Caliban, during the scene with Noli, had been as stone-struck as the others. He regained his volition first and struck twice, once with a kick in the base of a spine and immediately after with a chop on the side of a neck. The eighteen had become sixteen.
Nine turned towards him. I charged the remaining seven with a knife, and the room became a melee again. My knife went into a belly, but I took a gash from another across my shoulder. A throat got the first two inches of my knife, and a pair of brass knuckles banged and bloodied my cheek. The third man to get my knife took it in the solar plexus, and then it was knocked out of my hand by a blow from the butt of a rifle. The hand was paralyzed for a minute despite which I grabbed a wrist with my left hand while kicking a man’s kneecap loose with my foot, jerked, and tore the man’s arm loose from his socket. I whirled him around and into the bodies of two rushing me. All three went down. I leaped past a mace—but not without being gashed—kicked one of the men getting up off the floor and broke his neck, whirled, and leaped at the man with the mace.
He swung mightily; I dodged back and then in, felt the mace crack along one shoulder, rammed into him, and carried him backwards against the wall where his skull was cracked. The mace was close enough for me to leap at it like a cat after a mouse and pick it up before the survivor could get it. He had a knife, but he backed away, and then flipped it up and caught it, adjusted it; and threw it. My mace was on its way; it hit the knife and both went off course. The man was enabled to duck the mace, and immediately thereafter he decided he had had more than enough. He tried to run away, but I caught him by the back of the neck and squeezed. His face turned purple, and he dangled at arm’s length while I rammed him twice with my fist in the kidneys. When he was released, he sprawled motionless on the floor.
I whirled. Three of the nine were down. A man was stepping back, preparing to throw a knife at
Caliban. Now that there were fewer to crowd around, the danger for Caliban was, paradoxically, greater.
There was room to throw knives and wield rifles as clubs.
The man threw his arm back, and then he stiffened. The knife fell from his hand, and he was on the floor. I had heard the twang of the string and the zzzt! of the bolt. Trish had not wasted her one shot.
I was glad that it was gone, because I did not want her to have it when the end would come.
I charged in, ripped the ears off a man, and, as he turned screaming, chopped his ribs with the side of my palm. He fell forward, and I drove his chin up with my knee and cracked his neck.
Caliban had seized the wrist of a man stabbing at him with a knife, run ahead, turning the man, twisting the wrist so the knife dropped, and then stopped and pulled him over his back. The man cartwheeled through the air and slammed up against a wall.
Three were left. One charged me although I think he was more interested in getting by me than at me. I might have let them go but I did not think there should be anybody left who could testify about the events here. The man charging me was short but enormous of girth, weighing an estimated 340 pounds and with the short arms and legs of a champion weight-lifter. His nose had been smashed and he was bleeding from his chest. I ran towards him and kicked him in the belly. He went oof! as his air left him.
Before he could recover, I broke three of his fingers and then chopped him again across the nose. Blood spurted from his nose and mouth. My knuckle drove his eye back into the socket, and my knee knocked him unconscious. I picked up a knife and split open the huge belly.
The other two had been caught by Caliban, who had smashed their heads together. They dangled at the end of each hand, while he held them by the necks and squeezed. When their life was gone, he dropped them.
Only then did I realize that he was wearing a metallic, razor-edged, sharp-pointed device on the middle finger of both hands. It was this that made so much blood spurt when he seemed to have barely touched them.
The only sound in the huge room was the labored breathing of Caliban and myself. Both of us were naked except for our shoes, bloodied all over, and bleeding from a dozen deep or minor gashes. The stench of sweat, blood, piss and shit was strong, exceeded only by the not-yet-gone odor of terror from the now dead men.
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-skinned tiger.
“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.