The Fabulous Riverboat

"Livy!" he sobbed. The ship heeled to tack, and he lost her. Frantically, he swung the end of the scope back and forth.

Eyes wide, he stomped with his foot on the deck, and he bellowed, "Bloodaxe! Bloodaxe! Up here! Hurry!"

He swung toward the helmsman and shouted that he should go back and direct the ship toward the bank. Grimolfsson was taken aback at first by Clemens' vehemence. Then he slitted his eyes, shook his head, and growled out a no.

"I order you to!" Clemens screamed, forgetting that the helmsman did not understand English. "That's my wife! Livy! My beautiful Livy, as she was when she was twentyfive! Brought back from the dead!"

Someone rumbled behind him, and Clemens whirled to see a blond head with a shorn-off left ear appear on the level of the deck. Then Erik Bloodaxe's broad shoulders, massive chest and huge biceps came into view, followed by pillarlike thighs as he came on up the ladder. He wore a green-and-black checked towel, a broad belt holding several chert knives and a holster for his ax. This was of steel, broadbladed and with an oak handle. It was, as far as Clemens knew, unique on this planet, where stone and wood were the only materials for weapons.

He frowned as he looked over the river. He turned to Clemens and said, "What is it, sma-skitligr? You made me miscue when you screamed like Thor's bride on her wedding night. I lost a cigar to Toki Njalsson."

He took the ax from its holster and swung it. The sun glinted off the blue steel. "You had better have a good reason for disturbing me. I have killed many men for far less."

Clemens' face was pale beneath the tan, but this time it was not caused by Erik's threat. He glared, the windruffled hair, staring eyes and aquiline profile making him look like a kestrel falcon.

"To hell with you and your ax!" he shouted. "I just saw my wife, Livy, there on the right bank! I want ... I demand... that you take me ashore so I can be with her again! Oh, God, after all these years, all this hopeless searching! It'll only take a minute! You can't deny me this; you'd be inhuman to do so!"

The ax whistled and sparkled. The Norseman gri

"All this fuss for a woman? What about her?" And he gestured at a small dark woman standing near the great pedestal and tube of the rocket-launcher.

Clemens became even paler. He said, "Temah is a fine girl! I'm very fond of her! But she's not Livy!"

"Enough of this," Bloodaxe said. "Do you take me to be as big a fool as you? If I put into shore, we'd be caught between the ground and river forces, ground like meal in Freyr's mill. Forget about her."

Clemens screamed like a falcon and launched himself, arms out and flapping, at the Viking. Erik brought the flat of the ax against Clemens' head and knocked him to the deck. For several minutes, Clemens lay on his back, eyes open and staring at the sun. Blood seeped from the roots of the hair falling down over his face. Then he got to allfours and began to vomit.

Erik gave an impatient order. Temah, looking sidewise with fright at Erik, dipped a bucket at the end of a rope into The River. She threw the water over Clemens, who sat up and then wobbled to his feet. Temah drew another bucket and washed off the deck.

Clemens snarled at Erik. Erik laughed and said, "Little coward, you've been talking too big for too long! Now, you know what happens when you talk to Erik Bloodaxe as if he were a thrall. Consider yourself lucky that I did not kill you."

Clemens spun away from Erik, staggered to the railing, and began to climb upon it. "Livy!"

Swearing, Bloodaxe ran after him, seized him around the waist and dragged him back. Then he pushed Clemens so heavily that Clemens fell on the deck again.

"You're not deserting me at this time!" Erik said. "I need you to find that iron mine!"

"There isn ..." Clemens said and then closed his mouth tightly. Let the Norseman find out that he did not know where the mine—if there was a mine—was located, and he would be killed on the spot. "Moreover," Erik continued cheerfully, "after we find

he iron, I may need you to help us toward the Polar Tower, although I think I can get there just by following The River. But you have much knowledge that I need. And I can use that frost giant, Joe Miller."

"Joe!" Clemens said in a thick voice. He tried to get back onto his feet. "Joe Miller! Where's Joe? He'll kill you!"

The ax cut the air above Clemens' head. "You will tell Joe nothing of this, do you hear? I swear by Odin's blind socket, I will get to you and kill you before he can put a hand on me. Do you hear?"

Clemens got to his feet and swayed for a minute. Then he called, in a louder voice, "Joe! Joe Miller!"

2

A voice from below the poopdeck muttered. It was so deep that it made the hairs on the backs of men's necks rise even after hearing it for the thousandth time.

The stout bamboo ladder creaked beneath a weight, creaked so loudly it could be heard above the song of wind through leather ropes, flapping of membranous sails, grind of wooden joints, shouts of crew, hiss of water against the hull.

The head that rose above the edge of the deck was even more frightening than the inhumanly deep voice. It was as large as a half pony of beer and was all bars and arches and shelves and flying buttresses of bone beneath a pinkish and loose skin. Bone circled the eyes, smallseeming and dark blue. The nose was inappropriate to the rest of his features, since it should have been flat-bridged and flaring-nostriled. Instead, it was the monstrous and comical travesty of the human nose that the proboscis monkey shows to a laughing world. In its lengthy shadow was a long upper lip, like a chimpanzee's or comic-strip Irishman's. The lips were thin and protruded, shoved out by the convex jaws beneath.

His shoulders made Erik Bloodaxe's look like pretzels. Ahead of him he pushed a great paunch, a balloon trying to rise from the body to which it was anchored. His legs and arms seemed short, they were so out of proportion to the long trunk. The juncture of thigh and body was level with Sam Clemens' chin, and his arms, extended, could hold, and had held, Clemens out at arm's length in the air for an hour without a tremor.

He wore no clothes nor did he need them for modesty's sake, though he had not known modesty until taught by Homo sapiens. Long rusty-red hair, thicker than a man's, less dense than a chimpanzee's, was plastered to the body by his sweat. The skin beneath the hairs was the dirty-pink of a blond Nordic.

He ran a hand the size of an unabridged dictionary through the wavy, rusty-red hair that began an inch above the eyes and slanted back rapidly. He yawned and showed huge human-seeming teeth.

"I vath thleeping," he rumbled, "I vath dreaming of Earth, of klravulthithmengbhabajving—vhat you call mammothth. Thothe vere the good old dayth."

He shuffled forward, then stopped. "Tham! Vhat happened! You're bleeding! You look thick!"

Bellowing for his guards, Erik Bloodaxe stepped backwards from the titanthrop. "Your friend went mad! He thought he'd seen his wife—for the thousandth time—and he attacked me because I wouldn't take him in to the bank to her. Tyr's testicles, Joe! You know how many times he's thought he saw that woman, and how many times we stopped, and how many tunes it always turned out to be a woman who looked something like his woman but wasn't!

"This tune, I said no! Even if it had been his woman, I would have said no! We'd be putting our heads in the wolfs mouth!"

Erik crouched, ax lifted, ready to swing at the giant. Shouts came from middeck, and a big redhead with a flint ax ran up the ladder. The helmsman gestured for him to leave. The redhead, seeing Joe Miller so belligerent, did not hesitate to retreat.