GODS OF RIVERWORLD

"Syphilis or gonorrhea?" Frigate had said.

"Both, I think. What did it matter? Anyway, thanks to my mother, not God, I escaped them. And, eventually, Killigrew did pay me enough to discharge my debts and to live on for a while. A very short while."

She had paused, then said, smiling, and she looked beautiful when smiling, "I lied when I said that I wanted to die when in prison. Oh, perhaps! did briefly consider the benefits of suicide. No, I have always believed passionately that life is worthwhile, and I was not one who hoisted the white flag at the first discouragement. Nor did I ever acknowledge defeat. Not until the last breath came, and then not then. Death had not defeated me any more than life had. It just retired me.

"There I was, just out of prison, thin and wan, my debts paid except for what I owed my mother and not a pe

She was nearing thirty in a time when a woman of thirty looked—usually—much older than the woman of thirty of the late 1900s. Most had lost many teeth, and their breaths stank of rotten teeth. A woman without a husband, father, brother, uncle or cousin to protect her was considered fair prey. If wronged, she could resort to a law that was far on the side of the wealthy and privileged. The judges, the lawyers, the bailiffs, the jurors, were open to bribery—very few exceptions—and were easily impressed by the rich and the titled. Women writers were not unknown, but these were not professionals. They were the daughters of country vicars who wrote in their spare time or noblewomen who wanted to get a "name" for themselves. No woman in England had tried to get her livelihood from her pen.

Aphra knew that she could write flowingly, wittily and charmingly, and she had imagination. She was well-read, and she thought that she could do as well as any man in creating novels, poems and plays. But she would start with a handicap in the literary race because she was a woman.

However, somewhat compensating for the handicap, she looked better than most women her age. She had all her teeth, possibly because she had spent the first part of her life in Surinam and the minerals in the foods there helped preserve them. Possibly heredity was partly her dental savior. She was, though short, long-legged, though the skirts of her time kept most from observing that. She had full buoyant breasts, which the dress of her time did not conceal. She had beautiful yellow hair and large blue eyes with thick black brows that set off a face that was very attractive despite her long nose and somewhat short lower jaw. She had great charm, and she had a will with the momentum of a carriage and six horses galloping downhill.

Moreover, she had determined that she would remain single. As she had once written: "Marriage is as certain a bane to love as lending is to friendship; I'll neither ask nor give a vow."

She also wrote:

According to the strict rules of honour, Beauty should still be the reward of love, Not the vile merchandize of fortune, Or the cheap drug of a church-ceremony.

She's only infamous, who to her bed For interest takes some nauseous clown she hates; And though a jointure or vow in public Be her price, that makes her but the dearer whore....

Take back your gold, and give me current love, The treasure of your heart, not of your purse.

Despite which, she gave her heart to the wrong man, a barrister named John Hoyle, who ill-used her, took her love and money, gave her back mostly unfaithfulness and contempt, and came close to but did not quite succeed in breaking her heart. (Hoyle was murdered in a tavern brawl in 1692, after she had died. Frigate had told her of this.) "Hoyle was said by someone, I forget by whom, to be 'an atheist, a sodomite professed, a cor-rupter of youth, and a blasphemer of Christ.' "

"Socrates was also accused of all of that but the last," Aphra had said. "I did not mind that he was that and much more. It was ... he did not love me as I loved him ... loved me not all except in the begi

"What would you do now if you met him?" Frigate had said.

"I don't know. I don't hate him. Yet... perhaps I would kick him in the balls and then kiss him. Who knows? I hope I never see him again."

Aphra became famous, or infamous, and she was dubbed Astraea after the star maiden of ancient Greek mythology, daughter of Zeus and Themis, or perhaps of Astraeus the Titan and Eos. Astraea, during the golden age, distributed blessings. But when the iron age began, she left earth in disgust, and the gods placed her among the stars as the constellation Virgo.

Great literary figures and their hangers-on and young playwrights and poets flocked to her court. Some of them were lucky enough to be her lovers.

"However, many men, as I've said, resented my success, and many critics condemned my plays because they were written by a woman. Damn their rum-soaked brains and wine-bleared eyes and poxru

Nevertheless, she made a fortune, which somehow boiled away under the pressure of her high living and generosity, and she had many lovers, though, as she said, not much true love from them. When she was forty-six, she suffered from the violent and painful attacks of arthritis which were to kill her.

"Though I think that the effects of the pox were as fatal, though more insidious."

Though her writing hand hurt her and there were times when the pen slipped from her feeble grasp, she wrote furiously, and the novel that was to assure her a respectable place in English literature, Oroonoko, was published before she died. The sixteenth of April, 1689, her battle against prejudice, jealousy, gossip and the hatred of the puritanical and hypocritical was over.

William of Orange, the Dutch prince who had become monarch of England, did not like Mrs. Behn. Yet, somehow, though she was regarded as a wicked and scandalous woman, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.

"How did that happen? I was interred among the greatest of the great? I?"

"No one in my time knew why," Frigate said.

"Nor in mine," Burton said. "We will have to resurrect one of your contemporaries to determine that."

"Byron was refused a grave in Westminster Abbey," Frigate said. "He was thought to be too blasphemous and wicked to be given that honor. Yet you made it."

"And I," Burton said, "I was also refused. I had deserved it more than many who rested there, but Nigger Dick would not be allowed within the hallowed walls."

Aphra had many miserable and frightening times on the Ri-verworld, but life was almost always worthwhile. No fun being dead. So, here she was in 'the tower and she had just parted with another lover. She might live with de Marbot again, though it did not seem likely just now. Never mind. She did not intend to be alone for long.