Flesh Page 9

  He did not reappear all day, apparently dreading Stagg’s wrath, but the lesson had been taught. The Sunhero was supposed to display his naked glory to the worshiping people.

  Now Stagg slipped the cloak on and strode on bare feet across the wet grass. The guards stepped out from their tents and followed him, but they did not come close.

  Stagg halted before the cage. The girl sitting inside looked up, then turned her face away.

  “You don’t need to be ashamed to look at me,” he said. “I’m covered.”

  There was silence. Then he said, “For God’s sakes, speak to me! I’m a prisoner too, you know! I’m in as much of a cage as you.”

  The girl clutched the bars and pressed her face against them. “You said, ‘For God’s sake!’ What does that mean? That you’re a Caseylander too? You can’t be. You don’t talk like my countrymen. But then you don’t talk like a Deecee, either—or like anyone I ever heard before. Tell me, are you a believer in Columbia?”

  “If you’ll stop talking for a minute, I’ll explain,” Stagg said. “Thank God, you’re talking, though.”

  “There you go again,” she said. “You couldn’t possibly be a worshiper of the foul Bitch-Goddess. But if you’re not, why are you a Horned King?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me that. If you can’t, you can tell me some other things I’d like to know.”

  He held out the bottle to her. “Would you like a drink?”

  “I’d like one, yes. But I won’t accept one from an enemy. And I’m not sure you’re not one.”

  Stagg understood her with difficulty. She used enough words similar to those of Deecee for him to grasp the main idea of her sentences. But her pronunciation of some of the vowels was different, and the tonal pattern was not that of Deecee.

  “Can you speak Deecee?” he said. “I can’t keep up with you in Caseylander.”

  “I speak Deecee fairly well,” she replied. “What is your native tongue?”

  “Twenty-first-century American.”

  She gasped, and her big eyes became even wider.

  “But how could that be?”

  “I was born in the twenty-first century. January 30, 2030 A.D.... let’s see that would be...”

  “You don’t need to tell me,” she replied in his native speech. “That would be... uh... well, 1 A.D. is 2100 A.D. So, Deecee style, you were born 70 B.D. Before the Desolation. But what does that matter? We Caseylanders use the Old Style.”

  Stagg finally quit goggling at her and said, “You spoke twenty-first-century American! Something like it, anyway!”

  “Yes. Usually only priests can, but my father is a wealthy man. He sent me to Boston University, and I learned Church American there.”

  “You mean it’s a liturgical language?”

  “Yes. Latin was lost during the Desolation.”

  “I think I need a drink,” Stagg said. “You first?”

  She smiled and said, “I don’t understand much of what you’ve said, but I’ll take the drink.”

  Stagg slipped the bottle through the bars. “At least I know your name. It’s Mary I-Am-Bound-for-Paradise Little Casey. But that’s all I ever got out of my guards.”

  Mary handed back the bottle. “That was wonderful. It’s been a long dry spell. You said guard? Why do you need a guard? I thought all Sunheroes were volunteers.”

  Stagg launched into his story. He didn’t have time to go into the details, even though he could tell by Mary’s expression that she comprehended only half of what he told her. And occasionally he had to shift back into Deecee because it was evident that Mary might have studied Church American at college but she hadn’t mastered it.

  “So you see,” he concluded, “that I am a victim of these horns. I am not responsible for what I do.”

  Mary turned red. “I don’t want to talk about it. It makes me sick to my soul.”

  “Me too,” Stagg said. “In the mornings, that is. Later...”

  “Can’t you run away?”

  “Sure. And I’d run back even faster.”

  “Oh, these evil Deecee! They must have bewitched you, it could only be a devil in your loins that could possess you so! If only we could escape to Caseyland, a priest could exorcise it.”

  Stagg looked around him. “They’re beginning to break camp. We’ll be on the march in a minute. Then, Baltimore. Listen! I’ve told you about myself. But I still know nothing about you, where you come from, how you happened to be a prisoner. And there are things you could tell me about myself, what this Sunhero stuff is about.”

  “But I can’t understand why Cal...”

  She put her hand over her mouth.

  “Cal! You mean Calthorp! What’s he got to do with this? Don’t tell me he’s been talking to you? He told me he didn’t know a thing!”

  “He’s been talking to me. I thought that he must have told you so.”

  “He didn’t say a thing to me! In fact, he said he didn’t know any more than I did about what’s going on! Why, that...”

  Speechless, he turned and ran away from the cage.

  Halfway across the field, he regained his voice and began bellowing the name of the little anthropologist.

  The people in his path scattered; they thought that the Great Stag had gone amok again. Calthorp stepped out of the tent. Seeing Stagg running toward him, he scuttled across the road. He did not allow himself to be stopped by the stone fence in his path but put one hand on it and vaulted over. Once on the other side, he ran as fast as his spindly legs would carry him across a field and around a farmhouse.

  Stagg screamed after him, “If I catch you, Calthorp, I’ll break every bone in your body! How could you do this to me?”

  He stood for a moment, panting with rage. Then he turned away, muttering to himself. “Why? Why?”

  At that moment, the rain ceased. A few minutes later, the clouds cleared, and the midnoon sun shone fiercely.

  Stagg tore off his cloak and threw it on the ground. “To hell with Calthorp! I don’t need him and never did! The traitor! Who cares!”

  He called to Sylvia, an attendant, to bring him food and drink. He ate and drank as he always did in the afternoon, and when he had finished, he glared wildly about him. The antlers, which had been flopping limply with every movement of his head, now rose stiff and hard.

  “How many kilometers to Baltimore?” he roared.

  “Two and a half, sire. Shall I call your carriage?”

  “To hell with the carriage! I can’t be slowed down by wheels! I am going to run to Baltimore! I am going to take the city by surprise! I’ll be on them before they know it! They’ll think the Grandfather of all Stags hit them! I’ll ravage among them, lay them all low! It’ll not just be the mascots who’ll get it this time! I’ll not just take what’s handed to me! No Miss Americas only for me! Tonight, the whole city!”

  Sylvia was horrified. “But, sire, things just... just aren’t done that way! Since time immemorial...”

  “I am the Sunhero, am I not? The Horned King? I will do as I want to do!”

  He seized a bottle from the tray she was holding and began to run off down the road.

  At first he stayed on the cement. But even though the soles of his feet were by now as hard as iron, he found the pavement too rough, so he ran on the soft grass by the side of the road.

  “It’s better this way,” he said to himself. “The closer I get to Mother Earth, the better for me and the better I like it. It may be superstitious nonsense that a man is refreshed by direct contact with the earth. But I’m inclined to believe the Deecee. I can feel the strength surging up from the heart of Mother Earth, surging up like an electric current and recharging my body. And I can feel the strength coming with such power, such overflowing power, that my body isn’t big enough to contain it. And the excess spurts from the crown of my head and flames upward toward the sky. I can feel it.”

  He stopped running for a moment to uncap the bottle and take a drink. He noticed that the guards were
running toward him, but they were at least two hundred yards behind. They just did not have his speed and strength. Besides his native muscle, he had the additional power given him by the antlers. He was, he thought, probably the fastest and strongest human being that had ever existed.

  He took another drink. The guards were getting closer but they were winded, their pace slowing. They held their bows and arrows nocked, but he didn’t think they would shoot as long as he stayed on the road to Baltimore. He had no intention of straying from it. He just wanted to run along on the curving breast of Earth and feel her strength surge through him and feel the ecstasy of his thoughts.

  He ran faster, now and then giving great bounds into the air and uttering strange cries. They were sheer delight, exuberance, and nameless longings and their fulfillment. They were spoken in the language of the first men on Earth, the broken chaotic feeling-toward-speech the upright apes must have formed with clumsy tongues when they were trying to name the things around them. Stagg was not trying to name things. He was trying to name feelings. And he was having as little success as his ancestors a hundred thousand years before.

  But he was, like them, gaining joy from the effort. And he was gaining a consciousness of something never before experienced, something new to his kind and perhaps to every creature in the world.

  He ran toward a man, woman, and child who had been walking on the road. They stopped when they saw him, and then, recognizing him for what he was, fell on their knees.

  Stagg did not stop but raced past them. “I may seem to be alone!” he cried at them. “But I am not! Earth comes along with me, your Mother and mine! She is my Bride and goes with me wherever I go. I cannot get away from Her. Even when I traveled through space to places so distant it takes light-years to get there, She was with me. And the proof is that I am back and now have carried out my eight-hundred-years-old promise to marry Her!”

  By the time he had finished speaking, he was far past them. He did not care if they heard or not. All he wanted was to talk, talk, talk. Shout, shout, shout. Burst his lungs if he must, but scream out the truth.

  Suddenly, he stopped. A large red stag grazing in a meadow beyond a fence had caught his eye. It was the only male of a herd of hind, and, like those deer bred for milk and meat, the stag had a distinctly bovine quality. Its body was thick, its legs short, its neck powerful, its eyes stupid but lustful. It was probably a thoroughbred male, highly prized as a stud.

  Stagg leaped over the fence, though it was five feet high and composed of hard stone that would not have yielded if he had tripped. He landed on his feet and then ran toward the stag. The stag bellowed and stood his ground. The hinds ran off toward a corner of the field and there turned to see what was going to happen. They barked like dogs in their alarm, setting up such a clamor that the owner came running from a nearby barn.

  Stagg ran up to the big male. The beast waited until the man was about twenty yards away. Then it lowered its antlers, bugled a challenge, and charged.

  Stagg laughed with joy and ran very close. Timing his steps exactly, he leaped into the air just as the great branched horns swept the air where he had been. He drew up his knees so the horns would miss him, and then extended his legs so his feet landed beyond the base of the antlers and on the back of the neck. A second later, the stag reared his head, hoping to catch the man with his horns and throw him high in the air. The stag succeeded only in acting as a springboard for the man and propelling him along the line of his back. The man landed on the stag’s broad rump.

  There, instead of jumping down to the ground, he somersaulted backwards, intending to come down on the stag’s neck. However, his feet slipped, and he rolled off the beast and fell on the ground on his side.

  The stag wheeled and trumpeted another challenge and lowered his antlers and charged again. But Stagg was on his feet. As the beast lunged, Stagg jumped to one side, caught one of the big ears in his hand, and swung himself onto its back.

  During the next five minutes, the amazed farmer watched the naked man ride the bucking, rearing, wheeling, snorting, bugling stag and stay on its back despite all its furious maneuvers. Suddenly, the stag stopped. Its eyes were bulging, saliva dripping from its open mouth, through which wheezed a tired breath, its sides pumping agonizedly for more air.

  “Open the gate!” shouted Stagg to the farmer. “I’m going to ride this beast into Baltimore in style, like a Horned King should!”

  The farmer silently swung open the gate to the field. He was not going to object if the Sunhero appropriated his prize stag. He would not have objected if the Sunhero had wanted his house, his wife, his daughter, his own life.

  Stagg rode the beast onto the road toward Baltimore. Far ahead, he saw a carriage racing toward the city. Even at the distance he could perceive that it was Sylvia, going ahead to warn the people of Baltimore that the Horned King was arriving ahead of schedule—and doubtless to relay the Horned King’s boast that he would ravish the entire city.

  Stagg would have liked to race after her and arrive on her heels. But the deer was still breathing heavily, so he allowed it to walk until it could regain its breath.

  Half a kilometer from Baltimore, Stagg kicked the beast in the ribs with his bare heels and shouted in its ears. It began trotting, then, under its rider’s continued urgings, to gallop. It raced between two low hills, and suddenly was on the main street of Baltimore. This led straight for twelve blocks to the central square, where a large crowd was hastily being assembled. Even as Stagg crossed the city limits, a band struck up Columbia, Gem of the Ocean, and a group of priestesses began to march toward the Sunhero.

  Behind them, the mascots who had been lucky enough to be chosen as the Sunhero’s brides ranged themselves in a solid body. They looked very beautiful in their white bellshaped skirts and white lace veils, and their breasts were edged in white frilly lace. Each carried a bouquet of white roses.

  Stagg allowed the big deer to slow to a trot so it could reserve its strength for the final spurt. He bowed and waved his hand at the men and women who lined the street and cheered frantically. He called to the teen-aged girls who stood by their parents, the girls who had failed to get first place in the Miss America contest.

  “Don’t cry! I won’t neglect you tonight!”

  Then the blare of bugles, thunder of drums, shrilling of syrinxes swelled and filled the street. The priestesses marched toward him. They were clad in gowns of light blue, the color reserved for the goddess Mary, patron deity of Maryland. Mary, according to the myth, was the granddaughter of Columbia and the daughter of Virginia. It was she who had formed a fondness for the natives of this region and had taken them under her protection.

  The priestesses, fifty strong, marched toward Stagg. They sang and threw marigolds before them and occasionally gave long shuddering screams.

  Stagg waited until he was about fifty meters from them. He kicked the animal in the ribs and beat on its head with his fists. It bugled and reared, and then began galloping straight toward the group of priestesses. These stopped singing to stand in astonished silence. Suddenly, perceiving that the Sunhero did not intend to pull up his mount, that it was not slackening speed but was increasing it, they screamed and tried to scatter to one side. Here they found that the number of the crowd formed an impenetrable body. And when they turned and tried to outrun the galloping stag, they knocked each other down, tripped over each other, got in each other’s way.

  Only one priestess did not stampede. She was the Chief Priestess, a woman of fifty who had kept her virginity in honor of her patron goddess. Now she remained, as if bolted by her courage to the ground. She held out one hand as she would have held it out to bless him if he had arrived in normal fashion. She tossed her bouquet of marigolds at him, and with the other hand, which held a golden sickle, she described a religious symbol.

  The marigolds landed in front of the hoofs of the stag, were trampled, and then the Chief Priestess was knocked down to the ground and her head split open by a fl
ying hoof.

  The impact of the priestess’ body scarcely checked the onslaught of the stag, which weighed at least a ton. It rammed head-on into the solidly packed mob of struggling, writhing women.

  The animal stopped as if it had run into a stone wall, but Stagg continued.

  He rose over the lowered neck and antlers and floated through the air. For a moment, he seemed to be suspended. Beneath was the group of blue-clad priestesses, splitting into two from the crash of the great body, flying in all directions, some of them soaring away on their backs, others upside down, several describing cartwheels. There was a severed head spinning by him, a head that had been caught under the chin by the tip of the antler and ripped off.

  He was past the blue ruin and descending upon a field of white veils and red mouths behind the veils, of white flaring bell-shaped skirts and bare virginal breasts.

  Then he had fallen into the trap of lace and flesh and disappeared from view.

  8

  Peter Stagg did not awake until the evening of the following day. Yet he was the first of his group to rise, except for one. That was Dr. Calthorp, who sat by his captain’s bedside.

  “How long have you been here?” Stagg said.

  “In Baltimore? I followed right on your heels. I saw you charge that deer into the priestesses—and everything that went on afterwards.”

  Stagg sat up and moaned. “I feel as if every muscle in my body has been strained.”

  “Every muscle has been. You didn’t go to sleep until about ten in the morning. But you ought to feel more than muscle-ache. Doesn’t your back hurt much?”

  “A little. Feels like a slight burn in my lower back.”

  “Is that all?” Calthorp’s white brows rose high. “Well, all I can say is that the antlers must be doing more than pouring out philoprogenitive hormones into your bloodstream. They must also be conducive to cell-repair.”

  “What does all that mean?”