the point. They didn’t want a man in the room— except you. Even the surgeons were women. I tell you, when I saw them enter your room carrying saws and drills and bandages and all sorts of paraphernalia, I about went out of my mind. Especially when I saw that the surgeons were drunk. In fact, all the women were drunk. What a wild bunch! But John Barleycorn made me leave. He told me that at this time the women were likely to tear apart—literally—any man they encountered. He hinted that some of the musicians had not voluntarily qualified for candidacy as priests; they had just not been spry enough to get out of the way of the ladies on the evening of the winter solstice.

“Barleycorn asked me if I were an Elk. Only the totem brothers of the Great Stag were comparatively safe during this time. I replied that I wasn’t an Elk, but I was a member of the Lions Club—though my dues hadn’t been paid for a long time. He said I would have been safe last year, when the Sunhero was a Lion. But I was in great danger now. And he insisted on my leaving the White House until the Son—by which he meant you—was born. So I did. I came back at dawn and found everyone gone, except you. I stayed by your bedside until you woke up.”

He shook his head and clucked with sympathy.

“Do you know,” Stagg said, “some things are coming back to me. It’s vague and mixed up, but I can remember coming to after taking that drink. I was weak and helpless as a baby. There was a great noise around me. Women screaming as if they were in the pain of childbirth...”