Riverworld and Other Stories Read online

  Channing had been amazed. “That’s a splendid idea! I wonder why none of us thought of it?”

  He’d then complimented Mix on his intelligence. Mix hadn’t told him that he’d been through many areas in which his “new” idea was a long-standing practice.

  These places, like this one, had been lacking in sulfur. Otherwise, they would have processed nitrate crystals from the excrement and mixed it with charcoal and sulfur to make gunpowder. The explosive was then put into bamboo cases to be used as bombs or warheads for rockets.

  Mix went into the latrine shed and sat down on one of the twelve holes. During the short time he was there, he picked up some gossip, mostly about the affair one of the councilmen was having with a major’s woman. He also heard a dirty joke he’d never heard before, and he’d thought he’d heard them all on Earth. After washing his hands in a trough connected to a nearby stream, he hastened back to his hut. He picked up his grail and walked forty yards to Yeshua’s hut. He’d intended to knock on the door and invite the couple to go with him to the nearest charging stone. But he halted a few paces from the door.

  Yeshua and Bithniah were arguing loudly in heavily accented English of the seventeenth century. Mix wondered why they weren’t using Hebrew. Later, he would find out that English was the only language they had in common, though they could carry on a very limited conversation in sixteenth-century Andalusian Spanish and fourteenth-century High German. Though Bithniah’s native tongue was Hebrew, it was at least twelve hundred years older than Yeshua’s. Its grammar was, from Yeshua’s viewpoint, archaic, and its vocabulary was loaded with Egyptian loanwords and Hebrew items which had dropped out of the speech long before he was born.

  Moreover, though born in Palestine of devout Jewish parents, Yeshua’s native tongue was Aramaic. He knew Hebrew mainly as a liturgical tool, though he could read the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, with some difficulty.

  As it was, Mix had some difficulty in understanding half of what they said. Not only did their Hebrew and Aramaic pronunciations distort their words, they had learned their English in an area occupied by seventeenth-century Yorkshire people, and that accent further bent their speech. But Mix could fill in what he didn’t grasp. Usually.

  “I’ll not go with you to live in the mountains!” Bithniah was shouting. “I don’t want to be alone! I hate being alone! I have to have many people around me! I don’t want to sit on top of a rock with no one but a walking tomb to talk to! I won’t go! I won’t go!”

  “You’re exaggerating, as usual,” Yeshua said loudly but much more quietly than Bithniah. “In the first place, you will have to go down to the nearest foothill copiastone three times a day. And you may go down to the bank and talk whenever you feel like it. Also, I don’t plan to live up there all the time. Now and then I’ll go down to work, probably as a carpenter, but I don’t …”

  Mix couldn’t understand the rest of what the man said even though he spoke almost as loudly as before. He had no trouble comprehending most of Bithniah’s words, however.

  “I don’t know why I stay with you! Certainly it’s not because no one else wants me! I’ve had plenty of offers, let me tell you! And I’ve been tempted, very tempted, to accept some!

  “I do know why you want me around! It’s certainly not because you’re in love with my intelligence or my body! If it were, you’d delight in them, you’d be talking to me more and have me on my back far more than you do!

  “The only reason you stick with me is that you know that I knew Aharon and Mosheh, and I was with the tribes when we left Egypt and when we invaded Canaan! Your only interest in me is to drain me of all I know about your great and holy hero, Mosheh!”

  Mix’s ears figuratively stood up. Well, well! Here was a man who’d known Christ, or at least claimed to, living with a woman who’d known Aaron and Moses, or at least claimed to. One or both of them, however, could be liars. There were so many along The River. He ought to know. It took one to recognize one, though his lies were mainly just harmless prevarications.

  Bithniah screamed, “Let me tell you, Yeshua, Mosheh was a louse! He was always preaching against adultery and against lying with heathen women, but I happen to know what he practiced! Why, he even married one, a Kushi from Midian! And he tried to keep his son from being circumcised!”

  “I’ve heard all that many times before,” Yeshua said.

  “But you don’t really believe I’m telling the truth, do you? You can’t accept that what you believed so devoutly all your life is a bunch of lies! Why should I lie? What would I gain by that?”

  “You like to torture me, woman.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to lie to do that. There are plenty of other ways! Anyway, it’s true that Mosheh not only had many wives, he would take other men’s women if he got a chance! I should know; I was one of them. But he was a real man, a bull! Not like you! You can only become a real man when you’ve taken dreamgum and are out of your mind! What kind of a man is that, I ask you?”

  “Peace, woman,” Yeshua said softly.

  “Then don’t call me a liar!”

  “I have never done that.”

  “You don’t have to! I can see in your eyes, hear in your voice, that you don’t believe me!”

  “No. Though there are times—most of the time, in fact—when I wish I’d never heard your tales. But great is the truth, no matter how much it hurts.”

  He continued in Hebrew or Aramaic. The tone of his voice indicated that he was quoting something.

  “Stick to English!” Bithniah screamed. “I got so disgusted with the so-called holy men always quoting moral proverbs, and all the time their own sins stank like a sick camel! You sound like them! And you even claim to have been a holy man! Perchance you were! But I think that your devoutness ruined you! I wouldn’t know, though! You’ve never actually told me much about your life! I found out more about you when you were talking to the councilmen than you’ve ever told me!”

  Yeshua’s voice, which had been getting lower, suddenly became so soft that Mix couldn’t make out a word of it. He glanced at the eastern mountains. A few minutes more, and the sun would clear the peaks. Then the stones would give up their thundering, blazing energy. If they didn’t hurry, they’d have to go breakfastless. That is, unless they ate dried fish and acorn bread, the thought of which made him slightly nauseated.

  He knocked loudly on the door. The two within fell silent. Bithniah swung the door open violently, but she managed to smile at him as if nothing had occurred.

  “Yes, I know. We’ll be with you at once.”

  “Not I,” Yeshua said. “I don’t feel hungry now.”

  “That’s right!” Bithniah said loudly. “Try to make me feel guilty, blame your upset stomach on me. Well, I’m hungry, and I’m going to eat, and you can sit here and sulk for all I care!”

  “No matter what you say, I am going to live in the mountains.”

  “Go ahead! You must have something to hide! Who’s after you? Who are you that you’re so afraid of meeting people? Well, I have nothing to hide!”

  Bithniah picked up her copia by the handle and stormed out. Mix walked along with her and tried to make pleasant conversation. But she was too angry to cooperate. As it was, they had just come into sight of the nearest mushroom-shaped rock, located between two hills, when blue flames soared up from the top and a roar like a colossal lion’s came to them. Bithniah stopped and burst into her native language. Obviously she was cursing. Mix contented himself with one short word.

  After she’d quieted down, she said, “Got a smoke?”

  “In my hut. But you’ll have to pay me back later. I usually trade my cigarettes for liquor.”

  “Cigarettes? That’s your word for pipekins?”

  He nodded, and they returned to his hut. Yeshua was not in sight. Mix purposely left his door open. He trusted neither Bithniah nor himself.

  Bithniah glanced at the door.

  “You must think me a fool. Right next
door to Yeshua!”

  Mix grinned.

  “You never lived in Hollywood!”

  He gave her a cigarette. She used the lighter that the copia had furnished; a thin metallic box which extended a whitely glowing wire when pressed on the side.

  “You must have overheard us,” she said. “Both of us were shouting our fool heads off. He’s a very difficult man. Sometimes he frightens me, and I don’t scare easily. There’s something very deep—and very different, almost alien, maybe unhuman, about him. Not that he isn’t very kind or doesn’t understand people. He does, too much so.

  “But he seems so aloof most of the time. Sometimes, he laughs very much, and he makes me laugh, for he has a wonderful sense of humor. Other times, though, he delivers harsh judgments, so harsh they hurt me because I know that I’m included in the indictment. Now, I don’t have any illusions about men or women. I know what they are and what to expect. But I accept this. People are people, although they often pretend to be better than they are. But expect the worst, I say, and you now and then get a pleasant surprise because you don’t get the worst.”

  “That’s pretty much my attitude,” Mix said. “Even horses aren’t predictable, and men are much more complicated. So you can’t always tell what a horse or a man’s going to do or what’s driving him. One thing you can bet on. You’re Number One to yourself, but to the other guy, Number One is himself or herself. If somebody acts like you’re Number One, and she’s sacrificing herself for you, she’s just fooling herself.”

  “You sound as if you’d had some trouble with your wife.”

  “Wives. That, by the way, is one of the things I like about this world. You don’t have to go through any courts or pay any alimony when you split up. You just pick up your bucket, towels, and weapons, and take off. No property settlements, no in-laws, no kids to worry about.”

  “I bore twelve children,” she said. “All but six died before they were two years old. Thank God, I don’t have to go through that here.”

  “Whoever sterilized us knew what he was doing,” Mix said. “If we could have kids, this valley’d be jammed tight as a pig-trough at feeding time.”

  He moved close to her and grinned.

  “Anyway, we men still have our guns, even if they’re loaded with blanks.”

  “You can stop where you are,” she said, although she was still smiling. “Even if I leave Yeshua, I may not want you. You look too much like him.”

  “I might show you the difference,” he said.

  But he moved away from her and picked up a piece of dried fish from his leather bag. Between bites, he asked her about Mosheh.

  “Would you get angry or beat me if I told you the truth?” she said.

  “No, why should I?”

  “Because I’ve learned to keep my mouth shut about my Earthly life. The first time I told about it, that was less than a year after the Day of the Great Shout, I was badly beaten and thrown into The River. The people who did it were outraged, though I don’t know why they should have been. They knew that their religion was false. They had to know that the moment they rose from the dead on this world. But I was lucky not to have been tortured and then burned alive.”

  “I’d like to hear the real story of the exodus,” he said. “It won’t bother me that it’s not what I learned in Sunday school.”

  “You promise not to tell anybody else?”

  “Cross my heart and hope to fall off Tony.”

  6.

  She looked blank.

  “Is that an oath?”

  “As good as any.”

  She was, she said, born in the land of Goshen, which was in the land of Mizraim, that is, Egypt. Her tribe was that of Levi, and it had come with other tribes of Eber into Mizraim some four hundred years before.

  Famine in their own land had driven them there. Besides, Yoseph—in English, Joseph—had invited them to come. He was the vizier of the Pharaoh of Egypt and so was able to get the tribes into the land of plenty just east of the great delta of the Nile.

  Mix said, “You mean, the story of Joseph is true? He was sold into slavery by his brothers, and he did become the Pharaoh’s righthand man?”

  Bithniah smiled and said, “You must remember that all that happened four hundred years before I was born. It may or may not have been true, but that was the story I was told.”

  “It’s hard for me to believe that a Pharaoh would make a nomadic Hebrew his chief minister. Why wouldn’t he choose an Egyptian, a civilized man who’d know all the complicated problems of administering a great nation?”

  “I don’t know. But the Pharaoh of lower Egypt then, when my ancestors came into Egypt, was not an Egyptian. He was a foreigner, one of those invaders from the deserts whom the English call the Shepherd-kings. They spoke a language much like Hebrew, or so I was told. He would have regarded Joseph as more or less a cousin. One of a kindred people, anyway, and more to be trusted than a native Egyptian. Still, I don’t know if the story is true, since I did not see Joseph with my own eyes, of course. But while my people were in Goshen, the people of upper Egypt conquered the shepherd-kings and set up one of their own as Pharaoh of all Egypt.”

  That, said, Bithniah, was when the lot of the sons of Eber and of Jacob began to worsen. They had entered Mizraim as free men, working under contract, but then they became slaves, in effect if not officially.

  “Still, it was not so bad until the great Raamses became Pharaoh. He was a mighty warrior and a builder of forts and cities, and the Hebrews were among the many people set to build these.”

  “Was this Raamses the first or the second?” Mix said.

  “I don’t know. The Pharaoh before him was named Seti.”

  “He would have been Raamses II,” Mix said. “So he was the Pharaoh of the Oppression! And was the man who succeeded him named Merneptah?”

  “You pronounce his name strangely, but, yes, it was.”

  “The Pharaoh of the exodus.”

  “Yes, the going-forth. We were able to escape our bondage because Mizraim was in turmoil then. The people of the seas, as the English call them, and as they were called in my time, invaded. They were, I hear, beaten back, but during the time of troubles we took the opportunity to flee Mizraim.”

  “Moses, I mean Mosheh, didn’t go to the Pharaoh and demand that his people be allowed to go free?”

  “He wouldn’t have dared. He would have been tortured and then executed. And many of us would have been slain as an example.”

  “You’ve heard of the plagues visited upon the Egyptians by God because of Moses’ requests? The Nile turning to blood, the plague of frogs, the slaying of the firstborn male children of all the Egyptians and the marking with blood of the doorposts of the Hebrews so that their sons might be spared?”

  She laughed and said, “Not until I came to this world. There was a plague raging throughout the land, but it killed Hebrew as well as Egyptian. My two brothers and a sister died of it, and I was sick with it, but I survived.”

  Mix questioned her about the religion of the tribes. She said that there was a mixture of religions in the tribes. Her mother had worshipped, among others, El, the chief god that the Hebrews had brought with them when they had entered the land of Goshen. Her father had favored the gods of Egypt, especially Ra. But he had participated in offering sacrifices to El, though these were few. He couldn’t afford to pay for many.

  She had known Mosheh since she was very young. He was a wild kid (her own words), half-Hebrew, half-Mizraimite. The mixture was nothing unusual. The women slaves were often raped by their masters or gave themselves willingly to get more food and creature comforts. Or sometimes just because they liked to have sexual intercourse. There was even some doubt about whether or not one of her sisters had a Hebrew or an Egyptian father.

  There was also some doubt about the identity of Mosheh’s father.

  “When Mosheh was ten years old he was adopted by an Egyptian priest who’d lost his two sons to a plague. Why would the pri
est have adopted Mosheh instead of an Egyptian boy unless the priest was Mosheh’s father? Mosheh’s mother had worked for the priest for a while.”

  When Mosheh was fifteen, he had returned to the Hebrews and was once again a slave. The story was that his fosterfather had been executed because he was secretly practicing the forbidden religion of Aton, founded by the accursed Pharaoh Akhenaton. But Bithniah suspected that it was because Mosheh was suspected by his father of lying with one of his concubines.

  “Didn’t he have to flee to Midian later on when he killed an Egyptian overseer of slaves? He is supposed to have murdered the man when he caught him maltreating a Hebrew slave.”

  Bithniah laughed.

  “The truth is probably that the Egyptian caught him with his wife, and Mosheh was forced to kill him to keep from being killed. But he did escape to Midian. Or so he said when he returned some years later under a false name.”

  “Moses must have been horny as hell,” Mix said.

  “The kid grows up to be a goat.”

  On returning with his Midianite wife, Mosheh announced that the sons of Eber had been adopted by a god. This god was Yahweh. The announcement came as a surprise to the Hebrews, most of whom had never heard of Yahweh until then. But Yahweh had spoken from a burning bush to Mosheh, and Mosheh had been charged to lead his people from bondage. He was inspiring and spoke with great authority, he seemed truly to burn as brightly with the light of Yahweh as the burning bush he described.

  “What about the parting of the Red Sea and the drowning of Pharaoh and his soldiers when they pursued you Hebrews?”

  “Those Hebrews who lived long after we did and wrote those books I’ve been told about were liars. Or perchance they weren’t liars but just believed tales that had been told for many centuries.”

  “What about the golden calf?”

  “You mean the statue of the god that Mosheh’s brother Aharon made while Mosheh was on the mountain talking to Yahweh? It was a calf, the Mizraimite god Hapi as a calf. But it wasn’t made of gold. It was made of clay. Where would we get gold in that desert?”