' "Then you said those nasty vicious things merely as a trick?'' he said. "A verbal device to gain points? There was nothing personal in those so-cutting remarks?"
She hesitated a moment, then said, "I have to be honest. My main purpose was to make you lose your head. But I was not so cool myself. At the moment, I did feel that you were an ignorant simpleton, a living fossil. But that was my own anger speaking out in me.
"Actually, you were far ahead of your time. You rejected the superstitions and the barbarisms of your time, as far as anybody is able to reject his culture. You were an exceptional man, and I honor you for being that. And you'll never hear such words from me again.''
She hesitated again, then said, "But is it true that you repented on your deathbed?"
The Frenchman's face became red. He grimaced and said, "But yes, Ms. Gulbirra, I did indeed say that I was sorry for my blasphemies and my unbelief and I asked the good God for His pardon. I, who had been a violent atheist since the age of thirteen! I, who hated the fat, smug, oily, stinking, ignorant, hypocritical, parasitical priests! And their unfeeling, merciless, cruel God!
"But you do not know, you who lived in a freer and more permissive age, you do not know the horrors of hellfire, of eternal damnation! You cannot know what it was to have the fear of hell soaking you, drowning you! It was taught us from earliest childhood, ground into our flesh, our bones, our deepest mind!
'' And so, when I knew for sure that I was dying from a combination of that filthy disease with the lovely bucolic name of syphilis and a blow on the head from that beam, fallen accidentally or dropped by an enemy of mine, and I who only wanted to love all mankind, and womankind, too ... where was I?
"Ah, yes, knowing for sure that I was to die, and with the terrors of the devils and of eternal tortures swarming around me, I gave in to my sister, the toothless bitch and withered nun, and my good, too good friend, Le Bret, and I said, yes, I repent, I will save my soul, and you may rejoice, dear sister, dear friend, I will probably go to purgatory, but you will pray me out of it, won't you?
"Why not? I was frightened as I had never been in all my life, and yet, and yet, 1 did not wholly believe that I was destined for damnation. I had some reservations, believe me. But then, it could not hurt to repent. If Christ was indeed available for salvation, not costing a centime, mind you, and there was a heaven and a hell, then I would be a fool not to save my worthless skin and invaluable soul.
"On the other hand, if all was emptiness, nothingness, once one had died, what had I to lose? I would make my sister and that superstitious but kind-hearted Le Bret happy."
''He wrote a glowing panegyric of you after you died," she said. "It was his preface to your Voyage to the Moon, which he edited two years after you died."
''Ah! I hope he did not make me out to be a saint!" Cyrano cried.
"No, but he did give you a fine character, a noble if not quite saintly one. However, other writers... well, you must have had many enemies."
"Who attempted to blacken my name and reputation after I was dead and couldn't defend myself, the cowards, the pigs!"
"I don't remember," she said. "And it doesn't actually matter now, does it? Besides, only scholars know the names of your detractors. Unfortunately, most people only know you as the romantic, bombastic, witty, pathetic, somewhat Don-Quixotish hero of a play by a Frenchman written in the late nineteenth century.
"There was a belief for a long time that you were insane by the time you had written The Voyage to the Moon and The Voyage to the Sun. That was because your books were so heavily censored. By the time the churchly Grundies had slashed your texts, much of it made no sense. But the text was eventually restored as much as possible, and by the time I was born, an unexpurgated text had been published in English."
"I am happy to hear that! I knew from what Clemens and others said that I had become a literary Olympian, if not a Zeus at least a Ganymede, a cupbearer in the ranks of the exalted. But your sneering remark that I was superstitious hurt me very much, mademoiselle. It is true, as you observed, that I believed that the waning moon did suck up the marrow from the bones of animals. Now you say that that is sheer rot. Very well, I accept that.And I was wrong, along with millions of others of my time and God knows how many before my time.
"But this was a minuscule, a harmless error. What did it matter, what injury did it do to anyone, to have this misconception? The superstition, the grave error, that really harmed people, many millions of human beings, I assure you, was the stupid, barbarous belief in sorcery, in the ability of human beings to wreak evil through spells, chants, black cats, and the enlistment of devils as allies. I wrote a letter against that ignorant and vicious belief, that social system, rather. I contended that the grotesque legal sentences and the savagely cruel tortures and executions inflicted upon insane or innocent people in the name of God and the battle against Evil were themselves the essence of evil.
"Now, it is true that this letter I speak of. Against Sorcerers, was not published while I was alive. With good reason. I would have been tortured and burned alive. It was, however, circulated among my friends. It did show that I was not as you made me out to be. I was ahead of my time in many respects, though I was not, of course, the only person in that unhappy situation."
"I know this," she said. ."And I apologized once. Would you have me do it again?"
"It is not necessary," he said. His broad smile made him look handsome, or at least attractive, despite his large nose.
Jill picked up her grail by its handle and said, "Just about dinnertime."
Jill knew something about the man called Odysseus, having heard occasional references. He had appeared without notice, seemingly from nowhere, when Clemens' and King John's forces were battling invaders who wanted to seize the meteorite ore. He had killed the enemy leader with a well-placed arrow, worked havoc among the other officers, and so had given the defenders the advantage they needed for victory.
Odysseus of Ithaca claimed to be the historical Odysseus on whom Homer's mythical character was based. He was one of the host who had fought before the walls of Troy, though he stated that the real Troy was not where the scholars said it was. Its location was elsewhere, much further south on the coast of Asia Minor.
Jill, first hearing about this, had not known whether to believe that the man was truly Odysseus or not. There were so many impostors on the Riverworld. But there was one thing that made her think that he might actually be the historical Ithacan. Why should he say that Troy Vila, which even the archaeologists and Hellenists of her day had said was the true Ilion, was not the genuine site? Why would he claim that the historical Troy was some place else?
Whatever the reason, he was no longer around. He had disappeared as mysteriously as he had appeared. Agents sent to track him down had failed. Firebrass had continued to search for him after Clemens left on the Mark Twain. One of the searchers, Jim Sorley, had finally found some trace of the Greek, though it showed only that he had not been murdered by John's men.
Jill had wondered several times why Odysseus had volunteered to fight for Clemens' side. Why would a stranger who had seemingly blundered onto the battle pick out one force and risk his life for it? What had he to gain, especially since it seemed that he had known none of the participants on either force? She had once asked Fire-brass about this, and he had said that he just did not know. Sam Clemens might be able to enlighten her, but he had never volunteered a word on the subject.
Firebrass had added, "However, Odysseus may have been here for the same reason that Cyrano and I were. We wanted to get on the paddlewheeler so we could get to the polar sea."