The Magic Labyrinth (9 page)

A man and a woman lay in bed. Their skins touched; their dreams were lightyears apart.

Sam Clemens was dreaming again of that day when he had killed Erik Bloodaxe. Rather, when he had set in motion other men, one of whom had put a spear into the Norseman’s belly.

Sam had wanted the buried meteorite for its nickel-steel. Without it, he could not build the great paddle-wheeled boat he envisaged so often. Now, in this dream, he talked to Lothar von Richthofen of what must be done. Joe Miller was not present, having been treacherously captured by the man who had once been king of England. An invading fleet was sailing from downRiver to seize the grave of the fallen star. King John was upRiver, readying a fleet to sail down and grab the site of the buried treasure of nickel-steel. Sam’s army was between the two and weaker than either one. His would be ground to meal between the millstones. There was no chance for victory except by making an alliance with John. Also, if Joe Miller was to get out alive, Sam would have to make a deal with his captor, King John.

But Erik Bloodaxe, Sam’s partner, had refused to consider the alliance. Besides, Erik hated Joe Miller, who was the only human he had ever feared—if you could call Joe a human. Bloodaxe said that his men and Sam’s would make a stand and would smash the two invaders in a glorious victory. This was foolish boasting, though the Norseman may have believed what he said.

Erik Bloodaxe was the son of Harald Haarfager (Harold Finehair), the Norwegian who’d united, for the first time, all of Norway and whose conquests had led to mass migrations to England and to Iceland. When Harald died circa
A.D.
918, Erik became king. But Erik wasn’t popular. Even in a day of harsh and cruel monarchs, he led the pack. His half-brother, Haakon, then fifteen years old, had been reared in the court of King Athelstan of England since he was one year old. Supported by English troops, he raised a Norwegian army against his brother. Erik fled to Northumbria in England, where he was given its kingship by Athelstan, but he didn’t last long. According to the Norse chroniclers, he died in
A.D.
954 in southern England while making a great raid there. The old English tradition had it that he was expelled from Northumbria and was killed during a battle at Stanmore.

Erik had told Clemens that the former account was the true one.

Clemens had joined the Norseman because Erik owned a very rare steel ax and was looking for the source of ore from which the ax had been made. Clemens hoped that there’d be enough ore to make a large paddle-wheeled steamboat in which he could go to the headwaters of The River. Erik didn’t think much of Sam but took him in as a member of his crew because of Joe Miller. Erik didn’t like Joe, but he knew that the titanthrop was a very valuable asset in battle. And then Joe had been made a hostage by King John. Desperate, fearful that Joe would be killed by King John and that he would lose the meteorite, Sam had discussed the situation with Lothar, the younger brother of “The Red Baron.” He had made his proposal. They should kill Bloodaxe and his Viking bodyguards. After that, they could talk to John, who would see the advantage of teaming up with Clemens’ force. Together, the two might be a match for von Radowitz’ forces from downRiver.

Sam further strengthened his rationalizations with the thought that Bloodaxe probably intended to kill him after their enemies had been defeated. A showdown was inevitable.

Lothar von Richthofen agreed. It wasn’t treachery if you attacked a traitor. Besides, it was the only logical thing to do. If Bloodaxe was a true friend, then the case would be different. But the Norseman was as trustworthy as a rattlesnake with a toothache.

And so the foul deed had been done.

Yet, even though it was justified by all counts, the deed
was
foul. Sam had never gotten over his guilt. After all, he could have walked away from the meteorite, given up his dream.

With Lothar and some picked men, he had approached the hut in which Bloodaxe and a woman were humping away. The fight lasted a minute, the Norse guards being taken by surprise by a larger force. The Viking king, naked, holding his great ax, had dashed out. Lothar had pinned him to the wall of the hut with the spear.

Sam had been about to vomit, but he thought that at least the deed was all over. Then a hand had clamped on his ankle, causing him almost to faint with terror. He had looked down, and there was the dying Bloodaxe, holding him with a grip like an eagle’s.

“Bikkja!”
the Norseman had said, weakly but clearly.

That meant
bitch
, a word he often used to indicate his contempt for Clemens, whom he considered effeminate. “Droppings of Ratatosk,” he continued. In other words, crap of the giant squirrel, Ratatosk, that raced around the branches of the world tree, Yggdrasill, the cosmic ash which bound together earth, the abode of the gods, and hell.

And then Bloodaxe had prophesied, saying that Clemens
would
build his great boat. He would pilot it up The River. But its building and its voyage would be grief and sorrow for Clemens with little of the joy he anticipated. And when Clemens at long last neared the headwaters of The River, he would find that Bloodaxe would be waiting for him.

Sam remembered clearly the dying man’s speech. It came up now again from the shadowy figure that held his foot from a deep narrow hole in the ground. Eyes in the vague black mass in the earth burned into Clemens’.

“I will find you! I will be waiting on a distant boat, and I will kill you. And you will never get to the end of The River nor storm the gates of Valhalla!”

Even when the hand had slackened, Sam had been too cold with horror to move away. Death rattled in the throat of the sinister shadow, and still Sam was frozen on the outside, though vibrating inside.

“I wait!”

Those were Erik Bloodaxe’s last words, echoing yet in his dreams down the years.

Sam had scoffed at the prophecy—later on. No one could see into the future. That was superstitious rot. Bloodaxe might be upRiver, but, if he was, it was due to chance alone. There was a fifty-fifty probability that he was downRiver. Moreover, even if the Norseman was waiting for revenge, he wasn’t likely to have an opportunity to wreak it. The boat only made three stops a day, except for some occasional shore leaves of a week or so. Very probably Bloodaxe would be standing on the bank when the Riverboat traveled by. Run or paddle or sail though he might, Erik could not catch up with the swift vessel.

Believing this did not, however, keep Bloodaxe out of Sam’s nightmares. Perhaps this was because, deep within him, Sam knew that he was guilty of murder. Therefore, he should be punished.

In one of those sudden shifts of scene the Supervisor of Dreams so slickly contrives, Sam found himself in a hut. It was night, and rain and lightning and thunder were like a cat-o’-nine-tails against the back of darkness. The flashes in the sky faintly illumined the interior of the hut. A shadowy figure squatted near him. The figure was cloaked; a huge dome on its shoulders covered its head.

“What’s the occasion for this unexpected visit?” Sam said, repeating the question he’d asked during the Mysterious Stranger’s second visit.

“The Sphinx and I are playing draw poker,” the Stranger said. “Would you like to sit in?”

Sam awoke. The luminous digits of the chronometer on the wall across the cabin read 03:33.
What I tell you three times is true.
Gwenafra, beside him, groaned. She muttered something about “Richard.” Was she dreaming about Richard Burton? Though she had only been about seven when she had known him, and had been with him for only a year, she still talked of him. Her child’s love for him had survived.

There was no sound now except for Gwenafra’s breathing and the far-off chuff-chuff of the great paddle wheels. Their cycling sent slight vibrations throughout the ship. When he had his hand on the duraluminum frame of the bed, he could feel the faint waves. The four wheels turned by the colossal electrical motors were driving the vessel toward his goal.

Out there, on both banks, people were sleeping. Night lay over this hemi sphere, and an estimated 8.75 billion were abed, dreaming. What were their shadowy visions? Some would be of Earth; some, of this world.

Was the ex-caveman turning restlessly in his sleep, moaning, dreaming of a saber-tooth prowling outside the fire in the entrance? Joe Miller often dreamed of mammoths, those hairy curving-tusked leviathans of his time, food to stuff his capacious belly and skin to make tents and ivory to make props for the tents and teeth to make enormous necklaces. He also dreamed of his totem, his ancestor, the giant cave bear; the massive shaggy figure came to him at night and advised him on matters that troubled him. And he dreamed sometimes of being beaten with clubs on the soles of his feet by enemies. Joe’s eight hundred pounds plus his bipedal posture caused flat feet. He could not walk all day like the Homo sapiens pygmies; he had to sit down and ease his aching feet.

Joe also had nocturnal emissions when dreaming of a female of his kind. Joe was sleeping with his present mate, a six-foot seven-inch beauty, a Kassubian, a Slavic speaker of the third century
A.D.
She loved Joe’s massiveness and hairiness and the grotesque nose and the gargantuan penis and most of all his essentially gentle soul. And she may have gotten a perverse pleasure from making love to a not-quite-human being. Joe loved her, too, but that didn’t keep him from dreaming amorously of his Terrestrial wife and any number of other females of his tribe. Or, like humans everywhere, of a mate constructed by the Master of Dreams, an ideal living only in the unconscious.

“Every man is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

So Sam Clemens had written. How true. But the Master of Dreams, that master of ceremonies of bizarre circuses, trotted out his caged beasts and trapeze artists and tight-rope walkers and side-show freaks every night.

In last night’s dream, he, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, had been locked in a room with an enormous machine on the back of which rode his alter ego, Mark Twain. The machine was a monstrous and weird creature, squat, round-backed, a cockroach with a thousand legs and a thousand teeth. The teeth in the oblong mouth were bottles of patent medicine, “snake oil.” The legs were metal rods with round feet on the bottoms of which were letters from the alphabet. It advanced toward him, teeth clinking together while the legs squeaked and squealed from lack of oil. Mark Twain, seated in a gold-plated diamond-encrusted howdah on its back, pulled levers to direct it. Mark Twain was an old man with bushy white hair and a white bushy mustache. He wore an all-white suit. He grinned and then glared at Sam and jerked at the levers and steered his machine this way and that, trying to cut off Sam’s attempts to escape.

Sam was only eighteen, his famous mustache not yet grown. He clutched the handle of a carpetbag in one hand.

Round and round the room Sam fled, while the machine clinked and squeaked as it spun around and ran toward him and then backed up. Mark Twain kept yelling things at Sam, such as:
“Here’s a page from your own book, Sam,”
and
“Your publisher sends you his regards, Sam, and asks for more money!”

Sam, squealing like the machine, was a mouse trapped by a mechanical cat. No matter how fast he ran, how he spun, whirled, and leaped, he was inevitably going to be caught.

Suddenly, ripples passed over the metal shell of the monster. It stopped, and it groaned. A clicking issued from its mouth; it squatted, the legs bending. From an orifice in its rear spurted a stream of green paper. They were thousand-dollar bills, and they piled against the wall and then began to flow over the machine. The pile grew and grew and then fell into the howdah, where Mark Twain was screaming at the machine that it was sick, sick, sick.

Fascinated, Sam crept forward, keeping a wary eye on the machine. He picked up one of the bills. “At last,” he thought, “at long last.”

The paper in his hand became human feces.

Now he saw that all the bills had suddenly turned to feces.

But a door had opened in the hitherto unbroken wall of the room.

H. H. Rogers stuck his head through. He was the rich man who’d aided Sam during his troubles, even though Sam had excoriated the big oil trusts. Sam ran toward him, yelling, “Help! Help!”

Rogers stepped into the room. He wore nothing except red longjohns, the rear flap of which hung unbuttoned. On his chest in gold letters was the legend: IN STANDARD OIL WE TRUST; ALL OTHERS, GOD.

“You’ve saved me, Henry!” Sam gasped.

Rogers turned his back for a minute, exposing the sign on his buttocks: PUT IN A DOLLAR AND PULL THE LEVER.

Rogers, frowning, said, “Just a minute.” He reached behind him and pulled out a document.

“Sign here, and I’ll let you out.”

“I haven’t got a pen!” Sam said. Behind him, the machine was beginning to move again. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that it was creeping up on him. Beyond Rogers, through the door, Sam could see a beautiful garden. A lion and a lamb sat side by side, and Livy was standing just behind them. She smiled at him. She wore nothing, and she was holding a huge parasol over her head. Faces peeked from behind flowers and bushes. One of them was Susy, his favorite daughter. But what was she doing? Something he knew he wouldn’t like. Was that a man’s bare foot sticking out from the bush behind which Susy was hiding?

“I don’t have a pen,” Sam said again.

“I’ll take your shadow for collateral,” Rogers said.

“I already sold it,” Sam said. He groaned as the door swung shut behind Rogers.

And that had been the end of that nightmare.

Where now were his wife Livy, Clara, Jean, and Susy, his daughters? What dreams were they dreaming? Did he figure in them? If so, as what? Where was Orion, his brother? Inept bumbling ne’er-do-well optimistic Orion. Sam had loved him. And where was his brother Henry, poor Henry, burned so badly when the paddle wheeler
Pennsylvania
blew up, lingering for six excruciatingly painful days in the makeshift hospital in Memphis. Sam had been with him, had suffered with him, and then had seen him carried off to the room where the undoubtedly dying were taken.