Alexios's soldiers growled and brandished their flint-tipped spears. He held up a hand. "Let the pagan go in peace for now. Soon enough he will wake up naked and bald somewhere along the River far from here." He used the Greek his people spoke among themselves, then translated for Idris Alooma's benefit.

The big black man laughed scornfully. "You may have been plucked from hell to live beside us on the River here, Christian dog, but you are the one whom Allah will uproot when our armies meet." He turned on his heel and

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marched back toward the stretch of the riverbank that owed allegiance to Bornu's Sultan, Musa ar-Rahman.

Alexios watched him go, wondering all the while if he should have let his men enjoy their sport. He tossed his head in a Greek no; he'd done the right thing. If Idris Alooma failed to return to Bornu town, Musa would take his revenge by torturing Michael Palaiologos to death and rebirth. Alexios Komnenos had nothing against killing, but killing to no purpose was stupid and wasteful.

He turned to his brother Isaac, who stood as usual at his right hand. The two men were near twins, especially since being restored to life along the River at the same youthful age. Both were a little below average size, but strongly muscled. Both had a narrow, foxy face beneath a broad forehead; both were swarthy and dark, Isaac a little less so than Alexios. But the best way to tell them apart was to note that Isaac's features were a trifle more open and friendly than Alexios's. Alexios had ruled during his remembered life; Isaac merely aided.

"It will be war," Alexios said now.

"So it would seem," Isaac agreed. "It will not be an easy war, either."

"No." Alexios's scowl was black as the beard he could no longer raise. He still sometimes felt like a eunuch without it. "Why were we resurrected alongside these filthy Muslims?" Were he less pious, he would have wondered about God's mercy. The folk upstream from New Constantinople were peaceful red-skinned pagans who wanted only to be left alone. Given Bornu on his other flank, he'd been happy to oblige them.

Isaac said, "They are infidels, but they are brave. If we meet them head-on, we will lose a great many of our best men, men we cannot afford to be without. That

means that if anyone along this stretch of the River succeeds in uniting several little realms behind him, we will be vulnerable."

"This I know." Alexios scowled again. He aimed to lead this stretch of the River. Along with a majority of Rhomaioi, he currently ruled a minority of peasants from the Egypt of Ptolemy III. As soon as they'd accepted Christianity, they made subjects as good as his own folk—maybe better, for their loyalties were less conditional. Some of them had spoken Greek even before their resurrection; they all did now.

"The war will not wait much longer," Isaac warned. "If we do not begin it on our terms, Musa ar-Rahman will start it on his, for he loves us no better than we him."

"This I also know." Alexios's nostrils flared as he took a long, deep breath. He let it out in a sigh. He didn't want to say what he had to say next: "We shall begin it, brother of mine. But before we do, I aim to go to Shytown."

Isaac's bushy eyebrows flew toward his hairline. "You would deal with those—those aftermen?" Opisthanthropoi , was a word in no Greek lexicon; the folk of New Constantinople had coined it to describe people on the River who came from a time many centuries later than their own.

"God and the saints know I have no love for them," Alexios said. Aftermen were generally weak in faith, which made them unreliable, and strong in arcane gadg-etry, which made them dangerous. Alexios sighed once more. "But they are on Bornu's other flank. If they work with us, the pagans will fall like ripe wheat at harvesttime."

"Let us make sure that we reap the full benefit thereof, though, not the men of Shytown," Isaac warned.

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At last Alexios found something to amuse him. "Brother of mine, I was Basileus of the Romans for thirty-seven years. In all that time, did anyone ever out-trick me?"

Isaac did not answer. Alexios knew he had no answer. He'd stood off rebels from among his own people, Turks and Patzinaks and Normans; he'd even funneled through his Empire the western barbarians who called themselves Crusaders, and taken for the Rhomaioi most of the territory they'd won from the Seljuks in Anatolia. Maybe someone along the endless River was more cunning than he, but he had his doubts.

As if picking that boastful thought from his mind, Isaac said, "Do be cautious nonetheless. Shytown's Basileus is not a fool."

"Another truth. He does not style himself Emperor, though. While he is no Frank, he uses one of their titles—he calls himself Mayor."

"I wonder why?" Isaac mused.

"Who knows why the aftermen do as they do?" Alexios answered. "Their customs are even stranger than the Franks', and you know what it means for me to say that." No Franks lay anywhere close along the River, for which Alexios thanked God. Unwashed, ignorant, stinking, brutal savages—who happened to be inhumanly good at slaughtering anyone who got in their way. The Emperor rubbed his naked chin. "Where was I? Oh, yes, the customs of Shytown's aftermen. Do you know they didn't pick their Mayor by his courage or birth or anything sensible? No, they had all the people who wanted the job make speeches, and then chose by a show of hands from men and women both. 'Democracy,' they call it. It's idiocy, if you ask me."

"Demokratia." Isaac spat in the dirt. In the Greek the

two Komnenoi spoke, the word meant "mob rule." As Alexios said, it seemed a daft way to run a state, but Shytown flourished. Isaac added, "Do you really have to go there yourself?"

"Whom do you propose I send?" Alexios retorted. "The only other two men I might trust for the job are you and Michael Palaiologos. If I pull Michael out of Bornu town, Musa will surely divine what I aim to do. And. you, brother of mine, make a better soldier than an ambassador. Meaning no disrespect, but in a dicker the Mayor would eat you up and pick his teeth with your bones."

Since that was true, Isaac could only give his brother a reproachful stare. He said, "How do you even propose to get to Shytown? You let Idris Alooma go, so the Muslim blacks will know trouble lies ahead for them. And Musa ar-Rahman is no fool either. He will be looking for you to try to stab him in the back like that. Were I he, I'd have rafts in the water day and night. Do you want to be fished out and tortured, then given time to heal and tortured again for years on end?"

"Do I want that? Of course not. But I have to get to Shytown, and I don't think I could pass myself off as a proper subject of Musa's to sneak across his domain." Alexios laughed. So did Isaac, but he sounded more dutiful than amused. Black men of Musa ar-Rahman's tribe made up about two thirds of the people of Bornu. Most of the rest were short, golden-skinned, flat-featured, and narrow-eyed. Alexios's chance of successfully impersonating a member of either group was effectively none.

"All right. It will have to be the River, then, but I don't like it," Isaac said.

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Alexios laughed. "Here you are, Kaisar to my Basileus; if I fail, you become Emperor. And yet you caution me. What kind of brother are you?" He knew the answer to that: a loyal one. A loyal brother, especially among the treacherous Rhomaioi, was more precious than rubies. Alexios knew that, too. He clapped Isaac on the back with real affection. "Besides, I have an idea—"

The storm blew over not long before dawn. The River rode high and choppy in its banks. Debris drifted downstream—tree trunks, bamboo stalks, part of what had been a hut or a raft.

Isaac Komnenos chuckled. "If the Muslims were out watching for you last night, brother of mine, some of them will have drowned—so many the fewer to face when the time comes."

"True enough," Alexios answered. "I—" The morning roar of the grailstones interrupted him. Lambent blue fire shot into the air, to three times the height of a man. When it faded, the people of New Constantinople crowded forward to see what their grails contained today. Alexios took his with as much curiosity as anyone else.

He opened the hinged lid, smiled as savory steam tickled his nose. Black bread, honey, porridge with big bits of tuna and squid, a soft jar of wine, and a packet of the smokesticks his folk mostly traded to those who enjoyed sucking on them. And— "A firestarter!" he said happily. His grail had produced only a handful of them since his resurrection.

"A good omen," Isaac agreed.

"More than that," Alexios said. "A good weapon, too. I'll carry it along with my knife tonight. If a Bornu spots me, I'll burn out his tongue before he can shout the

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warning." That was bravado, and he knew it. Still, the new tool gave him one more string to his bow; without its appearance, he might not have thought to take one.

He spent the rest of the day going over his plans till he was sick of it and Isaac sicker. Most of what they talked about had to do with things that were unlikely to happen. Alexios had seen enough unlikely things in his life back on Earth to be sure some, at least, would come true: generally the ones that hadn't been planned for. He was a man who left as little as possible to chance.

The sun set in splendor over the mountains to the west. As dusk darkened toward true night, Alexios walked down to the River. A crew bossed by his brother waited for him there. When they started to prostrate themselves, he waved to show the gesture was unnecessary. "We have work to do here tonight, my friends."

He stripped off the reddish-purple kilt whose color was reserved for him alone in New Constantinople (any pieces of that hue that appeared on the grailstone were either saved for his use or traded away outside his little empire). To replace it, he covered himself with several dark-blue lengths of cloth, until only his head, hands, and feet remained bare.

Grunting and cursing, the work crew manhandled a yew into the River. They kept one last grassfiber line attached to it so it would not drift away downstream. Isaac Komnenos slapped Alexios on the back. "God go with you and bring you home again safe."

"You just say that because you don't want the work of ruling," Alexios said.

Isaac laughed. "Too right I don't, brother of mine. Do you have your reed?"

"Here." Alexios held up the yard-long piece of plant.

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It wasn't actually a reed, as it would have been back on earth; it was a thin length of bamboo, with all the pith hollowed out. But it would serve.

Alexios slipped into the water. It was cool but not cold. The Basileus took hold of a root that trailed from the yew. At Isaac's shouted direction, one of the men cut the last rope with a sharp piece of flint. The yew began to drift down the River.

The land slid slowly past. Settlements in New Constantinople centered on the grailstones. Once the one from which he'd left dropped away behind him, darkness prevailed for most of the next mile. Alexios glanced over to the far side of the River. Lights there were even fewer; a broad stretch of that bank was inhabited by hunters and gatherers even more primitive than the nomadic Patzinaks. They weren't even fierce enough to make decent allies against Bornu; had they been so, Alexios would have tried to recruit them.

Something nibbled his leg. He jerked and thrashed in the water. A croaker let out the mournful call that gave the fish its name, then splashed away. The things were cowards and scavengers and not worth eating if anything better was available. Alexios was glad to be rid of this one.

It could have been worse. It could have been a dragonfish. Dragonfish did not usually attack boats or people in the River. When they did, the people attacked usually reappeared on a new stretch of River.

Another grailstone, another town of Rhomaioi. This one was called Thessaloniki, after the second city in Alexios's empire. The people had lit a bonfire; Alexios saw men and women dancing around it. Faintly, the music of turtlefish lyres and upraised voices reached his

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ears. He smiled. He would sooner have been dancing around that fire himself than where he was.

In the middle of the next stretch of quiet dark, another croaker swam snuffling up to Alexios, hoping, no doubt, that he was a piece of offal. He hit the fish with his fist. It nipped him on the leg before it fled. He hoped he wasn't bleeding. Blood in the water would draw a dragonfish to him if anything would.

The last town of Rhomaioi before the frontier with Bornu was Nikaia. More fires blazed at the frontier; a detachment of Rhomaioi kept watch against the infidels. Less than a hundred yards farther on, the black men had then* own frontier garrison, of similar size to the one Alexios had posted.

The Bornu capered round their watchfires to the beat of bamboo-stalk drums with redfish leather skins. They brandished flint-tipped spears and shouted threats across the border to the Rhomaioi, most of whom, perhaps fortunately, could not understand them.

Alexios looked ahead. Before long, he spied torches on the River. The Bornu, he had learned since resurrection, came from a desert part of Africa; they did not take naturally to the water. But they were not stupid, either— they knew that if New Constantinople wanted to cut a deal with Shytown, the River was the logical avenue for emissaries.

The Basileus slid all the way under the water. He tried to get as far under the trunk of the yew as he could. Only the tip of his hollowed-out bamboo stuck up above the surface. The other end was in his mouth. He took deep, slow, steady breaths. A military manual from hundreds of years before his own time which he'd once read told how the Sklavenoi used this very trick to avoid detection by

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the Rhomaioi. Now, he thought, a Basileus of the Rhomaioi was turning it against barbarians.

He kept his eyes open, though the night-dark water all around him might as well have been ink. Then, through the crazily shifting mirror of the surface, he saw a flickering torchflame. He knew the black men were peering down into the River. If they saw his pale skin despite the gloomy kilts he'd draped round himself, if by some disaster they recognized his breathing tube for what it was... if either of those things happened, Isaac would become Basileus. Alexios just hoped the Bomu would eventually kill him, instead of torturing him almost to death, letting him heal, and starting over again.

The torchlight receded as the uprooted yew tree drifted on. Alexios sighed relief through hollow bamboo. He stayed submerged for some time, lest the noise of his emerging betray him to his foes.

But before long, he had to put up his head. He needed to watch the land by the River flow past, so he'd know when he'd gone by Bornu and entered the territory of Shytown. He also needed to keep an eye out for more rafts in the River. He would not have contented himself with a single line of pickets had he been Musa ar-Rahman, and he dared not assume the Sultan was less cautious than he.

Sure enough, he had to go under and breathe through his tube twice more. But the men of Bornu apparently found nothing suspicious about a tree floating downstream after a storm. Though once their torches seemed right overhead, they never probed the water with their spears.

After the third set of rafts, the Muslims had no further River defenses. Alexios drifted along past one of their

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settlements after another. He grew bored, and also chilly from having been in the water so long, but willingly endured both for the sake of the reward he might gain from this journey.

Bornu, by the look of things, fortified its border with Shytown more intensively than the one with New Constantinople. A palisade of bamboo and timber ran from the River toward the unclimbable mountains that sealed off the back of each domain.

Not long after he passed the palisade, Alexios kicked himself away from the yew and stroked toward the shore. He held on to his bamboo breathing tube: who could say when it might come in handy again?

He splashed up onto the riverbank. Shytown's sentries were alert; he'd hardly come out of the water before someone hailed him: "Who are you and what the devil are you doing here?"

He followed that, though he understood only a little of Shytown's language. The people of the Mayor's domain called it English, but it hardly resembled the English he'd learned from the Angles and Saxons of the Varangian Guard, men who'd abandoned England after William the Norman overthrew their kind. Having dealt with Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemund, Alexios did not love Normans, either.

He answered in the aftermen's dialect of English, as best he could: "I am Alexios Komnenos, Basileus of New Konstantinopolis. I will to see your Mayor."

"Say what?" It was a sudden, sharp exclamation, meaningless to Alexios. The sentry came up and looked him over. "Goddamn! Maybe you are him." He raised his voice: "Hey, Fred, Louie, come here! One of you take my slot, okay? This guy says he's Alexios from

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upstream, and he wants to see Mayor Daley. I'm gonna bring him to Hizzonor."

Fred or Louie came up. Whoever he was, he had a torch. "Yeah, that's Alexios, all right—I seen him once. Okay, Pete, you found him; I guess you get to take him. Beats stayin' here, that's for damn sure."

Alexios caught only part of that, but he gathered Pete would conduct him to the mayor. He fell into step with the Shytown sentry. All the way to Mayor Daley's residence, Pete bombarded him with questions. Why did he want to see the Mayor? Did it have to do with Bornu? If it didn't, what was it about? From one of his own subjects, Alexios would have found such prodding intolerable. But the folk of Shytown had a reputation for being both free of speech with their betters and insatiably inquisitive. Alexios found it politic to make his English poorer than it really was.

The Mayor dwelled in a fair-sized palace. Alexios thought the profusion of windows on the outside extravagant; houses in New Constantinople kept to the courtyard pattern of the lost imperial city. But enough guards ringed the place that theft was unlikely to be a problem.

Pete spoke to a guard by the door, too fast for Alexios to follow. Then he turned back and said, "Do you mind waiting till sunup? They don't want to wake Hizzonor yet."

Alexios considered, decided to have a tantrum. He cursed in Greek before trying English again at the top of his lungs: "I am the Basileus, God dump you to hell! You keep me to wait like man with fish to sell?" If the Mayor hadn't been awake, he ought to be now, theou thelontos.

After listening to some more ranting, the guard went

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inside. Mayor Daley came out a few minutes later, accompanied by a thin man with red hair who wore a bone cross on a leather thong round his neck. Daley rumbled in his brand of English. The thin man spoke Latin, which Alexios also understood: "I am Father Boyle, Hizzonor's interpreter. He asks why whatever business this is couldn't wait until the morning."

"Because I am as much a ruler as he is, and I am here now," Alexios answered. "Tell him that." Because he is an upstart and I am Basileus of the Rhomaioi—he thought, though he kept that to himself.

Daley spoke again: "All right; let's get on with it."

Alexios waved aside the priest's translation; he'd understood that himself. He studied Hizzonor. Like everyone else along the River, Mayor Richard J. Daley was physically perfect and in the prime of youth. That failed to make him handsome; he looked like a bruiser. But his eyes— Maybe it was a trick of the torchlight, but Alexios didn't think so. Those cold gray eyes held more than a youth's experience. Alexios would have bet Hizzonor had lived a long life and done a lot of underhanded things in it. Isaac claimed his own eyes had that look, so no wonder he recognized it.

Aloud, he said, "We ami to fight Bomu soon; we want you to come in on our side. Between us, we can crush the black infidels, take control of their grails, and add to the wealth of both Shytown and New Constantinople. Is that interesting enough to get you out of bed early, Mayor?"

Daley didn't speak Latin; he had to wait for Father Boyle to translate. Even after the priest was done, the Mayor did not change expression. Yes, he's good, Alexios thought with reluctant admiration. Daley answered,

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"Maybe. Depends on when you do it and what's in it for us. I don't have men to throw away on the Suicide Express."

Via Suicida made strange Latin, but Alexios understood: Daley didn't want men loyal to him killed and resurrected far, far up or down the River. Alexios didn't want that for his own retainers, either. He said, "That's why I propose alliance. Between us, we trap and outnumber the men of Bornu. Our casualties should be small."

"Yes, that might work," Daley said. "I also wouldn't mind seeing those shiftless blacks next door working for a living instead of sponging off their grails and lying around like they were in welfare heaven. So, yeah, I'm interested. Tell me more."

Even after Hizzonor's priest translated that, Alexios didn't get all of it; "welfare heaven" left him especially puzzled. Mayor Daley also seemed to despise the people of Bornu merely for being black. That confused Alexios. They couldn't help being black. But they had chosen false Islam of their own free will, and would (he continued to believe, despite resurrection along the River) one day suffer the pangs of hell for their error.

Reasons, however, didn't matter. He said, "Are we allies, then? Shall we fix the day for setting the fate of the black infidels?" If Hizzonor didn't like the Bornu because of their color, Alexios would remind him of it.

"It isn't quite so simple," Mayor Daley said. "The one thing the blacks are good for is keeping you and me from bumping up against each other. When we're neighbors, we're going to have to watch each other all the time. Musa's a nuisance to me now, what with his bucks coming in and stealing a white woman every so often,

but he's only a nuisance, if you know what I mean. Having you next door might be downright dangerous."

Alexios eyed Hizzonor with surprised respect. If he understood die idea of buffer states, he was indeed no one's fool. After some thought, Alexios said, "Let us agree in advance, then, on which of us will control each grailstone in Bornu. Quarrels settled ahead of time do not turn vexing later."

But Mayor Daley shook his head. "That isn't good enough. I heard you were smart, and I see it's so. So sooner or later, Shytown and New Constantinople will likely fight. We're both going to want to take over as much as we can—we're like that. Am I right or wrong?"

"I think you're right," Alexios admitted. He'd seen the same, but had intended to keep quiet about it. Hizzonor's style was different, almost brutally direct. The Basileus asked, "What do you propose to do about the problem?"

"Here's what," Daley said. "A big war would wreck your country and mine both, and leave whichever of us won in bad shape against anybody strong who might come up or down the River at him. So let's keep it clean: We'll go together against the Bornu, sure. But at the same time, I'll name you Vice Mayor of Shytown and you'll name me—what do you call your number-two guy?"

"Kaisar," Alexios answered.

"Okay. That's what you'll name me, then. You see what I'm driving at?"

"I see," Alexios said slowly. If he took Mayor Daley's terms, whichever of them assassinated the other would rule New Constantinople and Shytown both. Life henceforward would be nervous for the two headmen, but their

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retainers would live. Alexios went on, "But, you see, I already have a Kaisar. He—"

"I got a Vice Mayor, too," Daley interrupted. "It's no big deal. This is important. It needs doing, if Shytown and New Constantinople are going to end up next door to each other. Am I right, or not?"

Alexios had been about to say that his Kaisar was his own brother, the only man he'd ever known upon whom he could rely absolutely. The last thing he wanted was to replace Isaac with someone mainly interested in killing him off. But Daley had made it clear that Shytown wouldn't help against Bornu unless he had his way. And if New Constantinople took on Bornu alone, then even if he won he'd be vulnerable to an attack from downstream.

Better the risk to his person than the one to his empire, he decided. "Let it be as you say," he told the Mayor. "Once Bornu is taken, you will name me Vice Mayor and I will appoint you Kaisar." And we shall see what happens after that, too, he added to himself.

Daley stuck out his hand. Alexios took it. The Mayor's clasp was brief, firm, and as mechanical as the gears and levers that raised the imperial throne in Constantinople high in the air to overawe barbarous envoys. Daley, worse luck, did not act like a barbarian—he did not show on his face what he was thinking. Alexios reminded himself that the aftermen had had hundreds of years past his own time in which to learn deceit. He hoped his own lifetime of practicing such arts would suffice.

Once the Mayor had what he wanted, he turned businesslike in a hurry. "Let's plan this thing out," he said. "If we're going to do it, we ought to do it right. I think we can, but we need to work things out beforehand...."

The sun came up while Daley and Alexios were still

plotting. Only the roar from the grailstones made the Basileus notice he no longer needed torches to see. One of Daley's henchmen fetched him breakfast: fried eggs and bacon, toasted bread with fruit jam sweeter than honey, and the hot bitter brew called coffee. He didn't care for that, but drank for politeness' sake. After he finished it, he felt more awake and alert than the long night should have permitted.

Mayor Daley's title was anything but martial, but he had a sound grasp of strategy. If everything went as he and Alexios designed (which seldom happened in war), Bornu would be ground between them like grain between upper and lower millstones. And Daley's scheme for returning Alexios to New Constantinople was simplicity itself: "We'll send you as a sailor in one of our boats, and we'll tell the black boys they'll get instant war with us if they try searching anything of ours that floats. Think that'll work?"

"It should, by the Virgin," Alexios said. To his surprise, he found himself liking Hizzonor. Could the afterman have been trusted for a single instant out of Alexios's sight, he would have made a good Kaisar. As it was, he would make a bad enemy if he didn't get his way. Alexios smiled. Of course he intended to keep his promise to Daley....

The army of Rhomaioi swept over the border a little before dawn. A few sentries shot arrows at the soldiers. More fled screeching into the interior of Bornu.

"Had it been my choice instead of Musa's, I would have had the Shytown boat searched and taken me off it were I found," Alexios said to Isaac. "But Mayor Daley was right there: the men of Bornu dared not antagonize

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him and me at the same time, and so I came home safely."

"I'm glad of it, too," Isaac Komnenos answered. "From all you've said since you got back, the opisthan-thropos would be too much for a plain old honest soldier like me." He laughed to show he didn't mean to be taken altogether seriously.

Alexios laughed too. "One thing at a time, brother of mine. The first thing we have to do is settle Musa ar-Rahman. Only after Bornu ceases to be a problem will Shytown become one... unless, of course, Hizzonor means to sit this fight out, let us and the Muslims weaken ourselves, and then pick up the remains." That he had entertained that possibility earlier was a measure of Daley's skill at lulling him. Something new to worry about...

With every pace the Rhomaioi marched, they could see farther. The sun rose as they drew near the grailstone closest to the border. Bornu warriors boiled out of the town that had grown up around the grailstone. Like Alexios's men, they carried spears and bows, stone axes and sword-clubs with wooden bodies and flint or obsidian blades. Also like the Rhomaioi, they wore several layers of kiltcloth as armor.

There the resemblance ended. Alexios's soldiers marched in an orderly hollow diamond; the men of the outer ranks carried shields of wood and fish-leather to protect themselves and their comrades from missile weapons. The Bomu scorned both order and shields. Screaming "Allahu akbar!"—"God is great"—they hurled themselves at their Christian foes.

Isaac Komnenos waited till the black men were very close before he shouted, "Loose!" Hundreds of arrows

flew as one. The archers reached over their shoulders for more shafts, shot again and again. Their bows, made from dragonfish mouthparts, were better than any they'd had in their previous lives.

Even so, not many Bornu fell. Draped as they were in kiltcloth, they were armored against most archery. But some were hit in the face, others wounded in arms or calves and thus out of the fight. The Rhomaioi suffered almost no casualties.

The black men's woes grew worse when the fighting came to close quarters. They were as brave as their foes, maybe braver—the Rhomaioi seldom showed more courage than an occasion demanded. But the Bornu fought as individuals; they had no notion of battle as anything but a series of single combats.

They paid dearly for their education. To Alexios and Isaac, the success of the army as a whole came first, with individual glory a long way behind. Alexios fought at the fore, true, but more to inspire his own men than out of love for combat. He cared more for the power that came through war than for war itself.

The Bornu flung themselves at him, one after another. He could read their thought: if he fell, the army's aggressive spirit would perish with him. He knew they were wrong; Isaac was no diplomat, but made a perfectly capable soldier. Alexios took the series of attacks to mean Bornu resistance would fall apart if he killed Musa ar-Rahman.

The Basileus carried a stout stone-headed club. It was a pragmatist's weapon, one that would break bones even through kiltcloth. A tall, screaming black man thrust a spear at his face. He ducked, stepped close, swung that club. A man's ribs were a bigger, less elusive target than

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his head. The black man moaned. Pink foam spurted from his nose and mouth as he crumpled. The advancing Rhomaioi trampled him into the dirt.

Quite suddenly, the Bornu quit fighting and turned to flight. Alexios was tempted to open his tight formation and pursue, but decided against it: let the defeated Muslims spread panic ahead of New Constantinople's army. Nor could he be sure the Bornu weren't trying to lead him into an ambuscade.

As the Rhomaioi approached, shrieking women fled from the village around the grailstone. That convinced Alexios he really had won a victory worth having. When a few of his warriors seemed about to break ranks and run after the women, he called, "We'll have as many of these wenches as we like once the Bornu are beaten. Till then, we risk ourselves if we chase them without discipline."

His lines held steady. Unlike the black men, the Rhomaioi knew what discipline was worth; they could put off immediate pleasure for the sake of a greater gain later. They made him proud.

Ahead in the far distance, smoke rose against the sky. "Is that what we hope for?" Isaac asked.

"It should be," Alexios answered. "Mayor Daley promised the men of Shytown would burn the palisade the Bornu built to keep them out. The aftermen seem clever with incendiaries, and to be acquainted with more of them than our liquid fire." Yet another thing to worry about, he thought. But not until later. Worry about Musa ar-Rahman came first.

Alexios detached a company of troops to fill grails on the grailstone of the captured town. Some of those grails belong to his own soldiers; others were seized from captured blacks. The Basileus pushed on with the main

body of his force. The supply company had carts to carry the loaded grails (minus liquor, smoking hemp, and dreamgum) up to the rest of the army. The Bornu in the wake of the imperial forces would go hungry, but that was their hard luck.

"Do you think they'll try to attack us again, this side of their capital?" Isaac asked.

"I wouldn't, if I'd got myself into a mess like this," Alexios said. "But who can read Musa's mind with certainty? He might split his forces against us and Shytown, or he might try to beat one foe first and then turn back and quickly smite the other. But if it were me, I'd await attack where the works of the town favor defense. It's not as if we can starve him out in a hurry, worse luck."

Isaac chuckled. "Grails do make this whole business of sieges more complicated than it used to be."

Here and there, Bornu archers sniped from ambush at the advancing Rhomaioi. They did little damage. Alexios's scouts captured and hamstrung a couple of them and confiscated their grails. If the skirmishers were trying to slow off the Basileus's army, they failed.

Musa did as Alexios had guessed. After the first repulse, no sizable Bornu force appeared to challenge the men from New Constantinople. The second Bornu grailtown along the riverbank was all but deserted when the Rhomaioi reached it. The townsfolk had fled downstream with their grails. The same was true of the third town, where Alexios stopped to fill grails for the noon meal.

The fourth grailtown downstream from the border with New Constantinople was the capital of Bomu. Its grailstone was no bigger than any of the rest, so its normal population was like those of the other little cities, but Musa ar-Rahman had lavished far more care on it than on

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them. Its tall wall was built of stout timber and bamboo, and draped with kiltcloth to ward against torches. The second story of the Sultan's palace overtopped even the wall. That would be Musa's citadel if he lost the rest of the town, Alexios thought.

The wall was packed tight with black men who bellowed defiance at the Rhomaioi. Isaac Komnenos scowled up at them. "This place would be no joy to besiege even if they weren't able to feed themselves with their grails."

"I won't argue, brother of mine. However—" Alexios nodded to the musicians who accompanied the army. Shrill squeals from the flute, deep notes from the drum ordered the warriors to shift position. Alexios missed military trumpets, but not enough copper had been found in New Constantinople to make even one.

The front ranks of the army opened out, allowing the engineering detachment that had traveled in the middle of the hollow diamond to advance. They pushed their carts (quite different from those of the foragers) up toward the wall. Shieldmen moved forward with them, protecting them from the storm of missiles the Bornu loosed.

A man at the rear of each cart worked a kiltcloth bellows. Kiltcloth also lined the interior of the long bamboo tubes other engineers aimed toward the top of the wall. When the men at the bellows cried a warning, the shieldmen, as they'd practiced, skipped nimbly out of the way.

A golden liquid burst from the ends of the bamboo tubes. The aimers ignited it with carefully hoarded firestarters. Half a dozen streams of flowing fire rose to drip from the wall and the Bornu atop it.

Alexios watched in cold satisfaction as shrieking infidels dashed every which way in their agony, spreading

the flames as they ran. The liquid fire dripped between lengths of kiltcloth. In moments, the wall itself began to burn.

Some of the black men had the courage and wit to stick to their posts. They poured buckets of water onto the burgeoning flames. The Basileus smiled at their cries of dismay, for the fire refused to go out. It was not the precise recipe the Rhomaioi had used in Constantinople; no one on this strange new world had yet found petroleum oozing up from between the rocks. But dragonfish oil made a good enough substitute. Mixed with naphtha, sulfur, and a few other ingredients so secret the engineer who knew them refused to name them even for Alexios, the oil made a hellbrew that burned until it consumed itself or until it was smothered with sand.

The Bornu, though, were ignorant of that trick and had no time to learn it. More and more of them scrambled or jumped off the wall as the flames spread. The Rhomaioi cheered the thick black smoke mounting to the sky.

Alexios gave new orders to the musicians. Their sharp notes pierced the din. The men of New Constantinople obediently formed themselves into a wedge-shaped formation. Here were soldiers you could do something with, Alexios thought—they were brave and obedient at the same time.

A section of the wall fell over with a rending crash. Sparks flew upward. The flutes screamed. Crying Alexios's name and "Christ with us," the Rhomaioi surged into the town.

Fighting raged fierce for a few minutes. Then the Bornu began to break and to stream toward the citadel. Alexios caught Isaac's eye. They both grinned. If the town wall, draped with kiltcloth, had burned, what a

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merry bonfire Musa ar-Rahman's palace would make. The Bornu capital was as good as theirs.

Some of the black men saw that, too. A detachment of perhaps fifty smashed headlong into Alexios's army, struggling desperately to force the men from New Constantinople outside the walls once more. At the head of the detachment was a hook-nosed man with full kiltcloth armor and gleaming copper rings in both ears and one nostril. Such a display of wealth could belong only to Musa.

The Sultan spied Alexios at the same instant Alexios recognized him. "To the death between us!" he shouted in Arabic. "Let the winner rule both folk!"

Alexios advanced on him. But when Musa ar-Rahman charged into what he thought was single combat, Isaac Komnenos and three other Rhomaioi also assailed him. Alexios crushed the Sultan's skull with his club, but was never sure afterward if that was the mortal blow.

The Bornu wailed in horror at the treachery. Alexios remained unfazed. Like the Prankish barbarians whose crusade he'd had to deflect, they were foolish enough to think war was about honor. War was about winning, nothing more.

Their ruler's death took the heart out of the black men. Soon screaming women impeded the army of New Constantinople more than the soldiery of Bornu. Men raised their hands and gave up their grails in token of surrender. "Keep as many alive as you can!" Alexios shouted. "If they die, we lose the food and other good things controlling them would give us."

Musa had been an exception to that rule. He was too cunning, too dangerous to keep around as a grail slave— better that he be reborn somewhere far from New

Constantinople and make trouble there. Mutilating him every few months was another alternative, but Alexios didn't care for it. He had his own notions of honor, and cruelty without cause was not part of them.

Before long, only the Sultan's palace still held out against the Rhomaioi. Alexios sent an Arabic-speaking herald forward with a message: "Yield your weapons and your grails and you will not be badly treated. Otherwise, we will use liquid fire against you. You may be born again afterward, but your deaths will be slow and hideous. Decide quickly, or we will use it anyhow."

He waited. Just as he was about to order the engineers forward, the palace doorway opened. Dejected black men began filing out. They threw their bows and spears and clubs in a pile to the right of the doorway. The pile became mountainously high. The weapons were as good as anything the Rhomaioi used. Alexios decided to store them against future need.

The foraging detail took charge of the black men's grails. The Muslims gave them up even more reluctantly than their arms. Without grails, they were at their conquerors' mercy. If they did not obey henceforward, they would not eat. Oh, a few might slip off and survive on River fish and fruits and tubers from the plants that grew from the riverbank back into the foothills. But a stretch of land that would support a thousand people with grails might only let a double handful live on it without them.

After the last of the weapons and grails were surrendered, Alexios's record-keepers began taking the names of the Bornu men, women, and adolescents alike. Bamboo pulp replaced the parchment and papyrus the scribes had used at their desks in Constantinople. The Franks, Alexios remembered, had been amazed at the minutiae his offi-

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cials recorded. But how were you supposed to run a state if you didn't keep track of the people it contained?

The sun began to set over the mountains to the west. As the town's—now his town's—grailstone roared and flamed, he let himself feel how tired he was. Then he had to force himself back to abrupt alertness, for one of the scouts who had gone downstream from the former Bornu capital came pelting back, shouting, "An army's heading our way!"

One of the black men must have learned some Greek since being reborn along the River, for he made a dash for the piled weapons. Rhomaioi sprang after him, speared him down. He lay writhing in agony. "Finish him," Alexios said. One of his warriors smashed in the Bornu's skull. Let some other king far away deal with a troublemaker, the Basileus thought.

Another scout panted into town. "It's the men of Shy town," he said. The Rhomaioi cheered as if to make their cries echo from the distant mountains. Alexios instantly ordered the news translated into Arabic. The Bornu sank even deeper into despair.

With a well-armed bodyguard around him, Alexios went out to greet his allies. The Shytowners whooped with glee when they recognized him in the failing light. For the moment, all was concord in the two victorious armies. But Mayor Daley also had protectors when he stepped out to meet Alexios between his men and those of the Basileus.

Daley spoke. Father Boyle turned his half-intelligible words into Latin for Alexios:."It really did go just as we planned. How often does that happen in war?"

"Not very," Alexios said, wondering how much the afterman really knew of war. But that didn't matter, not

now. As Mayor Daley had said, they'd won. Alexios pushed through his bodyguards, held out his hand to the Mayor. Daley broke through the ranks of his own soldiers to clasp it. For one brief, proud moment, the alliance between them teetered on the edge of true friendship.

Then Daley said, "When do you think you can come to Shytown to be sworn in as Vice Mayor?"

A curious phrase, Alexios thought. But that was by the by. He focused again on what he would have to do, the gains and the probable costs. He said, "I think we would be wise first to consolidate and garrison what we have won today. Your men are already largely in place, since you are taking five of Bornu's Riverside grailstones to our four. But we still have to push away from the River to seize our extra inland stone to compensate. We may have a bit more fighting to do, though Musa concentrated his men along the River. I will join you—hmmm—in one week's time. Then you will visit New Constantinople to be anointed as our Kaisar."

Alexios held his voice steady only with effort. A foreigner as Kaisar of the Rhomaioi— It had happened once before, when Justinian II rewarded Tervel the Bulgar for backing in a civil war. Alexios still reckoned it disgraceful. But he'd needed Daley as Justinian had needed Tervel. He would pay the price.. .in his own fashion.

Father Boyle translated his words for the Mayor. Daley said something in the English of the opisthanthropoi. The priest dipped his head, then turned back to Alexios: "Hizzonor gives me leave to say a few words of my own to you. In our time and country, the land Constantinople ruled was more often called the Byzantine Empire than the Roman Empire. Byzantine became a word in our

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English, too, meaning subtle, complex, and cunning diplomacy. Having worked with you now, Your Majesty, I can see how the word gained that definition."

"You flatter me." Alexios's voice sounded uncommonly like a purr. The thing about flattery, though, was to enjoy it without letting it sway you. "You may tell Hizzonor that he has no mean ability along these lines himself."

Daley rumbled laughter. "One horse thief knows another," he said. That made Alexios laugh too, and again friendship nearly flowered. But he saw that Daley's smile never quite reached the Mayor's unsettling eyes. The were two of a kind, all right, each trying to manipulate the other.

The Basileus nodded to Hizzonor once more, then backed into the company of his own bodyguard. Trouble would come very soon, he thought, if the men of Shytown didn't draw back from this grailtown. The agreed-upon boundary was halfway between it and the next one downstream.

Fatigue smote Alexios again, this time irresistibly. Tomorrow would be time enough to worry about borders.

Michael Palaiologos and other dignitaries from New Constantinople watched as Alexios Komnenos became Vice Mayor of Shytown: with Bornu gone, Palaiologos would serve as the Basileus's envoy to Mayor Daley. Only Isaac Komnenos stayed home for the ceremony, so treachery from Daley could not wipe out all the leaders of the Rhomaioi at once.

Alexios found himself envying his brother. The aftermen might be devious politicians and clever artisans, but they ran boring ceremonies. Hizzonor made a speech that

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went on and on. Alexios tried for a while to follow the English dialect the opisthanthropoi used, but gave up when he concluded Daley wasn't really saying anything.

The Basileus expected Father Boyle to administer the vice-mayoral oath to him. That gave him pause: some of his subjects considered followers of the Roman pope like Boyle schismatics. But in fact, a man dressed all in black kiltcloth swore him in; through Boyle, Daley introduced him as Judge Corcoran.

"Judge?" Alexios asked. "A secular title?"

"We separate church and state," Father Boyle answered. Alexios shrugged; that struck him as falling somewhere between incomprehensible and just plain crazy. But how the Shytowners ran their affairs wasn't his business.

"Raise your right hand," Judge Corcoran said. Alexios obeyed. The judge gave him the oath: "Do you solemnly swear to carry out the duties of Vice Mayor of Shytown honestly and to the best of your ability, so help you God?"

The duties of Vice Mayor were, in essence, none. The oath did not refer to any point that had set theologians from Constantinople at odds with those from Rome. In its way, it was admirably simple. Alexios said, "I swear."

Everyone cheered. Like the oath, Mayor Daley's way of celebrating was simple but effective. "Now let's get drunk," Hizzonor boomed. Servants carried in trays with flasks of wine and whiskey.

Since being reborn along the River, Alexios had developed a taste for whiskey. He liked the way it burned going down but warmed when it got to his middle. He sipped from a flask. "When you come to us," he told Daley, "I'll show you our way of doing things." Hizzonor nodded and reached for another whiskey himself.

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When Mayor Daley descended from his boat to the riverbank, he advanced into New Constantinople through a double file of torchbearers. A chorus sang his praises. Pretty girls strewed flowers at his feet. He grinned enormously. "Fancy stuff," he said when he met Alexios in front of the imperial palace.

"Why not?" Alexios answered agreeably. "You've met my brother Isaac, I think—the current holder of the title Kaisar."

"No hard feelings, I hope," Daley said, perhaps sincerely—his own former Vice Mayor had been a nonentity, not his brother. But Isaac only smiled and shook his head. Hizzonor beamed. "Good, good."

"And here is the ecumenical patriarch of New Constantinople, Evstratios Garidas," Alexios said, pointing to a man in glittering gold kiltcloth. Most priests among the Rhomaioi took the loss of their beards here along the River very hard, but Garidas had always been smooth-chinned—in Constantinople, he'd been a eunuch. Between having his stones for the first time as an adult and the aphrodisiac effects of dreamgum, his chastity took a beating in the days after New Constantinople's folk were resurrected, but he remained a good and pious man.

Daley bowed politely. So did Father Boyle, which, given his probable attitude toward the church of Constantinople, might have required more discipline. The patriarch, his voice more than an octave deeper than Alexios remembered it from the imperial city, said, "Is the Mayor of Shytown prepared to take the oath as Kaisar of New Constantinople?" Alexios translated his Greek into Latin for Boyle, who turned it into the aftermen's English.

"I am," Hizzonor said, his voice solemn.

The oath Garidas had Mayor Daley swear was far more ornate and imposing than the one Judge Corcoran had given the Basileus. It invoked all three persons of the Trinity, the Virgin, and a squadron of saints (among them St. Andrew, patron of Constantinople), and called down upon the mayor anathema and damnation if he violated its terms by so much as an iota. "Will you, then, hold to these terms, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?" the patriarch finished.

Daley crossed himself. "By the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, I will."

"Bend your head," Garidas said. When Hizzonor obeyed, the patriarch anointed him with fish oil made sweet-smelling with perfume from the grailstones.

Alexios set a circlet of woven grass dyed scarlet round Daley's head. "Hail to our Kaisar!" he cried. The people of New Constantinople cheered along with the delegation from Shytown. The chorus sent up a song of praise and thanksgiving.

"Now what?" the newly made Kaisar asked.

When do we celebrate, Alexios took him to mean. He said, "We have one thing left to do before the feast begins." Daley folded his arms across his beefy chest and composed himself to wait. The Basileus raised his voice: "By elevating Hizzonor to the rank of Kaisar, I have left my brother Isaac without a title to suit him. As he is both flesh of my flesh and always at my right hand, by your consent, people of New Constantinople, I propose for him the dignity of Sebastokrator, august ruler, said dignity to rank in honor between my rank of Basileus and that of the Kaisar."

"Let it be so!" the people shouted, as they'd been coached. Sebastokrator, a rank Alexios had invented back

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on Earth, was the title Isaac Komnenos had held most of his life there; in New Constantinople, the Basileus had resimplified the hierarchy. But the old title remained there in case it ever seemed useful, as it did today.

Alexios did not translate his proclamation of Isaac as Sebastokrator into Latin for Father Boyle; the longer Mayor Daley remained in blissful ignorance of what was going on around him, the happier the Basileus would have been. It transpired, however, that Father Boyle understood enough Greek to realize what was happening. That did not surprise Alexios; the Mayor was merely being prudent by having in his retinue someone who could follow the language of New Constantinople. Alexios had had a couple of English-speakers with him at Shytown.

He could gauge almost to the second when Hizzonor realized he'd been tricked. Daley must have had Celtic ancestors, for his skin was as fair as any Prankish Crusader's. All at once, he turned brick red. "What the hell!" he bellowed, a roar of outrage even Alexios had no trouble translating.

Evstratios Garidas had almost finished administering the oath to Isaac. He paused, looked a question to Alexios. "Continue, Your Holiness," the Basileus said calmly. Garidas continued. Only after he had finished anointing the newly named Sebastokrator, thus making Isaac's tide indissoluble, did Alexios concern himself with his profanely displeased Kaisar.

Voice bland as butter, the Basileus turned to Mayor Daley. "Why are you unhappy? I named you Kaisar of New Constantinople as I promised. Had we gold, I'd have given you a crown rather than that fillet, but it is no less fine that the one Isaac wears."

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Daley threw the red-dyed fillet on the ground and stamped on it. "You son of a bitch, you cheated me!"

"Before God, I did not," Alexios answered. "As a condition for our alliance, you required me to name you Kaisar. I agreed, and the alliance did all we hoped it would: Bornu is no more, and we have divided its lands fairly between Shytown and New Constantinople. Nowhere did you require me not to appoint a lord of rank intermediate between mine and yours. That I have done, for the security of my own realm. But cheat you? I deny it, and deny it with clear conscience."

The Mayor stared at him. Cool calculation alone should have been enough to calm Hizzonor's wrath; the Rhomaioi had him and his delegation at their mercy, if they chose to attack. But Daley's glance never went to the gathered men of New Constantinople; he watched Alexios alone. And then, to Alexios's amazement, Hizzonor threw back his head and shouted laughter to the sky. "You son of a bitch, you cheated me," he said again. The words were as they had been a minute before, but their tone altogether different.

The Mayor slapped the Basileus on the back, hard enough to stagger him. A couple of Alexios's guards growled and took a step toward Daley, but Alexios waved them back. "Now that you know I can, perhaps we'll have a better chance of living next to each other in peace," he told Hizzonor. "One thing I've noticed about you opisthanthropoi is that you think anyone from before your own time has to be foolish. Would you have proposed this arrangement of ours to one of your contemporaries? They would have seen through it to your true intentions, and so have I."

"Most of them wouldn't, by God," Daley said. He

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did not mention that his true intentions were murderous, any more than Alexios had. Sometimes that was part of the game. Hizzonor laughed again, even louder than before. "All right, I'm Kaisar and it doesn't matter worth a damn. I know what I do the first thing I get back to Shy town, though."

"What's that?" Alexios asked. "Appoint myself an Associate Mayor—what else?" It was the Basileus's turn to laugh. "Fair enough. Now we feast."

Fool's Paradise

Ed German

I heard the voice but I tried to ignore it. I didn't want to wake up. I was dreaming of the apartment on Eddy Street in the sunny autumn of 1921, a few weeks after my daughter Mary Jane was born, and of how tender and pretty my wife looked in those days before I betrayed her and ended our marriage.

Then it was more than just a voice, the summoning, it was quick, small hands shaking my shoulder and saying over and over, "Please, Mr. Hammett. Please wake up."

The first thing I smelled was the rain, the clean chill scent of it on the heavy green foliage along the River, and the dull tamping sound it made on the roof of the jerry-rigged wooden cabin where I lived.

I got one eye open and pulled myself up to one elbow for support and looked at the rabbity little man shaking me.

I hadn't liked him much back on earth—his work, I

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mean; I obviously hadn't known him personally—and I didn't like him any better here on the Riverworld.

All the biographies have him as this tortured, romantic soul, but, like most people unfortunate enough to fit that description, he was a whiner, a schemer, and a tireless narcissist.

"I'm sorry I woke you up, Mr. Hammett."

"Yeah. I'll bet you are."

"I need your help, Mr. Hammett. Need it badly."

He always called me "Mr. Hammett." I suppose it was because of the hair. It went silver on me when I was young and no matter how much the ladies insisted it made me look "distinguished," it also made me look older than my years. Even now, even though like most folks on Riverworld I was only twenty-five, my hair was once again turning white.

I sat up on the blanket. I rubbed my eyes and allowed myself an expansive yawn. And then I punched him. Oh, it wasn't much of a punch, no teeth broken, no nose flattened, but it stunned him and pushed him back a foot or two, and that was good enough for me.

He touched his mouth tenderly, the tip of his tongue tasting the blood on his lower lip. "Why did you do that, Mr. Hammett?"

I've never been especially pleasant in the morning. My father was like that and so was my grandfather. I'm willing to blame it on my genes and not my soul. I'm especially unpleasant when somebody like my uninvited house guest wakes me up just at dawn.

I got to my feet, forgetting to duck in time. I raised the entire thatched roof with my white head.

He started to smirk, but I made a fist and his smirk dutifully vanished. I let the roof settle back down. I went

over and sat Indian-legged in the corner and poured myself a drink of water. The rain still smelled clean and good. I wished I could say as much for my guest.

Now that I was awake, I took my first good look at him. He had an unpleasant reputation on Riverworld, always seducing young girls and then deserting them, the sort of woman-hating games Casanova the satyr always played. At least Casanova had been forthright: he'd wanted goaty sex. Poe wrapped it all up in a fog of romance and dark feverish poetry.

"You stoned?"     v

"I resent that, Mr. Hammett."

"Knock off the theatrics and answer my question."

"No, I'm not stoned."

"You trying to tell me you're not a dreamgum addict anymore?"

"I use it occasionally."

"Occasionally. Uh-huh."

"I know you don't think much of me."

I sighed. I hate sanctimony, mine or anybody else's, and I realized suddenly that I was being awfully sanctimonious about this guy.

"Look," I said, "given the sort of life I led back on earth, I don't have any right to make moral judgments about anybody. And I sure as hell don't want to put on the Roman collar and tell somebody he's a self-indulgent, profligate twit who uses everybody he comes in contact with."

He smiled. "I think there was a message for me somewhere in there."

"Yes, I suppose there was."

"I know what I'm like, Mr. Hammett."

"You do, eh?"

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"Believe or not, I'm not that way consciously. It just sort of—comes out that way. I mean, I don't really mean to use people... I just sort of... do."

I sighed again. "What can I do for you this fine, sunny morning, Mr. Poe?"

"I wish you'd call me Edgar. Everybody else does."

"I'll make a deal with you."

"What's that?"

"You call me Dashiell and I'll call you Edgar."

He smiled again. All the books have him as handsome, but he wasn't, not really; his mouth and his chin were too weak for handsome. But there was some force in the dark eyes that held real power, some kind of madness that was fascinating to observe. I'm sure it's a power he shared with snake charmers and wealthy ministers and politicians who wrap themselves in patriotism.

"All right, Dashiell," he said.

"You came here to tell me something."

"Yes."

"Then tell me."

"I'm afraid somebody is trying to kill Arda."

"That's an unlikely tale for the Riverworld. There not being any death here."

"No, not death as such, but if you kill a man, he's reborn elsewhere. And if you were to kill the woman a man loves and she's reborn elsewhere and he's never able to find her again because the Riverworld is so vast— well, that's just the same thing as her dying, isn't it?"

"I guess you're right about that." I looked down at his long, slender hands. Some people would call them artistic hands, I suppose. Anyway, his hands were trembling, and badly. "Why would anybody want to harm her?"

"I don't know.". But the way he said it, fast and dismissive, I knew he was lying.

"I don't really do this sort of thing anymore, you know."

"You were a Pink."

"Pinkerton is the proper name. Pink is what the press called us, and I never much cared for that." I took some more water and then took a deep breath. "Maybe you don't know this, Edgar, but I ended up being a writer too. Not as good as you, maybe, but good enough that I was able to quit being a Pinkerton and support myself up to the end. Or thereabouts, anyway."

"What're you saying?"

"I'm saying that I'm out of practice."

"Last night, she was out walking and somebody shot an arrow at her. Missed her by no more than this." He indicated a small amount of space between thumb and forefinger. "And a week ago, somebody tried to drown her while she was bathing in the River. And a few days before that, somebody tried to push her off a mountain trail."

"Did she get a look at the person?"

"No. I wasn't there for any of it. But if I had been—" His messianic dark eyes looked away. "She has a hard time concentrating sometimes. And that can get dangerous when somebody is stalking you."

There's only one way you consistently lose your concentration on Riverworld.

"You mean you introduced her to dreamgum."

"No!" He was almost shouting. "She did it all on her own. I didn't even know she was doing it until it was too late."

Dreamgum comes to everybody in the grail. Most of

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us decline it, not wanting to spend our lives in a phantasmagoria. Waking up on Riverworld is fantastic enough for most folks.

But I was getting sanctimonious again, a trait of mine Lillian hadn't much liked. But then, there had been many traits of Lillian's I hadn't much liked either, especially when, near the end of my life on earth, I deduced the real nature of our relationship.

"Who would want to hurt her?" I asked.

"I don't know."

"Or why?"

"I don't know that either."

"It couldn't be her imagination?"

"The arrow's in our cabin. I assumed you wanted to talk with her. I figured you could see the arrow then."

"I just can't help you, Edgar."

"Won't, you mean."

"If you like."

The tears were there, and they were so sudden that I didn't see how they could be fake, even given his theatrical nature.

"Oh, shit," I said. "It's bad enough when a woman uses tears on me. But a man—"

"Do you have any idea how much I love her, Dashiell? Any idea at all?"

Now, in addition to the tears, his whole body had started shaking. I looked at him and hated him. He was so goddamned weak. But then I realized how weak I was, just in a different way was all, and so I gave up my pulpit and said, "It's been a long time since I was a Pinkerton, Edgar. A long, long time."

"She really needs help, Dashiell. Otherwise, somebody will take her from me forever."

A nut-case poet and a dreamgum nymphette. Aren't they just the kind of clients all private ops dream of?

After swimming for twenty minutes or so, I climbed back to the bank and returned to my hut and got ready for the day.

By now, I was starting to like the idea of having a case. Riverworld is many things, but exciting is not one of them, at least not in my own particular little patch of it. Two cultures and historical eras are represented here, the first being a group of suburban businessmen and their families from the Baltimore area circa 1907, the second being a group of San Franciscans from the late 1950s. I was among the latter group when I died and was reborn on Riverworld, whatever and wherever Riverworld really is.

When I got back to the shore, I found the good Baltimore burghers engaged in carrying material for huts into the surrounding forest. Even here, even in this purgatory in which we found ourselves, the good industrious burghers wanted a suburb to themselves. They believed, and quite rightly, that half the people you found canoeing down the River were riffraff. How could I disagree when one of our last visitors had been Wyatt Earp, who very seriously proposed that we take the six prettiest women in camp and set up a whorehouse, which he of course would be happy to oversee for a goodly share of the action?

The rain didn't bother the good burghers. They had

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been seized with an idea and nothing was going to stop them. They performed their task with the ceaseless and uncomplaining attitude of worker ants.

The San Franciscans were neither so robust nor so industrious. They sat beneath little canopies of leaves and fed on dreamgum and watched the River flow and waved to various folks floating by. One fellow told me that he'd once seen an entire UFO filled with little green Martians waving at him. Such are the rewards of dreamgum.

I waved to the burghers and I waved to the River watchers. I walked up the muddy, sloping hill to the small hut that sat on a bluff and overlooked-a deep ravine. This was where Poe lived.

There was no door, just a long rag that offered minimal privacy. From behind it, apparently hearing me approach, a young woman said, "Come in, Mr. Hammett."

The interior stank of mud. The floor was covered with large, heavy, spade-shaped leaves that the burghers had been bringing back from the forest and charitably sharing with others, proving that not all capitalists are bad folks, even to Communists like me.

She was a fetching one, she was. She crouched near the back of the hut wearing some kind of white dress made grubby from life along the River. But even so, her sweet-sad face and her small but rich body marked her as a true beauty. "I told him you'd come."

"Edgar?"

"Yes. He doesn't have much faith in humanity, I'm afraid. But then, I wouldn't either. Not with the kind of life he's led. His stepfather used to beat him mercilessly for one thing. Edgar still has nightmares about it."

She was succeeding in making me feel sorry for Poe.

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But he was easier to deal with when he came off as a self-indulgent artiste.

"What era are you from?" I asked.

"The 1930s. My father is a great admirer of yours. He's a judge and a very avid mystery reader." She reached out and touched a large pile of flowers that were dying inside the hut. Even their scent was gone here in the rain and the chill and the shadowed interior.

Then her face changed. Here she'd been this fetching young girl—the impolite name, in my time, being "jailbait" —and then she abruptly became this drawn, anxious young woman. "Look."

From somewhere among the leaves that gave the mud hut its floor, she produced a long arrow with a metal tip. Metals being as precious as they are on this world, I was impressed despite myself.

She handed it over. I rolled it around in my fingers and examined it, not worried about getting prints on it. Riverworld has a lousy crime lab.

The workmanship was very good, point, shaft, and nock perfectly designed. Having been an informal student of medieval history, I recognized the arrowhead as made of iron pile, the same metal an arrowsmith of the 1300s would have used.

"Edgar told you what happened?"

"Yes."

"Somebody's trying to kill me, Mr. Hammett."

"You could always call me Dashiell."

Her shy response was to tilt her head down in such a way that she looked younger and even more vulnerable.

She said, "I'm afraid. I don't want somebody to send me to some other time."

"I don't blame you."

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She raised her eyes. "I think it's O'Brien."

"Who?"

"Richard O'Brien. One of the Baltimore businessmen. He's married, but that doesn't seem to bother him."

"Has he ever threatened you?"

"Not exactly. But he waits till Edgar goes down to the River and then he sneaks up here. He's a real pest."

"Pests aren't usually violent."

"Oh, he's very violent. Very violent. He grabbed Edgar one night and tried to drown him. This was before you were here, I think."

"Anybody else I should talk to?"

She thought a moment. She was about to speak when a small birdlike cry filled the air.

We sat in the rain-smelling silence and looked at each other, Edgar's sweet-sad little girlfriend and I. The bird cry had been plaintive, so much so that I touched my arm and felt tiny cold pebbles of goose bumps there.

"What kind of bird sound was that?" There were no birds on Riverworld.

She smiled. "That was Robert."

"Who's Robert?"

But I needn't have asked, because suddenly the long rag that served as a door was thrown back and there stood a boy of perhaps ten, brown as an American Indian, streaked with mud so fierce it looked like war paint. He had sandy blond hair and furtive blue eyes. His hips were wrapped in a towel held up by a magnetic clip. He managed to look both frightening and pathetic in the way of street urchins from time immemorial. Even given the soaking he'd taken in the rain, he smelled of sweat and feces.

From his belt dangled a knife holster, the stone blade it

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held considerable and deadly. Filling his right hand, in almost comic contrast to the blade, was a handful of blue and yellow and pink flowers of the sort that grew on the periphery of the forest.

"These are for you," Robert said.

She smiled at him and put forth a frail hand. In her bony fingers, in the drab hut, the flowers were an explosion of bright summer colors.

"I'll see you later," the boy said. He stared at me as he spoke. He didn't try to hide his displeasure with my being there.

"But Robert—why don't I introduce you to Mr. Hammett?"

"No, thanks," he said.

And was gone, out the flapping rag of a door, down the brown mud slope into the cold silver rain.

"Poor Robert," she said after we heard the last of his flapping feet disappear in the thrum of rain.

"I'd say he's got more than a small crush on you."

"I feel so sorry for him. I was always falling in love with older men when I was his age. To adults it's always a joke, but when you're young—it's very painful."

"Who is he?"

She shrugged. "He lives with the woman they call the Witch of the Woods."

"I've heard of her."

"She's no witch. Just a very dirty woman with a bunch of mumbo-jumbo she spouts to scare the children away."

I lifted the arrow. "Maybe I'll see her when I go into the woods. Maybe she can tell me something about this." I smiled. "Being a witch and all, I mean."

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I stood up, careful of my head. Riverworld huts were not designed for people of the twentieth century.

"I guess I'll start with O'Brien."

"Be careful of him. He's a very tricky man."

I thought of my years in prison, there at the last when simply apologizing for being a Communist would have been sufficient to free me. I'd known a lot of tricky men in that time, both in prison and on the congressional committee that saw to it I was incarcerated. I thought of old Dick Nixon, actually not the wily man he seemed to be, but rather a sad frantic soul who'd been loved too much by his mother and not enough by his father. What was it Wilde said about parents—sometimes we even forgive them?

"I think I can handle him," I said.

"This is very nice of you."

I raised the cloth hanging down in the doorway. "Don't take any unnecessary chances."

She smiled. "You don't have to worry now. Edgar gave me this."

From beneath one of the fronds, a huge stone knife appeared in her slender hand. "And he also told me where to put it. Right between a man's legs."

She said it with such style and vigor that I almost grabbed my own sac out of pure protective response. The subject of castration does not set lightly on a man's ears.

"I just hope I get a chance to test myself," she said. "See if I'm really this helpless little girl or if I'm a really strong young woman."

I laughed. "Somehow I think you'll pass the test just fine."

She laughed too. "So do I, actually. I just pity the man who tries anything."

I nodded good-bye and went outside the tent. I started down the slope in the grass. The grass smelled strong and leafy. The sky was a shifting kaleidoscope of dark clouds and turbulence. As a child, I'd always been afraid of storms, the sudden chill and scent of rain overwhelming me. I suppose this dated back to the time my sister Reba had been lost for half an hour, my parents searching the neighborhood for her frantically as a storm gathered in the east. Storms would always mean that my sweet sister Reba was lost, even though I was now an adult and Reba had long ago been found safe at a neighbor's house.

The campsite was as shabby as everything else on the Riverworld. We brought all our skills with us, true, but we lacked the materials we needed. The "suburbs" was a good example, being little more than a large circle of huts in a forest clearing. At the eastern edge of it a man stood holding a crude spear while behind him a group of four children appeared to be playing marbles as they squatted around a small circle of bald, muddy earth.

The man with the spear stepped forward and said, "You're Mr. Hammett."

"That I am."

"Not to be unpleasant, Mr. Hammett, but we prefer to stay to ourselves. That's why we have a sentry posted twenty-four hours a day."

If he was supposed to be fierce, he wasn't doing his job very well. He was big, yes, but he was deferential, and that's never good in a would-be bully.

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"I'd like to see Mr. O'Brien."

He grinned. He looked like an oversize kid. "Well, you saved us both some trouble there."

"I don't understand."

"O'Brien isn't here—" He angled the spear in the direction of the mud huts. At that moment, a boy ran between two of the huts, chased by a laughing young girl. "He's down-river a ways." He nodded toward the River. "And I can't stop you from going there. All I have to do is guard the compound."

"Exactly what do you find so offensive about us, anyway, living apart, I mean?"

"Oh, it's nothing personal, Mr. Hammett. It's just that we're good fundamentalist Baltimore Christians and you're from San Francisco. Worlds apart, I'm afraid. But we don't hate you. Every day the parson leads us in a prayer •for your souls."

"Well, that's damned civilized of you."

He winced at "damned" and then started considering the possibility that I was mocking him.

I left him that way and went down-river.

Before I emerged from the forest and found the narrow, winding path running parallel to the water, I heard a thwacking sound. I had no idea what it was.

I followed the path, by now long used to the rain dripping like plump crystals from the green overhanging leaves, and where the path arced wide around an imposing furry bush, I found O'Brien.

He was big and Irish and mean-looking in a somewhat studied and theatrical way.

He held a large bow from which he launched arrows into a rain-blackened tree trunk. The arrow penetrating the wood was the thwacking sound I'd heard. A sad-

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looking little woman who looked much older than she probably was fetched his arrows and brought them back to him. It looked as if it took all her strength to jerk them free of the tree. There was something arrogant about working a worn-out woman this way.

The woman saw me first. She was ferrying his last arrow back when she glanced up and nodded in my direction.

He turned, facing me fully this time. "Who the hell are you?"

"He's Mr. Hammett," the woman said. "He's a famous writer about thirty years ahead of us."

"Shut up, you stupid bitch," he said, handing her his bow and then stepping over toward me. "You know how sick I am of you always butting in?"

The woman looked as if she'd been lashed.

I stopped about five feet from him. "You're O'Brien?"

"What if lam?"

"I need to talk to you."

"About what?"

"About something personal." I nodded to the woman. "Maybe your wife could use a little rest."

"Since when is my wife your business?"

The woman, weary and dirty and nervous, came up to him as if he were a great stone god and she the eternal supplicant. "I'll go back to the campsite and rest."

"Yes, as if you don't get enough rest already."

I had the sense that he was about to slap her. I wasn't tough and never had been tough, but I disliked him enough to take satisfaction in punching him, even if he later knocked me out.

He settled on shoving her. She started to pitch to the ground, but I grabbed her arm and kept her upright. She

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peered at me from eyes eternal with grief and fear. You saw women like this throughout the West of my day, their lives over well before they reached sixteen, little more than slaves to violent husbands and sad frantic children, living on hot black coffee and words unspoken and prayers unanswered.

I wanted to hold her, nothing sexual, just hold her for the sake of kindness, something she'd been so long denied.

And I then took a swing at him. I hadn't planned it, I was barely aware of it in fact, but just as my fist started toward his face, she nudged me, so that the arc of my fist went past him.

"I don't want to see you get hurt, Mr. Hammett," she said, and went quickly around the big furry bush in the slanting silver rain, and was gone.

"You supposed to be a tough guy?" O'Brien laughed.

"You could always treat her a little better."

"You see what she looks like? She let's herself become an Old woman. It was the same back in Baltimore. Hell, she didn't look so bad when she was reborn on the River, but she started going to hell all over again." He grinned. "I want some nice fresh nooky while my loins are still up to it."

"Meaning Arda?"

His eyes narrowed. His flat nose, which oddly enough lent him a brutal handsomeness, managed to look even fiercer. "What about Arda?"

"Somebody's trying to hurt her." I reached down on the ground and picked up one of the arrows he'd been shooting. It was identical to the one Arda had shown me in her hut. I raised my eyes to his. "Somebody shot an arrow at her recently."

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"She needs a man."

"She's got a man."

"You mean Poe?" He made a face. "He's a nancy if I ever saw one."

"She doesn't seem to think so."

"What the hell's your interest in all this, anyway?"

"She's under the impression that somebody is trying to take her from Poe." I held up the arrow. "This is the kind of arrow her assailant used."

"Are you saying I shot the arrow?"

"It's a possibility."

He grabbed at me then, but he was too paunchy to move quickly and so I was able to move right as he moved left.

"Arda wants you to leave her alone."

"That's my business."

"You've got a wife of your own. Why don't you try spending a little time with her?"

But I was getting sanctimonious again. I thought of my own wife, the one I'd left back there on Eddy Street along with my daughter, when I went off all liquored up to accept the accolades of Lillian and all her slick friends. I was in no position to give even a crud like O'Brien any moral preachments.

He snatched the arrow from my hand and said, "If I was you, I'd be getting out of here."

"Just remember what I said. Arda wants you to leave her alone."

"I'd say that's up to me."

He then turned around and picked up his bow and shot an arrow straight into the hard, shiny heart of the tree. It wasn't difficult to imagine him shooting an arrow into me.

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The next twenty minutes, I followed a path that took me to the center of the forest. Out of boredom more than anything, I'd started following various paths to see where they'd take me. Back in the real world, I'd studied a lot of maps, especially when I'd worked for Pinkerton on various railroads, and being a pathfinder held a real fascination for me. Anyway, as I said, Riverworld wasn't exactly overrun with spellbinding things to do.

I was taking a wide leg in the path, one that ran beneath a heavy canopy of trees, when I spotted the woman. She was lying on the ground, faceup.

Even from here, I could see that she looked grubby and strange. I could also see a trickle of blood on the side of her face that was being washed away by the rain dripping from the leaves above.

I ran to her and knelt next to her and started to turn her over for a better look at her crabbed, filthy face when—

When one of the highwayman's more venerable tricks was pulled on me.

Leave a helpless woman of whatever age in the middle of a path and what gallant man can resist coming to her aid?

Well, I came to her aid, all right, and that was when somebody stepped out from behind one of the trees and hit me squarely over the head.

All I had time for was a small lightning bolt of pain, and then all was darkness.

I came to in a large hut. A fire burned in a dugout in the center of the mud floor. The warmth of the flames felt good. The only bad thing was the stench of the place. Whoever lived here was not what I'd call cleanly.

Two women sat on the other side of the flapping fire, watching me. The flames gave their flesh the brown tint of American Indians, and their shining black eyes only enhanced the impression. They sat buried deep in towels. One had a pipe stuck in the corner of her mouth. This was the grubby one. Her sister—I assumed this because their facial similarities were remarkable—had no pipe and was bald. The hues of the fire danced red and yellow on her shiny dome.

"You're Mr. Hammett."

"I guess so."

"We're glad to meet you, Mr. Hammett."

"Yeah, I could tell that by the way you slugged me."

"We just had to be sure." The bald one had done all the talking thus far.

"Sure of what?"

"That you looked up to the task." This time the gray-haired one spoke. "I'm Elena, by the way, and this is my sister Stephanie."

I struggled to a sitting position. Elena handed me a cup of something steaming. I peered inside. I didn't see anything crawling around in there, so I started sipping it. It was tea and it was good, very good.

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"I know you probably think we're Indians, but we're not," Stephanie said. "We're French, actually. Our parents came to Baltimore from a small town just outside Paris. Anyway, we got to the Riverworld along with Mr. Poe and all the others. Unfortunately, we had nothing in common with them back there and we have nothing in common with them now."

I looked at Elena. "You're the Witch of the Woods?"

Her sister giggled.

"Don't encourage her. That's what she wants you to do. She's starting to believe all the myths people have started about her," Stephanie said.

"Then she's not a witch?"

Stephanie giggled again. "Hardly." She smiled. "Though I'll bet Mr. Poe wishes she was."

"Why's that?" I asked.

"Because the other night in the woods Elena caught him with another girl. If she were really a witch, Mr. Poe could ask her to put a spell on Arda so she wouldn't be angry with his infidelity."

I thought of Arda, of her sad little face and eyes, and of dramatic Poe seemingly so faithful to her. Even with Arda, he couldn't leave other girls alone.

I sipped more tea and said, "You were going to tell me why you slugged me."

"Easily enough explained, Mr. Hammett," Stephanie said. "We want you to steal something for us tonight, and we just wanted to make sure that you were stronger than you looked."

"We heard that you were a Pinkerton, but frankly, you don't look all that hearty to us."

"Well, maybe I can put on a few pounds for you."

Both women giggled this time.

"What is it you want me to steal?"

"We're not sure," Stephanie said. "And that's the problem."

Elena offered more tea. I accepted.

Elena said, "There's a little boy named Robert who lives in the woods here."

"Yes, I met him."

"Well, Robert's actually a very nice little boy, but he has a secret."

"A secret?"

"Yes, and it's one he won't share with us," Stephanie said.

"Then how do you know he has a secret?"

"Because the oilier night we saw Mr. O'Brien beating him."

"Beating Robert?"

"Yes," Stephanie said. "I like to run through the woods at night, playing the witch, I mean. Gives people something to talk about and it's kind of fun. Anyway, I was going through the woods and I saw Robert tied to a tree and Mr. O'Brien slapping him again and again. I tried to stop him, but Mr. O'Brien just pushed me away. He doesn't seem to be frightened by witches."

"It's because you're not a witch," Elena reminded her.

"Anyway, he kept telling Robert over and over to tell him the secret. But Robert wouldn't. He's very brave for a little boy." She sighed. "Then he took something from Robert. A piece of paper. He ripped it out of the boy's pocket and then took off running. I'd been hiding in the bushes, watching it all, and so when he left, I ran up and freed Robert."

"Robert didn't tell you what O'Brien had stolen?"

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"No, and in fact, when I brought it up, he started crying and ran off."

"So what you want me to steal is—"

"—is the piece of paper that Mr. O'Brien took from poor little Robert the other night."

"Great," I said. "Now I have two clients."

"You're being sarcastic, aren't you, Mr. Hammett?" Elena said. "About it being 'great' that you have two clients?"

"Of course he's being sarcastic, Elena. Pinkertons are always sarcastic."

"Don't you want to help poor little Robert, Mr. Hammett? Don't you?" Elena said.

And exactly what Was I going to say to that?

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It took me the rest of the day to find Robert and then I found him only coincidentally, following the trail to the huge stone mushroom where he stood staring at the River.

I moved over to him as carefully as I could. I didn't want to spook him. But when he sensed me, he turned around, saw me, frowned, and then took off running.

He followed a path along the River. The rain made running risky. Several times in escaping, he slipped. Several times in pursuing, I slipped.

I knew that he'd elude me completely if I didn't resort to something unpleasant. I stopped, stooped, and picked up a stone. I threw it with pleasing accuracy and caught him just below the back of the knee. The shock and pain

were enough to bring him down, and just as he reached the mud, I pounced.

When I jerked him to his feet and slammed him against a tree trunk, he was completely covered with mud. He looked as if he were doing a turn in blackface.

He was out of breath and so was I, and so we stood there, his mud washing away in the slanting silver rain, exhaling ragged and sour breath at each other.

"O'Brien took a piece of paper from you the other night," I said. "I want to know what the paper said."

"None of your business."

"Kid, I could break your arm."

"Go ahead. I don't give a shit."

"Somebody's trying to kill Arda. Don't you give a shit about that?"

"I love Arda."

He said it in a way most boys wouldn't. Most boys would be too inhibited and shy to say it out mat way. But there was so much need and so much pain in his quick urchin words that I sensed he needed to say them out loud, and often.

"She likes you too. She told me."

His eyes scanned the muddy path we'd just come down. "That's the problem."

"What is?"

"I love her, but she only likes me."

I got cute in the way adults usually get cute with youngsters who talk about romantic love. "You don't think she's a little old for you?"

"She may be a little old for me, but then, she's too young for Poe."

"I guess you've got a point there."

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He looked sad then, and I wished I hadn't gotten cute and I wished I knew the right thing to say.

"You like it here on Riverworld?"

He shrugged. "It's not any worse than where I lived in Baltimore. At least it doesn't have rats." He raised his eyes to me and spoke in a voice far too weary for his age. "I never loved anybody before."

"It can be pretty painful."

"I get sick to my stomach, it's so painful. She shouldn't love him, she should love me."

I had to keep reminding myself that he was only ten years old.

I said, "Have you ever hated her?"

He looked baffled. "Hated her? No. I said I love her. And I do."

"Well, sometimes when you love somebody very intensely you can also hate them intensely because they have so much power over you."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It may not make sense, but it's true."

He smiled. "When I hear things like that, I wonder if I ever want to be an adult."

I laughed. "I think that's a myth."

"What is?"

"That there's any such thing as adults. We're just bigger versions of kids. Anyway, being a so-called adult is the shits. It really is."

"You really think somebody wants to kill her?"

"Well, if they don't, they're sure doing a good job of pretending they do."

"I better not find out who it is. I'll kill him myself if I do." He touched the formidable knife shod in his leather holster.

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I paused a moment and said, "Tell me about the paper O'Brien took from you."

"That's between me and O'Brien."

"I thought maybe we were becoming friends."

"That doesn't have anything to do with it. That paper's a secret." His face hardened, as did his gaze. "I'll get it back from him one way or another."

"He could hurt you."

"I'm not afraid of him."

"You're not going to tell me about the paper?"

"No."

"You don't want me to help you?"

He shrugged. "O'Brien isn't any more afraid of you than he is of me."

"But still, the two of us—"

He smiled again. "Believe it or not, Mr. Hammett, there were a lot of people afraid of me back in Baltimore."

"I believe it."

"I may not be big or especially tough, but I'm determined." He touched his knife again. "And when somebody pisses me oflF—'* He shrugged again. " Well, I can be pretty relentless."

"I'll bet you can, kid, I'll bet you can."

And that's where I left him, there on the trail.

I nodded good-bye and set oflF back the way I'd come. He gave me a minute or two and then started following me through the underbrush. I tried to shake him up a few times by breaking into a run. He got panicky and made too much noise in the undergrowth. If I hadn't noticed him before, I sure would have now. But he was only ten, and for that age he was a regular Leatherstocking. When I was ten, I was living in my nice snug, middle-class home

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and hunting ducks with my father in the salt marsh along Chesapeake Bay.

I didn't have to support and sustain myself the way poor little Robert did.

I lay for two hours in my hut listening to the rain. It brought back memories of San Francisco when I was still living with my wife and daughter, who as a baby always asked, "Wet, Daddy? Is wet, Daddy?" when she saw crystal raindrops bead on the windows of our small apartment.

I slept, too, at least for a time, but it was the troubled sleep of an unhappy man, and when I came awake I did so with a yelp, the rock cracking my knee where it landed.

In the gloom and sweat of the hut, I jerked upward and grabbed the rock. Somebody had wrapped a note around it and then wrapped twine around rock and paper alike.

The note read: THE CLEARING BY THE GRAILSTONE AT DUSK.

There was one inherent problem with the instructions. Given the rain and the gloom, how could I tell when dusk actually settled in?

I waited two hours in the top of a leafy tree by the clearing. A minty aroma of leaf filled my nostrils. The bark was as slimy as a dragon's back.

Dark came. The rain continued. There is a melancholy that only cold rain can inspire in me, and it was with me there in that tree. I wanted to talk to my wife and daughter.

She wore cape and cowl, and at first I did not recog-

nize her as she ran across the clearing from one edge of the forest to the other.

Just as I realized that I was seeing Arda, a small shape in the shadows stepped forth and fired off an arrow.

I heard the dead chunking sound of arrowhead sinking into flesh.

Then she screamed, a strangled sound muffled by the fact that she was already pitching to the wet earth.

By now I knew who her assailant was, too. I wanted to go after Robert and slap him around to sate my rage, but I knew I'd better first attend to Arda.

She was light in my arms as I carried her upslope to the hut where she and Poe lived.

Poe must have heard us coming. Before we reached the hut, he was in the doorway. Then, dramatic as always, he ran toward us with his arms outstretched.

He ran alongside me as I bore her to the hut.

He didn't offer to share my burden, nor did he do much but coo little plaintive nonsense words in her direction.

Inside, we propped her up by the fire.

"Can you take the arrow out?" Poe asked, face yellow from flames. He was frantic.

"I thought maybe you'd want to do it. She's your woman."

"It would make me... sick. Feeling it slide out that way. I wouldn't be any good at it." There was pleading in both his voice and eyes.

I sighed. Excising the arrow wasn't something I relished either.

I went over to her and knelt down. She was unconscious. I felt her forehead. She was feverish already from the poison. Her pulse was faint.

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I worked as quickly as I could.

When I was halfway through, I heard a noise in the doorway and looked up.

Robert, without his bow, stood there watching me. "How's she doing, Mr. Hammett?"

He trembled with tears.

"Why the hell would you care, kid? After what you did to her?"

He started to say something else, but I said, "Shut the hell up. I'm trying to concentrate."

In the firelight, his eyes glistened with tears. Then the doorway was empty. He was gone.

It took about twenty minutes, and twice she came awake and started crying pretty hard and looked up at Poe with a love so obvious it embarrassed me to see.

Why the hell did she want some gigolo like Poe?

He stayed on the other side of the hut. He hadn't been kidding about not wanting to see. He wouldn't even glance down at the wound.

I got the arrow out and the wound cleaned and the shoulder covered up.

I was just about to get to my feet when I saw her eyes flutter open. She pulled me gently to her and pressed her soft warm lips to my ear and told me then the whole story.

The rain hit the water like bullets. There was no moon. I found him down on the bank, just sitting there, not caring about being wet or cold or alone. I sat down next to him in the darkness. The rain was cold and ceaseless. I said, "She told me." "I figured she would." "She could have been killed."

"I know." He sighed. "The other times were easy. We didn't have to do anything. She just told him that somebody tried to drown her and push her off a cliff and shot an arrow at her. She didn't actually have to get hurt or anything."

"But this time she asked you to really wound her."

"Right," he said.

She'd explained it all to me, back there in the hut she shared with Poe. She knew he was constantly unfaithful. She tried everything to stop him. Nothing worked.

She and her friend Robert concocted all the tales of somebody trying to kill her. She thought mat that would work for sure. Poe would be so worried about her, he'd give up running around. For a few weeks Poe was true to her, but then he went right back to slipping out at night and meeting other girls in the forest.

That's when Arda came up with the idea of getting herself wounded. Robert would steal O'Brien's bow and arrow—just as he'd stolen an arrow before to show to Poe—but this time he'd actually wound her.

Faced with Arda's injury, surely not even Poe could be unfaithful any longer.

But then Robert got angry with her one night because he knew she didn't love him the way she loved Poe. He wrote Poe a letter telling him about the plan Arda and he had concocted. O'Brien saw him writing this and snatched the paper away. He planned to use it as blackmail with Arda. She would sleep with him or he would turn Robert's letter over to Poe. Robert felt terrible. He knew he should never have written the letter, knew he would never have actually given it to Poe.

But now O'Brien's having the letter was moot.

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By now, back in their hut, Arda would have told Poe everything.

"He'll sneak off again on her, won't he, Mr. Hammett?"

"Poe, you mean?"

"Uh-huh."

"I'm afraid he will, Robert."

"I don't like him much."

"Neither do I."

"I just wish I didn't love her so much."

"Someday you won't love her at all."

"You mean I'll be able to look at her and my stomach won't get all knotted up?"

"You'll be able to look at her and wonder why the hell you wasted all that time loving her in the first place."

"Has that ever happened to you?"

"Many times."

"She's awfully pretty."

"Awfully pretty," I said.

"And she's nice to be in love with, because she doesn't care when you hang around all the time."

"Well, there's something to be said for that, I guess."

He sighed. "Maybe I'm not ready to stop loving her yet, Mr. Hammett."

"It doesn't sound like you are, Robert."

"Maybe someday she'll see Poe for what he really is."

"Maybe she will, Robert."

"And then maybe she'll want to marry me."

"That's always a possibility, Robert."

He kept quiet for a long time, then looked up at me and said, "You don't understand this any better than I do, do you, Mr. Hammett?"

I sure as hell had to laugh at that one. I tousled his hair and said, "I sure as hell don't, Robert. I sure as hell don't."

The Merry Men of Riverworld

John Gregory Betancourt

The man in green paused dramatically at the top of the rocky cliff, one hand shading his eyes against the sun. His shoulder-length hair, the color of wheat, ruffled faintly in the breeze. He carried a yew longbow and had a quiver of bamboo-fletched arrows slung across his shoulder. With the sun on his face and a thick, dark forest at his back, he cut quite a striking figure.

Below, the River wound like an endless silver ribbon as far as he could see. On its far bank, half a mile up, stood a town—a ramshackle accumulation of forty or fifty log houses. Smoke rose from clay-brick chimneys, and men and women dressed in brightly colored robes moved among the buildings.

He heard a woman's low voice singing a tune he didn't recognize in a language he didn't know. His men would have warned him if there was any danger, but he still didn't like surprises. He'd speak to Will or Tuck about it later.

Slowly, he dropped his right hand from his eyes. In a single movement he whirled, drew his bow, and nocked an arrow.

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It was a half-naked woman with skin the color of chocolate, and she was carrying a bundle of bamboo. She dropped the bamboo in a clattering heap, her mouth gaping in surprise and fear. Her hair was long and black, Robin saw, and she wore a grass skirt. Her naked breasts were small and deeply tanned.

"Ya linya!" she breathed. "Me tonfevin!"

Putting down his bow, Robin leaped onto a low boulder and looked her up and down. His voice was low, powerful, when he asked, "Do you speak the king's English?"

The woman started to back away.

Robin gave a whistle. The woods around them suddenly erupted with motion—two dozen men from the trees, from the bushes, seemingly from the very air itself. All wore green and carried longbows.

"I am Robin Hood," he said. "Welcome to Sherwood, m'lady!"

Screeching in terror, the woman turned and fled into the trees. Robin threw back his head and laughed.

"Sir Robin!" said the tall man he called Little John. "On the River—"

Robin turned to follow his friend's gaze.

Coming around a bend in the river was one of the strangest-looking riverboats he'd ever seen. They had encountered three others on the River, but this one—

It was huge, easily two hundred feet from pointed prow to broad, flat stern, with a large wheel on either side and a third wheel churning water at the rear. Its three tall decks had intricate woodwork, and twin smokestacks rose from a central pilot's cabin. Sunlight glinted off glass windows and what looked like brass railings. Several dozen men moved about various tasks on the upper two decks,

while sword-bearing guards maintained a vigilant watch on the lowest.

"Incredible," Robin said. He stared, a thoughtful look on his face.

"What do you think?" a portly Friar Tuck asked.

"I've never seen anything like it," Will Scarlet said.

"Who could have built it?" asked Little John.

"A better question is, where did they get the metal," said Mutch. He'd been a civil engineer in the last life and tended toward practical questions. "Did you see those windows? That was glass! Real glassl"

"I think," Robin said, sitting down, "we're going to wait for the riverboat's return. Will, Ben—scout the hill. There should be a grailstone on the other side. If the natives are peaceful, we'll spend the night here."

"Yes, Robin," Will Scarlet said. He and Ben Taylor slipped into the forest like shadows.

While Robin stared out across the River, deep in thought, the rest of his men began setting up camp: clearing the area, gathering wood, building a circle of stones to hold their fire. After a minute Robin opened his pack, took out a small square of cigarette paper, a tiny clay jar with a stopper, and a carved fishbone pen. He opened the jar, dipped his pen into a thin grayish ink, and began to write. His script was tiny, meticulous.

When he finished, he wrapped the paper around an arrow's shaft, tied it in place with human-hair string, and returned the arrow to his quiver. Now it was just a matter of time.

The natives turned out to be surprisingly friendly, considering the language barrier. They were a shy people, quiet and simple in their ways, all living in grass

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huts around a grailstone. They allowed Robin and his men to fit their grails into the unused slots in the grailstone, then clustered at the far side of the village to keep a wary vigil.

Robin counted twenty-five men and thirty women. He noticed each man kept a long, bone-tipped spear close at hand, though none made a hostile move.

"Polynesian," Friar Tuck suggested, "or from another of the Pacific Islands." He had been a sociologist before being recruited into the merry men: one of the reasons he'd joined was to see more of the people resurrected along the River's banks. "Probably never saw a white man in their natural lives...."

Nodding, Robin collected his grail from the grailstone after the charge had come. "What do you think the chances are they'll attack?"

Tuck hesitated. "They were a friendly people. But I wouldn't want to press our luck."

"Come on, then," Robin told the rest of his men. "Back to the River. We shouldn't push our welcome by eating in front of them."

He led the way back to the cliff. Will Scarlet was standing guard, keeping an eye out for the riverboat.

"No sign of it," he reported.

Robin nodded slowly. "I'm sure they're on a scouting mission this time," he said. "They'll be back."

"In such a craft?" Little John said, his bushy black eyebrows coming together in a frown. "They could go to the ends of the River. Why shouldn't they return here?"

"Any of a dozen reasons." Robin hunkered down and opened his grail. There were thin crispy wafers, little packets of what looked like peanut butter, strips of some

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dried, cured meat, and a little flask of brandy... as well as the usual tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum.

Robin took a chew of the meat and continued. ' 'First, that riverboat's one of the most valuable pieces of equipment on the River—but it burns wood. They'll have to put ashore whenever they run low. I'm betting they only stop at prearranged safe bases, and if they're scouting new territory they won't stop at all. They'll head home when they start to run low on fuel. Maybe two days, maybe three. Second, they didn't have enough people on board for an extended journey. If it were my riverboat and I were going far, I'd pack it with armed men. Every petty tyrant on the River will try to steal it, given half a chance."

"Shades of Robert Fulton ..." Little John murmured to himself.

"Unless you're wrong," Will Scarlet told Robin.

Robin flashed a dazzling grin. "Of course," he said. "If it hasn't returned in a week, we'll push on."

In the old days, before the Resurrection, Robin had been a classically trained actor named Edmond Hope Bryor. He'd played minor parts on stage for twenty-two years, since the age of six, before his big move to Hollywood and the silver screen. After three tragic love stories, eight forgettable westerns (critics admired the horses more than his acting talent), and one gangster movie where a young Spencer Tracy shot him in the end, he made the great leap to the enfant terrible of acting: television.

Cast as Robin Hood for the fledgling Dupont Network's twice-a-week Robin Hood and His Merry Men would have made Edmond Bryor a hero to tens of thousands of

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children. He'd known that when he signed onto the project. He'd also known he was going nowhere fast in movies, just as he'd gone nowhere fast on stage.

Only Diablo, the ill-tempered white stallion the producer insisted he ride, threw him on the first day of shooting Robin Hood and His Merry Men. Edmond had no real memories after that, just a vision of the soundstage floor rushing up to meet him. A broken neck, he assumed; instant death or close to it.

In three years of wandering the River's banks, he hadn't met anyone he'd known in the old life to verify his suspicions. It was just as well, he often thought; he'd given up his old life and assumed a new one: that of Robin Hood. It was the role he was born to play, a dream from the childhood he'd never truly outgrown.

As the only son of two thespians, he'd been molded to their ideals, with elocution lessons, dance lessons, and music lessons instead of play time. He knew it had warped him in subtle ways. Awakening on the River, he'd decided to start over again, to live the sort of life he'd always wanted for himself, full of adventure and romance. And so his wanderings began.

He assumed the name Robin Hood and began journeying up the River, righting any wrongs he found, on the pretense of searching for King Richard the Lionhearted. Playacting, yes, but it was curiously satisfying. Along the way he'd found others willing to share that quest, and he'd filled his band of merry men from their numbers. It seemed his dream was contagious. He'd even talked a politics-weary Abraham Lincoln into abandoning a new political career and assuming the role of Little John.

They'd been fast friends ever since. *   *   *

Two nights later, a light hand touched Robin's shoulder. He was awake instantly, gazing up into Mutch's stoic face.

"You were right," Mutch said. "It's come back."

Robin leaped to his feet and ran to the cliff, as close to the edge as he dared stand. The riverboat was easy to spot; its windows shone with a clear yellow light, like beacons in the darkness. What kind of lamps, he wondered, did they have on board? What kind of people could civilize a world so quickly?

"Build up the fire," he said.

The others obeyed, throwing wood onto the embers, fanning them until a huge bonfire blazed.

By the time the riverboat drew even with the cliffs, Robin had his bow strung and his special arrow nocked. He'd had two weeks of intense archery training for his television show; the producers had planned to bill him as the greatest archer of the twentieth century. To his surprise, he'd found he had a talent for it, and he'd honed that talent to perfection in three more years of practice along the River.

He aimed, then let his arrow fly. For an instant his eyes lost it in the darkness, then it hit the pilothouse's door with a thunk audible all the way across the water.

The door opened. A short, broad man was silhouetted for an instant. He saw the arrow and its note, grabbed them, and slammed the door closed. The riverboat's paddle wheels continued their steady chugging.

"They didn't stop," Tuck said.

"They will."

"What if they don't understand English?" he persisted.

Mutch said, "The riverboat is an American invention. They will speak English."

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Little John asked, "What did you tell them, Sir Robin?" "I'm sure you'd approve—the truth." He inclined his large head. "Ah, but which one?" Robin smiled. "Mine."

The riverboat slowed, but did not stop. It almost seemed as if some debate raged within. Five minutes passed, then ten, then fifteen. Finally it began to turn, the huge rear paddlewheel coming to a halt. It began to drift slowly down-River with the current, away from them.

"What does that mean?" Friar Tuck demanded.

"It means they don't want to meet us in the dark," Little John said. "They will float with the current until dawn, then paddle back up to see us."

"My thought exactly," Robin said. He sat, crossing his legs. "We wait."

The riverboat reappeared an hour after dawn, chugging faintly, smoke from its stack leaving twin gray smears in the air. Robin stood and began to wave his bow. His men did the same.

The riverboat slowed, its paddles turning just enough to keep abreast of Robin and his men. Sailors dressed in black and white swarmed across the deck. They broke out a small boat, lowered it, and two men began to row briskly toward the cliffs. Two more men aboard, armed with short curved swords, kept a vigilant watch on Robin and his men.

Robin began to make his way down to the rocky shore. The others followed. He arrived just as the boat reached the shallows and waded out to help pull them to shore.

"Bonjour," one of the men with swords said. "Je m'appelle Claude de Ves. Je suls—"

Robin shook his head, interrupting. "I don't speak French. Do you speak English?"

"A little," he said in a heavy accent. "I am Claude de Ves of the—how you say?—ah, the riverboat Belle Dame."

"Who is your captain?" Robin asked.

"Monsieur Jules Verne."

"The author?"

"Out."

The name meant nothing to Little John and most of the others, Robin saw. Quickly he explained about the famous French technologist and writer, who had foreseen the invention of everything from the submarine to atomic power.

"This is a man," Little John vowed, "that I would truly like to meet."

"Yes, he is a great man," Claude said. "Your letter— alors, I do not know the word—but the captain, he wishes to meet with you."

"Excellent!" Robin said. "It should not take more than four or five trips to get us all over—"

"You are the leader?" Claude asked.

"Yes."

"Monsieur Verne wishes only you to visit."

Robin looked at Little John. "What do you think?"

"If this Verne is as great a man as you say, you will have nothing to fear."

"My thought exactly." Robin looked at Claude de Ves. "Very well, your condition is acceptable." He clambered into the rowboat and sat. His men pushed them out into deeper water, and Verne's men maneuvered them around and began to row toward the riverboat with powerful strokes.

Once Robin glanced back and saw Little John standing

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there, staring back at him with an unreadable expression. Robin waved, and shouted, "I'll be back soon."

The riverboat itself was a technological marvel, but up close Robin began to notice subtle details that marked it as the product of a more primitive technology than he had at first suspected. The glass in the windows was cloudy and full of bubbles. The brass had been beaten to shape the rails; mallet marks were clearly visible. As he climbed onto the lower deck, he noted the square-headed nails in the ladder. The riverboat had been built by hand, he was sure, and represented the product of a fantastic amount of sheer physical labor.

"Monsieur Verne is in his cabin," Claude said. He led Robin to a hatch, then rapped sharply on its frame.

A feeble voice answered.

Claude undogged the hatch and stood back so Robin could enter first. Robin ducked through.

It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom inside. When he could see, he discovered a pale man with short, wiry black hair propped up in bed. There was a sweet smell in the air, almost like meat left in the sun too long. Infection, Robin thought.