That night, the eleven, headed by Burton, overpowered the guards on the Post No Bills. They came up from The Riverside, having swum silently to the railing, and boarded the port side. Two of the guards ^were sitting on the starboard railing and talking. These were grabbed from behind, and their noses and mouths were gripped until they passed out from lack of air. At the same time, Joe Miller entered the launch from the bankside. After a few words with the remaining sentinel, he seized him and carried him struggling to the bow and cast him into the water.
"Jethuth!" he called out to the yelling guard. "I hate to do thith, Thmith, but I got a higher duty! Give my regretth to Kimon!"
After the guards had been thrown off, Burton's group carried aboard their grails and other possessions and some long ropes and tools which had been brought up by divers from the Not For Hire. Aphra Behn turned on the electricity. As soon as the last of the supplies had been thrown onto the deck and the tie lines loosed, she took the boat away. It was shortly going at its top speed while behind them torches flared and men and women yelled.
It was not until the launch had gotten through the strait that Burton felt they had really begun the next-to-last stage of the long, long journey.
Burton thought briefly about X. According to Cyrano's story of X's visit to him, X had told him to relay to the recruits that they should wait a year for X at Virolando. Burton didn't want to do this and neither did his colleagues. They were going on now.
Traveling against the shoreline current at thirty miles per hour and only stopping for two hours each day, the Post No Bills averaged 660 miles every twenty-four hours. When they had to abandon the boat, they still had some distance to go, the most difficult part of the journey. Before that, they'd have to stop and catch fish to smoke and make acorn bread and collect bamboo tips. These would not be all they'd have to eat, though. They carried twenty "free grails" some of which they'd owned and some of which they'd stolen. They planned to fill these before getting to the final grailstone in order to have extra provisions. The food which would decay swiftly would be kept in the launch's refrigerator or dragged behind in a cask in the cold water.
As they went north, The Valley became broader. Apparently the Ethicals had made it wider so that it might receive more of the weak sunlight. The temperature was tolerable during the day, which was longer than those in the regions behind them, reaching as high as sixty-two Fahrenheit. But it would get ever colder the farther north they went. The fogs lasted longer, too.
Goring had been right about the scarcity of people. There were only approximately a hundred per square mile. This number was being cut down daily, as the many boats going down-River showed.
Joe Miller, standing in the bow, looked longingly at the titanthrops they passed. When the launch landed for recharging, he went ashore to talk to any he could find. The conversations were in Esperanto, since none knew his native tongue.
"Jutht ath veil," Joe said. "I've forgotten motht of it anyvay. Jethuth H. Chritht! Ain't I ever going to find my parentth and my friends, my own tribethpeople?"
Fortunately, the titanthrops were amiable. They were by now far outnumbered by the "pygmies," and most of them had been converted to the Chancer faith. Burton and Joe tried to recruit some, but failed. The giants wanted nothing to do with the beings in the tower.
"They all dread the far north," Burton said. "You must have shared their fear. Why did you go with the Egyptians?"
Joe swelled his gorillalike chest. "I'm braver than thothe otherth. Thmarter, too. Though, to tell the truth, I came near thyitting down my leg vhen I thaw the tower. But any man vould. You jutht vait until you thee it."
The tenth day, they stopped for a shore leave of several days. The locals were a few titanthrops with a majority of Scandinavians, ancient, medieval, and modern. Among them were, however, people from any different times and places. The men who had no cabinmates immediately started looking for overnight stands. Burton walked around inquiring if anybody had seen the men and women who'd been forced to abandon the launch from the Rex. There were plenty, and all said that these had gone up-River in boats, all of them stolen.
"Have any others come along/who've said they were on the Not For Hire?" Burton said. "That's the giant metal riverboat like the Rex, propelled by paddlewheels and driven by electric motors."
"No, I've not seen or heard of anybody like that."
Burton didn't expect that the deserters would advertise their identity.
Nor would the agents who'd left Clemens' vessel before the battle be any more open.
However, getting descriptions of those who had gone northward during the past few weeks, he recognized those who'd fled the Rex. De Marbot, who was also questioning, recognized from the descriptions all who'd deserted the Not For Hire.
"We'll catch up with them soon," Burton said.
"If we're lucky," the Frenchman said. "We may pass them at night. Or they might get word of our coming and hide while we go by."
"In any event, we'll get there first."
Twenty days passed. By then the agents from both boats had to have been behind them. Though Burton stopped the launch every twenty miles to question the locals, he could find none of those he sought.
In the interim, he watched his crew. Only two matched the short massive physique and facial features of the Ethicals Than-abur and Loga. The man who called himself Gilgamesh, and the man who called himself Ah Qaaq. But both were very dark and had dark brown eyes. Gilgamesh had curly, almost kinky, hair. Ah Qaaq had a slight epicanthic fold which made him look as if he had some recent Mongolian ancestors. Each spoke his supposed native language fluently. Unlike the agent Spruce, who had claimed to be a twentieth-century Englishman and whose very slight foreign accent had betrayed him to Burton, these two lacked any trace of such. Burton didn't know Sumerian or ancient Mayan well, but he knew enough to recognize a non-Sumerian or non-Mayan pronunciation and intonation.
That only meant that one of the two, possibly both, had completely mastered the tongues. Or it meant that both were innocent and what they claimed to be.
Twenty-two days after he'd passed through the strait in an area where there weren't more than fifty people to a grailstone, Burton was approached by a tall skinny woman with big eyes and a big mouth. Her white teeth shone in the black African face.
She spoke in Esperanto affected heavily by a backwoods Georgia accent. Her name was Blessed Croomes, and she wanted to go on the boat as far as it would go. Then she'd go on foot to the headwaters.
"That's where my mother Agatha Croomes went. I'm looking for her. I think she must have found the Lord and is now living at His right hand, waiting for me! Hallelujah!"
41
IT WAS DIFFICULT TO STOP HER FLOW OF TALK, BUT BURTON finally said, loudly and sternly, that she had to answer his questions.
"Okay," she said, "I'll listen to the wise. Are you wise?"
"Wise enough," he said, "and mighty experienced, which is the same thing if you're not stupid. Let's start at the beginning. Where were you born and what were you on Earth?"
Blessed told him that she was born a slave in Georgia in 1734 in the house of her master. Come early, caught her mother in the kitchen while she was helping prepare the evening meal. She'd been raised as a house slave and baptized into the faith of her father and mother. After her father had died, her mother had become a preacher. She was a very devout and very strong woman who scared her flock, though they also loved her. Her mother had died in 1783 and she in 1821. But both had been resurrected near the same grailstone.