Old English, Old Norse, Prankish, Gothic, Old Saxon, and so on.
The others ranged from seeming octogenarians to those who looked no more than 50. I knew something of each, since I had had contact daily for several weeks when I had been Speaker. One was a
Hebrew born shortly before 1 A.D. Two were Mongolian but spoke a language between themselves I could not identify. One was a very old, very huge Negro, and he sometimes talked to himself in a language that I am sure is the ancestor of all the Bantu tongues of modern Africa. The seventh looked as if he were a North American Indian. He also looked so Mongolian, however, that he could be an Olmec of ancient
Mexico. Ing looked Nordic. Iwaldi was a dark-skinned dwarf with very broad shoulders, a huge head, slight epicanthic folds, long thick gnarled arms, great hands like the roots of an oak tree, and very short thick bowed legs. His white hair fell to his buttocks, and his white beard to his knees. He looked as if he belonged to a very different stock of Caucasian. Yet he spoke Primitive Germanic with Ing and XauXaz and seemed very close to them, as if they had known each other for a long time and had unusually common interests.
Anana said, “The mourning is over for us. And the chair is still empty. Who shall sit in the High’s seat?”
The torches flickered on the naked men and women standing on the downslope. The light was dim, yet I could see that skin of the woman near me was goose-pimpled. It may have been the cold dampness of the cavern or the anticipation—apprehensive—of the ceremony, or it may have been the suddenly increased tension from Anana’s words. We knew, without having been told, that one of us was going to be nominated for a seat with the Nine.
I had counted 49 people, including myself. There were, I knew, many more than that in the organization. These people must be those whom the Nine considered their best candidates. Doctor
Caliban stood on my left about 20 feet away. There was nothing between us to block the view. I studied him during the silence. He was indeed a magnificent man. By the peculiar light of the torches, he looked more than ever like a bronze statue. He was not, however, Hellenic. No Athenian sculptor would have created a male figure so divinely proportioned except for the genitals. They were gargantuan, and, for some reason, the penis was half-erect. It was of a far darker bronze than the surrounding skin, being engorged with blood.
At that moment, the statue came to life. Caliban shifted his weight to his left leg, and a second later he turned his head slightly and looked out of the corners of his eyes at me. His gaze was downward; a slight smile—not amused—made fluid the corners of the lips and the eyes seemed to light up from an inner explosion. This was, of course, an illusion of the flickering torchlight.
I looked down. Not until that moment had I realized that my hatred and my desire to kill him had erected my penis. I also realized that my own skin was almost as bronzish as Caliban’s, even to the darker bronze of the penis.
The Danish countess, Clara, was staring at my erection. She was undoubtedly wondering why she had failed and what there was in this situation to arouse me.
The Speaker thumped his staff on the oaken floor again. It was as if a stalactite had fallen. Almost everybody jumped. I did; I react swiftly to stimuli unless I have some reason to control myself. Caliban did not jump. He merely smiled on seeing my response, and he looked utterly savage as he did so, and then he turned his head to look back at the Nine.
The Speaker told us, briefly, what we would do. Because of the death of XauXaz, we would go through the ceremony in the presence of the other servants. All except two would experience the same ceremony as before. These two were the final candidates, chosen from the group in this cavern. If the two candidates did not meet the requirements of the Nine, if both failed, then other candidates would be chosen from the rest of the group. That, however, would be at a later time, since the test would occupy the two for a while.
Silence fell again like a piece of darkness from the ceiling. The Nine seemed to be thinking of other things. Perhaps they were remembering the last time a new man had taken a seat.
The cry of the Speaker cracked the darkness.
“Lord Grandrith! Doctor Caliban! Approach! Wade through the waters! Climb the Tree to the Table of the Gods!”
We walked down the slope and into the lake. The waters were cold. The blood in my legs jelled, quivered, and was dead. This deadness went up my legs, up my thighs, and then the waters covered my testicles and my penis, which had lost its swelling as soon as it hit the water. The testicles tried to retreat into the cavity of my belly, and then they froze. My bowels became ice. The lower part of my spine was a tree with roots exposed to the Arctic sea.
Climbing up the oak logs to the top of the structure did not thaw me much. The ascent was not easy because of the partial paralysis and because the logs were slimy. I don’t know what was the ultimate fate of anyone who slipped back into the water and then could not make the climb.
Caliban and I got to the top at the same time. At the low-voiced direction of the Speaker, we stood side by side and faced Anana across the table. She looked even more wrinkled than I remembered her, as if
Time had folded up her face like a bag and then, changing his mind, had unfolded it to give her a chance to live longer. The dark blue eyes in that face like a fist were bright, however. And deep. The many thousands of years had drilled far into the region behind the eyes. There was something ineffably sphinxlike about her, and, at the same time, something unidentifiable. That nameless quality was frightening. She, and three others of the Nine, are the only human beings that ever made me feel touched with fear. These four may not be human. When a man lives past a thousand years, he may become more—or less—than human.
Anana’s voice was a whisper. She spoke in English with echoes of a tongue that perished long before bronze was invented.
“What is your quarrel with him, Grandrith?”
I believed that she knew very well what my quarrel was. She probably knew far more than I, since she would also have the facts about Caliban. Also, I was beginning to wonder if she was not, in part at least, responsible for the state in which Caliban and I were enmeshed.
The Speaker bellowed out her question. The words flew back from the distant walls like invisible bats.
I said, “Caliban attacked me without provocation.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the bronze figure shudder a little.
“Did you, Caliban?”
The Speaker shouted her words.
“No. He lies.”
The Speaker repeated in a voice like a bull’s, “No. He lies!”
I was beginning to get irritated by the thunderish repetitions and the bat-like echoes, which seemed to jeer. Ordinarily, such things do not bother me. The unusualness of the ceremony, its unknown and possibly sinister development, the irrational motives for Caliban’s hatred, my desire to kill him and get him out of the way, and my nervousness to get to England to protect Clio combined to make me abnormally sensitive.
Anana said, “Why did you attack Grandrith?”
“He raped and murdered my cousin, Trish Wilde.”
“You know this to be a fact?”
“She was with a botanical expedition near the Uganda-Kenya border. A naked man ran into the camp at night, knocked Trish out, and carried her off. Some of the natives identified the man as Grandrith. They tried to follow but lost the trail. They did run across two natives who had seen Grandrith raping my cousin.”