A Feast Unknown

40

Trish started towards Caliban. He gestured, indicating she should stay away, and said, “No matter what happens, Trish, you are not to interfere! Do you understand? You are not to interfere in any way until it’s over!”

She shrank back, her bloody hand covering her bloody mouth. Her eyes were wide and fixed.

I backed away because I wanted a little time to try to bring him to his senses. He followed me, stalking like a huge bronze-ski

“Caliban,” I said, “there is your cousin. Our cousin. Alive and safe. She will tell you I had nothing whatsoever to do with her abduction. Or her rape. On the contrary, I saved her. Ask her! She will tell you what a terrible mistake you have made.”

I did not care that the Nine had decreed that one must bring back the head and genitals of the other.

In that moment, I had made the decision that I was no longer a servant of the Nine. I was their enemy, even if it meant losing immortality. I could no longer pay the price. Faust, you might say, wanted his soul back.

He said nothing but moved closer. Then he stopped and removed the finger-ring-knives and his shoes and socks. He wanted us to meet, naked and bare-handed, fighting as two males of The Folk fought for the chieftainship.

“Caliban,” I said, “do not misunderstand me. I would never plead for myself. But I do not want us to be the tools and playthings of the Nine. I believe that the Nine have done us great evil for their own cryptic reasons. They arranged for Trish to be abducted by that man pretending to be me. They arranged for the body of a woman to be found, and they probably had her killed just for that reason. The Nine probably had something to do with the Kenyans’ attempt to obliterate me. You know what enormous, if invisible, power they have.

“Listen! I am convinced that my own birth, in its very extraordinary circumstances, was due to the

Nine’s machinations. There are some very puzzling things in my uncle’s diary. I think he was the victim of the Nine, and that I am the result of an experiment by the Nine. I think that they arranged that I should be adopted by a female of The Folk and raised as a wild boy in the jungle among the subhumans.

“I am convinced that their designs have been even deeper. I think they had something to do with the madness of our father.”

Trish gasped and said, “Your father? Your father?”

I moved a step backwards. Caliban advanced by one step. His great hands, seemingly muscled with bridge cables beneath the glistening red-brown skin, were out and half-clenched. He was saying, as he had said on the natural bridge over the chasm, “No judo or karate or tricks. Power and speed only. We shall see who is the strongest and swiftest.”

I wondered if he had heard anything I had said.

I refused to back any more. I waited.

I said, “Caliban, you haven’t read the Grandrith family records. Your family’s record. You don’t know of the mystery surrounding our paternal grandfather, do you? He shot himself at the age of 55. He looked as if he were thirty. He had three sons, but his wife, when she was very sick and thought she was dying, told an aunt that her husband had been sterile. The aunt wrote this in a diary in a code, which I cracked easily. The aunt said that she suspected a very tall, very powerful, very handsome but elderly gentleman from Norway who visited them quite frequently. The aunt wrote that she would think her suspicions insane, because the old gentleman looked as if he were over 90. But he had a very strong personality, a strange, compelling, and sometimes repelling, radiation. Radiation is the word she used, I suppose, to communicate an outpouring of psychic strength. And she knew that he had seduced one of the maids in the wine cellar. The maid testified to that.

“The old gentleman, a Mister Bileyg, had a white beard that reached to his navel, and a patch over his right eye. And he was the biggest boned man she had ever seen.”

Caliban frowned and said, “What are you talking about, Grandrith?”

“That man was our grandfather,” I said. “The evidence may be peculiar, to say the least. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But it tells the truth. Our grandfather was one of the Nine! The man we knew as

XauXaz! Which, if you know your Primitive Germanic, means the High One!

“And the name he used when he visited Grandrith was Bileyg. That’s Old Norse for One-Whose-Eye-

Deceives-Him. Which is to say, One-Eyed!”

“What?” he said. Apparently, his reputedly wide and deep knowledge did not encompass Germanic linguistics. Or Germanic mythology.

“The man we knew as one of the Nine, XauXaz, must have been born in the Old Stone Age,” I said.

“I don’t know how old he was. Perhaps 30,000. Perhaps 20,000. Who knows what his history was? At one time, he and two others, perhaps his brothers, who were also part of the Nine that then existed, went to lower Sweden. They were present when the Ursprache, the parent language of the Indo-Europeans, changed to what we call Common Germanic. The dialect that became the ancestor of all the Germanic tongues of today, English, High and Low German, Norse.

“In some way, perhaps because they had lived so long and knew so much, they became gods. Not actual gods, you know, but they were worshipped as such.

“What I’m saying is that XauXaz, and Ebnaz XauXaz and Thrithjaz—who died before we came along—High, Equally High, and the Third, were the old Germanic male trinity, later accounted as brothers. And, by the way, Iwaldi, that dwarf, gnome, or whatever, was contemporary with them. And he ruled his people, who dug deep into the earth and lived underground.

“Common Germanic died out, of course, but the three continued to speak it among themselves as a sort of code. Sometime in man’s history, they ceased to appear among men as gods. They shucked their role and retired to whatever identity the Nine required of them.”

Caliban shook his head as if he were wondering about my sanity.

I said, “Our father got the elixir from the Nine. He was a Servant, as we are. As I was,” I amended.

“And then the same thing happened to him that happened later to us. The side effect of the elixir is to make the user mad, if only for a short time. Its effect is psychic, as well as physical. Something deeply disturbing, no matter how repressed, ruptures the surface, thrusts up from under. The particular form of the psychosis depends upon the character of the particular individual, of course.

“Take me, Caliban, or should I call you Doc, since I’m your brother? Take me. I had always thought my attitudes towards killing was very healthy. And I’d always thought my attitude towards sex was extremely healthy. But somewhere in me was a linkage between the two. Something in me equated the act of coitus with killing, the thrust of the penis with the thrust of the knife, orgasm with the bliss of the knife, as Nietzsche called it.

“And take you, Doc. Brother. You have always, up until now, with one fatal exception, avoided killing. You never did it even to those most deserving being killed, if you could possibly avoid it. But you wanted to kill, Doc. And you equated coitus with killing. Down there, deep down there.

“And take our father, Doc. He went mad and was locked up in the castle. And he got loose and fled to London to hide in the big city. There his psychosis took the form of the grisly murders of prostitutes.

Why, I don’t know.

“He raped my mother. Which is why I was born. Later, he went to America. Something happened, the tide of evil reversed, siphoned off, as it were. He took the name of Caliban and devoted his life to good. Trying to make up in some measure for what he’d done in England, I presume.

“Note the name Caliban. Another name for a savage. Shakespeare’s monster in The Tempest, and a literary archetype of the savage. An anagram of ca