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honored by being attached to the retinue of the Patriarch of Jerusalem. But,
now that his faith had been discredited, he hated priests. And he was apt to
drive any he met into a fury with his scorn, hoping that they would attack
him. Some did, and he came close to killing them. Burton had cautiously
reprimanded him for this (you did not speak harshly to de Greystock unless
you wished to fight to the death with him), pointing out that when they were
guests in a strange land, and immensely outnumbered by their hosts, they
should act as guests. De Greystock admitted that Burton was right, but he
could not keep from baiting every priest he met. Fortunately, they were not
often in areas where there were Christian priests. Moreover, there were
very few of these who admitted that they had been such.
Beside him, talking earnestly, was his current woman, born Mary
Rutherford in 1637, died Lady Warwickshire in 1674. She was English but
of an age 300 years later than his, so there were many differences in their
attitudes and actions. Burton did not give them much longer to stay
together.
Kazz was sprawled out on the deck with his head in the lap of
Fatima, a Turkish woman whom the Neanderthal had met forty days ago
during a lunch stop. Fatima, as Frigate had said, seemed to be `hung up on
hair.' That was his explanation for the obsession of the seventeenth-
century wife of a baker of Ankara for Kazz. She found everything about him
stimulating but it was the hairiness that sent her into ecstasies. Everybody
was pleased about this, most of all Kazz. He had not seen a single female
of his own species during their long trip, though he had heard about some.
Most women shied away from him because of his hairy and brutish
appearance. He had had no permanent female companionship until he met
Fatima.
Little Lev Ruach was leaning against the forward bulkhead of the
fo'c'sle, where he was making a slingshot from the leather of a hornfish. A
bag by his side contained about thirty stones picked up during the last
twenty days. By his side, talking swiftly, incessantly exposing her long
white teeth, was Esther Rodriguez. She had replaced Tanya, who had
been henpecking Lev before the Hadji set off. Tanya was a very attractive
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and petite woman but she seemed unable to keep from `remodeling' her
men; Lev found out that she had `remodeled' her father and uncle and two
brothers and two husbands. She tried to do the same for, or to, Lev, usually
in a loud voice so that other males in the neighborhood could benefit by her
advice. One day, just as The Hadji was about to sail, Lev had jumped
aboard, turned, and said, `Goodbye, Tanya. I can't stand any more
reforming from The Bigmouth from the Bronx. Find somebody else;
somebody that's perfect.' Tanya had gasped, turned white, and then
started screaming at Lev. She still was screaming, judging by her mouth,
long after The Hadji had sailed out of earshot. The others laughed and
congratulated Lev, but he only smiled sadly. Two weeks later, in an area
predominantly ancient Libyan, he met Esther, a fifteenth-century Sephardic
Jewess.
`Why don't you try your luck with a Gentile?' Frigate had said.
Lev had shrugged his narrow shoulders. `I have. But sooner or later
you get into a big fight, and they lose their temper and call you a goddam
kike. The same thing also happens with my Jewish women, but from them I
can take it.'
`Listen, friend,' the American said. `There are billions of Gentiles
along this river who've never heard of a Jew. They can't be prejudiced. Try
one of them.'
`I'll stick to the evil I know.'
`You mean you're stuck to it,' Frigate said.
Burton sometimes wondered why Ruach stayed with the boat. He
had never made any more references to The Yew, The Gypsy, and El
Islam, though he often questioned Burton about other aspects of his past.
He was friendly enough but had a certain indefinable reserve. Though
small, he was a good man in a fight and he had been invaluable in teaching
Burton judo, karate, and jukado. His sadness, which hung about him like a
thin mist even when he was laughing, or making love, according to Tanya,
came from mental scars. These resulted from his terrible experiences in
concentration camps in Germany and Russia, or so he claimed. Tanya had
said that Lev was born sad; he inherited all the genes of sorrow from the
time when his ancestors sat down by the willows of Babylon.
Monat was another case of sadness, though he could come out of it
fully at times. The Tau Cetan kept looking for one of his own kind, for one
of the thirty males and females who had bees tom apart by the lynch mob.
He did not give himself much chance. Thirty in an estimated thirty-five to
thirty-six billion strung out along a river that could be ten million miles long
made it improbable that he would ever see even one. But there was hope.
Alice Hargreaves was sitting forward of the fo'c'sle, only the top of
her head in his view, and looking at the people on the banks whenever the
boat got close enough for her to make out individual faces. She was
searching for her husband, Reginald, and also for her three sons and for
her mother and father and her sisters and brothers. For any dear familiar
face. The implications were that she would leave the boat as soon as this
happened. Burton had not commented on this. But he felt a pain in his
chest when he thought of it. He wished that she would leave and yet he did
not wish it. To get her out of sight would eventually be to get her out of his
mind. It was inevitable. But he did not want the inevitable. He felt for her as
he had for his Persian love, and to lose her, too, would be to suffer the
same long-lived torture.
Yet he had never said a word about how he felt to her. He talked to
her, jested with her, showed her a concern that he found galling because [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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